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      Hillary Clinton Calls Trump Indictments a ‘Terrible Moment for Our Country’

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      Less than an hour after a grand jury in Atlanta returned indictments in the 2020 election interference case in Georgia, Hillary Clinton on Monday called the developments “a terrible moment for our country.”The indictment, released late on Monday evening, charges former President Donald J. Trump in a sprawling case. Before the charges were made public, Mrs. Clinton gave a previously scheduled late-night interview on MSNBC. She said that she felt “great profound sadness” that the former president had already been indicted on so many other charges that “went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive.”“Do you feel satisfaction in that you warned the country, essentially, that he was going to try to end democracy?” the anchor, Rachel Maddow, asked Mrs. Clinton, a former secretary of state and former first lady.“I don’t feel any satisfaction,” Mrs. Clinton responded, adding that she did not know whether “anybody should be satisfied.” “The only satisfaction may be that the system is working, that all of the efforts by Donald Trump, his allies and his enablers to try to silence the truth, to try to undermine democracy have been brought into the light.”In addition to the Georgia case, Mr. Trump has been charged in federal court with carrying out a concerted effort in six states, including Georgia, to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s victory. He has been charged in a federal court in Florida with mishandling classified documents, and in state court in New York in relation to hush-money paid to a porn star during the 2016 campaign.Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump’s Democratic presidential rival in 2016, has been a target of Mr. Trump and his Republican allies as he has come under investigation.Since Mr. Trump became the first former U.S. president to face federal charges, Republicans have repeatedly referred to the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 not to bring charges against Mrs. Clinton for her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. But several official investigations have found that Mrs. Clinton did not systematically or deliberately mishandle classified material. In 2018, a report by the inspector general supported the F.B.I.’s decision not to charge Mrs. Clinton.On Monday night, she praised Mr. Biden’s leadership and fired back at a Republican Party that she suggested had lost its backbone and conscience, saying Americans needed to use the rule of law and elections “to defeat those who want to weaponize divisiveness, who want to undermine democratic values and institutions.” Mrs. Clinton described the attack on the nation’s election system as the most critical in a long line of efforts to undermine the public’s trust in voting and democracy. “What happened on Jan. 6 — ‘Don’t believe what you saw, believe what I tell you’ — those are all the hallmarks of authoritarian, dictatorial kinds of leaders,” she said, calling 2024 a crucial moment in defeating anti-American political ideas and values. More

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      Key Takeaways from the Trump Indictment in Georgia

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      Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted for a fourth time on Monday, this time over what prosecutors in Atlanta described as his and his allies’ efforts to unlawfully undo his election loss in Georgia in 2020.The indictment follows a lengthy investigation by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, and includes 13 charges against Mr. Trump, as well as charges against 18 other Trump allies who Ms. Willis said were part of a “criminal enterprise” seeking to overturn the Georgia election results.Here’s what to know.Trump was charged under Georgia’s RICO ActProsecutors charged Mr. Trump and his allies under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, which allows them to tie together various crimes committed by different people by arguing that they were acting together for a common criminal goal.Georgia’s RICO Act is patterned after a federal law that was passed to combat organized crime groups but in recent years has been used effectively in white-collar crime and political corruption cases.At its heart, the statute requires prosecutors to prove the existence of an “enterprise” and a “pattern of racketeering activity.” Ms. Willis said 19 defendants were part of a criminal enterprise that tried to “accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump to seize the president’s office.”Mr. Trump and his allies were charged under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesAmong those charged: Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows.The charges outlined in the indictment reach far beyond Mr. Trump to some of his closest allies. They include Mark Meadows, who was Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and lawyer for Mr. Trump.Also charged are several more lawyers who are accused of working to try to overturn the election: Sidney Powell, who once promised to “release the Kraken” in exposing purported election fraud; John C. Eastman, who helped promote the idea of using bogus Trump electors in states where Mr. Trump lost; and Kenneth Chesebro, who also played a central role in that effort.The sprawling nature of the racketeering case is noted in the indictment, with prosecutors citing conduct in Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania that they say furthered the defendants’ efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.Ms. Willis said late on Monday that she plans to try all 19 defendants together.Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and lawyer for Mr. Trump, was charged as well in the indictment.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe charges fall into several baskets.The indictment bundles together several efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse the election results in Georgia. None of the 19 defendants is accused of taking part in all of those different schemes, but under the RICO law, prosecutors have to prove only that each one broke state laws as part of a continuing criminal enterprise with the same overarching goal.Several of the individual counts stem from false claims of election fraud that Mr. Giuliani and two other Trump lawyers, Robert Cheeley and Ray Smith III, made at legislative hearings in December 2020.Another batch of charges concerns a plan Mr. Trump’s supporters carried out to vote for a false slate of pro-Trump electors and send a forged document to Congress claiming those electors were legitimate.A third raft of charges accuses several Trump allies of conspiring to steal voter data and tamper with voting equipment at the elections office in Coffee County, Ga. Some of the defendants were charged only in connection with a bizarre scheme to harass and intimidate an election worker, Ruby Freeman, whom Mr. Trump and his allies had wrongfully accused of fraud.Shaye Moss, center, being comforted by her mother, Ruby Freeman, during a hearing last year. The two women served as election workers in Georgia in 2020 and were wrongfully accused of fraud by Mr. Trump and his allies.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesThe district attorney is giving Trump 10 days to turn himself in.Ms. Willis said on Monday that she was giving Mr. Trump until noon on Aug. 25 to surrender in Fulton County, where he would be arraigned on the charges and enter a plea.When Mr. Trump was indicted in New York, he was able to surrender and avoid some of the standard procedures for most people who are arrested, such as having his mug shot taken and being handcuffed.Patrick Labat, the Fulton County sheriff, said this month that unless he was told otherwise, Mr. Trump would be booked in the same way as any other defendant.Still, the Secret Service could try to change the sheriff’s plans.Mr. Trump has until Aug. 25 to surrender in Fulton County, where he would be arraigned on the charges and enter a plea.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTrump blasted the indictment and questioned the prosecutor’s motive.Mr. Trump lashed out at Ms. Willis after the indictment, suggesting that she had charged him to further her own political standing and seizing on the fact that an improper copy of the indictment had reportedly been uploaded to a court website even before the grand jurors voted.Earlier in the day, Reuters reported that a document that appeared to be a docket entry for an indictment against Mr. Trump had been posted, and then removed from, the Fulton County court’s website. A spokesman for the court called the document “fictitious,” and the court clerk, Ché Alexander, declined to discuss what had happened in detail.Mr. Trump and his allies said it was a sign that the prosecution saw the grand jury’s vote, which took place later in the day, as a foregone conclusion.Richard Fausset More

