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      Legal Consequences Arrive for Trump and Other Election Deniers

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      Legal repercussions have arrived for the leaders of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential contest, in what could serve as a warning to those who meddle in future elections.For two and a half years, most of Donald J. Trump’s allies in the sprawling effort to overturn the 2020 election escaped consequences, continuing to try to undermine President Biden’s legitimacy by spreading false claims about voting machines, mail ballots and rigged elections.Now the legal repercussions are arriving.Last month, three leading election deniers in Michigan were charged with felonies over a scheme to surreptitiously obtain election machines and inspect them in parking lots and hotels. Soon after, Mr. Trump himself was indicted in a major federal investigation of his actions surrounding the 2020 election.Then, in the longest reach of the law yet, Mr. Trump and 18 others were criminally charged on Monday over their attempts to interfere with the outcome of the election in Georgia.The broad indictment includes some of the most prominent figures in the movement to subvert the election: Rudolph W. Giuliani, who presented state legislatures with what he said was evidence of fraud and has continued to make such claims as recently as this month; John C. Eastman, a lawyer and an architect of the scheme to create bogus slates of pro-Trump electors; David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, who filed 16 fake electors; and Sidney Powell, a lawyer behind some of the wildest claims about election machines.“The attacks on the election system were so brazen,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Some accountability,” she added, would “make people think twice before pushing the envelope and trying to break the law.”Despite the flood of criminal charges, election denialism persists in American politics. Many of the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted to overturn the election were re-elected, and Mr. Trump has made false election claims central to his campaign to take back the White House. In a post on his social media site on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump pledged to unveil a “report” next week on “election fraud” in Georgia. (Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, among others, have said they did nothing wrong and have cast the charges as politically motivated.)It is still far from clear whether Mr. Trump and his allies who face charges will ultimately be convicted. But the legal threat may force Trump allies to think twice in the future about repeating their more drastic actions — tampering with election machines, organizing the fake elector scheme, filing reams of frivolous lawsuits.In addition to the criminal charges, several lawyers who pushed baseless election claims in court are facing disbarment. And Fox News was forced to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of misinformation about the 2020 election.One sign that prosecutions can act as a deterrent has already surfaced. More than 1,100 people were arrested after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, according to Justice Department records. More than 630 have pleaded guilty to various charges, and about 110 have been convicted at trial. Almost 600 have been sentenced and, of those, about 370 have served some amount of time behind bars.Legal experts say those convictions are a key reason that recent provocations by Mr. Trump after his series of indictments have not resulted in mass protests or violence.“The federal government has made a concerted effort to investigate and prosecute people who stormed the Capitol,” said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner. “And I think we’ve seen when Trump tried to rally people in Manhattan or in Florida, not only were the crowds small, but a lot of right-wing influencers were out there telling people: ‘Do not do this. You are going to get arrested.’”Part of the challenge for prosecutors is that bringing criminal charges for trying to overturn an election is relatively uncharted legal terrain.“It would be wrong to say that there’s precedent in these exact circumstances, because we have never had these exact circumstances,” said Mary McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s national security division and a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center.In Georgia, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who led the investigation, turned to the state’s racketeering statute, often used for targeting organized crime, because of the magnitude of the inquiry and the large number of people involved.In the federal case, Jack Smith, the special counsel assigned by the Justice Department to investigate Mr. Trump, used novel applications of criminal laws — such as conspiring to defraud the government and corruptly obstructing a congressional proceeding — to bring charges against the former president over his actions leading up to the Capitol riot.In Michigan, the charges were more straightforward, focusing specifically on allegations of illegal possession of a voting machine and a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer or computer system.Such applications of the law, while in some cases untested, could establish a playbook for prosecutors to go after those who threaten elections in the future.“We hope at the end of the day, yes, there will be precedents created, legal precedents created as a result of actions people took after the 2020 election,” said Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former Justice Department lawyer, adding that he hoped those precedents “in the end will make our democracy stronger.”Alan Feuer More

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      Why the Fani Willis Prosecution of Donald Trump Is Indispensable

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      When the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, Fani Willis, filed criminal charges against Donald Trump and over a dozen of his allies for their attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results, she did something ingenious.In contrast to the special counsel Jack Smith’s latest laser-focused federal indictment of Mr. Trump, Ms. Willis charges a wide range of conspirators, from people in the Oval Office to low-level Georgia G.O.P. functionaries, and is the first to plumb the full depths, through a state-focused bathyscaph, of the conspiracy.Her case also provides other important complements to the federal matter: Unlike Mr. Smith’s case, which will almost certainly not be broadcast because of federal standards, hers will almost certainly be televised, and should Mr. Trump or another Republican win the White House, Ms. Willis’s case cannot be immediately pardoned away. It offers transparency and accountability insurance. As she said in her news conference on Monday night, “The state’s role in this process is essential to the functioning of our democracy.”But the indictment stands out, above all, because Georgia offers uniquely compelling evidence of election interference — and a set of state criminal statutes tailor-made for the sprawling, loosely organized wrongdoing that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators are accused of engaging in. It is a reminder of the genius of American federalism: When our democracy is threatened, states have an indispensable part to play in protecting it.At 98 pages, Ms. Willis’s indictment is more than twice the size of Mr. Smith’s indictment in his Jan. 6 case and contains 19 defendants to his one. The indictment charges 41 counts (to Mr. Smith’s four) — among them, Georgia election crimes like solicitation of violation of oath by public officer (for Mr. Trump’s infamous demand to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to just “find 11,780 votes”) and state offenses like forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery (for creating fake electoral certificates) and conspiracy to commit computer trespass (for unlawfully accessing election machines in Coffee County to attempt to prove that votes were stolen).The large cast of defendants populates a complete conspiracy chain of command and features the famous (Mr. Trump, his chief of staff Mark Meadows and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani), the infamous (the Trump attorneys John Eastman, Ken Chesebro and Jeffrey Clark) and the otherwise unknown (including Georgia state false electors and local Trump campaign allies without whom the plot would have stalled).Ms. Willis ties them all together by levying one charge against Mr. Trump and each of the 18 other defendants under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO, accusing Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators of functioning as a criminal gang.American law has long recognized through the crime of conspiracy that combinations of criminals are more dangerous than lone wolves. RICO is conspiracy on steroids, providing for stiffer penalties and other advantages like bringing multiple loosely connected conspiracies under one umbrella.Georgia has one of the most capacious RICO statutes in the country. The state’s legislature enacted it specifically to “apply to an interrelated pattern of criminal activity” and mandated courts to “liberally construe” it to