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      Loyalty to Donald Trump Has Led Rudy Giuliani to Being Indicted

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      It is easy to forget, and in some ways difficult to imagine, that Rudy Giuliani was once revered for his integrity. He was seen by many as a hero long before Sept. 11, a seemingly fearless U.S. attorney who broke the back of the mob, took on Wall Street titans and sent political power brokers to prison.With each sensational indictment handed down by his office in the 1980s, Mr. Giuliani spoke like the priest he almost became about good and evil, and the seductions of power and money.“It’s a rare individual in public office who does not eventually become personally corrupt,” he said in 1988.The comment takes on new meaning when you read through the Georgia grand jury’s indictment, Mr. Giuliani’s first as a defendant. The details make it clear that the crusader of the 1980s and 1990s has completely lost his ability to distinguish right from wrong. He has gone from a moral compass in a city teeming with corruption to a long-ago leader who has descended into a moral void.He stands accused of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to upend the 2020 presidential election. It’s a remarkable irony, and a catastrophic blow to his legacy, that the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, Fani Willis, has brought charges against him under a version of the federal RICO law that Mr. Giuliani famously employed against the Mafia. The indictment also portrays his venal, if stumbling, efforts to employ his old prosecutorial gifts to Donald Trump’s advantage.Mr. Giuliani in mid-November 2020 with a chart about plans to dispute some presidential election results.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesToday Mr. Giuliani is 79 years old and seems lost in a fog, a confused man railing on X, previously known as Twitter, about Joe and Hunter Biden and bragging about decades-old accomplishments as if his work for Mr. Trump had not turned him into a figure of ridicule and contributed to two presidential impeachments. He has been drowning in criminal investigations, lawsuits and defamation cases, and is apparently burning through the vast sums that he earned over his career, much of it from consulting and speaking fees after 9/11. He now makes Cameo videos for $325 apiece.Yet the indictment is a vivid reminder of how dangerous he was in the Trump years. In the former president’s last months in office, an untold number of Trump White House and campaign lawyers and even the attorney general labored to convince Mr. Trump that he had lost the election. But it was Mr. Giuliani who had the president’s ear. And he was telling Mr. Trump that he had won.Predictably, Mr. Trump named him to lead the postelection legal fight. Mr. Giuliani dove into the work, seemingly more than willing to cross legal and ethical lines, evolving from prosecutor to transgressor. He used his understanding of the criminal mind not to enforce the law, but to propagate what the grand jury describes as a conspiracy.A prosecutor’s job is to weave together a compelling story out of a blizzard of facts and paint a vivid picture to jurors in a trial. Mr. Giuliani was a master of the art. As an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in 1974, he accused then-Representative Bertram Podell of being “a United States congressman who agreed to sell the influence of his office for money.” At trial, he conducted a withering cross-examination that rattled the congressman so much that he changed his plea to guilty. It made Mr. Giuliani’s career.His formidable talents brought him to the highest levels of the Justice Department and won him public adoration. With each victory he spoke from a moral pedestal. “If we can teach our entire society that no matter how powerful you are … you have to pay a price when you violate the law,” he said shortly before landing a racketeering conviction in 1987.In the years that followed, he applied those prosecutorial gifts to his own career, cultivating a heroic image: America’s greatest corruption fighter; the mayor who cleaned up New York; the personification of leadership on Sept. 11. The dramatic story line overshadowed acts of callousness — cheating on his wives, according to friends and colleagues; slandering Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed Black man who had been killed by an undercover detective; cashing in on his 9/11 fame; and pursuing political and legal misadventures for President Trump in Ukraine.With his ethical bedrock crumbling, Mr. Giuliani attempted to put his old skills to work in 2020 and spin a gripping story to Mr. Trump’s advantage.On Dec. 3, he brought the stolen election claims to Georgia, a pivotal state that Joe Biden had surprisingly won. He was welcomed by Republicans at a Georgia State Senate committee hearing at the state capital, where he claimed, falsely, that Dominion Voting Systems equipment had turned Trump votes into Biden votes, and that almost 100,000 nonexistent mail-in ballots were counted. Mr. Giuliani looked on as a member of his team falsely characterized a video showing vote counters pulling out ballot containers from under a desk in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on election night and alleged, falsely, that the containers were “suitcases” filled with illegal ballots.A week later, Mr. Giuliani made a presentation to the Georgia House in which he accused two election workers of “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.” (He recently admitted in a civil court filing that he made false statements about the election workers.) The picture he painted in the Georgia House was as vivid as it was dishonest. The Georgia indictment laid it out in great detail.“This is going to be the election that will be the dirtiest election, the most crooked election, the most manipulated election in American history,” Mr. Giuliani said at a third December appearance in front of the Georgia legislature. “Georgia is going to be at the center of it because you have what I call the Zapruder film. … If you can watch that and not realize that this was a major situation of voter fraud, then you’re a fool or a liar.”As he traveled from state to state, hearing to hearing, an increasing number of people inside and outside of the White House threw cold water on his claims. After Georgia’s secretary of state’s office proved his most serious charges patently false, Mr. Giuliani’s accusations began to irk Trump campaign officials.