Racketeering and Racketeers

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      Giuliani Plans to Surrender Wednesday in Georgia Election Case

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      Mr. Giuliani served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and advanced false claims that the election was stolen.Rudolph W. Giuliani plans to turn himself in on Wednesday at the Atlanta jail where defendants are being booked in the racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, Mr. Giuliani’s local lawyer said Wednesday morning.Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump face the most charges among the 19 defendants in the sprawling case. A former mayor of New York, Mr. Giuliani served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer in the aftermath of the 2020 election and played a leading role in advancing false claims that the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump.Bernard Kerik, who served as New York City’s police commissioner during Mr. Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, planned to accompany him to the jail in Atlanta, two people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s plans said. Mr. Kerik is not a defendant in the case.The former mayor’s bond has not yet been set. His lawyers plan to meet on Wednesday with the office of Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who is leading the investigation.The bond for Mr. Trump, who plans to turn himself in on Thursday, has been set at $200,000.“Based on the bonds that have been set, we would expect it to not be any higher than the president’s, but we’re going to negotiate that with the district attorney’s office,” said Brian Tevis, an Atlanta lawyer representing Mr. Giuliani.The case against Mr. Giuliani is a striking chapter in the recent annals of criminal justice. A former federal prosecutor who made a name for himself with racketeering cases, he now faces a racketeering charge himself.“This is a ridiculous application of the racketeering statute,” he said last week after the indictment was issued.Several of the defendants in the case have already made the trip to the Fulton County jail to be fingerprinted and have mug shots taken. They include Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, the two architects of the plan to use fake electors to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost the election to President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.David Shafer, a former head of the Republican Party in Georgia, has also turned himself in, as has Scott Hall, a pro-Trump Atlanta bail bondsman who was involved in a data breach at a rural Georgia elections office.In a social media post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump — who is running for office again, leads the Republican presidential primary field and is skipping his party’s first debate on Wednesday night — sounded a defiant note on social media about his upcoming visit to the Atlanta jail, saying he would “proudly be arrested” Thursday afternoon.Mr. Giuliani has struggled financially with mounting legal expenses, many of them related to his efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office for another term after the 2020 defeat. After repeated entreaties from people close to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump plans to host a $100,000-per-person fund-raiser next month at his club in Bedminster, N.J., to aid the former mayor, according to a copy of the invitation.Three of the 19 defendants have begun trying to have the case removed to federal court: Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official; Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff; and Mr. Shafer.Mr. Clark and Mr. Meadows have also filed court papers seeking to block their arrest.Some defendants were granted bond this week after their lawyers met with prosecutors in Atlanta. Mr. Trump’s bond agreement includes stipulations that he not intimidate witnesses or co-defendants, whether in social media posts or otherwise.Shane Goldmacher More

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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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      The Georgia Indictment Speaks to History