protect the state and its citizens from harm. Under the law, prosecutors can charge a sprawling criminal enterprise and even include individuals who may not have known “of the others’ existence,” as one court put it.Here, the statute may be triggered by violations of an array of federal crimes as well as over 40 charges specific to Georgia, including forgery, false statements and influencing witnesses.Georgia RICO has become Ms. Willis’s signature. She applied it in cases like the Atlanta teacher cheating scandal, in which educators engaged in a wide-ranging scheme to inflate scores on standardized tests, and the prosecution of the rapper Young Thug, in which he co-founded a street gang that was accused of committing almost 200 criminal acts.In using RICO, Ms. Willis accuses Mr. Trump of functioning like a gang leader overseeing a theft ring, except instead of stealing cash or cars, he and his allies are accused of attempting to purloin the Georgia presidential election results.The overall charge includes four core schemes. The first was to pressure government officials to advance the objective of securing Georgia’s electoral votes for Mr. Trump, even though he lost. For the evidence here, in addition to Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Raffensperger, Ms. Willis details other efforts by Mr. Trump and his co-defendants — including Mr. Giuliani’s pressuring of state legislators, Mr. Meadows’s pressure on election authorities and the co-conspirators’ lies and intimidation targeting the ballot counters Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, who goes by Shaye. This also includes efforts in Washington that affected Georgia, such as the Department of Justice lawyer Jeffrey Clark’s preparation of an allegedly fraudulent draft letter targeting the state.Two-person audit boards working to recount ballots at the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections in Lawrenceville, Ga.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe second scheme was the organization of electors falsely proclaiming that Mr. Trump was the winner in Georgia. Ms. Willis alleges that Mr. Trump personally participated in this effort; for example, he called the Republican National Committee with Mr. Eastman from the White House to organize the fake slates of electors, including in Georgia. And she charges a great deal of other activity in and outside Georgia.The third scheme was the unlawful accessing of voting machines in Coffee County, a rural county southeast of Atlanta. The indictment asserts that, after a White House conversation about getting access to election machines to prove supposed vote theft, Sidney Powell, a lawyer tied to Mr. Trump, along with Trump campaign allies and computer consultants, conspired to gain access to voting equipment in Coffee County.Ms. Willis’s inclusion of that plan spotlights what has been one of the more neglected aspects of the nationwide effort. Mr. Smith does not even mention it in his federal indictment. Yet the Willis indictment alleges that this was part of a plan discussed (in general terms) in the Oval Office.The fourth and final scheme is what has become a trademark allegation against Mr. Trump and his circle: obstruction and cover-up. Ms. Willis alleges that members of the conspiracy filed false documents, made false statements to government investigators and committed perjury during the Fulton County judicial proceedings.In addition to the RICO charges, each of the 19 defendants is charged with at least one other offense. Perhaps most telling among these is the charge against Mr. Trump and six others of felony solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer. This fits Mr. Trump’s demand for those 11,780 votes like a glove.Mr. Trump has already begun to defend himself, trying to get Ms. Willis and her special grand jury disqualified, based on an array of supposed conflicts and other grievances. The Georgia courts have already repeatedly rejected those arguments. He will also probably employ defenses similar to ones he and his legal team have laid out in pending criminal matters elsewhere, seeking removal to federal court and advancing First Amendment and intent defenses that have been picked apart by many legal experts.He and his co-conspirators may attempt to challenge the RICO charges on technical grounds, for example, arguing that the conspiracies are not sufficiently related under the statute. But Ms. Willis powerfully alleges otherwise, in particular emphasizing the unifying objective of Mr. Trump’s wrongfully seizing Georgia’s electoral votes.That all of this is likely to play out on television only deepens the historic nature of the indictment. Georgia law makes generous allowance for court proceedings to be broadcast, with the state rightly considering open courtrooms to be “an indispensable element of an effective and respected judicial system.” Assuming that rules against televising federal trials stand, the Georgia trial would be the only one that the public could watch as it unfolds. We know from the Jan. 6 hearings — as well as, in an earlier era, the Watergate hearings — the power of seeing and hearing these events. And they will remain for viewing in posterity as a lesson in the rule of law.There is one final important advantage of the Georgia case. It is shielded from what may be Mr. Trump’s ultimate hope: the issuance of a pardon should he or another Republican be elected president in 2024 (or a command by a Republican that the Justice Department simply drop the case). A president’s power to pardon federal offenses does not extend to state crimes.And pardons in Georgia are not an unreviewable power vested solely in the chief executive. They are awarded by the State Board of Pardons and Paroles — and are not even available until five years after completion of all sentences.The indictment from Ms. Willis strongly complements the federal case. It adds dimensionality, transparency and additional assurance of accountability for the former president and those who betrayed democracy in Georgia.Norman Eisen was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Amy Lee Copeland, a former federal prosecutor, is a criminal defense and appellate attorney in Savannah, Ga.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      As Indictment Decision Looms, Here’s What to Know About the Trump Investigation in Georgia

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      A grand jury could decide within days whether former President Trump should be indicted for interfering in the state’s 2020 presidential election.Starting on Monday morning, prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., are expected to present a grand jury with the findings from their two-and-a-half-year investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and a number of his allies for their multipronged effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow election loss in Georgia in November 2020.The grand jury will likely decide within days whether Mr. Trump should be indicted for interfering in the presidential election in Georgia. The former president has already been indicted in three separate cases this year, a staggering legal burden for a politician who is running for another term.Mr. Trump is far ahead of competitors in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, and neck-and-neck with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a potential rematch, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in late July.Here is what we know about the investigation in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta.Why is Mr. Trump under investigation in Georgia?Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, began looking into whether Mr. Trump and his associates violated Georgia law shortly after a recording was released of Mr. Trump talking by phone to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. During the call, Mr. Trump insisted that he had won the state of Georgia and made baseless allegations of fraud, even though multiple recounts confirmed that he had lost.Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger that he wanted to “find” 11,780 votes in the state — one more than he needed to win Georgia and its Electoral College votes.Over time, court documents and other public records revealed that Ms. Willis, a Democrat, was also investigating false statements that lawyers for Mr. Trump made in state legislative hearings; a meeting of 16 pro-Trump Republicans who cast bogus Electoral College votes for him; an intimidation campaign against a pair of Fulton County election workers falsely accused of fraud, and a successful effort by Trump allies to copy sensitive software at an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga.An audio recording of Mr. Trump talking to Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia, was played during a hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWhat laws may have been broken?In February 2021, Ms. Willis, in a letter to state officials, said the potential laws violated include “the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”That list may not prove definitive for a number of reasons, including that investigators probably had not settled on the final scope of their inquiry at the time. Outside legal experts have said that the Coffee County data breach could result in charges like computer trespassing and computer invasion of privacy.Ms. Willis signaled repeatedly that she was considering pursuing charges under the state’s racketeering law, which is often used to target members of an “enterprise” that has engaged in a pattern of criminal activity.The federal racketeering law is best known for being used against members of the mafia. But federal and state racketeering laws have been used in a wide array of cases. Prosecutors often use the laws to ensure that leaders of a criminal enterprise, and not just the foot soldiers, are held accountable.Who else is being scrutinized?The Georgia investigation may prove to be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers and other associates undertook to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges. They include Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who, as a Trump lawyer, made numerous false claims about voter fraud at Georgia legislative hearings.They also include David Shafer, the former chair of the state Republican Party. He oversaw the meeting of the bogus electors in December 2020; more than half of the electors have been cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office.A number of lawyers who worked to keep Mr. Trump in power have been under scrutiny in the investigation, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro. Last year, Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, was ordered to testify before a special grand jury that aided in the investigation.The Justice Department blocked an effort to seek the testimony of Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking lawyer in the department who sought to intervene in Georgia on Mr. Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election.A number of people whose names have been mentioned in connection with the investigation have said that they did nothing illegal, including Mr. Trump, who has described his call to Mr. Raffensperger as “absolutely perfect.”A Trump supporter protested election results at the Georgia State Capitol in downtown Atlanta in the days after the 2020 election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesHow does the Georgia inquiry relate to other investigations of Mr. Trump?Ms. Willis has said that she has not coordinated with Jack Smith, the special counsel in two federal investigations of Mr. Trump that have resulted in indictments. But Ms. Willis’s team has made use of the voluminous documents and testimony about election interference efforts produced by Congress’s Jan. 6 Committee.One of the federal cases is related to the former president’s handling of classified documents; the other to his efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. Another indictment, in New York State, is related to what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme to cover up a potential sex scandal and clear his path to the presidency in 2016. Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty in all three cases.What would come next?If the Fulton County grand jury decides to indict, any defendants will have to make their way to Atlanta to be booked and arraigned. A number of them could face multiple charges, and the potential sentences could be steep: Violating the racketeering law alone can potentially result in a five-to-20-year sentence.There is also the question of when a trial might occur, given Mr. Trump’s legal troubles in several other venues. If the Georgia case results in multiple defendants, pretrial matters like jury selection could take months. More

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      How Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election Results in Georgia

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      The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election.When President Donald J. Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat.“Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr. shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified.Mr. Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference — who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” — that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Mr. Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.It could also prove the most enduring: While Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Ms. Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Mr. Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election — an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Mr. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.They deployed fake local electors to certify that Mr. Trump had won the election. Within even the Justice Department, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.And on the same day that Mr. Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.The Georgia investigation has encompassed an array of high-profile allies, from the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election. But it has also scrutinized lesser-known players like a Georgia bail bondsman and a publicist who once worked for Kanye West.As soon as Monday, there could be charges from a Fulton County grand jury after Ms. Willis presents her case to them. The number of people indicted could be large: A separate special grand jury that investigated the matter in an advisory capacity last year recommended more than a dozen people for indictment, and the forewoman of the grand jury has strongly hinted that the former president was among them.If an indictment lands and the case goes to trial, a regular jury and the American public will hear a story that centers on nine critical weeks from Election Day through early January in which a host of people all tried to push one lie: that Mr. Trump had secured victory in Georgia. The question before the jurors would be whether some of those accused went so far that they broke the law.A recording of Mr. Trump talking to Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia, was played during a hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee last October. Alex Wong/Getty ImagesUnleashing ‘Hate and Fury’It did not take long for the gloves to come off.During the Nov. 5 visit by Donald Trump Jr., the Georgia Republican Party was already fracturing. Some officials believed they should focus on defending the seats of the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were weeks away from runoff elections, rather than fighting a losing presidential candidate’s battles.But according to testimony before the Jan. 6 committee by one of the Trump campaign’s local staffers, Mr. Trump’s son was threatening to “tank” those Senate races if there was not total support for his father’s effort. (A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. disputed that characterization, noting that the former president’s son later appeared in ads for the Senate candidates.) Four days later, the two senators called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation. The Raffensperger family was soon barraged with threats, leading his wife, Tricia, to confront Ms. Loeffler in a text message: “Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury.”Four other battleground states had also flipped to Mr. Biden, but losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Mr. Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.By the end of November, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed had become a font of misinformation. “Everybody knows it was Rigged” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 29. And on Dec. 1: “Do something @BrianKempGA,” he wrote, referring to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican. “You allowed your state to be scammed.”But these efforts were not gaining traction. Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp were not bending. And on Dec. 1, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, announced that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”A Show for LawmakersIt was time to turn up the volume.Mr. Giuliani was on the road, traveling to Phoenix and Lansing, Mich., to meet with lawmakers to convince them of fraud in their states, both lost by Mr. Trump. Now, he was in Atlanta.Even though Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia had been upheld by a state audit, Mr. Giuliani made fantastical claims at a hearing in front of the State Senate, the first of three legislative hearings in December 2020.Rudolph Giuliani at a legislative hearing at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta in December 2020.Rebecca Wright/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressHe repeatedly asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden and changed the election outcome — false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and a number of others.Mr. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, also played a video that he said showed election workers pulling suitcases of suspicious ballots from under a table to be secretly counted after Republican poll watchers had left for the night.He accused two workers, a Black mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, of passing a suspicious USB drive between them “like vials of heroin or cocaine.” Investigators later determined that they were passing a mint; Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil suit that he had made false statements about the two women.Other Trump allies also made false claims at the hearing with no evidence to back them up, including that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and others unqualified to vote in Georgia had done so.John Eastman, a lawyer advising the Trump campaign, claimed that “the number of underage individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”That was not remotely true. During an interview last year, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who had made an error, and there were in fact about 2,000 voters who “were only 16 when they registered.”But a review of the data he was using found that Mr. Eastman was referring to the total number of Georgians since the 1920s who were recorded as having registered before they were allowed. Even that number was heavily inflated due to data-entry errors common in large government databases.The truth: Only about a dozen Georgia residents were recorded as being 16 when they registered to vote in 2020, and those appeared to be another data-entry glitch.Trump supporters protesting election results at State Farm Arena in Atlanta in the days following the 2020 election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe President CallingIn the meantime, Mr. Trump was working the phones, trying to directly persuade Georgia Republican leaders to reject Mr. Biden’s win.He called Governor Kemp on Dec. 5, a day after the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to have the state’s election results overturned. Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Kemp to compel lawmakers to come back into session and brush aside the will of the state’s voters.Mr. Kemp, who during his campaign for governor had toted a rifle and threatened to “round up illegals” in an ad that seemed an homage to Mr. Trump, rebuffed the idea.Two days later, Mr. Trump called David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House, with a similar pitch. But Mr. Ralston, who died last year, “basically cut the president off,” a member of the special grand jury in Atlanta who heard his testimony later told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He just basically took the wind out of the sails.”By Dec. 7, Georgia had completed its third vote count, yet again affirming Mr. Biden’s victory. But Trump allies in the legislature were hatching a new plan to defy the election laws that have long been pillars of American democracy: They wanted to call a special session and pick new electors who would cast votes for Mr. Trump.Never mind that Georgia lawmakers had already approved representatives to the Electoral College reflecting Biden’s win in the state, part of the constitutionally prescribed process for formalizing the election of a new president. The Trump allies hoped that the fake electors and the votes they cast would be used to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results on Jan. 6.Mr. Kemp issued a statement warning them off: “Doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option that is allowed under state or federal law.”The Fake Electors MeetRather than back down, Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the emerging plan to enlist slates of bogus electors.Mr. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, to enlist her help, according to Ms. McDaniel’s House testimony. By Dec. 13, as the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected an election challenge from the Trump campaign, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s local director of Election Day operations, emailed the 16 fake electors, directing them to quietly meet in the capitol building in Atlanta the next day.Mr. Trump’s top campaign lawyers were so troubled by the plan that they refused to take part. Still, the president tried to keep up the pressure using his Twitter account. “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” he wrote in a post just after midnight on Dec. 14, adding, “Demand this clown call a Special Session.”Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, at a news conference following the election in 2020.Al Drago for The New York TimesLater that day, the bogus electors met at the Statehouse. They signed documents that claimed they were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though they were not.In the end, their effort was rebuffed by Mr. Pence.In his testimony to House investigators, Mr. Sinners later reflected on what took place: “I felt ashamed,” he said.Moves in the White HouseWith other efforts failing, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, got personally involved. Just before Christmas, he traveled to suburban Cobb County, Ga., during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots, which had been requested by Mr. Kemp.Mr. Meadows tried to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. He was turned away. But he did meet with Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the audit process.During the visit, Mr. Meadows put Mr. Trump on the phone with the lead investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson. “I won Georgia by a lot, and the people know it,” Mr. Trump told her. “Something bad happened.”Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta at the time, believed that Mr. Meadows’s visit was “highly unusual,” adding in his House testimony, “I don’t recall that ever happening in the history of the U.S.”In Washington, meanwhile, a strange plot was emerging within the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump.Mr. Barr, one of the most senior administration officials to dismiss the claims of fraud, had stepped down as attorney general, and jockeying for power began. Jeffrey Clark, an unassuming lawyer who had been running the Justice Department’s environmental division, attempted to go around the department’s leadership by meeting with Mr. Trump and pitching a plan to help keep him in office.Mr. Trump, his daughter Ivanka Trump and Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, leaving the White House en route to Georgia in January 2021.Pool photo by Erin ScottMr. Clark drafted a letter to lawmakers in Georgia, dated Dec. 28, falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” regarding the state’s election results. He urged the lawmakers to convene a special session — a dramatic intervention.Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general, later testified that he was so alarmed when he saw the draft letter that he had to read it “twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing, because it was so extreme.”The letter was never sent.One Last CallStill, Mr. Trump refused to give up. It was time to reach the man who was in charge of election oversight: Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.On Jan. 2, he called Mr. Raffensperger and asked him to recalculate the vote. It was the call that he would later repeatedly defend as “perfect,” an hourlong mostly one-sided conversation during which Mr. Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected his entreaties.“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president warned, adding, “you know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.”Mr. Raffensperger was staggered. He later wrote that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”Mr. Trump seemed particularly intent on incriminating the Black women working for the county elections office, telling Mr. Raffensperger that Ruby Freeman — whom he mentioned 18 times during the call — was “a professional vote-scammer and hustler.”“She’s one of the hot items on the internet, Brad,” Mr. Trump said of the viral misinformation circulating about Ms. Freeman, which had already been debunked by Mr. Raffensperger’s aides and federal investigators.Trump-fueled conspiracy theories about Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Ms. Moss, were indeed proliferating. In testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last year, Ms. Moss recounted Trump supporters forcing their way into her grandmother’s home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter; Ms. Freeman said that she no longer went to the grocery store.Then, on Jan. 4, Ms. Freeman received an unusual overture.Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter from Chicago who had once worked as a publicist for Kanye West, persuaded Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station outside Atlanta. Ms. Freeman later said that Ms. Kutti — who told her that “crisis is my thing,” according to a video of the encounter — had tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud.“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Ms. Freeman said in her testimony, adding, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”Cathy Latham, center, in a light blue shirt, in the elections office in Coffee County, Ga., while a team working on Mr. Trump’s behalf made copies of voting equipment data in January 2021.Coffee County, Georgia, via Associated Press‘Every Freaking Ballot’On Jan. 7, despite the fake electors and the rest of the pressure campaign, Mr. Pence certified the election results for Mr. Biden. The bloody, chaotic attack on the Capitol the day before did not stop the final certification of Biden’s victory, but in Georgia, the machinations continued.In a quiet, rural county in the southeastern part of the state, Trump allies gave their mission one more extraordinary try.A few hours after the certification, a small group working on Mr. Trump’s behalf traveled to Coffee County, about 200 miles from Atlanta. A lawyer advising Mr. Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County with employees of the company on Jan. 7, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Mr. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on Election Day.A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”Others would have their regrets, too. While Mr. Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Mr. Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”By then, Ms. Willis’s investigation was well underway.“An investigation is like an onion,” she said in an interview soon after her inquiry began. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.” More

