Georgia Criminal Case Against Trump (2020 Election)

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      The Lawyers Now Turning on Trump

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      Clare Toeniskoetter and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicOver the past few days, two of the lawyers who tried to help former President Donald J. Trump stay in power after losing the 2020 election pleaded guilty in a Georgia racketeering case and have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against him.Richard Faussett, who writes about politics in the American South for The Times, explains why two of Mr. Trump’s former allies have now turned against him.On today’s episodeRichard Fausset, a correspondent for The New York Times covering the American South.The two lawyers pleading guilty in the Georgia case are Sidney Powell, left, and Kenneth Chesebro.Photos: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters; Pool photo by Alyssa PointerBackground readingSidney Powell, a member of the Trump legal team in 2020, pleaded guilty and will cooperate with prosecutors seeking to convict the former president in an election interference case in Georgia.Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump-aligned lawyer, also pleaded guilty in Georgia.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Richard Fausset More

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      From Bush v. Gore to ‘Stop the Steal’: Kenneth Chesebro’s Long, Strange Trip

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      Mr. Chesebro, a buttoned-down Harvard lawyer, evolved from left-leaning jurist to key player in the Trump false electors scandal. What happened?In January 2001, Kenneth Chesebro was a mild-mannered Harvard lawyer toiling for Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount battle. Two decades later, on Jan. 6, 2021, he joined the mob outside the Capitol, reborn as a MAGA-hatted kingpin.On Friday, Mr. Chesebro’s journey took another turn, when he pleaded guilty in a criminal racketeering indictment in Fulton County, Ga., and agreed to testify against former President Donald J. Trump and other co-defendants, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and several other top Trump aides.Mr. Chesebro, 62, a workaholic who brought platinum credentials to Mr. Trump’s shambolic legal team, is the third defendant to plead guilty for his role in what prosecutors say was a criminal conspiracy to create fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors in six states, including Georgia, that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won.Mr. Chesebro’s trial, which had been scheduled to begin Monday, will no longer go forward. Liberal lawyers from his former life had hoped it would provide clues to an enduring mystery: What happened to “The Cheese?’’“I still don’t see what should have been a warning sign,” Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard constitutional law scholar who was Mr. Chesebro’s mentor, said in an interview. “Was there anything I could or should have done?”Some former colleagues say Mr. Chesebro’s 180-degree turn came after a lucrative 2014 investment in Bitcoin and a subsequent posh, itinerant lifestyle. Others, like Mr. Tribe, see Mr. Chesebro as a “moral chameleon” and his story an old one about the seduction of power.“He wanted to be close to the action,” said Mr. Tribe, who is among 60 lawyers and scholars who signed an ethics complaint in New York that could result in Mr. Chesebro’s disbarment. At Harvard, Mr. Chesebro assisted Mr. Tribe on many cases, including Bush v. Gore, which Mr. Tribe, as Mr. Gore’s chief legal counsel, argued before the Supreme Court.“I was representing a vice president who might become president,” Mr. Tribe said. Mr. Chesebro, he continued, “saw me as having access to power. When the world turned and Donald Trump became president, I stopped hearing from him.”Laurence H. Tribe was a mentor to Kenneth Chesebro at Harvard Law School. When Mr. Tribe represented former Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount battle, Mr. Chesebro helped him.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMr. Chesebro has responded that in his work for Mr. Trump, he was providing him with the zealous legal advocacy that all clients deserve when he proposed a scheme that he acknowledged at the time “could appear treasonous.”“It is the duty of any attorney to leave no stone unturned in examining the legal options that exist in a particular situation,” Mr. Chesebro said in an interview with Talking Points Memo, before he was indicted. Beyond that interview, he has said very little, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination for most of a deposition he gave to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks.Emails released in the run up to Mr. Chesebro’s trial suggest it was not just the law that drove him. In emails to the other Trump lawyers fighting to overturn the 2020 results, Mr. Chesebro estimated the odds of the Supreme Court stepping in at 1 percent. Still, he added, appealing to the high court has “possible political value.”After his guilty plea on Friday, Mr. Chesebro’s lawyer, Scott R. Grubman, said in an email that “Mr. Chesebro is glad to be able to move on with his life and avoid spending even a minute in jail.” Mr. Grubman noted that Mr. Chesebro had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, rather than the racketeering charge.