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      Decades from now, when high school students want to learn about the great conspiracy against democracy that began in 2020, they could very well start with the 98-page indictment filed Monday night in Georgia, in which former president Donald Trump is accused of leading a “criminal enterprise” to stay in power.No one knows whether these charges will lead to convicting Mr. Trump and the other conspirators or to keeping him from power. But even if it doesn’t, the indictment and the evidence supporting it and the trial that, ideally, will follow it will have a lasting value.Unlike the other three cases against Mr. Trump, this one is an indictment for history, for the generations to come who will want to know precisely how the men and women in Mr. Trump’s orbit tried to subvert the Constitution and undermine American democracy and why they failed. And it is a statement for the future that this kind of conduct is regarded as intolerable and that the criminal justice system, at least in the year 2023, remained sturdy enough to try to counter it.History needs a story line to be fully understood. The federal special counsel Jack Smith told only a few pieces of the story in an indictment limited to Mr. Trump, focusing mainly on the groups of fake state electors that Mr. Trump and his circle tried to pass off as real and the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to certify them. But in Georgia, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, was unencumbered by the narrower confines of federal law and was able to use the more expansive state RICO statute to draw the clearest, most detailed picture yet of Mr. Trump’s plot.As a result, her story is a much broader and more detailed arc of treachery and deceit, naming 19 conspirators and told in 161 increments, each one an “overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy,” forming the predicate necessary to prove a violation of the RICO act. (Neither of the indictments, unfortunately, holds Mr. Trump directly responsible for the Jan. 6 riot — a tale best told in the archives of the House Jan. 6 committee.)Not each of the acts is a crime, but together they add up to the most daring and highest-ranking criminal plot in U.S. history to overturn an election and steal the presidency — and a plot that appears to have violated Georgia law, leaving no question about the importance of prosecuting Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators. Ms. Willis has risen to the occasion by documenting a lucid timeline, starting with Mr. Trump’s brazenly false declaration of victory on Nov. 4, 2020, and continuing with scores of conversations between the president and his lawyers and aides as they try to persuade a number of states to decertify the vote.The narrative contains tweets that might be just eye-rolling on their own — such as Mr. Trump’s utterly false claim that Georgia Democrats had fed phony ballots into voting machines — but that in context demonstrate a relentless daily effort to perpetrate a fraud well past his forced exit from the White House on Inauguration Day.The world knows about people like Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, who was asked by Mr. Trump to “find” him enough votes to overturn the state election and who refused. It knows about how Mr. Pence rebuffed his boss’s demands to decertify the vote on Jan. 6 and of officials in other states and in the Justice Department who collectively helped save democracy by resisting pressure from the conspirators.But Ms. Willis, in trying to tell the full story, made sure the high cost paid by lesser-known figures was also recorded for the books. Specifically, the indictment focuses on the outrageous accusations made against Ruby Freeman, the Atlanta election worker who was singled out by Mr. Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani for what they insisted was ballot stuffing and turned out to be nothing of the kind.Mr. Giuliani told a Georgia House committee on Dec. 10, 2020, that Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” in order to alter votes on “crooked Dominion voting machines.” For this, Mr. Giuliani — who admitted last month that he had made false statements about the two women and is facing a defamation suit they filed — was charged in the indictment with the felony offense of making false statements.Ms. Freeman was also targeted by other conspirators charged in the case, and she may well have been chosen for that role because she is Black and was thus a more believable villain to the kinds of people who have most ardently swallowed Mr. Trump’s lies for many years. As the indictment painstakingly lays out, Stephen C. Lee, a Lutheran pastor from Illinois, went to Ms. Freeman’s home and tried to get her to admit to election fraud; he was charged with five felonies. He enlisted the help of Willie Lewis Floyd III, a former head of Black Voices for Trump, to join in intimidating Ms. Freeman; Mr. Floyd was charged with three felonies. Trevian Kutti, a publicist in the worlds of cannabis and hip-hop, was also recruited to help pressure Ms. Freeman, who said Ms. Kutti tried to get her to confess to voter fraud. Ms. Kutti now faces three felony charges.In the “vast carelessness” of their scheme, to use F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, the plotters smashed up institutions and rules without regard to the resulting damage, willfully destroying individual reputations if it might help their cause. Ms. Freeman was one of those who was smashed, exposed by Mr. Trump to ridicule and abuse, though he never paid a price. Now, thanks to Ms. Willis, Ms. Freeman’s story will reach a jury and the judgment of history, and the record will show precisely who inflicted the damage to her and to the country.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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      Trump Allies, and Possibly Trump, Likely to Be Booked at Notorious Atlanta Jail

