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      Trump and Allies in Georgia Face RICO Charges. Here’s What That Means.

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      At the heart of the indictment against Mr. Trump and his allies in Georgia are racketeering charges under the state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.Like the federal law on which it is based, the state RICO law was originally designed to dismantle organized crime groups, but over the years it has come to be used to prosecute other crimes, from white collar Ponzi and embezzlement schemes to public corruption cases.It’s a powerful law enforcement tool. The Georgia RICO statute allows prosecutors to bundle together what may seem to be unrelated crimes committed by a host of different people if those crimes are perceived to be in support of a common objective.“It allows a prosecutor to go after the head of an organization, loosely defined, without having to prove that that head directly engaged in a conspiracy or any acts that violated state law,” Michael Mears, a law professor at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta. “If you are a prosecutor, it’s a gold mine. If you are a defense attorney, it’s a nightmare.”Prosecutors need only show “a pattern of racketeering activity,” which means crimes that all were used to further the objectives of a corrupt enterprise. And the bar is fairly low. The Georgia courts have concluded that a pattern consists of at least two acts of racketeering activity within a four-year period in furtherance of one or more schemes that have the same or similar intent.That means the act might allow prosecutors to knit together the myriad efforts by Donald J. Trump and his allies, like Rudolph W. Giuliani, to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia in the 2020 presidential race. Those efforts include the former president’s now infamous phone call in which he pressed Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” him enough votes to win.At its heart, the statute requires prosecutors to prove the existence of an “enterprise” and a “pattern of racketeering activity.” The enterprise does not have to be a purely criminal organization. In Georgia, the law has been used to hold defendants accountable for a host of different schemes, including attempts by candidates to seek or maintain elected office and efforts by school officials to orchestrate cheating on standardized tests.The sorts of crimes prosecutors could try to pin on Mr. Trump and his allies include solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with performance of election duties, making false statements, criminal solicitation, improperly influencing government officials and even forgery.The law lays out a list of 40 state crimes or acts that can qualify together as “pattern of racketeering activity.” It is broader than the federal law in that the attempt, solicitation, coercion, and intimidation of another person to commit one of the offenses can be considered racketeering activity. A number of the crimes Mr. Trump and his allies are accused of are on the list, including making false statements.Mr. Mears said the law doesn’t require the state to prove that Mr. Trump knew about or ordered all the crimes, just that he was the head of an enterprise that carried them out. The main defense for Mr. Trump’s lawyers would likely be to show that the various actors did not intend to commit a crime.The Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, has extensive experience with bringing racketeering cases, including some outside the usual crime family realm. She won the case involving public-school educators accused of altering students’ standardized tests. Her office is also currently pursuing racketeering charges against two gangs connected to the hip-hop world, including one led by the Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams, who performs as Young Thug.“RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office or law enforcement to tell the whole story,” Ms. Willis said at a news conference in August to announce a racketeering case against the Drug Rich gang.A person convicted of racketeering under the Georgia law faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine, in addition to the penalty for the underlying crime. More

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      Georgia grand jury indictment: what we know so far in Trump case

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      A grand jury in Georgia has issued an indictment accusing the Donald Trump of efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
      Prosecutors brought 11 counts against Trump and his associates, including forgery and racketeering, which is used to target members of organized crime groups.
      Prosecutors charged 18 other people, including Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.
      The Trump campaign has responded to the indictment, saying, “President Trump will continue to power through this unprecedented abuse of power”.
      A news conference featuring district attorney Fani T Willis is expected to take place after the indictment is released.
      The court briefly posted a document on its website earlier on Monday listing several felony charges against Trump, but quickly removed it without explanation. Willis’s office said at the time no charges had been filed and declined further comment.
      Over the course of a two-year investigation, Willis has examined Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure state leaders to reverse his 11,000-vote loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the state and organise a slate of illegitimate electors to undermine the process of formalising Biden’s victory. She has also looked into an alleged attempt by Trump’s allies to manipulate voting equipment in rural Coffee county.
      Trump has denied any wrongdoing and accuses Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, an elected Democrat, of being politically motivated.
      Trump, 77, has been criminally indicted three times so far this year, including once by US special counsel Jack Smith on charges of trying to overturn his election defeat. He has long dismissed the many investigations, including two impeachments, he has faced in his years in politics as a politically motivated “witch-hunt”. More

