Racketeering and Racketeers

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      Will Trump Face Criminal Charges in Georgia Election Inquiry?

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      The House Jan. 6 committee report offered fresh evidence that former President Donald J. Trump was at the center of efforts to overturn election results in Georgia.A few weeks after losing the 2020 election, President Donald J. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, with a plan for keeping himself in office. During the call, he asked John C. Eastman, an architect of the strategy, to lay it out: Trump supporters in states that the president had lost would act as if they were official Electoral College delegates, an audacious scheme to circumvent voters.After the plan was put in motion, Ms. McDaniel forwarded an “elector recap” report to Mr. Trump’s executive assistant, who replied soon after, “It’s in front of him!”Such details, from the report released in December by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, offer fresh evidence that Mr. Trump was not on the periphery of the effort to overturn the election results in Georgia but at the center of it.For the last two years, prosecutors in Atlanta have been conducting a criminal investigation into whether the Trump team interfered in the presidential election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden. With the wide-ranging inquiry now entering the indictment phase, the central question is whether Mr. Trump himself will face criminal charges.Legal analysts who have followed the case say there are two areas of considerable risk for Mr. Trump. The first are the calls that he made to state officials, including one to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump said he needed to “find” 11,780 votes. But the recently released Jan. 6 committee transcripts shed new light on the other area of potential legal jeopardy for the former president: his direct involvement in recruiting a slate of bogus presidential electors in the weeks after the 2020 election.The Atlanta prosecutors have moved more quickly than the Department of Justice, where a special counsel, Jack Smith, was recently appointed to oversee Trump-related investigations. This month, the Fulton County Superior Court disbanded a special grand jury after it produced an investigative report on the case, concluding months of private testimony from dozens of Trump allies, state officials and other witnesses.Election personnel count absentee ballots in Atlanta in November 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe report remains secret, although a hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to determine if any or all of it will be made public. Nearly 20 people known to have been named targets of the investigation could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, will need to make her case to a regular grand jury if she seeks indictments, which would likely come by May. That means the nation could be in for months more waiting and speculating, particularly if a judge decides after this week’s hearing not to make public the report’s recommendations.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said in a statement Monday that they would not be at Tuesday’s hearing, adding that Mr. Trump “was never subpoenaed nor asked to come in voluntarily by this grand jury or anyone in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.”Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      On the Docket: Atlanta v. Trumpworld

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      ATLANTA — The criminal investigation into efforts by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn his election loss in Georgia has begun to entangle, in one way or another, an expanding assemblage of characters:A United States senator. A congressman. A local Cadillac dealer. A high school economics teacher. The chairman of the state Republican Party. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Six lawyers aiding Mr. Trump, including a former New York City mayor. The former president himself. And a woman who has identified herself as a publicist for the rapper Kanye West.Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta area district attorney, has been leading the investigation since early last year. But it is only this month, with a flurry of subpoenas and target letters, as well as court documents that illuminate some of the closed proceedings of a special grand jury, that the inquiry’s sprawling contours have emerged.For legal experts, that sprawl is a sign that Ms. Willis is doing what she has indicated all along: building the framework for a broad case that could target multiple defendants with charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud, or racketeering-related charges for engaging in a coordinated scheme to undermine the election.“All of these people are from very disparate places in life,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, said of the known witnesses and targets. “The fact that they’re all being brought together really suggests she’s building this broader case for conspiracy.”What happened in Georgia was not altogether singular. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has put on display how Mr. Trump and his allies sought to subvert the election results in several crucial states, including by creating slates of fake pro-Trump electors. Yet even as many Democrats lament that the Justice Department is moving too slowly in its inquiry, the local Georgia prosecutor has been pursuing a quickening case that could pose the most immediate legal peril for the former president and his associates.Whether Mr. Trump will ultimately be targeted for indictment remains unclear. But the David-before-Goliath dynamic may in part reflect that Ms. Willis’s legal decision-making is less encumbered than that of federal officials in Washington by the vast political and societal weight of prosecuting a former president, especially in a bitterly fissured country.But some key differences in Georgia law may also make the path to prosecution easier than in federal courts. And there was the signal event that drew attention to Mr. Trump’s conduct in Georgia: his call to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, whose office, in Ms. Willis’s Fulton County, recorded the president imploring him to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to reverse his defeat.A House hearing this past week discussed a phone call in which President Donald J. Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” an additional 11,780 votes.Shawn Thew/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Trump’s staff did not comment, nor did his local counsel. When Ms. Willis opened the inquiry in February 2021, a Trump spokesman described it as “simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump.” Lawyers for 11 of the 16 Trump electors, Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow and Holly A. Pierson, accused Ms. Willis of “misusing the grand jury process to harass, embarrass and attempt to intimidate the nominee electors, not to investigate their conduct.”Last year, Ms. Willis told The New York Times that racketeering charges could be in play. Whenever people “hear the word ‘racketeering,’ they think of ‘The Godfather,’” she said, before explaining that charges under Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act could apply in any number of realms where corrupt enterprises are operating. “If you have various overt acts for an illegal purpose, I think you can — you may — get there,” she said.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