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      Why the Fani Willis Prosecution of Donald Trump Is Indispensable

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

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      With Racketeering Charges, Georgia Prosecutor Aims to ‘Tell the Whole Story’

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      Prosecutors have found racketeering laws to be powerful tools in targeting not only foot soldiers in a criminal enterprise, but also high-level decision makers.For more than 50 years, prosecutors have relied on a powerful tool to take down people as varied as mafia capos, street gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, and pharmaceutical executives accused of fueling the opioid crisis.Now a prosecutor in Georgia is using the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, to go after former President Donald J. Trump, who along with 18 of his allies was indicted on Monday on charges of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.One power of RICO is that it often allows a prosecutor to tell a sweeping story — not only laying out a set of criminal acts, but identifying a group of people working toward a common goal, as part of an “enterprise,” to engage in patterns of illegal activities.Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is using a RICO indictment to tie together elements of a broad conspiracy that she describes as stretching far outside of her Atlanta-area jurisdiction into a number of other swing states, a legal move made possible by the racketeering statute. Her investigation also reached into rural parts of Georgia — notably Coffee County, where Trump allies got access to voting machines in January 2021 in search of evidence that the election had been rigged.Signaling its breadth, the indictment brought Monday night laid out a number of ways the defendants obstructed the election: by lying to the Georgia legislature and state officials, recruiting fake pro-Trump electors, harassing election workers, soliciting Justice Department officials, soliciting Vice President Mike Pence, breaching voting machines and engaging in a cover-up.“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 last year.Her challenge will be to convince jurors that the disparate group of 19 conspirators charged in the indictment — including a former president and a local bail bondsman, a White House chief of staff and a former publicist for Kanye West — were all working together in a sprawling but organized criminal effort to keep Mr. Trump in power.State and federal prosecutors have found that they can use RICO laws to effectively make such arguments, and Ms. Willis has done it before. So has Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the defendants, who made his name trying racketeering cases against mafia families decades ago as a federal prosecutor in New York. Rudolph W. Giuliani, at the Fulton County courthouse in Atlanta last year.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesClark D. Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, said the indictment “shows the incredible power brought to bear against Trump by using Georgia’s racketeering law,” noting that in addition to the 19 people charged, it encompassed “as many as 30 unindicted co-conspirators — over 160 separate acts in all.”But RICO laws have their detractors. Some critics say that the laws have granted too much power to prosecutors, allowing them to indict dubious members of “organizations” that are in some cases barely organized.“Because RICO is so expansive, and so open, as a tool, it allows people to be caught in its dragnet that are nothing like the people who were originally intended” when the laws were first developed more than 50 years ago, said Martin Sabelli, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.Another potential pitfall for a big RICO case is that it may become too complex for jurors to follow. As Michael J. Moore, the former U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, put it on Monday night: “When you fish with too big a net, you risk getting tangled up yourself.”Some of the defendants were already accusing Ms. Willis of overreaching. A spokeswoman for Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was charged in the case, said Ms. Willis was “exceeding her powers by inserting herself into the operations of the federal government to go after Jeff.”Mr. Trump’s legal team said, “We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.”Mr. Trump and his allies have argued that their efforts to challenge his 2020 election loss in Georgia were well within the bounds of the law. Indeed, Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork for his defense for months, arguing repeatedly that there was nothing illegal about his now-famous call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021.In that call, Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger he hoped to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win Georgia.But the RICO indictment forces Mr. Trump to push back against a broader allegation — that he was part of a multipronged criminal scheme that involved not only calls to state officials, but the convening of bogus pro-Trump electors, the harassment of Fulton County elections workers, and false statements made