Since leaving the White House, Donald Trump has continued to face a cloud of lawsuits and investigations, which could frustrate his hopes to win back the presidency in 2024.
On 15 August, the former president was indicted on 13 criminal charges related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
A grand jury in Fulton County charged Mr Trump with violating the RICO Act, making false statements and soliciting a violation of oath by a public officer, among other charges.
Mr Trump was indicted alongside 18 other defendants consisting of his allies including Rudy Guliani, Mark Meadows and John Eastman.
The indictment stems from a years-long investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis into Mr Trump’s actions to change election results in 2020.
It is the fourth time the ex-president has been charged in a criminal indictment this year.
Mr Trump became the first current or former US president to be charged with a federal crime on 13 June after a grand jury indicted him on 37 charges related to his handling of classified documents, including national defence information, after leaving the White House.
In April, Mr Trump became the first former or current president to face criminal charges at all when a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him over hush money payments allegedly paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 presidential election. He pleaded not guilty in that case too.
His subsequent second and third indictments over the classified documents and the 2020 election was soon followed by a fourth from Ms Willis over his efforts to subvert the vote in that crucial swing state.
Lawsuits and investigations hung over Mr Trump throughout his business career and then his political one, including actions like the bombshell $250m lawsuit from New York attorney general Letitia James against Mr Trump and three of his children for a host of allegedly fraudulent business practices, a suit which joins an estimated 4,000 cases Mr Trump has faced in his lifetime.
Here’s what you need to know about all the major investigations and lawsuits against Donald Trump.
The Capitol riots and the 2020 election
Mr Trump faces a number of lawsuits relating to his conduct during the 2020 election — and especially on 6 January, the day a mob of pro-Trump supporters attacked the Capitol after a fiery speech from the recently defeated president.
The outgoing president was impeached by the House of Representatives for a historic second time a week after the attack took place and, in 2022, a congressional committee led by Democrat Bennie Thompson investigated the affair, conducting high-profile televised public hearings and producing thousands of pages of documents in evidence before concluding its work at the year’s end and publishing a major report.
The January 6 committee recommended Mr Trump face criminal charges and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which came to fruition on 1 August 2023 when a grand jury in DC indicted him.
Mr Trump pleaded not guilty to all four charges at his arraignment in DC on 3 August.
It was Mr Thompson who had first set the wheels in motion in February 2021 when he sued the 45th president for allegedly inciting the riot, alongside his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and right-wing extremist groups.
In March of that year, California Democrat Eric Swalwell filed a similar suit, which also included Donald Trump Jr, the ex-president’s son and Alabama congressman Mo Brooks.
Mr Thompson dropped his suit in July 2021 as the January 6 committee process began to heat up, but Mr Swalwell’s continued.
Demonstrators loyal to Donald Trump rally at the US Capitol in Washington on 6 January 2021— (AP)
Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia focused on Mr Trump’s conduct before the riots, such as the now-infamous tape of Mr Trump urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” just enough votes to overturn the state’s election results, as well as a scheme to send unauthorised electors to cast Georgia’s Electoral College votes.
In January of 2023, a grand jury impanelled in the Georgia investigation concluded its work, leaving a potential charging decision in the hands of local prosecutors. In August, they indicted Mr Trump and 18 of his allies.
The Legal Defense Fund is also suing Mr Trump over the election, accusing him, his campaign and the Republican National Committee of attempting to overturn the election, in violation of the Voting Rights Act and Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan Act.
The NAACP is representing members of Congress in their own suit against the president. In November 2022, a federal court ruled in favour of the NAACP, allowing it to file an amended complaint against the former president.
At the end of March 2021, two Capitol police officers filed a suit against Mr Trump for damages over the “physical and emotional injuries” they suffered during and after the riot. James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby are seeking compensation in excess of $75,000 plus interest and costs each.
