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

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      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

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      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

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      in US Politics

      The charges against Trump and allies in Fulton county – full text of indictment

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      A grand jury in Georgia has issued an indictment accusing Donald Trump of efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.Prosecutors brought 41 counts against Trump and his associates, including forgery and racketeering, which is used to target members of organized crime groups.Prosecutors also charged 18 other people, including Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.Read the full text of the indictment below. More

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      ‘He’s going to be very surprised’: Georgia DA Fani Willis prepares to face off with Trump

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      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.“What you see on TV is authentic to who she really is,” he said.Still, there are nuances that film has always eschewed in order to tell a more succinct story. Willis’s career, like most people’s, is full of the type of complexities that don’t always fit neatly into a box. What’s clear from speaking with several of her colleagues in Atlanta’s legal community, however, is that the district attorney’s entire career has been preparing her for this moment in the spotlight.On Monday night Willis brought an indictment with numerous charges against former US president Donald Trump and 18 others – including such high-profile names as Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows – for their attempts to overturn the election. The announcement of criminal charges, part of a sprawling racketeering case, was the culmination of more than two years of work.In early 2021, Willis had just been elected district attorney when she announced plans to investigate Trump. She took office by unseating her former boss, who had served as the DA in Georgia’s most populous county (which includes the state’s capital, Atlanta) for six terms, or 23 years.Her investigation has focused on Trump’s efforts to subvert the will of Georgia’s voters, including his campaign’s plot to assemble a slate of fake electors and Trump’s phone call to Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes”, which would make him the winner over Joe Biden in the state.In her first term as DA – and amid ongoing conversations about criminal justice reform in Georgia and beyond – Willis has not only prepared to face off with a former president and his legal team, she’s also been tough on crime in a number of other ways, too.Since running for office, the Democratic official has made no apologies for being a liberal with conservative-leaning views on criminal justice or the fact that she was endorsed and received funding from a police union during her campaign. As DA, she’s indicted Grammy-award winning rapper Young Thug and his music collective under Georgia’s racketeering statute, fought appeals from teachers she previously prosecuted during a high-profile standardized test cheating scandal, and sought the death penalty for a man who murdered four women during a shooting spree that targeted Asian spas in metro Atlanta.“She’s a prosecutor through and through. She wholeheartedly believes in the work, for better or for worse, depending on which side of the lane you fall on,” said Devin Franklin, policy counsel for the Southern Center for Human Rights.In 2020, Willis unseated the six-term Democratic incumbent Paul Howard, securing 73% of the vote, at a time of both local and national unrest. For many residents of Fulton county, her campaign not only offered a new direction for the DA’s office, which had become plagued by controversies, but it also promised to address increasing concerns about reports of a crime wave and the resignation of about 200 officers from the Atlanta police department.“It was a strange period of time,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor. “I think there was just a general agitation in the community.”An Inglewood, California, native who attended Howard University and then Emory University for law school, Willis began working in the Atlanta solicitor’s office in 2000. In that role, she handled petty crimes before working for her predecessor in the Fulton county district attorney’s office in 2001.In Howard’s office, she was eventually tasked with prosecuting high-profile murder cases and, notably, the Atlanta public schools cheating trial. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has referred to the case as the “largest school-cheating scandal in US history”. Eleven educators were found guilty in the racketeering case, which spanned six months of testimony to become the longest trial in Georgia history. Twenty-one people accepted plea deals. Willis served as one of three lead prosecutors throughout the trial.Anna Simonton, an editor and reporter for the criminal justice news organization the Appeal, co-wrote the book None of the Above about the trial. (The other author, Shani Robinson, was convicted during the trial and continues to proclaim her innocence. She is currently out on an appeal bond.) Simonton said she wasn’t familiar with Willis until she began reporting on the trial.“In reading the trial transcripts, she began to emerge to me as a distinct part in the prosecution team and someone who was very theatrical,” she said. “One of her tactics was to really pull on the emotions of the jury. I was surprised by some of the things I was seeing her say in the transcript because of how bombastic it was at the time.”The reporter said the district attorney’s office’s use of the racketeering statute served as a “dragnet” for a large number of educators with varying to no levels of culpability.Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act was enacted in 1980, a decade after the federal version, which has a notably narrower scope. The federal statute, for instance, requires that prosecutors show proof that there is a threat of ongoing racketeering activity. In Georgia, only two related acts are needed to prove a pattern.Howard was leading the Fulton county DA’s office when prosecutors used the Rico Act against the Atlanta public school educators. Still, the trial gave Willis the knowledge and confidence to use the tool more than any of her predecessors once she became district attorney. She’s since hired attorney John E Floyd, a leading Rico expert, to help with these types of cases.Kreis said the Atlanta public schools trial gives a preview of how Willis might prosecute Trump and associates.“You had all of these teachers who knew what they were doing was wrong,” he said. “No one would think falsifying test scores was a good thing or a proper thing, but they didn’t know exactly what other teachers or schools were working together. But they were all working towards the same impermissible end.”“I think the 2020 election aftermath and attempts to overthrow the election are very similar to that,” he added. “There’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of different actors and they all don’t necessarily have the same degree of information as all of the others, and they all don’t get together to say ‘let’s do this unlawful thing,’ but they know that they’re a part of a machine that’s doing something that they shouldn’t.”Some in Fulton county aren’t excited about the expansive use of the Rico Act in the past decade.“Rico is so broad in Georgia that it really is a free-for-all,” Franklin said. “It allows for the substance of the case to become secondary and it allows for prosecutors to just tell a narrative of whatever they want to tell because the pattern of racketeering only has to be two occurrences that don’t necessarily have to be related to one another. It just felt abusive and leans into this concept of prosecutors as bullies who just want to get what they want as opposed to using the tools at their disposal to achieve community safety and justice.”Defense attorney Steel is currently representing Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffrey Williams, in a racketeering case that is poised to unseat the educators’ trial as the longest in Georgia history. (The trial began the first week in January. A jury has yet to be selected.)Steel maintains that Williams is “totally innocent and wrongfully charged” and “not a part of any conspiracy”.NAACP president Griggs isn’t short on praise for Willis, but even he has been critical of her use of the statute. Specifically, Griggs was one of the defense attorneys in the Atlanta public schools cheating trial. His client was convicted, although she has since had her record expunged and sealed, and has returned to teaching. “With that particular case, I think it was a waste of time,” he said.Still, Griggs said he credits Willis for the organization and transparency she’s brought to the district attorney’s office and warned against underestimating how likable she can be with jurors.“I know Fani and I’m looking forward to seeing her actually try this case herself,” he said. “Especially after the former president has gone after her personally. I think he’s going to be very surprised when he’s sitting across from her for months on trial. He’ll find out how great of a lawyer she really is.”No matter what perceptions voters have had of her until this point, Georgia State professor Kreis said Willis is likely to have a “clean slate” with her liberal base in Fulton county if she’s able to secure a conviction against Trump. More