by Trump allies, including Mr. Giuliani, before state legislative bodies.The Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, where the fake electors gathered in 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesIn Georgia, RICO is a felony charge that carries stiff penalties: a potential prison term of five to 20 years, a fine or both.Racketeering statutes are an outgrowth of New York City’s long history of combating corruption and organized crime. The word “racketeer” itself is derived from the “racket” at boisterous Tammany Hall fund-raising dinners where it was an expectation, among crooked politicians, that anyone who hoped to get a piece of city business would buy tickets.Under Mr. Giuliani’s leadership in the 1980s, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York used RICO to prosecute powerful mobsters like Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese crime family, and Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo of the Lucchese family. But Mr. Giuliani also used the federal statute to prosecute white-collar business cases.Ms. Willis may rival Mr. Giuliani in her deep well of experience with RICO charges. She made her name as an assistant district attorney by bringing a sprawling RICO case against educators in the Atlanta public school system in 2013 in the wake of a cheating scandal, and has used Georgia’s version of the law repeatedly since then.In the 2013 case, a group of Atlanta educators were accused of inflating standardized test scores and giving a false sense of academic progress. At the time, there was concern that the state was applying a law known for targeting the mob to a group of modestly paid public schoolteachers, most of whom were Black.“I think it’s overkill,” the Atlanta lawyer Bruce H. Morris told The Los Angeles Times. “RICO was originally designed for organized crime.”Ms. Willis has said defending the integrity of the education system — and children’s right to an education — was paramount. The trial ended with 11 defendants being found guilty of racketeering, with some convicted of other crimes.After being elected Fulton County’s top prosecutor in 2020, she has continued to be aggressive in using RICO to prosecute other cases, particularly in her fight against street gangs. The best known is the ongoing RICO conspiracy case against the group Young Slime Life, headed by the Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams, who performs as Young Thug.Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis made her name as an assistant district attorney by bringing a sprawling RICO case in 2013.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe indictment charges that members of the group, known as YSL, committed the crime of conspiracy to violate the RICO act, and that certain members are responsible for crimes like murder, aggravated assault and armed robbery. Defense attorneys maintain that the group is merely a musical collective.In an analysis of the case for the pop culture website Complex, Andre Gee, a music and culture writer, blasted Ms. Willis for wielding RICO as an overly broad dragnet.“It’s an ugly, precedent-setting maneuver in the war on rap that can only happen because the law allows her to be creatively predatory with their definition of a ‘corrupt organization,’” Mr. Gee wrote.Some experts have argued that applying RICO charges in a criminal case allows prosecutors to use the laws’ often stiff penalties to pressure defendants marginally connected to criminal groups to take plea bargains. In the YSL case, Ms. Willis’s office obtained pleas from a number of defendants, securing admissions along the way that the group was indeed a criminal street gang.The Young Thug case, taking place in the same courthouse that may eventually host Mr. Trump, has shown how unwieldy a large racketeering case with multiple defendants can be: Jury selection, which began in January, has yet to be completed, and has been rife with hiccups and scandals.Noting that Ms. Willis is hoping for a trial within the next six months, Christopher Timmons, an Atlanta trial lawyer and former prosecutor experienced in RICO cases, said the timetable seemed to be “ambitious.”“Six months to start a RICO trial is lightning fast,” Mr. Timmons said in an email early Tuesday. “They usually take a year to put together. That suggests the D.A.’s office walked into the grand jury room knowing what their case will look like at trial.”Even though RICO laws now go far beyond mob-busting, their origins in fighting the New York mafia can still work against defendants in the court of public opinion.But a good defense lawyer can sometimes use the laws’ association with the mob to their client’s advantage. That was the case in 2013, when one of Mr. Trump’s current lawyers in Georgia, Drew Findling, was defending a sheriff in the suburbs of Atlanta who had been accused of corruption and was facing state RICO charges.In his closing argument at trial, Mr. Findling, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ridiculed state prosecutors for not reaching out to federal authorities if they truly believed they were dealing with a criminal on a par with the nation’s most infamous gangsters.His client was acquitted. More

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

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