Donald Trump was indicted for his wide-ranging attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the third time in four months that the former U.S. president has been criminally charged even as he campaigns to regain the presidency next year.

The four-count, 45-page indictment charges Republican Trump with conspiring to defraud the U.S. by preventing Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden's victory and to deprive voters of their right to a fair election.

Then-President Trump pushed fraud claims he knew to be untrue, pressured state and federal officials - including Vice President Mike Pence - to alter the results and finally incited a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol in a desperate attempt to undermine American democracy and cling to power, prosecutors said.

Trump was ordered to make an initial appearance in federal court in Washington on Thursday. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was appointed by Trump's predecessor Barack Obama.

The role that fake slates of electors played in Donald Trump’s desperate effort to cling to power after his defeat in the 2020 election is at the center of a four-count indictment released against the former president Tuesday.

The third criminal case into Trump details, among other charges, what prosecutors say was a massive and monthslong effort to “impair, obstruct, and defeat” the federal process for certifying the results of a presidential election, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The 45-page indictment states that when Trump could not persuade state officials to illegally swing the election in his favor, he and his allies began recruiting a slate of fake electors in seven battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to sign certificates falsely stating that he, not Democrat Joe Biden, had won their states.