Racketeering and Racketeers

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    Judge Quashes Six Charges in Georgia Election Case Against Trump

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    The ruling said charges that Donald Trump and allies solicited public officials to break the law were not specific enough; it left the rest of the case intact.In a surprise move on Wednesday, a judge in Atlanta quashed six of the charges against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in the sprawling Georgia election interference case, including one related to a call that Mr. Trump made to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state in early January 2021.The judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton Superior Court, left intact the rest of the racketeering indictment, which initially included 41 counts.The ruling was not related to a defense effort to disqualify Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., who is leading the case. A ruling on that matter, which has made headlines for weeks after it was revealed that Ms. Willis had engaged in a romantic relationship with another prosecutor, is expected by the end of the week.The nine-page ruling on Wednesday took aim at charges asserting that Mr. Trump and other defendants had solicited public officials to break the law. For example, one count against Mr. Trump said that he “unlawfully solicited, requested and importuned” the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to violate his oath of office by decertifying the election.“These six counts contain all the essential elements of the crimes but fail to allege sufficient detail regarding the nature of their commission,” Judge McAfee wrote in his ruling. “They do not give the Defendants enough information to prepare their defenses intelligently, as the Defendants could have violated the Constitution and thus the statute in dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct ways.”A spokesman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment on the ruling.Mr. Trump and his former personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, had faced the most charges, at 13 apiece. They now each face 10 charges in the Georgia case.Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, said that the ruling does not weaken the state racketeering charge that remains, and that is central to the case. That charge is based on “overt acts” that are detailed in the indictment, and the judge was explicit in stating that Wednesday’s order does not affect these acts.He said that the prosecution could choose to take the loss on these lesser counts, or appeal the judge’s order, or reintroduce versions of the challenged charges to a grand jury with more specifics.The judge’s order reduced the number of charges against Mr. Trump, as well as co-defendants Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Ray Smith III, and Robert Cheeley. More

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      Messy Diversion in Georgia Trump Case Creates Perception Problem

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      Regardless of whether Fani T. Willis is disqualified from leading the high-stakes case, the extraordinary detour it has taken may have changed it fundamentally. At some point in the coming weeks or months, the Georgia criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies will presumably focus once again on the defendants and whether they conspired to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss there in 2020. But the extraordinary detour that the case has taken, plunging into the intimate details of a romantic relationship between the two lead prosecutors and forcing them to fight accusations of impropriety, may have changed it fundamentally. Now it is unclear whether the case will even remain with Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, since lawyers for Mr. Trump and other defendants are seeking to have her entire office disqualified. Even if the presiding judge allows Ms. Willis to keep the case, she is likely to face tough scrutiny from now on, including from a new state commission that will be able to remove prosecutors and from the Georgia Senate, which has opened an investigation. The controversy has also provided fresh fodder for Mr. Trump and his allies, who are adept at exploiting their opponents’ vulnerabilities. Mr. Trump was already making inflammatory attacks on Ms. Willis even before her relationship with Nathan J. Wade, the lawyer she hired to help run the election interference case, came to light. If nothing else, Ms. Willis’s decision not to disclose her relationship with Mr. Wade from its outset has created a messy diversion from an extremely high-stakes prosecution. Even if the revelations do not taint a jury pool in Fulton County, where Democrats far outnumber Republicans and Ms. Willis has many admirers, her world-famous case could face a lasting perception problem. And if the case gets taken from her, more serious problems may follow. Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court suggested on Friday that he is likely to not rule next week on whether the relationship created a disqualifying conflict of interest. But already, state officials are considering what might happen if Ms. Willis, who has given no indication that she will step aside voluntarily, has to hand off the case to another district attorney in the state. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Georgia Lawyer, Steven Sadow, May Soon Drop His Quiet Strategy