‘The Cheese’ RisesMr. Chesebro grew up in Wisconsin Rapids, in the heart of the state. His father, Donald Chesebro, was a high school music teacher, clarinetist and local bandleader inducted into the Polka Hall of Fame.Mr. Chesebro graduated from Northwestern University and went on to Harvard Law School, where in a nod to his roots in America’s dairyland classmates dubbed him “The Cheese.” (His name is actually pronounced CHEZ-bro.)His classmates remember him as intelligent and clever among the students who clustered around Mr. Tribe. They describe him as socially awkward — “Hi, it’s um, Ken,” he would say on phone calls — and in trying to ingratiate himself with faculty staff members ended up pestering them by hanging around a little too long at their desks.But he worked hard, pulling all-nighters in writing briefs, especially if one was going to have Mr. Tribe’s name on it.Mr. Chesebro graduated from law school in 1986 and secured a coveted job, clerking in Washington for U.S. District Court Judge Gerhard A. Gesell, who presided over some of the most pivotal political cases of the 1970s and 1980s.Judge Gesell, who died in 1993, ruled against the Nixon administration’s effort to stop The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers about America’s involvement in Vietnam. He presided over several Watergate trials, ruling that President Richard M. Nixon’s office tape recordings were in the public domain because they had already been played in court, and that Nixon’s firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox was illegal.The energetic judge prided himself on moving swiftly through his caseload with the help of a single clerk, who from 1986 to 1987 was Mr. Chesebro.Early one morning the judge entered his chambers to find Mr. Chesebro asleep on a sofa. A former clerk recalled that Mr. Chesebro confessed to him that without telling the judge, he had been living in the courthouse. The judge was generous with his staffers, the former clerk said, and had Mr. Chesebro told him he needed housing, he likely would have helped, the clerk said.Judge Gerhard Gesell, who presided over some of the most pivotal political cases of the 1970s and ’80s, prided himself on moving swiftly through his caseload with the help of a single clerk. From 1986 to 1987, that was Mr. Chesebro.Diana Walker, via Getty ImagesAfter his clerkship Mr. Chesebro did not join the government or a big plaintiffs’ firm, as many Gesell protégés did, but moved back to Cambridge and hung out his own shingle. For the next two decades he did occasional work for Mr. Tribe, writing briefs for his mentor.In 1994 he married Emily Stevens, a physician. Around the same time he began writing appellate briefs for a slew of cases brought by smokers against the major American tobacco companies. He registered to practice in multiple states, and crisscrossed the country.Holly Hostrup, a California lawyer who worked with Mr. Chesebro on appellate briefs defending multibillion-dollar verdicts against Philip Morris, recalled him as a fine lawyer. “He was obviously bright and had good arguments and had good experience and had been hired onto big cases and won big cases,” she said. Ms. Hostrup belongs to a lawyers’ email list and said that Mr. Chesebro had been weighing in on tobacco cases as recently as this year.After Mr. Chesebro’s indictment Ms. Hostrup asked an expert in courtroom psychology to help her understand: “How does a person who worked on all those cases on the plaintiffs’ side become a MAGA Republican?”“To my mind,’’ she said, “it was like turning around and going to work for Philip Morris.”Richard Daynard, a Northeastern University law professor and president of its Public Health Advocacy Institute, devised the legal strategy for suing the tobacco giants. “Ken was a guy with really interesting ideas, and proud of them,” he recalled.“I can see the seduction,” he added, speaking of Mr. Chesebro’s embrace by Trump World. “I’m a Democrat, and if I had some bright ideas Biden’s advisers were taking seriously, that’s a big deal, a kind of opportunity.“But of course I’m not about to throw my body over the tracks by saying this is a wonderful human being and whatever he was doing had to be for good reason.”Sudden Wealth, Severed TiesDuring the 2000 presidential election recount battle in Florida, Mr. Chesebro served on the research team assisting Mr. Tribe and other legal luminaries representing Mr. Gore. After Mr. Gore lost, Mr. Tribe and Mr. Chesebro worked together on a few more big lawsuits, then largely went separate ways.But they stayed in touch. Mr. Chesebro’s 2014 investment in Bitcoin netted him “several million dollars,” he wrote in an email to Mr. Tribe that was quoted in a recent article in Air Mail. His marriage ended, and Mr. Chesebro acquired expensive homes in Boston and Manhattan, and a villa in Puerto Rico.Soon after Mr. Chesebro’s big payday, his name began appearing on legal briefs filed by far-right conservatives, including John Eastman and a former Wisconsin judge, James Troupis. All three were described as co-conspirators in the federal indictment for the 2020 election scheme. He made hefty campaign donations to far-right Republicans, maxing out to Mr. Trump in 2020.