A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. indicted former President Donald Trump on Tuesday over matters relating to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol and alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The four-count indictment accused Trump of conspiring to defraud the U.S. by preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory, chronicled his months-long campaign to sow doubts about the election results and alleged he sought to exploit the Jan. 6 riot by trying to further delay the counting of votes.

It also accused Trump and his allies of trying to “exploit the violence and chaos” by calling lawmakers into the evening on Jan. 6 to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.

“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” said Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, whose office has spent months investigating Trump. “It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation’s process of collecting counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

Trump, as he has in the past two indictment cases, announced on Truth Social before the formal indictment had been delivered that he was expecting charges.

“I hear that Deranged Jack Smith, in order to interfere with the Presidential Election of 2024, will be putting out yet another Fake Indictment of your favorite President, me, at 5:00 p.m.,” he wrote minutes before the news broke.

The former president added, “Why didn’t they do this 2.5 years ago? Why did they wait so long? Because they wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign. Prosecutorial Misconduct!”

Trump is considered the front-runner among Republican presidential hopefuls. 

Though Trump was the only one charged in Tuesday’s indictment, prosecutors obliquely referenced a half-dozen people, including lawyers inside and outside of government who, they said, had worked with Trump to undo the election results. It also cited handwritten notes from former Vice President Mike Pence, with Pence recounting how Trump in one conversation derided him as “too honest” to stop the certification.

Trump is due in court Thursday before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the first step in the legal process.

The indictment, which arrives as Trump remains the dominant frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential contest, centers on the turbulent two months after the November 2020 election, in which Trump refused to accept his loss and claimed that victory was stolen from him. In the riot at the Capitol, Trump loyalists broke into the building, attacked police officers and disrupted the congressional counting of electoral votes.

Trump’s claims of having won the election, the indictment said, were “false, and the Defendant knew they were false. But the defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway – to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

The indictment had been expected since Trump said in mid-July that the Justice Department had informed him he was a target of its investigation. A bipartisan House committee that investigated the run-up to the Capitol riot also recommended prosecuting Trump on charges, including aiding an insurrection and obstructing an official proceeding.

The indictment included charges of conspiring to defraud the U.S., conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding and violating a post-Civil War Reconstruction Era civil rights statute that makes it a crime to conspire to violate rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution – in this case, the right to vote.

The mounting criminal cases against Trump are unfolding in the heat of the 2024 race. A conviction in this case, or any other, would not prevent Trump from pursuing the White House or serving as president..

Trump had announced on July 18 he had received a letter two days before notifying him that he was a target of an investigation by a grand jury examining the Jan. 6 attack and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which he narrowly lost to President Joe Biden.

The target letter reportedly named three federal statutes related to the deprivation of rights, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and witness tampering. However, it remains unclear what charges prosecutors will specifically level against the former president.

The indictment was received by the duty magistrate judge and placed under seal.

On Tuesday, Judge Moxila Upadhyaya was scheduled as the duty magistrate, though a different judge will oversee the eventual trial.

The grand jury has been convening for months in the District of Columbia in the investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith.

As speculation swirled about whether the grand jury would move to indict the former president when it convened on Thursday, July 27, two of Trump’s attorneys met with prosecutors in the district that day.

Hours later, Smith’s team surprised Trump with a superseding indictment, bringing three new charges to the ongoing case surrounding alleged mishandling of classified record at his Florida resort home, Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors included a new charge of willful retention of documents and two new obstruction charges, alleging Trump worked with two co-defendants to attempt to delete Mar-a-Lago’s surveillance footage.

Smith received more documents the week of July 24 as part of his investigation, including records from a lawyer representing former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who said he sent thousands of pages of documents to Smith’s office over the weekend.

The grand jury also recently heard testimony recently from William Russell, a former White House aide who now works for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Ahead of the Tuesday indictment, Trump and his advisers spent the start of the week in preparation, lining up surrogates and allies to immediately respond to the new charges once they become filed, sources familiar with the plans told CNN.

Trump has now been indicted in three different cases. His first federal indictment came in June in the case related to his handling of classified documents. He was indicted on New York state charges in April in a case surrounding a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign. On July 27, he faced a superseding indictment from a Florida grand jury adding additional charges in Smith’s original classified documents case.

He has pleaded not guilty during two separate arraignments over the federal and state charges.