Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      President Emmerson Mnangagwa Re-elected in Zimbabwe

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      President Emmerson Mnangagwa won another five-year term, but did so by intimidating voters and manipulating the campaign process, the opposition says.President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe claimed victory on Saturday in an election marred by widespread allegations that the governing party, ZANU-PF, had committed fraud.Mr. Mnangagwa’s victory over his closest competitor, Nelson Chamisa, after his first full term in office strengthened ZANU-PF’s grip on power in a nation it has led since independence from Britain in 1980. Over the past two decades, Zimbabwe has suffered under disastrous economic policies that have led to soaring prices, high unemployment and a medical system lacking basic drugs and equipment.Mr. Mnangagwa won 52.6 percent of the vote compared with 44 percent for Mr. Chamisa, according to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which is responsible for running the election and has faced withering criticism of showing bias toward ZANU-PF.Mr. Chamisa’s party, Citizens Coalition for Change, quickly denounced the results and vowed to challenge them.“We reject any result hastily assembled without proper verification,” Promise Mkwananzi, the party spokesman, wrote on Twitter shortly after the results were announced. “We will not relent on the people’s victory!”With Mr. Mnangagwa, 80, winning another five years in office, Zimbabwe is likely to continue to struggle to break out of its isolation from Western nations, which have demanded greater democracy and respect for human rights in exchange for helping it grapple with $18 billion in debt.Zimbabwe, a southern African nation of 16 million, has a history of election irregularities, and such tactics helped Robert Mugabe, a liberation leader turned autocrat, maintain power for nearly four decades. Mr. Mugabe was removed in a coup in 2017 by Mr. Mnangagwa and his allies. The following year, Mr. Mnangagwa eked out a victory over Mr. Chamisa in an election, winning just over 50 percent of the vote.This year’s voting, held on Wednesday, was marred by chaotic delays of more than 10 hours at some polling locations because the country’s electoral commission failed to deliver ballots on time. Thousands of voters found themselves camping overnight at polling stations because of the delays, which mostly affected urban areas, where Mr. Chamisa and his party hold most of their support.The Zimbabwean police drew global condemnation for arresting dozens of members of one of the country’s most respected election watchdogs on election night, accusing them of plotting to sow discord by releasing projected election results. The night after the raid, ZANU-PF officials offered their own election projections at a news conference, and drew no ire from the police.Before the results were announced, several independent foreign observer missions criticized the fairness and credibility of the elections. The European Union’s mission offered among the most biting critiques, saying in a statement that the government curtailed fundamental freedoms by passing repressive laws “and by acts of violence and intimidation, which resulted in a climate of fear.”Although Election Day was peaceful, “the election process fell short of many regional and international standards, including equality, universality and transparency,” the statement said.A woman casts her vote at a primary school in Glen Norah, Harare, Zimbabwe, on Thursday.Philimon Bulawayo/ReutersChristopher Mutsvangwa, the spokesman for ZANU-PF, said the allegations of vote rigging were “all humbug.” The election mechanics were foolproof, he said, with agents from every party allowed to observe the vote counting and sign off on the results in each precinct.“We have shown the whole world that we have exercised democracy,” he said.Before the voting on Wednesday, ZANU-PF used the machinery of the state to shut down opposition rallies and try to get candidates thrown off the ballot in court, analysts said. The governing party also deployed Forever Associates Zimbabwe, a pseudo-military organization run by people with close ties to the government’s intelligence agency, to intimidate voters in rural communities, said Bekezela Gumbo, a principal researcher at the Zimbabwe Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital.The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is stacked with officials with ties to ZANU-PF, Mr. Gumbo said. Critics said that the commission had failed to produce a definitive voter roll and kept adjusting polling locations, potentially leading to confusion with voters showing up at the wrong places to cast their ballots.The electoral commission blamed court challenges that held up the printing of ballots for delays in voting on Election Day. But critics noted that the delays were mostly in Harare and other urban areas that are opposition strongholds.The commission invited all of the presidential candidates to observe the tabulation on Saturday before the results were announced.“If this is not a demonstration of transparency, then I probably do not know the definition of this word,” said Rodney Kiwa, the deputy chairman of the commission.On Wednesday afternoon, Mirirai Moyo, a mother of three, had returned to her market stall in a suburb of Harare after a failed effort to cast her vote in the morning. There were no ballots at her polling station, she said.“I can’t go back because it’s late now,” she said. “It’s sad now. This is what ZANU-PF wanted because it knew there would be people like me who won’t be able to stick around the polling stations till late.”Voters also woke up Wednesday to fliers scattered about the streets of Harare and the southern city of Bulawayo falsely claiming that Mr. Chamisa’s party was urging people not to vote, an apparent effort to suppress opposition turnout.Near some polling sites, ZANU-PF set up tables where officials were purportedly conducting exit polls. They asked voters for their personal information and whom they voted for, and in some cases intimidated citizens before they cast their vote, according to multiple news reports and social media.Zimbabwe Electoral Commission officials and polling agents carry ballot boxes from a polling station to a command center in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Thursday.Aaron Ufumeli/EPA, via ShutterstockMany had held out hope that a defeat for Mr. Mnangagwa, a former guerrilla fighter in Zimbabwe’s battle for independence from British colonial rule, would represent a clean break from the suffering under Mr. Mugabe.Under Mr. Mnangagwa’s watch, obscenely high, triple-digit inflation returned. An estimated 90 percent of the work force holds informal odd jobs, like selling vegetables by the roadside, while more educated Zimbabweans are leaving the country in growing numbers in search of economic opportunity.Nearly six in 10 Zimbabweans believe that corruption has grown worse since Mr. Mnangagwa took office, and more than 70 percent say the country is going in the wrong direction, according to Afrobarometer, a nonpartisan research firm that conducts surveys across Africa.Supporters of the president and of ZANU-PF argued that he had set up the country for economic success by luring investors despite barriers they believe have been erected by the West. Zimbabwe sits on Africa’s largest reserves of lithium, a mineral critical for electric car batteries and other clean technologies. Chinese companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in lithium production in the country.