Georgia Criminal Case Against Trump (2020 Election)

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      Donald Trump’s Campaign of Violence and Lawlessness

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      Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”Donald Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.In poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including the vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary.That advantage over the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case. A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors in another after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. He is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer, sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”While a government shutdown won’t end the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.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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      Trump Will Not Seek to Move Georgia Election Case to Federal Court

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      His decision comes after Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, tried unsuccessfully to move his own case from state to federal court.Former President Donald J. Trump will not seek to move the criminal racketeering case against him in Atlanta to federal court, according to a legal filing from his lawyer on Thursday.Mr. Trump was indicted by a grand jury in August, along with 18 of his advisers and allies, after a two-and-a-half year investigation into election interference by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis. Keeping the case in state court means that any trial for Mr. Trump would be televised, unlike in federal court.“This decision is based on his well-founded confidence that this honorable court intends to fully and completely protect his constitutional right to a fair trial,” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, wrote in the filing, referring to Fulton County Superior Court, “and guarantee him due process of law throughout the prosecution of his case.”The move comes a few weeks after a federal judge rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his own case to federal court. That decision has been appealed, but it dimmed the chances for successful removal efforts by other defendants, including Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, and three Georgia Republicans who submitted bogus Electoral College votes for the former president in December 2020.Removal is a longstanding practice meant to protect federal officials from state-level prosecution that could impede them from conducting federal business. It is rooted in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law “supreme” over contrary state laws.But Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia decided this month that the actions ascribed to Mr. Meadows in the indictment were not within the scope of his federal duties as White House chief of staff. The evidence, he ruled, “establishes that the actions at the heart of the state’s charges against Meadows were taken on behalf of the Trump campaign with an ultimate goal of affecting state election activities and procedures.”Removal to federal court would have provided some advantages for Mr. Trump, including a jury pool somewhat more favorable to him. But he would have faced the same state felony charges.In the Georgia case, all 19 defendants are facing a racketeering charge for their role in what prosecutors have described as a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. Each defendant also faces at least one other charge; Mr. Trump and his former personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, face the most — 13 each.If Mr. Trump ends up going to trial in Fulton County Superior Court, as now seems increasingly likely, the presiding judge will be Scott McAfee, who was recently appointed to the bench.While attending law school at the University of Georgia, Mr. McAfee was a vice president of the school’s chapter of the conservative Federalist Society. He later worked for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, where his supervisor was Ms. Willis.Thus far, Judge McAfee has been moving the court proceedings along briskly, but he has not had the opportunity to make many substantive rulings.When Mr. Trump will actually face trial remains uncertain. Two of the lawyers who worked to keep him in power, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, are set to go to trial on Oct. 23. The two defendants had requested an early trial date, which is their right under Georgia law, though both have been filing a flurry of motions over the last few weeks to dismiss the case, or parts of it.Another lawyer who faces charges, John Eastman, said in a filing on Thursday that he might still invoke his right to a speedy trial. Those not seeking the option may not face trial until the second half of next year, or even later. More

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      Lawyers for Fake Trump Electors Hint at Defense Strategy in Georgia Case