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      How Jack Smith Structured the Trump Election Indictment to Reduce Risks

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      The special counsel layered varied charges atop the same facts, while sidestepping a free-speech question by not charging incitement.In accusing former President Donald J. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy, the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged the same story three different ways. The charges are novel applications of criminal laws to unprecedented circumstances, heightening legal risks, but Mr. Smith’s tactic gives him multiple paths in obtaining and upholding a guilty verdict.“Especially in a case like this, you want to have multiple charges that are applicable or provable with the same evidence, so that if on appeal you lose one, you still have the conviction,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor.That structure in the indictment is only one of several strategic choices by Mr. Smith — including what facts and potential charges he chose to include or omit — that may foreshadow and shape how an eventual trial of Mr. Trump will play out.The four charges rely on three criminal statutes: a count of conspiring to defraud the government, another of conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and two counts related to corruptly obstructing a congressional proceeding. Applying each to Mr. Trump’s actions raises various complexities, according to a range of criminal law experts.At the same time, the indictment hints at how Mr. Smith is trying to sidestep legal pitfalls and potential defenses. He began with an unusual preamble that reads like an opening statement at trial, acknowledging that Mr. Trump had a right to challenge the election results in court and even to lie about them, but drawing a distinction with the defendant’s pursuit of “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”While the indictment is sprawling in laying out a case against Mr. Trump, it brings a selective lens on the multifaceted efforts by the former president and his associates to overturn the 2020 election.“The strength of the indictment is that it is very narrowly written,” said Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and former public defender. “The government is not attempting to prove too much, but rather it went for low-hanging fruit.”For one, Mr. Smith said little about the violent events of Jan. 6, leaving out vast amounts of evidence in the report by a House committee that separately investigated the matter. He focused more on a brazen plan to recruit false slates of electors from swing states and a pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to block the congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.That choice dovetails with Mr. Smith’s decision not to charge Mr. Trump with inciting an insurrection or seditious conspiracy — potential charges the House committee recommended. By eschewing them, he avoided having the case focus on the inflammatory but occasionally ambiguous remarks Mr. Trump made to his supporters as they morphed into a mob, avoiding tough First Amendment objections that defense lawyers could raise.For another, while Mr. Smith described six of Mr. Trump’s associates as co-conspirators, none were charged. It remains unclear whether some of them will eventually be indicted if they do not cooperate, or whether he intends to target only Mr. Trump so the case will move faster.Mr. Smith chose to say very little about the violent events of Jan. 6 and instead focused on the scheme to recruit slates of fake electors and the pressure Mr. Trump brought upon Vice President Pence.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesAmong the charges Mr. Smith did bring against Mr. Trump, corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding is the most familiar in how it applies to the aftermath of the 2020 election. Already, hundreds of ordinary Jan. 6 rioters have been charged with it.To date, most judges in Jan. 6 cases, at the district court and appeals court level, have upheld the use of the statute. But a few Trump-appointed judges have favored a more narrow interpretation, like limiting the law to situations in which people destroyed evidence or sought a benefit more concrete than having their preferred candidate win an election.Mr. Trump, of course, would have personally benefited from staying in office, making that charge stronger against him than against the rioters. Still, a possible risk is if the Supreme Court soon takes up one of the rioter cases and then narrows the scope of the law in a way that would affect the case against Mr. Trump.Proving IntentSome commentators have argued in recent days that prosecutors must persuade the jury that Mr. Trump knew his voter fraud claims were false to prove corrupt intent. But that is oversimplified, several experts said.To be sure, experts broadly agree that Mr. Smith will have an easier time winning a conviction if jurors are persuaded that Mr. Trump knew he was lying about everything. To that end, the indictment details how he “was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue” and “deliberately disregarded the truth.”“What you see in Trump — a guy who seems to inhabit his own fictional universe — is something you see in other fraud defendants,” said David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University law professor. “It’s a common challenge in a fraud case to prove that at some level the defendant knew what he was telling people wasn’t true. The way you prove it is, in part, by showing that lots of people made clear to the defendant that what he was saying was baseless.”Moreover, the indictment emphasizes several episodes in which Mr. Trump had firsthand knowledge that his statements were false. Prosecutors can use those instances of demonstrably knowing lies to urge jurors to infer that Mr. Trump knew he was lying about everything else, too.The indictment, for example, recounts a taped call on Jan. 2 with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump shared a series of conspiracy theories that he systematically debunked in detail. But on Twitter the next day, Mr. Trump “falsely claimed that the Georgia secretary of state had not addressed” the allegations.And on Jan. 5, Mr. Pence told Mr. Trump that he had no lawful authority to alter or delay the counting of Mr. Biden’s electoral votes, but “hours later” Mr. Trump issued a statement through his campaign saying the opposite: “The vice president and I are in total agreement that the vice president has the power to act.”Vice President Pence appears during House committee hearings investigating Jan. 6. The indictment suggests Mr. Trump knew he was lying about what Mr. Pence had told him on January 5.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn any case, several rioters have already argued that they did not have “corrupt intent” because they sincerely believed the election had been stolen. That has not worked: Judges have said that corrupt intent can be shown by engaging in other unlawful actions like trespassing, assaulting the police and destroying property.“Belief that your actions are serving a greater good does not negate consciousness of wrongdoing,” Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote last month.Mr. Trump, of course, did not rampage through the Capitol. But the indictment accuses him of committing other crimes — the fraud and voter disenfranchisement conspiracies — based on wrongful conduct. It cites Mr. Trump’s bid to use fake electors in violation of the Electoral Count Act and his solicitation of fraud at the Justice Department and in Georgia, where he pressured Mr. Raffensperger to help him “find” 11,780 votes, enough to overcome Mr. Biden’s margin of victory.