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      Georgia grand jury returns indictments in Trump 2020 election inquiry

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      An Atlanta-area grand jury returned at least one indictment on Monday night in the investigation of Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results in the state of Georgia, according to a cover page for charging papers and a person familiar with the matter.The specific charges and the names of the defendants were not immediately clear. In the Fulton county courthouse, the indictments were walked over to Georgia superior court judge Robert McBurney, who did not make public any of the contents of the indictments.But the high-profile investigation led by Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, is widely expected to result in charges against Trump and multiple allies, especially given the nature of the witnesses summoned to testify to the grand jury on Monday.The witnesses included Geoff Duncan, the former Georgia lieutenant governor, and the reporter George Chidi, who had initially been scheduled to testify on Tuesday but were summoned to appear a day early, a move that signaled the prosecutors wanted to wrap proceedings the same day.Charges against Trump would mark significant legal peril for him, since the charges come at the state level and he would not be able to undo any potential convictions through measures such as a self-pardon or appointing a partisan attorney general even if he was re-elected president in 2024.In recent months, the district attorney’s office identified multiple general and state election law violations by Trump and Republican operatives as they sought to subvert the 2020 election, from pressuring state officials to organizing fake slates of electors to breaching voting machines.The prosecutors examined whether there was scope to construct racketeering charges from the outset, hiring experts on the Rico law (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) in Georgia, which is more expansive than its federal counterpart and requires only the showing of an “interrelated pattern of activity” of a criminal enterprise.Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, noted that Georgia’s Rico statute was a favorite tool for the Fulton county district attorney, referencing the 2014 Atlanta public schools trial where teachers and officials conspired to cheat on standardised tests.“I think the 2020 election aftermath and attempts to overthrow the election are very similar to that, where there’s just a lot of moving parts and a lot of different actors,” he said.“They all don’t necessarily have the same degree of information as all the others do. They all don’t get together and say, ‘Let’s do this unlawful thing’ but they know they’re part of a machine that’s doing something they shouldn’t,” Kreis explained.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe district attorney’s office spent more than two years investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and impaneled a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have Willis disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.When the prosecutors on the Trump case eventually presented the evidence to the grand jury meeting on Mondays and Tuesdays, the process went faster than anticipated, and at least two witnesses who had been scheduled to testify on Tuesday had their summons moved up by a day.The expedited grand jury presentment came after the clerk for the court appeared to accidentally post an incomplete docket report outlining a number of charges against Trump just after midday, even though more witnesses were still scheduled to testify.Trump’s lawyers railed against the incident, saying in a statement: “The Fulton county district attorney’s office has once again shown that they have no respect for the integrity of the grand jury process. This was not a simple administrative mistake.“A proposed indictment should only be in the hands of the district attorney’s office. Yet it somehow made its way to the clerk’s office and was assigned a case number and a judge before the grand jury even deliberated. This is emblematic of the pervasive and glaring constitutional violations.” More

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      Reuters Report of Trump Charges Adds Drama Ahead of Georgia Grand Jury Decision

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      At first, Reuters appeared to have the scoop: Charges had been filed against former President Donald J. Trump by the state of Georgia.But no indictment had actually been handed up by the grand jury, and a document that the news organization cited as its source seemed to have disappeared. Reuters soon walked back its reporting.Still, the report sent competing news organizations scrambling, with Mr. Trump’s lawyers crying foul and the county’s clerk referring to the document as “fictitious.” The matter only added to the drama surrounding an investigation that appeared to be reaching its culmination after months of anticipation.The source of confusion was a two-page document that Reuters said was available on the court’s website. The document appeared to list multiple charges against Mr. Trump.Reuters then reported that the document was taken down from the court’s website, and said in an updated article that the news organization “was not immediately able to determine why the item was posted or removed.”Hours later, the court clerk’s office issued a news release referring to a “fictitious document that has been circulated online and reported by various media outlets.”“While there have been no documents filed today regarding such, all members of the media should be reminded that documents that do not bear an official case number, filing date, and the name of The Clerk of Courts, in concert, are not considered official filings and should not be treated as such,” the office said in the statement.A Reuters spokeswoman said: “We stand by our reporting.”Lawyers for Mr. Trump criticized the county, saying the document showed that prosecutors “have no respect for the integrity of the grand jury process.” They added, “This is emblematic of the pervasive and glaring constitutional violations which have plagued this case from its very inception.” More

