Willis, Fani T

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      Testimony Suggests Trump Was at Meeting About Accessing Voting Software in 2020

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      In a letter to federal officials, a liberal-leaning group highlighted testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee that described then-President Trump attending a meeting about the plan in December 2020.ATLANTA — Former President Donald J. Trump took part in a discussion about plans to access voting system software in Michigan and Georgia as part of the effort to challenge his 2020 election loss, according to testimony from former Trump advisers. The testimony, delivered to the House Jan. 6 committee, was highlighted on Friday in a letter to federal officials from a liberal-leaning legal advocacy group.Allies of Mr. Trump ultimately succeeded in copying the elections software in those two states, and the breach of voting data in Georgia is being examined by prosecutors as part of a broader criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the presidential election there. The former president’s participation in the discussion of the Georgia plan could increase his risk of possible legal exposure there.A number of Trump aides and allies have recounted a lengthy and acrimonious meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, which one member of the House Jan. 6 committee would later call “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.” During the meeting, then-President Trump presided as his advisers argued about whether they should seek to have federal agents seize voting machines to analyze them for fraud.Testimony to the Jan. 6 committee from one aide who attended the meeting, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary and counselor, was highlighted on Friday in a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from Free Speech for People, a liberal nonprofit legal advocacy group. Mr. Lyons recounted that during the meeting, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, opposed seizing voting machines and spoke of how the Trump campaign was instead “going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” and that the access would be “voluntary.”Other attendees offered similar testimony to the committee, which released its final report on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in late December. Among those involved in the Oval Office discussion were two prominent pro-Trump conspiracy theorists: Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who spread numerous falsehoods after the 2020 election and who also discussed Mr. Giuliani’s comments in her testimony.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is trying to clarify Mr. Trump’s role in a number of efforts to overturn his November 2020 election loss in Georgia — including the plan to gain access to voting machine data and software — and determine whether to recommend indictments for Mr. Trump or any of his allies for violating state laws.A spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office declined to comment Friday on Mr. Lyons’s testimony. Marissa Goldberg, an Atlanta-area lawyer representing Mr. Trump in Georgia, did not respond to a request for comment.In its letter, Free Speech for People argued that the testimony and other details that have been made public prove that Mr. Trump “was, at a minimum, aware” of an “unlawful, multistate plot” to access and copy voting system software. The group urged the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to conduct “a vigorous and swift investigation.”On Jan. 7, 2021, a small group working on behalf of Mr. Trump traveled to rural Coffee County, Ga., some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, and gained access to sensitive election data; subsequent visits by pro-Trump figures were captured on video surveillance cameras.The group’s first visit to Coffee County occurred on the same day that Congress certified President Biden’s victory; the certification had been delayed by the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. The visitors to Coffee County apparently saw it as an ideal place to gather intelligence on what they viewed as voting irregularities: At one point, video footage shows the then-chair of the Coffee County Republican Party, Cathy Latham, appearing to welcome into the building the members of a forensics company hired by Ms. Powell.Ms. Latham was also one of the 16 pro-Trump fake electors whom Georgia Republicans had assembled in an effort to reverse the election results there.Text messages from that period indicate that some Trump allies seeking evidence of election fraud had considered other uses for the Coffee County election data and their analyses of it. One cybersecurity consultant aiding in the effort even raised the possibility, in a text message to other Trump allies in mid-January 2021, of using a report on Coffee County election data “to try to decertify” a highly consequential United States Senate runoff election that Democrats had just won in Georgia. CNN reported on the existence of that text message on Friday.The Trump allies who traveled to Coffee County copied elections software used across the state and uploaded it on the internet, creating the potential for future election manipulation, according to David Cross, a lawyer involved in civil litigation over election security in Georgia filed by the Coalition for Good Governance. The Coffee County data was also used earlier this year in a presentation to conservative activists that included unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, The Los Angeles Times has reported.Some of those involved with the Coffee County effort came to regret it. A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler, the consulting firm hired by Ms. Powell to help gain access to the county’s voting machines, would later release a statement saying that, “With the benefit of hindsight, and knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.” More

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      Atlanta Prosecutor Seeks Removal of Lawyer in Trump Case