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers, Scott Grubman and Serreen Meki, speaking to journalists after his guilty plea in Atlanta on Friday.Pool photo by Alyssa PointerMr. Troupis appealed to Mr. Chesebro for help several days after the election. According to the Georgia indictment, Mr. Chesebro drafted a flurry of incriminating memos.In emails laying out the false electors plan, Mr. Chesebro misinterpreted Mr. Tribe’s work on Bush v. Gore, repeatedly citing it to support his theories. Mr. Tribe called him out in an article in August titled “Anatomy of a Fraud.” More

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      Sidney Powell Pleads Guilty in Georgia Trump Case

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      Ms. Powell, a lawyer who pushed baseless theories about ballot fraud in 2020, is the second defendant to accept a plea deal in the election interference case. Sidney Powell, the Trump-aligned lawyer and conspiracy theorist indicted in Georgia and accused of participating in a plot to overturn former President Donald J. Trump’s election loss in 2020, pleaded guilty on Thursday morning to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference of election duties.Ms. Powell, who appeared in a downtown Atlanta courtroom, was sentenced to six years of probation for the charges, a significantly less-severe outcome than she would have faced if found guilty of the charges for which she was originally indicted, which included a violation of the state racketeering law.She was also fined $6,000 and agreed to pay $2,700 restitution to the State of Georgia, as well as write an apology letter “to the citizens of the state of Georgia.” More

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      Sidney Powell Seeks Distance From Trump Ahead of Georgia Trial

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      Ms. Powell, a lawyer who promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud after Donald J. Trump’s 2020 defeat, now says she never represented him or his campaign.Few defenders of Donald J. Trump promoted election fraud theories after his 2020 defeat as stridently as Sidney K. Powell. In high-profile appearances, often alongside other members of the Trump legal team, she pushed conspiracies involving Venezuela, Cuba and China, as well as George Soros, Hugo Chávez and the Clintons, while baselessly claiming that voting machines had flipped millions of votes.But now Ms. Powell, who next week will be one of the first defendants to go to trial in the Georgia racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 17 of his allies, is claiming through her lawyer that she actually “did not represent President Trump or the Trump campaign” after the election.That claim is undercut by Ms. Powell’s own past words, as well as those of Mr. Trump — and there is ample video evidence of her taking part in news conferences, including one where Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, introduced her as one of “the senior lawyers” representing Mr. Trump and his campaign.Most of the Georgia charges against Ms. Powell relate to her role in a data breach at an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga. There, on the day after the Jan. 6 riots, Trump allies copied sensitive and proprietary software used in voting machines throughout the state in a fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.At a recent court hearing, Ms. Powell’s lawyer, Brian T. Rafferty, said that his client “had nothing to do with Coffee County.”But a number of documents suggest otherwise, including a 392-page file put together by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that was obtained by The New York Times. The file, a product of the agency’s investigation into the data breach, has been turned over to Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, a Republican.It is not clear that Mr. Carr will take any action, given that Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani T. Willis, has already brought racketeering charges against Ms. Powell, Mr. Trump and 17 others. The Fulton indictment accuses them of participating in a “criminal organization” with the goal of subverting Georgia’s election results.Brian Rafferty, a lawyer representing Ms. Powell, spoke during a hearing this week.Pool photo by Alyssa PointerJury selection in Ms. Powell’s trial and that of Kenneth Chesebro, a legal architect of the plan to deploy fake electors for Mr. Trump in Georgia and other swing states, starts on Monday. Ms. Powell and Mr. Chesebro demanded a speedy trial, their right under Georgia law, while Mr. Trump and most other defendants are likely to be tried much later.Ms. Powell’s vow during a Fox Business Network appearance in 2020 to “release the kraken,” or a trove of phantom evidence proving that Mr. Trump had won, went viral after the election, though the trove never materialized. The next year, after Dominion Voting Systems sued her and a number of others for defamation, Ms. Powell’s lawyers argued that “no reasonable person would conclude” that some of her wilder statements “were truly statements of fact.”That led the office of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, to crow that “The Kraken Cracks Under Pressure,” and precipitated a spoof of Ms. Powell on Saturday Night Live.Not all are convinced that her conduct veered into criminality.