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      The details came at a hearing on whether the three electors, co-defendants of Donald J. Trump in an election interference case, could have their cases moved to federal court.Lawyers for three Georgia Republicans charged in a racketeering indictment for casting false Electoral College votes for former President Donald J. Trump offered a glimpse of their defense strategy on Wednesday, telling a federal judge that they submitted the votes as part of their “duty” under federal law.The three defendants — David Shafer, the former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party; Cathy Latham, a party activist from a rural part of the state; and State Senator Shawn Still — were among 16 Republicans recruited to cast electoral votes for Mr. Trump at the Georgia State Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, the same day that the legitimate electors for President Biden met to cast their votes for him.The three are among 19 people, including Mr. Trump, who were charged last month in an indictment that sketches out a multifaceted scheme to illegally overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. Crucial to the plan, the indictment says, was an effort to recruit Trump loyalists to “convene and cast false Electoral College votes” in Georgia.On Wednesday morning, lawyers for the three fake electors squared off against prosecutors from the Fulton County district attorney’s office in a hearing over whether the three were serving as “federal officers.” Such a designation could allow them to move their cases from state court to the federal system, where the jury pool would be somewhat more supportive of Mr. Trump.The defense lawyers are hoping that Judge Steve C. Jones of U.S. District Court will move the case to federal court — or throw out their clients’ cases completely.At the hearing, the lawyers for the would-be electors said that their clients had believed they were legally preserving Mr. Trump’s rights in case a lawsuit challenging the election at the time ended up in his favor.That lawsuit was filed by Mr. Trump and Mr. Shafer four days before the so-called safe harbor deadline of Dec. 8, 2020, when state-level election challenges were supposed to be wrapped up. Craig Gillen, a lawyer for Mr. Shafer, noted that a judge had not ruled on the lawsuit by the deadline. Therefore, he argued, Georgia, under federal law, lost its authority to decide who the legitimate electors were.That made it incumbent upon the Republican electors to cast votes for Mr. Trump, he said, so that Congress could decide which electoral votes from Georgia to ultimately count.“They did their duty,” Mr. Gillen said, arguing that they should be considered “contingent electors,” and not “fake electors,” as described by prosecutors and reporters.“It’s just too easy to say ‘fake’ without digging into what the law says,” he said.Anna Cross, a special prosecutor, countered that the electors had acted not out of duty, but in their own self-interest, and in the interest of their preferred candidate. She called the lawsuit filed by Mr. Shafer and Mr. Trump “meritless,” and said that the filing of such a suit just before the deadline should not be allowed to cause electoral “chaos.” (The lawsuit was voluntarily withdrawn by the plaintiffs on Jan. 7, 2021.)Not only were the electors not federal officials, Ms. Cross said, but they “were no electors at all.”While the hearing played out in federal court, pretrial jockeying continued in state court, where defense lawyers are seeking other ways to strengthen their hand as an Oct. 23 trial date for two of the 19 defendants, the lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, approaches. On Tuesday, Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court ruled that defense lawyers could interview members of the grand jury that returned the indictment against Mr. Trump and his co-defendants — but only those who were willing to be questioned.On Wednesday, the office of Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, filed a notice pointing to potential conflicts of interest for several of the defense lawyers, though it was unclear if any were serious enough to merit action from Judge McAfee. Many of the suggested conflicts related to having prior connections to witnesses who might be called to testify during a trial.One of the state’s witnesses mentioned in the filing was L. Lin Wood, one of the lawyers who sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss. After the election, Mr. Wood, who was not charged in the case, embraced conspiracy theories and extreme rhetoric, at one point calling for putting former Vice President Mike Pence before a firing squad.In an interview, Mr. Wood said that he had been subpoenaed to testify but that he has nothing worthwhile to say.“A lot of people are putting out stories that I’m a government snitch or I flipped on President Trump,” he said. “That’s just errant nonsense.”Last year, Mr. Wood testified before a special grand jury that heard from 75 witnesses as part of the investigation into election interference in Georgia. More

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      The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket