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      The lawyer represents 10 Georgia Republicans who were part of a plan to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election and keep Donald J. Trump in power.The lead prosecutor investigating election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia filed a motion on Tuesday accusing two defense lawyers ​​in the case of misconduct. The prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., sought to have one of the lawyers, Kimberly B. Debrow, thrown off the proceedings.Ms. Debrow represents 10 Georgia Republicans who were part of a bogus slate of electors for Mr. Trump under a broader plan to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election and keep him in power. According to the motion, some of the electors recently told prosecutors that Ms. Debrow and another attorney, Holly Pierson, had not informed them of offers of immunity in exchange for cooperation that were made last year.The filing noted that Ms. Pierson had previously told the court that she and Ms. Debrow had spoken to their clients about potential immunity offers, but that “none of their clients were interested.”Ms. Pierson represents David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party, who served as one of the fake electors. She and Ms. Debrow, who are being paid by the state party, had originally represented 11 electors until a judge forced them to separate Mr. Shafer from the other 10. In a statement, Ms. Pierson said that Ms. Willis’s allegations of misconduct were “entirely false,” adding that the court “already has documents in its possession” that prove it.“Sadly, the D.A.’s office continues to seem more interested in media attention, trampling on the constitutional rights of innocent citizens and recklessly defaming its perceived opponents, than in the facts, the law or the truth,” Ms. Pierson’s statement said.Ms. Willis’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether the former president and his allies illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election, and is expected to seek indictments next month. It was not immediately clear if the latest development could delay the timetable.A special grand jury that heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, and its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times this year that Mr. Trump was among them.Central to the investigation are the steps that Trump allies and state party officials took to assemble a group of 16 pro-Trump electors in December 2020, who then submitted bogus slates of Electoral College votes for Mr. Trump in hopes of reversing the election’s outcome in the state. Mr. Trump was directly involved in such efforts, which also took place in a number of other swing states, and called the head of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, to seek her assistance, according to Ms. McDaniel’s testimony to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.At least one of the electors not represented by Ms. Debrow or Ms. Pierson has an immunity deal in place and has cooperated with the prosecution, people with knowledge of the case have said.Ms. Willis’s new motion comes as other electors are seeking immunity deals, with indictment decisions looming. According to a legal analysis by the Brookings Institution, the fake electors could potentially face criminal liability for interfering with elections, among other charges.Ms. Willis has indicated that she may bring broader state racketeering or conspiracy charges, which could apply to some of the bogus electors and a number of other people, including Mr. Trump, who were involved in several schemes to overturn the Georgia results.The filing on Tuesday indicates that Ms. Willis’s office is still actively investigating, even though the special grand jury completed its work in January. During recent discussions with prosecutors, some of the fake electors represented by Ms. Debrow claimed that another elector, whom she also represents, broke the law, but that they themselves “were not party to these additional acts,” according to the new filing.The fact that Ms. Debrow is representing people who are making accusations against another of her clients amounts to an untenable conflict, the district attorney’s office said.“Ms. Debrow’s continued participation in this matter is fraught with conflicts of interest that rise to the level of her being disqualified from this case in its entirety,” the filing said.During their recent discussions with some of the fake electors, investigators in Ms. Willis’s office were told “that no potential offer of immunity was ever brought” to those electors last year, despite assurances to the court by Ms. Pierson.Clark D. Cunningham, a law professor and ethics specialist at Georgia State University who has been following the case closely, said that if the conduct described in the filing did take place, “that’s the kind of conduct that can get a lawyer disbarred.”Ms. Debrow, in a statement late Tuesday, called the motion “baseless, false and offensive.”“None of my clients have committed any crimes, and they necessarily have not implicated themselves or each other in any crimes,” she said.Last year, Ms. Debrow and Ms. Pierson together represented the 10 electors and Mr. Shafer until Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, who is handling the case, decided that Mr. Shafer needed separate counsel. Mr. Shafer has been informed that he is among the targets of the investigation who could face criminal charges, according to people with knowledge of the case.Mr. Trump’s legal team, in a filing in March, assailed the special grand jury proceedings as “confusing, flawed and, at times, blatantly unconstitutional.”The Atlanta case is not the only legal issue Mr. Trump faces. Earlier this month, the former president pleaded not guilty in Manhattan to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, in a case tied to his role in a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. He is also under investigation by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, for his role in the events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and retaining sensitive government documents at his home in Florida. More

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      Georgia Looms Next After Trump’s Indictment in New York