“You have to separate crazy theories from criminal conspiracies,” said Harvey Silverglate, a Boston-area lawyer and civil liberties advocate who has a unique perspective: He is representing John Eastman, another lawyer-defendant in the case, and is a co-author of a 2019 book with Ms. Powell that looked at prosecutorial overreach.“That’s the big dividing line in this whole prosecution — what is criminal and what is wacky, or clearly erroneous or overreaching,” Mr. Silverglate said.Ms. Powell, he added, is “in a tougher position” than his own client, because the accusations against her go beyond the notion that she merely gave legal advice to the Trump campaign as it sought to overturn Mr. Biden’s win. But Mr. Silverglate also said he didn’t think prosecutors would win any convictions in the Georgia case or the three other criminal cases against Mr. Trump in New York, Florida and Washington, given how politicized the trials will be.“I think in any jurisdiction — even Washington, D.C. — you will have at least one holdout,” he said.Ms. Powell is a North Carolina native and a onetime Democrat who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor in Texas and Virginia before establishing her own defense practice. In 2014, she wrote a book, “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.” She billed it as an exposé of a department riddled with prosecutors who used “strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics” in their “narcissistic pursuit of power.”Ms. Powell appeared on Mr. Trump’s radar when she represented his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition. He later tried to withdraw the plea.Ms. Powell, appearing on Fox News, argued that the case should never have been brought and that the F.B.I. and prosecutors “broke all the rules.” Mr. Trump would go on to pardon Mr. Flynn a few weeks after losing the 2020 election.On election night itself, Ms. Powell was at the White House watching the returns come in, according to her testimony to House investigators. When they asked what her relationship with Mr. Trump had been, she declined to answer, she said, because of “attorney-client privilege.”By Nov. 14, Mr. Trump, in a tweet, specifically referred to Ms. Powell as a member of his “truly great team.” Ms. Powell’s lawyer has pointed out that she was not paid by the Trump campaign. But the Trump connection helped her raise millions of dollars for Defending the Republic, her nonprofit group that is dedicated in part to fighting election fraud.Around that time, Ms. Powell, Mr. Flynn and other conspiracy-minded Trump supporters began meeting at a South Carolina plantation owned by L. Lin Wood, a well-known plaintiff’s attorney. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation file, it was decided there that an Atlanta-based technology firm, SullivanStrickler, “would be used to capture forensic images from voting machines across the nation to support litigation” and that “Powell funded SullivanStrickler’s efforts.”By late November, the Trump team grew exasperated with Ms. Powell’s wild claims and publicly cut ties. But the schism was short-lived; she would make several trips to the White House in the weeks that followed.On Dec. 18, Ms. Powell attended a heated Oval Office meeting with Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani that the Georgia indictment lists as an “overt act” in furtherance of the election interference conspiracy. According to the Georgia indictment, they discussed “seizing voting machines” as well as possibly naming Ms. Powell a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud, though the appointment was never made.Sidney Powell appeared on a screen during a July 2022 hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Jan. 7, a number of Trump allies, along with SullivanStrickler employees, traveled to Coffee County. “We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman who made the trip, recalled in a recorded phone conversation at the time. He pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors last month and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.Misty Hampton, a defendant in the racketeering case who was the Coffee County elections administrator, welcomed the Trump-aligned team into the building. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation file makes clear that the county election board did not officially approve the visit and that local officials lacked authority over the voting equipment. (Ms. Hampton, Ms. Powell and other Fulton County defendants are among the subjects of the state investigation listed in the G.B.I. file, as is Katherine Friess, a lawyer who worked with Mr. Giuliani after the election.)While SullivanStrickler didn’t deal exclusively with Ms. Powell, a number of the firm’s employees have asserted that Ms. Powell was the client for its work copying the Coffee County election data, according to the G.B.I. investigation.