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      The local sheriff has said the defendants would be treated like everyone else should they surrender at the jail; the process for Donald J. Trump could be different.To locals, the jail is known simply as “Rice Street.”And over the next nine days, the sprawling Atlanta detention center is where defendants in the racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies will be booked. The local sheriff, who oversees the jail, says that even high-profile defendants like Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, would be treated like everyone else should they surrender there.That means they would undergo a medical screening, be fingerprinted and have mug shots taken, and could spend time in a holding cell at the jail, weeks after the Justice Department announced an investigation for what it called “serious allegations of unsafe, unsanitary living conditions” there.On Wednesday, the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office prohibited news media from gathering near the jail as it prepared for the defendants to be processed. Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, has said that she wants all 19 people charged in the case to be booked by noon on Aug. 25. Her office has led a two-and-a-half-year investigation into election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies that culminated this week with a 98-page racketeering indictment.The Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Tuesday that “at this point, based on guidance received from the district attorney’s office and presiding judge, it is expected that all 19 defendants” would be booked at the Fulton County Jail, as the Rice Street jail is officially called. But whether Mr. Trump himself is processed there will very likely depend on the Secret Service.After surrendering this year in Manhattan, where he has been indicted in an unrelated case, Mr. Trump was allowed to forgo certain procedural steps, including being handcuffed and having his booking photo taken.The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office has not described in detail how the booking process will unfold for Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, leaving it unclear if they will truly follow standard operating procedure in one of the highest-profile prosecutions in the state’s history.After the bookings, the defendants will be arraigned in court, where they will hear the charges against them and enter their pleas. On Wednesday, Ms. Willis’s office filed a motion seeking to schedule arraignments for the week of Sept. 5, but the judge assigned to the case, Scott McAfee, will ultimately decide.She is also seeking to start the trial on March 4 of next year, the day before the Super Tuesday primaries. The Sheriff’s Office has said that some arraignments and appearances in the Trump case “may be virtual as dictated by the presiding judge.”The Rice Street jail is not a place for the faint of heart, said Robert G. Rubin, a veteran defense lawyer who has had many clients booked there. In recent weeks, two inmates have been found dead at the jail. Last year, a detainee was found dead in his cell, his body covered in bites from bed bugs and other insects, according to his lawyer.At least two songs on Spotify are titled “901 Rice Street,” the jail’s address. The popular rapper Latto has a song whose title refers to Rice Street with an expletive. And a line from a Killer Mike rap goes, “Locked in like Rice Street without a bond.”Typically, as soon as a defendant surrenders to the police, they go to a holding area with other detainees, Mr. Rubin said. “It’s miserable. It’s cold. It smells. It’s just generally unpleasant,” he said, relying on his clients’ past descriptions. “Plus, there’s a high degree of anxiety for any defendant that’s in that position.”At some point after that comes the booking process, which includes checking to see if the detainee has outstanding warrants. Mr. Rubin says that the computer systems used for such checks sometimes fail, causing delays.Gerald A. Griggs, another Atlanta-area trial lawyer, said the booking process could take “four hours or four days,” although a matter of hours at Rice Street is the most likely scenario for the defendants in the Trump case. That is because their lawyers will have probably negotiated their bond with prosecutors before turning themselves in, obviating the need for a bond hearing before a judge.History suggests that the Trump defendants could receive some special treatment. Both Mr. Griggs and Mr. Rubin represented clients in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating case, which targeted a number of teachers and educators who were accused of changing students’ standardized test scores. Both lawyers said their educator clients were allowed to stay in detention areas segregated from the general jail population.Mr. Griggs said he could foresee that happening with the Trump case defendants, on the grounds that the high-profile nature of their case may heighten the chance that they could be targets of violence.The Rice Street jail is about four miles northwest of the downtown Atlanta courthouse where the indictment against Mr. Trump and his allies was handed up by a grand jury late Monday night. The high-rise building is set amid stands of trees and cannot be seen from the entrance to the front parking lot.The immediate surroundings are weedy and industrial, with a few bail bond companies and bus stops within walking distance. Some of the nearby residential streets are dotted with forlorn and boarded-up homes.The sheriff department’s decision to close off the parking lot in front of the main jail entrance came as a shock to veteran local reporters. For years, news crews and reporters have set up there to record the comings and goings of high-profile defendants.On Wednesday morning, a photographer for The New York Times was waiting at a second jail entrance identified as an “intake center.” She was told by a sheriff’s deputy to leave her position on a public street, and when she protested she was soon surrounded by three other law enforcement officers on motorcycles.Mr. Rubin says that he advises his clients to prepare for the experience by showing up at Rice Street in comfortable clothes with minimal personal belongings, which will likely be confiscated for the duration of their stay. More

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      In Trump Georgia Case, a Trial Within 6 Months Could Be a Stretch

