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      Trump is undermining the entire US judicial system with another big lie | Robert Reich

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      Not content with trying to destroy America’s trust in the US election system with his big lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Donald Trump is now trying to destroy America’s trust in the US judicial system with another big lie.The second big lie is that judges, prosecutors, witnesses and juries are corruptly prosecuting Trump as a means of keeping him from being re-elected.Late on Monday, following a two-and-a-half-year investigation by the Fulton county, Georgia, district attorney, Fani Willis, a grand jury there charged the former president and 18 others with criminally seeking to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia.This fourth indictment marks another step in the US’s slow but steady process of criminal justice. It is another illustration that no one is above the law.Willis and her staff deserve the nation’s thanks, as do special counsel Jack Smith and his staff at the justice department, who have brought evidence to other grand juries of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election nationwide and to steal secret documents.None of this is easy work under the best of circumstances. With a rogue former president fanning the flames of anger and recrimination, the work is also potentially dangerous.Trump has called Willis “corrupt”, and worse. He has called Smith “deranged”, among many other epithets and baseless charges. He has leveled similar charges against judges who have already been assigned to hear the cases against him.We know all too well of the violent proclivities of a subset of Trump supporters. His wild statements endanger people. Willis and her staff have already been threatened, as has Smith, and potential witnesses.On Monday morning, for example, before the Georgia grand jury even met, Trump posted that he “had been reading reports” that former Georgia lieutenant governor Jeff Duncan would be testifying before the grand jury.Trump then charged that Duncan “was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia. He refused having a Special Session to find out what went on … and fought the TRUTH all the way.”Was Duncan intimidated by Trump’s post when he testified on Monday? Did he alter or downplay his testimony out of fear of retribution by a Trump supporter?We may never know. But the mere possibility of intimidation is itself troubling.Trump’s conditions of release at his arraignment in Washington earlier this month included a vow – which Trump swore to uphold – that he would not intimidate or harass witnesses and officers of the court or threaten the administration of justice.Yet Trump has not ceased posting inflammatory invective against potential witnesses, against potential jurors in Washington DC, New York and Georgia, against judges who have been assigned to hear the cases against him, and against Willis, Smith and other prosecutors.The possibility that his threats might silence potential witnesses, or that his rants might intimidate jurors, prosecutors and judges, cannot be dismissed. It is incumbent on the courts to stop Trump, even if it requires revoking his release from jail pending his trials.Trump’s invective is also having a more insidious effect. By casting the criminal justice system as corrupt and partisan – as part of a conspiracy to prevent him from being re-elected – Trump is undermining public trust in that system.Republican members of Congress have joined Trump in charging that Democrats have “weaponized” the prosecutions against him, even though those prosecutions come through grand juries composed of average citizens.More than half of Republicans – including 77% of self-identified Maga Republicans – say the indictments and investigations against Trump are an attack on people like them, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll taken soon after the most recent indictment.“I AM BEING ARRESTED FOR YOU,” Trump posted in all caps on 3 August, the day of his indictment in Washington for seeking to overthrow the 2020 election.“I’m being indicted for you,” Trump said in June, after being charged with retaining government secrets.A century ago, the world witnessed fascist leaders who sought to fuse their identities with their followers while sowing distrust in all other institutions, so that followers lost their capacities for independent thought and accepted whatever the leaders said as truth.If a substantial portion of the American public comes to believe that the judges, juries and prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election are part of the same trumped-up plot to keep him from becoming president, the US’s 244-year experiment in self-government is seriously jeopardized.Trump’s second big lie is almost as dangerous to the future of American democracy, and to the rest of the world that looks to the US for leadership, as was his first.The second big lie should be understood as an extension of Trump’s attempted coup.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Giuliani championed organised crime act Rico. Now he’s charged under it

