Several top aides to President Trump, including Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, will go on trial on Jan. 5, 2026, on charges they conspired to overturn the results of Arizona’s 2020 presidential election, a judge announced Monday.
The trial date comes just one day before the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, in which a mob of Trump supporters, emboldened by Trump’s false claims of election fraud, stormed the building as the election was being certified.
Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, and Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, are among 16 defendants facing remaining charges. Several others, the state’s so-called “fake electors,” signed documents falsely claiming that Trump won Arizona’s 2020 presidential election. They were indicted in April and have pleaded not guilty.
Trump’s former lawyer, Jenna Ellis, had already been indicted but the charges were dropped after she pleaded guilty earlier this month and agreed to cooperate with Arizona prosecutors. A Republican activist who falsely claimed Trump won the election also pleaded guilty.
Trump himself is not a defendant in the case — he is named in the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirator 1” — but he has been charged in federal court and in the state of Georgia with allegedly trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The supplementary electoral system relied on former Vice President Mike Pence certifying slates of electors in favor of Trump from battleground states in lieu of the actual electoral votes cast for President Biden, which Pence rejected on January 6, 2021.
Prosecutors in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada have also filed criminal charges related to the scheme, but the Nevada case was dismissed in June and state prosecutors are appealing the decision.
