A lone Donald Trump co-defendant who was jailed following his arrest in the Georgia election subversion case has finally posted bond.
Harrison Floyd, who was the director of “Black Voices for Trump” during his 2020 campaign, surrendered to authorities in Fulton County on 24 August where he was arrested for his part in the sweeping 41-count criminal indictment.
Mr Trump and the other dozen defendants who turned themselves in for arrest sailed in and out of the Fulton County Jail quickly after posting bond.
But Mr Floyd wasn’t so lucky.
Unlike the others, the inmate – under booking number 2313818 – did not have a pre-arranged bond, so was held inside the notorious jail until Tuesday, when his $100,000 consent bond order was approved by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee.
He was expected to be released by 9am Wednesday, 11Alive reported.
It was not immediately clear why Mr Floyd did not negotiate a bond with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in advance.
However, it has emerged that his arrest in the Georgia election interference case comes just three months after he was charged with assaulting an FBI agent in Maryland.
Court records show that Mr Floyd was arrested on federal charges back in May accused of aggressively confronting two FBI agents who were sent to serve him with a grand jury subpoena.
According to the documents, he screamed, cursed and jabbed a finger in one of the agent’s faces and chest-bumped them in a stairwell.
Now, Mr Floyd is also charged with three counts of violating the RICO Act, conspiracy to commit solicitation of false statements and writings and influencing witnesses in the Georgia election interference case.
His charges stem from the harassment of Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman who was falsely accused of counting fraudulent votes.
Harrison Floyd mug shot— (Fulton County Sheriff’s Office)
Mr Floyd and other Trump allies allegedly took part in a conversation with Ms Freeman on 4 January 2020 where they pressured her to commit election fraud. She refused.
Mr Floyd was arrested hours before Mr Trump surrendered to Fulton County authorities on Thursday evening to face 13 charges in the sweeping RICO indictment.
The former president was booked into Fulton County Jail where he was fingerprinted and had his mug shot taken – marking a historic moment as the first current or former president to ever be captured in a booking photo.
In each of his other three arrests, Mr Trump has avoided having to sit for a mug shot.
This time round, Fulton County officials vowed that the former president would be treated the same as any other defendant in their county.
The former president flew on his private jet Trump Force One from his Bedminster golf club to Atlanta, Georgia, to surrender to authorities on Thursday evening – a time he is said to have deliberately orchestrated to optimise on primetime coverage.
He was booked into the jail as inmate number P01135809 and had his height recorded as 6ft3 and weight as 215 pounds.
The latter raised several eyebrows – coming 25 pounds lighter than the weight recorded at his April arrest in New York, with CNN reporting that Mr Trump’s team self-reported his weight rather than being measured at the jail.
Bond was set for Mr Trump at $200,000 with him paying 10 per cent in order to be released.
Donald Trump in mug shot— (AP)
Mr Trump used his historic – and scowling – mug shot to mark his first return to X, formerly Twitter, since his ban in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot.
The former president’s account was restored in November but he was yet to post on it, instead preferring to use his platform Truth Social.
In his first post-ban tweet, he shared his mug shot alongside a link to his fundraising website on Thursday night.
He also fumed that he’d had a “terrible experience” – despite admitting he had been “treated very nicely” at the jail – in an interview with Newsmax.
By Friday morning, all of the 19 defendants in the case – including former Mr Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell – had surrendered to face charges for violating Georgia’s RICO statute. Arraignments are set to take place back-to-back on 6 September.
The indictment accuses Mr Trump and his allies of orchestrating and running a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere, to “accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump to seize the presidential term of office, beginning on January 20, 2021”.
“This criminal organization constituted an enterprise as that term is defined in O.C.G.A. § l6-14-3(3), that is, a group of individuals associated in fact. The Defendants and other members and associates of the enterprise had connections and relationships with one another and with the enterprise,” it reads.
The criminal organisation’s members and associates “engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury”.
Mug shots of several of the defendants in the sprawling indictment— (Fulton County Sheriff’s Office/Reuters)
The other co-defendants are former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell, attorneys John Eastman, Kenneth Cheseboro, Jenna Ellis, Ray Smith III, and Robert Cheeley, former US Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark, former Trump campaign official Michael Roman, former state senator and the former chair of the Georgia Republican Party David Schafer, Georgia state senator Shawn Still, Lutheran pastor Stephen Lee, mixed martial artist Harrison Floyd, Kanye West’s former PR Trevian Kutti, former head of the Republican Party in Coffee County Cathleen Latham, Atlanta-area bail bondsman Scott Hall, and former election supervisor of Coffee County Misty Hampton.
DA Willis has spent more than two years investigating efforts by Mr Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in the crucial swing state.
The investigation came following the release of a 2 January 2021 phone call Mr Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where he told him to “find” enough votes to change the outcome of the election in the state.
“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr Trump is heard saying in the leaked phone call. “Because we won the state.”
Mr Biden won the state by less than 12,000 votes.
The investigation then expanded from that phone call to include a scheme whereby a group of fake Republican electors planned to falsely certify the results in Mr Trump’s favour instead of Mr Biden’s. The plot failed and the fake electors have since reached immunity deals with DA Willis’ office.
Ms Willis said she would like to try the defendants altogether and within the next six months.
In total, the former president is now facing 91 charges from four separate criminal cases.
On 1 August, he was hit with a federal indictment charging him with four counts over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the events leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot, following an investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith’s office.
This came after Mr Smith’s office charged Mr Trump in a separate indictment over his alleged mishandling of classified documents on leaving office.
Back in April, Mr Trump was charged for the first time with New York state charges following an investigation into hush money payments made prior to the 2016 election.