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      Rudy Giuliani has dined out for years on his aggressive use of Rico, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which he wielded with dramatic effect against New York mobsters in the 1980s.For his pains, he was granted an award by the Italian government. Later, as New York City mayor, he turned his use of the anti-racketeering law into a vote-getter, presenting himself as the hero of Rico.As an in-joke, he handed the keys of the city to the cast of the Sopranos. Then he went on Saturday Night Live and bragged about “sticking it to organised crime”.He may not be laughing so loudly now.On Monday night Giuliani, Donald Trump and 17 other co-defendants were slapped with organised crime charges in Georgia under the state’s Rico law, for allegedly having been part of a vast conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The hero of Rico had been hoist with his own petard.The grand jury indictment charges all of the 19 co-defendants, Giuliani included, with “racketeering activity” in Georgia and other states. It alleges that they acted together as a “criminal organisation” which engaged in illegal activities including forgery, filing false documents and conspiracy to defraud the state.The irony that Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county who is leading the prosecution, chose to hit the hero of Rico with a Rico rap has not been lost on Giuliani watchers. Appointed as US attorney for the southern district of New York in 1983, he did not so much invent the anti-racketeering law, which was enacted in 1970, as become an early adopter in its use against organised crime.His most famous case, the 1986 prosecution known as the “commission” case, targeted eight defendants at the very top of one of the most powerful New York mafia families. “The verdict reached today has resulted in dismantling the ruling council of La Cosa Nostra,” Giuliani said after the convictions were secured in a 10-week trial.His victory demonstrated the huge potential of Rico as a prosecutorial tool against crime gangs. Instead of the traditional approach of picking out individual foot soldiers, one arduous case at a time, Rico allowed prosecutors to take out the entire upper leadership of the criminal enterprise in a single devastating blow.Giuliani may well be ruing his much-vaunted success. The “commission” case put Rico on the map, and since 1986 it has spread widely at both a federal level and across state jurisdictions – Georgia included.The Fulton county indictment makes a specific point of highlighting aspects of Giuliani’s behavior in the thick of the 2020 election that it alleges amounted to racketeering. It recounts some of the more lurid lies that he disseminated in front of the Georgia lawmakers in an attempt to persuade them to subvert Joe Biden’s electoral victory in the state.The falsehoods included his claim that 10,315 dead people had voted in the presidential election; that fraudulent ballots had been counted five times in a counting center; and that two poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, had passed around USB ports “as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” seeking to infiltrate the voting machines.In July, Giuliani admitted in court that his comments about Freeman and Moss were false. Moss testified to the January 6 committee that the supposed USB ports she had exchanged with her mother were in fact ginger mints.The indictment presents all these incidents not just as lies, but as the actions of a member of a criminal racketeering enterprise, designed to further the conspiracy and achieve its goal of keeping Trump in the White House despite his electoral defeat. That Giuliani should have exposed himself to a Rico prosecution in this way is puzzling to those who have followed his legal career.“Of all the defendants, Giuliani knows Rico better than anyone, he lived with it for decades,” said Michael Discioarro, a former prosecutor in the Bronx. “Rudy knows darn well where the line is drawn, and it’s surprising to me that he even put himself in that position.” More

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      Trump’s Indictment Has Georgia Republicans Fearing Replay of 2020

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      State officials who rejected Donald Trump’s calls to subvert the election results say the party must move on from 2020 in order to defeat President Biden in 2024.Georgia Republicans say they know a winning message for 2024: Under President Biden, voters are struggling with inflation, gas prices are on the rise and undocumented migrants are streaming across the southern border.But they fear Donald J. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, won’t be able to stay on message.Mr. Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election, now heightened by two criminal cases over his efforts to steal it, threatens to reopen wounds in the state’s G.O.P. that have bedeviled it in the two and a half years since he pushed to overturn Mr. Biden’s narrow victory there. If Mr. Trump is the nominee, it’s unlikely he would contain his vitriol toward the officials who defied him to certify the 2020 election results, including the state’s popular governor — making for potential competing visions.