Presidential Election of 2020

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      Georgia Case Against Young Thug Hints at How Trump Case Could Unfold

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      The racketeering case against Young Thug has been marked by a plodding pace, an avalanche of pretrial defense motions and pressure on lower-level defendants to plead guilty.On its face, the criminal case accusing former President Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia has little in common with the other high-profile racketeering case now underway in the same Atlanta courthouse: that of the superstar rapper Young Thug and his associates.But the 15-month-old gang case against Young Thug — which, like the Trump case, is being prosecuted by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney — offers glimpses of how State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump et al. may unfold: with a plodding pace, an avalanche of pretrial defense motions, extraordinary security measures, pressure on lower-level defendants to plead guilty, and a fracturing into separate trials, to name a few.Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, was indicted in May 2022 along with 27 others under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, known as RICO. Like Mr. Trump’s RICO indictment, the charging papers described a corrupt “enterprise” whose members shared common illegal goals.Prosecutors claim that Mr. Williams is a founder of Young Slime Life, or YSL, a criminal street gang whose members were responsible for murders and other violence, drug dealing and property crimes, with the purpose of illegally obtaining “money and property.” (The defendants say YSL is simply a record label.)But the case against Mr. Williams has been whittled to eight defendants, from an initial 28. Some defendants have had their cases severed because they struggled to find lawyers or were fugitives from justice, among other reasons. As is common in big racketeering cases, others have accepted plea deals, making admissions along the way that could help prosecutors in their effort to convict the remaining defendants.After raucous courtroom outbursts from fans and a number of bizarre incidents — including alleged efforts to smuggle drugs into court — security has been ratcheted up, with members of the public and the news media barred from the courtroom.And remarkably, the case has been stuck in the jury selection phase since January, with many potential jurors claiming they would suffer hardships if forced to participate in a trial that was originally estimated to last six to 12 months. On Thursday morning, a young woman — one of more than 2,000 potential jurors to come through the courthouse doors — was grilled about her life, her future plans to pursue medical training and whether serving would present a hardship.Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, was indicted in May 2022 along with 27 others under the state’s RICO law.Steve Schaefer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via A.P.She said it would not. When asked if she knew of Young Thug, she said she did, and that she liked his music — which, she added, would make hearing the case “surreal,” although she also said she could be fair-minded.The YSL indictment is significantly more complex than the Trump case, describing nearly 200 criminal acts as part of a bloody gang war that played out for at least eight years in a city considered to be a hotbed of music industry innovation. The authorities have said that a crosstown rivalry between YSL and a gang called YFN was exacerbated in 2015 with the murder of Donovan Thomas, a behind-the-scenes connector instrumental in several rap careers.In the aftermath of the killing, the authorities say, many in the city picked sides as retaliatory shootings spilled across Atlanta.It is a world far removed from White House meetings and voting software. But experts say the Trump case, with its own famous lead defendant and sprawling nature, could encounter some similar complications.In Mr. Trump’s indictment, prosecutors also outlined a “criminal organization,” made up of power players like Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and obscure Trump supporters like Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman who was charged with helping to carry out a data breach at a rural Georgia elections office.The Trump team’s shared goal, according to the indictment, was “to unlawfully change the outcome” of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor.Ms. Willis, a veteran prosecutor, has said she appreciates the way that RICO indictments allow for the telling of big, broad, easily digestible stories. Both the YSL and Trump indictments paint pictures of multifaceted “organizations,” showing how the defendants are connected and what they are accused of, which are described across dozens of pages as “acts in furtherance of the conspiracy.”These acts include both discernible criminal activity — like murder and aggravated assault in the YSL case and “false statements and writings” and “conspiracy to defraud the state” in the Trump case. But they also include noncriminal “overt acts” meant to further the goal of the conspiracy.Ms. Willis’s office has proposed that the Trump trial begin in March.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesIn the YSL indictment, the “overt acts” include Mr. Williams’s performing rap songs with violent lyrics — a legal strategy that has set off a heated debate about free speech and whether hip-hop, a quintessentially Black art form, is the target of racist scapegoating. Last year, Mr. Williams’s defense team filed a motion seeking to exclude the lyrics from the case, but the judge has yet to rule on it.Chris Timmons, a trial lawyer and former Georgia prosecutor, said he expected a similar free speech fight to erupt, at least in court, over Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts. Mentions of tweets he posted in the months after the 2020 election pepper the 98-page indictment as it describes efforts in Washington to set up bogus pro-Trump electors in Georgia and other states, to cajole legislators in those states to accept them, and to pressure Mike Pence, then the vice president, to throw a wrench in the final Electoral College vote.Some of the tweets in the indictment might seem rather bland in a different context. “Georgia hearings now on @OANN. Amazing!” Mr. Trump tweeted on Dec. 3, 2020 — a month after Election Day — referring to a far-right TV network’s airing of a state legislative hearing in which his supporters made a number of untrue allegations about election fraud.In other instances, Mr. Trump tweeted outright lies about election fraud. “People in Georgia got caught cold bringing in massive numbers of ballots and putting them in ‘voting’ machines,” he posted in December 2020.Mr. Timmons said he expected Mr. Trump’s lawyers to try to throw out his Twitter posts, as well as a recording of a call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on free speech grounds.“They’re going to try to suppress the recording of the phone call, and probably try to suppress any tweets that were sent, and any text messages, anything along those lines, as violative of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution,” he said.In another parallel with the YSL case, the Trump case is almost certain to see multiple pretrial motions from a bumper crop of defense lawyers. One defendant, Mr. Meadows, has already filed a motion to move the case to federal court.Both Mr. Trump and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who is among the defendants, may also file for removal, which would broaden the jury pool beyond liberal Fulton County into more Trump-friendly areas.Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer representing John Eastman, a defendant in the Trump case charged with helping to plan the bogus elector scheme, said this week that he expected a number of defendants to try to sever their cases.“Bringing in that many defendants and that many counts is an unmanageable criminal case,” he said, referring to the fact that each defendant is charged with racketeering and at least one of 40 other criminal charges.Mr. Silverglate, who said his client was innocent, added, “This is a case that wouldn’t reach trial in two years.”Ms. Willis’s office has proposed that the Trump trial begin in March, but the chances of that happening seem vanishingly slim. Mr. Meadows’s removal effort alone is likely to trigger a federal appeal, a process that could take months to resolve.While dragging out a case can hurt the prosecution, as witnesses forget or even die, the mere prospect of a multiyear legal ordeal can help convince some defendants to take a plea, as probably happened in the YSL case.Mr. Timmons, who tried numerous RICO cases, said that prosecutors often hoped to secure pleas from the lower-level players and work up toward the defendant at the top of the list, who is often the most prominent or powerful among them.“Your goal is to roll that up like a carpet, working at the bottom and working your way to the top,” he said.The Trump case may prove different from the YSL case in that rappers’ careers might survive a guilty plea (unless they are deemed snitches), while lawyers convicted of felonies lose their licenses — and there are numerous lawyers on the Trump indictment. Those lawyers may choose to hang on and fight an epic legal battle with Ms. Willis, a formidable prosecutor who has been trying RICO cases for years.Mr. Trump is running for re-election while facing indictments in Florida, New York and Washington, D.C., as well as in Georgia. If he is concerned about how his legal troubles could affect his popularity, he might find hope in the fact that Mr. Williams released his latest album while in custody, and saw it debut at the top of a Billboard chart this summer. More