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      Steven Sadow’s minimalist approach in the racketeering case against his client has created some dramatic tension, but his silence may be coming to an end.Steven H. Sadow, the lead lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump in his Georgia criminal case, has been praised by the Atlanta rapper T.I. — one of Mr. Sadow’s former clients — as “probably the best criminal defense attorney of his time,” a man with “a slight hint of genius.”If so, much of that genius has remained bottled up since Mr. Trump’s indictment in Georgia over the summer. Mr. Sadow, a heavyweight in the Atlanta legal world who specializes in representing what he calls “high profile individuals,” has so far kept a low profile in the state election interference case, largely piggybacking on briefings from other lawyers representing Mr. Trump’s co-defendants.Mr. Sadow has only rarely spoken publicly about the case. And at a number of related court hearings, he has shown up alone, in his trademark cowboy boots, observing the proceedings from the courtroom gallery.His minimalist approach stands in marked contrast to those of other, more voluble lawyers that Mr. Trump has retained around the country to deal with his legal problems. It has also lent a certain dramatic tension to the Georgia case. He is like a featured soloist in a band who has yet to really play.The quiet period may soon be coming to an end. This week, Mr. Sadow filed a motion arguing that before any trial, the Georgia courts should weigh whether the 13 felony charges against Mr. Trump should be thrown out because his claims about voting fraud after he lost the 2020 election were protected by the First Amendment.And on Friday, Mr. Sadow is expected to make his first significant court appearance in the case, to argue that Mr. Trump should be granted access to evidence gathered by federal prosecutors in his separate election interference case in Washington.The hearing could provide early hints of Mr. Sadow’s long-game strategy, and how he might incorporate lessons learned over decades of defending a colorful roster of clients including rappers and the occasional tabloid demi-celebrity.“This is an enormously creative guy who will design a defense based on all the tools at his disposal,” said Arthur W. Leach, a former assistant U.S. attorney who has faced off against Mr. Sadow.Like Mr. Trump’s lawyers in his other pending criminal cases, Mr. Sadow is trying not only to win exoneration for his client, but also to delay. Prosecutors have proposed an August start date for the Georgia trial, but Mr. Trump would probably prefer that it be pushed beyond next fall’s presidential election, in which he is a candidate.The indictment accuses the former president and 14 allies of conspiring to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia; four other defendants have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.Mr. Sadow, 69, declined an interview request. He has previously let it be known that he is not a Trump supporter. He took over as Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer on the day of the former president’s voluntary surrender in August, replacing Drew Findling, known as the Billion Dollar Lawyer for his work defending prominent hip-hop artists.Mr. Sadow’s friends say that he most likely took the case for the challenge, as well as for the money. Mr. Findling’s firm was paid at least $816,000 for about a year’s worth of work, according to public records.Legal experts say that Mr. Sadow’s understated approach is a calculated strategy.Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court at a hearing for Harrison Floyd, part of the Georgia election indictments. Pool photo by Dennis ByronHe has probably been watching the moves of other defendants’ lawyers to see which approaches fare best with Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, who is relatively new to the bench. Mr. Sadow has occasionally joked to reporters that there was no reason he should write his own briefs when other lawyers who happen to be great writers have already done good work.Mr. Sadow may be trying not to put anything on paper that could inadvertently help Jack Smith, the prosecutor in the separate federal election interference case against Mr. Trump, which is scheduled to go to trial in Washington in March.“I don’t think anybody on Trump’s legal team in Georgia wants to do anything that will remotely rock the boat in D.C.,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.In courtrooms in Atlanta and beyond, Mr. Sadow has shown an aptitude for aggressive cross-examination and thinking on his feet.Christian Fletcher, a client of Mr. Sadow’s who was acquitted in a major health care fraud case in March, said Mr. Sadow’s real strength was his feel for people, and for how jurors think. “It’s like he downloads who you are as a person,” he said, “and what moves you.”In an online interview with his client T.I., the rapper, Mr. Sadow said he did his own legal research because “I don’t think anybody else can do it better than me.” He also said he had been called to the profession to curb the excesses of government power.“People need to be looked after and protected,” he told the performer. “They’ve got to be protected against the government” — because, he said, the government does not care about most people.In addition to T.I., who was pleased with the plea deal and the one-year prison sentence that Mr. Sadow helped him secure when he faced a federal gun charge, he has represented the rappers Gunna and Rick Ross, who occasionally name-drops Mr. Sadow in his lyric.The rapper T.I. has praised Mr. Sadow, who arranged a plea deal for him on a federal gun charge.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“Indictment on the way, got Sadow on the case,” he rapped on his 2019 song “Turnpike Ike.”In 2000, Mr. Sadow obtained an acquittal for Joseph Sweeting, who had been charged in the stabbing deaths of two men after a Super Bowl party in Atlanta. The case earned national attention because Ray Lewis, the Baltimore Ravens football star, had also been charged; Mr. Lewis reached a plea agreement with prosecutors.Mr. Sadow also represented Steven E. Kaplan, the owner of a notorious Atlanta strip club called the Gold Club, which was targeted by federal prosectors who claimed it had mob connections and allowed prostitution. Mr. Sadow called it a “very good deal” when Mr. Kaplan, who had been facing decades in prison, pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge in 2001, receiving a 16-month sentence and a $5 million fine.What those successes will bring to bear on Mr. Trump’s case is hard to say. Mr. Sadow faces the uphill task of winning over a jury in Fulton County, where President Biden won 73 percent of the vote in 2020. A number of legal experts following the case expect Mr. Sadow to file a motion soon arguing that Mr. Trump should be immune from the Georgia charges because he was the president. Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the Washington case have filed a similar motion that many experts say is unlikely to succeed.Mr. Sadow grew up in Ohio and moved to Atlanta in the 1970s to attend Emory Law School. Even back then, said Martin Salzman, a lawyer and a former classmate, he excelled at thinking up alternate theories for a case.“I said, ‘You just think like a criminal — that’s why you like criminal law,’” Mr. Salzman recalled, chuckling. “He really comes up with theories that most other people just don’t, in order to bring up a reasonable doubt.” More