“I don’t think he’ll let us” unite, said Jack Kingston, a former House Republican from Georgia and a Trump ally. “His nature isn’t to sit down and say nice things, even about Brian Kemp, one of the most successful governors in the country.”Like many Republicans, Mr. Kingston believes that Mr. Trump’s false claims that the election in Georgia was rigged cost the G.O.P. two Senate seats in runoffs in January 2021. Democrats flocked to the polls to secure victories for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, while many Republican voters appeared to heed the former president’s warnings that the state’s election system was “rigged” and stayed home.Mr. Trump’s false claims will now most likely be on trial in the state — and in its most populous county, Fulton — as the presidential election heats up. The 41-count indictment is the most sweeping of the four criminal cases that Mr. Trump faces, stretching from the Oval Office to the Georgia secretary of state’s office to the elections office in tiny Coffee County, where Trump allies successfully copied sensitive software.Early voters casting their ballots for the 2020 election in Suwanee, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesRepublicans in Georgia “have always had fissures,” said Rusty Paul, the Republican mayor of Sandy Springs, a rapidly growing Fulton County suburb abutting the capital city, Atlanta, to the north. Voters in North Georgia and other rural stretches tend to be staunchly conservative. Voters in the populous suburbs of Atlanta were once reliably Republican, but more moderate. Low-country Republicans in Savannah are still another breed.But the most difficult disconnect at the moment is the pro-Trump leadership of the Georgia Republican Party, versus the voters who soundly rejected the primary candidates handpicked by Mr. Trump in 2022. Those Trump-backed candidates challenged state officials, including Mr. Kemp and the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to go along with Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In a runoff election, a small but critical slice of Georgia Republicans cast ballots for Mr. Warnock or stayed home altogether, helping the Democrat win a full six-year term against Mr. Trump’s chosen U.S. Senate candidate, the retired football star Herschel Walker.Senior Republicans in the state believe the eventual presidential nominee will secure the support of the hard-core Republican base. They’re more concerned about the Republican voters who backed both Mr. Kemp and Mr. Warnock — and who recoil at the party leadership’s ardently pro-Trump stance.“That disconnect between the Republican leadership and the rank-and-file voters creates organizational problems,” Mr. Paul said, adding, “How do you get voters fired up and ready to go when they disagree with you?”The initial response of Georgia’s Republican base to Monday’s indictment, Mr. Trump’s fourth, is likely to mirror the national Republican response: rally around the candidate. But over time, Mr. Paul predicted, that could change, suggesting that “there’s beginning to be some fatigue with President Trump.”Mr. Kemp refuted stolen election claims that Mr. Trump made on Truth Social on Tuesday, saying that elections in Georgia are “secure, accessible and fair.”“The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus,” he wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Raffensperger also weighed in: “The most basic principles of a strong democracy are accountability and respect for the Constitution,” he said in a statement. “You either have it or you don’t.”Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia has become a target of the former president’s wrath after failing to back his false election claims and refusing to aid in the effort to overturn the vote.Alex Slitz/Associated PressMr. Kemp has committed to supporting the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 regardless of who it is. But he has kept his distance from the party’s far-right factions. Neither he nor Mr. Raffensperger attended the state party convention in June — an event that once served as a conservative confab peppered with unflashy business meetings but has now become beholden, in the eyes of some state conservatives, to culture wars and election denialism.Georgia, with its 16 electoral college votes and genial suburban Republicans, has never been terribly friendly to Mr. Trump’s brand of pugilistic politics. Mr. Trump’s 50.8 percent in 2016 was down from Mitt Romney’s 53.3 percent in 2012 and George W. Bush’s 58 percent in 2004. The trend continued in 2020 when Mr. Trump slipped below 50 percent and lost to Mr. Biden by 11,779 votes.Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s Republican former lieutenant governor and a fierce Trump critic, emerged from grand jury testimony on Monday and said, “We’re either as Republicans going to take our medicine and realize the election wasn’t rigged” or lose again.“Donald Trump was the worst candidate ever in the history of the party, even worse than Herschel Walker, and now we’re going to have to pivot,” he said. “We want to win an election in 2024. It’s going to have to be someone other than Donald Trump.”That entreaty contrasted with the conclusion of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican and Trump ally who represents Northwest Georgia. “Corrupt Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis’ ‘investigation’ (WITCH HUNT) of President Trump dragged on for over two and a half years, just in time to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election,” she wrote on X. “That’s not a coincidence. That’s election interference.”Mr. Biden’s allies suggest that Mr. Trump’s ongoing crusade against Georgia Republicans could help Democrats keep the state in 2024.