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      In Trump Election Interference Investigation, Grand Jury Looms

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      An Atlanta D.A. is said to be likely to impanel a special grand jury in her criminal investigation of election interference by the former president and his allies.As the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot fights to extract testimony and documents from Donald J. Trump’s White House, an Atlanta district attorney is moving toward convening a special grand jury in her criminal investigation of election interference by the former president and his allies, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deliberations.The prosecutor, Fani Willis of Fulton County, opened her inquiry in February and her office has been consulting with the House committee, whose evidence could be of considerable value to her investigation. But her progress has been slowed in part by the delays in the panel’s fact gathering. By convening a grand jury dedicated solely to the allegations of election tampering, Ms. Willis, a Democrat, would be indicating that her own investigation is ramping up.Her inquiry is seen by legal experts as potentially perilous for the former president, given the myriad interactions he and his allies had with Georgia officials, most notably Mr. Trump’s January call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging him to “find 11,780 votes” — enough to reverse the state’s election result. The Georgia case is one of two active criminal investigations known to touch on the former president and his circle; the other is the examination of his financial dealings by the Manhattan district attorney.Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, opened her criminal inquiry into the former president in February.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMs. Willis’s investigation is unfolding in a state that remains center stage in the nation’s partisan warfare over the vote.The Biden Justice Department has sued Georgia over a highly restrictive voting law passed by the Republican-led legislature, arguing that it discriminates against Black voters. At the same time, Mr. Trump is aggressively seeking to reshape the state’s political landscape by ousting Republicans whom he considers unwilling to do his bidding or to adopt his false claims of election fraud. He is supporting a challenger to Mr. Raffensperger in next year’s primary, and has been courting possible candidates to run against the Republican governor, Brian Kemp. One Trump ally, former Senator David Perdue, is weighing such a run, while another, the former football star Herschel Walker, is eyeing a Senate bid. (A new governor would not have direct power to pardon, which in Georgia is delegated to a state board.)Instead of impaneling a special grand jury, Ms. Willis could submit evidence to one of two grand juries currently sitting in Fulton County, a longtime Democratic stronghold that encompasses much of Atlanta. But the county has a vast backlog of more than 10,000 potential criminal cases that have yet to be considered by a grand jury — a result of logistical complications from the coronavirus pandemic and, Ms. Willis has argued, inaction by her predecessor, Paul Howard, whom she replaced in January.By contrast, a special grand jury, which by Georgia statute would include 16 to 23 members, could focus solely on the potential case against Mr. Trump and his allies. Ms. Willis is likely to soon take the step, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deliberations, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the decision is not final. Though such a jury could issue subpoenas, Ms. Willis would need to return to a regular grand jury to seek criminal indictments.Ms. Willis’s office declined to comment; earlier this year, in an interview with The New York Times, she said, “Anything that is relevant to attempts to interfere with the Georgia election will be subject to review.”Aides to Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment; in February, a spokesman called the Fulton County inquiry “the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump.”Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, wrote in a new book about Mr. Trump’s asking him to “find” more votes: “I felt then — and still believe today — that this was a threat.”Ron Harris/Associated PressMr. Raffensperger made his view of Mr. Trump’s election meddling clear in a book released this month, on Election Day: “For the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that,” he wrote.Of Mr. Trump’s call, Mr. Raffensperger wrote, “I felt then — and still believe today — that this was a threat.”A 114-page analysis of potential issues in the case was released last month by the Brookings Institution, with authors including Donald Ayer, a deputy attorney general during the George H.W. Bush administration, and Norman Eisen, who was a special counsel to President Barack Obama. The report concluded that Mr. Trump’s postelection conduct in Georgia put him “at substantial risk of possible state charges,” including racketeering, election fraud solicitation, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud.Mr. Trump’s ongoing commentary about what took place in Georgia may not be helping his cause. In September, he held a rally in Perry, Ga., attended by thousands of followers, as well as Mr. Walker and Representative Jody Hice, who is running against Mr. Raffensperger.At the rally, Mr. Trump recalled how he phoned Mr. Kemp, who refused his entreaties to intervene.“Brian, listen,” Mr. Trump said he told the governor. “You have a big election-integrity problem in Georgia. I hope you can help us out and call a special election, and let’s get to the bottom of it for the good of the country.”The Brookings authors asserted that these comments could help prosecutors establish “intent” to convince lawmakers to commit election fraud — a crucial hurdle in proving a solicitation case against Mr. Trump.“I think he worsened his exposure with those comments,” Mr. Eisen said. “The mere fact of his conversation with Kemp is evidence of solicitation of election fraud, because Trump’s demand was based on falsehoods. By commenting on it further at the rally, he offered the prosecution free admissions about the content of that exchange.”Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 6A monthslong campaign. More