“President E.D. Mnangagwa is loved by many people because of his drive for development,” said Nyasha Musavengana, wearing a green T-shirt with the president’s picture as she participated in a rally before the election. “Brick by brick, step by step, he is fixing things in Zimbabwe.”Although Mr. Mnangagwa has talked about deeper engagement with the United States and Europe, he has also gleefully embraced rivals of Western nations, notably China and Russia. Just weeks after attending a business conference in Botswana hosted by the United States, Mr. Mnangagwa was a darling of a Russia-Africa summit in July, where he gave a speech proclaiming his support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He also cheerfully accepted Mr. Putin’s gift of a helicopter.Mr. Chamisa, 45, presented a starkly different vision. A member of Parliament for the past 20 years as well as a lawyer and preacher, he has expressed an eagerness to re-engage with the United States and Europe. He leads a new party, Citizens Coalition for Change, and told Zimbabweans that he offered a break from the corruption of years past.“I voted for C.C.C. because I’m tired of suffering,” said Maggie Sibanda, 70, after casting her vote near Bulawayo. “My children are in South Africa and they want to come home, but how can they when things are so bad?”Tendai Marima contributed reporting from Bulawayo and Harare, and Jeffrey Moyo from Harare. 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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      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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      Legal Consequences Arrive for Trump and Other Election Deniers

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      Legal repercussions have arrived for the leaders of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential contest, in what could serve as a warning to those who meddle in future elections.For two and a half years, most of Donald J. Trump’s allies in the sprawling effort to overturn the 2020 election escaped consequences, continuing to try to undermine President Biden’s legitimacy by spreading false claims about voting machines, mail ballots and rigged elections.Now the legal repercussions are arriving.Last month, three leading election deniers in Michigan were charged with felonies over a scheme to surreptitiously obtain election machines and inspect them in parking lots and hotels. Soon after, Mr. Trump himself was indicted in a major federal investigation of his actions surrounding the 2020 election.Then, in the longest reach of the law yet, Mr. Trump and 18 others were criminally charged on Monday over their attempts to interfere with the outcome of the election in Georgia.The broad indictment includes some of the most prominent figures in the movement to subvert the election: Rudolph W. Giuliani, who presented state legislatures with what he said was evidence of fraud and has continued to make such claims as recently as this month; John C. Eastman, a lawyer and an architect of the scheme to create bogus slates of pro-Trump electors; David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, who filed 16 fake electors; and Sidney Powell, a lawyer behind some of the wildest claims about election machines.“The attacks on the election system were so brazen,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Some accountability,” she added, would “make people think twice before pushing the envelope and trying to break the law.”Despite the flood of criminal charges, election denialism persists in American politics. Many of the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted to overturn the election were re-elected, and Mr. Trump has made false election claims central to his campaign to take back the White House. In a post on his social media site on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump pledged to unveil a “report” next week on “election fraud” in Georgia. (Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, among others, have said they did nothing wrong and have cast the charges as politically motivated.)It is still far from clear whether Mr. Trump and his allies who face charges will ultimately be convicted. But the legal threat may force Trump allies to think twice in the future about repeating their more drastic actions — tampering with election machines, organizing the fake elector scheme, filing reams of frivolous lawsuits.In addition to the criminal charges, several lawyers who pushed baseless election claims in court are facing disbarment. And Fox News was forced to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of misinformation about the 2020 election.One sign that prosecutions can act as a deterrent has already surfaced. More than 1,100 people were arrested after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, according to Justice Department records. More than 630 have pleaded guilty to various charges, and about 110 have been convicted at trial. Almost 600 have been sentenced and, of those, about 370 have served some amount of time behind bars.Legal experts say those convictions are a key reason that recent provocations by Mr. Trump after his series of indictments have not resulted in mass protests or violence.“The federal government has made a concerted effort to investigate and prosecute people who stormed the Capitol,” said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner. “And I think we’ve seen when Trump tried to rally people in Manhattan or in Florida, not only were the crowds small, but a lot of right-wing influencers were out there telling people: ‘Do not do this. You are going to get arrested.’”Part of the challenge for prosecutors is that bringing criminal charges for trying to overturn an election is relatively uncharted legal terrain.“It would be wrong to say that there’s precedent in these exact circumstances, because we have never had these exact circumstances,” said Mary McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s national security division and a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center.In Georgia, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who led the investigation, turned to the state’s racketeering statute, often used for targeting organized crime, because of the magnitude of the inquiry and the large number of people involved.In the federal case, Jack Smith, the special counsel assigned by the Justice Department to investigate Mr. Trump, used novel applications of criminal laws — such as conspiring to defraud the government and corruptly obstructing a congressional proceeding — to bring charges against the former president over his actions leading up to the Capitol riot.In Michigan, the charges were more straightforward, focusing specifically on allegations of illegal possession of a voting machine and a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer or computer system.Such applications of the law, while in some cases untested, could establish a playbook for prosecutors to go after those who threaten elections in the future.“We hope at the end of the day, yes, there will be precedents created, legal precedents created as a result of actions people took after the 2020 election,” said Jon Greenbaum, the chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former Justice Department lawyer, adding that he hoped those precedents “in the end will make our democracy stronger.”Alan Feuer More

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      With Racketeering Charges, Georgia Prosecutor Aims to ‘Tell the Whole Story’

