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    Legal Consequences Arrive for Trump and Other Election Deniers

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

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    Governor Brian Kemp tells Trump Georgia’s 2020 election ‘was not stolen’

    Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, insisted on Tuesday that the 2020 presidential election in his state “was not stolen” in an apparent defense of the latest criminal indictment of Donald Trump.Kemp, who has clashed frequently with the former president over his false claim the election was rigged, responded on Twitter to an earlier post on Truth Social from Trump announcing a press conference next week at which he promised to present “irrefutable” evidence of fraud.“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. 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,” Kemp wrote in his tweet.“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.”Kemp’s message was immediately endorsed by Chris Christie, the Republican former governor of New Jersey who is challenging Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.“This is a strong leader telling the truth. Others should try it,” Christie wrote on Twitter, taking his own dig at Trump’s honesty.Trump has previously railed against Kemp and Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, the recipient of his infamous phone call demanding officials “find” enough votes to nullify Joe Biden’s win.That January 2021 conversation is believed to have been a central component of the investigation by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, that led to Trump’s Monday night indictment on charges including forgery and racketeering.Kemp’s tweet referred to numerous failed efforts by Trump’s legal team in Georgia to overturn the result following Biden’s victory there by fewer than 12,000 votes. A judge dismissed one lawsuit alleging that 147,000 illegitimate ballots were wrongly counted, and the state’s supreme court refused to hear an appeal.That lawsuit was supported by David Perdue, a Trump ally and former senator who challenged Kemp for their party’s gubernatorial nomination in 2022. Perdue’s defeat was widely regarded as a significant blow to Trump’s ongoing campaign to reverse his own loss.It is the second time in five days that Kemp has tweeted a message directed at Trump, having accused him last week of putting himself “ahead of the future of our country” by declining to pledge support to the eventual 2024 Republican presidential nominee.Trump has been equally critical of Kemp, the two having feuded since Trump blamed his 2020 humiliation in Georgia on the governor.Kemp is among a number of senior Republicans, including Christie and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, who have urged the party to move on from Trump, the leading candidate for its 2024 presidential nomination.Analysts say Kemp’s style of conservative leadership offers a blueprint for the future if Trump’s grip on the party should loosen. More

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    The Guardian view on Trump’s latest charges: the case for the cases against an ex-president | Editorial

    Even close followers of the news could be forgiven for losing track of the criminal proceedings against Donald Trump. His indictment in Georgia is his second in a fortnight, and his fourth in total. The 13 new counts added to the scorecard bring the total – so far – to 91. What was once the precedent-shattering prospect of a former president facing trial on serious charges now seems oddly commonplace. That’s without mentioning the two impeachments he survived in office, or the multiple civil cases against him.Like the federal charges brought by the special counsel Jack Smith earlier this month, these are vastly graver matters than those relating to the payment of hush money to a pornography star, or even to the retention of classified national security documents. The federal case also addresses his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. But Mr Trump would have less ability to interfere with a state-level case if re-elected, and would not be able to pardon himself. The use of Georgia’s racketeering legislation, broader than the federal equivalent, is also striking, and not only because it is usually associated with the pursuit of mobsters. It does not require prosecutors to prove that defendants directly broke the law, but that they knowingly coordinated with others who did so. The charging of 18 alleged co-conspirators may increase the likelihood of former associates flipping and assisting the prosecution.Nonetheless, the pattern is well established. Prosecutors present detailed evidence against Mr Trump, enlarging on what was already in the public domain. He dismisses the charges as a “witch-hunt”. Republicans who briefly shunned him after the storming of the Capitol now rally to his cause once more. The danger of overestimating the difference that these cases could make on next year’s election is similarly well rehearsed. Most voters made up their minds on Mr Trump long ago. He claims each charge as further evidence of the grand conspiracy he falsely claims denied him victory in 2020 and, therefore, as mandating more support, including financial. The former president himself told voters recently that “we need one more indictment to close out the election”. Previous charges appeared to boost his lead over his Republican rival Ron DeSantis, who is trailing far behind him.His favourability ratings fell among Republicans following his June indictment over illegally holding classified documents, and last year’s midterms were a reminder of the differences between primary and general election voters. In purely practical terms, the need to fight – and even testify in – criminal cases will be a time-consuming distraction while trying to campaign for the presidency.Still, the next election is more likely to be swayed by Joe Biden’s ability to convince voters that the economy is thriving – something they are unwilling to believe as yet – and by campaigning on issues such as abortion. This month, citizens in Ohio overwhelmingly rejected the constitutional amendment that Republicans were trying to rush through to fend off abortion rights protections, demonstrating the continued commitment of voters to safeguarding access – and their growing awareness of Republican efforts to tilt elections. Many grow more determined as they see more such efforts.In contrast, the impact of each set of criminal charges, even if they are more serious than the last, is inevitably reduced somewhat as they accumulate. Democracy is not only about contests of popularity: it cannot survive without procedures of accountability.
    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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    Of the criminal cases against Trump, Georgia’s may be the most important | Moira Donegan