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      Giuliani Repeatedly Sought Help With Legal Bills From Trump

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      As Rudolph Giuliani has neared a financial breaking point with a pile of legal bills, the former president has largely demurred, despite making a vague promise to pay up.Rudolph W. Giuliani is running out of money and looking to collect from a longtime client who has yet to pay: former President Donald J. Trump.To recover the millions of dollars he believes he is owed for his efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, Mr. Giuliani first deferred to his lawyer, who pressed anyone in Mr. Trump’s circle who would listen.When that fizzled out, Mr. Giuliani and his lawyer made personal appeals to the former president over a two-hour dinner in April at his Mar-a-Lago estate and in a private meeting at his golf club in West Palm Beach.When those entreaties largely failed as well, Mr. Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who has an independent relationship with the former president, visited Mr. Trump at his club in New Jersey this month, with what people briefed on the meeting said was the hope of getting his father’s huge legal bills covered.That appeared to help. Mr. Giuliani’s son asked that Mr. Trump attend two fund-raisers for the legal bills, and the former president agreed to do so, the people said.Still, for the better part of a year, as Mr. Giuliani has racked up the bills battling an array of criminal investigations, private lawsuits and legal disciplinary proceedings stemming from his bid to keep Mr. Trump in office after the 2020 election, his team has repeatedly sought a lifeline from the former president, according to several people close to him. And even as the bills have pushed Mr. Giuliani close to a financial breaking point, the former president has largely demurred, the people said, despite making a vague promise during their dinner at Mar-a-Lago to pay up.Mr. Giuliani, 79, who was criminally charged alongside Mr. Trump this week in the election conspiracy case in Georgia, is currently sitting on what one person familiar with his financial situation says is nearly $3 million in legal expenses. And that is before accounting for any money that Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, might be owed for his work conducted after Election Day on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Trump’s political action committee, which has doled out roughly $21 million on legal fees primarily for Mr. Trump but also for a number of people connected to investigations into him, has so far covered only $340,000 for Mr. Giuliani, a payment made in late May.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment, nor did a spokesman for Mr. Giuliani.Mr. Giuliani, whose law license has been suspended because of his work to overturn the election, has few sources of income left, according to people close to him.He earns roughly $400,000 a year from his WABC radio show, according to a person familiar with the matter. He also gets some income from a podcast he hosts, and, according to another person familiar, a livestream broadcast. The three cash streams are nowhere near enough to cover his debts, people close to him say. A legal-defense fund set up by friends to raise $5 million for him in 2021 took down its website after raising less than $10,000.Those who remain close to Mr. Giuliani have expressed bafflement that Mr. Trump has given him little financial help after his work on behalf of the former president.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn the past, Mr. Trump has entered dangerous territory by not paying an associate’s legal bills when the case is connected to him, most notably with his former lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who has become a chief antagonist and star witness against him. But people close to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani take it as an article of faith that the former mayor would never cooperate with investigators in any meaningful way against the former president. (Mr. Giuliani has said both he and his former client did nothing wrong.)Among those who remain close to Mr. Giuliani, there is bafflement, concern and frustration that the former mayor, who encouraged Mr. Trump to declare victory on election night before all the votes were counted, has received little financial help.Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner under Mr. Giuliani, who worked with the former mayor trying to identify evidence of fraud and who remains a supporter of Mr. Trump, puts the fault on people around the former president. Mr. Kerik was pardoned by Mr. Trump after pleading guilty to tax fraud and having lied to White House officials when President George W. Bush nominated him to be secretary of the Homeland Security Department.“I know the president is surrounded by a number of people that despised Giuliani even before the election, more so after the election, for his loyalty to the president and for their relationship,” Mr. Kerik said. “It’s always been a point of contention for a number of people who I personally think didn’t serve the president well in the first place.”Mr. Kerik added, “Where is everybody? Where’s the campaign?”But, even as Mr. Kerik and others have blamed Mr. Trump’s inner circle for the lack of payments, the decision, as several people familiar with the matter noted, was always the former president’s.Mr. Trump has never explicitly told Mr. Giuliani why he is effectively stiffing him, but the former president has pointed out that he lost the cases related to the election. That has been consistent with what Mr. Trump told aides shortly after Election Day, when an associate of Mr. Giuliani’s, Maria Ryan, asked the campaign in an email for $20,000 a day to pay for the former mayor’s work.People close to the former mayor argue he was not working strictly on lawsuits, but also on research and efforts to keep state legislatures from certifying results Mr. Giuliani insisted were false. But Mr. Trump told aides he didn’t want Mr. Giuliani to receive “a dime” unless he succeeded. Some of Mr. Giuliani’s expenses were eventually paid, but only after Mr. Trump personally approved the money.Andrew Giuliani appealed to Mr. Trump on behalf of his father.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesThe effort to collect legal fees from Mr. Trump began in earnest more than two years ago. Mr. Giuliani’s main lawyer, Robert J. Costello, started calling people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, making the case that the former president was on the hook for legal fees Mr. Giuliani incurred because of his work for Mr. Trump. Mr. Costello has contacted at least six lawyers close to Mr. Trump, according to people with knowledge of the discussions, and most appeared sympathetic to Mr. Giuliani’s situation.This spring, Mr. Giuliani reached out to Mr. Trump directly and asked to meet, the people said. Mr. Trump agreed, and in late April, they met at Mr. Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach.The meeting was pleasant, and lasted more than an hour, a person familiar with the meeting said. But Mr. Trump, who was accompanied by one of his Florida attorneys, was noncommittal.Yet he agreed to meet them again, two days later, at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, a meeting previously reported by CNN. Over a nearly two-hour dinner, Mr. Costello pressed Mr. Trump to cover not only Mr. Giuliani’s legal bills, but also to pay him for the work Mr. Giuliani provided Mr. Trump in the wake of the 2020 election.Mr. Trump resisted, noting that Mr. Giuliani did not win any of those cases. Mr. Costello, who did most of the talking for Mr. Giuliani, said that the money was not coming out of Mr. Trump’s own pocket, but rather the coffers of his PAC. By the end of the dinner, Mr. Trump agreed that Mr. Giuliani would be paid, one person said. But in the weeks that followed, neither he nor the PAC delivered. And Mr. Giuliani was growing more and more desperate.A federal judge was exasperated with Mr. Giuliani for failing to search for records as part of a defamation lawsuit that two Georgia election workers filed against him because he falsely accused them of stealing ballots. Mr. Giuliani said that he could not afford to pay for a vendor to do so.Mr. Costello pleaded with Mr. Trump’s aides to pay off Mr. Giuliani’s balance with the vendor, and the PAC made a $340,000 payment to that firm.Since then, however, the PAC has not covered any other bills for Mr. Giuliani.It has been a remarkable reversal of fortune for Mr. Giuliani, who was once worth tens of millions of dollars made partly on contracts he signed after leaving City Hall in New York, having become known as “America’s mayor” for his performance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.A divorce from his third wife, Judith Nathan, cost him much of his wealth around the time he left his law firm to represent Mr. Trump, then the president, in the investigation brought by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III over whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian officials in the 2016 election.From there, Mr. Giuliani engaged in campaign efforts to find damaging information about Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Ukraine, where Mr. Biden’s son had business dealings, efforts that helped lead to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.As part of an investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s work in Ukraine, the F.B.I. searched his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in May 2021. That apartment is now on sale for $6.5 million. More