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      Listen to Trump Pressure Georgia Official Over 2020 Election

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      In a 2021 telephone conversation, President Trump pushed Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to overturn the state’s election results, citing debunked claims of election fraud. That call is among the central pieces of evidence in the election interference case against the former president. Here are some notable excerpts from a recording of that call, which was obtained by The New York Times.Listen to Excerpts From Trump’s CallThe president pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the state’s election results.TRUMP: I could tell you by the rally I’m having on Monday night, the place, they already have lines of people standing out front waiting. It’s just not possible to have lost Georgia. It’s not possible. When I heard it was close, I said there’s no way. But they dropped a lot of votes in there late at night, you know that Brad. And that’s what we are working on very, very stringently. But regardless of those votes, with all of it being said, we lost by 11 to — essentially 11,000 votes. And we have many more votes already calculated and certified too.TRUMP: We have, we have, we have won this election in Georgia based on all of this. And there’s, there’s nothing wrong with saying that, Brad. You know, I mean, having the, having a correct — the people of Georgia are angry and these numbers are going to be repeated on Monday night, along with others that we’re going to have by that time, which are much more substantial even. And the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.RAFFENSPERGER: Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. We, we talked to the congressmen, and they were surprised. But they — I guess, there’s a person named Mr. Brainard that came to these meetings and presented data and he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. And so, that’s wrong, that was two.______RAFFENSPERGER: Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say anything.TRUMP: Oh, this isn’t social media. This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not, it’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less. Social media is Big Tech. Big Tech is on your side, you know. I don’t even know why you have a side, because you should want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican.RAFFENSPERGER: We believe that we do have an accurate election.TRUMP: No, no, you don’t. No, no, you don’t. You don’t have, you don’t have. Not even close. You’re off by hundreds of thousands of votes.________TRUMP: But the ballots are corrupt. And you’re going to find that they are — which is totally illegal, it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard. And they are removing machinery and they’re moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds. And you can’t let it happen and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state._______TRUMP: So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break._______TRUMP: So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this. And it’s going to be very costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you’re going to re-examine it and you can re-examine it, but re-examine it with people that want to find answers, not people that don’t want to find answers._______RAFFENSPERGER: Mr. President, you have people that submit information and we have our people that submit information. And then it comes before the court and the court then has to make a determination. We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right. More

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      Election-interference charges loom for Trump as docket posted then removed

