Racketeering and Racketeers

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      Harrison Floyd, Last Defendant in Trump Election Interference Case in Georgia, Is Granted Bond

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      Harrison William Prescott Floyd, who once led a group called Black Voices for Trump, was held longer at an Atlanta jail after turning himself in, apparently because he showed up to his booking without a lawyer.Harrison William Prescott Floyd, a supporter of Donald J. Trump’s who was indicted along with the former president in the Georgia election interference case, was granted a $100,000 bond on Tuesday, the last of the 19 defendants in the case to reach a bond agreement.While the other defendants named in the indictment, including Mr. Trump, made only brief visits to an Atlanta jail in recent days to be booked, Mr. Floyd, 39, who once led a group called Black Voices for Trump, spent a number of days at the jail after turning himself in last Thursday, apparently because he showed up to his booking without a lawyer.As of Tuesday evening, Fulton County inmate records showed that Mr. Floyd had not yet been released. Neither Mr. Floyd nor the lawyer who eventually signed up to represent him, Todd A. Harding, could be reached for comment on Tuesday.Mr. Floyd, who also goes by Willie Lewis Floyd III, is accused of being involved in a scheme to extract a confession of election fraud from Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County election worker, as Mr. Trump and a number of his supporters searched for evidence of fraud so that they could derail Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential vote.The targeting of Ms. Freeman, a Black woman in her 60s, is one of the stranger narratives that form the basis of the 98-page state indictment. Shortly after the election, right-wing commentators began spreading unfounded accusations of wrongdoing by Ms. Freeman, based on security-camera footage of her counting votes at a downtown Atlanta sports arena.Mr. Trump joined in, mentioning Ms. Freeman by name in his now-famous Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. During the call, he labeled Ms. Freeman as a “a professional vote scammer and hustler” and told Mr. Raffensperger that he wanted to “find” roughly 12,000 votes in Georgia — just enough for him to win the state.Two days later, a Trump supporter named Trevian Kutti persuaded Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station in Cobb County, Ga., outside Atlanta. Ms. Kutti warned Ms. Freeman that an event would soon occur that would “disrupt” her “freedom,” according to police body-camera video of the meeting. Ms. Kutti also offered vague assurances of help, telling Ms. Freeman that she was going to call a man who had “authoritative powers to get you protection.”Ms. Freeman then called Mr. Floyd. According to Reuters, Ms. Freeman said that Mr. Floyd had tried to pressure her into saying that she had committed voter fraud. Ms. Kutti warned her that she would go to jail if she did not “tell everything,” Ms. Freeman told the news outlet.All 19 defendants in the sprawling Georgia indictment, including Mr. Trump, are charged with racketeering in connection with what prosecutors call a “criminal organization” whose aim was to unlawfully reverse the former president’s election loss in the state. They all face at least one other charge; Mr. Floyd is charged with influencing a witness and conspiracy to commit solicitation of false statements and writings.Mr. Floyd was previously arrested in February on charges of attacking a federal agent involved in the Justice Department’s investigation into the 2020 election, The Washington Post reported last week. More

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      Mark Meadows Testifies in Bid to Move Georgia Trump Case to Federal Court