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      Prosecutors have found racketeering laws to be powerful tools in targeting not only foot soldiers in a criminal enterprise, but also high-level decision makers.For more than 50 years, prosecutors have relied on a powerful tool to take down people as varied as mafia capos, street gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, and pharmaceutical executives accused of fueling the opioid crisis.Now a prosecutor in Georgia is using the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, to go after former President Donald J. Trump, who along with 18 of his allies was indicted on Monday on charges of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.One power of RICO is that it often allows a prosecutor to tell a sweeping story — not only laying out a set of criminal acts, but identifying a group of people working toward a common goal, as part of an “enterprise,” to engage in patterns of illegal activities.Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is using a RICO indictment to tie together elements of a broad conspiracy that she describes as stretching far outside of her Atlanta-area jurisdiction into a number of other swing states, a legal move made possible by the racketeering statute. Her investigation also reached into rural parts of Georgia — notably Coffee County, where Trump allies got access to voting machines in January 2021 in search of evidence that the election had been rigged.Signaling its breadth, the indictment brought Monday night laid out a number of ways the defendants obstructed the election: by lying to the Georgia legislature and state officials, recruiting fake pro-Trump electors, harassing election workers, soliciting Justice Department officials, soliciting Vice President Mike Pence, breaching voting machines and engaging in a cover-up.“RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office or law enforcement to tell the whole story,” Ms. Willis said at a news conference last year.Her challenge will be to convince jurors that the disparate group of 19 conspirators charged in the indictment — including a former president and a local bail bondsman, a White House chief of staff and a former publicist for Kanye West — were all working together in a sprawling but organized criminal effort to keep Mr. Trump in power.State and federal prosecutors have found that they can use RICO laws to effectively make such arguments, and Ms. Willis has done it before. So has Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the defendants, who made his name trying racketeering cases against mafia families decades ago as a federal prosecutor in New York. Rudolph W. Giuliani, at the Fulton County courthouse in Atlanta last year.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesClark D. Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, said the indictment “shows the incredible power brought to bear against Trump by using Georgia’s racketeering law,” noting that in addition to the 19 people charged, it encompassed “as many as 30 unindicted co-conspirators — over 160 separate acts in all.”But RICO laws have their detractors. Some critics say that the laws have granted too much power to prosecutors, allowing them to indict dubious members of “organizations” that are in some cases barely organized.“Because RICO is so expansive, and so open, as a tool, it allows people to be caught in its dragnet that are nothing like the people who were originally intended” when the laws were first developed more than 50 years ago, said Martin Sabelli, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.Another potential pitfall for a big RICO case is that it may become too complex for jurors to follow. As Michael J. Moore, the former U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, put it on Monday night: “When you fish with too big a net, you risk getting tangled up yourself.”Some of the defendants were already accusing Ms. Willis of overreaching. A spokeswoman for Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was charged in the case, said Ms. Willis was “exceeding her powers by inserting herself into the operations of the federal government to go after Jeff.”Mr. Trump’s legal team said, “We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.”Mr. Trump and his allies have argued that their efforts to challenge his 2020 election loss in Georgia were well within the bounds of the law. Indeed, Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork for his defense for months, arguing repeatedly that there was nothing illegal about his now-famous call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021.In that call, Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger he hoped to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win Georgia.But the RICO indictment forces Mr. Trump to push back against a broader allegation — that he was part of a multipronged criminal scheme that involved not only calls to state officials, but the convening of bogus pro-Trump electors, the harassment of Fulton County elections workers, and false statements made by Trump allies, including Mr. Giuliani, before state legislative bodies.The Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, where the fake electors gathered in 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesIn Georgia, RICO is a felony charge that carries stiff penalties: a potential prison term of five to 20 years, a fine or both.Racketeering statutes are an outgrowth of New York City’s long history of combating corruption and organized crime. The word “racketeer” itself is derived from the “racket” at boisterous Tammany Hall fund-raising dinners where it was an expectation, among crooked politicians, that anyone who hoped to get a piece of city business would buy tickets.Under Mr. Giuliani’s leadership in the 1980s, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York used RICO to prosecute powerful mobsters like Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese crime family, and Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo of the Lucchese family. But Mr. Giuliani also used the federal statute to prosecute white-collar business cases.Ms. Willis may rival Mr. Giuliani in her deep well of experience with RICO charges. She made her name as an assistant district attorney by bringing a sprawling RICO case against educators in the Atlanta public school system in 2013 in the wake of a cheating scandal, and has used Georgia’s version of the law repeatedly since then.In the 2013 case, a group of Atlanta educators were accused of inflating standardized test scores and giving a false sense of academic progress. At the time, there was concern that the state was applying a law known for targeting the mob to a group of modestly paid public schoolteachers, most of whom were Black.“I think it’s overkill,” the Atlanta lawyer Bruce H. Morris told The Los Angeles Times. “RICO was originally designed for organized crime.”Ms. Willis has said defending the integrity of the education system — and children’s right to an education — was paramount. The trial ended with 11 defendants being found guilty of racketeering, with some convicted of other crimes.After being elected Fulton County’s top prosecutor in 2020, she has continued to be aggressive in using RICO to prosecute other cases, particularly in her fight against street gangs. The best known is the ongoing RICO conspiracy case against the group Young Slime Life, headed by the Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams, who performs as Young Thug.Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis made her name as an assistant district attorney by bringing a sprawling RICO case in 2013.