Georgia Criminal Case Against Trump (2020 Election)

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      Trump’s Bail Set at $200,000 in Georgia Election Interference Case

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      Mr. Trump, who said he would turn himself in on Thursday, was told not to intimidate or threaten any witnesses or co-defendants in the case.A judge in Atlanta set bail for former President Donald J. Trump at $200,000 on Monday in the new election interference case against him, warning Mr. Trump not to intimidate or threaten witnesses or any of his 18 co-defendants as a condition of the bond agreement.Mr. Trump, who posted on Truth Social that he would surrender to the authorities in Atlanta on Thursday, is also sorting out logistical details in three other criminal cases that have been filed against him this year. Earlier in the day, federal prosecutors pushed back on a request from his lawyers to postpone a separate election interference trial in Washington, D.C., until at least April 2026.Under his bond agreement in Georgia, Mr. Trump cannot communicate with any co-defendants in the case except through his lawyers. He was also directed to “make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against the community,” including “posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual.”The terms were more extensive than those set for other defendants in the case so far, which did not specifically mention social media. In the past, Mr. Trump has made inflammatory and sometimes false personal attacks on Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, who is leading the case.Bond was set at $100,000 for John Eastman, one of the architects of a plan to use fake electors to keep Mr. Trump in power. according to court filings; a lawyer for Kenneth Chesebro, who also developed that plan, said the same amount was set for Mr. Chesebro.Mr. Trump’s attacks continued on Monday ahead of his bond being set. In a post on Truth Social, he called Ms. Willis “crooked, incompetent, & highly partisan” and wrote that she “has allowed Murder and other Violent Crime to MASSIVELY ESCALATE.” In fact, homicides have fallen sharply in Atlanta in the first half of the year.From front left, Donald Trump’s lawyers Marissa Goldberg, Jennifer Little and Drew Findling outside the Fulton County Government Center in Atlanta.Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesWhile Mr. Trump did not have to pay bail in the other criminal cases against him, the agreements posted for him and several of his co-defendants in Georgia on Monday require five- and six-figure sums. The defendants have to come up with only 10 percent of the bail amount, but even that could prove difficult for some, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, who is running out of money because of an array of legal entanglements.Racketeering cases like this one can be particularly long and costly for defendants — in another racketeering case in the same court, involving a number of high-profile rappers, jury selection alone has gone on for seven months.The costs clearly worry some of the defendants in the Trump case; one of them, Cathy Latham, a former Republican Party official in Georgia who acted as a fake elector for Mr. Trump in 2020, has set up a legal-defense fund, describing herself as “a retired public-school teacher living on a teacher’s pension.” The $3,645 she has initially raised is well short of a $500,000 goal.Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who assisted Mr. Giuliani in his efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost in 2020, expressed frustration over the looming legal costs a few days after her indictment in the case. “Why isn’t MAGA, Inc. funding everyone’s defense?” she asked last week on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Trump and the other defendants were indicted last week on charges that they were part of a conspiracy to subvert the election results in Georgia, where Mr. Trump narrowly lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr.The Fulton County jail in Atlanta, where Mr. Trump will be booked.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe indictment laid out eight ways the defendants were accused of trying to reverse the election results as part of a “criminal enterprise”: by lying to the Georgia legislature, lying to state officials, creating fake pro-Trump electors to circumvent the popular vote, harassing election workers, soliciting Justice Department officials, soliciting Vice President Mike Pence, breaching voting machines and engaging in a cover-up.Mr. Trump has not been required to pay cash bail in the three other criminal cases he has been charged in this year — one in Manhattan and two federal cases brought by the special counsel, Jack Smith, in Miami and Washington, D.C.In Atlanta, prosecutors and law enforcement officials have emphasized a desire to treat the defendants as other accused felons would typically be treated in the city’s criminal justice system, with mug shots, fingerprinting and cash bails. But the Secret Service is sure to have security demands regarding the booking of a former president.On Monday, lawyers for a number of the defendants were seen walking in and out of a complex of connected government buildings, including the Fulton County courthouse and a government office building, where they met with representatives from the district attorney’s office. The lawyers had little to say, including about when Mr. Trump might surrender.“You’ll find out everything soon enough,” Drew Findling, Mr. Trump’s lead local lawyer, told reporters. “Patience is a virtue.”The lawyer Scott Grubman, left, who is representing Kenneth Chesebro, outside the Fulton County Courthouse on Monday.Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesMs. Ellis worked with Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost the election, traveling with him to various states to push claims of widespread fraud that were quickly debunked. But she has been a target of online attacks by allies of Mr. Trump for months, as she has been critical of the former president and has made supportive statements about his closest competitor in the Republican presidential primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.“I was reliably informed Trump isn’t funding any of us who are indicted,” Ms. Ellis posted on X last week. “Would this change if he becomes the nominee? Why then, not now?”Asked about her post, Ms. Ellis replied in a text message, “Mounting a defense in these circumstances is exorbitantly expensive. I don’t have great personal wealth and am doing this on my own. I have been overwhelmed and blessed with the generosity and support of Christians and conservatives across the nation who want to help me.”A person briefed on the matter said that Ms. Ellis had not asked for help from a legal-defense fund formed recently by Mr. Trump’s advisers but that she had sought help earlier and had been denied.Mr. Trump has used a political action committee that is aligned with him, and that is replete with money he raised in small-dollar donations as he falsely claimed he was fighting widespread fraud after the 2020 election, to pay the legal bills of a number of allies, as well as his own.But other defendants have been denied help with mounting legal bills long before they were charged. Among those asking for help are Mr. Giuliani; Mr. Trump’s political action committee, which has spent roughly $21 million on legal fees primarily for Mr. Trump but also for others connected to investigations into him, has so far covered only $340,000 for Mr. Giuliani.All 19 defendants are required to turn themselves in by noon on Friday.“The order said it had to be by Friday, I believe, and he plans to follow the order,” Mr. Grubman said of Mr. Chesebro.Sean Keenan contributed reporting from Atlanta. More

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      The Trump Indictments Are an Indictment of America