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      Georgia Judge Weighs Revoking Bail for a Trump Co-Defendant, Harrison Floyd

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      Prosecutors say the defendant, Harrison Floyd, has been intimidating potential witnesses in the racketeering case with his social media posts.In a fiery courtroom presentation, the prosecutor overseeing the Georgia racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump argued on Tuesday that one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants had intimidated potential witnesses on social media and should be sent to jail.But Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court chose not to revoke the bond of Harrison Floyd, the co-defendant. Instead, he signed off on modified terms prohibiting Mr. Floyd from posting further comments about witnesses in the case.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., took the unusual step of personally arguing on behalf of the prosecution, a few days after she filed a motion accusing Mr. Floyd of intimidating an elections worker and other witnesses for the state — including Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — through his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers noted that Mr. Trump himself had issued provocative social media posts about the Georgia case, and that no action had been taken against him. That, they argued, made “the state’s decision to go after Harrison Floyd hard to justify.”They also argued that Mr. Floyd had not been trying to intimidate or threaten anyone with his posts. But they acknowledged by the end of Tuesday’s hearing that he had “walked up close to the line” of violating the terms of his bond.Mr. Floyd, once the head of a group called Black Voices for Trump, was paid by the 2020 Trump campaign. He is one of 19 people, including the former president, who were named as defendants in a 98-page racketeering indictment in August.The indictment charges them with orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Four of the defendants have pleaded guilty and have promised to cooperate with prosecutors.In addition to a state racketeering charge, Mr. Floyd faces two other felony counts in the case, for his role in what the indictment describes as a scheme to intimidate Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County elections worker, and pressure her to falsely claim that she had committed electoral fraud.Ms. Freeman and her daughter were part of a team processing votes in Fulton County on election night in November 2020. Soon after, video images of the two women handling ballots were posted online, and Trump supporters falsely claimed that the video showed them entering bogus votes to skew the election in President Biden’s favor.Ms. Freeman became the target of so many threats that she was forced to leave her home.Her lawyer was a witness for the prosecution at Tuesday’s hearing, producing a report that he said showed a recent “spike” in online mentions of Ms. Freeman. That spike led her to adopt a fresh set of security measures, her lawyer said.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers, John Morrison and Chris Kachouroff, called the effort to revoke his bond “a retaliatory measure” — in part, they said, because Mr. Floyd recently turned down a plea agreement offered by the state. They argued that “tagging” people in posts did not constitute contact with witnesses, and was no different from yelling “a message to someone else sitting on the opposite side of a packed Mercedes-Benz stadium during the middle of an Atlanta Falcons football game.” Ms. Willis responded that “this notion that tagging someone doesn’t get a message to them is really lunacy,” She also called Mr. Floyd’s posts “disgusting,” adding that “what he really did is spit on the court.”And she was explicit about the stakes as she saw them: Election workers, she said, should not be intimidated for doing their jobs.Judge McAfee said that it appeared that Mr. Floyd had committed a “technical violation” of his bond by communicating with witnesses in the case, but seemed reluctant to take the step of jailing Mr. Floyd. “Not every violation compels revocation,” he said.Ms. Willis’s forceful stance on Mr. Floyd’s posts could have repercussions for Mr. Trump, who is enmeshed in battles over gag orders in other civil and criminal cases against him. Mr. Trump’s bond agreement in Georgia specifies that he “shall perform no act,” including social media posts, “to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a co-defendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”Mr. Floyd was the only one of the original 19 co-defendants in Georgia to spend days in jail in August while waiting to make bond. At Tuesday’s hearing, he cut a colorful figure at the defense table, wearing a green blazer adorned with polo horses. Before the hearing began, he appeared to be reading a book about the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.As the two sides worked out the new terms of the bond agreement, Ms. Willis made a reference to “Trump,” prompting Mr. Floyd to interject, “President Trump.”The judge told Mr. Floyd that it was not his place to talk. More