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      The indictment of Donald Trump over his attempted election subversion in Georgia loomed closer on Monday amid an apparent false alarm about charges being filed and a series of angry statements from the former president punctuating a day of prosecution presentations in court.At about midday, a two-page docket report posted to the Fulton county court website indicated charges against Trump including racketeering, conspiracy and false statements. The appearance of the report set off a flurry of news media activity, but then the document vanished.A spokesperson for the district attorney said reports “that those charges were filed [are] inaccurate. Beyond that we cannot comment.”Trump, 77, already faces 78 criminal charges in three other indictments: over hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, his retention of classified documents and his election subversion at the federal level.Despite such unprecedented legal jeopardy, Trump dominates Republican primary polling as the first televised debate nears at the end of this month.Lawyers for Trump have mounted a free speech defense to charges over election subversion. On Monday, Trump was characteristically free with his speech.Using his Truth Social media platform, he lashed out at his perceived persecutors, in one instance appearing to attempt to intimidate a witness against him.“I am reading reports that failed former Lt Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton county grand jury,” Trump wrote, misspelling the first name of Geoff Duncan, a Republican witness who said he was due to appear before the grand jury on Tuesday.“He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this witch hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the election fraud that took place in Georgia.”Experts agree that in Trump’s conclusive 2020 defeat by Joe Biden there was no widespread electoral fraud in Georgia or any other state. The federal indictment secured by the special counsel Jack Smith this month contained extensive evidence that Trump was repeatedly told as much but advanced his lie regardless.In Atlanta on Monday, prosecutors began presenting to a grand jury.A former Democratic state senator, Jen Jordan, told reporters as she left the Fulton county courthouse she was questioned for about 40 minutes. News outlets reported that a former Democratic state representative, Bee Nguyen, and Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the office of the Georgia secretary of state, were seen arriving too.For two and a half years, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has been investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia. Barriers and street closures around the courthouse in downtown Atlanta, and statements made by Willis, indicated that indictments could come this week.Nguyen and Jordan attended state legislative hearings in December 2020, during which the former New York mayor turned Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and other aides made false claims of widespread fraud in Georgia.The Trump lawyer John Eastman appeared during at least one of those hearings, saying the election had not been held in compliance with Georgia law and lawmakers should appoint a new slate of electors.Sterling and the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, pushed back against allegations of widespread problems. Both are Republicans.On 2 January 2021, Trump called Raffensperger to say officials should help “find” the votes he needed to beat Biden. The release of a recording of that call prompted Willis to open her investigation.In his social media posts on Monday, Trump said: “Would somebody please tell the Fulton county grand jury that I did not tamper with the election. The people that tampered with it were the ones who rigged it.” He also abused the DA as “Phony Fani Willis” and said she “wants desperately” to indict him.Citing unnamed sources briefed on the matter, the Guardian has reported that Willis is set to announce charges this week against more than a dozen defendants, including crimes related to election law and a racketeering charge, the latter under a statute commonly used to fight organised crime.Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Donald Trump braced for fourth criminal indictment – US politics live