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      This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.The country needs a right-of-center party. But today, as the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.The Georgia election case against Mr. Trump and 18 others makes for a particularly powerful X-ray of the party. The sheer array and specific identities of those indicted in the case highlights how easily a conspiracist approach to political life, unconstrained by a party now incapable of policing boundaries or channeling passions into a larger purpose beyond raw hardball, can justify and compel illicit machinations.The defendants in the Georgia case represent every major component of what scholars term a modern “party network”: formal party organizations at the state and local level (like the former Georgia party chairman David Shafer), informal activist and interest groups (like John Eastman of the Claremont Institute) and candidate-centered operations (like Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump).Beyond those indicted, the broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.Conspiracism has a long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. So does a ruthlessly mercenary view of political parties. A speaker at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975 deemed parties “no more than instruments, temporary and disposable.” Such activists soon occupied the party’s commanding heights.Along with that activism came the constriction of the party’s vision for the public good. Starting in the 1970s, Republicans won elections by marrying a regressive economic agenda with us-versus-them populist appeals. At moments like the “Reagan revolution,” Jack Kemp’s work to broaden conservatism’s appeal to more working-class voters or George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s ambition to build an enduring Republican majority around an “opportunity society,” the party’s collective effort could take on a confident and expansive cast.But the programmatic side of the party, under the leadership of figures like Paul Ryan (a Kemp protégé), came eventually to alienate even the party’s own base with an unpopular agenda more and more tailored to the affluent.By 2016, as a demagogue unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.But conspiracy and party have an even longer history, one that stretches back to the frenzied and unbounded politics of the early Republic. In the 1790s, the emergent parties of Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans fell into personalized strife, but possessed neither the legitimacy nor the machinery to channel and stabilize the conflict. The organizers of new party activity on both sides were, to a one, avowedly antiparty politicians, and so they conceived of their efforts as a temporary expediency — emergency measures necessary to combat the nefarious conspiracies threatening to undermine the Constitution.In an era in which personal reputation was still inextricable from conflict over public matters, politicians refused to accept their opponents as legitimate, let alone as constituting a loyal opposition.For example, the vitriol and paranoia that attended the election of 1800, pitting the incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson, underscored the danger that a politics unfettered by strong parties poses to the Republic. The election featured not merely epic bouts of mudslinging but credible threats of collective violence and secession from both sides.The construction of mass political parties in subsequent generations — organizations with huge electoral bases and institutions like nominating conventions for party decision-making — channeled individual ambition into collective public purposes. At times, to be sure, as when Democratic pioneers of the mass party of the 19th century aimed for a cross-sectional politics that would sideline the divisive slavery question, the stability achieved through party politics actually suppressed conflict necessary to providing genuine political alternatives.But with mass parties came a shared understanding that the erosion of collective party principle could threaten a reversion to the 18th century’s politics-as-cabal. As the early political scientist Francis Lieber put it in 1839, “all parties are exposed to the danger of passing over into factions, which, if carried still farther, may become conspiracies.”The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to that danger, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.Without that commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene.This is not to impugn every Republican. As confirmed by both the federal and Georgia election-related indictments, many Republican officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, resisted intense pressure to interfere with the election and did their duty. And for all their defenses of Mr. Trump against his several indictments, his Republican presidential rivals have generally shied away from taking the critical step of saying they would have acted differently from Mike Pence when the Electoral College votes were counted at the Capitol on Jan. 6.But these responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.Might that project emerge from Republican governors? Lacking the option of substituting antics for governance, they have forged viable approaches in power. Indeed, many of the country’s most popular governors are Republicans.But our polarized political system is also a nationalized one, where state-level success as a problem solver too often obstructs rather than clears a path to national influence within the Republican Party. And we have no illusions that behavior dangerous to democracy will lead to long-lasting punishment at the polls.To see the personalism around Mr. Trump in the context of the entire party is to see past the breathless statements about his magnetic appeal and to observe a party more bent on destroying its enemies than on the tough work of solving hard problems.As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.Sam Rosenfeld, an associate professor of political science at Colgate, and Daniel Schlozman, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, are the authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”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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      Trump Says He Hopes Meadows Will Remain ‘Loyal’ to Him in Election Case