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      Former President Donald J. Trump now faces a very different legal challenge in the culmination of a more than two-year Atlanta investigation into election interference.ATLANTA — The indictment of Donald J. Trump in New York over hush-money payments to a porn star was a global spectacle, with the former president glumly returning to his old stomping grounds in Manhattan as TV networks closely tracked his procession of black SUVs on their way to the courthouse.But strip away the high drama, and the actual charging document in the case was far less grand — 34 felony counts of a fairly narrow and common bookkeeping charge that Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, described as the “bread and butter” of his office’s white-collar criminal prosecutions.In Georgia, however, there is another criminal investigation of Mr. Trump nearing completion, this one also led by a local prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County. While nothing is certain, there are numerous signs that she may go big, with a more kaleidoscopic indictment charging not only Mr. Trump, but perhaps a dozen or more of his allies.Her investigation has targeted a wide range of conduct centered around efforts to subvert the democratic process and overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss. Nearly 20 people are already known to have been told that they are targets who could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.For Mr. Trump, the possibility of a second and potentially more complex criminal indictment in another state underscores the blizzard of legal challenges he is facing, even as he emerges as the clear front-runner among Republican presidential candidates.For Ms. Willis, the choice to pursue a narrowly focused indictment or more a sprawling one — a classic prosecutor’s dilemma — carries with it potential risks and benefits on both sides. And American history offers few examples in which the stakes are so high.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., has said that seeking an indictment under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute is an option that she is considering.Audra Melton for The New York Times“Certainly prosecutors would have this conversation of what’s in the best interest of justice and what is strategically preferable for a case,” said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former federal prosecutor. A narrow case can be easier for jurors to understand. But it is also possible to go “too narrow,” Ms. McQuade said, denying a jury the ability to see the entire scope of a defendant’s criminal behavior.If, on the other hand, a wide-ranging scheme is charged, “you allow them to see the full scope of criminal conduct,” she said. But going big could cause jurors to become lost amid a profusion of evidence, with a long trial increasing the possibility of a mistrial.In Georgia, the investigation is focused on myriad efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow loss in Georgia after his 2020 election defeat, including his January 2021 phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” him enough votes to win.Mr. Trump is also under investigation by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, for his role in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his decisions to retain sensitive government documents at his home in Florida.If Ms. Willis chooses to seek indictments in the Georgia case, she may do so after a new grand jury begins its work in the second week of May, though nothing is set in stone. Typically, presenting such cases to a regular grand jury is a short process that takes a day or two.The wide scope of the investigation has been evident for months, and Ms. Willis has said that seeking an indictment under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute is an option that she is considering. Like the similar federal law, the Georgia RICO statute allows prosecutors to bundle what may seem to be unrelated crimes committed by a host of different people if those crimes are perceived to be in support of a common objective.Election workers counted absentee ballots in Atlanta in 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesMs. Willis has extensive experience with racketeering cases, including a case she won involving a group of public-school educators accused of altering students’ standardized tests. Her office is currently pursuing racketeering charges against two gangs connected to the hip-hop world, including one led by the Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams, who performs as Young Thug.“I think jurors are very, very intelligent,” Ms. Willis said at a news conference in August, in which she announced a racketeering case against a third Atlanta-area gang known as Drug Rich. “RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office or law enforcement to tell the whole story. And so we use it as a tool so that they can have all the information they need to make a wise decision.”After starting the Trump investigation in February 2021, Ms. Willis’s office sought the aid of a special grand jury to gather and consider evidence. In Georgia, such juries do not have indictment powers but can issue subpoenas in long-running investigations. The body was empaneled last spring and completed its work in January after hearing closed-door testimony from 75 witnesses, though its recommendations have remained largely under seal.Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of that special grand jury, strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among more than a dozen people who had been recommended for indictment. “You’re not going to be shocked,” she said, when asked whether Mr. Trump was named in the report. “It’s not rocket science.”Court records show that the special grand jury sought testimony from witnesses including Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff under Mr. Trump; Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, an ally of the former president; and Trevian Kutti, a former self-described publicist for rapper Kanye West who, according to prosecutors, was involved in a plot to force a Fulton County elections worker to give a false confession of election fraud.Documents also show that prosecutors are following numerous narrative threads in Georgia involving either Mr. Trump or his allies. These include Mr. Trump’s phone calls to Georgia officials, including the one to Mr. Raffensperger; specious statements about election fraud made by Mr. Giuliani and others at state legislative hearings; the convening of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College at the Georgia State Capitol; Ms. Kutti’s bizarre meeting with the elections worker, Ruby Freeman, two days after Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump falsely accused Ms. Freeman of being a “vote scammer”; and a plot by allies of Mr. Trump involving the copying of sensitive election software in rural Coffee County, Ga.In Georgia, the investigation is focused on efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia after his 2020 election defeat, including his January 2021 phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to win.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe battle lines have already been drawn. Mr. Trump has steadfastly maintained his innocence and used inflammatory language to assail the prosecutors in both Georgia and New York. And last month, his legal team in Georgia filed a 52-page motion, with more than 400 additional pages of exhibits, challenging a case that has yet to be filed. Legal experts saw it as a sign of what’s to come.“That’s indicative of the type of motions you’ll see if there’s an indictment,” said Melissa D. Redmon, a law professor at the University of Georgia who has been a prosecutor in Fulton and Clayton Counties. “Every single step is going to be challenged from the beginning.”In New York, Mr. Bragg said he, too, was focusing on crimes that thwarted the democratic process, though these were from the 2016 campaign. In a statement, he said that Mr. Trump had “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.” He is accused of covering up a potential sex scandal involving the porn star Stormy Daniels.Mr. Trump more than once has compared his legal tribulations to those of the notorious Chicago mob boss Al Capone. He said on social media, as recently as February, that he had more lawyers working for him than Capone, who was famously found guilty in 1931 and sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion — hardly the most lurid or troubling of his many misdeeds.Mr. Bragg’s decision in New York opened him up to intense criticism from Republicans, who have called the charges flimsy and politically motivated, and the alleged offenses insufficient to merit the nation’s first indictment of a former president. Even some Democrats note that the New York charges seem pedestrian compared with the allegations looming against Mr. Trump elsewhere.“Is it as problematic as Jan. 6 or what happened at Mar-a-Lago? No,” David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said recently, referring to federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t investigate it.”If Ms. Willis brings a sprawling RICO case, it could present its own problems, said Michael J. Moore, a former U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. Asking a jury to consider multiple acts that do not tie directly back to Mr. Trump might make it more difficult “to point the finger at him with the strength that you might have been able to in a simpler case,” he said.Mr. Moore also wondered how far a trial involving Mr. Trump would stretch into the coming presidential election season. He noted that the jury selection process in the multi-defendant racketeering case involving Young Thug had been going on for roughly four months, and that the judge in the case had estimated the trial could take up to nine months.“We’re just going to have to face the reality that we’re going to have to deal with that,” he said. More