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      Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, told a judge he believed his actions regarding the 2020 election fell within the scope of his job as a federal official.A battle over whether to move the Georgia racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies to federal court began in earnest on Monday, when Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff, testified in favor of such a move before a federal judge in Atlanta.Under questioning by his own lawyers and by prosecutors, Mr. Meadows stated emphatically that he believed that his actions detailed in the indictment fell within the scope of his duties as chief of staff. But he also appeared unsure of himself at times, saying often that he could not recall details of events in late 2020 and early 2021. “My wife will tell you sometimes that I forget to take out the trash,” he told Judge Steve C. Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.At another point during the daylong hearing, he asked whether he was properly complying with the judge’s instructions, saying, “I’m in enough trouble as it is.”The effort to shift the case to federal court is the first major legal fight since the indictment of Mr. Trump, Mr. Meadows and 17 others was filed by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga. The indictment charges Mr. Trump and his allies with interfering in the 2020 presidential election in the state. Mr. Meadows is one of several defendants who are trying to move the case; any ruling on the issue could apply to all 19 defendants.Mr. Meadows testified that Mr. Trump directed him to set up the now-famous phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. During the call — a focus of the case — Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Raffensperger and said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 more Trump votes, enough to reverse his defeat in Georgia.Mr. Meadows said Mr. Trump wanted to make the call because he believed that fraud had occurred, and wanted to resolve questions about the ballot signature verification process. “We all want accurate elections,” Mr. Meadows said at one point.Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican who is the state’s top elections official, also testified after being subpoenaed by the prosecution. He recounted how he had ignored earlier calls from Mr. Meadows — he said he “didn’t think it was appropriate” to talk to him while Mr. Trump was contesting the state’s results — and initially tried to avoid the Jan. 2 call with Mr. Trump. Under questioning by the prosecution, he characterized it as “a campaign call.”“Outreach to this extent was extraordinary,” he said of the calls from Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump.Monday’s hearing marked a dramatic inflection point in the case: Mr. Meadows, one of the highest-profile defendants, faced Fulton County prosecutors for the first time. Mr. Raffensperger recounted the threats against him, his wife and election workers after Mr. Trump made unfounded allegations about Georgia voter fraud. And Mr. Trump’s distinctive voice filled the courtroom as prosecutors played snippets of the Jan. 2 call.“We won the state,” Mr. Trump said.If the effort to move the case to federal court succeeds, it could benefit the Trump side by broadening the jury pool beyond Fulton County into outlying counties where the former president has somewhat more support.It could also slow down at least some of the proceedings. If the case remains in state court, three of the defendants are likely to face trial starting in October. Kenneth Chesebro has already been granted an early trial, and Sidney Powell has sought the same. A lawyer for John Eastman, another defendant, has said he, too, will seek a speedy trial.Removing a case to federal court requires persuading a judge that the actions under scrutiny were carried out by federal officers as part of their official business. Earlier this year, Mr. Trump failed in his attempt to move a New York State criminal case against him to federal court; his argument in that case was seen as particularly tenuous.Mr. Meadows was cross-examined by Anna Cross, a veteran prosecutor who has worked for district attorneys in three Atlanta area counties. She continually pressed him on what kind of federal policy or interest he was advancing in carrying out what prosecutors have described in court documents as political acts in service of the Trump campaign — and thus not grounds for removal to federal court.Mr. Meadows and his lawyers argue that the job of chief of staff sometimes seeps into the realm of politics by its very nature, and that the local district attorney is essentially operating beyond her power by seeking to delineate what a powerful federal official’s job should and should not be.Ms. Cross noted to Mr. Meadows that he had visited suburban Cobb County, Ga., where a ballot audit was taking place, after a meeting with William P. Barr, who was then the U.S. attorney general. During the meeting, Mr. Barr dismissed election fraud claims as unsupported by facts. Mr. Meadows replied that in his mind, there were still allegations worthy of investigation.The arguments echoed those made in filings before the hearing by the prosecution and Mr. Meadows’s lawyers. Mr. Meadows, along with all 18 other defendants, is charged with racketeering. Along with Mr. Trump, he is also accused of soliciting Mr. Raffensperger to violate his oath of office. (Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, has written that he felt he was being pressured to “fudge the numbers.”)During his testimony, Mr. Meadows discussed the trip he made to Cobb County during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots. He was turned away after trying to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. Mr. Meadows said he had been in the area visiting his children who live there, and went to the auditing location because he was “anticipating” that Mr. Trump would eventually bring up the Cobb County review. He said what he found was “a very professional operation.”The case continues to move forward in state court. On Monday, the judge, Scott McAfee, scheduled arraignments of Mr. Trump and the other defendants for Sept. 6. It is possible that some or all of the arraignments will not be conducted in person, given the heightened security requirements involving a former president.For the next few weeks at least, the case will be wrangled by two different judges working in courthouses a few blocks apart in downtown Atlanta. Judge McAfee, of Fulton County Superior Court, is an appointee of Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and a member of the conservative Federalist Society, though he also once worked for Ms. Willis and is well regarded by many lawyers on both sides of the case.Judge Jones, an Obama appointee, has been moving quickly regarding the removal question. In 2019, he upheld Georgia’s purge of nearly 100,000 names from its voter rolls, over the objections of liberal activists. In 2020, he blocked a six-week abortion ban from taking effect in the state.The Georgia case is the fourth criminal indictment of Mr. Trump this year. If Mr. Trump is elected president again, he could theoretically try to pardon himself for any federal convictions. But regardless of whether the Georgia case is tried in state or federal court, it concerns state crimes, which are beyond the pardon power of presidents.Christian Boone More