“Donald Trump is the one candidate around which Democrats can rally and will turn out to vote against him,” said Fred Hicks, an Atlanta-based Democratic political strategist. “This is a real crisis moment for Republicans who care about electability.”Joshua McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, said he thought the indictment would drive Republican voters in the state to unite around what they see as the politically motivated targeting of not only the former president but several state figures, including a sitting state senator and the former chairman of the state party. But, he added that same development could have a chilling effect on efforts to recruit and organize state activists.“I think the intent of this kind of activity is to discourage people from being involved,” Mr. McKoon said. “It’s sort of like sending a message, ‘you better be careful about how active you are in the party or you may find yourself criminally indicted.’”Mr. Trump, should he be the Republican nominee, would almost certainly maintain his conservative base of support through next year. But for any G.O.P. candidate to succeed in 2024, he or she would need to woo Georgia’s moderate and swing voters — the same small group whose distaste for Mr. Trump in 2020 helped Mr. Biden to victory, and who elected both Mr. Kemp and Mr. Warnock in 2022.Cole Muzio, president of the Georgia-based conservative group Frontline Policy Council, called Mr. Trump’s standing in the state “very dubious at best,” should he win the Republican nomination. For the G.O.P. to carry the state in the next presidential election, he added, “it can’t be about 2020.”“Good grief, we can’t keep re-litigating 2020 because if we do, we will lose the most consequential election in my life,” he said. More

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      Trump prosecutor Fani Willis faces racist abuse after indicting ex-US president

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      Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote. “They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!”Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges were made public on Monday night. Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Willis and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago.“I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe,” she said.As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis has rebuffed his claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.The judge in the federal case, Tanya Chutkan, has warned him to be careful not to make inflammatory public comments about the proceedings, saying she would “take whatever measures are necessary” to prevent intimidation of witnesses or contamination of the jury pool. More

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      What to know about the 30 unindicted co-conspirators in Georgia election investigation

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      The Georgia district attorney Fani Willis delivered an extensive 41-count indictment against former president Donald Trump and 18 others over their plot to subvert the 2020 US presidential election, unsealed late on Monday night. While each defendant faces a different list of charges, all 19 have been charged with racketeering in violation of Georgia’s powerful Rico (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, which carries a sentence of five to 20 years.The racketeering charge also lists 30 “unindicted co-conspirators”, as participants in the “criminal enterprise in Fulton county, Georgia, and elsewhere”.Willis did not charge the 30 unnamed co-conspirators in her investigation, but that doesn’t mean they can never face penalties for their involvement in the election fraud plot to keep Trump in power.Here’s what to know about the 30 unnamed co-conspirators.13 unnamed Georgia Republican electorsDavid Shafer, Cathy Latham and Shawn Still are the three fake electors – out of 16 total – that are named as defendants in Willis’s indictment, charged with racketeering and other felonies. But the other 13 appear to be listed among the unnamed co-conspirators: “Individual 2, Individual 8, Individual 9, Individual 10, Individual 11, Individual 12, Individual 13, Individual 14, Individual 15, Individual 16, Individual 17, Individual 18, and Individual 19.”On 14 December 2020, the 16 Republican electors had met to cast fraudulent votes for Trump by signing a document titled “CERTIFICATE OF THE VOTES OF THE 2020 ELECTORS FROM GEORGIA’’ that declared a Trump victory, falsely claiming that they were the “duly elected and qualified Electors” from the state. They then mailed that document, attempting to file it in a Georgia district court.According to the indictment, the fake electors committed three felony offenses, including: impersonating a public officer, forgery in the first degree, and false statements and writings; and they attempted to commit a fourth felony offense of filing false documents, according to the unsealed indictment.Individual 3: references point to Trump adviser Boris EpshteynReferences to “Individual 3” within Willis’s indictment point to Boris Epshteyn, a political consultant and adviser to Trump, as one of the unindicted co-conspirators who aided the plot to subvert the election.Epshteyn, who is also believed to be one of the six co-conspirators in the federal investigation into Trump’s January 6 involvement by Jack Smith, attended