How many active criminal indictments has Donald Trump faced since 2019?
Executive summary
Donald Trump has been the subject of four separate criminal indictments filed in 2023 — two federal and two state — and those four are the only criminal indictments documented in major trackers since 2019; reporting and legal trackers frame those as the four active criminal cases that began in 2023 [1] [2] [3]. Distinguishing impeachment proceedings from criminal indictments is essential: impeachments are political removals, not criminal charges [4].
1. Direct answer: four criminal indictments since 2019
Multiple authoritative project trackers and news outlets record that Trump was criminally indicted in four distinct cases beginning in 2023 — two federal prosecutions and two state prosecutions — and those four indictments constitute the body of criminal charges brought against him since 2019 [1] [2] [3].
2. What the four indictments are, in brief
Those four cases include: a New York state prosecution alleging falsified business records tied to hush‑money payments, a federal classified‑documents prosecution in Florida, a federal prosecution in Washington, D.C., related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and a Georgia state racketeering/election‑interference indictment; major outlets and legal guides list these four cases as the separate criminal indictments filed in 2023 [5] [6] [3] [1].
3. How counts and outcomes complicate the simple “four” metric
While the number of separate indictments is four, the total number of criminal counts across those cases has been reported in the dozens — trackers put the aggregate charges in the dozens to near a hundred (variously reported as around 88–91 counts), and one of the New York counts produced a conviction on 34 felony counts in May 2024 — so saying “four indictments” answers the question about distinct cases, but it does not capture the far larger tally of individual charges and mixed outcomes across them [7] [6] [5].
4. Why impeachment is not part of the count
Public confusion often arises because Trump was impeached twice (2019 and 2021), but impeachment proceedings in the House and Senate are quasi‑constitutional/political processes distinct from criminal indictments brought by prosecutors; authoritative explainers and encyclopedic timelines explicitly separate the two categories and list the criminal indictments as beginning in 2023 [4] [1].
5. “Active” is a dynamic status — trackers and legal rulings matter
Legal trackers like CREW and news projects emphasize that the number and posture of indictments can change with new filings, superseding indictments, dismissals, convictions, appeals and court rulings; organizations monitoring the situation publish tables showing counts, jurisdictions, motion activity and expected trial dates because “active” can mean pending, on appeal, or subject to interlocutory rulings [7] [2].
6. Reporting limits and the bottom line
Based on the major news and legal trackers cited here, the verifiable, documented total of separate criminal indictments filed against Donald Trump since 2019 is four — all filed in 2023 — and that is the defensible, source‑backed answer; readers should note that the number of individual criminal counts across those indictments and their legal status (convictions, dismissals, appeals, superseding indictments) is fluid and tracked separately by the cited projects [1] [7] [6].