    Whether they like it or not, the three prosecutors who have now indicted Donald Trump in four different cases – the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who is bringing charges in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; the special counsel Jack Smith, who is bringing federal charges against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents and January 6 cases; and now Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who is bringing state charges against Trump regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia – are now the former president’s political opponents. They pose a greater risk to his political future than any of his primary rivals.This, at least, is how Trump is behaving as his presidential campaign lumbers toward 2024: as if he’s running against the prosecution. For one thing, Trump is acting like the prosecutions are political attacks. In the lead-up to the Georgia indictment, he aired TV ads attacking Willis. And for another, the cases are costing him a tremendous amount of money. A Pac that the former president is using to pay his mounting legal fees, Save America, recently requested a refund of a donation it had made to another group supporting Trump’s re-election effort. The money couldn’t go to campaign efforts, as had been planned, because it was needed to pay the legal fees. That’s how rapidly lawyers’ bills are adding up for the former president and his long list of indicted allies.That list got a lot longer late Monday night, when Willis’s office unsealed an indictment charging Trump and 18 others on charges derived from Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico. Trump himself was charged with 13 felony counts stemming from his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, including not just racketeering but also soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, and numerous conspiracy and false statements charges.The wide-ranging indictment is the result of a two-and-a-half-year investigation undertaken using a special grand jury, and charges stem from incidents ranging from election day 2020 to September 2022, when defendants allegedly perjured themselves in testimony to the grand jury in an attempt to cover up the scheme. The query began after the release of audio of a call in which Trump urged the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to invalidate votes for Biden in majority-Black Atlanta and “find 11,780 votes” to allow Trump to win the state.Willis has taken a broad view of her mandate, taking advantage of state law’s expanded purview to charge much more expansively in Georgia than Jack Smith has under federal law. Willis has said in the past that she uses Rico charges to tell a complete story of a criminal enterprise to a jury, and the indictment is designed to allow her prosecutorial team to bring in out-of-state conduct in order to add context to the broader effort to overturn the election. The indictment depicts the effort to overturn the election results in Georgia and elsewhere as a criminal enterprise engaged in a conspiracy to commit illegal activity and then cover it up, with Trump as the syndicate boss.In addition to false statements about election fraud made by the likes of Rudy Giuliani to the Georgia legislature, the indictment also surveys conduct in places as far afield as Pennsylvania and Arizona; includes charges related to the false electors scheme in Georgia; and details a bizarre incident on 7 January 2021 in which a firm employed by the conspiracist Trump lawyer Sidney Powell illegally confiscated confidential election data from voting machines in rural Coffee county with the help of one of those fake electors, the Georgia state Republican official Cathy Latham.Giuliani, Powell and Latham are all co-defendants, along with figures such as the disgraced law professor John Eastman, the fake electors scheme architect Kenneth Chesebro, the Department of Justice official Jeff Clark, the Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, the former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, and the then Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer. In addition to the 19 defendants, the indictment lists 30 unindicted co-conspirators.Willis has said that she plans to try all defendants at the same trial. That’s a recipe for chaos: 19 defendants means that there will be multiple defense teams, using multiple strategies to throw sand in the procedural gears of the court and delay, delay, delay. But it also creates many vulnerabilities for the former president: there will be a lot of opportunities for people to flip, and testify against Trump. And those co-defendants may have even more incentive to turn on their old boss than in the other cases, because in Georgia, the Rico charge faced by Trump and other defendants carries a mandatory minimum of five years in prison.Of the criminal cases against Trump, this is the most expansive and ambitious. It may also be among the most significant for the country. As a state charge, it cannot be crushed if Trump returns to power; in Georgia, due to a history of corruption and Klan affiliations among state officials, the governor does not have pardon power, and so Trump cannot look to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for reprieve. Alvin Bragg’s hush money case seems the weakest of the charges, and Jack Smith’s documents case appears to be the strongest. But though Trump’s flouting of the law both in and outside of office has been prolific, it is his attempts to overturn the will of the voters and illegally retain power that are the most dangerous for our country, most offensive to our nation’s shared aspiration to democratic self-rule.The fact that the scheme has not been punished – and that it seemed, for a while, as if neither Congress nor prosecutors would have the courage and political will to punish it – was a profound insult to American citizens. The coming months promise to be chaotic, vitriolic and stupid. Trump will try to spin the indictments as evidence of his martyrdom; his Republican allies will rally to his defense in whichever way they think will improve their own electoral prospects while also keeping them out of jail; journalists will be tasked with repeating, over and over, the bare facts, trying to etch out a legible sketch of reality for their readers amid the onslaught of cynical fictions.But the upcoming trials of Donald Trump, some of which appear to be on track to happen at the height of the presidential election, might also offer a thorough reckoning with what happened after the 2020 election, and an opportunity, for the first time, to truly hold the perpetrators accountable. That, at least, is much needed.Another specter hangs over this latest indictment of Trump, however. The conspiracy that followed the former president’s 2020 election loss seems to have been a scheme not just to stay in power but to spare the man humiliation. “I don’t want people to know that we lost,” the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump told his advisers. “This is embarrassing.”If Trump loses again in 2024, he will face not only the prospect of embarrassment, but the prospect of jail time. We should all fear what he might do to avoid it.
    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Why the Fani Willis Prosecution of Donald Trump Is Indispensable

