Donald Trump is now the subject of four criminal cases at a time when he is also hot on the trail of another stint in the White House.
The former president was indicted for a fourth time in Georgia on 14 August – less than a month after Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith unveiled federal charges against him for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
This time, Mr Trump was charged by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis with 13 counts related to an alleged conspiracy to alter the election result in the swing state in the days that followed his defeat to Joe Biden.
He was charged alongside 18 other defendants, including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Sidney Powell, in an indictment containing 41 counts in total related to racketeering.
In a 98-page dossier, based on a two-year investigation, Ms Willis outlined the ways that Mr Trump and his co-defendants had allegedly conspired to replace electors with fake ones, unlawfully accessed voter data, harassed election workers and solicited public officials to reject the results.
The former president surrendered to authorities in Fulton County on 24 August where he was arrested, fingerprinted and had his mug shot taken.
On 31 August, Mr Trump pleaded not guilty and waived his arraignment – a move that means he can now avoid what would have been his first televised court hearing.
The Georgia case is the fourth criminal indictment Mr Trump has received this year, the latest unprecedented milestone for the first American president to have been impeached twice.
Earlier this year, he became the first-ever former or current president to face criminal charges when a New York City grand jury voted to indict him in April over hush money payments allegedly made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 presidential election.
Mr Trump pleaded not guilty in that case to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal an alleged scheme to illegally influence the national vote by suppressing negative stories about him.
His second indictment of the year followed in June when Mr Smith handed down federal charges, following a grand jury investigation, charging Mr Trump and an aide, Walt Nauta, with 37 counts related to the unlawful retention of classified documents post-presidency and with obstruction of justice. A second Trump employee, Carlos De Oliveira, was later also accused of playing a role in the alleged coverup.
Those charges stem from a case that began early last year when officials from the National Archives and Records Administration discovered more than 100 classified documents in boxes that were retrieved from Mr Trump’s private residence Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
Mr Trump’s third indictment, again courtesy of Mr Smith, and pertaining to the 2020 election and his alleged role in instigating the Capitol riot of 6 January 2021 followed on 1 August and that has since been followed by the fourth from Ms Willis in Georgia.
In addition to all of that, he also faces a $250m civil lawsuit from New York attorney general Letitia James, whose investigation allegedly reveals “years of illegal conduct to inflate his net worth… to deceive banks and the people of the great state of New York.”
He was also found liable for the sexual abuse of Elle magazine columnist E Jean Carroll by a Manhattan civil jury early this year.
Ms Carroll, 79, sued the former president for assaulting her and then “destroying” her reputation when he accused her of lying about the encounter, claiming that she was not his “type”.
Mr Trump remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president and has insisted that he will remain in the race regardless of any outcome of the criminal cases against him.
He also has relied on news of the investigations and indictments to raise money for his campaign, which has netted millions of dollars from sympathetic supporters buying into his “political persecution” narrative.
But with potential convictions and judgments in both federal and state indictments and with multi-million dollar lawsuits to fight, what will all of this rolling chaos mean for Mr Trump’s political future?