a 19 November 2020 press conference on behalf of the Trump campaign along with Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell where they made false statements of election fraud.Epshteyn was also copied on previously reported emails that detail parts of the fake electors scheme, which the Willis indictment identifies as being received by Individual 3.Individual 4: references point to Robert Sinners, Trump 2020 campaign election day operations officialDavid Shafer sent a previously reported email to Robert Sinners on 20 November 2020, asking him to help Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall “as needed”, which matches a reference involving “Individual 4” from the Willis indictment. Individual 4 was also copied on a number of messages asking for help with the 16 Georgia Republican electors scheme on 14 December 2020, to “avoid drawing attention” and ensure everything went according to plan.From the indictment: “On or about the 20th day of November 2020, DAVID JAMES SHAFER sent an e-mail to unindicted co-conspirator Individual 4, whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, and other individuals. In the e-mail, DAVID JAMES SHAFER stated that SCOTT GRAHAM HALL, a Georgia bail bondsman, “has been looking into the election on behalf of the President at the request of David Bossie” and asked unindicted co-conspirator Individual 4 to exchange contact information with SCOTT GRAHAM HALL and to “help him as needed.” This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”Sinners sent the 14 December 2020 email referenced in the Willis indictment to Michael Roman and others saying: “All votes cast, paperwork complete, being mailed now. Ran pretty smoothly” which was previously presented by the House January 6 select committee.OthersIndividual 1: discussed with Trump on 31 October 2020 a draft speech for a widely televised 4 November 2020 news conference during which Trump falsely declared victory.Individuals 5 and 6: met with a group of Pennsylvania legislators at the White House on 25 November 2020 along with Trump, Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis to discuss holding a special session of the Pennsylvania general assembly.They also met with Arizona legislators, along with Giuliani and Ellis, on 30 November 2020 where the two Trump attorneys requested the Arizona legislators to unlawfully appoint Republican electors from their state.Individual 7: ‘Electors Whip Operation’Assisted with the fake electors scheme in six states – Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.This person is probably among a group of individuals associated with the Trump campaign whom Mike Roman enlisted to participate in his “Electors Whip Operation” – who kept track of Trump electors. That team included G Michael Brown, Peter McGinnis, James Fitzpatrick, Shawn Flynn, Jesse Law, Thomas Lane, Valerie Phillips McConahay, Robert Sinners and Ryan Terrill, as revealed by the House January 6 select committee.Individual 20: met with Trump, Giuliani, Powell and others at the White House where they “discussed certain strategies and theories intended to influence the outcome of the November 3, 2020, presidential election, including seizing voting equipment and appointing SIDNEY KATHERINE POWELL as special counsel with broad authority to investigate allegations of voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere”. While the individual’s identity is unclear, the 18 December 2020 meeting was infamously “unhinged” as Trump and his allies screamed at White House aides who pushed back against their plan to overturn the election. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, were among the Trump allies at that meeting.Individuals 21 and 22: copied on a 21 December 2020 email from Sidney Powell to the chief operations officer of SullivanStrickler LLC, who instructed him that they were to “receive a copy of all data” obtained by SullivanStrickler LLC from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Michigan.Individual 23: Participated in a four-way phone call with Harrison Floyd, Trevian Kutti and Steve Lee on 5 January 2021.Coffee county, Georgia, voting machine data schemeIndividual 24: traveled with Scott Hall to Coffee county, Georgia on 7 January 2021. That day, Hall, Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton sought to unlawfully access voting machines at the Coffee county board of elections & registration office.Individuals, 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29: unlawfully sought to access data from voting machines in Coffee county, Georgia, at various points in January and February 2021.Individual 30: involved with the unlawful effort to access voting machine data. More

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      In Trump Georgia Case, a Trial Within 6 Months Could Be a Stretch

