Harrison Floyd, a co-defendant of Donald Trump, posts bond in Georgia – The Washington Post

Jail records showed that Floyd was still in custody after 5 p.m. Tuesday, and it was not clear when he would be released.

Unlike the other defendants in the case, Floyd did not initially retain a lawyer and did not contact the office of District Attorney Fani T. Willis to negotiate a bond agreement before surrendering at the county jail on Thursday. As a result, he was held in jail for five nights — until Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee ordered a public defender to take up Floyd’s case to reach a bond agreement to get him out of jail.

Floyd live-streamed his surrender at the jail and was forced to halt the broadcast by law enforcement officers when he entered the building.

Floyd had already been evaluated by the Georgia Public Defender Counsel and was not taken on as a client — a sign that he may not have qualified financially for indigent defense services. McAfee wrote in his order that Floyd could be liable for reimbursement to the public defender’s office.

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Since then, however, a lawyer in private practice, Todd Harding, has been substituted to represent Floyd. Two other firms, the Dominion Law Group and the Law Offices of Brandon A. Thomas are running crowdsourced online fundraisers for Floyd that so far have raised roughly $300,000. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Floyd, 39, also known as Willie Lewis Floyd III, is a little-known player who helped run Trump’s 2020 campaign outreach to Black voters. An online member profile and Q&A posted by the University Club of Washington in November 2021 describes him as a U.S. Marine Corps veteran whose assignments included jobs as a machine-gunner, combat marksmanship trainer and martial arts instructor.

Floyd was charged earlier this year with attacking an FBI agent working on the Justice Department’s parallel investigation of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

Agents went to Floyd’s apartment in Rockville, Md., on Feb. 23 to serve a grand jury subpoena, according to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. The agents were delivering the subpoena as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of efforts by Trump and his supporters to undo the results of the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the investigation. The subpoena sought Floyd’s appearance before a federal grand jury in Washington.

The affidavit accuses Floyd of body-slamming an agent and hurling expletives at him and his colleague.

“WHO THE F— DO YOU THINK YOU ARE,” Floyd allegedly screamed, standing “chest to chest” with an agent after knocking him backward with his body.

In Georgia, Floyd is charged with racketeering, conspiracy to solicit false statements and influencing witnesses. The charges stem from his alleged efforts alongside a professional publicist and a preacher to pressure a local election worker, Ruby Freeman, into falsely confessing to election crimes that she did not commit. Freeman was the target of repeated lies by Trump and his supporters in the days and weeks after the 2020 election. The former president mentioned her 18 times in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, at one point calling her a “professional vote scammer and hustler.”

In 2019 and 2020, Floyd helped lead the Trump campaign’s Black Voices for Trump, seeking to bolster support for the then-president’s reelection bid. Floyd announced a run for Congress in Georgia in 2019 but dropped out of the race within weeks. An ad for his short-lived campaign included images of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) before showing footage of Floyd shooting a weapon.

Floyd’s bond agreement in Georgia came as a handful of other co-defendants filed motions to waive their scheduled arraignment hearings on Sept. 6.

Former Trump campaign attorneys Ray Smith and Sidney Powell, along with publicist Trevian Kutti, who is charged for her role in the alleged pressure campaign against Freeman, all entered written pleas of not guilty.

Powell and former Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro have also filed requests for a speedy trial in the Georgia case. Last week, McAfee set a trial date of Oct. 23 for Chesebro. On Tuesday, Willis and her team of prosecutors sought to clarify with McAfee whether the judge’s ruling on Chesebro’s trial schedule meant that he had formally severed his case from the other 18 defendants.

In a Tuesday motion, Willis reaffirmed that she wants to try all 19 people charged in the case together beginning on Oct. 23 and asked McAfee to set deadlines for attorneys to file notice if they seek to “sever” their clients’ cases from Chesebro’s.

“The state maintains its position that severance is improper at this juncture and that all defendants should be tried together, but at an absolute minimum, the court should set defendant Powell’s trial and that of any other defendant who may file a speedy trial demand on the same date as defendant Chesebro’s,” the motion signed by Willis and assistant district attorney Will Wooten read.