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe indictment charges that members of the group, known as YSL, committed the crime of conspiracy to violate the RICO act, and that certain members are responsible for crimes like murder, aggravated assault and armed robbery. Defense attorneys maintain that the group is merely a musical collective.In an analysis of the case for the pop culture website Complex, Andre Gee, a music and culture writer, blasted Ms. Willis for wielding RICO as an overly broad dragnet.“It’s an ugly, precedent-setting maneuver in the war on rap that can only happen because the law allows her to be creatively predatory with their definition of a ‘corrupt organization,’” Mr. Gee wrote.Some experts have argued that applying RICO charges in a criminal case allows prosecutors to use the laws’ often stiff penalties to pressure defendants marginally connected to criminal groups to take plea bargains. In the YSL case, Ms. Willis’s office obtained pleas from a number of defendants, securing admissions along the way that the group was indeed a criminal street gang.The Young Thug case, taking place in the same courthouse that may eventually host Mr. Trump, has shown how unwieldy a large racketeering case with multiple defendants can be: Jury selection, which began in January, has yet to be completed, and has been rife with hiccups and scandals.Noting that Ms. Willis is hoping for a trial within the next six months, Christopher Timmons, an Atlanta trial lawyer and former prosecutor experienced in RICO cases, said the timetable seemed to be “ambitious.”“Six months to start a RICO trial is lightning fast,” Mr. Timmons said in an email early Tuesday. “They usually take a year to put together. That suggests the D.A.’s office walked into the grand jury room knowing what their case will look like at trial.”Even though RICO laws now go far beyond mob-busting, their origins in fighting the New York mafia can still work against defendants in the court of public opinion.But a good defense lawyer can sometimes use the laws’ association with the mob to their client’s advantage. That was the case in 2013, when one of Mr. Trump’s current lawyers in Georgia, Drew Findling, was defending a sheriff in the suburbs of Atlanta who had been accused of corruption and was facing state RICO charges.In his closing argument at trial, Mr. Findling, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ridiculed state prosecutors for not reaching out to federal authorities if they truly believed they were dealing with a criminal on a par with the nation’s most infamous gangsters.His client was acquitted. More

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      Before He Faces a Jury, Trump Must Answer to Republican Voters

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      After three other criminal indictments were filed against him, Donald Trump was accused on Monday of racketeering. In a new indictment, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., charged him with leading what was effectively a criminal gang to overturn the 2020 presidential election in that state.The grand jury indictment says Mr. Trump and 18 others violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO law, established by the federal government and more than 30 states and used to crack down on Mafia protection rackets, biker gangs and insider trading schemes. The Georgia indictment alleges that Mr. Trump often behaved like a mob boss, pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to decertify the Georgia election and holding a White House meeting to discuss seizing voting equipment.Mr. Trump, along with a group of associates that included his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and one of his lawyers at the time, the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were also accused of a series of crimes that go beyond even the sweeping federal indictment filed this month by the special counsel Jack Smith. The former president, for example, was charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree forgery, for arranging to have a false set of Georgia electors sent to Washington to replace the legitimate ones for Joe Biden. That same act also resulted in a charge against Mr. Trump of conspiracy to impersonate a public officer and a series of charges relating to filing false statements and trying to get state officials to violate their oath of office.Taken together, these four indictments — which include more than 90 federal and state criminal charges implicating his official conduct during his term and acts afterward, as well as in his personal and business life — offer a road map of the trauma and drama Mr. Trump has put this nation through. They raise questions about his fitness for office that go beyond ideology or temperament, focusing instead on his disdain for American democracy.And yet these questions will ultimately be resolved not by the courts but by the electorate. Republican primary voters, in particular, are being presented with an opportunity to pause and consider the costs of his leadership thus far, to the health of the nation and of their party, and the further damage he could do if rewarded with another four years in power.Put aside, for the moment, everything that has happened in the eight years since Mr. Trump first announced his candidacy for president. Consider only what is now on reams of legal paper before the American people: evidence of extraordinarily serious crimes, so overwhelming that many other defendants would have already negotiated a plea bargain rather than go to trial. This is what he faces as he asks, once again, for the votes of millions of Americans.“I’m being indicted for you,” the former president has been telling his supporters. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.” But time and again, Mr. Trump has put his ego and ambition over the interests of the public and of his own supporters. He has aggressively worked to undermine public faith in the democratic process and to warp the foundations of the electoral system. He repeatedly betrayed his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the nation’s laws. His supporters may be just as angered and disappointed by his loss as he is. But his actions, as detailed in these indictments, show that he is concerned with no one’s interests but his own. Among the accusations against him:He took dozens of highly classified documents, some involving nuclear secrets and attack plans, out of the White House and stored them at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, where guests of all kinds visit each year. Then, despite being asked multiple times, he refused to return many of these documents, instead working with his aides and confidants to move and hide the boxes containing them and to destroy video surveillance records of those acts, even after a subpoena from the Justice Department.He attempted to overturn the 2020 election by using what he knew to be false claims of voter fraud to pressure numerous state and federal officials, including his own vice president and top officials of the Justice Department, to reverse voting results and declare him the winner.He sought to disenfranchise millions of American voters by trying to nullify their legally cast ballots in order to keep himself in office. In doing so, he colluded with dozens of campaign staff members and other associates to pressure state officials to throw out certified vote counts and to organize slates of fake electors to cast ballots for him.In one example of the personal damage he caused, Mr. Trump led a scheme to harass and intimidate a Fulton County election worker, Ruby Freeman, falsely