“The defense’s stance that Sidney Powell was not aware of the Coffee County breaches is preposterous,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff in civil litigation over Georgia’s voting security that unearthed much of what happened in Coffee County.According to the racketeering indictment, the data copied that day included “ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information.” SullivanStrickler invoiced Ms. Powell more than $26,000 for its work, and her organization, Defending the Republic, paid the bill.Mr. Raffensperger, the secretary of state, subsequently replaced Coffee County’s voting machines and said that “the unauthorized access to the equipment” had violated Georgia law. More

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      I.R.S. Puts Lien on Giuliani’s Palm Beach Condo for $550,000 Tax Debt

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      The action by federal tax officials is the latest sign of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s growing financial troubles.The I.R.S. has placed a lien on a Florida property owned by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and lawyer for Donald J. Trump, because he owes roughly $550,000 in income taxes, according to a court filing.The property, a lakeside condominium in Palm Beach, sits less than three miles from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence. Mr. Giuliani and his ex-wife had tried to sell it for $3.3 million in 2019, but never found a buyer, according to The Palm Beach Daily News.The existence of the court filing in Palm Beach County was first reported by The Daily Mail.The action by federal officials over Mr. Giuliani’s 2021 income taxes is the latest sign of his growing financial troubles. He is entangled in numerous legal battles and has been racking up bills for his defense in criminal investigations, private lawsuits and legal disciplinary proceedings stemming from his bid to keep Mr. Trump in office after the 2020 election.He faces a racketeering charge, among others, in Georgia for his role in that effort, as well as a defamation case brought by two election workers in the state. In July, Mr. Giuliani put his Upper East Side apartment in New York City up for sale for $6.5 million. His lawyer, Adam Katz, said at the time that his client was “close to broke.” At one point in August, Mr. Giuliani was said to owe nearly $3 million in legal expenses. Robert J. Costello, once a protégé of Mr. Giuliani, is suing him for unpaid legal fees. And last week Hunter Biden sued Mr. Giuliani for his role in spreading personal information about Mr. Biden.Mr. Giuliani has repeatedly asked Mr. Trump to pay him millions of dollars he believes he is owed for his role in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in office. After entreaties from people close to Mr. Giuliani for a financial lifeline, Mr. Trump hosted a $100,000-per-person fund-raiser at his club in Bedminster, N.J., last month to aid the former mayor.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Trump Will Loom Over Lawyers’ Trial in Georgia This Fall

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      Two lawyers who tried to help overturn the 2020 election results are facing trial this month, an early test of the Georgia case against the former president and 17 others.Within weeks, jury selection in Fulton County, Ga. will be underway. Cameras will be in the courtroom. And prosecutors will present their case alleging a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.But the star defendant — former President Donald J. Trump — won’t be there.Instead, the defendants in the first trial in the racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies, scheduled to begin on Oct. 23, will be two of the lawyers who tried to keep him in power after the election: Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, who were the only ones to seek speedy trials, as Georgia allows.The former president will loom over the courtroom, though, even if he is not in it. That has much to do with how racketeering cases work.“It is absolutely the trial of Donald Trump,” said Keith Adams, an Atlanta defense lawyer and former prosecutor. “Everyone else — they’re not extras, necessarily, but they’re bit characters.”Mr. Trump and the other defendants are moving more slowly, potentially going to trial in the second half of next year or even later, though Atlanta prosecutors have been seeking plea deals with some of the accused. Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman, accepted a deal last week in which he pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors and was sentenced to five years of probation.A lawyer for another defendant, Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign staffer, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week that he rejected a plea offer.The two heading to trial later this month — weeks after the start of a civil fraud trial against Mr. Trump in New York — could not be more different. Ms. Powell is a voluble Texan who spouted conspiracy theories and courted cameras after the 2020 election, promising to “release the kraken,” or a trove of evidence proving that Mr. Trump had won. Mr. Chesebro, a quiet Harvard Law graduate from Wisconsin, worked behind the scenes, devising the legal theory that drove the recruitment of bogus electors in swing states lost by Mr. Trump.Prosecutors will not focus solely on the accusations against the pair; rather, they will lay out what they have described in charging documents as a far-reaching “criminal organization” that committed computer theft and perjury, filed false documents, impersonated public officers and carried out other crimes, with the common goal of changing the election outcome to favor Mr. Trump.Mr. Adams, who is representing the rapper known as Young Thug in another high-profile racketeering case in Atlanta, said that by delving into the alleged misdeeds of Mr. Trump and other co-defendants, prosecutors would be making things harder for Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell.In a racketeering case, he said, “every defendant becomes responsible, and is drawn into the conspiracy, based not just on their own actions, but based upon the actions of other individuals who may or not be there in a courtroom with them.”Steven Sadow, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump, at the Atlanta airport on the day Mr. Trump was booked at the Fulton County Jail in August.Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesThe first trial may also provide clues as to how the former president will fare when his turn before a jury comes. And Mr. Trump’s Atlanta lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, will be watching closely.Mr. Sadow has been a regular presence at pretrial hearings for other defendants, observing from the back of the courtroom and occasionally cracking wise. During a recent hearing, Mr. Sadow, wearing ostrich-skin cowboy boots, remarked on lapel pins worn by the prosecution team and joked that perhaps the defense could fashion some pins bearing the widely distributed mug shot of the former president.The indictment describes various strands of a broad effort to keep Mr. Trump in power, including appeals the former president made to Georgia’s Republican leaders to help him “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his defeat in the state. There were also efforts to harass rank-and-file election workers that Mr. Trump and his allies had accused of fraud, and efforts by a Trump ally at the Justice Department to advance false claims about the election.Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell each had a major role in other phases of the operation. Ms. Powell coordinated a successful effort by other Trump allies to infiltrate a rural Georgia county’s elections office, where they copied sensitive and proprietary software used in voting machines throughout the state in a fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.As Mr. Hall said in a recorded phone call, the team that visited the office in early January 2021 “scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot.” His plea deal is not good news for Ms. Powell, who has asserted in legal filings that she did nothing wrong because the group was invited into the office by the local elections administrator, Misty Hampton, who is also a defendant. “Nothing was done without authorization,” Ms. Powell’s lawyer, Brian T. Rafferty, wrote in a recent filing.But Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, subsequently replaced the voting machines and has referred to what took place as “the unauthorized access to the equipment that former Coffee County election officials allowed in violation of Georgia law.”Filings from Ms. Powell say that she did not “plan or organize” the data breach. But email traffic between Ms. Powell and SullivanStrickler, the company hired to help carry out the work, shows that she was kept informed of what was taking place. Her nonprofit, Defending the Republic, paid the company.“She is right in the thick of it,” said David D. Cross, a lawyer for a nonprofit group that is suing over perceived security vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting system, adding, “she’s on emails with the SullivanStrickler firm in real time.”Scott Grubman, left, is representing Kenneth Chesebro in the election interference case.Miguel Martinez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Chesebro was a key architect of the plan to deploy fake electors in swing states that Mr. Trump had lost. His lawyers have argued that his work was shielded by the First Amendment and that he “acted within his capacity as a lawyer” by offering his legal opinion to his client, the Trump campaign.Prosecutors have taken issue with the fact that the fake electors called themselves “duly elected and qualified” in documents they sent to Washington. By that time, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia had signed paperwork officially awarding the state’s 16 electoral votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers have said that in