“Whether he thinks he won or lost is relevant but not determinative,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former prosecutor who worked on the independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton. “Trump could try to achieve vindicating his beliefs legally. The conspiracy is tied to the illegal means. So he has to say that he thought ‘finding’ 11,000 votes was legal, or that fake electors were legal. That is much harder to say with a straight face.”Proving Mr. Trump’s intent will also be key to the charges of defrauding the government and disenfranchising voters. But it may be easier because those laws do not have the heightened standard of “corrupt” intent as the obstruction statute does.Court rulings interpreting the statute that criminalizes defrauding the United States, for example, have established that evidence of deception or dishonesty is sufficient. In a 1924 Supreme Court ruling, Chief Justice William H. Taft wrote that it covers interference with a government function “by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.” A 1989 appeals courts ruling said the dishonest actions need not be crimes in and of themselves.This factor may help explain the indictment’s emphasis on the fake electors schemes in one state after another, a repetitive narrative that risks dullness: It would be hard to credibly argue that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators thought the fake slates they submitted were real, and the indictment accuses them of other forms of trickery as well.The opening of the Michigan Electoral College session at the State Capitol in 2020. The indictment emphasizes Mr. Trump’s involvement in fake electors schemes in several swing states.Pool photo by Carlos Osorio“Some fraudulent electors were tricked into participating based on the understanding that their votes would be used only if the defendant succeeded in outcome-determinative lawsuits within their state, which the defendant never did,” it said.A Novel ChargeThe inclusion of the charge involving a conspiracy to disenfranchise voters was a surprising development in Mr. Smith’s emerging strategy. Unlike the other charges, it had not been a major part of the public discussion of the investigation — for example, it was not among the charges recommended by the House Jan. 6 committee.Congress enacted the law after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal prosecutors to go after Southern white people, including Ku Klux Klan members, who used terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved Black people from voting. But in the 20th century, the Supreme Court upheld a broadened use of the law to address election-fraud conspiracies. The idea is that any conspiracy to engineer dishonest election results victimizes all voters in an election.“It was a good move to charge that statute, partly because that is really what this case really is about — depriving the people of the right to choose their president,” said Robert S. Litt, a former federal prosecutor and a top intelligence lawyer in the Obama administration.That statute has mostly been used to address misconduct leading up to and during election, like bribing voters or stuffing ballot boxes, rather than misconduct after an election. Still, in 1933, an appeals court upheld its use in a case involving people who reported false totals from a voter tabulation machine.It has never been used before in a conspiracy to use fake slates of Electoral College voters from multiple states to keep legitimate electors from being counted and thereby subvert the results of a presidential election — a situation that itself was unprecedented.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have signaled they will argue that he had a First Amendment right to say whatever he wanted. Indeed, the indictment acknowledged that it was not illegal in and of itself for Mr. Trump to lie.But in portraying Mr. Trump’s falsehoods as “integral to his criminal plans,” Mr. Smith suggested he would frame those public statements as contributing to unlawful actions and as evidence they were undertaken with bad intentions, not as crimes in and of themselves.Mr. Trump at Reagan National Airport Thursday following his court appearance. Mr. Trump’s legal team has signaled they will argue that he had a First Amendment right to say whatever he wanted.Doug Mills/The New York TimesA related defense Mr. Trump may raise is the issue of “advice of counsel.” If a defendant relied in good faith on a lawyer who incorrectly informed him that doing something would be legal, a jury may decide he lacked criminal intent. But there are limits. Among them, the defendant must have told the lawyer all the relevant facts and the theory must be “reasonable.”The indictment discusses how even though White House lawyers told Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence had no lawful authority to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory, an outside lawyer — John Eastman, described in the indictment as Co-Conspirator 2 and who separately faces disbarment proceedings — advised him that Mr. Pence could.Several legal specialists agreed that Mr. Trump has an advice-of-counsel argument to make. But Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor, said Mr. Smith was likely to try to rebut it by pointing to the repeated instances in which Mr. Trump’s White House legal advisers told him that Mr. Eastman was wrong.“You have to have a genuine good-faith belief that the legal advice is legitimate and valid, not just ‘I’m going to keep running through as many lawyers as I can until one tells me something I want to hear, no matter how crazy and implausible it is,’” Mr. Buell said. More

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      The Charges That Were Notably Absent From the Trump Indictment

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      An indictment this week did not accuse former President Donald Trump of inciting the mob that attacked the Capitol, but it did show that some close to him knew violence might be coming.There was something noticeably absent when the special counsel, Jack Smith, unsealed an indictment this week charging former President Donald J. Trump with multiple conspiracies to overturn the 2020 election: any count that directly accused Mr. Trump of being responsible for the violence his supporters committed at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The indictment asserted that as violence erupted that day, Mr. Trump “exploited the disruption,” using it to further his goal of stopping the certification of his loss in the election. But it stopped short of charging him with actually encouraging or inciting the mob that stormed the building, chasing lawmakers from their duties.Still, the charging document, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, made abundantly clear that a group of aides and lawyers surrounding Mr. Trump were highly aware that he was playing with fire by pushing forward with his plan to pressure his vice president, Mike Pence, to throw the election his way during the congressional proceeding on Jan. 6.While some of the aides and lawyers were aghast by what might, and ultimately did, take place, others seemed unconcerned, especially those who were later named as Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators in the case.In one scene described in the indictment, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump warned the lawyer John Eastman just days before the Capitol was attacked that his plan to have Mr. Trump strong-arm Mr. Pence was “going to cause riots in the streets.”According to the indictment, Mr. Eastman “responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic.”More than 1,000 people have been charged so far with taking part in the Capitol attack, which caused millions of dollars’ worth of damage and injuries to more than 100 police officers. Among those accused are nearly 350 defendants charged with assaulting the police and 10 members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia who were convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy, a crime that requires showing that physical force was used against the government.In December, the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 recommended that the Justice Department charge Mr. Trump with several federal crimes, including inciting insurrection — a count that would have directly placed the blame for the attack on Mr. Trump’s shoulders. But Mr. Smith’s prosecutors did not include that charge in the indictment.Instead, they focused on counts that detailed Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging machinations to remain in power in the weeks leading up to the attack and on how he took his time in issuing a plea for calm to his supporters once the attack was underway.At a news conference announcing the charges, Mr. Smith asserted that the assault on the Capitol was “fueled by lies,” but over the course of its 45 pages, the indictment itself never quite makes that accusation directly against Mr. Trump.And yet the charges did lay out how Mr. Eastman, who is identified in the indictment only as Co-Conspirator 2, and Jeffrey Clark, a loyalist in Mr. Trump’s Justice Department who appears as Co-Conspirator 4, understood and even accepted that violence might result from their plans to subvert the democratic process and keep Mr. Trump in the White House.Three days before the Capitol was attacked, the indictment says, a deputy White House counsel told Mr. Clark that there had been no voting fraud sufficient to change the results of the election and that if Mr. Trump nonetheless maintained his grip on power, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.”Mr. Clark’s response, according to the indictment, was to bring up a federal law that allows the president to summon the military to quell domestic unrest.“That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” he said.For reasons that remain unknown, prosecutors chose not to include in the indictment any evidence from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows. In a gripping testimony last year in front of the House Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Hutchinson described how Mr. Trump, knowing his supporters were armed and threatening violence on Jan. 6, urged them to march to Capitol anyhow — and even sought to join them.Ms. Hutchinson told the panel that Mr. Trump had demanded that security checkpoints be removed outside his rally on the Ellipse, near the White House, even though he had been warned that some in the crowd had been spotted with weapons.