accusing her of committing election crimes. The Georgia indictment — accusing him of the crime of false statements and writings in official matters — says he falsely called her a “professional vote scammer” who stuffed a ballot box with fraudulent votes for Mr. Biden.After having extramarital sex with an adult film actress, he falsified business records to hide $130,000 in hush-money payments to her before the 2016 election.That list does not include the verdict, by a New York State court in May, that Mr. Trump was civilly liable for sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll. Nor does it include the ongoing asset and tax fraud prosecution of the Trump Organization by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.Time and again, Mr. Trump has demanded that Republicans choose him over the party, and he has exposed and exploited some genuine rifts in the G.O.P., refashioning the party to suit his own agenda. The party will have to deal with those fault lines and may have to reconfigure itself and its platform. But if Republicans surrender to his demands, they may find themselves led by a candidate whose second term in office would be even more damaging to America and to the party than his first.A president facing multiple criminal trials, some prosecuted by his own Justice Department, could not hope to be effective in enforcing the nation’s laws — one of the primary duties of a chief executive. (If re-elected, Mr. Trump could order the federal prosecutions to be dropped, though that would hardly enhance his credibility.) A man accused of compromising national security would have little credibility in his negotiations with foreign allies or adversaries. No document could be assumed to remain secret, no communication secure. The nation’s image as a beacon of democracy, already badly tarnished by the Jan. 6 attack, may not survive the election of someone formally accused of systematically dismantling his own country’s democratic process through deceit.The charges in the Georgia case are part of the larger plot described in the federal indictment of Mr. Trump this month. But Ms. Willis used tools that weren’t available to Mr. Smith. Georgia’s RICO statute allows for many more predicate crimes than the federal version does, including false statements, which she used to bring the charge against several of the defendants in the fake-elector part of the scheme.Altogether, the Fulton grand jury cited 161 separate acts in the larger conspiracy, from small statements like false tweets to major violations like trying to get the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to decertify the state’s election by “unlawfully altering” the official vote count, which was in Mr. Biden’s favor. Though some of the individual acts might not be crimes themselves, they added up to what Ms. Willis called a scheme by “a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities,” all for the benefit of the former president of the United States.Those legal tools are part of a broad American justice ecosystem that is, at its core, a mechanism for seeking the truth. It is not designed to care about politics or partisanship; it is supposed to establish facts. To do so, it tests every claim rigorously, with a set of processes and rules that ensure both sides can be heard on every issue, and then it puts the final decision to convict in the hands of a jury of the defendant’s peers, who will make the weighty decision of guilt or innocence.And that is what makes this moment different from all the chaos of the past eight years. Mr. Trump is now a criminal defendant four times over. While he is innocent until proven guilty, he will have to answer for his actions.But almost certainly before then, he will have to answer to Republican voters. His grip on the party has proved enduring but not universal; while he is far ahead of the other candidates, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that he is the choice of only 54 percent of likely primary voters. And about half of Republican voters told pollsters for Reuters/Ipsos that they would not vote for him if he was convicted of a felony.The indictments — two brought by elected prosecutors who are Democrats, all of them arriving before the start of Republican presidential primaries — have been read by many as political, and Republicans have said without evidence they are all organized for the benefit of Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump has amplified that message and used it to drive fund-raising for his campaign. Although the outcome of these indictments may have a political impact, that alone does not make them political. To assume that any prosecution of a political figure is political would, in effect, “immunize all high-ranking powerful political people from ever being held accountable for the wrongful things they do,” said Kristy Parker, a lawyer with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “And if you do that, you subvert the idea that this is a rule-of-law society where everybody is subject to equal justice.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly offered Republicans a false choice: Stick by me, or the enemy wins. But a healthy political party does not belong to or depend on one man, particularly one who has repeatedly put himself over his party and his country. A healthy democracy needs at least two functioning parties to challenge each other’s honesty and direction. Republican voters are key to restoring that health and balance.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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      As Indictment Decision Looms, Here’s What to Know About the Trump Investigation in Georgia

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      A grand jury could decide within days whether former President Trump should be indicted for interfering in the state’s 2020 presidential election.Starting on Monday morning, prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., are expected to present a grand jury with the findings from their two-and-a-half-year investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and a number of his allies for their multipronged effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow election loss in Georgia in November 2020.The grand jury will likely decide within days whether Mr. Trump should be indicted for interfering in the presidential election in Georgia. The former president has already been indicted in three separate cases this year, a staggering legal burden for a politician who is running for another term.Mr. Trump is far ahead of competitors in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, and neck-and-neck with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a potential rematch, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in late July.Here is what we know about the investigation in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta.Why is Mr. Trump under investigation in Georgia?Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, began looking into whether Mr. Trump and his associates violated Georgia law shortly after a recording was released of Mr. Trump talking by phone to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. During the call, Mr. Trump insisted that he had won the state of Georgia and made baseless allegations of fraud, even though multiple recounts confirmed that he had lost.Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger that he wanted to “find” 11,780 votes in the state — one more than he needed to win Georgia and its Electoral College votes.Over time, court documents and other public records revealed that Ms. Willis, a Democrat, was also investigating false statements that lawyers for Mr. Trump made in state legislative hearings; a meeting of 16 pro-Trump Republicans who cast bogus Electoral College votes for him; an intimidation campaign against a pair of Fulton County election workers falsely accused of fraud, and a successful effort by Trump allies to copy sensitive software at an elections office in rural Coffee County, Ga.An audio recording of Mr. Trump talking to Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia, was played during a hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWhat laws may have been broken?In February 2021, Ms. Willis, in a letter to state officials, said the potential laws violated include “the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”That list may not prove definitive for a number of reasons, including that investigators probably had not settled on the final scope of their inquiry at the time. Outside legal experts have said that the Coffee County data breach could result in charges like computer trespassing and computer invasion of privacy.Ms. Willis signaled repeatedly that she was considering pursuing charges under the state’s racketeering law, which is often used to target members of an “enterprise” that has engaged in a pattern of criminal activity.The federal racketeering law is best known for being used against members of the mafia. But federal and state racketeering laws have been used in a wide array of cases. Prosecutors often use the laws to ensure that leaders of a criminal enterprise, and not just the foot soldiers, are held accountable.Who else is being scrutinized?The Georgia investigation may prove to be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers and other associates undertook to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges. They include Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who, as a Trump lawyer, made numerous false claims about voter fraud at Georgia legislative hearings.They also include David Shafer, the former chair of the state Republican Party. He oversaw the meeting of the bogus electors in December 2020; more than half of the electors have been cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office.A number of lawyers who worked to keep Mr. Trump in power have been under scrutiny in the investigation, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro. Last year, Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, was ordered to testify before a special grand jury that aided in the investigation.The Justice Department blocked an effort to seek the testimony of Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking lawyer in the department who sought to intervene in Georgia on Mr. Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election.A number of people whose names have been mentioned in connection with the investigation have said that they did nothing illegal, including Mr. Trump, who has described his call to Mr. Raffensperger as “absolutely perfect.”A Trump supporter protested election results at the Georgia State Capitol in downtown Atlanta in the days after the 2020 election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesHow does the Georgia inquiry relate to other investigations of Mr. Trump?Ms. Willis has said that she has not coordinated with Jack Smith, the special counsel in two federal investigations of Mr. Trump that have resulted in indictments. But Ms. Willis’s team has made use of the voluminous documents and testimony about election interference efforts produced by Congress’s Jan. 6 Committee.One of the federal cases is related to the former president’s handling of classified documents; the other to his efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election. Another indictment, in New York State, is related to what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme to cover up a potential sex scandal and clear his path to the presidency in 2016. Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty in all three cases.What would come next?If the Fulton County grand jury decides to indict, any defendants will have to make their way to Atlanta to be booked and arraigned. A number of them could face multiple charges, and the potential sentences could be steep: Violating the racketeering law alone can potentially result in a five-to-20-year sentence.There is also the question of when a trial might occur, given Mr. Trump’s legal troubles in several other venues. If the Georgia case results in multiple defendants, pretrial matters like jury selection could take months. More

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      How Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election Results in Georgia

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      The Georgia case offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths Mr. Trump and his allies went to in the Southern state to reverse the election.When President Donald J. Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat.“Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr. shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified.Mr. Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference — who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” — that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country. But perhaps nowhere were there as many attempts to intervene as in Georgia, where Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, is now poised to bring an indictment for a series of brazen moves made on behalf of Mr. Trump in the state after his loss and for lies that the president and his allies circulated about the election there.Mr. Trump has already been indicted three times this year, most recently in a federal case brought by the special prosecutor Jack Smith that is also related to election interference. But the Georgia case may prove the most expansive legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power, with nearly 20 people informed that they could face charges.It could also prove the most enduring: While Mr. Trump could try to pardon himself from a federal conviction if he were re-elected, presidents cannot pardon state crimes.Perhaps above all, the Georgia case assembled by Ms. Willis offers a vivid reminder of the extraordinary lengths taken by Mr. Trump and his allies to exert pressure on local officials to overturn the election — an up-close portrait of American democracy tested to its limits.There was the infamous call that the former president made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his narrow loss there. Mr. Trump and his allies harassed and defamed rank-and-file election workers with false accusations of ballot stuffing, leading to so many vicious threats against one of them that she was forced into hiding.They deployed fake local electors to certify that Mr. Trump had won the election. Within even the Justice Department, an obscure government lawyer secretly plotted with the president to help him overturn the state’s results.And on the same day that Mr. Biden’s victory was certified by Congress, Trump allies infiltrated a rural Georgia county’s election office, copying sensitive software used in voting machines throughout the state in their fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.The Georgia investigation has encompassed an array of high-profile allies, from the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election. But it has also scrutinized lesser-known players like a Georgia bail bondsman and a publicist who once worked for Kanye West.As soon as Monday, there could be charges from a Fulton County grand jury after