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      There are two ways to read the stack of indictments and impeachments the 45th president of the United States has amassed so far. They can be regarded, accurately, as America’s case against Donald Trump. Indictment is a legal action whereas impeachment is a political act, but when taken together the texts provide a singular and consistent case. They capture the progression of transgression evident in Trump’s political campaigns, his presidency and its aftermath, with each escape from accountability yielding a bolder and more reckless iteration of Trump.But the documents also reveal Trump’s case against the United States — dismissing America as a nation where politics serves as a defense against law and repudiating its people as easily and willingly misled, by ever escalating levels of deceit.Trump’s first indictment, for allegedly falsifying business records to conceal payments to women with whom he had extramarital affairs, offers an early and straightforward example of his deception. Concerned that the revelations would hurt his presidential campaign — or make him lose to Hillary Clinton by even more than expected or just antagonize Melania — he “orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication,” per the statement of facts compiled by the district attorney of New York County. Whether or not that effort also involved violations of electoral or tax law, it succeeded in hiding “damaging information from the voting public.” In short, the indictment contends, Trump obscured the truth.Once in office, Trump’s power to deceive grew and his fear of exposure diminished. His attempted strong-arming of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in 2019 — dangling security assistance and a possible White House visit in exchange for “a favor” — was in keeping with his actions during the 2016 race, just more daring. He was still trying to improve his electoral prospects. But instead of using his own money to suppress negative stories, Trump was now withholding congressionally appropriated funds from Ukraine in order to generate negative stories about his potential 2020 general-election opponent, Joe Biden, and to feed the notion that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. The first article of impeachment in the Ukraine affair asserts that Trump “engaged in this scheme” — there’s that word again — “for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit.”Another scheme, a bigger lie. This time, Trump didn’t just hide the truth; he sought to distort it. And even when “faced with the public revelation of his actions,” the articles of impeachment note, the president continued to “openly and corruptly” urge Ukraine to open investigations that would help Trump politically. Such shamelessness is possible only from a president confident that enough voters will share it.The recent indictment by the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., covers a multitude of alleged crimes — like issuing false statements and filing false documents, forgery, conspiracy to defraud the state, solicitation of the violation of an oath by a public officer — but it comes down to a single corrupt purpose: Once Trump lost the 2020 election, the outgoing president sought to reverse or at least delegitimize the outcome.We experience Trump’s impeachments and indictments only in the order in which they came out, a sequence that does not neatly track the chronology or intensity of his misdeeds. Trump progressed from hiding reality with the hush-money payments (indictment No. 1), to remaking reality with the attempted shakedown of Ukraine (impeachment No. 1), to ignoring reality with his insistence that he had won re-election and that other officials should affirm that belief (indictment Nos. 3 and 4). The next step was obvious — to change reality by force. So came Jan. 6 (addressed in impeachment No. 2 as well as indictments Nos. 3 and 4, for those keeping score at home).Trump’s mendacity about the 2020 election was legal; as Jack Smith, the latest special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to investigate him, put it, “the Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud.” His alleged actions and conspiracies in furtherance of those lies — pushing officials to ignore the popular vote in their states, disenfranchising voters, encouraging fake slates of electors — were not, according to the indictment. And once the attempts to claim a counterfactual victory were rejected in the courts, in the states and by his own vice president, the call for violence was all that was left. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump declared on Jan. 6.That line was quoted in Trump’s second impeachment, in support of its lone article, incitement of insurrection. It was one of three utterances by the president included in the document. The other two were, “We won this election, and we won it by a landslide” (also from Jan. 6) and then a single word, “find,” from Trump’s request to the secretary of state of Georgia to manufacture more votes for him, just enough to win. Those quotes also show the Trumpian progression: The lie, the scheme to support it and the brutishness to enforce it.Trump’s indictment for retaining and concealing classified information after leaving office — and for obstructing the investigations into the matter — nicely captures the former president’s attitude toward truth and law. According to the document, when he consulted his lawyers about how to respond to a grand jury subpoena for any classified material in his possession, Trump asked, “What happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” (As if you can just ghost a federal grand jury.) He also wondered aloud, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”Isn’t it better just to lie? For Trump, the answer is almost always yes.Rusty Bowers, a former speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, who resisted Trump’s blandishments.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesIn early 2018, the political activist Amy Siskind published “The List: A Week-By-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year.” Faithful to its title, the book numbered various misdeeds of the early Trump presidency — each norm and institution degraded, every truth or conflict of interest ignored — totaling thousands of offenses, large and small. The work was especially useful in a refresher-course sort of way; as I wrote then, “it is remarkable how much we can forget, in the shock of the moment, about the previous shock of the moment.”I thought about “The List” once again while reading and rereading the Trump indictments and impeachments. The descriptions of the former president’s alleged actions in these documents — even just a sampling of the verbs — offer their own refresher on the past seven years:Abused. Compromised. Persisted in openly and corruptly urging and soliciting. Served to cover up. Threatened the integrity. Betrayed his trust. Repeatedly and fraudulently falsified. Disguised. Endeavored to obstruct. Did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate. Pursued unlawful means. Used knowingly false claims. Publicly maligned. Refused to accept. Hid and concealed. Constituted a criminal organization. Falsely accused. And, of course, spread lies.One of the Trump era’s recurring questions (a bit quaint now) has been whether Trump lies knowingly or truly believes the untruths he professes. These documents leave little doubt that Trump was told, repeatedly, that his lies were just that, and by officials close to him. David French summarized the latest indictment against Trump in The Times this way: “The Georgia case is about lies. It’s about lying, it’s about conspiring to lie, and it’s about attempting to coax others to lie.”Much the same could be said of the other Trump indictments and of his impeachments, too. They’re all about his lies and about the country’s willingness to countenance them.There are individuals in these documents like Rusty Bowers, a former speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, who, when Trump urged him to appoint new presidential electors from the state, responded: “I voted for you. I worked for you. I campaigned for you. I just won’t do anything illegal for you.” But there are many who believe and enable Trump’s lies, whether out of conviction, allegiance or expedience. His overwhelming lead in the early polling for the next Republican nomination and his current tie with Biden in a possible 2024 rematch exist despite — or, at times, because of — those lies.Trump’s impeachments in 2019 and 2021 did not yield convictions in his Senate trials, and now, after the indictments of 2023, new trials await. Yet even criminal convictions would not ease the political challenge that Trumpism poses. They may even exacerbate it.Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, in his individual statement appended to the 1974 report by the Senate committee on Watergate, warned that “law alone will not suffice to prevent future Watergates.” Ervin wrote that “the only sure antidote” is to elect leaders who understand the principles of our government and display the intellectual and moral integrity to uphold them. Their election is not in the hands of prosecutors or lawmakers, but of voters. Our choices, as Smith might put it, are also outcome-determinative.It is fitting that legal as well as political remedies have been brought to bear on Trump. His transgressions span both worlds and play out in the haze between them. Trump seems to hope that politics can save him from law. That belief is his indictment of both.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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      Georgia Case Against Young Thug Hints at How Trump Case Could Unfold