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      Georgia Trump Investigation Poses Challenges for Federal Prosecutors

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      The concurrent investigations create complications for separate teams relying on similar evidence, some of the same criminal targets and a small, shared pool of witnesses.WASHINGTON — The Fulton County district attorney’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia is nearing a decision point, posing fresh challenges for federal prosecutors considering charging him in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The long-running investigation by Fani T. Willis in Atlanta substantially overlaps with the broader inquiry into Mr. Trump’s conduct by the special counsel, Jack Smith, in Washington. Both rely on similar documentary evidence, some of the same criminal targets and a small, shared pool of witnesses with knowledge of the former president’s actions and intent.Mr. Trump’s critics believe the concurrent investigations provide assurance that the former president and architects of the scheme to install fake electors in battleground states, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and John C. Eastman, will be held to account.But they also create complications for two aggressive investigative teams pursuing some of the same witnesses, increasing the possibility of discrepancies in testimony that Mr. Trump’s lawyers could exploit. Ms. Willis and her team have a head start, having begun their work in February 2021, and are expected to seek indictments early next month. That raises the pressure on Mr. Smith, who has pledged to work quickly, to move even faster, according to current and former prosecutors.The investigation by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, overlaps with the broader inquiry into Mr. Trump’s conduct by the special counsel, Jack Smith, in Washington.Audra Melton for The New York Times“Normally, the lead federal prosecutor just picks up the phone and tries to work it out with the local prosecutor, but it’s obviously a lot more difficult in a case of this magnitude,” said Channing D. Phillips, who served as acting United States attorney for the District of Columbia from March to November 2021. “The stakes of not working things out are incredibly high.”The investigative efforts are by no means the same. Mr. Smith’s purview extends into other areas, most notably the investigation into whether Mr. Trump mishandled classified documents that were found at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office.The federal investigation into Jan. 6 focuses on several charges, according to two law enforcement officials: wire fraud for emails sent between those pushing the false electors scheme; mail fraud for sending the names of electors to the National Archives and Records Administration; and conspiracy, which covers the coordination effort. (A fourth possible charge, obstruction of an official proceeding before Congress, has been used in many cases brought against participants in the Capitol attack.)And some of Ms. Willis’s work has been more parochial in nature, including a review of false statements that Trump allies like Mr. Giuliani made at state legislative hearings in December 2020.Justice Department officials said the indictment of Mr. Trump by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, over a hush money payment to a porn star will have little effect on their investigations. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan passed on bringing a similar case.But the Georgia investigation is entirely different. The Justice Department has no authority to order local prosecutors to step aside in areas where the investigations do overlap, unless their investigations conflict with federal law. In fact, internal department rules discourage indicting the subjects of prior state prosecutions.Moreover, there is “no formal rule book” for settling jurisdictional questions or for deciding the chronological sequence of prosecutions, and disputes are usually hashed out informally, as they arise, on an ad hoc basis, said Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.Local and federal prosecutors routinely work together to coordinate charging decisions based on which jurisdiction offers better chances of conviction or a stiffer sentence. But in many high-profile cases, prosecutors view dueling investigations as a nuisance or even a hazard.Witnesses, even forthright ones, sometimes offer different accounts when interviewed by lawyers representing different offices. Differences between state and federal laws can lead to damaging conflicts over strategy and priorities. Then there is what is known as “witness fatigue,” when important players simply grow tired or uncooperative after running gantlets of government inquisitors.Fulton County prosecutors are conducting a wide-ranging investigation that includes calls made by Mr. Trump to exert pressure on state officials and efforts by the former president and his allies to replace legitimate electors in Georgia with pro-Trump alternates. Last year, Ms. Willis’s office sought to interview two key figures who had served in the Justice Department: Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general in the waning days of the Trump administration, and Jeffrey Clark, an assistant attorney general who led the department’s environmental division.Shortly after Mr. Trump left office, it emerged that Mr. Clark had tried to circumvent the department’s leaders and aid Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in power. He even drafted a letter that was to have been sent to lawmakers in Georgia falsely claiming that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” that would affect the state’s election results and urging lawmakers to convene a special session.Mr. Donoghue was alarmed when he saw the draft, according to testimony he provided to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack.Aides to Ms. Willis filed what are known as Touhy requests, named after a 1951 Supreme Court case. Under the rule, local prosecutors are required to get authorization from the Justice Department to question its current or former employees. But the requests were ultimately rejected.It is not clear why the department rejected the requests. But both men were at the center of an investigation into Mr. Clark’s conduct by the Justice Department’s inspector general that was subsequently handed off to Mr. Smith’s team.A spokesman for Mr. Smith declined to comment.The possibility of an indictment in the Georgia investigation next month raises the pressure on the special counsel, Jack Smith, to move even faster, according to current and former prosecutors.Peter Dejong/Associated PressFulton County prosecutors also declined to comment. The forewoman of an Atlanta special grand jury that issued an advisory report in January, which has remained largely under seal, appeared to hint in an interview this year that it had recommended that Mr. Trump be indicted.The Atlanta case has put additional pressure on Mr. Smith. Justice Department officials have said they wanted to make charging decisions in the spring or summer, before the 2024 election kicks into high gear — which raises the question of whether Mr. Smith will try to bring charges before Ms. Willis does.“Looking at this as a federal prosecutor, I would just want to go first,” said Joyce Vance, a University of Alabama law professor who served as the U.S. attorney in Birmingham from 2009 to 2017. “I don’t want to have to try my case after it’s already been brought in a state court. You really want to go first to avoid problems with witnesses, and other technical or legal problems.”If Ms. Willis moves first, Mr. Smith’s team would have to obtain department approval to waive an internal rule that precludes “multiple prosecutions and punishments for substantially the same act(s).”Demonstrators rallying for Mr. Trump near his Mar-a-Lago estate this week.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThat is not considered a high bar, however. Mr. Smith would simply have to show that the state case did not completely cover all the issues addressed in a federal case. It is believed that exemption was recently used to obtain a hate crimes conviction against three men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man who was jogging through their neighborhood.John P. Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said he often requested that local prosecutors step aside when he thought their investigations conflicted with his. He suggested that Mr. Smith could at least consider asking Ms. Willis to do the same.“D.O.J. and state prosecutors do not play well in the same sandbox, but at the end of the day, if it gets into a tug of war, D.O.J. is usually going to win,” he said. “The federal government just has more power as far as compelling witnesses, more power to assign people to a case and more oomph, in general.”While prosecutors should clear up disputes over access to witnesses and documents, it is vital that the two efforts be seen as independent and fact-driven and not a “witch hunt,” as Mr. Trump has described all of the investigations into him, former Justice Department officials say.“I don’t think they would coordinate on things like timing or language of the charges or anything like that — although that wouldn’t be illegal,” said Mary McCord, a former top official in the department’s national security division who is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center.“But the goal here is avoid any appearance that they are coordinating prosecutions for political purposes,” added Ms. McCord.Glenn Thrush More