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      Trump’s Georgia charges are a win for voting rights leaders

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      After nearly three years, two statewide recounts and a violent attack on the US Capitol, Donald Trump is finally facing criminal charges over his relentless campaign to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the battleground state of Georgia.On Monday, the former president and his allies were indicted on a total of 41 counts in Fulton county, Georgia, where the district attorney, Fani Willis, has been investigating the former president and his associates since 2021. The 13 charges against Trump himself include racketeering, forgery and perjury. News of the Georgia indictment came less than two weeks after Trump pleaded not guilty to a separate set of federal charges stemming from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 attack and 2020 election subversion efforts.For the voting rights leaders who worked tirelessly to deliver Democratic wins in Georgia, Trump’s indictment in Fulton county marked a clear rebuke of his extensive efforts to disenfranchise the state’s voters, reaffirming the sanctity and the power of the ballot.“This indictment is a win for voting rights and democracy because it strengthens our ability to defend it from its most imminent threat: Donald Trump,” said Xakota Espinoza, a spokesperson for the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight. “It is critical that we send a message that our democracy is sacrosanct, whether it is at the ballot box or courthouse.”The Fulton county indictment represents a crucial turning point in a drama that has been unfolding since Biden was declared the winner of Georgia in November 2020. Two statewide recounts in Georgia confirmed Biden defeated Trump by roughly 12,000 votes, making him the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since 1992. The victory was heralded as a landmark achievement for Democrats, particularly the Black voters who make up much of the party’s base in Georgia.Kendra Davenport Cotton, chief executive officer at the New Georgia Project Action Fund, emphasized that the validity of Biden’s win in Georgia had been determined beyond question long before Trump’s indictment. But the charges against Trump reassert the electoral power of the multiracial coalition that carried Biden to victory.“We believe facts. Biden won the 2020 race because Georgia voters showed up and showed out in record breaking numbers,” Cotton said. “The folks that I work with here at NGP Action Fund have always known the power of Georgia voters and have always known what Georgia voters are capable of – especially Black, brown and young voters.”But after Biden won the presidential race, Trump and his associates immediately went to work challenging the legitimacy of the election results, as Smith outlined in his own indictment filed earlier this month. After dozens of his election lawsuits failed, Trump then attempted to pressure state leaders to overturn Biden’s wins in key battleground states.In Georgia specifically, Trump placed an infamous phone call to the secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, to demand that he “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s victory. Days later, a group of Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of Biden’s win. Shortly after that violent day, Willis began the investigative work that culminated in a grand jury approving an indictment against Trump on Monday.“[The indictment] is holding a former president accountable for attempting to overturn the results of a free, fair and legitimate election just because he lost right,” Cotton said. “Georgia voters specifically deserve to have some retribution for what he did during that time and what he continues to do.”Trump continues to falsely claim the 2020 race was stolen, which has spurred more election denialism among the former president’s most fervent supporters. Voting rights leaders hope that Trump’s indictment in Georgia, as well as the federal case against him, will deter others from engaging in similar anti-democratic efforts in the future.“The former president’s election denial conspiracies birthed a new anti-democratic movement that produced anti-voter legislation, threats to election workers, and undermined faith in democracy with lies and false allegations,” Espinoza said. “This indictment should serve as a warning to future anti-voter politicians that the will and voices of Georgia voters cannot be silenced, and there is no place for election-denying conspiracy theorists in our democracy.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Trump’s indictment may help prevent other election subversion efforts in the future, much of the damage cannot be reversed. As the country waited for news from Fulton county, Cotton found herself thinking about Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who served as election workers in 2020 and became a central focus of right-wing conspiracy theories.Trump’s allies claimed video footage showed Freeman and Moss tabulating fraudulent ballots after counting had officially concluded on election night, a claim that swiftly debunked by Georgia election officials. A report released by the Georgia state election board in June concluded: “All allegations made against Freeman and Moss were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”Despite the falsity of the allegations, some of Trump’s supporters continued to harass the two women for months. Testifying last year before the House select committee investigating January 6, Moss said she and her family had received numerous death threats, making her afraid to leave her home or introduce herself to strangers.Freeman told the committee: “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”The trauma experienced by Freeman and Moss cannot be erased, Cotton said, but she wondered if Trump’s indictment might provide them with some solace.“These are not individuals who wanted to do anything but serve their community, to be good public servants,” Cotton said. “I hope that, from him being held accountable, that they find a sense of peace and justice.” More

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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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      in Elections

      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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      in Elections

      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