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      The former president, who has been warned against saying anything that could influence witnesses in his election interference case, made the statements during an interview on “Meet the Press.”Former President Donald J. Trump said he hoped Mark Meadows — his final White House chief of staff and a co-defendant in a sweeping racketeering indictment in Georgia stemming from efforts to thwart the 2020 election — was still “loyal” to him.Mr. Trump made his comment during a lengthy interview with Kristen Welker, the new moderator of NBC’s “Meet The Press,” broadcast on Sunday morning. Mr. Trump has been warned by the federal judge in a case also stemming from his efforts to stay in office, brought against him by the special counsel Jack Smith, to avoid saying anything that might affect the testimony of witnesses. His comment about Mr. Meadows could attract new interest.A lawyer for Mr. Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Both Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump are among 19 co-defendants in the Fulton County, Ga., indictment brought by the district attorney, Fani T. Willis. It accuses those charged with a criminal conspiracy to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the state in his re-election effort.“By the way, do you think your former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is still loyal to you? He just pleaded not guilty in the Georgia case,” Ms. Welker asked.“Well, I hope he’s loyal to me,” Mr. Trump said.“Do you worry about him flipping?” Ms. Welker asked.“I mean, I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Trump replied.Legal experts have suggested that prosecutors may push to have some of the defendants in the case plead guilty and become witnesses against others involved.Mr. Trump recorded the interview with Ms. Welker late last week. On Friday, a day after the interview, prosecutors asked the judge in the federal election interference case, Tanya S. Chutkan, for a limited gag order against Mr. Trump after weeks of attacks on the special counsel, among others.“Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election,” they wrote, “the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution — the judicial system — and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals — the court, the jury pool, witnesses and prosecutors,” Mr. Smith’s office wrote in the request, which they said they wanted to be narrowly tailored.Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Smith again shortly after the request was made, writing on his social media site, “I’m campaigning for President against an incompetent person who has WEAPONIZED the DOJ & FBI to go after his Political Opponent, & I am not allowed to COMMENT? How else would I explain that Jack Smith is DERANGED, or Crooked Joe is INCOMPETENT?”Judge Chutkan has yet to rule on the request.In his “Meet the Press” interview, Mr. Trump extensively reiterated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, despite facing indictment in both Georgia and Washington on the matter.When Ms. Welker pointed out to him that the most senior lawyers in his administration had told him following dozens of legal challenges that he had lost, and that he listened to outside groups of lawyers, Mr. Trump said it was because “I didn’t respect them.”“But I did respect others. I respected many others that said the election was rigged,” Mr. Trump said.And when Ms. Welker noted that he himself had reportedly said some of his outside lawyers had “crazy theories” about election interference, he replied, “You know who I listen to? Myself. I saw what happened. I watched that election, and I thought the election was over at 10 o’clock in the evening.”As she asked fresh questions, he went on: “My instincts are a big part of it. That’s been the thing that’s gotten me to where I am, my instincts. But I also listen to people. There are many lawyers. I could give you many books.” But ultimately, he told her, “It was my decision. But I listened to some people.”Mr. Trump’s statements were in keeping with — and yet could ultimately complicate — his efforts to raise what is known as an advice of counsel defense in the election interference case. Under the strategy, defendants seek to avoid liability for criminal charges by arguing that they were merely following the professional advice of their lawyers.Alan Feuer contributed reporting. More

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      Georgia Judge Orders 2 Separate Trials for Defendants in Trump Election Case