calling themselves “duly elected and qualified,” the Trump electors meant “qualified and elected by the Republican Party.”For Mr. Trump, this is just the beginning. He has also been indicted in a criminal case in Manhattan, on state charges stemming from hush money paid to a pornographic film actress. And he has been indicted in a pair of federal cases — one in Washington, related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election nationally, and one in Florida, over his handling of sensitive government documents after leaving office.But the prosecutions in Atlanta will stand out for targeting not just the former president, but also many of his former advisers. And unlike in the other criminal trials, they will provide a televised window into the historic prosecutions of a former president and his associates.There is still a chance that the trial scheduled to start this month won’t take place — several defendants have sought to move the proceedings to federal court — or that the timing could shift. But the so-called removal efforts were dealt a blow when Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his case. Mr. Meadows has appealed the decision.Mr. Adams said that in cases with many defendants and staggered trials, defense lawyers like him have the advantage of getting a preview, in the first trial, of the prosecution’s strategies.“I’m sitting in the back of the courtroom, I can see what’s presented, I can see what the witnesses have said, I can see what their arguments are,” he said. “I get to tailor my defense and my arguments for when we strike up trial No. 2.” More

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      Trump Won’t Be on Trial in Georgia Case This Fall, but His Presence Will Be Felt

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      Two lawyers who tried to help overturn the 2020 election results are facing trial this month, an early test of the state racketeering case against the former president and 17 others.Within weeks, jury selection in Fulton County, Ga. will be underway. Cameras will be in the courtroom. And prosecutors will present their case alleging a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.But the star defendant — former President Donald J. Trump — won’t be there.Instead, the defendants in the first trial in the racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies, scheduled to begin on Oct. 23, will be two of the lawyers who tried to keep him in power after the election: Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, who were the only ones to seek speedy trials, as Georgia allows.The former president will loom over the courtroom, though, even if he is not in it. That has much to do with how racketeering cases work.“It is absolutely the trial of Donald Trump,” said Keith Adams, an Atlanta defense lawyer and former prosecutor. “Everyone else — they’re not extras, necessarily, but they’re bit characters.”Mr. Trump and the other defendants are moving more slowly, potentially going to trial in the second half of next year or even later, though Atlanta prosecutors have been seeking plea deals with some of the accused. Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman, accepted a deal last week in which he pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors and was sentenced to five years of probation. A lawyer for another defendant, Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign staffer, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week that he rejected a plea offer. The two heading to trial later this month — weeks after the start of a civil fraud trial against Mr. Trump in New York — could not be more different. Ms. Powell is a voluble Texan who spouted conspiracy theories and courted cameras after the 2020 election, promising to “release the kraken,” or a trove of evidence proving that Mr. Trump had won. Mr. Chesebro, a quiet Harvard Law graduate from Wisconsin, worked behind the scenes, devising the legal theory that drove the recruitment of bogus electors in swing states lost by Mr. Trump.Prosecutors will not focus solely on the accusations against the pair; rather, they will lay out what they have described in charging documents as a far-reaching “criminal organization” that committed computer theft and perjury, filed false documents, impersonated public officers and carried out other crimes, with the common goal of changing the election outcome to favor Mr. Trump.Mr. Adams, who is representing the rapper known as Young Thug in another high-profile racketeering case in Atlanta, said that by delving into the alleged misdeeds of Mr. Trump and other co-defendants, prosecutors would be making things harder for Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell.In a racketeering case, he said, “every defendant becomes responsible, and is drawn into the conspiracy, based not just on their own actions, but based upon the actions of other individuals who may or not be there in a courtroom with them.”Steven Sadow, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump, at the Atlanta airport on the day Mr. Trump was booked at the Fulton County Jail in August.Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesThe first trial may also provide clues as to how the former president will fare when his turn before a jury comes. And Mr. Trump’s Atlanta lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, will be watching closely.Mr. Sadow has been a regular presence at pretrial hearings for other defendants, observing from the back of the courtroom and occasionally cracking wise. During a recent hearing, Mr. Sadow, wearing ostrich-skin cowboy boots, remarked on lapel pins worn by the prosecution team and joked that perhaps the defense could fashion some pins bearing the widely distributed mug shot of the former president.The indictment describes various strands of a broad effort to keep Mr. Trump in power, including appeals the former president made to Georgia’s Republican leaders to help him “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his defeat in the state. There were also efforts to harass rank-and-file election workers that Mr. Trump and his allies had accused of fraud, and efforts by a Trump ally at the Justice Department to advance false claims about the election.Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell each had a major role in other phases of the operation. Ms. Powell coordinated a successful effort by other Trump allies to infiltrate a rural Georgia county’s elections office, where they copied sensitive and proprietary software used in voting machines throughout the state in a fruitless hunt for ballot fraud. As Mr. Hall said in a recorded phone call, the team that visited the office in early January 2021 “scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot.” His plea deal is not good news for Ms. Powell, who has asserted in legal filings that she did nothing wrong because the group was invited into the office by the local elections administrator, Misty Hampton, who is also a defendant. “Nothing was done without authorization,” Ms. Powell’s lawyer, Brian T. Rafferty, wrote in a recent filing.But Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, subsequently replaced the voting machines and has referred to what took place as “the unauthorized access to the equipment that former Coffee County election officials allowed in violation of Georgia law.”Filings from Ms. Powell say that she did not “plan or organize” the data breach. But email traffic between Ms. Powell and SullivanStrickler, the company hired to help carry out the work, shows that she was kept informed of what was taking place. Her nonprofit, Defending the Republic, paid the company.“She is right in the thick of it,” said David D. Cross, a lawyer for a nonprofit group that is suing over perceived security vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting system, adding, “she’s on emails with the SullivanStrickler firm in real time.”Scott Grubman, left, is representing Kenneth Chesebro in the election interference case.Miguel Martinez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Chesebro was a key architect of the plan to deploy fake electors in swing states that Mr. Trump had lost. His lawyers have argued that his work was shielded by the First Amendment and that he “acted within his capacity as a lawyer” by offering his legal opinion to his client, the Trump campaign.Prosecutors have taken issue with the fact that the fake electors called themselves “duly elected and qualified” in documents they sent to Washington. By that time, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia had signed paperwork officially awarding the state’s 16 electoral votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers have said that in calling themselves “duly elected and qualified,” the Trump electors meant “qualified and elected by the Republican Party.”For Mr. Trump, this is just the beginning. He has also been indicted in a criminal case in Manhattan, on state charges stemming from hush money paid to a pornographic film actress. And he has been indicted in a pair of federal cases — one in Washington, related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election nationally, and one in Florida, over his handling of sensitive government documents after leaving office. But the prosecutions in Atlanta will stand out for targeting not just the former president, but also many of his former advisers. And unlike in the other criminal trials, they will provide a televised window into the historic prosecutions of a former president and his associates.There is still a chance that the trial scheduled to start this month won’t take place — several defendants have sought to move the proceedings to federal court — or that the timing could shift. But the so-called removal efforts were dealt a blow when Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his case. Mr. Meadows has appealed the decision.Mr. Adams said that in cases with many defendants and staggered trials, defense lawyers like him have the advantage of getting a preview, in the first trial, of the prosecution’s strategies.“I’m sitting in the back of the courtroom, I can see what’s presented, I can see what the witnesses have said, I can see what their arguments are,” he said. “I get to tailor my defense and my arguments for when we strike up trial No. 2.” More