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      How European Officials View a Possible Second Trump Term

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      The prospect of a second presidential term for Donald J. Trump has many officials worried about alliance cohesion, NATO and the war in Ukraine.For most European governments, it is almost too upsetting to think about, let alone debate in public. But the prospect that Donald J. Trump could win the Republican nomination for the presidency and return to the White House is a prime topic of private discussion.“It’s slightly terrifying, it’s fair to say,” said Steven Everts, a European Union diplomat who is soon to become the director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies. “We were relieved by President Biden and his response to Ukraine,” Mr. Everts said, “but now we’re forced to confront the Trump question again.”Given the enormous role the United States plays in European security,” he added, “we now have to think again about what this means for our own politics, for European defense and for Ukraine itself.”The talk is intensifying as Mr. Trump, despite the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his various indictments, is running well ahead of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination and is neck-and-neck with President Biden in early opinion polls.In general, Central Europeans are more convinced that they can manage a second Trump presidency, but Western Europeans are dreading the prospect, especially in Germany, about which Mr. Trump seems to feel significant antipathy.During his presidency, Mr. Trump threatened to pull out of NATO and withheld aid to Ukraine as it struggled with a Russian-backed insurgency, the subject of his first impeachment. He ordered the withdrawal of thousands of American troops from Germany, a move later overturned by Mr. Biden, and spoke with admiration of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Mr. Trump with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Osaka, Japan, in 2019. Mr. Trump, who has praised the Russian leader, said he would end the war in Ukraine in a day.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesToday, with Europe and Russia locked in conflict over Ukraine, and Mr. Putin making veiled threats about nuclear weapons and a wider war, the question of American commitment takes on even greater importance. Mr. Trump recently said that he would end the war in a day, presumably by forcing Ukraine to make territorial concessions.A second Trump term “would be different from the first, and much worse,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a former German government official who is now with the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. “Trump has experience now and knows what levers to pull, and he’s angry,” he said.Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff said he remembered talking with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel the night she returned from her first meeting with Mr. Trump as president. As usual, she was “all about managing the man as she had managed dozens of powerful men,” he said. “But no one will think” they can manage “Trump Two.”Several European officials declined to talk on the record about the prospect of another Trump presidency. They do not want to engage in American domestic politics, but they also may need to deal with Mr. Trump if he is elected, and some say they remember him as vindictive about criticism.Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany engaging with Mr. Trump during a Group of 7 summit in Canada in 2018. Many of their exchanges were notoriously frosty.Jesco Denzel/German Federal Government, via Associated PressFor many European officials, Mr. Biden restored the continuity of the United States’ commitment to Europe since World War II: a dependable, even indispensable, ally whose presence eased frictions among former European rivals and allowed the continent to cohere, while providing an ironclad security guarantee.In the view of Mr. Trump and his supporters, that relationship allowed Europe to shirk spending on its own defense, a resentment that fueled Mr. Trump’s threats to reduce or withdraw American commitments.“The NATO alliance is not a treaty commitment so much as a trust commitment,” said Ivo Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO. Given the doubts Mr. Trump raised in his first term, his return as president “could mean the end of the alliance, legally or not.”In conversations with Europeans, Mr. Daalder said, “they are deeply, deeply concerned about the 2024 election and how it will impact the alliance. No matter the topic, Ukraine or NATO cohesion, it’s the only question asked.”Jan Techau, a former German defense official now with Eurasia Group, said that in the worst case, a United States that turned its back would set off “an existential problem” for Europe at a moment when both China and Russia are working avidly to divide Europeans.President Biden delivering a speech in Lithuania during meetings with NATO leaders in July. In remarks, he affirmed his support for Ukraine in the war.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAbsent American engagement, “there would be a destructive scramble for influence,” he said.For Germany, Mr. Techau said, there would be the difficult question: Should Berlin be the backbone of a collective European defense without the Americans, or would it try to make its own deal with Russia and Mr. Putin?France would most likely try to step in, having long advocated European strategic autonomy, but few believe it can provide the same kind of nuclear and security guarantee for the continent, even together with Britain, that Washington does.President Emmanuel Macron of France has made it clear that he believes a politically polarized United States, more focused on China, will inevitably reduce its commitments to Europe. He has been pushing Europeans to do more for their own defense and interests, which are not perfectly aligned with Washington’s.So far he has largely failed in that ambition and, given the war in Ukraine, has instead embraced a stronger European pillar within NATO. But even Mr. Macron would not welcome an American withdrawal from the alliance.“It’s absolutely clear that Putin intends to continue the war, at least until the American elections, and hopes for Trump,” as does China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said Thomas Gomart, the director of the French Institute of International Relations. “It could be a big shock for Europeans.”A Trump victory, Mr. Gomart said, would most likely mean less American support for Ukraine, more pressure on Kyiv to settle, and more pressure on the Europeans to deal with Mr. Putin themselves, “which we are not ready to do militarily.”Ukrainian soldiers with an American tactical vehicle during training near Kyiv, Ukraine, in March. A Trump victory could mean less U.S. support for Ukraine.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesThere is also concern that a Trump victory could breathe new life into anti-democratic forces in Europe.Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 gave a major boost to European populist politics, and another victory would almost surely do the same, a major worry in France, where Marine Le Pen, a far-right leader, could succeed Mr. Macron.Even in Mr. Trump’s absence, the far-right Alternative for Germany, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has under surveillance as a threat to the Constitution, is for the moment the country’s second-most popular party.Dominique Moïsi, a French analyst with Institut Montaigne, a research organization, said a second Trump term would be “catastrophic” for Europe’s resistance to populism.Mr. Trump is a prince of chaos, Mr. Moïsi said, and with a war raging in Europe, and China open about its ambitions, “the prospect of an America yielding to its isolationist instinct” and embracing populism “is simply scary.”Not everyone in Europe would be unwelcoming, to be sure.Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has long celebrated ties to Mr. Trump and his wing of the Republican Party. Mr. Orban and his self-styled “illiberal democracy” is considered a sort of model by the hard right, especially his defense of what he considers traditional gender roles and of religion and his antipathy toward uncontrolled migration.Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary speaking at a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering last year in Texas. He is revered by a wing of the American political right.Emil Lippe for The New York TimesIn Poland, too, the governing Law and Justice party shares many of the same views and criticisms of established elites. It had excellent relations with Mr. Trump and succeeded in getting American troops sent to Poland.“The view in the government and in a large part of the strategic community here was that the worst didn’t happen — he didn’t sell us out to the Russians,” said Michal Baranowski of the German Marshall Fund in Warsaw. “There was a feeling that the West Europeans were freaking out a bit too much,” he said.The big question for Poland, which has been fiercely pro-Ukrainian, is what Mr. Trump and the Republicans would do about Ukraine.Mr. Baranowski said that recent discussions in Washington with officials from the conservative Heritage Foundation had given him the impression that there would be significant continuity on Ukraine.“But Trump is unpredictable to an uncomfortable degree for everyone,” he said. More

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      How Many of Trump’s Trials Will Happen Before the Election?