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      Two defendants will get a speedy trial starting in October, but the others, including Donald J. Trump, can have more time to prepare, the judge ruled.A judge on Thursday granted former President Donald J. Trump and 16 others a separate trial from two of their co-defendants who will go to trial next month in the Georgia election interference case.The judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, has laid out an expedited trial schedule for Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, two lawyers who helped Mr. Trump try to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. The two had invoked their right under Georgia law to seek a speedy trial, in part to avoid the high cost of a more protracted legal fight.Their trial is set to begin with jury selection on Oct. 23. Judge McAfee, in a seven-page order on Thursday, said that he hoped to have a jury seated by Nov. 3 to comply with the speedy trial law.A trial date for Mr. Trump and the other 16 co-defendants has not been set. In his order, Judge McAfee described what was to come as a “mega-trial.” But he also raised the possibility that those 17 might not all be tried together in the end, if some make successful arguments to break off their cases.“Additional divisions of these 17 defendants may well be required,” the judge wrote. “That is a decision for another day once the many anticipated pretrial motions have been resolved and a realistic trial date approaches.”All 19 defendants were charged in August in a wide-ranging state racketeering indictment after an investigation into election interference in Georgia, which Mr. Trump lost in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes. In the weeks after Election Day, Mr. Trump made baseless claims that he was the victim of significant electoral fraud. The indictment says that he and the other 18 defendants were part of a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn his loss in Georgia in various ways.Questions about the size, shape and timing of trials for a case of such magnitude have yet to be fully resolved. The Fulton County District Attorney’s office, which is leading the prosecution, had wanted all 19 defendants to be tried together, arguing in a filing on Tuesday that “breaking this case up into multiple lengthy trials would create an enormous strain on the judicial resources.”But in his order on Thursday, Judge McAfee noted that some lawyers would need more time to prepare. He also noted that the Fulton County courthouse “simply contains no courtroom adequately large enough to hold all 19 defendants.”Further complicating matters is the fact that several defendants are seeking to move their cases to federal court. If just one of them succeeds, there is a possibility that the whole group could be forced into the federal system, although experts say the law on this issue is not clear.Regardless, the prospect of a federal judge presiding over a state trial dimmed somewhat last week, when Judge Steve C. Jones, a U.S. district court judge, rejected a removal request from Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff and a defendant.Mr. Meadows has appealed. Judge Jones is scheduled to hold hearings next week on similar requests from Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who sought to intervene after the Georgia election, and three other co-defendants who served as bogus electors on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Trump’s lawyer in Georgia, Steven H. Sadow, has indicated in court documents that the former president may also soon ask to have his case moved to federal court.On Thursday morning, as Judge McAfee held a hearing on a number of pretrial motions, tensions between the prosecution and defense were palpable. Brian T. Rafferty, a lawyer for Ms. Powell, accused the district attorney’s office of failing to respond to his request for certain documents as part of the discovery process.At another point, Scott Grubman, a lawyer for Mr. Chesebro, angrily accused Daysha D. Young, a Fulton County assistant district attorney, of engaging in a “personal attack” on Mr. Grubman’s co-counsel, Manny Arora, after Ms. Young mentioned a 2010 incident in which a judge barred Mr. Arora from contacting grand jurors in a separate case.Mr. Chesebro was indicted based on his role as an architect of the bogus electors scheme. His lawyers have called for his case to be dismissed, arguing that he was merely “researching and finding precedents in order to form a legal opinion, which was then supplied to his client, the Trump campaign.”Ms. Powell was indicted on charges relating to the copying of sensitive voter system data in rural Coffee County, Ga., by Trump allies seeking evidence of fraud. On Wednesday, her lawyer filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that county elections officials had allowed access to the elections system there in January 2021.“This means that no data was stolen, there was no fraud, and nothing was done without authorization,” the motion said. More

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      Questions About Key Players in Trump’s Plan to Overturn the 2020 Election