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      The racketeering case against Young Thug has been marked by a plodding pace, an avalanche of pretrial defense motions and pressure on lower-level defendants to plead guilty.On its face, the criminal case accusing former President Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia has little in common with the other high-profile racketeering case now underway in the same Atlanta courthouse: that of the superstar rapper Young Thug and his associates.But the 15-month-old gang case against Young Thug — which, like the Trump case, is being prosecuted by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney — offers glimpses of how State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump et al. may unfold: with a plodding pace, an avalanche of pretrial defense motions, extraordinary security measures, pressure on lower-level defendants to plead guilty, and a fracturing into separate trials, to name a few.Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, was indicted in May 2022 along with 27 others under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, known as RICO. Like Mr. Trump’s RICO indictment, the charging papers described a corrupt “enterprise” whose members shared common illegal goals.Prosecutors claim that Mr. Williams is a founder of Young Slime Life, or YSL, a criminal street gang whose members were responsible for murders and other violence, drug dealing and property crimes, with the purpose of illegally obtaining “money and property.” (The defendants say YSL is simply a record label.)But the case against Mr. Williams has been whittled to eight defendants, from an initial 28. Some defendants have had their cases severed because they struggled to find lawyers or were fugitives from justice, among other reasons. As is common in big racketeering cases, others have accepted plea deals, making admissions along the way that could help prosecutors in their effort to convict the remaining defendants.After raucous courtroom outbursts from fans and a number of bizarre incidents — including alleged efforts to smuggle drugs into court — security has been ratcheted up, with members of the public and the news media barred from the courtroom.And remarkably, the case has been stuck in the jury selection phase since January, with many potential jurors claiming they would suffer hardships if forced to participate in a trial that was originally estimated to last six to 12 months. On Thursday morning, a young woman — one of more than 2,000 potential jurors to come through the courthouse doors — was grilled about her life, her future plans to pursue medical training and whether serving would present a hardship.Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, was indicted in May 2022 along with 27 others under the state’s RICO law.Steve Schaefer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via A.P.She said it would not. When asked if she knew of Young Thug, she said she did, and that she liked his music — which, she added, would make hearing the case “surreal,” although she also said she could be fair-minded.The YSL indictment is significantly more complex than the Trump case, describing nearly 200 criminal acts as part of a bloody gang war that played out for at least eight years in a city considered to be a hotbed of music industry innovation. The authorities have said that a crosstown rivalry between YSL and a gang called YFN was exacerbated in 2015 with the murder of Donovan Thomas, a behind-the-scenes connector instrumental in several rap careers.In the aftermath of the killing, the authorities say, many in the city picked sides as retaliatory shootings spilled across Atlanta.It is a world far removed from White House meetings and voting software. But experts say the Trump case, with its own famous lead defendant and sprawling nature, could encounter some similar complications.In Mr. Trump’s indictment, prosecutors also outlined a “criminal organization,” made up of power players like Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and obscure Trump supporters like Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman who was charged with helping to carry out a data breach at a rural Georgia elections office.The Trump team’s shared goal, according to the indictment, was “to unlawfully change the outcome” of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor.Ms. Willis, a veteran prosecutor, has said she appreciates the way that RICO indictments allow for the telling of big, broad, easily digestible stories. Both the YSL and Trump indictments paint pictures of multifaceted “organizations,” showing how the defendants are connected and what they are accused of, which are described across dozens of pages as “acts in furtherance of the conspiracy.”These acts include both discernible criminal activity — like murder and aggravated assault in the YSL case and “false statements and writings” and “conspiracy to defraud the state” in the Trump case. But they also include noncriminal “overt acts” meant to further the goal of the conspiracy.Ms. Willis’s office has proposed that the Trump trial begin in March.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesIn the YSL indictment, the “overt acts” include Mr. Williams’s performing rap songs with violent lyrics — a legal strategy that has set off a heated debate about free speech and whether hip-hop, a quintessentially Black art form, is the target of racist scapegoating. Last year, Mr. Williams’s defense team filed a motion seeking to exclude the lyrics from the case, but the judge has yet to rule on it.Chris Timmons, a trial lawyer and former Georgia prosecutor, said he expected a similar free speech fight to erupt, at least in court, over Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts. Mentions of tweets he posted in the months after the 2020 election pepper the 98-page indictment as it describes efforts in Washington to set up bogus pro-Trump electors in Georgia and other states, to cajole legislators in those states to accept them, and to pressure Mike Pence, then the vice president, to throw a wrench in the final Electoral College vote.Some of the tweets in the indictment might seem rather bland in a different context. “Georgia hearings now on @OANN. Amazing!” Mr. Trump tweeted on Dec. 3, 2020 — a month after Election Day — referring to a far-right TV network’s airing of a state legislative hearing in which his supporters made a number of untrue allegations about election fraud.In other instances, Mr. Trump tweeted outright lies about election fraud. “People in Georgia got caught cold bringing in massive numbers of ballots and putting them in ‘voting’ machines,” he posted in December 2020.Mr. Timmons said he expected Mr. Trump’s lawyers to try to throw out his Twitter posts, as well as a recording of a call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on free speech grounds.“They’re going to try to suppress the recording of the phone call, and probably try to suppress any tweets that were sent, and any text messages, anything along those lines, as violative of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution,” he said.In another parallel with the YSL case, the Trump case is almost certain to see multiple pretrial motions from a bumper crop of defense lawyers. One defendant, Mr. Meadows, has already filed a motion to move the case to federal court.Both Mr. Trump and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who is among the defendants, may also file for removal, which would broaden the jury pool beyond liberal Fulton County into more Trump-friendly areas.Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer representing John Eastman, a defendant in the Trump case charged with helping to plan the bogus elector scheme, said this week that he expected a number of defendants to try to sever their cases.“Bringing in that many defendants and that many counts is an unmanageable criminal case,” he said, referring to the fact that each defendant is charged with racketeering and at least one of 40 other criminal charges.Mr. Silverglate, who said his client was innocent, added, “This is a case that wouldn’t reach trial in two years.”Ms. Willis’s office has proposed that the Trump trial begin in March, but the chances of that happening seem vanishingly slim. Mr. Meadows’s removal effort alone is likely to trigger a federal appeal, a process that could take months to resolve.While dragging out a case can hurt the prosecution, as witnesses forget or even die, the mere prospect of a multiyear legal ordeal can help convince some defendants to take a plea, as probably happened in the YSL case.Mr. Timmons, who tried numerous RICO cases, said that prosecutors often hoped to secure pleas from the lower-level players and work up toward the defendant at the top of the list, who is often the most prominent or powerful among them.“Your goal is to roll that up like a carpet, working at the bottom and working your way to the top,” he said.The Trump case may prove different from the YSL case in that rappers’ careers might survive a guilty plea (unless they are deemed snitches), while lawyers convicted of felonies lose their licenses — and there are numerous lawyers on the Trump indictment. Those lawyers may choose to hang on and fight an epic legal battle with Ms. Willis, a formidable prosecutor who has been trying RICO cases for years.Mr. Trump is running for re-election while facing indictments in Florida, New York and Washington, D.C., as well as in Georgia. If he is concerned about how his legal troubles could affect his popularity, he might find hope in the fact that Mr. Williams released his latest album while in custody, and saw it debut at the top of a Billboard chart this summer. More

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      Giuliani Repeatedly Sought Help With Legal Bills From Trump

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      As Rudolph Giuliani has neared a financial breaking point with a pile of legal bills, the former president has largely demurred, despite making a vague promise to pay up.Rudolph W. Giuliani is running out of money and looking to collect from a longtime client who has yet to pay: former President Donald J. Trump.To recover the millions of dollars he believes he is owed for his efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, Mr. Giuliani first deferred to his lawyer, who pressed anyone in Mr. Trump’s circle who would listen.When that fizzled out, Mr. Giuliani and his lawyer made personal appeals to the former president over a two-hour dinner in April at his Mar-a-Lago estate and in a private meeting at his golf club in West Palm Beach.When those entreaties largely failed as well, Mr. Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who has an independent relationship with the former president, visited Mr. Trump at his club in New Jersey this month, with what people briefed on the meeting said was the hope of getting his father’s huge legal bills covered.That appeared to help. Mr. Giuliani’s son asked that Mr. Trump attend two fund-raisers for the legal bills, and the former president agreed to do so, the people said.Still, for the better part of a year, as Mr. Giuliani has racked up the bills battling an array of criminal investigations, private lawsuits and legal disciplinary proceedings stemming from his bid to keep Mr. Trump in office after the 2020 election, his team has repeatedly sought a lifeline from the former president, according to several people close to him. And even as the bills have pushed Mr. Giuliani close to a financial breaking point, the former president has largely demurred, the people said, despite making a vague promise during their dinner at Mar-a-Lago to pay up.Mr. Giuliani, 79, who was criminally charged alongside Mr. Trump this week in the election conspiracy case in Georgia, is currently sitting on what one person familiar with his financial situation says is nearly $3 million in legal expenses. And that is before accounting for any money that Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, might be owed for his work conducted after Election Day on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Trump’s political action committee, which has doled out roughly $21 million on legal fees primarily for Mr. Trump but also for a number of people connected to investigations into him, has so far covered only $340,000 for Mr. Giuliani, a payment made in late May.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment, nor did a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani.Mr. Giuliani, whose law license has been suspended because of his work to overturn the election, has few sources of income left, according to people close to him.He earns roughly $400,000 a year from his WABC radio show, according to a person familiar with the matter. He also gets some income from a podcast he hosts, and, according to another person familiar, a livestream broadcast. The three cash streams are nowhere near enough to cover his debts, people close to him say. A legal-defense fund set up by friends to raise $5 million for him in 2021 took down its website after raising less than $10,000.Those who remain close to Mr. Giuliani have expressed bafflement that Mr. Trump has given him little financial help after his work on behalf of the former president.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn the past, Mr. Trump has entered dangerous territory by not paying an associate’s legal bills when the case is connected to him, most notably with his former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who has become a chief antagonist and star witness against him. But people close to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani take it as an article of faith that the former mayor would never cooperate with investigators in any meaningful way against the former president. (Mr. Giuliani has said both he and his former client did nothing wrong.)Among those who remain close to Mr. Giuliani, there is bafflement, concern and frustration that the former mayor, who encouraged Mr. Trump to declare victory on election night before all the votes were counted, has received little financial help.Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner under Mr. Giuliani, who worked with the former mayor trying to identify evidence of fraud and who remains a supporter of Mr. Trump, puts the fault on people around the former president. Mr. Kerik was pardoned by Mr. Trump after pleading guilty to tax fraud and having lied to White House officials when President George W. Bush nominated him to be secretary of the Homeland Security Department.“I know the president is surrounded by a number of people that despised Giuliani even before the election, more so after the election, for his loyalty to the president and for their relationship,” Mr. Kerik said. “It’s always been a point of contention for a number of people who I personally think didn’t serve the president well in the first place.”Mr. Kerik added, “Where is everybody? Where’s the campaign?”But, even as Mr. Kerik and others have blamed Mr. Trump’s inner circle for the lack of payments, the decision, as several people familiar with the matter noted, was always the former president’s.Mr. Trump has never explicitly told Mr. Giuliani why he is effectively stiffing him, but the former president has pointed out that he lost the cases related to the election. That has been consistent with what Mr. Trump told aides shortly after Election Day, when an associate of Mr. Giuliani’s, Maria Ryan, asked the campaign in an email for $20,000 a day to pay for the former mayor’s work.People close to the former mayor argue he was not working strictly on lawsuits, but also on research and efforts to keep state legislatures from certifying results Mr. Giuliani insisted were false. But Mr. Trump told aides he didn’t want Mr. Giuliani to receive “a dime” unless he succeeded. Some of Mr. Giuliani’s expenses were eventually paid, but only after Mr. Trump personally approved the money.Andrew Giuliani appealed to Mr. Trump on behalf of his father.