In February 2022, a federal court found Mr Trump was not immune from litigation in relation to their suits. That summer, a federal judge allowed three other lawsuits, from members of the US Capitol and DC Metropolitan police forces, to move forward on similar grounds.
In January of 2023, Mr Trump was hit with yet another lawsuit, from the longtime partner of former Washington police officer Brian Sicknick, who died after he sustained injuries on January 6.
That same month, a judge refused to toss a suit from a group of US Capitol police officers who say Mr Trump and others violated federal law and fuelled the January 6 riot.
Classified documents inquiry
In June 2023, Mr Trump was charged with a 37-count indictment stemming from an investigation by Mr Smith, into his handling of sensitive government documents.
A month later, officials added further charges, alleging Mr Trump conspired with an employee at his Mar-a-Lago club to delete surveillance footage once the former president was served with a subpoena.
In August 2022, FBI agents seized 33 boxes of documents from Mr Trump’s Florida home, of which approximately 100 contained classification markings including top secret and secret.
The search was prompted after months of attempts by the National Archives to retrieve documents that Mr Trump took with him after leaving office in 2021.
For over a year, Mr Trump avoided the federal government’s requests and subpoenas to obtain documents subject to the Presidential Records Act. Prior to the search, the former president turned over 15 boxes of records which prompted a Justice Department investigation.
He has gone as far as to claim that he declassified the material found at Mar-a-Lago when he was president, claiming that he could declassify materials “by thinking about it”.
Mr Smith’s investigation sought to answer the question if Mr Trump knowingly kept the classified documents and if he later obstructed the federal government’s effort to obtain them.
According to one report from CNN, Mr Trump was allegedly captured on a recording acknowledging that he kept a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran.
The charges against him include willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal and false statements and representations.
A photo published by the US Justice Department in their charging document against former president Donald Trump shows boxes of documents stored in a bathroom at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in early 2021— (Justice Department/Reuters)
Officials allege that Mr Trump kept highly-classified information in his bathroom, in storerooms, in a bedroom and on a stage in the Mar-a-Lago ballroom. He allegedly showed the materials to unauthorised persons on two separate occasions.
His aide Walt Nauta was also charged in the case.
Then, on 27 July 2023, Mr Trump was hit with new charges in the case in a superseding indictment, which also added a third defendant: Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira.
In a 60-page revised indictment, the former president was charged with three new counts, including one of wilful retention of defence information and two of obstruction, taking his charges up to 40 in the case.
The charges come in relation to new allegations that Mr Trump and two of his employees, Mr Nauta and Mr De Oliveira, tried to delete Mar-a-Lago security footage before it could be handed over to investigators.
Mr Trump was also hit with a new charge – his 32nd – for retaining national defence information in relation to a new classified document described as a top-secret “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country”.
This document is believed to be a plan of attack on Iran, which leaked audio previously revealed Mr Trump discussing in a meeting with biographers and staffers at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club.
Sexual harassment
The former president was found liable by a Manhattan jury in May 2023 for the sexual abuse of former Elle magazine columnist E Jean Carroll. The author accused the president of raping her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s and sued Mr Trump has said she was “totally lying” about the allegation, prompting a defamation suit.
The trial in the defamation suit took place in April, with a verdict being reached in early May. Mr Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse of Ms Carroll — but not rape — and for defaming her. Mr Trump is appealing the ruling.
Just one day later Mr Trump attacked Ms Carroll again with remarks at a CNN town hall, doubling down on his previous defamatory comments.
E. Jean Carroll pictured arriving at Manhattan federal court on Tuesday 9 May 2023— (AP)
An amended lawsuit has now been filed by her lawyer Roberta Kaplan to include the remarks made on CNN.
The Stormy Daniels scandal
The former president’s sprawling business empire is another target for legal action. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr, a Democrat, led a criminal investigation against Mr Trump for more than a year over hush money payments to women accusing him of affairs during the presidential campaigns, as well as potential fraud relating to allegedly selectively devaluing and inflating the value of his business’s assets for tax and loan benefits.