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      The prosecutor in the racketeering case against Donald Trump and 18 allies has an ambitious timeline. Experts have their doubts.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., said on Monday that she hoped her criminal racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies could go to trial in the next six months. But racketeering cases are not built for speed. Just getting this one together has taken two and a half years. The effort to proceed to trial quickly in Georgia will almost certainly be complicated by the schedules of three other criminal cases that Mr. Trump is already facing in Florida, New York and Washington, D.C. And with 19 defendants represented by a fleet of attorneys, a number of experts on Tuesday didn’t expect a smooth path forward and raised the possibility that the case could potentially take years, rather than months, to lumber toward a conclusion. One defendant, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, has already filed a motion to move the case to federal court. Mr. Trump himself has a long history of using delay tactics in his various legal entanglements, and he, too, is likely to file pretrial motions seeking to get the case thrown out or moved to federal court. The judge in the case may also determine that six months is not enough time for defense lawyers to prepare for a trial involving so many defendants and 41 total charges, including a racketeering count that took prosecutors nearly 60 pages to describe.John B. Meixner Jr., an assistant law professor at the University of Georgia and a former federal prosecutor, said that, normally, a six-month window from indictment to trial for a case like this one would be “a very aggressive timeline.” Prosecutors, and perhaps the judge, he said, will be highly motivated to resolve the case ahead of the 2024 election. On the other hand, Mr. Meixner said, the looming election could make Mr. Trump particularly motivated to push back his trial date in Georgia. “If the case is still ongoing, and if Mr. Trump were to win the 2024 election, we’d have a new slate of questions of whether a sitting president can be tried for a state criminal offense,” he said. Another racketeering indictment, against the rapper known as Young Thug and his associates, was handed up in Fulton County in May of last year, and a jury has yet to be seated.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesChris Timmons, an Atlanta-area lawyer and a former prosecutor, said that with 19 defendants, political gamesmanship may not be the only factor. “It takes a while to get everybody arraigned,” he said. “It takes a while to make sure everybody’s got an attorney. There’s discovery that’s got to be engaged in.” He added: “There’s a lot of information to process to get organized, to be ready to go.”Ms. Willis was the lead prosecutor on a racketeering case that dragged on for two years after state investigators found that educators in Atlanta had cheated on school tests. By the time the trial finished in 2015, the lead defendant had died. Another racketeering indictment, against the rapper known as Young Thug and his associates, was handed up in Fulton County in May of last year; jury selection began more than six months later, in January, and a jury has yet to be seated.Generally speaking, prosecutors prefer to move quickly, while defense lawyers try to slow things down.The defense in the Trump case is likely to argue that they need at least as much time to build their case as Ms. Willis took building hers, said Jeffrey E. Grell, a Minneapolis lawyer who specializes in RICO cases, adding that the court may well listen. “The paramount obligation is to protect the defendant’s due process rights,” he said.Ms. Willis, a Democrat who took office in 2021 and launched her investigation into election interference in Georgia shortly thereafter, will be up for re-election next year. Some critics say that handling the Trump case has caused her office to lose sight of more traditional priorities for a D.A. “I wish I could get Fani Willis as fired up to prosecute murders in Sandy Springs as she is on this one,” said Rusty Paul, the Republican mayor of Sandy Springs, a relatively affluent suburban city in Fulton County. He added: “I’m no fan of Donald Trump, but I’ve got murderers who committed their alleged crime in 2016 but haven’t been brought to trial.”Atlanta’s homicide count spiked in 2020 and remained high for two years, mirroring that of many other cities during the pandemic. But police data shows murders down 25 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2022. Noting that the murder rate was dropping, Ms. Willis recently told a local radio station, “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”Gerald A. Griggs, a trial lawyer and president of the Georgia N.A.A.C.P., worked with Ms. Willis in the Atlanta solicitor’s office years ago. He has criticized her in the past for what he believes is an overzealous prosecution of poor Black people. But he also describes her as one of Georgia’s most talented prosecutors — and one with serious experience navigating complex RICO cases. That experience, said Mr. Griggs, who represented a number of defendants in the cheating case, might help move the process along.“She’s done this before,” he said. “I think people are underestimating her skills as a trial attorney.”Jonathan Weisman More

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      The Georgia Case Against Trump Is The Simplest and Most Direct