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      The prosecutor in the racketeering case against Donald Trump and 18 allies has an ambitious timeline. Experts have their doubts.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., said on Monday that she hoped her criminal racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies could go to trial in the next six months. But racketeering cases are not built for speed. Just getting this one together has taken two and a half years. The effort to proceed to trial quickly in Georgia will almost certainly be complicated by the schedules of three other criminal cases that Mr. Trump is already facing in Florida, New York and Washington, D.C. And with 19 defendants represented by a fleet of attorneys, a number of experts on Tuesday didn’t expect a smooth path forward and raised the possibility that the case could potentially take years, rather than months, to lumber toward a conclusion. One defendant, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, has already filed a motion to move the case to federal court. Mr. Trump himself has a long history of using delay tactics in his various legal entanglements, and he, too, is likely to file pretrial motions seeking to get the case thrown out or moved to federal court. The judge in the case may also determine that six months is not enough time for defense lawyers to prepare for a trial involving so many defendants and 41 total charges, including a racketeering count that took prosecutors nearly 60 pages to describe.John B. Meixner Jr., an assistant law professor at the University of Georgia and a former federal prosecutor, said that, normally, a six-month window from indictment to trial for a case like this one would be “a very aggressive timeline.” Prosecutors, and perhaps the judge, he said, will be highly motivated to resolve the case ahead of the 2024 election. On the other hand, Mr. Meixner said, the looming election could make Mr. Trump particularly motivated to push back his trial date in Georgia. “If the case is still ongoing, and if Mr. Trump were to win the 2024 election, we’d have a new slate of questions of whether a sitting president can be tried for a state criminal offense,” he said. Another racketeering indictment, against the rapper known as Young Thug and his associates, was handed up in Fulton County in May of last year, and a jury has yet to be seated.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesChris Timmons, an Atlanta-area lawyer and a former prosecutor, said that with 19 defendants, political gamesmanship may not be the only factor. “It takes a while to get everybody arraigned,” he said. “It takes a while to make sure everybody’s got an attorney. There’s discovery that’s got to be engaged in.” He added: “There’s a lot of information to process to get organized, to be ready to go.”Ms. Willis was the lead prosecutor on a racketeering case that dragged on for two years after state investigators found that educators in Atlanta had cheated on school tests. By the time the trial finished in 2015, the lead defendant had died. Another racketeering indictment, against the rapper known as Young Thug and his associates, was handed up in Fulton County in May of last year; jury selection began more than six months later, in January, and a jury has yet to be seated.Generally speaking, prosecutors prefer to move quickly, while defense lawyers try to slow things down.The defense in the Trump case is likely to argue that they need at least as much time to build their case as Ms. Willis took building hers, said Jeffrey E. Grell, a Minneapolis lawyer who specializes in RICO cases, adding that the court may well listen. “The paramount obligation is to protect the defendant’s due process rights,” he said.Ms. Willis, a Democrat who took office in 2021 and launched her investigation into election interference in Georgia shortly thereafter, will be up for re-election next year. Some critics say that handling the Trump case has caused her office to lose sight of more traditional priorities for a D.A. “I wish I could get Fani Willis as fired up to prosecute murders in Sandy Springs as she is on this one,” said Rusty Paul, the Republican mayor of Sandy Springs, a relatively affluent suburban city in Fulton County. He added: “I’m no fan of Donald Trump, but I’ve got murderers who committed their alleged crime in 2016 but haven’t been brought to trial.”Atlanta’s homicide count spiked in 2020 and remained high for two years, mirroring that of many other cities during the pandemic. But police data shows murders down 25 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2022. Noting that the murder rate was dropping, Ms. Willis recently told a local radio station, “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”Gerald A. Griggs, a trial lawyer and president of the Georgia N.A.A.C.P., worked with Ms. Willis in the Atlanta solicitor’s office years ago. He has criticized her in the past for what he believes is an overzealous prosecution of poor Black people. But he also describes her as one of Georgia’s most talented prosecutors — and one with serious experience navigating complex RICO cases. That experience, said Mr. Griggs, who represented a number of defendants in the cheating case, might help move the process along.“She’s done this before,” he said. “I think people are underestimating her skills as a trial attorney.”Jonathan Weisman More

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      In Georgia, a Test of Rudy Giuliani’s Loyalty to Trump

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      Michelle Cottle and Donald Trump has been indicted, again. But this time, he’s got company. The Opinion writers Michelle Cottle and David French discuss why that makes this indictment different — and potentially more effective — than the others.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra; photograph by Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe 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.This Times Opinion Short was produced by Phoebe Lett. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Kristina Samulewski and Derek Arthur. More

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      The Georgia Case Against Trump Is The Simplest and Most Direct