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      Dissecting Charges That Could Arise From the Trump Investigations

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      Prosecutors in New York, Georgia and the Justice Department face complex choices about what crimes to charge if they decide to indict Donald Trump.WASHINGTON — Prosecutors like to say that they investigate crimes, not people. The looming decision by the Manhattan district attorney about whether to indict former President Donald J. Trump on charges related to an alleged hush money payment to a porn actress is highlighting the complexity of the legal calculations being made by prosecutors in New York, Georgia and the Justice Department as they examine Mr. Trump’s conduct on a number of fronts.The investigations — which also focus on Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after leaving office — are confronting prosecutors with tough choices. They must decide whether and how to charge not just Mr. Trump, but also associates who could face jeopardy for actions to which he was not a direct party, like mail or wire fraud for communications that he did not participate in.The publicly known understanding of the evidence is incomplete. It is not clear, for example, in several instances what facts investigators have been able to gather about Mr. Trump’s personal knowledge, directions and intentions related to several of the matters.Here is a look at some of the criminal laws that different prosecutors appear to be weighing and how they might apply to Mr. Trump’s actions.Stormy Daniels was paid $130,000.Markus Schreiber/Associated PressThe Stormy Daniels Hush Money PaymentOverviewAlvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, appears to be nearing a decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump with a crime related to his $130,000 hush money payment just before the 2016 election to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels, who has said they had an extramarital affair. Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, sent the money to Ms. Daniels, and the Trump Organization reimbursed him over the course of 2017, according to a 2018 federal court filing in Mr. Cohen’s case. Mr. Trump’s business concealed the true purpose of the payments, the filing said, by recording them as having been for a legal retainer that did not exist.Potential charge: Bookkeeping fraudThe New York Times has reported that the case may include a potential charge of falsifying business records under Article 175 of the New York Penal Law. A conviction for a felony version of bookkeeping fraud carries a sentence of up to four years.To prove that Mr. Trump committed that offense, prosecutors would seemingly need evidence showing that he had knowingly caused subordinates to make a false entry in his company’s records “with intent to defraud.” For the action to be a felony rather than a misdemeanor, prosecutors would also need to show that Mr. Trump falsified the business records with the intention of committing, aiding or concealing a second crime.The public understanding of Mr. Bragg’s theory of the case remains murky and incomplete. The district attorney’s office has reportedly weighed invoking alleged campaign-finance violations as that intended second crime, which could raise complications. Among other things, presidential elections are governed by federal law, and it is not clear whether Mr. Bragg has found a theory by which a state campaign law covered Mr. Trump’s actions, or if a state prosecutor can cite a law over which he lacks jurisdiction. It remains possible that Mr. Bragg has obtained nonpublic evidence of some other intended offense, like if there was any initial intention to deduct the payments as a business expense on state tax returns.Bookkeeping fraud has a two-year statute of limitations as a misdemeanor and a five-year one as a felony, both of which would normally have expired for payments made to Mr. Cohen in 2017. But New York law extends those limits to cover periods when a defendant was continuously out of state, as when Mr. Trump was while living in the White House or at his home in Florida. In addition, during the pandemic, New York’s statute of limitations was extended by more than a year.Mr. Trump has claimed — without evidence — that he declassified all the files taken to Mar-a-Lago.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe Mar-a-Lago DocumentsOverviewJack Smith, a special counsel for the federal Justice Department, is investigating matters related to Mr. Trump’s handling of several hundred documents marked as classified that he kept at his Florida club and home, Mar-a-Lago, after leaving office, and how Mr. Trump resisted efforts by the government to retrieve all of those files. After the Justice Department obtained a subpoena for all remaining files marked as classified, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, M. Evan Corcoran, turned over some while helping to draft a statement falsely saying those were all that remained. In August, the F.B.I. executed a search warrant and found 103 more, including in Mr. Trump’s desk.Prosecutors last week persuaded a federal judge that Mr. Corcoran should be compelled to answer more questions from a grand jury investigating the documents matter, notwithstanding attorney-client privilege. That means the judge agreed with prosecutors that the situation met the threshold for an exception for lawyer communications or work that apparently helped further a crime.Potential charge: Unauthorized retention of national security documentsOne of the charges the F.B.I. listed in its affidavit for the Mar-a-Lago search warrant was Section 793(e) of Title 18, a provision of the Espionage Act. Prosecutors would have to show that Mr. Trump knew he was still in possession of the documents after leaving the White House and failed to comply when the government asked him to return them and then subpoenaed him. The theoretical penalty is up to 10 years per such document.Prosecutors would also have to show that the documents related to the national defense, that they were closely held and that their disclosure could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Although Mr. Trump has claimed — without evidence — that he declassified all the files taken to Mar-a-Lago, prosecutors would not need to prove that they were still classified because the Espionage Act predates the classification system and does not refer to it as an element..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Potential charge: ObstructionAnother charge in the F.B.I. affidavit was Section 1519 of Title 18, which makes it a crime to conceal records to obstruct an official effort. Prosecutors would need to show that Mr. Trump knew he still had files that were responsive to the National Archives’ efforts to take custody of presidential records and the Justice Department’s subpoena for files marked as classified, and that he intentionally caused his subordinates to fail to turn them all over while leading officials to believe they had complied. The penalty is up to 20 years per offense.Potential charge: Mishandling official documentsA third charge in the affidavit was Section 2071 of Title 18, which criminalizes the concealment or destruction of official documents, whether or not they were related to national security. Among other things, former aides to Mr. Trump have recounted how he sometimes ripped up official documents, and the National Archives has said that some of the Trump White House paper records transferred to it had been torn up — some of which were taped back together and some of which were not reconstructed. The penalty is up to three years per offense plus a ban on holding federal office, although the latter is most likely unconstitutional, legal experts say.Potential