The grand jury in Georgia investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss has handed up a criminal indictment, though it was unclear whether the charges involved the former US president.

Officials with the Fulton County Court on Monday handed the indictment to Judge Robert McBurney, but did not make them public.

Media accounts showed images of a cover sheet saying the grand jury had returned 10 indictments, but did not say who was indicted or what charges were filed.

The case, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, could add to the legal woes facing Trump, the frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.

Earlier, Fulton County court clerk Che Alexander told reporters it could take her office up to three hours to process the indictments after they were accepted by the judge.

It stems from a January 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump urged Georgia’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to reverse his narrow loss in the state. Raffensperger declined to do so.

Four days later, and two weeks before Trump was due to leave office, his supporters stormed the US Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying Biden’s victory.

Willis also investigated an alleged scheme by the Trump campaign to subvert the US electoral process by submitting false slates of electors, people who make up the Electoral College that elects the president and vice president.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and accuses Willis, an elected Democrat, of being politically motivated.

Trump, 77, has been criminally indicted three times so far this year, including once by Special Counsel Jack Smith on charges of trying to overturn his election defeat.

He has long dismissed the many investigations, including two impeachments, he has faced in his years in politics as a politically motivated “witch hunt”.

Earlier in the day, a list of criminal charges in Georgia against Trump briefly appeared on a court website, but prosecutors said he had not been indicted.

– AAP