by Sharon Rondeau
(Aug. 24, 2023) — After more than 2.5 years, 45th President and 2024 leading Republican candidate Donald J. Trump issued a “tweet” on “X,” formerly known as “Twitter.”
The post consisted of Trump’s “mug shot” taken by the Fulton County, GA Sheriff’s Office during his “arrest” stemming from an August 14 indictment on 13 charges construed by a Fulton County grand jury as a violation of Georgia election laws.
Trump accompanied the tweet with the commentary, “Election Interference,” “Never Surrender!” and a link to his 2024 campaign website.
The investigation of Trump and 17 others yielding grand-jury indictments resulted from Trump and his associates having questioned the 2020 election results declaring Joe Biden the winner of the state’s 16 electoral votes.
Thursday evening’s events consisted of the first time a current or former president has had his photo taken in a criminal booking.
Trump posted the same graphic on his TruthSocial account Thursday evening, where he included a video of his comments made live after he exited the Fulton County jail complex.
During his remarks, he maintained that his team retained, and still retains, the right to question an election outcome.
Trump claims Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s prosecution of him is politically-motivated and pure “election interference.”
Also on Thursday the House Oversight Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH4) announced an investigation into any federal funds Willis might have used during her grand-jury probe of Trump and 17 others following the 2020 election and a phone call Trump had with White House attorneys, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his team which was recorded and leaked to the press.
During what Trump says was the “perfect phone call,” he asked Raffensperger to “find” approximately 11,000 votes, the number reportedly separating him from Biden’s count. The grand jury examining evidence in the case found that to constitute “racketeering” and other serious crimes.
On December 30, 2020, many individuals, including then-Trump personal attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (also known as “America’s Mayor” following the 9/11 attacks) testified to the Georgia State Senate Judiciary Committee‘s Election Law Study Subcommittee alleging significant fraud during the election, a fact now difficult to verify through an internet search.
The Georgia legislature subsequently approved new election laws limiting the use of ballot drop boxes, the automatic mailing of absentee ballots to “all voters” and instituting discipline among county election workers for failing to adhere to “state election regulations.”
Prior to this evening’s activity, Trump’s last tweet on “X,” then “Twitter” and owned by Jack Dorsey rather than Elon Musk, declared January 8, 2021 he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration 12 days later.
January 8 was the day Twitter executives banned Trump from the platform, a decision Musk reversed shortly after he purchased the social-media enterprise last October. Despite that, Trump continued to post exclusively on TruthSocial, a site one of his companies developed, until tonight.
Yahoo! News reported Thursday Trump’s “inmate number” as P01135809, also noting he “skipped” the first Republican primary debate Wednesday night while failing to mention the simultaneous release of a widely-viewed interview, taped earlier that day at his Bedminster resort, with fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
According to the DC Enquirer, the interview garnered more views than any other in history. “Trump’s interview reaching over 200 million people is record-breaking because the title of most watched interview of all time used to be held by Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Michael Jackson in 1993, which reached 62.3 million views,” the outlet reported and a link to which Trump posted.
As of Thursday at 10:45 p.m. EDT, the interview, which runs approximately 45 minutes, has had 248.5 million views.