charge: Contempt of courtSection 402 of Title 18 makes it a crime to willfully disobey a court order, like the grand jury subpoena Mr. Trump received in May 2022 requiring him to turn over all documents with classification markings remaining in his possession. It carries a penalty of a fine of up to $1,000 and up to six months in prison. To bring this charge, prosecutors would need evidence showing he knew that he was still holding onto other files with classification markings during and after his representatives purported to comply with the subpoena.Potential charge: Conspiracy to make a false statementSection 1001 of Title 18 makes it a crime to make a false statement to a law enforcement officer about a fact material to the officer’s investigation, and Section 371 makes it a crime to conspire with another person to break that or any other law. It carries a penalty of up to five years. Prosecutors would need to be able to show that Mr. Trump and Mr. Corcoran knew and agreed that the lawyer should lie to the Justice Department about there being no further documents responsive to the subpoena.Ballots being recounted in Atlanta, which is part of Fulton County, in 2020.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe Georgia Election Law InvestigationOverviewFani T. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., is investigating events related to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn President Biden’s narrow victory in that state in the 2020 election. Among other things, in a phone call that was recorded and leaked, Mr. Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and pressured him to “find” enough additional votes for him to flip the outcome.Ms. Willis is also investigating Trump associates’ efforts to get 16 of his supporters to falsely declare themselves to be an alternative slate of electors from Georgia, which helped lay the groundwork for Mr. Trump’s push to get Vice President Mike Pence to reject the true results when Congress met to certify the election on Jan. 6, 2021.Potential charges: Election code violationsMost elections offenses in Georgia’s code are misdemeanors, but there are several felony charges that Ms. Willis may be considering, based on the same basic set of facts. These include Section 21-2-603, which makes it a crime to conspire with another person to violate a provision of the election code, and Section 21-2-604, which makes it a crime to solicit another person to commit election fraud.To bring such a charge against Mr. Trump, prosecutors would need to cite another election law whose violation was his alleged goal. It is possible, for example, that they might be considering contending that Mr. Trump’s pushing Mr. Raffensperger to “find” additional votes amounted to implicitly asking him to violate a provision that makes it a felony for the secretary of state to alter official election records, but Mr. Trump’s language was not explicit.Potential charge: RacketeeringMs. Willis has indicated that she is considering bringing charges under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. So-called RICO laws are tools that were developed to make it easier to go after organized criminal enterprises, and can be used against members of any group that engaged in a pattern of criminal activities with a common purpose. A conviction would carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.To convict Mr. Trump under Georgia’s RICO law, Section 16-14-4, prosecutors would need to show that as part of his efforts with associates to overturn Georgia’s election results, he conspired with others or engaged in two or more offenses from a list of several dozen offenses, most of which are violent crimes but which include things like solicitation, forgery and making materially false statements to state officials.The House Jan. 6 committee made a criminal referral of Mr. Trump and others to the Justice Department.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe 2020 Election and Jan. 6OverviewMr. Smith, the special counsel, is also conducting a broader federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and the events of Jan. 6. The House committee that carried out the investigation into the riot last year made a criminal referral of Mr. Trump and others to the Justice Department. While that was of largely symbolic value — the department already had an investigation open and Congress has no authority to prosecute — the analysis in the panel’s final report sets out possible charges that Mr. Smith could also consider.Potential charge: Obstruction of an official proceedingOne criminal accusation the Jan. 6 committee leveled against Mr. Trump was the attempted corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, under Section 1512(c) of Title 18. It is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors have used this law to charge about 300 ordinary Jan. 6 defendants — people who rioted — and an appeals court is currently weighing whether that charge has been appropriately applied in those cases. But even if the judiciary upholds use of the charge, such a case against Mr. Trump would be very different since he did not physically participate in the riot.The Jan. 6 committee argued that he could be charged with it based on two sets of actions. First, it argued that his summoning of supporters to Washington and urging them to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” violated that law. Mr. Trump’s defense team would surely seek to raise doubt about whether he intended for his supporters to riot, including because he also told them to protest “peacefully.”Second, the committee portrayed as criminal obstruction the scheme to recruit so-called fake electors from various states and pressuring Mr. Pence to cite their existence as a basis to delay certifying the election. The panel stressed how Mr. Trump had been told that there was no truth to his claims of a stolen election, which it said proved his intentions were corrupt. Among other things, Mr. Trump’s defense team would surely argue that because a lawyer, John Eastman, advised him to take those steps, there is no proof he understood that doing so was illegal.Potential charge: Conspiracy to defraud the United StatesA second criminal accusation leveled by the Jan. 6 committee was Section 371 of Title 18, which makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to conspire with another person to defraud the government. The panel cited an array of evidence about Mr. Trump’s interactions with various lawyers and aides in pursuit of his effort to prevent the certification of Mr. Biden’s electoral victory. The committee also argued that prosecutors could prove Mr. Trump intended to be deceitful via evidence that he was repeatedly told that his allegations of widespread voter fraud were baseless.Potential charge: Conspiracy to make a false statementThe Jan. 6 committee highlighted the efforts to submit slates of fake electors to Congress and to the National Archives. As with other such potential charges, a key challenge for prosecutors would be proving Mr. Trump’s intentions and understanding beyond a reasonable doubt.Potential charge: InsurrectionThe committee also pointed to Section 2383 of Title 18, which makes it a crime to incite, assist or “aid and comfort” an insurrection against the authority and laws of the federal government. The panel emphasized in particular how Mr. Trump refused for hours to take steps to call off the rioters despite being implored by aides to do so, and an inflammatory tweet he sent about Mr. Pence in the midst of the violence.While the committee said the events of Jan. 6 met the standard for an insurrection, it is notable that prosecutors have not accused any of the Jan. 6 defendants to date of that offense — even those they charged with seditious conspiracy. More