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      The best way to think about Georgia’s sprawling indictment against Donald Trump and his allies is that it is a case about lies. It’s about lying, conspiring to lie and attempting to coax, coerce and cajole others into lying. Whereas the attorney general of Michigan just brought a case narrowly focused on the alleged fake electors in her state (Trump is not a defendant in that one), and the special counsel Jack Smith brought an indictment narrowly focused on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, has brought a case about the entire conspiracy, from start to finish, and targeted each person subject to her jurisdiction for each crime committed in her jurisdiction.In other words, this indictment is ambitious. But it also answers two related questions: Why bring yet another case against Trump in yet another jurisdiction? Isn’t he going to face a federal trial in Washington, D.C., for the same acts outlined in the Georgia indictment?The answers lie in the distinctions between state and federal law. Georgia law is in many ways both broader and more focused than the federal statutes at issue in Smith’s case against Trump. The breadth is evident from the racketeering charges. As Norm Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland wrote in The Times, Georgia’s racketeering statute allows prosecutors to charge, among other crimes, a number of false statement statutes as part of a generalized criminal scheme. In other words, rather than seeing each actionable lie as its own, discrete criminal act, those lies can also be aggregated into part of a larger whole: an alleged racketeering enterprise designed to alter the results of the Georgia presidential election.Yet it’s the focus of Georgia law that’s truly dangerous to Trump. The beating heart of the case is the 22 counts focused on false statements, false documents and forgery, with a particular emphasis on a key statute: Georgia Code Section 16-10-20, which prohibits false statements and writings on matters “within jurisdiction of state or political subdivisions.” The statute is a state analog to a federal law, 18 U.S.C. Section 1001, which also prohibits false statements to federal officials on matters within their jurisdiction, but the Georgia statute is even broader.Simply put, while you might be able to lie to the public in Georgia — or even lie to public officials on matters outside the scope of their duties — when you lie to state officials about important or meaningful facts in matters they directly oversee, you’re going to risk prosecution. That’s exactly what the indictment claims Trump and his confederates did, time and time again, throughout the election challenge.The most striking example is detailed in Act 113 of the indictment, which charges Trump with making a series of false statements to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and his deputies in Trump’s notorious Jan. 2, 2021, telephone call. Most legal commentators, myself included, focused on that call because it contained a not-so-veiled threat against Raffensperger and his counsel. In recorded comments, Trump told them they faced a “big risk” of criminal prosecution because he claimed they knew about election fraud and were taking no action to stop it.Willis’s focus, by contrast, is not on the threats but rather on the lies. And when you read the list of Trump’s purported lies, they are absolutely incredible. His claims aren’t just false; they’re transparently, incandescently stupid. This was not a sophisticated effort to overturn the election. It was a shotgun blast of obvious falsehoods.Here’s where the legal nuances get rather interesting. While Willis still has to prove intent — the statute prohibits “knowingly and willfully” falsifying material facts — the evidentiary challenge is simpler than in Smith’s federal case against Trump. To meet the requirements of federal law, Smith’s charges must connect any given Trump lie to a larger criminal scheme. Willis, by contrast, merely has to prove that Trump willfully lied about important facts to a government official about a matter in that official’s jurisdiction. That’s a vastly simpler case to make.Yes, it is true that the individual lying allegations are also tied to much larger claims about a criminal conspiracy and a racketeering enterprise. But if I’m a prosecutor, I can build from that single, simple foundation: Trump lied, and those lies in and of themselves violated Georgia criminal law. Once you prove that simple case, you’ve laid the foundation for the larger racketeering claims that ratchet up Trump’s legal jeopardy. Compounding the danger to Trump, presidents don’t have the power to pardon state criminal convictions, and even Georgia’s governor doesn’t possess the direct authority to excuse Trump for his crimes.If Trump’s comments on Truth Social are any indication, he may well defend the case by arguing that the Georgia election was in fact stolen. He may again claim that the wild allegations he made to Raffensperger were true. That’s a dangerous game. The claims are so easily, provably false that the better course would probably be to argue that Trump was simply asking Raffensperger about the allegations, not asserting them as fact.But if Trump continues to assert his false claims as fact, then Willis has an ideal opportunity to argue that Trump lied then and is lying now, that he’s insulting the jury’s intelligence just as he insulted the nation’s intelligence when he made his claims in the first place.But declaring that the core of the Georgia case is simpler than the federal case does not necessarily mean that it will be easier to try. Willis chose to bring claims against 19 defendants, and she said she intended to try them together. While that decision makes some sense if you’re trying to prove the existence of a sprawling racketeering enterprise, it is also a massive logistical and legal