By Jack Queen
ATLANTA (Reuters) – Rudy Giuliani, who served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, said he was traveling to Georgia on Wednesday to surrender to face state criminal charges that he sought to overturn the former U.S. president’s 2020 election loss.
Four other of Trump’s co-defendants in the criminal case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis accusing him and his associates of trying to reverse his 2020 election loss in Georgia already have surrendered at an Atlanta jail, according to county records.
Speaking in New York, Giuliani denied wrongdoing.
“I’m going to Georgia and I’m feeling very, very good about it because I feel like I’m defending the rights of all Americans,” Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and New York City mayor, told reporters.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination to face Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, was set to turn himself in on Thursday to face his fourth criminal indictment this year. The remaining 13 co-defendants named in the Georgia indictment have until Friday to surrender.
Trump has called his four indictments politically motivated and continues to make false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud that benefited Biden.
The Georgia indictment accused Giuliani of making numerous false statements about election fraud, including to officials in other states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania, in a failed bid to convince them to approve an alternative slate of electors in the formal congressional certification of the election results to keep Trump in power.
On Tuesday, Trump’s former lawyer John Eastman and Republican poll watcher Scott Hall surrendered to the Fulton County sheriff’s office. Two other co-defendants – former Georgia Republican Party leaders Cathy Latham and David Shafer – were booked overnight, jail records showed.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to two sets of federal criminal charges brought by Jack Smith, a special counsel named by Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his possession of classified documents after leaving office. Trump also pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan case involving hush money paid before the 2016 election to a porn star.
(Reporting by Jack Queen in Atlanta and Susan Heavey in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone)