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

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    The new Trump charges are shocking. But his White House odds won’t change | Lloyd Green

    On Monday night, a grand jury in Fulton county, Georgia, delivered a 41-count, 98-page felony indictment. Donald Trump and the names of 18 co-defendants litter its pages. Prosecutors allege that Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Sidney Powell and a passel of lackeys illegally interfered with the 2020 election and violated Georgia’s anti-racketeering statute.Trump helmed a “criminal enterprise”, the indictment alleges. He now stands in the shoes of a purported mob boss. Said differently, the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee personifies the spirit of Tony Soprano.In hindsight, the so-called “perfect” phone call was anything but that. His request that Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, “find 11,780 votes” has returned to haunt him.“On or about the 2nd day of January 2021, DONALD JOHN TRUMP and MARK RANDALL MEADOWS committed the felony offense of SOLICITATION OF VIOLATION OF OATH BY PUBLIC OFFICER,” Count 1 of the indictment contends. The duo had unlawfully solicited Raffensperger “to engage in conduct constituting the felony offense of Violation of Oath by Public Officer ….”Meanwhile, Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor turned Trump consigliere, allegedly peddled lie after lie to state legislators. According to the indictment, Giuliani repeatedly “made false statements concerning fraud in the November 3, 2020, presidential election”. In June 2021, a New York court suspended his law license. Facing a raft of investigations, he seeks to sell his Manhattan apartment for $6.5m.The 45th president’s rhetorical attacks on witnesses, prosecutors and the court pose a potential legal headache here. Earlier in the day, Trump trashed Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s Republican former lieutenant governor, who was among the last witnesses to testify before the grand jury. Georgia law authorizes bail only where the defendant poses “no significant risk of intimidating witnesses or otherwise obstructing the administration of justice”.“Trump was the worst candidate ever, in the history of our party,” Duncan remarked as he left Monday night. “We are going to have to pivot from there.” Maybe, but not before the 2024 election.Georgia joins Michigan in charging Republican activists in connection with efforts to allegedly subvert the 2020 election. Last month, Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, announced the indictment of 16 Republicans who she said falsely stated that they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors” for president and vice president.The message of the insurrection lives. On Saturday, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida told Trump and Iowa Republicans that “only through force do we make any change…” Days earlier, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene laughed about the idea of executing her political rivals. Last week, the FBI fatally shot an armed Utah man who had threatened Joe Biden. Violence lurks.Seven in 10 Republicans view the Biden presidency as seriously tainted or illegitimate. That perception will further solidify. Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, recently announced that a special counsel would investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s wayward son. Garland had expanded the remit of David Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney in charge of the prosecution of Hunter Biden.At the same time, a filing by the US Department of Justice revealed that the government and the younger Biden’s legal team had reached an impasse. Practically speaking, the likelihood of both Trump and Hunter standing trial is no longer speculative.For Biden and the Democrats this is a “Houston, we have a problem” moment. Given Hunter’s apparent attraction to drugs, guns, money and sex, his trial would possess the trappings of a circus and soap opera, complete with a readily digestible narrative.But it doesn’t end there. A trial stands to shine a spotlight on Biden Inc and the ways that the president’s family seems to have cashed in on the Biden name during Joe Biden’s time in public life. Beyond that, and equally worrisome for Democrats, is the possibility that the trial might amplify the president’s silence, if not acquiescence or more, in his family’s financial endeavors.On the one hand, Biden as a senator was among the poorer members of the august body. “I entered as one of the poorest men in Congress, left one of the poorest men in government – in Congress and as vice president,” he said during a 2020 debate. On the other hand, Biden managed to live well, or at least well enough.From October onward, Trump faces a blizzard of litigation. The Iowa caucus coincides with another E Jean Carroll defamation trial. Fani Willis, the Fulton county prosecutor, wants her case to go to trial in the next six months, with all 19 defendants in the same courtroom.Trump’s extensive legal woes burden his campaign. By the numbers, roughly 30 cents out of every one-dollar contribution helps keep him free and his battery of lawyers sated. Yet his earlier indictments fueled a fundraising spurt and a rise in the polls. Small donors are fine with paying for Trump’s legal team. In contrast, Ron DeSantis is in retrograde, changing his campaign team more often than his socks.Against this backdrop, the Fulton county indictment is best viewed as a potentially surmountable and televised obstacle for Trump and his minions.
    Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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    Before He Faces a Jury, Trump Must Answer to Republican Voters