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      Last month, Times Opinion published a graphic mapping out many of the key players in former President Donald Trump’s plot to upend the 2020 election. In response to the project, we received more than 700 questions and comments from readers hungry to know more. Some asked why key players had not yet been charged. Others wanted to know how to prevent future subversive efforts like the fake electors scheme. So we asked Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who drew up the initial list of names and worked on how to arrange them, to weigh in. He started with the questions that, as he put it, “hit hardest for me: questions about who we left out and those who funded the whole shebang.” Reader comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.The Masterminds and FinanciersWho is financing Mr. Trump’s machine? When you follow the money, what do you find? — Nathaniel Means, Shreveport, La.Norman Eisen: Nathaniel’s question is key. An army of small donors have shouldered part of the burden, as have more substantial donors to his Save America PAC and other organizations.There were others who funded aspects of the election overthrow effort. The Rule of Law Defense Fund, an organization associated with the Republican Attorneys General Association, for instance, was involved in promoting the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse. Other donors include Julie Jenkins Fancelli, a Publix heiress who reportedly gave about $300,000 to rally organizers. The special counsel Jack Smith is reportedly continuing to analyze as part of his prosecution fund-raising efforts related to the attempt to overturn the election, though it is unclear if that will include the Jan. 6 rally, so we may see.If you want more information, you can dig into the Jan. 6 committee’s final report. It includes an appendix entitled “The Big Rip-off,” which explains how the Trump campaign raised enormous sums off its claims that the election was stolen.And of course, there’s a whole additional piece of this puzzle: the figures who continue to fund the members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election. Public Citizen and Judd Legum’s “Popular Information” newsletter have both done good reporting on this topic. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an organization I co-founded, has also published very good analysis of the major American companies that have or continue to fund these members of Congress. I patronize many of those companies, so I suppose the ultimate answer to your question is that we’re all funding those who enabled or continue to enable Trump, if indirectly.This conspiracy to “defraud” America seems very decentralized. Who, or what group of conspirators, masterminded the effort and gave it urgency and energy? — Jeff Tarakajian, Narragansett, R.I.We put Mr. Trump at the center of our graphic with his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, directly to his right because we felt that they were really the masterminds behind this effort. But ultimately, I believe that this was an attempted coup not of soldiers, tanks and guns but of lawyers, cases and statutes. That’s why we depicted lawyers on Mr. Trump’s other side. They too were critical to the overall scheme. So were many others who still seem to be welcomed in polite society, including the R.N.C. chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.Criteria for the ‘Congressional Cowards’What, if any, consequences will the “congressional cowards” suffer? Are they all just going to get off scot-free? Run for re-election? How can that be possible? — Cheryl Voglesong, Troy, Mich.The eight congressional cowards we highlighted, and the additional 139 members of Congress who baselessly voted against certifying the 2020 election, do indeed seem to be insulated from consequences so far. These 147 members largely hail from Trump strongholds, which has shielded them from electoral consequences. Exacting legal consequences is also challenging because of the complex set of legal immunities members of Congress enjoy. That makes them tougher to prosecute or even investigate. Just last week, Scott Perry, a congressman from Pennsylvania who had one of the most significant roles in the attempted coup, was able to use this immunity argument to convince judges on the D.C. Circuit that prosecutors shouldn’t be able to access everything on his cellphone. (It was seized by the F.B.I. in August 2022, and he has been fighting back in the courts since.) The D.O.J. may still appeal that decision to the full D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court, but the whole episode highlights the challenge that prosecutors face in attempting to hold members of Congress accountable for their actions.If you’re wondering why we chose to highlight these eight members of Congress and not the other 139 who voted against certifying the election results, it’s because we felt that, based on a thorough review of the public record, they bore the most profound responsibility. We could have included a generic bubble for the remaining 139, as we did elsewhere in the graphic, but ultimately we chose a simpler approach.Serious Players Haven’t Been ChargedBased on taped comments that have been broadcast in the media, it would seem both Roger Stone and Steve Bannon were involved in the conspiracy. Why haven’t they been charged? — Kathy Rogers, Whitefish Bay, Wis.Part of the reason Mr. Stone and Mr. Bannon have yet to be charged is that the American justice system has extremely high standards for prosecution and appeal. It’s one of the strengths of our justice system. So despite their participation in aspects of the effort, including taking part in the infamous Willard war room, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Stone were not charged because prosecutors likely decided the evidence was just not strong enough.‘Mr. Trump Has Inspired Extreme Loyalty’One would expect these were all law-abiding people for whom the threat of potential criminal prosecution works as an effective deterrent. Any thoughts about why the politicians and lawyers and bureaucrats risked their own personal well-being for this long-shot effort? — Jon Lipsky, San FranciscoI have wrestled with this question for years, including as the attempted coup was unfolding in real time after the election. I suspect the answer is slightly different for every single one of these people. Mr. Trump has inspired extreme loyalty in millions of Americans, and these leaders appear to be among them. That allegiance sent them down a factual and legal slippery slope that started with baseless arguments but culminated in outright illegal ones.Pushing Back on Subversive EffortsWhat formal mechanisms can be put in place to prevent individual states from putting up slates of fake electors? — Jeff Rosen, Evanston, Ill.The efforts to overturn the election exploited weaknesses in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which defined the procedures for certifying a president-elect’s victory at the time. In August 2022, I testified before the Senate Rules Committee in support of comprehensive legislative reform to prevent such shenanigans in the future by targeting the gaps exposed on Jan. 6. I’m pleased to say that these improvements became law in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022. With 135 years elapsing between the original act in 1887 and the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022, this remodel was long overdue, and should restrict future misconduct (although the criminal mind is endlessly inventive).This network obviously does not care what the public thinks of them, and the progress made by the justice system has been halting at best. How can the average Joe push back on these subversive efforts? — Benjamin Larson, CincinnatiThe ultimate way that average people can push back on election subversion is by making their voices heard at the ballot box, preferably creating margins that are too large to easily overthrow. But it doesn’t stop there. With the multiple criminal cases moving across the country, there’s also a role for average folks in serving on the juries in these matters. Given Mr. Trump’s heated rhetoric, coming on top of the other sacrifices in serving as a juror in the trial of a long case, that is no easy task. But I’m confident that Americans will step up to do that job as well.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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      in Elections