“They’re not here to hurt me,” she quoted Mr. Trump as saying.In theory, Mr. Smith’s team could bring new charges against Mr. Trump at almost any time, using accounts like Ms. Hutchinson’s to support an accusation that Mr. Trump played some role in encouraging the violence at the Capitol. The incitement charge recommended by the House committee is written quite broadly, making it a crime to “incite, assist with or participate in” a rebellion or an insurrection against federal laws or government authority.Prosecutors could also try to connect Mr. Trump more directly with the violence through the statements made by scores of rioters charged in the Capitol attack who have said that they were answering Mr. Trump’s call when they traveled to Washington and joined in the assault.“Hey we’re going back to Washington January 6 — Trump has called all patriots,” an Iowa woman named Deborah Sandoval wrote on Facebook on Dec. 21, 2020, two days after Mr. Trump summoned his followers to a “wild” protest in the city. “If the electors don’t elect, we will be forced into civil war.”Still, prosecutors are often wary of bringing incitement charges because they typically involve behavior like speeches or social media posts that the First Amendment protects, within limits.And Mr. Trump’s lawyers have already signaled that he intends to use a First Amendment defense against the charges he is facing.During his speech before the attack, Mr. Trump did at one point tell his followers to march on the Capitol “peacefully,” and, after the building had been stormed, he posted messages on Twitter belatedly asking people in the crowd to “remain peaceful.”But prosecutors say that even though he issued those calls, he did not ask his supporters to leave the Capitol grounds until after 6 p.m. that day. And as he made that request, the indictment said, he continued to repeat his false claims that a “sacred landslide victory” had been “viciously stripped away” from him. More

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      Trump Indictment Leaves Alleged Co-Conspirators Facing Tough Choices

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      The special counsel’s decision not to charge six people said to have played critical roles in the effort to keep Donald Trump in office seemed to give them a chance to cooperate with prosecutors. Some appear to be unwilling.By the time Jack Smith, the special counsel, was brought in to oversee the investigation of former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the inquiry had already focused for months on a group of lawyers close to Mr. Trump.Many showed up as subjects of interest in a seemingly unending flurry of subpoenas issued by a grand jury sitting in the case. Some were household names, others less familiar. Among them were Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell.On Tuesday, most of these same lawyers showed up again — albeit unnamed — as Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators in a federal indictment accusing him of a wide-ranging plot to remain in office despite having lost the election.The appearance of the lawyers at the center of the case suggests how important prosecutors judged them to be to the conspiracy to execute what one federal judge who considered some of the evidence called “a coup in search of a legal theory.”The lawyers’ placement at the heart of the plot while remaining uncharged — for now — raised questions about why Mr. Smith chose to bring the indictment with Mr. Trump as the sole defendant.In complex conspiracy cases, prosecutors often choose to work from the bottom up, charging subordinates with crimes to put pressure on them to cooperate against their superiors. It remains unclear precisely what Mr. Smith may be seeking to accomplish by flipping that script.Some legal experts theorized on Wednesday that by indicting Mr. Trump alone, Mr. Smith might be seeking to streamline and expedite the case ahead of the 2024 election. If the co-conspirators were indicted, that would almost certainly slow down the process, potentially with the other defendants filing motions and seeking to splinter their cases from Mr. Trump’s.“I think it’s a clean indictment to just have Donald Trump as the sole defendant,” said Soumya Dayananda, a former federal prosecutor who served as a senior investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee. “I think it makes it easier to just tell the story of what his corrupt activity was.”Another explanation could be that by indicting Mr. Trump — and leaving open the threat of other charges — Mr. Smith was delivering a message: cooperate against Mr. Trump, or end up indicted like him. By not charging them for now, Mr. Smith could be giving the co-conspirators an incentive to reach a deal with investigators and provide information about the former president.While the threat of prosecution could loom indefinitely, it is possible that the judge overseeing the case might soon ask Mr. Smith’s team to disclose whether it plans to issue a new indictment with additional defendants. And some legal experts expect additional charges to come.“It’s clearly a strategic decision not to charge them so far, because it’s out of the ordinary,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney who is now a University of Alabama law professor. “I don’t see an advantage to giving people this culpable a pass.”That said, at least one of the co-conspirators — Mr. Giuliani — and another possible co-conspirator — Boris Epshteyn, a lawyer and strategic adviser close to Mr. Trump — have already sat with prosecutors for extended voluntary interviews. To arrange for such interviews, prosecutors typically consent not to use any statements made during the interview in future criminal proceedings against them unless the subject is determined to have been lying.Boris Epshteyn has sat with prosecutors for an extended voluntary interview.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via ShutterstockBut those protections do not prevent Mr. Smith from charging anyone who sat for an interview. He still has the option of filing charges against any or all of the co-conspirators at more or less any time he chooses.He used that tactic in a separate case against Mr. Trump related to the former president’s mishandling of classified documents, issuing a superseding indictment last week that accused a new defendant — the property manager of Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida — of being part of a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s attempts to retrieve the sensitive materials.Some of the lawyers named as Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators in the indictment filed on Tuesday have effectively acknowledged to being named in the case through their lawyers.In a statement issued Tuesday night, Robert J. Costello, a lawyer for Mr. Giuliani, said it “appears” as if the former New York City mayor were Co-Conspirator 1. The statement also leveled a blistering attack on the indictment — and a defense of Mr. Trump — suggesting that Mr. Giuliani was an unlikely candidate for cooperating against the former president.“Every fact that Mayor Giuliani possesses about this case establishes the good-faith basis President Donald Trump had for the action that he took,” Mr. Costello said.Not long after, Charles Burnham, a lawyer for Mr. Eastman, implicitly admitted his client’s role as Co-Conspirator 2 by issuing a statement “regarding United States v. Donald J. Trump indictment” in which he insisted Mr. Eastman was not “involved in plea bargaining.”John Eastman after a hearing in Los Angeles. His lawyer implicitly admitted his client’s role as Co-Conspirator 2.Jae C. Hong/Associated Press“The fact is, if Dr. Eastman is indicted, he will go to trial,” the statement said. “If convicted, he will appeal.”Some sleuthing was required to determine the identities of the other co-conspirators.The indictment refers to Co-Conspirator 3, for instance, as a lawyer whose “unfounded claims of election fraud” sounded “crazy” to Mr. Trump.That description fits Ms. Powell. She was best known during the postelection period for filing four lawsuits in key swing states claiming that a cabal of bad actors — including Chinese software companies, Venezuelan officials and the liberal financier George Soros — conspired to hack into voting machines produced by Dominion Voting Systems and flip votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.Mr. Clark is a close match to the description of Co-Conspirator 4, who is identified in the charges as a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and plotted with Mr. Trump to use the department to “open sham election crime investigations” and “influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”Against the advice of top officials at the Justice Department, Mr. Trump sought to install Mr. Clark, a high-ranking official in the department’s civil division, as the acting attorney general in the waning days of his administration after Mr. Clark agreed to support his claims of election fraud.Sidney Powell was best known during the postelection period for filing four lawsuits in key swing states claiming that a cabal of bad actors conspired to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Clark also helped draft a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, urging him to call the state legislature into a special session to create a slate of false pro-Trump electors even though the state was won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.A batch of documents obtained by The New York Times helped to identify Mr. Chesebro as Co-Conspirator 5, who is described in the indictment as a lawyer who helped to craft and implement “a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”The emails obtained by The Times laid out a detailed picture of how several lawyers, reporting to Mr. Giuliani, carried out the so-called fake elector plot on behalf of Mr. Trump, while keeping many of their actions obscured from the public — and even from other lawyers working for the former president.Several of these emails appeared as evidence in the indictment of Mr. Trump, including some that showed lawyers and the false electors they were seeking to recruit expressing reservations about whether the plan was honest or even legal.