    After three other criminal indictments were filed against him, Donald Trump was accused on Monday of racketeering. In a new indictment, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., charged him with leading what was effectively a criminal gang to overturn the 2020 presidential election in that state.The grand jury indictment says Mr. Trump and 18 others violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO law, established by the federal government and more than 30 states and used to crack down on Mafia protection rackets, biker gangs and insider trading schemes. The Georgia indictment alleges that Mr. Trump often behaved like a mob boss, pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to decertify the Georgia election and holding a White House meeting to discuss seizing voting equipment.Mr. Trump, along with a group of associates that included his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and one of his lawyers at the time, the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were also accused of a series of crimes that go beyond even the sweeping federal indictment filed this month by the special counsel Jack Smith. The former president, for example, was charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree forgery, for arranging to have a false set of Georgia electors sent to Washington to replace the legitimate ones for Joe Biden. That same act also resulted in a charge against Mr. Trump of conspiracy to impersonate a public officer and a series of charges relating to filing false statements and trying to get state officials to violate their oath of office.Taken together, these four indictments — which include more than 90 federal and state criminal charges implicating his official conduct during his term and acts afterward, as well as in his personal and business life — offer a road map of the trauma and drama Mr. Trump has put this nation through. They raise questions about his fitness for office that go beyond ideology or temperament, focusing instead on his disdain for American democracy.And yet these questions will ultimately be resolved not by the courts but by the electorate. Republican primary voters, in particular, are being presented with an opportunity to pause and consider the costs of his leadership thus far, to the health of the nation and of their party, and the further damage he could do if rewarded with another four years in power.Put aside, for the moment, everything that has happened in the eight years since Mr. Trump first announced his candidacy for president. Consider only what is now on reams of legal paper before the American people: evidence of extraordinarily serious crimes, so overwhelming that many other defendants would have already negotiated a plea bargain rather than go to trial. This is what he faces as he asks, once again, for the votes of millions of Americans.“I’m being indicted for you,” the former president has been telling his supporters. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.” But time and again, Mr. Trump has put his ego and ambition over the interests of the public and of his own supporters. He has aggressively worked to undermine public faith in the democratic process and to warp the foundations of the electoral system. He repeatedly betrayed his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the nation’s laws. His supporters may be just as angered and disappointed by his loss as he is. But his actions, as detailed in these indictments, show that he is concerned with no one’s interests but his own. Among the accusations against him:He took dozens of highly classified documents, some involving nuclear secrets and attack plans, out of the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, where guests of all kinds visit each year. Then, despite being asked multiple times, he refused to return many of these documents, instead working with his aides and confidants to move and hide the boxes containing them and to destroy video surveillance records of those acts, even after a subpoena from the Justice Department.He attempted to overturn the 2020 election by using what he knew to be false claims of voter fraud to pressure numerous state and federal officials, including his own vice president and top officials of the Justice Department, to reverse voting results and declare him the winner.He sought to disenfranchise millions of American voters by trying to nullify their legally cast ballots in order to keep himself in office. In doing so, he colluded with dozens of campaign staff members and other associates to pressure state officials to throw out certified vote counts and to organize slates of fake electors to cast ballots for him.In one example of the personal damage he caused, Mr. Trump led a scheme to harass and intimidate a Fulton County election worker, Ruby Freeman, falsely accusing her of committing election crimes. The Georgia indictment — accusing him of the crime of false statements and writings in official matters — says he falsely called her a “professional vote scammer” who stuffed a ballot box with fraudulent votes for Mr. Biden.After having extramarital sex with an adult film actress, he falsified business records to hide $130,000 in hush-money payments to her before the 2016 election.That list does not include the verdict, by a New York State court in May, that Mr. Trump was civilly liable for sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll. Nor does it include the ongoing asset and tax fraud prosecution of the Trump Organization by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.Time and again, Mr. Trump has demanded that Republicans choose him over the party, and he has exposed and exploited some genuine rifts in the G.O.P., refashioning the party to suit his own