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      Little-Known Lawyer, a Trump Ally, Draws Scrutiny in Georgia

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      A special grand jury looking into election meddling interviewed Robert Cheeley, a sign that false claims made by Donald J. Trump’s allies loom large in the case.ATLANTA — At a Georgia State Senate hearing a few weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost his bid for re-election, Rudolph W. Giuliani began making outlandish claims. “There are 10 ways to demonstrate that this election was stolen, that the votes were phony, that there were a lot of them — dead people, felons, phony ballots,” he told the assembled legislators.After Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, a like-minded Georgia lawyer named Robert Cheeley presented video clips of election workers handling ballots at the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta. Mr. Cheeley spent 15 minutes laying out specious assertions that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes, saying their actions “should shock the conscience of every red blooded Georgian” and likening what he said had happened to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.His comments mostly flew under the radar at the time, overshadowed by the election fraud claims made by Mr. Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and by other higher-profile figures. But Mr. Cheeley’s testimony did not end up in the dustbin. He was among the witnesses questioned last year by a special grand jury in Atlanta that investigated election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies, the grand jury’s forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview last month.Robert Cheeley reads through Georgia law during a hearing at the Henry County Courthouse in McDonough, Ga., in 2021.Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe fact that Mr. Cheeley was called to appear before the special grand jury adds to the evidence that although the Atlanta investigation has focused on Mr. Trump’s biggest areas of legal exposure — the calls he made to pressure local officials and his involvement in a scheme to draft bogus presidential electors — the false claims made by his allies at legislative hearings have also been of significant interest. Mr. Giuliani has been told that he is among the targets who could face charges in the investigation.“He did testify before us,” Ms. Kohrs said of Mr. Cheeley in the interview.His appearance left such an impression that Ms. Kohrs began reciting from memory the beginning of Mr. Cheeley’s remarks at the State Senate hearing. Asked if his testimony to the special grand jury had been credible, she said, “I’m going to tell you that Mr. Cheeley was not one that I’m going to forget.”Mr. Cheeley did not return calls for comment for this article, and he was not present when a reporter visited his office on Wednesday in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. The fact that he testified before the special grand jury was not previously known.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More