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      Jenna Ellis, Former Trump Lawyer, Pleads Guilty in Georgia Election Case

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      Three lawyers indicted with Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results will now cooperate with prosecutors in the racketeering case.Jenna Ellis, a pro-Trump lawyer who amplified former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud as part of what she called a legal “elite strike force team,” pleaded guilty on Tuesday as part of a deal with prosecutors in Georgia.During a public hearing Tuesday morning in Atlanta, Ms. Ellis pleaded guilty to a charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. She is the fourth defendant to plead guilty in the Georgia case, which charged Mr. Trump and 18 others with conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor.Ms. Ellis agreed to be sentenced to five years of probation, pay $5,000 in restitution and perform 100 hours of community service. She has already written an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia, and she agreed to cooperate fully with prosecutors as the case progresses.Prosecutors struck plea deals last week with Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the effort to deploy fake Trump electors in swing states, and Sidney Powell, one of the most outspoken members of Mr. Trump’s legal team in the aftermath of the 2020 election.Late last month, Scott Hall, a bail bondsman charged along with Ms. Powell with taking part in a breach of voting equipment and data at a rural Georgia county’s elections office, pleaded guilty in the case.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., obtained an indictment of the 19 defendants in August on racketeering and other charges, alleging that they took part in a criminal enterprise that conspired to interfere with the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. More

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      The Lawyers Now Turning on Trump

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      Clare Toeniskoetter and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicOver the past few days, two of the lawyers who tried to help former President Donald J. Trump stay in power after losing the 2020 election pleaded guilty in a Georgia racketeering case and have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against him.Richard Faussett, who writes about politics in the American South for The Times, explains why two of Mr. Trump’s former allies have now turned against him.On today’s episodeRichard Fausset, a correspondent for The New York Times covering the American South.The two lawyers pleading guilty in the Georgia case are Sidney Powell, left, and Kenneth Chesebro.Photos: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters; Pool photo by Alyssa PointerBackground readingSidney Powell, a member of the Trump legal team in 2020, pleaded guilty and will cooperate with prosecutors seeking to convict the former president in an election interference case in Georgia.Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump-aligned lawyer, also pleaded guilty in Georgia.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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      Sidney Powell Seeks Distance From Trump Ahead of Georgia Trial