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      The best way to think about Georgia’s sprawling indictment against Donald Trump and his allies is that it is a case about lies. It’s about lying, conspiring to lie and attempting to coax, coerce and cajole others into lying. Whereas the attorney general of Michigan just brought a case narrowly focused on the alleged fake electors in her state (Trump is not a defendant in that one), and the special counsel Jack Smith brought an indictment narrowly focused on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, has brought a case about the entire conspiracy, from start to finish, and targeted each person subject to her jurisdiction for each crime committed in her jurisdiction.In other words, this indictment is ambitious. But it also answers two related questions: Why bring yet another case against Trump in yet another jurisdiction? Isn’t he going to face a federal trial in Washington, D.C., for the same acts outlined in the Georgia indictment?The answers lie in the distinctions between state and federal law. Georgia law is in many ways both broader and more focused than the federal statutes at issue in Smith’s case against Trump. The breadth is evident from the racketeering charges. As Norm Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland wrote in The Times, Georgia’s racketeering statute allows prosecutors to charge, among other crimes, a number of false statement statutes as part of a generalized criminal scheme. In other words, rather than seeing each actionable lie as its own, discrete criminal act, those lies can also be aggregated into part of a larger whole: an alleged racketeering enterprise designed to alter the results of the Georgia presidential election.Yet it’s the focus of Georgia law that’s truly dangerous to Trump. The beating heart of the case is the 22 counts focused on false statements, false documents and forgery, with a particular emphasis on a key statute: Georgia Code Section 16-10-20, which prohibits false statements and writings on matters “within jurisdiction of state or political subdivisions.” The statute is a state analog to a federal law, 18 U.S.C. Section 1001, which also prohibits false statements to federal officials on matters within their jurisdiction, but the Georgia statute is even broader.Simply put, while you might be able to lie to the public in Georgia — or even lie to public officials on matters outside the scope of their duties — when you lie to state officials about important or meaningful facts in matters they directly oversee, you’re going to risk prosecution. That’s exactly what the indictment claims Trump and his confederates did, time and time again, throughout the election challenge.The most striking example is detailed in Act 113 of the indictment, which charges Trump with making a series of false statements to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and his deputies in Trump’s notorious Jan. 2, 2021, telephone call. Most legal commentators, myself included, focused on that call because it contained a not-so-veiled threat against Raffensperger and his counsel. In recorded comments, Trump told them they faced a “big risk” of criminal prosecution because he claimed they knew about election fraud and were taking no action to stop it.Willis’s focus, by contrast, is not on the threats but rather on the lies. And when you read the list of Trump’s purported lies, they are absolutely incredible. His claims aren’t just false; they’re transparently, incandescently stupid. This was not a sophisticated effort to overturn the election. It was a shotgun blast of obvious falsehoods.Here’s where the legal nuances get rather interesting. While Willis still has to prove intent — the statute prohibits “knowingly and willfully” falsifying material facts — the evidentiary challenge is simpler than in Smith’s federal case against Trump. To meet the requirements of federal law, Smith’s charges must connect any given Trump lie to a larger criminal scheme. Willis, by contrast, merely has to prove that Trump willfully lied about important facts to a government official about a matter in that official’s jurisdiction. That’s a vastly simpler case to make.Yes, it is true that the individual lying allegations are also tied to much larger claims about a criminal conspiracy and a racketeering enterprise. But if I’m a prosecutor, I can build from that single, simple foundation: Trump lied, and those lies in and of themselves violated Georgia criminal law. Once you prove that simple case, you’ve laid the foundation for the larger racketeering claims that ratchet up Trump’s legal jeopardy. Compounding the danger to Trump, presidents don’t have the power to pardon state criminal convictions, and even Georgia’s governor doesn’t possess the direct authority to excuse Trump for his crimes.If Trump’s comments on Truth Social are any indication, he may well defend the case by arguing that the Georgia election was in fact stolen. He may again claim that the wild allegations he made to Raffensperger were true. That’s a dangerous game. The claims are so easily, provably false that the better course would probably be to argue that Trump was simply asking Raffensperger about the allegations, not asserting them as fact.But if Trump continues to assert his false claims as fact, then Willis has an ideal opportunity to argue that Trump lied then and is lying now, that he’s insulting the jury’s intelligence just as he insulted the nation’s intelligence when he made his claims in the first place.But declaring that the core of the Georgia case is simpler than the federal case does not necessarily mean that it will be easier to try. Willis chose to bring claims against 19 defendants, and she said she intended to try them together. While that decision makes some sense if you’re trying to prove the existence of a sprawling racketeering enterprise, it is also a massive logistical and legal challenge. Moreover, Trump is likely to try to move the case to federal court, which would require him to demonstrate that his actions were part of his official duties as president — a formidable task, given that he was interacting with Georgia officials in his capacity as a candidate. But if successful, it would expand the available jury pool to include more Trump-friendly areas outside Fulton County.These challenges — especially when combined with Trump’s upcoming criminal trials in Washington, D.C.; Manhattan; and Florida — make it difficult to see how Willis can bring this case to trial within the six months that she has said is her preference.For eight long years, Americans have watched Donald Trump lie. Those lies have been morally indefensible, but some may also be legally actionable. His campaigns and presidency may have been where the truth went to die. But the law lives, and the law declares that Trump cannot lie to Georgia public officials within the scope of their official duties. If Willis can prove that he and his confederates did exactly that, then she will prevail in the broadest, most consequential prosecution in modern American political history.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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      in Elections