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      Donald J. Trump is the target of four separate criminal indictments, but the prosecutions could drag on for months or even years.Three different prosecutors want to put Donald J. Trump on trial in four different cities next year, all before Memorial Day and in the midst of his presidential campaign.It will be nearly impossible to pull off.A morass of delays, court backlogs and legal skirmishes awaits, interviews with nearly two dozen current and former prosecutors, judges, legal experts and people involved in the Trump cases show. Some experts predicted that only one or two trials will take place next year; one speculated that none of the four Trump cases will start before the election.It would be virtually unheard of for any defendant to play a game of courthouse Twister like this, let alone one who is also the leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And between the extensive legal arguments that must take place before a trial can begin — not to mention that the trials themselves could last weeks or months — there are simply not enough boxes on the calendar to squeeze in all the former president’s trials.“This is something that is not normal,” said Jeffrey Bellin, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who now teaches criminal procedure at William & Mary Law School and believes that Mr. Trump might only be on trial once next year. “While each of the cases seems at this point to be strong, there’s only so much you can ask a defendant to do at one time.”Any delay would represent a victory for Mr. Trump, who denies all wrongdoing and who could exploit the timeline to undermine the cases against him. Less time sitting in a courtroom equals more time hitting the campaign trail, and his advisers have not tried to hide that Mr. Trump hopes to overcome his legal troubles by winning the presidency.If his lawyers manage to drag out the trials into 2025 or beyond — potentially during a second Trump administration — Mr. Trump could seek to pardon himself or order his Justice Department to shut down the federal cases. And although he could not control the state prosecutions in Georgia or Manhattan, the Justice Department has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, which very likely applies to state cases as well.Ultimately, the judges overseeing the four cases might have to coordinate so that Mr. Trump’s lawyers can adequately prepare his defense without needlessly delaying the trials. Judges are permitted under ethics rules to confer with one another to efficiently administer the business of their courts, experts said, and they periodically do so.“The four indictments can appear to resemble four cars converging on an intersection that has no lights or stop signs — but that won’t happen,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Well before the intersection, the judges will figure it out.”For now, Mr. Trump’s court schedule looks to be nearly as crowded as his campaign calendar, with potential trials overlapping with key dates in the Republican primary season. Claiming he is a victim of a weaponized justice system that is seeking to bar him from office, Mr. Trump may end up bringing his campaign to the courthouse steps.A federal special counsel, Jack Smith, has proposed Jan. 2 of next year (two weeks before the Iowa caucuses) as a date for Mr. Trump to stand trial in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. In a Thursday night court filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers countered with a proposed date of April 2026.Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney who this week announced racketeering charges against Mr. Trump, accusing him of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s election results, wants that trial to begin on March 4 (the day before Super Tuesday).It is possible that the election interference case brought against Mr. Trump by special counsel Jack Smith may be given scheduling priority, the experts said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Smith’s recent case in Washington, and Ms. Willis’s in Georgia, were filed after Mr. Trump was already scheduled for two additional criminal trials next spring: in New York, on March 25, on state charges related to a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels; and in Florida, on May 20, on federal charges brought by Mr. Smith accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling classified material after leaving office.Although the New York and Florida indictments were unveiled earlier, affording them first crack at the calendar, some experts now argue that they should take a back seat to the election-related cases, in Georgia and Washington, in which the charges strike at the core of American democracy. Trial scheduling is not always a first-come, first-served operation, and deference could be given to the most serious charges.In a radio interview last month, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said that having been the first to indict did not necessarily mean he would insist on being the first to put the former president on trial. However, he said, the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, ultimately controls the calendar.“We will follow the court’s lead,” Mr. Bragg said.There has not yet been any direct communication among judges or prosecutors about moving the Manhattan case, according to people with knowledge of the matter.Still, Mr. Bragg’s comments suggest that he would not oppose moving the Manhattan case, which carries a lesser potential punishment than the three others, backward in line.“My own belief is Alvin Bragg will be true to his word and remain flexible in the interests of justice,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and believes that prosecutors might be able to squeeze in three Trump trials next year.And Mr. Eisen, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that voters deserve to know whether Mr. Trump was convicted of subverting the will of the people in the previous election before they vote in the next one.“There could not be a more important question confronting the country than whether a candidate for the office of the presidency is innocent or guilty of previously abusing that office in an attempted coup,” he said.The most likely candidate to take over Mr. Bragg’s March trial date would be Mr. Smith and his election interference case. Recently, nearly a dozen Republican-appointed former judges and high-ranking federal officials submitted a brief to the judge overseeing that case, arguing that the trial should take place in January as Mr. Smith has proposed and citing a “national necessity” for a “fair and expeditious trial.”But this is the case in which Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a 2026 trial date, citing the voluminous amount of material turned over by the government — 11.5 million pages of documents, for example — that the defense must now review. Mr. Trump’s lawyers estimated that to finish by the prosecution’s proposed January trial date would mean reading the equivalent of “Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”In that case, Mr. Smith brought a narrow set of charges against Mr. Trump in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, totaling four felony counts, and with no co-defendants.In contrast, Ms. Willis’s election case is a sweeping 98-page indictment of not only Mr. Trump, who faces 13 criminal counts, but also 18 co-defendants, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Already, Mr. Meadows has petitioned for his case to be moved from state to federal court, and other defendants are likely to follow suit. That process could take months and could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, probably making Ms. Willis’s proposed trial date of March 4 something of a long shot.In contrast to the relatively narrow election interference case brought by Mr. Smith in federal court, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, has charged Mr. Trump and his associates with a multitude of felonies related to the 2020 presidential election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe sheer size of Mr. Trump’s Georgia case, and the fact it was the last of the four cases to be brought, suggests any Georgia trial of Mr. Trump could be delayed even beyond next year.It is exceedingly rare for a criminal defendant to face so many trials in such a concentrated period of time. The once high-flying lawyer Michael Avenatti seemed to be heading for three federal trials after he was charged in Manhattan in 2019 in a scheme to extort the apparel giant Nike; and, separately, with stealing money from Ms. Daniels, a former client; and in California, with embezzling money from other clients. (He was eventually convicted in the New York trials and pleaded guilty in the California case.)E. Danya Perry, a lawyer who represented Mr. Avenatti in the Nike case, the first to go to trial, said the challenge was “sequencing the cases in a way that would be most advantageous” to her client. And because there was some overlap in the evidence, she said, the defense had to be careful not to open the door for prosecutors to introduce evidence against Mr. Avenatti from another of the cases.“You’re not just trying the case in front of that particular judge,” Ms. Perry said. “Evidence from one case could bleed into other cases.”Before any trial, Mr. Trump’s cases are also likely to become bogged down as his lawyers review and potentially argue over large amounts of documents and other case material turned over by the government. Certain judicial rulings could also lead to drawn-out pretrial appeals.In the Florida documents case, disputes over the use of classified information could delay the proceeding as well. And in the federal court in Washington, which is already contending with lengthy backlogs amid prosecutions of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested they plan to litigate complex constitutional issues, including whether some of Mr. Trump’s false claims about the election were protected by the First Amendment.Even the jury selection process could drag on for weeks or months, as courts summon huge pools of prospective jurors for questioning over whether they harbor bias in favor of or against the polarizing former president.Michael B. Mukasey, a former U.S. attorney general and longtime Manhattan federal judge, said because of the complex issues raised in all four of Mr. Trump’s cases, “I think the odds are slim to none that any of them gets to trial before the election.”And Mr. Trump’s criminal cases are not the only courtroom battles he’s waging.In October, he faces trial in a civil suit filed by Attorney General Letitia James of New York, accusing him, his company and three of his children of a “staggering” fraud in overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. In January, Mr. Trump faces two civil trials arising from private lawsuits: one a defamation claim by the writer E. Jean Carroll and the other accusing him of enticing people into a sham business opportunity.“We fully expect both cases to go to trial in January 2024,” said Roberta A. Kaplan, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the two private suits.Although Mr. Trump need not be in court for the civil cases, he almost certainly will have to attend the criminal trials, said Daniel C. Richman, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School.“If you asked all the prosecutors in each case, they’d firmly and sincerely say that they want these trials to happen in the first half of 2024,” Mr. Richman said. “But wishing does not make it so.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Trump Supporters’ Calls for Georgia to Stymie Prosecution Fall Flat