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      Ms. Powell, a lawyer who promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud after Donald J. Trump’s 2020 defeat, now says she never represented him or his campaign.Few defenders of Donald J. Trump promoted election fraud theories after his 2020 defeat as stridently as Sidney K. Powell. In high-profile appearances, often alongside other members of the Trump legal team, she pushed conspiracies involving Venezuela, Cuba and China, as well as George Soros, Hugo Chávez and the Clintons, while baselessly claiming that voting machines had flipped millions of votes.But now Ms. Powell, who next week will be one of the first defendants to go to trial in the Georgia racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 17 of his allies, is claiming through her lawyer that she actually “did not represent President Trump or the Trump campaign” after the election.That claim is undercut by Ms. Powell’s own past words, as well as those of Mr. Trump — and there is ample video evidence of her taking part in news conferences, including one where Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, introduced her as one of “the senior lawyers” representing Mr. Trump and his campaign.Most of the Georgia charges against Ms. Powell relate to her role in a data breach at an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga. There, on the day after the Jan. 6 riots, Trump allies copied sensitive and proprietary software used in voting machines throughout the state in a fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.At a recent court hearing, Ms. Powell’s lawyer, Brian T. Rafferty, said that his client “had nothing to do with Coffee County.”But a number of documents suggest otherwise, including a 392-page file put together by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that was obtained by The New York Times. The file, a product of the agency’s investigation into the data breach, has been turned over to Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, a Republican.It is not clear that Mr. Carr will take any action, given that Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani T. Willis, has already brought racketeering charges against Ms. Powell, Mr. Trump and 17 others. The Fulton indictment accuses them of participating in a “criminal organization” with the goal of subverting Georgia’s election results.Brian Rafferty, a lawyer representing Ms. Powell, spoke during a hearing this week.Pool photo by Alyssa PointerJury selection in Ms. Powell’s trial and that of Kenneth Chesebro, a legal architect of the plan to deploy fake electors for Mr. Trump in Georgia and other swing states, starts on Monday. Ms. Powell and Mr. Chesebro demanded a speedy trial, their right under Georgia law, while Mr. Trump and most other defendants are likely to be tried much later.Ms. Powell’s vow during a Fox Business Network appearance in 2020 to “release the kraken,” or a trove of phantom evidence proving that Mr. Trump had won, went viral after the election, though the trove never materialized. The next year, after Dominion Voting Systems sued her and a number of others for defamation, Ms. Powell’s lawyers argued that “no reasonable person would conclude” that some of her wilder statements “were truly statements of fact.”That led the office of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, to crow that “The Kraken Cracks Under Pressure,” and precipitated a spoof of Ms. Powell on Saturday Night Live.Not all are convinced that her conduct veered into criminality.“You have to separate crazy theories from criminal conspiracies,” said Harvey Silverglate, a Boston-area lawyer and civil liberties advocate who has a unique perspective: He is representing John Eastman, another lawyer-defendant in the case, and is a co-author of a 2019 book with Ms. Powell that looked at prosecutorial overreach.“That’s the big dividing line in this whole prosecution — what is criminal and what is wacky, or clearly erroneous or overreaching,” Mr. Silverglate said.Ms. Powell, he added, is “in a tougher position” than his own client, because the accusations against her go beyond the notion that she merely gave legal advice to the Trump campaign as it sought to overturn Mr. Biden’s win. But Mr. Silverglate also said he didn’t think prosecutors would win any convictions in the Georgia case or the three other criminal cases against Mr. Trump in New York, Florida and Washington, given how politicized the trials will be.“I think in any jurisdiction — even Washington, D.C. — you will have at least one holdout,” he said.Ms. Powell is a North Carolina native and a onetime Democrat who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor in Texas and Virginia before establishing her own defense practice. In 2014, she wrote a book, “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.” She billed it as an exposé of a department riddled with prosecutors who used “strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics” in their “narcissistic pursuit of power.”Ms. Powell appeared on Mr. Trump’s radar when she represented his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who in 2017 pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition. He later tried to withdraw the plea.Ms. Powell, appearing on Fox News, argued that the case should never have been brought and that the F.B.I. and prosecutors “broke all the rules.” Mr. Trump would go on to pardon Mr. Flynn a few weeks after losing the 2020 election.On election night itself, Ms. Powell was at the White House watching the returns come in, according to her testimony to House investigators. When they asked what her relationship with Mr. Trump had been, she declined to answer, she said, because of “attorney-client privilege.”By Nov. 14, Mr. Trump, in a tweet, specifically referred to Ms. Powell as a member of his “truly great team.” Ms. Powell’s lawyer has pointed out that she was not paid by the Trump campaign. But the Trump connection helped her raise millions of dollars for Defending the Republic, her nonprofit group that is dedicated in part to fighting election fraud.Around that time, Ms. Powell, Mr. Flynn and other conspiracy-minded Trump supporters began meeting at a South Carolina plantation owned by L. Lin Wood, a well-known plaintiff’s attorney. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation file, it was decided there that an Atlanta-based technology firm, SullivanStrickler, “would be used to capture forensic images from voting machines across the nation to support litigation” and that “Powell funded SullivanStrickler’s efforts.”By late November, the Trump team grew exasperated with Ms. Powell’s wild claims and publicly cut ties. But the schism was short-lived; she would make several trips to the White House in the weeks that followed.On Dec. 18, Ms. Powell attended a heated Oval Office meeting with Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani that the Georgia indictment lists as an “overt act” in furtherance of the election interference conspiracy. According to the Georgia indictment, they discussed “seizing voting machines” as well as possibly naming Ms. Powell a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud, though the appointment was never made.Sidney Powell appeared on a screen during a July 2022 hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Jan. 7, a number of Trump allies, along with SullivanStrickler employees, traveled to Coffee County. “We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman who made the trip, recalled in a recorded phone conversation at the time. He pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors last month and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.Misty Hampton, a defendant in the racketeering case who was the Coffee County elections administrator, welcomed the Trump-aligned team into the building. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation file makes clear that the county election board did not officially approve the visit and that local officials lacked authority over the voting equipment. (Ms. Hampton, Ms. Powell and other Fulton County defendants are among the subjects of the state investigation listed in the G.B.I. file, as is Katherine Friess, a lawyer who worked with Mr. Giuliani after the election.)While SullivanStrickler didn’t deal exclusively with Ms. Powell, a number of the firm’s employees have asserted that Ms. Powell was the client for its work copying the Coffee County election data, according to the G.B.I. investigation.“The defense’s stance that Sidney Powell was not aware of the Coffee County breaches is preposterous,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff in civil litigation over Georgia’s voting security that unearthed much of what happened in Coffee County.According to the racketeering indictment, the data copied that day included “ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information.” SullivanStrickler invoiced Ms. Powell more than $26,000 for its work, and her organization, Defending the Republic, paid the bill.Mr. Raffensperger, the secretary of state, subsequently replaced Coffee County’s voting machines and said that “the unauthorized access to the equipment” had violated Georgia law. 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      Trump Will Not Seek to Move Georgia Election Case to Federal Court