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesThe effort to collect legal fees from Mr. Trump began in earnest more than two years ago. Mr. Giuliani’s main lawyer, Robert J. Costello, started calling people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, making the case that the former president was on the hook for legal fees Mr. Giuliani incurred because of his work for Mr. Trump. Mr. Costello has contacted at least six lawyers close to Mr. Trump, according to people with knowledge of the discussions, and most appeared sympathetic to Mr. Giuliani’s situation.This spring, Mr. Giuliani reached out to Mr. Trump directly and asked to meet, the people said. Mr. Trump agreed, and in late April, they met at Mr. Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach.The meeting was pleasant, and lasted more than an hour, a person familiar with the meeting said. But Mr. Trump, who was accompanied by one of his Florida attorneys, was noncommittal.Yet he agreed to meet them again, two days later, at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, a meeting previously reported by CNN. Over a nearly two-hour dinner, Mr. Costello pressed Mr. Trump to cover not only Mr. Giuliani’s legal bills, but also to pay him for the work Mr. Giuliani provided Mr. Trump in the wake of the 2020 election.Mr. Trump resisted, noting that Mr. Giuliani did not win any of those cases. Mr. Costello, who did most of the talking for Mr. Giuliani, said that the money was not coming out of Mr. Trump’s own pocket, but rather the coffers of his PAC. By the end of the dinner, Mr. Trump agreed that Mr. Giuliani would be paid, one person said. But in the weeks that followed, neither he nor the PAC delivered. And Mr. Giuliani was growing more and more desperate.A federal judge was exasperated with Mr. Giuliani for failing to search for records as part of a defamation lawsuit that two Georgia election workers filed against him because he falsely accused them of stealing ballots. Mr. Giuliani said that he could not afford to pay for a vendor to do so.Mr. Costello pleaded with Mr. Trump’s aides to pay off Mr. Giuliani’s balance with the vendor, and the PAC made a $340,000 payment to that firm.Since then, however, the PAC has not covered any other bills for Mr. Giuliani.It has been a remarkable reversal of fortune for Mr. Giuliani, who was once worth tens of millions of dollars made partly on contracts he signed after leaving City Hall in New York, having become known as “America’s mayor” for his performance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.A divorce from his third wife, Judith Nathan, cost him much of his wealth around the time he left his law firm to represent Mr. Trump, then the president, in the investigation brought by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III over whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian officials in the 2016 election.From there, Mr. Giuliani engaged in campaign efforts to find damaging information about Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Ukraine, where Mr. Biden’s son had business dealings, efforts that helped lead to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.As part of an investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine, the F.B.I. searched his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in May 2021. That apartment is now on sale for $6.5 million. More

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      When the Law Is Not a Trump Card

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      The multiplying indictments of Donald Trump, I argued a couple of weeks ago, are putting an end to all attempts to simply practice normal politics in 2024. For both his Republican primary opponents and eventually President Biden, the ongoing efforts to put a former president in prison will shape and warp and shadow every effort to make more prosaic political arguments against a Trump restoration.But there is a corollary to this point, brought home by the conjunction of this week’s Georgia indictment and an argument from two conservative legal scholars that the 14th Amendment’s third article, aimed at excluding Confederates who had betrayed oaths to the Union from political office, should apply to Trump after the events of Jan 6. If the legal challenges against Trump have the power to shape the democratic politics of 2024, the shaping power also works the other way. As extraordinary judicial proceedings alter democratic politics, the legal arena is inevitably politicized as well, undermining its claim to standing some distance outside and above democratic realities.This isn’t a judgment on the legal merits of any of the Trump indictments. It doesn’t matter how scrupulous the prosecutor, how fair-minded the judge; to try a man, four times over, whom a sizable minority of Americans believe should be the next president, is an inherently political act. And it is an especially political act when the crimes themselves are intimately connected to the political process, as they are in the two most recent indictments.The prosecutions seek to demonstrate that not even a president is above the law. But if Trump is indeed the Republican nominee, the proceedings against him will potentially end by subjecting the judicial to the political, the law to raw politics, because millions of Americans can effectively veto the findings of the juries by simply putting Trump in the White House once again. And even if they do not make that choice (I think they probably won’t), even if the polls currently overestimate Trump’s strength (I think they probably do), the entire election will still be an object lesson in the supremacy of the political, because everyone will see that the court rulings aren’t actually final, that political combat is stronger than mere law.You can see all that and still support Trump’s prosecutions as a calculated but necessary risk — in the hopes that having him lose twice, in the courts and at the ballot box, will re-establish a political taboo against his kind of postelection behavior and on the theory that this outcome is worth the risk that the whole strategy will fail completely if he wins.If you see things that way, good; you see clearly, you are acting reasonably. My concern is that not enough people do clearly see what’s risked in these kinds of proceedings, that many of Trump’s opponents still regard some form of legal action as a trump card — that with the right mix of statutory interpretation and moral righteousness, you can simply bend political reality to your will.Certainly that’s my feeling reading the argument that the 14th Amendment already disqualifies Trump from the presidency and that indeed no further legal proceedings — no trial for rebellion or treason, no finding of guilt — are necessary for state officials to simply exclude him from their ballots.The authors of this notable argument, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, are serious conservative legal scholars of the originalist persuasion, and their claims are couched in close attention to the text of the amendment and its history. Since I am not a legal scholar, the fact that I do not find these arguments remotely plausible can be partially discounted, so I would direct you first to two different critiques: one from a conservative scholar and friend of the authors, Stanford’s Michael McConnell, and one from a critic of originalism, Georgia State’s Eric Segall.McConnell suggests that to avoid giving the 14th Amendment’s provisions a dangerously anti-democratic breadth, such that all manner of normal democratic dissent and rabble-rousing could be deemed disqualifying, we should assume that they refer to a large-scale insurrection, military rebellion or explicit civil war. Applying them to a political protest-turned-riot, even a riot that disrupted the transfer of presidential power, risks a serious abuse of power — “depriving voters of the ability to elect candidates of their choice” — without adequate limitations on its use.Meanwhile, Segall questions the authors’ claim that the amendment’s provisions are “self-executing,” that they can be applied to Trump or any other supposed insurrectionist immediately. He points out that this