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      Appeals by the former president’s supporters to change the state’s rules on pardons, and to investigate or even impeach the prosecutor in the case, will likely go nowhere, at least for now.The racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia has ignited outrage among staunch supporters of the former president, pushing some to urge the Republican-controlled state legislature to find a way to intervene.Change the state’s rules on pardons to empower the governor to absolve Mr. Trump and his associates should they be convicted — that has been one suggestion making the rounds on social media and conservative talk shows this week.And on Thursday, a state senator from rural northwest Georgia sent a letter to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, demanding an emergency special session for “the review and response to the actions of Fani Willis,” the Fulton County district attorney who is leading the case.The odds of any of that coming to fruition anytime soon: slim to nonexistent.“It ain’t going to happen,” said Charles S. Bullock III, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, who is considered a leading scholar on politics in Georgia and the South, which he has studied for more than five decades.There are not only procedural hurdles standing in the way but the political reality in Georgia. Mr. Kemp, who would have to call a special session, has signaled he has no interest in doing so. He and Mr. Trump parted ways in 2020 after he refuted Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud in the state; this week, he once again pushed back on such claims.And while Republicans control the legislature, they do not appear to have the votes needed to achieve what Mr. Trump’s supporters are seeking. For one thing, they lack a two-thirds majority in the State Senate.State Senator Colton Moore, who wrote the letter calling for the special session, has argued that the prosecution of Mr. Trump was politically motivated, and that the Legislature should investigate Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, and possibly impeach her.In interviews with conservative commentators on Thursday, Mr. Moore asserted that Ms. Willis was “using taxpayer money, using her government authority, to persecute her political opponent.”The Fulton County district attorney’s office declined to comment on Mr. Moore’s letter.Separately, some Trump supporters have pushed for changes in how pardons are given in the state. In Georgia, the power to pardon rests with a state board appointed by the governor, not with the governor himself. A pardon is a possibility only for an individual who has completed the sentence and “lived a law-abiding life” for five years before applying.Changing the law would require amending the state Constitution, which would require the approval of two-thirds of the Legislature.Cody Hall, a senior adviser to the governor, strongly suggested to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday that Mr. Kemp was opposed to challenging the Trump prosecution. “Where have I heard special session, changing decades-old law and overturning constitutional precedent before?” Mr. Hall asked, referring to unsuccessful calls from Mr. Trump and others for a special session to overturn President Biden’s win in the state. “Oh right, prior to Republicans losing two Senate runoffs in January of 2021.”He was referring to the runoff races that Republican incumbents lost that month to Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both Democrats, as Mr. Trump clung to claims of election fraud in Georgia.“What are people hoping to learn in the second kick of the election-losing mule?” Mr. Hall added.Asked on Thursday about the new call for a special session, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp referred a reporter to Mr. Hall’s comments to the Journal-Constitution.Representative Jon Burns, the Republican speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, declined through a spokesman to comment.Still, the state’s Republican leadership was not completely averse to the idea of challenging local prosecutors. Legislation signed this year by Mr. Kemp establishes a state commission that could investigate local prosecutors or remove them from office.Ms. Willis was a principal critic. More

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      A Majority of Americans Support Trump Indictments, Polls Show

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      Recent polls conducted before the Georgia indictment showed that most believed that the prosecutions of the former president were warranted.Former President Donald J. Trump’s blistering attacks on prosecutors and the federal government over the cascade of indictments he faces do not appear to be resonating much with voters in the latest polls, yet his grip on Republicans is further tightening.A majority of Americans, in four recent polls, said Mr. Trump’s criminal cases were warranted. Most were surveyed before a grand jury in Georgia indicted him over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election, but after the federal indictment related to Jan. 6.At the same time, Mr. Trump still holds a dominant lead over the crowded field of Republicans who are challenging him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who continues to slide.The polls — conducted by Quinnipiac University, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, ABC News/Ipsos and Fox News — showed that Americans remain divided along party lines over the dozens of criminal charges facing Mr. Trump.The takeaways aligned with the findings of a New York Times/Siena College poll last month, in which 22 percent of voters who believed that Mr. Trump had committed serious federal crimes said they still planned to support him in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup with Mr. DeSantis.Here are key findings from the recent polling:Most say a felony conviction should be disqualifying.In the Quinnipiac poll, 54 percent of registered voters said Mr. Trump should be prosecuted for trying to overturn the 2020 election. And seven out of 10 voters said that anyone convicted of a felony should no longer be eligible to be president.Half of Americans, but only 20 percent of Republicans, said that Mr. Trump should suspend his presidential campaign, according to the ABC News/Ipsos poll. This poll, which surveyed American adults, was the only one of the four surveys conducted entirely after Mr. Trump’s indictment in Georgia.When specifically asked by ABC about the Georgia case, 63 percent said the latest criminal charges against Mr. Trump were “serious.”Republicans, by and large, haven’t wavered.The trends were mixed for Mr. Trump, who is a voracious consumer of polls and often mentions them on social media and during campaign speeches. He has continually argued that the indictments were politically motivated and intended to short-circuit his candidacy.In a hypothetical rematch of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump trailed President Biden by a single percentage point in the latest Quinnipiac poll, 47 to 46 percent. Mr. Biden’s advantage was 5 percentage points in July.At his campaign rallies, Mr. Trump has frequently boasted how the indictments have been a boon for his polling numbers — and that rang true when Republicans were surveyed about the primary race.In those polls that tracked the G.O.P. nominating contest, Mr. Trump widened his lead over his challengers, beating them by nearly 40 points. His nearest competitor, Mr. DeSantis, had fallen below 20 percent in both the Fox and Quinnipiac polls.Mr. DeSantis, who earlier this month replaced his campaign manager as he shifts his strategy, dropped by 6 to 7 percentage points in recent months in both polls.Trump participated in criminal conduct, Americans say.About half of Americans said that Mr. Trump’s interference in the election in Georgia was illegal, according to the AP/NORC poll.A similar share of Americans felt the same way after Mr. Trump’s indictments in the classified documents and the Jan. 6 cases, but the percentage was much lower when he was charged in New York in a case related to a hush-money payment to a porn star.Fewer than one in five Republicans said that Mr. Trump had committed a crime in Georgia or that he broke any laws in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.When asked by Fox News whether Mr. Trump had engaged in illegal activity to overturn the 2020 election, 53 percent of registered voters said yes.But just 13 percent of Republicans shared that view.A plurality of those surveyed by ABC (49 percent) believed that Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime in Georgia.Support for the Justice Department’s charges.Fifty-three percent of U.S. adults said that they approved of the Justice Department’s decision to bring charges against Mr. Trump for his attempts to reverse his electoral defeat in 2020, The A.P. found.At the same time, the public’s confidence in the Justice Department registered at 17 percent in the same poll. More