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      Why Trial Dates for Trump’s Georgia Case Are So Uncertain

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      Some defendants have already sought to move the case to federal court, while others are seeking speedy or separate trials.Even as former President Donald J. Trump and his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case turned themselves in one by one at an Atlanta jail this week, their lawyers began working to change how the case will play out.They are already at odds over when they will have their day in court, but also, crucially, where. Should enough of them succeed, the case could split into several smaller cases, perhaps overseen by different judges in different courtrooms, running on different timelines.Five defendants have already sought to move the state case to federal court, citing their ties to the federal government. The first one to file — Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff during the 2020 election — will make the argument for removal on Monday, in a hearing before a federal judge in Atlanta.Federal officials charged with state crimes can move their cases to federal court if they can convince a judge that they are being charged for actions connected to their official duties, among other things.In the Georgia case, the question of whether to change the venue — a legal maneuver known as removal — matters because it would affect the composition of a jury. If the case stays in Fulton County, Ga., the jury will come from a bastion of Democratic politics where Mr. Trump was trounced in 2020. If the case is removed to federal court, the jury will be drawn from a 10-county region of Georgia that is more suburban and rural — and somewhat more Trump-friendly. Because it takes only one not-guilty vote to hang a jury, this modest advantage could prove to be a very big deal.The coming fights over the proper venue for the case are only one strand of a complicated tangle of efforts being launched by a gaggle of defense lawyers now representing Mr. Trump and the 18 others named in the 98-page racketeering indictment. This week, the lawyers clogged both state and federal court dockets with motions that will also determine when the case begins.Already, one defendant’s case is splitting off as a result. Kenneth Chesebro, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump after the 2020 election, has asked for a speedy trial, and the presiding state judge has agreed to it. His trial is now set to begin on Oct. 23. Another defendant, Sidney Powell, filed a similar motion on Friday, and a third, John Eastman, also plans to invoke his right to an early trial, according to one of his lawyers.Soon after Mr. Chesebro set in motion the possibility of an October trial, Mr. Trump, obviously uncomfortable with the idea of going to court so soon, informed the court that he intended to sever his case from the rest of the defendants. Ordering separate trials for defendants in a large racketeering indictment can occur for any number of reasons, and the judge, Scott McAfee, has made clear the early trial date applied only to Mr. Chesebro.Mr. Trump’s move came as no surprise. As the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he is in no hurry to see the Georgia matter, or the other three criminal cases against him, go to trial. In the separate federal election interference case Mr. Trump faces in Washington, D.C., his lawyers have asked that the trial start safely beyond the November 2024 general election — in April 2026.In Georgia, the possibility that even a portion of the sprawling case may go to trial in October remains up in the air. The removal efforts have much to do with that.There is a possibility that if one of the five defendants seeking removal is successful, then all 19 will be forced into federal court. Many legal scholars have noted that the question is unsettled.“We are heading for uncharted territory at this point, and nobody knows for sure what is in this novel frontier,” Donald Samuel, a veteran Atlanta defense attorney who represents one of the defendants in the Trump case, Ray Smith III, wrote in an email. “Maybe a trip to the Supreme Court.”The dizzying legal gamesmanship reflects the unique nature of a case that has swept up a former president, a number of relatively obscure Georgia Republican activists, a former publicist for Kanye West and lawyer-defendants of varying prominence. All bring their own agendas, financial concerns and opinions about their chances at trial.And of course, one of them seeks to regain the title of leader of the free world.Some of the defendants seeking a speedy trial may believe that the case against them is weak. They may also hope to catch prosecutors unprepared, although in this case, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney, has been investigating for two and a half years and has had plenty of time to get ready.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney, has been investigating the case for two and a half years. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAnother reason that some may desire a speedy trial is money.Ms. Willis had originally sought to start a trial in March, but even that seemed ambitious given the complexity of the case. Harvey Silverglate, the lawyer for Mr. Eastman, said he could imagine a scenario in which a verdict might not come for three years.“And Eastman is not a wealthy man,” he said.Mr. Silverglate added that his client “doesn’t have the contributors” that Mr. Trump has. “We are going to seek a severance and a speedy trial. If we have a severance, the trial will take three weeks,” he predicted.How long would a regular racketeering trial take? Brian Tevis, an Atlanta lawyer who negotiated the bond agreement for Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, said that “the defense side would probably want potentially a year or so to catch up.”“You have to realize that the state had a two-year head start,” he said. “They know what they have, no one else knows what they have. No discovery has been turned over, we haven’t even had arraignment yet.”In addition to Mr. Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, is already seeking removal, as is David Shafer, the former head of the Georgia Republican Party; Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator; and Cathy Latham, the former chair of the Republican Party in Coffee County, Ga. Mr. Trump is almost certain to follow, having already tried and failed to have a state criminal case against him in New York moved to federal court.Former President Donald J. Trump informed the court that he intended to sever his case from the rest of the defendants.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe indictment charges Mr. Meadows with racketeering and “solicitation of violation of oath by public officer” for his participation in the Jan. 2, 2021 call in which Mr. Trump told the Georgia secretary of state that he wanted to “find” enough votes to win Georgia. The indictment also describes other efforts by Mr. Meadows that prosecutors say were part of the illegal scheme to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Meadows’s lawyers argue that all of the actions in question were what “one would expect” of a White House chief of staff — “arranging Oval Office meetings, contacting state officials on the president’s behalf, visiting a state government building, and setting up a phone call for the president” — and that removal is therefore justified.Prosecutors contend that Mr. Meadows was in fact engaging in political activity that was not part of a chief of staff’s job.The issue is likely to be at the heart of Mr. Trump’s removal effort as well: In calling the secretary of state and other Georgia officials after he lost the election, was he working on his own behalf, or in his capacity as president, to ensure that the election had run properly?Anthony Michael Kreis, an assistant law professor at Georgia State University, said that the indictment may contain an Easter egg that could spoil Mr. Trump’s argument that he was intervening in the Georgia election as part of his duty as a federal official.The indictment says that the election-reversal scheme lasted through September 2021, when Mr. Trump wrote a letter to Georgia’s secretary of state asking him to take steps to decertify the election.Mr. Trump, by that point, had been out of federal office for months.“By showing the racketeering enterprise continued well beyond his time in office,” Mr. Kreis said in a text message, “it undercuts any argument that Trump was acting in a governmental capacity to ensure the election was free, fair and accurate.” More