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      From 3h agoGood morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
      1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
      3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
      The House and Senate are out.
      Donald Trump appeared to warn former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, against testifying before the Fulton County grand jury in the state’s 2020 election investigation.“I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury,” Trump posted on Truth Social today.Trump added:
      He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster for those looking into the Election Fraud that took place in Georgia.
      His post came days after the US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s January 6 case in Washington DC, warned against making “inflammatory statements” that could intimidate witnesses in that trial.Duncan confirmed he had been asked to testify before the grand jury on Tuesday hearing evidence of alleged meddling in the 2020 presidential election.“Republicans should never let honesty be mistaken for weakness,” Duncan tweeted.The US will send Ukraine a new military aid package worth around $200m, secretary of state Antony Blinken announced.The latest security aid package includes air defense munitions, artillery rounds, anti-armor capabilities, and additional mine-clearing equipment, according to the statement.For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, please follow our live blog. After five years, the US attorney pursuing Hunter Biden has only been able to file tax and unlawful gun possession charges – and that shouldn’t change just because the prosecutor has been named special counsel in the case, the lawyer for the president’s son has said.“If anything changes from his conclusion … the question [that] should be asked [is] what infected the process that was not the facts and the law?” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. Lowell also said: “There’s no new evidence to be found.“Only thing that will change is the scrutiny on some of the charges.”Lowell’s remarks came after the US attorney in Delaware who has been investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, David Weiss, received an appointment on Thursday to become special counsel over the case.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has said Weiss told him days earlier that “in his judgment, his investigation [had] reached a stage at which he should continue his work as a special counsel, and he asked to be appointed”. Garland added that he granted the request of Weiss – who was appointed to his post by Joe Biden’s presidential successor Donald Trump – having concluded that it was “in the public interest” to do so.Yet Garland’s justification did little to dampen a political firestorm in Washington DC. Weiss’s probe into Biden’s son is set to continue on a track that is parallel to special counsel investigations into Trump – the Republican frontrunner to challenge Biden in the 2024 race for the White House – which have produced a multitude of criminal charges against him.Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign on Sunday evening tried to walk back on comments he made earlier in the day in support of a nationwide abortion restriction after the first three months of pregnancy.In an interview at the Iowa State Fair, Kennedy told NBC News that he believes “a decision to abort a child should be up to the women during the first three months of life”.Asked if he would sign a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks or 21 weeks of pregnancy if he were elected president, he said “yes, three months”.
      Once a child is viable, outside the womb, I think then the state has an interest in protecting the child.
      But in a later statement, Kennedy’s campaign team said he had “misunderstood” the reporter’s questions, citing a “crowded” and “noisy” exhibit hall at the fair.The statement continued:
      Mr Kennedy’s position on abortion is that it is always the woman’s right to choose. He does not support legislation banning abortion.
      In response, NBC reporter Ali Vitali shared a transcript of the full exchange and said she asked her questions multiple times to make sure the presidential candidate understood the subject.Twice impeached and now arrested and indicted three times. Donald Trump faces serious criminal charges in New York, Florida and Washington over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election, his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.As Trump prepares for those cases to go to trial, the former president is simultaneously reeling from a verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation toward writer E Jean Carroll. A New York jury awarded Carroll, who accused Trump of assaulting her in 1996, $5m in damages.And more criminal charges could be on the way for Trump in Georgia as early as this week.Here is where each case against Trump stands:Prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia have gathered evidence directly connecting members of the former president’s legal team to the voting system breach in Coffee County, according to a report.Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.Investigators are in possession of text messages and emails indicating the breach was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, CNN reported, citing sources.Six days before pro-Trump operatives gained unauthorized access to voting systems, the local elections official who allegedly helped facilitate the breach shared a “written invitation” to attorneys working for Trump, according to the report.Investigators have also probed the involvement of Trump’s then attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the sources said.Georgia former state senator Jen Jordan has been spotted at the Fulton County courthouse today, according to NBC.Jordan had been expected to testify before a grand jury as part of the Georgia prosecutor’s investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his election loss in the state.The indictment that the Fulton County district attorney, Fanis Willis, may bring against Donald Trump as early as this week could be the most sprawling case against the former president in response to his efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election.“I think people are going to be surprised at the level of preparedness and the level of sophistication of the prosecution,” Clint Rucker, a former prosecutor in Fulton County, told AP.He added that he was not surprised the investigation has taken so long. While Willis is likely to let her team of prosecutors handle the trial, he said there was no question that she is calling the shots.
      When she says stuff like, ‘We’re ready to go,’ that’s not being braggadocious’. It’s her saying pretty much to anybody who’s interested, ‘Look, we’re ready.’
      The synopsis for a Fani Willis biopic would probably go something like this:
      In Fulton county, the first Black woman to serve as district attorney takes on an unlikely case. Willis grew up attending court with her father, a defense attorney and Black Panther. Now, she sits on the opposite side of the courtroom, hoping to indict a former president who sought to overturn election results and often espoused white supremacist rhetoric while doing so.