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      As Trump Inquiry Continues, Republicans Seek Oversight of Georgia Prosecutors

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      The proposals are part of a broader push by conservative lawmakers around the country to rein in district attorneys whom they consider too liberal.ATLANTA — To Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Atlanta, several bills in the Georgia legislature that would make it easier to remove local prosecutors are racist and perhaps retaliatory for her ongoing investigation of former President Donald J. Trump. To the Republican sponsors of the bills, they are simply a way to ensure that prosecutors enforce the laws of the state, whether they agree with them or not.Two of the measures under consideration would create a new state oversight board that could punish or remove prosecutors for loosely defined reasons, including “willful misconduct.” A third would sharply reduce the number of signatures required to seek a recall of a district attorney. The proposals are part of a broader push by conservative lawmakers around the country to rein in prosecutors whom they consider too liberal, and who in some cases are refusing to prosecute low-level drug crimes or enforce strict new anti-abortion laws.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida last year suspended a Democratic prosecutor in the Tampa area, Andrew Warren, after Mr. Warren said, among other things, that he would not prosecute anyone seeking abortions. The Republican-controlled Pennsylvania House voted in November to impeach Larry Krasner, the liberal district attorney in Philadelphia. And a Republican-backed bill currently under consideration in the Indiana legislature would allow a special prosecuting attorney, appointed by the state attorney general, to step in if a local prosecutor is “categorically refusing to prosecute certain crimes.”The debate in Georgia unfolding amid mounting concerns over urban crime, particularly in Atlanta. But Ms. Willis has been a centrist law-and-order prosecutor who has targeted some prominent local rappers in a sprawling gang case. She is also part of the changing face of justice in Georgia: The state now has a record number of minority prosecutors — 14 of them — up from five in 2020, the year Ms. Willis, who is Black, was voted into office. And of course, there is the Trump inquiry, the latest accelerant to the partisan conflagrations that have consumed the increasingly divided state for years. The subject of Ms. Willis’s investigation is whether Mr. Trump and his allies tried to flout Georgia’s democratic process with numerous instances of interference after his narrow 2020 election loss in the state. Ms. Willis, center, with her team during proceedings to seat the special purpose grand jury in Fulton County in May 2022.Ben Gray/Associated PressMs. Willis has said she is considering building a racketeering or conspiracy case. Anticipation is rising, particularly since the forewoman of a special grand jury charged with looking into the matter spoke publicly last month, saying that the jury’s final report, which is still largely under wraps, recommended indictments for more than a dozen people.Ms. Willis must now decide whether to bring a case to a regular grand jury, which can issue indictments. A decision ‌could come as early as ‌May.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More

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      Trump Legal Team Assails Georgia Inquiry

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      The lawyers said public comments by the forewoman of the special grand jury that investigated election interference had “poisoned” the process. But they have yet to challenge anything in court.ATLANTA — Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said late Wednesday that details divulged this week by the forewoman of a special grand jury investigating election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies had “poisoned” the Georgia inquiry. As of Thursday morning, however, the two lawyers had not filed any motions in court challenging the inquiry. Nor would they discuss what form such a challenge might take, saying only that they were weighing their options. “We’re just considering everything,” one of the lawyers, Drew Findling, said.Earlier this week, the forewoman, Emily Kohrs, spoke in interviews with a number of news outlets after The Associated Press identified her through a public records request. She said that the 23-person special grand jury, which can only make recommendations on whether prosecutors should indict, had made such recommendations for more than a dozen people in the case. Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, who is handling the case, will ultimately make charging decisions and bring them to a regular grand jury.Ms. Kohrs declined to name names or say which laws the jurors believed had been broken. But asked if Mr. Trump was among those recommended for indictment, she told The New York Times: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.” Some outside legal experts have said that Ms. Kohrs’s public comments present a headache, if nothing else, for prosecutors because the forewoman’s discussion of some elements of the case could be seen as diminishing the gravity of the proceedings. Others expressed doubt that they would have much impact, if any, on the case, in part because special grand juries cannot bring criminal charges.Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for the Fulton County district attorney’s office, declined to comment on the Trump lawyers’ criticism of the case. He noted that the office had nothing to do with Ms. Kohrs’s media appearances.Mr. Trump is seen as having two main areas of particular legal jeopardy in the Georgia inquiry: the calls he made to pressure state officials to overturn the 2020 election, and his direct involvement in efforts to assemble an alternate slate of electors even after three vote counts affirmed President Biden’s victory in the state. Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More