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      Former Justice Department Official Is Booked in Trump Georgia Case

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      As of late Friday morning, only one of the 19 defendants in the state election interference case involving former President Donald J. Trump had yet to turn himself in.Jeffrey A. Clark, the former high-ranking Justice Department official criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state, was booked at the Fulton County Jail early on Friday, a few hours after the former president’s dramatic booking at the same Atlanta facility.After Mr. Clark’s surrender and that of another defendant, Trevian C. Kutti, only one of the 19 defendants in the state election interference case — Stephen C. Lee, an Illinois pastor — had yet to turn himself in as of late Friday morning. The office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis gave the defendants a deadline of noon Friday to turn themselves in. After that point, arrest warrants for outstanding defendants would be put into effect.Mr. Clark, a former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division, was released on a $100,000 bond. In addition to the state racketeering charge, he faces a felony charge of criminal attempt to commit false statements and writings, based on a letter he wanted to send in December 2020 to state officials in Georgia that falsely claimed that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” that would affect the state’s election results.Several of the defendants, including Mr. Clark, are seeking to have their cases shifted to federal court, a relatively uncommon step that is known as removal. Earlier this week, U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones rejected efforts by Mr. Clark and another defendant, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to prevent them from being booked at the county jail while they were seeking removal of their cases to federal court.Ms. Kutti, a music publicist who prosecutors say harassed an election worker on Mr. Trump’s behalf, surrendered to the jail on Friday morning and was booked into the jail’s system, online records showed. She was released on $75,000 bond. Ms. Kutti has represented musicians like R. Kelly and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye, in the past. More

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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

      by

      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