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      Fact-Checking Trump’s Election Lies

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      The former president faces multiple charges related to his lies about the 2020 election. Here’s a look at some of his most repeated falsehoods.Before the 2020 election had even concluded, President Donald J. Trump laid the groundwork for an alternate reality in which he was declared the victor, falsely assailing the integrity of the race at nearly every turn.Those lies are now central to two criminal indictments brought against him by the Justice Department and in Georgia, and formed what prosecutors have described as the bedrock of his attempts to overturn the election.In public, he made more than 800 inaccurate claims about the election from the time the polls began closing on Nov. 3, 2020, to the end of his presidency, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Dozens of times, he simply characterized the election as “rigged,” “stolen” or “a hoax,” and flatly and falsely declared he had won — even as a mountain of evidence proved otherwise. Other falsehoods were more specific about the voting and ballot-counting process, contained unproven allegations and promoted conspiracy theories.Here are five common ways in which Mr. Trump has lied about the 2020 election.How Mr. Trump sought to undermine the election:Mischaracterizations of the voting and counting processFalse claims about barred observers and lack of verificationBaseless examples of supposed fraudConspiracy theories about voting machinesNon sequiturs that do not prove fraudMischaracterizations of the voting and counting processWhat Mr. Trump Said“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the ‘pollsters’ got it completely & historically wrong!”— On Twitter on Nov. 4False. Dozens of times before and after the 2020 election, Mr. Trump described the legitimate vote-counting process as suspicious. For months, officials across the country had warned that tallying ballots may take days or even weeks to complete, given the prevalence of absentee voting that year. Studies and experts predicted that on election night, Mr. Trump could lead in key states, but that lead could slowly erode as officials continued to count mail-in ballots.That’s precisely what happened. Mr. Trump’s early leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia narrowed and then reversed. But the same thing also happened to Joseph R. Biden Jr., who initially led early vote tallies in North Carolina and Ohio only to eventually lose the final count. And in Florida, the candidate in the lead changed four times as more ballots were counted and before Mr. Trump ultimately prevailed.Officials sorting and counting mail-in and absentee ballots in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Nov. 4, 2020.Robert Nickelsberg for The New York TimesWhat Mr. Trump Said“I’ve been talking about mail-in ballots for a long time. It’s really destroyed our system. It’s a corrupt system.”— In a news conference on Nov. 5, two days after the election.False. Numerous independent studies and government reviews have found voter fraud to be extremely rare in all forms, including mail-in voting.Mr. Trump himself has voted by mail in Florida, which he has claimed is more secure because they use “absentee ballots” rather than mail-in ballots. (The state itself refers to them as “vote-by-mail ballots.”)But there is no meaningful difference between “absentee ballots” and “vote-by-mail ballots.” The terms are often used interchangeably. Moreover, they are both secure forms of voting. Both mail-in and absentee ballots are paper ballots marked by hand by the voter, which the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan group of public officials, considers the “gold standard of election security.” Twenty-seven states conduct signature verification for mail ballots, 12 require the signature of a witness or notary, and a handful of others ask voters to provide identification.What Mr. Trump Said“It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided, too. I know that it’s supposed to be to the advantage of the Democrats, but in all cases, they’re so one-sided.”— Nov. 5 news conferenceThis lacks evidence. Many studies have found little evidence that mail-in ballots help one party over another. Of the nine states where more than half of voters cast their ballots by mail in the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Trump won four. Several Republican states like Iowa, Missouri and Alabama expanded mail-in ballots in the 2020 election.What Mr. Trump Said“We used to have what was called Election Day. Now we have election days, weeks and months, and lots of bad things happened during this ridiculous period of time.”— In a Dec. 2 speech at the White HouseFalse. The 2020 election was certainly not the first presidential election where results were not immediately ascertained. The first federal elections were held in 1788, but there was no single day until Congress passed a law in 1845 that set aside the Tuesday after the first Monday of November for elections. Slow vote counting and limits in communication then meant that days, weeks or even months passed before voters learned who had won in several elections in the 19th century. In the modern day, close elections dragged out to the next morning in 1960 and 1976. And famously, it took more than a month for the 2000 election to be resolved, when the Supreme Court ended a recount in Florida that December and effectively handed the presidency to George W. Bush.False claims about barred observers and lack of verificationWhat Mr. Trump Said“The OBSERVERS were not allowed, in any way, shape, or form, to do their job and therefore, votes accepted during this period must be determined to be ILLEGAL VOTES.”— On Twitter on Nov. 6False. Mr. Trump has complained about poll observers being denied access to watch ballot counting in key states. His own legal filings acknowledged the presence of Republican observers in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, and there were at least 134 Republican poll challengers present inside TCF Center in Detroit, a convention center where votes were counted.A lawyer for Mr. Trump acknowledged that there were “a nonzero number” of campaign observers allowed in the counting room in Philadelphia. In Michigan, the campaign relied on affidavits from election observers who claimed they witnessed fraud.Observers watching the voting process in Las Vegas on Election Day 2020.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesWhat Mr. Trump Said“The Fake recount going on in Georgia means nothing because they are not allowing signatures to be looked at and verified. Break the unconstitutional Consent Decree!”— On Twitter on Nov. 16False. This was an inaccurate reference to a legal settlement between Georgia and the Democratic Party. Under the settlement signed in March 2020, officials in the state must notify voters whose signatures were rejected within three business days and give them the chance to correct issues. It did not bar officials from verifying signatures.Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican, noted that the state trained election officials on signature matching, required a confirmed match and created a portal that checked and confirmed driver’s licenses of voters. Moreover, signatures are not verified again during the recount process, as ballots are separated from the signed envelopes during the initial counting process.What Mr. Trump Said“In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state and the State Supreme Court in essence abolished signature verification requirements just weeks prior to the election, in violation of state law. You’re not allowed to do that.”— In the Dec. 2 news conferenceThis is misleading. Federal courts have ruled against Mr. Trump’s assertion.In August 2020, the League of Women Voters and other groups sued Pennsylvania over a lack of clarity in state policy over mail-in ballots that had been rejected because of issues with the signatures, noting the absence of official guidance or uniform standards. A month later, Pennsylvania’s top election official told county election officials that they could not reject ballots because of a perceived mismatch in signatures. In response, the Trump campaign added a challenge to this guidance to an existing lawsuit.In October, a federal judge appointed by Mr. Trump ruled against the campaign, writing that the state election code “does not impose a signature comparison requirement.” About two weeks later, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which included two Republicans, ruled unanimously that the election code does not require signature verification.Baseless examples of supposed fraudWhat Mr. Trump Said“In Fulton County, Republican poll watchers were ejected, in some cases, physically from the room under the false pretense of a pipe burst. Water main burst, everybody leave, which we now know was a total lie. Then election officials pull boxes, Democrats, and suitcases of ballots out from under a table.”