Racketeering and Racketeers

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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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      Inside Fani Willis’s Georgia Investigation of Donald Trump

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      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

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      Key Takeaways from the Trump Indictment in Georgia

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

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      in Elections

      Why the Fani Willis Prosecution of Donald Trump Is Indispensable

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