interpretation was already rejected in 1869 by Salmon Chase, then the chief justice of the United States, one year after the amendment’s ratification in the only ruling we have on this question. This is acknowledged by Baude and Paulsen, to be sure, who argue at length that Chase was wrong. But they are still in the dubious position of claiming that theirs is the true “original” reading of the amendment, seeking some way to deal with the problem of Donald Trump a century and a half later, rather than the reading offered at the time of ratification that has stood unchallenged since.Then here is the point that I, a non-scholar, want to make (though I should note that Segall makes it as well): Even if Baude and Paulsen were deemed correct on some pure empyrean level of constitutional debate, and Salmon Chase or anyone else deemed completely wrong, their correctness would be unavailing in reality, and their prescription as a political matter would be so disastrous and toxic and self-defeating that no responsible jurist or official should consider it.The idea that the best way to deal with a demagogic populist whose entire appeal is already based on disillusionment with the established order is for state officials — in practice, state officials of the opposing political party — to begin unilaterally excluding him from their ballots on the basis of their own private judgment of crimes that he has not been successfully prosecuted for … I’m sorry, the mind reels. It should not happen, it would not work if it did happen, John Roberts and four more justices would not uphold it, and it would license political chaos to no good purpose whatsoever. And if the legal theorist’s response is that this isn’t the “best” way to deal with Trump, it’s just the way that the Constitution requires, then so much the worse for their theory of the Constitution.There is an irony here, which is that a similar kind of legal mentality influenced Trump’s campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election. John Eastman’s argument that Mike Pence could interpose himself between the official results of the election and Joe Biden’s inauguration was a much more fanciful constitutional argument than the one that Baude and Paulsen make. But it was similar in imagining a particular interpretation of the Constitution as something that can just be deemed correct and then imposed by a particular actor — the vice president in the Eastman case, state election officials in theirs — without regard to anything that would naturally follow in the realm of the political.What would have probably followed from the Pence maneuver, as his own lawyer advised him, would have been either a swift smackdown from the courts or the vice president standing alone against both houses of the legislative branch. (This seems like one reason Eastman’s crackbrained proposal was not a rebellion under 14th Amendment definitions; if Confederate secession could have been defeated through a quick appeal to the Supreme Court, it would not have been much of a rebellion either.)But imagine, if you will, a world where Eastman had uncovered, days before Jan. 6, some piece of historical evidence that raised his theory’s status from “desperate Trumpist motivated reasoning” to “an idea that merits some academic debate.” Suppose even that a few liberal legal scholars had been forced to concede a little ground to his position. Would this in any way have changed the total political folly of the Pence maneuver, the impossibility of levering a presidential outcome from the vice president’s supervisory position, the purposeless destabilization that such a gambit would entail?I say that it would not, that where legal theory touches politics in this way it must necessarily deal with political considerations, that appeals to law and legal text alone are not enough to settle matters if political realities are against you. That is the cold knowledge that all of us watching Trump’s extraordinary indictments converge with his extraordinary campaign need to carry into 2024.BreviaryNic Rowan on Bill WattersonJustin E.H. Smith sings a ballad of Generation XJohn Duggan on Sally Rooney and CatholicismAlex Tabarrok on the acts of Saint ThomasNotes for a Susannah Black Roberts essay on the post-Christian right More

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      How Many of Trump’s Trials Will Happen Before the Election?

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      Donald J. Trump is the target of four separate criminal indictments, but the prosecutions could drag on for months or even years.Three different prosecutors want to put Donald J. Trump on trial in four different cities next year, all before Memorial Day and in the midst of his presidential campaign.It will be nearly impossible to pull off.A morass of delays, court backlogs and legal skirmishes awaits, interviews with nearly two dozen current and former prosecutors, judges, legal experts and people involved in the Trump cases show. Some experts predicted that only one or two trials will take place next year; one speculated that none of the four Trump cases will start before the election.It would be virtually unheard of for any defendant to play a game of courthouse Twister like this, let alone one who is also the leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And between the extensive legal arguments that must take place before a trial can begin — not to mention that the trials themselves could last weeks or months — there are simply not enough boxes on the calendar to squeeze in all the former president’s trials.“This is something that is not normal,” said Jeffrey Bellin, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who now teaches criminal procedure at William & Mary Law School and believes that Mr. Trump might only be on trial once next year. “While each of the cases seems at this point to be strong, there’s only so much you can ask a defendant to do at one time.”Any delay would represent a victory for Mr. Trump, who denies all wrongdoing and who could exploit the timeline to undermine the cases against him. Less time sitting in a courtroom equals more time hitting the campaign trail, and his advisers have not tried to hide that Mr. Trump hopes to overcome his legal troubles by winning the presidency.If his lawyers manage to drag out the trials into 2025 or beyond — potentially during a second Trump administration — Mr. Trump could seek to pardon himself or order his Justice Department to shut down the federal cases. And although he could not control the state prosecutions in Georgia or Manhattan, the Justice Department has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, which very likely applies to state cases as well.Ultimately, the judges overseeing the four cases might have to coordinate so that Mr. Trump’s lawyers can adequately prepare his defense without needlessly delaying the trials. Judges are permitted under ethics rules to confer with one another to efficiently administer the business of their courts, experts said, and they periodically do so.“The four indictments can appear to resemble four cars converging on an intersection that has no lights or stop signs — but that won’t happen,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Well before the intersection, the judges will figure it out.”For now, Mr. Trump’s court schedule looks to be nearly as crowded as his campaign calendar, with potential trials overlapping with key dates in the Republican primary season. Claiming he is a victim of a weaponized justice system that is seeking to bar him from office, Mr. Trump may end up bringing his campaign to the courthouse steps.A federal special counsel, Jack Smith, has proposed Jan. 2 of next year (two weeks before the Iowa caucuses) as a date for Mr. Trump to stand trial in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. In a Thursday night court filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers countered with a proposed date of April 2026.Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney who this week announced racketeering charges against Mr. Trump, accusing him of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s election results, wants that trial to begin on March 4 (the day before Super Tuesday).It is possible that the election interference case brought against Mr. Trump by special counsel Jack Smith may be given scheduling priority, the experts said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Smith’s recent case in Washington, and Ms. Willis’s in Georgia, were filed after Mr. Trump was already scheduled for two additional criminal trials next spring: in New York, on March 25, on state charges related to a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels; and in Florida, on May 20, on federal charges brought by Mr. Smith accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling classified material after leaving office.Although the New York and Florida indictments were unveiled earlier, affording them first crack at the calendar, some experts now argue that they should take a back seat to the election-related cases, in Georgia and Washington, in which the charges strike at the core of American democracy. Trial scheduling is not always a first-come, first-served operation, and deference could be given to the most serious charges.In a radio interview last month, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said that having been the first to indict did not necessarily mean he would insist on being the first to put the former president on trial. However, he said, the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, ultimately controls the calendar.“We will follow the court’s lead,” Mr. Bragg said.There has not yet been any direct communication among judges or prosecutors about moving the Manhattan case, according to people with knowledge of the matter.Still, Mr. Bragg’s comments suggest that he would not oppose moving the Manhattan case, which carries a lesser potential punishment than the three others, backward in line.“My own belief is Alvin Bragg will be true to his word and remain flexible in the interests of justice,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and believes that prosecutors might be able to squeeze in three Trump trials next year.And Mr. Eisen, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that voters deserve to know whether Mr. Trump was convicted of subverting the will of the people in the previous election before they vote in the next one.“There could not be a more important question confronting the country than whether a candidate for the office of the presidency is innocent or guilty of previously abusing that office in an attempted coup,” he said.The most likely candidate to take over Mr. Bragg’s March trial date would be Mr. Smith and his election interference case. Recently, nearly a dozen Republican-appointed former judges and high-ranking federal officials submitted a brief to the judge overseeing that case, arguing that the trial should take place in January as Mr. Smith has proposed and citing a “national necessity” for a “fair and expeditious trial.”But this is the case in which Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a 2026 trial date, citing the voluminous amount of material turned over by the government — 11.5 million pages of documents, for example — that the defense must now review. Mr. Trump’s lawyers estimated that to finish by the prosecution’s proposed January trial date would mean reading the equivalent of “Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”In that case, Mr. Smith brought a narrow set of charges against Mr. Trump in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, totaling four felony counts, and with no co-defendants.In contrast, Ms. Willis’s election case is a sweeping 98-page indictment of not only Mr. Trump, who faces 13 criminal counts, but also 18 co-defendants, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Already, Mr. Meadows has petitioned for his case to be moved from state to federal court, and other defendants are likely to follow suit. That process could take months and could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, probably making Ms. Willis’s proposed trial date of March 4 something of a long shot.In contrast to the relatively narrow election interference case brought by Mr. Smith in federal court, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, has charged Mr. Trump and his associates with a multitude of felonies related to the 2020 presidential election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe sheer size of Mr. Trump’s Georgia case, and the fact it was the last of the four cases to be brought, suggests any Georgia trial of Mr. Trump could be delayed even beyond next year.It is exceedingly rare for a criminal defendant to face so many trials in such a concentrated period of time. The once high-flying lawyer Michael Avenatti seemed to be heading for three federal trials after he was charged in Manhattan in 2019 in a scheme to extort the apparel giant Nike; and, separately, with stealing money from Ms. Daniels, a former client; and in California, with embezzling money from other clients. (He was eventually convicted in the New York trials and pleaded guilty in the California case.)E. Danya Perry, a lawyer who represented Mr. Avenatti in the Nike case, the first to go to trial, said the challenge was “sequencing the cases in a way that would be most advantageous” to her client. And because there was some overlap in the evidence, she said, the defense had to be careful not to open the door for prosecutors to introduce evidence against Mr. Avenatti from another of the cases.“You’re not just trying the case in front of that particular judge,” Ms. Perry said. “Evidence from one case could bleed into other cases.”Before any trial, Mr. Trump’s cases are also likely to become bogged down as his lawyers review and potentially argue over large amounts of documents and other case material turned over by the government. Certain judicial rulings could also lead to drawn-out pretrial appeals.In the Florida documents case, disputes over the use of classified information could delay the proceeding as well. And in the federal court in Washington, which is already contending with lengthy backlogs amid prosecutions of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested they plan to litigate complex constitutional issues, including whether some of Mr. Trump’s false claims about the election were protected by the First Amendment.Even the jury selection process could drag on for weeks or months, as courts summon huge pools of prospective jurors for questioning over whether they harbor bias in favor of or against the polarizing former president.Michael B. Mukasey, a former U.S. attorney general and longtime Manhattan federal judge, said because of the complex issues raised in all four of Mr. Trump’s cases, “I think the odds are slim to none that any of them gets to trial before the election.”And Mr. Trump’s criminal cases are not the only courtroom battles he’s waging.In October, he faces trial in a civil suit filed by Attorney General Letitia James of New York, accusing him, his company and three of his children of a “staggering” fraud in overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. In January, Mr. Trump faces two civil trials arising from private lawsuits: one a defamation claim by the writer E. Jean Carroll and the other accusing him of enticing people into a sham business opportunity.“We fully expect both cases to go to trial in January 2024,” said Roberta A. Kaplan, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the two private suits.Although Mr. Trump need not be in court for the civil cases, he almost certainly will have to attend the criminal trials, said Daniel C. Richman, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School.“If you asked all the prosecutors in each case, they’d firmly and sincerely say that they want these trials to happen in the first half of 2024,” Mr. Richman said. “But wishing does not make it so.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Trump Supporters’ Calls for Georgia to Stymie Prosecution Fall Flat