      The film’s montage would pull from real life, depicting a determined, unflappable Willis relentlessly poring over documents, leading her team through the long work hours and security risks that come with bringing an indictment against an often inflammatory former president, even as national attention on the case reached a groundswell.We’d watch her face racist threats and unsubstantiated rumors of misconduct, but she’d refuse to back down from the task at hand. She’d advocate for what she believed to be right even when it wasn’t popular. She’d appear in press conferences and in media interviews delivering stern soundbites such as: “Lady justice is actually blind. This is the reality. If you come into my community and you commit a crime, you deserve to be held responsible.”According to some of Willis’s colleagues who have worked with her over more than 20 years, all of this would be an accurate depiction of the district attorney.Defense attorney Brian Steel has known Willis her entire career and says she’s both “extremely honest” and “extremely hard working”. Atlanta NAACP president Gerald Griggs described her as “transparent”, a “zealous advocate for the state” and the “best trial attorney” in the Fulton county district attorney’s office. He said:
      What you see on TV is authentic to who she really is.
      Read the Guardian’s full profile of Willis here. The district attorney’s office in Georgia has spent more than two years investigating whether Donald Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, including impaneling a special grand jury that made it more straightforward to compel evidence from recalcitrant witnesses.Unlike in the federal system, grand juries in the state of Georgia need to already be considering an indictment when they subpoena documents and testimony. By using a special grand jury, prosecutors can collect evidence without the pressure of having to file charges.The special grand jury in the Trump investigation heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews with multiple news outlets.Trump’s legal team sought last month to invalidate the work of the special grand jury and have the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, disqualified from proceedings, but the Georgia supreme court rejected the motion, ruling that Trump lacked “either the facts or the law necessary to mandate Ms Willis’s disqualification”.From his Bedminster club in New Jersey, where Trump spends his summers, the former president unleashed a wave of personal attacks against Willis ahead of what would be his fourth indictment after most recently being charged by special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to subvert the 2020 election.Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Willis was “racist” and treated gang members with “kid gloves” – two accusations without any merit, especially given her office last week prosecuted members of the PDE gang in Atlanta with a Rico charge and street gang terrorism.In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies kicked off an aggressive pressure campaign in an attempt to overturn the election results in six swing states where certified results declared Joe Biden the winner.Nowhere was the effort more acute than in Georgia, which became the consuming focus of the former president and his allies, according to a Washington Post report today. Those close to Trump pushed state officials to identify fraud that would cast Biden’s victory in doubt, it writes.
      In the process, they personally targeted individual election workers with false claims of cheating, unleashing waves of threats, and amplified conspiracy theories about rigged machines that persist today. In the end, after Trump sought to use every lever of power to overturn the results, top state Republicans stood in his way, refusing to buckle under the pressure.
      Some of the most fantastical claims of fraud came directly from Trump and his allies, “who amplified baseless accusations on conservative media and unleashed new waves of outlandish tips from rank-and-file Republicans”.The former president’s accusations also turned election workers in Georgia and other states into targets of harassment and threats.
      They spread false claims that thousands of mail ballots should be discarded because of questionable signatures, that a mother-daughter team of election workers in Atlanta had triple-tallied counterfeit votes, that voting machines had been programmed to flip votes from one candidate to another.
      For the purposes of the Trump case, prosecutors in Georgia will be required to show an “interrelated pattern of activity by and through the [public] office” predicated on at least two “qualifying” or predicate crimes drawn from a list of specific statutes.The prosecutors on the Trump case have developed evidence of a pattern of racketeering activity that could lead to a Rico charge based on predicates of influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the Guardian has previously reported.Among the election law charges that prosecutors have been examining: criminal solicitation to commit election fraud through seeking a public or political officer to fail to perform duties and seeking to destroy, deface or delay the delivery of ballots; and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The prosecutors have also developed evidence for the previously unreported state election law charges of intentional interference with performance of election duties, the people said, as well as general criminal solicitation, which is not part of the Georgia election law statutes.In anticipation of charges against Donald Trump and his allies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, local law enforcement last week started to increase security around the building that contains the Fulton county district attorney’s office and Georgia superior court, closing off roads and installing temporary barricades.The district attorney, Fani Willis, had instructed most of her staff to work remotely through the first weeks of August as a safety precaution, and the public area inside the building for days has been taken over by deputies from the Fulton county sheriff’s office.Good morning, US politics blog readers. The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is expected to seek multiple charges against more than a dozen defendants, including the former president, this week.The timeline for when the district attorney, Fani Willis, would present evidence to a grand jury came into sharper relief over the weekend after prosecutors summoned the former Georgia lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, and reporter George Chidi to testify on Tuesday.The presentation is expected to take two days, to a grand jury that meets Mondays and Tuesdays. In Georgia, it is typical for prosecutors to ask a grand jury to return indictments the same day. The notifications are the clearest indication that the prosecutors intend to charge the former president this week.Prosecutors have identified roughly seven statutes of the Georgia state criminal code – including a racketeering charge, election law crimes as well as other non-election law crimes – with which to charge more than a dozen defendants in a sprawling indictment, the Guardian reported today, citing sources.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10.30am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will depart Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for the White House.
      1pm: Biden and vice president Kamala Harris will have lunch.
      3pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief the press.
      The House and Senate are out. More