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      His decision comes after Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, tried unsuccessfully to move his own case from state to federal court.Former President Donald J. Trump will not seek to move the criminal racketeering case against him in Atlanta to federal court, according to a legal filing from his lawyer on Thursday.Mr. Trump was indicted by a grand jury in August, along with 18 of his advisers and allies, after a two-and-a-half year investigation into election interference by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis. Keeping the case in state court means that any trial for Mr. Trump would be televised, unlike in federal court.“This decision is based on his well-founded confidence that this honorable court intends to fully and completely protect his constitutional right to a fair trial,” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, wrote in the filing, referring to Fulton County Superior Court, “and guarantee him due process of law throughout the prosecution of his case.”The move comes a few weeks after a federal judge rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to move his own case to federal court. That decision has been appealed, but it dimmed the chances for successful removal efforts by other defendants, including Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, and three Georgia Republicans who submitted bogus Electoral College votes for the former president in December 2020.Removal is a longstanding practice meant to protect federal officials from state-level prosecution that could impede them from conducting federal business. It is rooted in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law “supreme” over contrary state laws.But Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia decided this month that the actions ascribed to Mr. Meadows in the indictment were not within the scope of his federal duties as White House chief of staff. The evidence, he ruled, “establishes that the actions at the heart of the state’s charges against Meadows were taken on behalf of the Trump campaign with an ultimate goal of affecting state election activities and procedures.”Removal to federal court would have provided some advantages for Mr. Trump, including a jury pool somewhat more favorable to him. But he would have faced the same state felony charges.In the Georgia case, all 19 defendants are facing a racketeering charge for their role in what prosecutors have described as a “criminal organization” that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. Each defendant also faces at least one other charge; Mr. Trump and his former personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, face the most — 13 each.If Mr. Trump ends up going to trial in Fulton County Superior Court, as now seems increasingly likely, the presiding judge will be Scott McAfee, who was recently appointed to the bench.While attending law school at the University of Georgia, Mr. McAfee was a vice president of the school’s chapter of the conservative Federalist Society. He later worked for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, where his supervisor was Ms. Willis.Thus far, Judge McAfee has been moving the court proceedings along briskly, but he has not had the opportunity to make many substantive rulings.When Mr. Trump will actually face trial remains uncertain. Two of the lawyers who worked to keep him in power, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, are set to go to trial on Oct. 23. The two defendants had requested an early trial date, which is their right under Georgia law, though both have been filing a flurry of motions over the last few weeks to dismiss the case, or parts of it.Another lawyer who faces charges, John Eastman, said in a filing on Thursday that he might still invoke his right to a speedy trial. Those not seeking the option may not face trial until the second half of next year, or even later. More