— In a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before a mob of loyalists stormed the CapitolFalse. Election officials have said and surveillance videos show that this did not happen.A water leak caused a delay for about two hours in vote counting at the State Farm Arena, but no ballots or equipment were damaged. Georgia’s chief election investigator, Frances Watson, testified that a “review of the entire security footage revealed that there were no mystery ballots that were brought in from an unknown location and hidden under tables.”Election observers and journalists were present at State Farm Arena when the water leak occurred. They were not asked to leave, Ms. Watson said, but simply “left on their own” when they saw one group of workers, who had completed their task, exit.Election workers counting absentee ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta on Nov. 4, 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesWhat Mr. Trump Said“Everybody knows that dead people, below age people, illegal immigrants, fake signatures, prisoners, and many others voted illegally.”— In a series of tweets on Dec. 13This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump has claimed that tens of thousands of dead people voted in key states: 20,000 in Pennsylvania, 17,000 in Michigan and 5,000 in Georgia.The Pennsylvania figure most likely referred to a lawsuit filed by a conservative group accusing the state of including 21,206 supposedly deceased people on voter rolls. But a federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush took issue with the group’s methodology and declined to remove the names from the rolls. This does not support the notion that 20,000 dead people cast ballots.The Michigan figure might refer to a list of supposedly deceased voters who submitted absentee ballots posted by a right-wing personality to social media. That list included people who were alive or who shared a name with a deceased person. A state audit later found that of 2,775 absentee ballots cast by voters from May 2019 to November 2020 who had died by Election Day, 2,734 had died within 40 days of the elections.And while it is unclear where Mr. Trump got his 5,000 deceased voters figure for Georgia, officials have found only four cases of dead people voting.What Mr. Trump Said“In Detroit, turnout was 139 percent of registered voters. Think of that. So you had 139 percent of the people in Detroit voting.”— In the Jan. 6 speech“A group of Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania say 200,000 more votes were counted in the 2020 Election than voters (100% went to Biden).”— On Twitter on Dec. 29False. About 51 percent of registered voters and 38 percent of the entire population cast a ballot in Detroit.The figure for Pennsylvania was a reference to faulty analysis conducted by state Republican lawmakers. The analysis relied on a voter registration database that Pennsylvania’s Department of State said was incomplete as a few counties — including Philadelphia and Allegheny, the two largest in the state — had yet to fully upload their data. The department called the analysis “obvious misinformation.”Conspiracy theories about voting machinesWhat Mr. Trump Said“All of the mechanical ‘glitches’ that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes. They succeeded plenty, however, without getting caught. Mail-in elections are a sick joke!”— On Twitter on Nov. 15This lacks evidence. Issues with unofficial vote counts in a few counties in Michigan and Georgia on election night were caused by human error, not nefarious software, and were quickly rectified. In Michigan, election workers erroneously double-counted votes in one county and improperly configured the software in another, before realizing the mistakes and correcting them. In Georgia, the software delayed the reporting of results.In April, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems for knowingly spreading falsehoods about the company’s election technology switching votes during the 2020 election. While the network did not apologize or make an admission of guilt in its settlement, Dominion obtained and released a trove of internal communications in which personalities and executives at Fox expressed skepticism about the claims. No credible evidence has ever emerged that issues with voting machines affected vote tallies.Voting machines in Atlanta the day after the 2020 election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesWhat Mr. Trump Said“When you look at who’s running the company, who’s in charge, who owns it, which we don’t know, where are the votes counted, which we think are counted in foreign countries, not in the United States.”— In the Dec. 2 news conferenceThis lacks evidence. This was an oblique reference to conspiracy theories about Dominion’s supposedly nefarious ties to the financier George Soros and Venezuela advanced by members of his legal team, who also face charges in Georgia.Dominion does not have any ties to Venezuela or Mr. Soros. The company’s chief executive said in an April 2020 letter to Congress that he owned a 12 percent stake in the company, while a private equity firm, Staple Street Capital Group in New York, owned about 75 percent, The Associated Press reported. No other investor held more than 5 percent of Dominion. A 2018 news release also announced Dominion’s acquisition by Staple Street.Mr. Trump also could have been referring to another popular baseless claim, which was that the U.S. military had seized computer servers that had evidence of voter fraud from a company in Germany. The company in question and the Army both denied the claims.Non sequiturs that do not prove fraudWhat Mr. Trump Said“With over 74 million votes, over, think of that, more than, I got more votes than any sitting president in history, 11 million more votes than we got in 2016.”— In a campaign rally in Georgia on Dec. 5This is misleading. One of Mr. Trump’s most repeated complaints assumes that it is improbable that he lost the 2020 election because the vote count that year was higher than his vote count in 2016. Mr. Trump received 74 million votes in the 2020 presidential election, 12 million more than he received in the 2016 election. President Biden, of course, received even more votes in 2020, 81 million.A large number of votes received by the losing candidate is not evidence of fraud. To wit, Hillary Clinton also received two million more votes in 2016 than President Barack Obama did in 2012.A crowd gathered outside of the TCF Center in Detroit as absentee ballots were counted on Nov. 4, 2020.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesWhat Mr. Trump Said“In Georgia, 0.5 percent of the mail-in ballots were rejected in 2020 compared to 5.77 percent. That’s a difference of 11 times more. It’s hundreds of thousands of votes. In Pennsylvania, .03 percent were rejected in 2020 compared to a much, much higher percentage in 2016.”— In the Dec. 5 campaign rallyThis is misleading.In 2020, about 0.4 percent of absentee ballots in Georgia were rejected, compared with about 5.8 percent in 2016, according to reports from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. But in Pennsylvania, the rejection rate actually increased from 0.9 percent in 2016 to 1.3 percent in 2020. (Mr. Trump’s 0.03 percent rejection rate came from a partial tally from Nov. 5, before Pennsylvania had completed counting its ballots.)In its 2020 report, the election commission noted that although the total number of mail-in ballots tallied in 2020 was more than double the amount in 2016, the rejection rate did not change significantly nationally: 0.8 percent in 2020 and 1 percent in 2016.The decline in Georgia’s rejection rate of mail-in ballots is also not evidence of fraud. The rate had also decreased to 3.1 percent in the 2018 midterm elections. A 2021 analysis of absentee ballot rejections from the Election Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted that Georgia enacted a ballot-curing process — in which voters are notified about errors with their ballots and are given the chance to fix them — after the 2016 election. The 18 states with such processes all had lower rejection rates, according to the analysis.We welcome suggestions and tips from readers on what to fact-check on email and Twitter. More