      Inside Fani Willis’s Georgia Investigation of Donald Trump

      by

      Fani T. Willis faced hiring challenges, threats, a judge’s reproach and a series of legal obstacles over her two-and-a-half-year investigation of Donald J. Trump.Fani T. Willis was barely three days into her new job as district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., when a potential case caught her attention.A recording had emerged of Donald J. Trump, in his waning days as president, telling Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state and a fellow Republican, that he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse his narrow 2020 election loss there. The call fell squarely in Ms. Willis’s new jurisdiction, since Fulton County includes the State Capitol building in Atlanta where Mr. Raffensperger works.Ms. Willis had inherited an office with a deep backlog of cases exacerbated by the pandemic, and had limited staff. But she knew almost immediately that she would investigate.“When allegations come about — about anything that would hamper society’s ability to believe in fair elections, or if there is even conduct that rises to the level of suspicion, I don’t think that I have a choice,” Ms. Willis said in February 2021, shortly after announcing that she had opened a criminal inquiry into the matter.Over the next two and a half years, what began as an examination of a single phone call became a sprawling investigation stretching across multiple counties and states and into the federal government. On Monday, Ms. Willis announced that a grand jury had indicted 19 people on 41 felony counts, including Mr. Trump and a number of his former top aides and allies, on charges that they had criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election in her state.That the most expansive case against Mr. Trump and his associates would emerge from a local prosecutor’s office in the Deep South was never a given.Her office faced frequent security concerns and threats as the investigation played out, many of them racist, leading Ms. Willis to have staff members outfitted with bulletproof vests.There was a parade of legal challenges from witnesses reluctant to testify in her investigation — including from Senator Lindsey Graham and Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff — though most eventually did so after losing court battles.Ms. Willis’s own political judgment became a sticking point when a judge berated her for headlining a fund-raiser for a Democrat rival of a state lawmaker who was one of the investigation’s potential targets.Through it all, she made clear that she would not be deterred. When she and a lawyer for Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, got into a disagreement over the terms of Mr. Kemp providing testimony in her investigation, Ms. Willis wrote to the lawyer in an email: “You have taken my kindness as weakness,” adding, “Despite your disdain, this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”Ms. Willis, center, with her team during proceedings to seat a special grand jury in May 2022.Ben Gray/Associated PressSecurity around the Lewis R. Slaton Courthouse in Atlanta was increased leading up the indictment announcement.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesWhile Ms. Willis has been depicted by Mr. Trump and his allies as a left-wing zealot, she is actually a centrist, law-and-order prosecutor. Only a few months before taking office, when she was facing a primary against her old boss, an anonymous flier circulated that superimposed a photograph of Ms. Willis standing next to Mr. Trump and branded her as a Republican.Before becoming district attorney, she was best known for helping lead a high-profile case a decade ago against a group of educators in the Atlanta public school system who were involved in a widespread cheating scandal. Some attacked her for prosecuting teachers and other educators, but she retorted in a 2021 interview that she was sticking up for children.“Y’all can put it in my obituary,” she said of the criticism.From the start of the Trump investigation, Ms. Willis floated the possibility of bringing charges under the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, as she had done in the cheating case. One of her early hires as an outside consultant, in March 2021, was John E. Floyd, who wrote a guidebook on such laws, published by the American Bar Association.But the investigation was slow to develop. Today, Ms. Willis has about 10 people working on the case, including Mr. Floyd, out of a total work force of 370 people.Finding a lead prosecutor for what would be one of the highest-profile cases in the state’s history was another hurdle. After several candidates turned her down, she enlisted an old friend, Nathan Wade, a defense lawyer and former municipal court judge whose small firm handled personal injury cases as well as criminal defense.As the case heads toward trial, Ms. Willis’s office is prosecuting another sprawling racketeering case involving prominent local rappers accused of operating a criminal gang. That case has its own dramas slowing it down, including legal sparring over evidence of a goat sacrifice and jury selection that has already taken more than seven months.