Ms. Willis presents her case to them. The number of people indicted could be large: A separate special grand jury that investigated the matter in an advisory capacity last year recommended more than a dozen people for indictment, and the forewoman of the grand jury has strongly hinted that the former president was among them.If an indictment lands and the case goes to trial, a regular jury and the American public will hear a story that centers on nine critical weeks from Election Day through early January in which a host of people all tried to push one lie: that Mr. Trump had secured victory in Georgia. The question before the jurors would be whether some of those accused went so far that they broke the law.A recording of Mr. Trump talking to Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia, was played during a hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee last October. Alex Wong/Getty ImagesUnleashing ‘Hate and Fury’It did not take long for the gloves to come off.During the Nov. 5 visit by Donald Trump Jr., the Georgia Republican Party was already fracturing. Some officials believed they should focus on defending the seats of the state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were weeks away from runoff elections, rather than fighting a losing presidential candidate’s battles.But according to testimony before the Jan. 6 committee by one of the Trump campaign’s local staffers, Mr. Trump’s son was threatening to “tank” those Senate races if there was not total support for his father’s effort. (A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. disputed that characterization, noting that the former president’s son later appeared in ads for the Senate candidates.) Four days later, the two senators called for Mr. Raffensperger’s resignation. The Raffensperger family was soon barraged with threats, leading his wife, Tricia, to confront Ms. Loeffler in a text message: “Never did I think you were the kind of person to unleash such hate and fury.”Four other battleground states had also flipped to Mr. Biden, but losing Georgia, the only Deep South state among them, seemed particularly untenable for Mr. Trump. His margin of defeat there was one of the smallest in the nation. Republicans controlled the state, and as he would note repeatedly in the aftermath, his campaign rallies in Georgia had drawn big, boisterous crowds.By the end of November, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed had become a font of misinformation. “Everybody knows it was Rigged” he wrote in a tweet on Nov. 29. And on Dec. 1: “Do something @BrianKempGA,” he wrote, referring to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican. “You allowed your state to be scammed.”But these efforts were not gaining traction. Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp were not bending. And on Dec. 1, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr, announced that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”A Show for LawmakersIt was time to turn up the volume.Mr. Giuliani was on the road, traveling to Phoenix and Lansing, Mich., to meet with lawmakers to convince them of fraud in their states, both lost by Mr. Trump. Now, he was in Atlanta.Even though Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia had been upheld by a state audit, Mr. Giuliani made fantastical claims at a hearing in front of the State Senate, the first of three legislative hearings in December 2020.Rudolph Giuliani at a legislative hearing at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta in December 2020.Rebecca Wright/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressHe repeatedly asserted that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden and changed the election outcome — false claims that became part of Dominion defamation suits against Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and a number of others.Mr. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, also played a video that he said showed election workers pulling suitcases of suspicious ballots from under a table to be secretly counted after Republican poll watchers had left for the night.He accused two workers, a Black mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, of passing a suspicious USB drive between them “like vials of heroin or cocaine.” Investigators later determined that they were passing a mint; Mr. Giuliani recently admitted in a civil suit that he had made false statements about the two women.Other Trump allies also made false claims at the hearing with no evidence to back them up, including that thousands of convicted felons, dead people and others unqualified to vote in Georgia had done so.John Eastman, a lawyer advising the Trump campaign, claimed that “the number of underage individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”That was not remotely true. During an interview last year, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who had made an error, and there were in fact about 2,000 voters who “were only 16 when they registered.”But a review of the data he was using found that Mr. Eastman was referring to the total number of Georgians since the 1920s who were recorded as having registered before they were allowed. Even that number was heavily inflated due to data-entry errors common in large government databases.The truth: Only about a dozen Georgia residents were recorded as being 16 when they registered to vote in 2020, and those appeared to be another data-entry glitch.Trump supporters protesting election results at State Farm Arena in Atlanta in the days following the 2020 election.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe President CallingIn the meantime, Mr. Trump was working the phones, trying to directly persuade Georgia Republican leaders to reject Mr. Biden’s win.He called Governor Kemp on Dec. 5, a day after the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit seeking to have the state’s election results overturned. Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Kemp to compel lawmakers to come back into session and brush aside the will of the state’s voters.Mr. Kemp, who during his campaign for governor had toted a rifle and threatened to “round up illegals” in an ad that seemed an homage to Mr. Trump, rebuffed the idea.Two days later, Mr. Trump called David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House, with a similar pitch. But Mr. Ralston, who died last year, “basically cut the president off,” a member of the special grand jury in Atlanta who heard his testimony later told The Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He just basically took the wind out of the sails.”By Dec. 7, Georgia had completed its third vote count, yet again affirming Mr. Biden’s victory. But Trump allies in the legislature were hatching a new plan to defy the election laws that have long been pillars of American democracy: They wanted to call a special session and pick new electors who would cast votes for Mr. Trump.Never mind that Georgia lawmakers had already approved representatives to the Electoral College reflecting Biden’s win in the state, part of the constitutionally prescribed process for formalizing the election of a new president. The Trump allies hoped that the fake electors and the votes they cast would be used to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results on Jan. 6.Mr. Kemp issued a statement warning them off: “Doing this in order to select a separate slate of presidential electors is not an option that is allowed under state or federal law.”The Fake Electors MeetRather than back down, Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the emerging plan to enlist slates of bogus electors.Mr. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, to enlist her help, according to Ms. McDaniel’s House testimony. By Dec. 13, as the Supreme Court of Georgia rejected an election challenge from the Trump campaign, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s local director of Election Day operations, emailed the 16 fake electors, directing them to quietly meet in the capitol building in Atlanta the next day.Mr. Trump’s top campaign lawyers were so troubled by the plan that they refused to take part. Still, the president tried to keep up the pressure using his Twitter account. “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is,” he wrote in a post just after midnight on Dec. 14, adding, “Demand this clown call a Special Session.”Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, at a news conference following the election in 2020.Al Drago for The New York TimesLater that day, the bogus electors met at the Statehouse. They signed documents that claimed they were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors,” even though they were not.In the end, their effort was rebuffed by Mr. Pence.In his testimony to House investigators, Mr. Sinners later reflected on what took place: “I felt ashamed,” he said.Moves in the White HouseWith other efforts failing, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, got personally involved. Just before Christmas, he traveled to suburban Cobb County, Ga., during its audit of signatures on mail-in absentee ballots, which had been requested by Mr. Kemp.Mr. Meadows tried to get into the room where state investigators were verifying the signatures. He was turned away. But he did meet with Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, to discuss the audit process.During the visit, Mr. Meadows put Mr. Trump on the phone with the lead investigator for the secretary of state’s office, Frances Watson. “I won Georgia by a lot, and the people know it,” Mr. Trump told her. “Something bad happened.”Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta at the time, believed that Mr. Meadows’s visit was “highly unusual,” adding in his House testimony, “I don’t recall that ever happening in the history of the U.S.”In Washington, meanwhile, a strange plot was emerging within the Justice Department to help Mr. Trump.Mr. Barr, one of the most senior administration officials to dismiss the claims of fraud, had stepped down as attorney general, and jockeying for power began. Jeffrey Clark, an unassuming lawyer who had been running the Justice Department’s environmental division, attempted to go around the department’s leadership by meeting with Mr. Trump and pitching a plan to help keep him in office.Mr. Trump, his daughter Ivanka Trump and Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, leaving the White House en route to Georgia in January 2021.Pool photo by Erin ScottMr. Clark drafted a letter to lawmakers in Georgia, dated Dec. 28, falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” regarding the state’s election results. He urged the lawmakers to convene a special session — a dramatic intervention.Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general, later testified that he was so alarmed when he saw the draft letter that he had to read it “twice to make sure I really understood what he was proposing, because it was so extreme.”The letter was never sent.One Last CallStill, Mr. Trump refused to give up. It was time to reach the man who was in charge of election oversight: Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state.On Jan. 2, he called Mr. Raffensperger and asked him to recalculate the vote. It was the call that he would later repeatedly defend as “perfect,” an hourlong mostly one-sided conversation during which Mr. Raffensperger politely but firmly rejected his entreaties.“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president warned, adding, “you know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.”Mr. Raffensperger was staggered. He later wrote that “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.”Mr. Trump seemed particularly intent on incriminating the Black women working for the county elections office, telling Mr. Raffensperger that Ruby Freeman — whom he mentioned 18 times during the call — was “a professional vote-scammer and hustler.”“She’s one of the hot items on the internet, Brad,” Mr. Trump said of the viral misinformation circulating about Ms. Freeman, which had already been debunked by Mr. Raffensperger’s aides and federal investigators.Trump-fueled conspiracy theories about Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Ms. Moss, were indeed proliferating. In testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last year, Ms. Moss recounted Trump supporters forcing their way into her grandmother’s home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter; Ms. Freeman said that she no longer went to the grocery store.Then, on Jan. 4, Ms. Freeman received an unusual overture.Trevian Kutti, a Trump supporter from Chicago who had once worked as a publicist for Kanye West, persuaded Ms. Freeman to meet her at a police station outside Atlanta. Ms. Freeman later said that Ms. Kutti — who told her that “crisis is my thing,” according to a video of the encounter — had tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud.“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Ms. Freeman said in her testimony, adding, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”Cathy Latham, center, in a light blue shirt, in the elections office in Coffee County, Ga., while a team working on Mr. Trump’s behalf made copies of voting equipment data in January 2021.Coffee County, Georgia, via Associated Press‘Every Freaking Ballot’On Jan. 7, despite the fake electors and the rest of the pressure campaign, Mr. Pence certified the election results for Mr. Biden. The bloody, chaotic attack on the Capitol the day before did not stop the final certification of Biden’s victory, but in Georgia, the machinations continued.In a quiet, rural county in the southeastern part of the state, Trump allies gave their mission one more extraordinary try.A few hours after the certification, a small group working on Mr. Trump’s behalf traveled to Coffee County, about 200 miles from Atlanta. A lawyer advising Mr. Trump had hired a company called SullivanStrickler to scour voting systems in Georgia and other states for evidence of fraud or miscounts; some of its employees joined several Trump allies on the expedition.“We scanned every freaking ballot,” Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County with employees of the company on Jan. 7, recalled in a recorded phone conversation. Mr. Hall said that with the blessing of the Coffee County elections board, the team had “scanned all the equipment” and “imaged all the hard drives” that had been used on Election Day.A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler would later release a statement saying of the company, “Knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”Others would have their regrets, too. While Mr. Trump still pushes his conspiracy theories, some of those who worked for him now reject the claims of rigged voting machines and mysterious ballot-stuffed suitcases. As Mr. Sinners, the Trump campaign official, put it in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee last summer, “It was just complete hot garbage.”By then, Ms. Willis’s investigation was well underway.“An investigation is like an onion,” she said in an interview soon after her inquiry began. “You never know. You pull something back, and then you find something else.” More