agenda. The party will have to deal with those fault lines and may have to reconfigure itself and its platform. But if Republicans surrender to his demands, they may find themselves led by a candidate whose second term in office would be even more damaging to America and to the party than his first.A president facing multiple criminal trials, some prosecuted by his own Justice Department, could not hope to be effective in enforcing the nation’s laws — one of the primary duties of a chief executive. (If re-elected, Mr. Trump could order the federal prosecutions to be dropped, though that would hardly enhance his credibility.) A man accused of compromising national security would have little credibility in his negotiations with foreign allies or adversaries. No document could be assumed to remain secret, no communication secure. The nation’s image as a beacon of democracy, already badly tarnished by the Jan. 6 attack, may not survive the election of someone formally accused of systematically dismantling his own country’s democratic process through deceit.The charges in the Georgia case are part of the larger plot described in the federal indictment of Mr. Trump this month. But Ms. Willis used tools that weren’t available to Mr. Smith. Georgia’s RICO statute allows for many more predicate crimes than the federal version does, including false statements, which she used to bring the charge against several of the defendants in the fake-elector part of the scheme.Altogether, the Fulton grand jury cited 161 separate acts in the larger conspiracy, from small statements like false tweets to major violations like trying to get the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to decertify the state’s election by “unlawfully altering” the official vote count, which was in Mr. Biden’s favor. Though some of the individual acts might not be crimes themselves, they added up to what Ms. Willis called a scheme by “a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities,” all for the benefit of the former president of the United States.Those legal tools are part of a broad American justice ecosystem that is, at its core, a mechanism for seeking the truth. It is not designed to care about politics or partisanship; it is supposed to establish facts. To do so, it tests every claim rigorously, with a set of processes and rules that ensure both sides can be heard on every issue, and then it puts the final decision to convict in the hands of a jury of the defendant’s peers, who will make the weighty decision of guilt or innocence.And that is what makes this moment different from all the chaos of the past eight years. Mr. Trump is now a criminal defendant four times over. While he is innocent until proven guilty, he will have to answer for his actions.But almost certainly before then, he will have to answer to Republican voters. His grip on the party has proved enduring but not universal; while he is far ahead of the other candidates, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that he is the choice of only 54 percent of likely primary voters. And about half of Republican voters told pollsters for Reuters/Ipsos that they would not vote for him if he was convicted of a felony.The indictments — two brought by elected prosecutors who are Democrats, all of them arriving before the start of Republican presidential primaries — have been read by many as political, and Republicans have said without evidence they are all organized for the benefit of Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump has amplified that message and used it to drive fund-raising for his campaign. Although the outcome of these indictments may have a political impact, that alone does not make them political. To assume that any prosecution of a political figure is political would, in effect, “immunize all high-ranking powerful political people from ever being held accountable for the wrongful things they do,” said Kristy Parker, a lawyer with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “And if you do that, you subvert the idea that this is a rule-of-law society where everybody is subject to equal justice.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly offered Republicans a false choice: Stick by me, or the enemy wins. But a healthy political party does not belong to or depend on one man, particularly one who has repeatedly put himself over his party and his country. A healthy democracy needs at least two functioning parties to challenge each other’s honesty and direction. Republican voters are key to restoring that health and balance.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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    A Law Used Against the Mafia — and Now Trump

    Rikki Novetsky and Rachel Quester, Patricia Willens and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicOn Monday, former President Donald J. Trump and 18 others were indicted by an Atlanta grand jury, with Mr. Trump and some of his former top aides accused of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.Richard Fausset, who covers politics and culture in the American South for The Times, explains why, of all the charges piling up against Trump, this one may be the hardest to escape.On today’s episodeRichard Fausset, a New York Times correspondent based in Atlanta.Former President Donald J. Trump has denounced the various criminal cases against him as partisan, unconstitutional and weak.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBackground readingA grand jury in Georgia indicted the former president and 18 allies on multiple charges related to a conspiracy to subvert the will of voters.Here are the latest developments in the investigation.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Richard Fausset More