“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” a lawyer based in Phoenix who helped organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona wrote to Mr. Epshteyn on Dec. 8, 2020.In another example, Mr. Chesebro wrote to Mr. Giuliani that two electors in Arizona “are concerned it could appear treasonous.”At one point, the indictment quotes from a redacted message sent by an Arizona lawyer on Dec. 8, 2020, that reads, “I just talked to the gentleman who did that memo, [Co-Conspirator 5]. His idea is basically. …”Jeffrey Clark appears to be a close match to Co-Conspirator 4, who is described in the charges as a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and plotted with Mr. Trump.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAn unredacted version of that email obtained by The Times has the name “Ken Cheseboro” in the place of Co-Conspirator 5.The indictment also cites a legal memo dated Nov. 18, 2020, that proposed recruiting a group of Trump supporters who would meet and vote as purported electors for Wisconsin. The court filing describes it as having been drafted by Co-Conspirator 5. That memo, also obtained by The Times, shows it was written by Mr. Chesebro.A separate email, reviewed by The Times, gives a hint that Mr. Epshteyn could be Co-Conspirator 6.The email — bearing a subject line reading, “Attorney for Electors Memo” — was sent on Dec. 7, 2020, to Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Giuliani’s son, Andrew.“Dear Mayor,” it reads. “As discussed, below are the attorneys I would recommend for the memo on choosing electors,” adding the names of lawyers in seven states.Paragraph 57 of the indictment asserts that Co-Conspirator 1, or Mr. Giuliani, spoke with Co-Conspirator 6 about lawyers who “could assist in the fraudulent elector effort in the targeted states.”It also says that Co-Conspirator 6 sent an email to Mr. Giuliani “identifying attorneys in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin” — the same seven states mentioned in the email reviewed by The Times.Maggie Haberman More

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      Why Jack Smith Had to Bring This Indictment Against Trump

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      Donald Trump has now been indicted three times, accused of crimes occurring before, during and after his presidency. The latest indictment alleges facts from all quarters to prove his criminality: from the vice president to the White House counsel and the heads of the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence, as well as many others. All are Republican loyalists.But the indictment does more: It skillfully avoids breathing air into a Trump claim of selective prosecution. To not have brought this case against Mr. Trump would have been an act of selective nonprosecution. The Justice Department has already charged and obtained convictions for myriad foot soldiers related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including charging well over 300 people for obstructing the congressional proceedings. In this indictment, the special counsel Jack Smith wisely brings that same charge, but now against the alleged leader of the effort to thwart the transfer of power.That charge of obstruction and conspiracy to defraud the United States in the administration of elections are entirely fitting for the conduct alleged in the indictment. In a civil case last year, the Federal District Court judge David Carter held that Mr. Trump and John Eastman likely engaged in a criminal conspiracy under both those statutes in their schemes to organize false electors and pressure the vice president. Mr. Smith has now said he can prove the same conduct beyond a reasonable doubt.Although the Jan. 6 select committee referred Mr. Trump for investigation for inciting an insurrection, Mr. Smith wisely demurred. The Justice Department has not charged that offense in any other case involving the attack on the Capitol, and insurrection has not been charged since the 19th century. Of course, no president has engaged in it since then — but since no one else has been charged with that crime relating to Jan. 6, it likely would have been an issue. And since the penalty for the insurrection offense is that the defendant would not be eligible to hold federal office, it would have fueled a claim of weaponizing the Justice Department to defeat a political rival.Mr. Trump and others like him will of course continue to assert that the Justice Department has been politically weaponized. That claim has it exactly backward.To not charge Mr. Trump for trying to criminally interfere with the transfer of power to a duly elected president would be to politicize the matter. It would mean external political considerations had infected the Justice Department’s decision-making and steered the institution away from its commitment to holding everyone equally accountable under the law.What those circling their wagons around Mr. Trump are in effect asking for is a two-tiered system, in which the people who were stirred by lies to interrupt the congressional certification are held to account but not the chief instigator. That injustice has not been lost on judges overseeing cases related to Jan. 6. In the 2021 sentencing of John Lolos — a 48-year-old man with no criminal record who traveled from Seattle to hear Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse before being convinced to “storm” the Capitol — Judge Amit Mehta commented on the incongruity in the D.C. courtroom.“People like Mr. Lolos were told lies, fed falsehoods, and told that our election was stolen when it clearly was not,” the judge said. He went on to add that those “who created the conditions that led to Mr. Lolos’s conduct” and the events of Jan. 6 have “in no meaningful sense” been held “to account for their actions and their words.”We are now on the doorstep of the sort of accountability that Judge Mehta found lacking.That is what also makes this indictment of the former president different. Where both the Manhattan hush money case and classified documents case have been, in some part, mired in discussions of whataboutism, the 2020 election interference indictment is where whataboutism goes to die.In this case, the Trump stratagem is unmasked. Given the record of robust prosecutions of Jan. 6 foot soldiers and Mr. Trump’s responsibility for their actions, he has had to resort to saying the Capitol attack was good, and he and his enablers have lauded convicted felons as heroes and “political prisoners.” Mr. Trump’s continued statements in favor of the Jan. 6 defendants can and likely will be used against him in any trial.As the narrative of the indictment lays out, Mr. Trump’s schemes — to sell the big lie and promote election fraud even when he privately conceded to advisers the claims were “unsupported” and “crazy” — are what contributed to the attack of Jan. 6. And it is a relief that the indictment includes Mr. Trump’s role and responsibility in that violence. Many Americans would not understand the Justice Department focusing only on bureaucratic and procedural efforts to affect the congressional certification.As Senator Mitch McConnell said at the close of Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There is no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”He added: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”What is also clear from the indictment is that Mr. Trump will most likely not be the last white-collar defendant charged for the set of crimes it sets out. Mr. Smith clearly, and properly, considers that the six co-conspirators — parts of the indictment describe actions by co-conspirators that correspond with those taken by, for example, Mr. Eastman and Rudy Giuliani — committed federal offenses that threatened the core of our democracy. The rule of law cannot tolerate those actors facing charges with the main protagonist going scot free.The main task ahead for Mr. Smith is getting his cases to trial before the general election. But the true test ahead will not be for Mr. Smith. It will be for us: Will Americans care about the rule of law enough to vote for it? The courtroom is a place where facts and law still matter, but the criminal cases against Mr. Trump will test whether the same can be said for the ballot box.Ryan Goodman, a law professor at the New York University School of Law, is a co-editor in chief of Just Security. Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, is a professor at N.Y.U. School of Law and a host of the podcast Prosecuting Donald Trump.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More