At the end of 2021, Mr Vance left office, but the investigation continued under his successor Alvin Bragg.
His office had been investigating whether Mr Trump falsified the Trump Organisation’s business records when his former lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen made a payment of $130,000 to Ms Daniels days before the 2016 election.
Prosecutors (as well as Ms Daniels and Mr Cohen) claim that the money was used in an attempt to silence Ms Daniels about an alleged affair she had with Mr Trump.
Mr Trump has long denied having an affair with the adult film star but not the payments themselves.
Stormy Daniels is at the centre of another case against Trump— (TalkTV)
Mr Cohen, Mr Trump’s estranged former fixer and personal attorney, pleaded guilty to tax evasion lying to Congress and campaign finance violations related to the payments to Ms Daniels in 2018. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
The Manhattan DA’s Office began presenting evidence to a grand jury in January 2023 and both Mr Cohen and Ms Daniels testified. Prosecutors also offered Mr Trump the chance to appear before the grand jury though he declined.
On 30 March, a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict the former president on criminal charges, making Mr Trump the first current or former US president to ever face criminal charges.
He was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on 4 April, pleading not guilty to all charges.
Fraud cases
On 21 September 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a bombshell $250m lawsuit against Mr Trump and three of his children, accusing them of perpetrating “the art of the steal” through a litany of fraudulent business practices the AG’s office has been investigating for years.
Mr Trump has called the suit a politically driven “witch hunt” and denied any wrongdoing.
The AG’s findings have also been referred to federal prosecutors and the Internal Revenue Service, Ms James said.
The probe won a major victory when a former federal court judge was appointed to monitor parts of the Trump Organisation’s financial activities while the case plays out.
Alan Garten, general counsel for the Trump Organisation, has previously said all Trump business practices were above board.
But that assertion was thrown directly into question in January when the Trump Organisation was fined $1.6m for tax fraud in what New York prosecutors described as a tax scheme that stretched more than a decade between 2005 and 2018.
And there’s one more: a trial is expected to begin in January 2024 in a suit alleging Mr Trump used the Celebrity Apprentice TV show to promote multi-level marketing schemes.
Parallel to all of these cases is yet another looking into Mr Trump’s business practices.
In October 2021, the Westchester District Attorney’s Office in New York launched an investigation into financial irregularities surrounding Mr Trump’s golf course in the area, which remained ongoing as of August 2022.
Other suits and potential cases
In January of 2023, a Texas man named John Anthony Castro filed a suit against Mr Trump, seeking to have him declared ineligible to seek the White House under the 14th Amendment, which bars those who have participated in insurrections from holding office.
Mr Castro, a relative unknown on the national stage, is running for president himself.
Mr Trump’s real estate empire has attracted other cases as well: a Washington Post analysis found that numerous pending suits relate to his properties, ranging from slip-and-fall lawsuits, to allegations of bed bugs at a Las Vegas hotel, to former and current tenants who say the Trumps schemed them with phony rent invoices.
There are also a number of simmering legal questions that could turn into future cases, such as suits against those involved in the Capitol riots that could name the ex-president.
How’s he going to pay for all of this?
While Mr Trump’s business may have taken a $700m hit since he was president, he remains a wealthy man and a recently formed post-presidential Trump political action committee raised more than $105m, which he could use for his legal expenses.
That said, The New York Times reported on 1 August 2023 that the Save America PAC had already seen the bulk of its cash eaten up by legal fees, leaving it with just $4m in its piggy bank, potentially leaving Mr Trump with one more headache.
The Trump Organisation, Mr Brooks, Mr Giuliani and the RNC did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent.
This article was amended on 1 April 2023 to clarify that the Legal Defense Fund and the NAACP are separate entities, both with suits against Donald Trump.
It was last updated on 14 August 2023.