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      For an Atlanta Reporter, a Trump Scoop Long in the Making

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      George Chidi’s cameo appearance in the indictment of Donald J. Trump in Georgia was a plot twist, but not an accident.The scoop of a lifetime for George Chidi, a freelance journalist in Georgia, began at the State Capitol on the morning of Dec. 14, 2020, when a longtime source walked briskly past, eyes averted as if he didn’t know him, then disappeared into Room 216.Mr. Chidi, concluding that something odd was taking place on the other side of the door, turned the knob and stepped into history.What he saw, and simultaneously live-streamed from his phone, were six to 10 people who reacted with alarm to his presence. As the source, an 18-year-old Republican activist named CJ Pearson, bustled wordlessly out of the room, Mr. Chidi asked what was going on.“Education,” one of the people said.Mr. Chidi was soon escorted out of the meeting, but once in the corridor he asked who had reserved the room. Eventually, a clerk informed him that it was the House speaker, David Ralston, a Republican, who had done so at the behest of one of President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, Ray Smith. An hour or so later, the state’s Republican chairman, David Shafer, stepped out and told a gathering crowd of reporters that he and the others in the room were providing an “alternate” slate of electors favoring Mr. Trump as a means of challenging Georgia’s official 2020 election results.As of this week, that challenge is characterized as important evidence of a criminal enterprise in a 98-page indictment, the State of Georgia vs. Donald John Trump and 18 other conspirators. It appears on Page 17 under the heading, “Creation and Distribution of False Electoral College Documents.”David Shafer, then the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, leading a meeting about an alternate slate of electors at the State Capitol in Atlanta on Dec. 14, 2020.Ben Gray/Associated PressRecounting the tableau at a coffee shop in Decatur, Ga., on Tuesday morning, only hours after the indictment was made public at the Fulton County courthouse, Mr. Chidi said he wanted to dispel any notion that his achievement had been a fluke, like a journalistic equivalent of scratching a winning lottery ticket.“It’s not like I just wandered into the Capitol that day,” Mr. Chidi said. “This was years of reporting.”Bald, voluble and insomnia-prone, Mr. Chidi, 50, has a nonlinear but relentless career trajectory that offers an object lesson in how local journalism, imperiled though it may be, can achieve national significance.He is a curious hybrid of old school and new school, an aggressively skeptical journalist but also a man unwilling to remain on the sidelines taking notes. In 2012, he participated in Occupy Atlanta protests that incurred the scorn of Republicans. Five years later, he worked to help close a blighted homeless shelter in the city, to the consternation of some local progressives.Twice he has lost bids for public office, first for state representative and then for county commissioner. He also served two terms on the City Council of Pine Lake, Ga.Mr. Chidi currently makes his living from the 300 or so subscribers who pay $10 a month to read his Substack page, called The Atlanta Objective. The title reflects his animating interest, both in civics and as a writer. He describes a city of enduring promise and vexing inequality, in which the average income of a white household is $80,000 — more than double that of a Black household.In terse but evocative prose and deep reporting, Mr. Chidi examines topics like homelessness and street shootings. He is not shy about contrasting himself with the comparatively polished members of the national press who descended on the Fulton County courthouse to capture the moment of Mr. Trump’s indictment.The son of a Nigerian-born doctor and a stay-at-home mother of Polish descent, Mr. Chidi spent his adolescence as a nerdy Dungeons & Dragons aficionado, one of the only Black students at his school in Northbridge, Mass. After flunking out of the University of Massachusetts, he joined the Army as a reservist in 1991. A slot for a military journalist opened up. As someone with a few English credits who could type over 20 words a minute, Mr. Chidi qualified.Beginning in 1995, he spent the next four years with the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, a setting that amounted to on-the-job-training for a local reporter.“Chidi always tested the limits,” recalled Dee McNutt, his former supervising editor at The Hawaii Army Weekly. “He would always try for a different angle, and sometimes I’d have to sit him down and talk to him about it. But he made us better.”Mr. Chidi contrasts himself with members of the national press who descended on the Fulton County courthouse this week to capture former President Donald J. Trump’s indictment.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesReturning home to the Boston area in 1999, Mr. Chidi struggled to find regular journalism work. He made ends meet as a substitute teacher while moonlighting as a security guard. Finally, in 2004, he landed a reporting job for The Rocky Mount Telegram in Rocky Mount, N.C., which paid $14 an hour. His profiles of migrant workers in the area’s tobacco fields caught the notice of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which hired him in 2005. An editor for that newspaper, Bill Torpy, recalled strolling through Centennial Olympic Park with Mr. Chidi just after he accepted the new job.“George threw his arms in the air, twirled around and yelled, ‘Atlanta!’” Mr. Torpy said.But the elation proved to be short-lived. Mr. Chidi spent the next two years as a crime reporter, a despairing beat. He said he came to view crime as “a political issue,” one that reflected a city’s social and budgetary choices that all too often came at the expense of a nonwhite underclass. At around the same time, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ceased its practice of endorsing political candidates, which Mr. Chidi interpreted as the paper’s reluctance to risk offending readers during a challenging time for local journalism.“I think he just got tired of it,” Mr. Torpy said. “When you’re working for a newspaper, you’re there to report, and you can’t be an activist. He needed to be where there’s no wall separating the two. And that’s where he is now.”As a self-described independent journalist, Mr. Chidi’s work often takes him to the State Capitol. He was there on Dec. 19, 2016, videotaping demonstrators who marched outside the building while the state’s 16 electoral votes for Mr. Trump were being tallied.Four years later, Mr. Chidi anticipated that the 2020 electoral certification would be far less placid. He attended a “Stop the Steal” rally in which the right-wing personalities Alex Jones, Ali Alexander and Nicholas Fuentes spoke from the Capitol steps and then, the next day, from inside the building. Mr. Chidi recognized many of the attendees as members of far-right local militia groups he had seen squaring off with antiracist protesters months earlier in Stone Mountain, where Mr. Chidi lived.It was with those encounters in mind that he made his way back to the State Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020.Asked the morning after Mr. Trump’s indictment whether he would now leave the story to the national press, Mr. Chidi put down his cup of coffee and thought for a moment.“Hell, no,” he said. “I want to compete with those guys. Come to my home turf and see what happens.” More