“We’re not one-dimensional, right?” Ms. Willis told a local radio station recently, adding that her office could pursue the election investigation “while making sure that, as you see, the murder rate is dropping in Atlanta. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”By last summer, the Trump investigation took a critical turn on two fronts. A special grand jury was empaneled at Ms. Willis’s request. In Georgia, such juries cannot bring indictments, but can gather information for longer periods of time than regular grand juries can, giving them the ability to dig into complex issues.At the same time, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol began its public hearings, and its fact-gathering would be a valuable source of information for the Georgia investigators.But Ms. Willis was soon found to have committed a misstep. In July 2022, the judge presiding over the case, Robert C.I. McBurney, barred her from pursuing charges against Burt Jones, a state lawmaker and Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia. Ms. Willis had headlined a recent fund-raiser for Mr. Jones’s Democratic rival.Ms. Willis, right, and Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, in the process of seating a grand jury in July.Brynn Anderson/Associated PressThe police removed flowers and photographs of Ms. Willis that were placed outside the courthouse the morning after the indictment was announced.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“This scenario creates a plain — and actual and untenable — conflict,” the judge wrote in his decision, after noting during a hearing on the matter that “the optics are horrific.” By then, Mr. Jones, one of the 16 pro-Trump “alternate electors” in Georgia, had been told that he could face charges, along with the other fake electors. But any potential prosecution of Mr. Jones, who eventually won election as Georgia’s lieutenant governor, would have to be handled by another prosecutor.The special grand jurors spent the second half of last year interviewing about 75 witnesses over seven months.“We definitely started with the first phone call, the call to Secretary Raffensperger,” said Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the special grand jury, in an interview in February.From there, they heard evidence about how votes and voting machines were handled. They discussed the vote counting that took place at State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta, and the false claims that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and other Trump allies made about ballot fraud taking place there.The jurors “talked a lot” about state legislative hearings that Mr. Giuliani spoke at in December 2020, spreading misinformation about the election, Ms. Kohrs said, “and then we talked some about events leading up to and immediately following the January phone call.”They also heard evidence about Trump allies breaching the election system in a rural county south of Atlanta in hopes of finding evidence that the election had been rigged.As the special grand jury’s work proceeded, Mr. Trump hired a high profile Atlanta lawyer, Drew Findling, who had represented rappers such as Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Migos.Mr. Findling tried repeatedly to derail the investigation, an aggressive strategy that is not unusual among Mr. Trump’s growing retinue of lawyers. Complications proliferated as a number of witnesses wavered, and by May more than half of the bogus Trump electors were cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office.Georgia judges also appeared to run out of patience with the Trump team’s filings. The State Supreme Court unanimously rebuffed Mr. Findling’s efforts to have Ms. Willis disqualified. And Judge McBurney, of Fulton County Superior Court, encouraged the Trump team to follow professional standards “before burdening other courts with unnecessary and unfounded legal filings.”This week, after the charges were announced, Mr. Findling and Mr. Trump’s other Georgia lawyers, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg, said in a statement that they “look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.’”With the indictment in the books, a new set of legal battles is now sure to begin. Ms. Willis has made clear that this is not an ordinary prosecution, going so far as to instruct many employees to work from home for the first half of August as charges loomed and security concerns built.Yet she has also emphasized that in some ways, she will treat the case against Mr. Trump like any other.If anyone interfered with the election, “I have a duty to investigate,” she said, adding: “In my mind, it’s not of much consequence what title they wore.” More