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      Appeals by the former president’s supporters to change the state’s rules on pardons, and to investigate or even impeach the prosecutor in the case, will likely go nowhere, at least for now.The racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia has ignited outrage among staunch supporters of the former president, pushing some to urge the Republican-controlled state legislature to find a way to intervene.Change the state’s rules on pardons to empower the governor to absolve Mr. Trump and his associates should they be convicted — that has been one suggestion making the rounds on social media and conservative talk shows this week.And on Thursday, a state senator from rural northwest Georgia sent a letter to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, demanding an emergency special session for “the review and response to the actions of Fani Willis,” the Fulton County district attorney who is leading the case.The odds of any of that coming to fruition anytime soon: slim to nonexistent.“It ain’t going to happen,” said Charles S. Bullock III, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, who is considered a leading scholar on politics in Georgia and the South, which he has studied for more than five decades.There are not only procedural hurdles standing in the way but the political reality in Georgia. Mr. Kemp, who would have to call a special session, has signaled he has no interest in doing so. He and Mr. Trump parted ways in 2020 after he refuted Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud in the state; this week, he once again pushed back on such claims.And while Republicans control the legislature, they do not appear to have the votes needed to achieve what Mr. Trump’s supporters are seeking. For one thing, they lack a two-thirds majority in the State Senate.State Senator Colton Moore, who wrote the letter calling for the special session, has argued that the prosecution of Mr. Trump was politically motivated, and that the Legislature should investigate Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, and possibly impeach her.In interviews with conservative commentators on Thursday, Mr. Moore asserted that Ms. Willis was “using taxpayer money, using her government authority, to persecute her political opponent.”The Fulton County district attorney’s office declined to comment on Mr. Moore’s letter.Separately, some Trump supporters have pushed for changes in how pardons are given in the state. In Georgia, the power to pardon rests with a state board appointed by the governor, not with the governor himself. A pardon is a possibility only for an individual who has completed the sentence and “lived a law-abiding life” for five years before applying.Changing the law would require amending the state Constitution, which would require the approval of two-thirds of the Legislature.Cody Hall, a senior adviser to the governor, strongly suggested to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday that Mr. Kemp was opposed to challenging the Trump prosecution. “Where have I heard special session, changing decades-old law and overturning constitutional precedent before?” Mr. Hall asked, referring to unsuccessful calls from Mr. Trump and others for a special session to overturn President Biden’s win in the state. “Oh right, prior to Republicans losing two Senate runoffs in January of 2021.”He was referring to the runoff races that Republican incumbents lost that month to Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both Democrats, as Mr. Trump clung to claims of election fraud in Georgia.“What are people hoping to learn in the second kick of the election-losing mule?” Mr. Hall added.Asked on Thursday about the new call for a special session, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp referred a reporter to Mr. Hall’s comments to the Journal-Constitution.Representative Jon Burns, the Republican speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, declined through a spokesman to comment.Still, the state’s Republican leadership was not completely averse to the idea of challenging local prosecutors. Legislation signed this year by Mr. Kemp establishes a state commission that could investigate local prosecutors or remove them from office.Ms. Willis was a principal critic. More

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      A Majority of Americans Support Trump Indictments, Polls Show

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      Recent polls conducted before the Georgia indictment showed that most believed that the prosecutions of the former president were warranted.Former President Donald J. Trump’s blistering attacks on prosecutors and the federal government over the cascade of indictments he faces do not appear to be resonating much with voters in the latest polls, yet his grip on Republicans is further tightening.A majority of Americans, in four recent polls, said Mr. Trump’s criminal cases were warranted. Most were surveyed before a grand jury in Georgia indicted him over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election, but after the federal indictment related to Jan. 6.At the same time, Mr. Trump still holds a dominant lead over the crowded field of Republicans who are challenging him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who continues to slide.The polls — conducted by Quinnipiac University, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, ABC News/Ipsos and Fox News — showed that Americans remain divided along party lines over the dozens of criminal charges facing Mr. Trump.The takeaways aligned with the findings of a New York Times/Siena College poll last month, in which 22 percent of voters who believed that Mr. Trump had committed serious federal crimes said they still planned to support him in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup with Mr. DeSantis.Here are key findings from the recent polling:Most say a felony conviction should be disqualifying.In the Quinnipiac poll, 54 percent of registered voters said Mr. Trump should be prosecuted for trying to overturn the 2020 election. And seven out of 10 voters said that anyone convicted of a felony should no longer be eligible to be president.Half of Americans, but only 20 percent of Republicans, said that Mr. Trump should suspend his presidential campaign, according to the ABC News/Ipsos poll. This poll, which surveyed American adults, was the only one of the four surveys conducted entirely after Mr. Trump’s indictment in Georgia.When specifically asked by ABC about the Georgia case, 63 percent said the latest criminal charges against Mr. Trump were “serious.”Republicans, by and large, haven’t wavered.The trends were mixed for Mr. Trump, who is a voracious consumer of polls and often mentions them on social media and during campaign speeches. He has continually argued that the indictments were politically motivated and intended to short-circuit his candidacy.In a hypothetical rematch of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump trailed President Biden by a single percentage point in the latest Quinnipiac poll, 47 to 46 percent. Mr. Biden’s advantage was 5 percentage points in July.At his campaign rallies, Mr. Trump has frequently boasted how the indictments have been a boon for his polling numbers — and that rang true when Republicans were surveyed about the primary race.In those polls that tracked the G.O.P. nominating contest, Mr. Trump widened his lead over his challengers, beating them by nearly 40 points. His nearest competitor, Mr. DeSantis, had fallen below 20 percent in both the Fox and Quinnipiac polls.Mr. DeSantis, who earlier this month replaced his campaign manager as he shifts his strategy, dropped by 6 to 7 percentage points in recent months in both polls.Trump participated in criminal conduct, Americans say.About half of Americans said that Mr. Trump’s interference in the election in Georgia was illegal, according to the AP/NORC poll.A similar share of Americans felt the same way after Mr. Trump’s indictments in the classified documents and the Jan. 6 cases, but the percentage was much lower when he was charged in New York in a case related to a hush-money payment to a porn star.Fewer than one in five Republicans said that Mr. Trump had committed a crime in Georgia or that he broke any laws in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.When asked by Fox News whether Mr. Trump had engaged in illegal activity to overturn the 2020 election, 53 percent of registered voters said yes.But just 13 percent of Republicans shared that view.A plurality of those surveyed by ABC (49 percent) believed that Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime in Georgia.Support for the Justice Department’s charges.Fifty-three percent of U.S. adults said that they approved of the Justice Department’s decision to bring charges against Mr. Trump for his attempts to reverse his electoral defeat in 2020, The A.P. found.At the same time, the public’s confidence in the Justice Department registered at 17 percent in the same poll. More