challenge. Moreover, Trump is likely to try to move the case to federal court, which would require him to demonstrate that his actions were part of his official duties as president — a formidable task, given that he was interacting with Georgia officials in his capacity as a candidate. But if successful, it would expand the available jury pool to include more Trump-friendly areas outside Fulton County.These challenges — especially when combined with Trump’s upcoming criminal trials in Washington, D.C.; Manhattan; and Florida — make it difficult to see how Willis can bring this case to trial within the six months that she has said is her preference.For eight long years, Americans have watched Donald Trump lie. Those lies have been morally indefensible, but some may also be legally actionable. His campaigns and presidency may have been where the truth went to die. But the law lives, and the law declares that Trump cannot lie to Georgia public officials within the scope of their official duties. If Willis can prove that he and his confederates did exactly that, then she will prevail in the broadest, most consequential prosecution in modern American political history.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 Plans to Release 100-Page Report on Georgia Election Fraud Claims

      by

      Liz Harrington, a communications aide described as a true believer in the former president’s lies about a stolen election, helped prepare the report. Mr. Trump said he would release it on Monday.Hours after former President Donald J. Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges accusing him of a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election, his aides and allies awoke to a social-media post from the Republican front-runner inviting people to a news conference on Monday.“A Large, Complex, Detailed but irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete & will be presented by me at a major News Conference at 11:00 A.M. on Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, just before 9 a.m.He added that it will be a “CONCLUSIVE Report” after which “all charges should be dropped against me & others.”The report in question, according to people familiar with the matter, is a document of more than 100 pages that was compiled at least in part by Liz Harrington, a Trump communications aide who is often described as among the true believers in his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread fraud.The document focuses on what detractors of the election have insisted are widespread voting anomalies in Georgia during that campaign, the people said. It has been in the works for many weeks, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.Ms. Harrington has been making calls to people outside of Mr. Trump’s campaign about the event, according to two people familiar with the matter. She posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, four hours after Mr. Trump announced the news conference.“Georgia has among the most corrupt elections in the country — and they haven’t gotten better since 2020, they’ve gotten worse!” she wrote. “Tune in Monday!”Ms. Harrington declined to comment when contacted. She also appears, although unnamed, in a key scene detailed in Mr. Trump’s first federal indictment, over his mishandling of classified documents.She was in the room with Mr. Trump at his home in Bedminster, N.J., in the summer of 2021, when the former president was recorded rustling through papers and discussing a sensitive military document that he lamented he could have declassified as president. Three people familiar with the matter said she is one of the women heard speaking in a recording of that conversation, a partial transcript of which appears in the indictment.A wide variety of Mr. Trump’s past claims about fraud in Georgia have already been debunked, and it remains unclear precisely what will be in the report he mentioned in his post. It is also unclear whether Mr. Trump’s promised news conference will go forward on Monday, when the club is expected to be closed and holding only private events.Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, denounced Mr. Trump’s comments a short time after the former president posted them.“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen,” Mr. Kemp wrote. “For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward — under oath — and prove anything in a court of law. Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor. The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus.’’Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post came as people in his expansive orbit of lawyers and advisers have grown increasingly concerned about what he says publicly about the four criminal indictments he is facing. The judge overseeing his federal case over attempting to subvert the election has already warned Mr. Trump and his lawyers against making “inflammatory” statements that could compromise witnesses or the jury pool.Mr. Trump’s decision to revisit his baseless claims about the 2020 election in such a high-profile setting — with a news conference devoted entirely to the topic — cuts against months of efforts by his allies and advisers to limit the extent to which he focuses on a subject that has already proved to be a political loser.That is especially true after the 2022 midterm elections, when the candidates he endorsed and who promoted his claims of a stolen election fared poorly. More