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      As Indictment Decision Looms, Here’s What to Know About the Trump Investigation in Georgia

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      A grand jury could decide within days whether former President Trump should be indicted for interfering in the state’s 2020 presidential election.Starting on Monday morning, prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., are expected to present a grand jury with the findings from their two-and-a-half-year investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and a number of his allies for their multipronged effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow election loss in Georgia in November 2020.The grand jury will likely decide within days whether Mr. Trump should be indicted for interfering in the presidential election in Georgia. The former president has already been indicted in three separate cases this year, a staggering legal burden for a politician who is running for another term.Mr. Trump is far ahead of competitors in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, and neck-and-neck with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a potential rematch, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in late July.Here is what we know about the investigation in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta.Why is Mr. Trump under investigation in Georgia?Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, began looking into whether Mr. Trump and his associates violated Georgia law shortly after a recording was released of Mr. Trump talking by phone to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. During the call, Mr. Trump insisted that he had won the state of Georgia and made baseless allegations of fraud, even though multiple recounts confirmed that he had lost.Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger that he wanted to “find” 11,780 votes in the state — one more than he needed to win Georgia and its Electoral College votes.Over time, court documents and other public records revealed that Ms. Willis, a Democrat, was also investigating false statements that lawyers for Mr. Trump made in state legislative hearings; a meeting of 16 pro-Trump Republicans who cast bogus Electoral College votes for him; an intimidation campaign against a pair of Fulton County election workers falsely accused of fraud, and a successful effort by Trump allies to copy sensitive software at an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga.An audio recording of Mr. Trump talking to Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia, was played during a hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWhat laws may have been broken?In February 2021, Ms. Willis, in a letter to state officials, said the potential laws violated include “the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”That list may not prove definitive for a number of reasons, including that investigators probably had not settled on the final scope of their inquiry at the time. Outside legal experts have said that the Coffee County data breach could result in charges like computer trespassing and computer invasion of privacy.Ms. Willis signaled repeatedly that she was considering pursuing charges under the state’s racketeering law, which is often used to target members of an “enterprise” that has engaged in a pattern of criminal activity.The federal racketeering law is best known for being used against members of the mafia. But federal and state racketeering laws have been used in a wide array of cases. Prosecutors often use the laws to ensure that leaders of a criminal enterprise, and not just the foot soldiers, are held accountable.Who else is being scrutinized?The Georgia investigation may prove to be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers and other associates undertook to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges. They include Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who, as a Trump lawyer, made numerous false claims about voter fraud at Georgia legislative hearings.They also include David Shafer, the former chair of the state Republican Party. He oversaw the meeting of the bogus electors in December 2020; more than half of the electors have been cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office.A number of lawyers who worked to keep Mr. Trump in power have been under scrutiny in the investigation, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro. Last year, Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, was ordered to testify before a special grand jury that aided in the investigation.The Justice Department blocked an effort to seek the testimony of Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking lawyer in the department who sought to intervene in Georgia on Mr. Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election.A number of people whose names have been mentioned in connection with the investigation have said that they did nothing illegal, including Mr. Trump, who has described his call to Mr. Raffensperger as “absolutely perfect.”A Trump supporter protested election results at the Georgia State Capitol in downtown Atlanta in the days after the 2020 election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesHow does the Georgia inquiry relate to other investigations of Mr. Trump?Ms. Willis has said that she has not coordinated with Jack Smith, the special counsel in two federal investigations of Mr. Trump that have resulted in indictments. But Ms. Willis’s team has made use of the voluminous documents and testimony about election interference efforts produced by Congress’s Jan. 6 Committee.One of the federal cases is related to the former president’s handling of classified documents; the other to his efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. Another indictment, in New York State, is related to what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme to cover up a potential sex scandal and clear his path to the presidency in 2016. Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty in all three cases.What would come next?If the Fulton County grand jury decides to indict, any defendants will have to make their way to Atlanta to be booked and arraigned. A number of them could face multiple charges, and the potential sentences could be steep: Violating the racketeering law alone can potentially result in a five-to-20-year sentence.There is also the question of when a trial might occur, given Mr. Trump’s legal troubles in several other venues. If the Georgia case results in multiple defendants, pretrial matters like jury selection could take months. More