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      Trump Moves to Quash Most Charges Against Him in Georgia

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      The motion essentially piggybacked off another filed by one of the former president’s co-defendants, which gave a detailed critique of the sprawling indictment.Former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Monday to throw out most of the 13 charges against him in the wide-ranging election interference indictment handed up by a grand jury last month in Georgia.The one-page motion from Mr. Trump’s Georgia lawyer, Steven H. Sadow, refers to a more expansive motion also filed on Monday by one of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, the lawyer Ray Smith III. That motion gives a detailed critique of the 98-page indictment, arguing that its “defects” are “voluminous,” and that it is legally unsound.Among other things, Mr. Smith’s motion says that the charge of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — which all 19 defendants face — seeks to “punish protected First Amendment activity” and fails to “sufficiently allege the existence” of a racketeering enterprise whose goal was to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow 2020 election loss in the state.The Smith filing argues that the racketeering conspiracy laid out by the prosecution was actually “comprised of millions of people throughout the country” who believed election fraud had taken place and were working toward the same goal as the defendants.To illustrate the point, the motion stated that there were probably thousands of bank robbers in the United States, “but the mere fact that they all rob banks and have the same goal and many of the same methods of operation, does not mean that all American bank robbers constitute one RICO enterprise, despite the fact that they are people who commit the same crime, for the same reason.”Mr. Smith’s legal team includes Donald F. Samuel, a veteran Atlanta defense lawyer.The office of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, who is leading the prosecution, declined to comment on Monday evening ahead of an official response to the motion in court. Mr. Sadow also declined to comment.The filing was the latest legal volley in the case, which Mr. Trump sought to quash even before his indictment in mid-August. It came as little surprise to legal analysts watching the case, who had expected Mr. Trump’s lawyers to mount an aggressive defense long before the start of a trial.The former president’s lawyers have already moved to sever his case from two co-defendants, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who have demanded a speedy trial. Their joint trial is set to start on Oct. 23.Mr. Smith, a lawyer based in Atlanta who helped Mr. Trump’s team challenge his loss in Georgia after the election, faces a dozen charges in the case. He advanced false claims about the election at a legislative hearing, according to the indictment. And, prosecutors charge, he took part in the efforts to get fake Trump electors to cast votes and sign documents that falsely claimed that he had won the election. Mr. Smith has pleaded not guilty.“He never advocated violence; he never cried ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” his lawyers argued in the motion. “If advocacy in court or the legislature is a crime — if it merits being branded a ‘racketeer’ — there are very few people who will have the courage to risk engaging in such advocacy. ”Chris Timmons, a former prosecutor in the Atlanta area, said on Monday that the motion was unlikely to succeed in court, describing the racketeering enterprise defined in the indictment as “pretty tightly drawn.” But he noted that defense lawyers sometimes filed motions directed more at the court of public opinion, with an eye toward influencing a potential jury pool.Notably, the Smith motion does not excuse all the activity that took place.“If, as the Fulton prosecutors claim, somebody threatened physical harm to an election worker, that might (or should) be prosecuted as a crime,” Mr. Smith’s lawyers write. “The same for stealing computers or information from a computer.”Some defendants in the case were charged with conspiracy to commit computer theft in a breach of a rural Georgia county’s voting system, while others were accused of threatening a poll worker.Mr. Trump may soon follow the lead of several other defendants and ask to have his case moved to federal court, where the jury pool would be somewhat more supportive of him. But on Friday, a U.S. District Court judge rejected such a request from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, dimming the prospects that others would succeed with the strategy. More