      Trump Moves to Quash Most Charges Against Him in Georgia

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      The motion essentially piggybacked off another filed by one of the former president’s co-defendants, which gave a detailed critique of the sprawling indictment.Former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Monday to throw out most of the 13 charges against him in the wide-ranging election interference indictment handed up by a grand jury last month in Georgia.The one-page motion from Mr. Trump’s Georgia lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, refers to a more expansive motion also filed on Monday by one of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, the lawyer Ray Smith III. That motion gives a detailed critique of the 98-page indictment, arguing that its “defects” are “voluminous,” and that it is legally unsound.Among other things, Mr. Smith’s motion says that the charge of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — which all 19 defendants face — seeks to “punish protected First Amendment activity” and fails to “sufficiently allege the existence” of a racketeering enterprise whose goal was to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow 2020 election loss in the state.The Smith filing argues that the racketeering conspiracy laid out by the prosecution was actually “comprised of millions of people throughout the country” who believed election fraud had taken place and were working toward the same goal as the defendants.To illustrate the point, the motion stated that there were probably thousands of bank robbers in the United States, “but the mere fact that they all rob banks and have the same goal and many of the same methods of operation, does not mean that all American bank robbers constitute one RICO enterprise, despite the fact that they are people who commit the same crime, for the same reason.”Mr. Smith’s legal team includes Donald F. Samuel, a veteran Atlanta defense lawyer.The office of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, who is leading the prosecution, declined to comment on Monday evening ahead of an official response to the motion in court. Mr. Sadow also declined to comment.The filing was the latest legal volley in the case, which Mr. Trump sought to quash even before his indictment in mid-August. It came as little surprise to legal analysts watching the case, who had expected Mr. Trump’s lawyers to mount an aggressive defense long before the start of a trial.The former president’s lawyers have already moved to sever his case from two co-defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who have demanded a speedy trial. Their joint trial is set to start on Oct. 23.Mr. Smith, a lawyer based in Atlanta who helped Mr. Trump’s team challenge his loss in Georgia after the election, faces a dozen charges in the case. He advanced false claims about the election at a legislative hearing, according to the indictment. And, prosecutors charge, he took part in the efforts to get fake Trump electors to cast votes and sign documents that falsely claimed that he had won the election. Mr. Smith has pleaded not guilty.“He never advocated violence; he never cried ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” his lawyers argued in the motion. “If advocacy in court or the legislature is a crime — if it merits being branded a ‘racketeer’ — there are very few people who will have the courage to risk engaging in such advocacy. ”Chris Timmons, a former prosecutor in the Atlanta area, said on Monday that the motion was unlikely to succeed in court, describing the racketeering enterprise defined in the indictment as “pretty tightly drawn.” But he noted that defense lawyers sometimes filed motions directed more at the court of public opinion, with an eye toward influencing a potential jury pool.Notably, the Smith motion does not excuse all the activity that took place.“If, as the Fulton prosecutors claim, somebody threatened physical harm to an election worker, that might (or should) be prosecuted as a crime,” Mr. Smith’s lawyers write. “The same for stealing computers or information from a computer.”Some defendants in the case were charged with conspiracy to commit computer theft in a breach of a rural Georgia county’s voting system, while others were accused of threatening a poll worker.Mr. Trump may soon follow the lead of several other defendants and ask to have his case moved to federal court, where the jury pool would be somewhat more supportive of him. But on Friday, a U.S. District Court judge rejected such a request from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, dimming the prospects that others would succeed with the strategy. More