“When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases,” one senior adviser wrote on Dec. 8, according to one of the federal indictments against Trump. “I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” Two days later, Mr. Giuliani was in front of the state legislature, saying, “every single vote should be taken away from Biden.”His fabrications did not stop with false claims about the video. He helped oversee the scheme in which false elector certificates were submitted in favor of Mr. Trump rather than Mr. Biden.Mr. Giuliani had another lawyer send memos to Trump points of contact in several states, explaining how they could mimic legitimate electors, but the memo didn’t mention that they intended to disrupt the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6. When some Trump false electors in Pennsylvania expressed concerns about participating, Mr. Giuliani assured them that the certificates they signed would be used only if Mr. Trump won certain litigation according to one of the federal indictments. He didn’t appear to give any such assurances to the fake electors from other states, and the false certificates with their names were submitted. False electors from Michigan are now facing state charges.On the night of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani placed calls to members of Congress in an attempt to continue to spread the debunked charges in hopes of buying time to delay certification of Mr. Biden’s victory, according to one of the federal indictments against Mr. Trump. “Georgia gave you a number in which 65,000 people who were underage voted,” he said in a phone message that federal prosecutors claim was intended for a U.S. senator. The correct number was zero.After spending years of his life escaping the shadow of his father’s criminal past — Harold Giuliani served a year and four months in Sing Sing for robbing a milkman — Mr. Giuliani put his future and even personal freedom on the line for Mr. Trump. He is now facing prison time himself.Faced with the political irrelevance and collapsing client base that would accompany Mr. Trump’s defeat, he seemingly made a Faustian bargain, working to undermine democracy in order to save his career. He was ultimately thwarted by the rule of law, and his own bumbling. The disaster he has made of his life, and the ruination of his legacy, are of his own making.“I am a basically simple person,” Mr. Giuliani told a reporter back in 1989. “I think there are rules, [and] you have to try to live as best you can by those rules. If those rules are laws, you had better darn well live by them.”After a half-century crafting, enforcing and then breaking those rules, Mr. Giuliani is now faced with the reality that they apply to him.Andrew Kirtzman is the author of “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” for which David Holley served as the researcher.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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      With the Latest Trump Indictment, Mind These Lessons From the South

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      With her sweeping indictment of former President Donald Trump and over a dozen co-conspirators, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney Fani Willis is now set to prosecute her case in a court of law. Just as important, it is essential that she and others continue to explain to the American public why the decision serves a critical purpose beyond the courts and for the health of our constitutional order.The indictment should be situated in the broader arc of American political development, particularly in the South. That history justifies using the criminal justice system to protect the democratic process in Georgia — a critical swing state — for elections now and in the future.We have the benefit of hindsight to heed the great lesson of the Reconstruction era and the period of redemption that followed: When authoritarians attack democracy and lawbreakers are allowed to walk away from those attacks with impunity, they will try again, believing there are no repercussions.We should not make those mistakes again.The period after the American Civil War entrenched many of America’s political ills. Ex-confederates were welcomed back into the body politic without meaningful penance. There were vanishingly few arrests, trials and lengthy punishments. Suffering minimal political disabilities, they could muster enough power to “redeem” Southern governments from biracial coalitions that had considerable sway to remake the South.Examples of democratic decay were regrettably abundant. An early sign occurred in Louisiana. With a multiracial electorate, Reconstruction Louisiana held great promise. During contentious state elections in 1872, Louisiana Democrats intimidated Black voters from casting ballots and corruptly claimed victory. The disputed election spurred political violence to assert white supremacy, including the Colfax Massacre in 1873, where as many as 150 Black citizens were killed in Grant Parish when a white mob sought to take control of the local government.Federal prosecutors brought charges against a number of the perpetrators. But in 1876, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Cruikshank that the federal government could not prosecute private violence under the 14th Amendment because it could only protect citizens against constitutional rights violations by state actors. By its decision, the court gave license to mobs to disrupt the peaceful transition of power with grave consequences.South Carolina could have been a Reconstruction success story. Its state constitution and government reflected the values and priorities of its Black majority. The planter elite attacked the Reconstruction government as a socialist rabble and baselessly mocked elected officials as incompetent. In the lead-up to elections in 1876, political violence brewed across the state, and Democrats secured a narrow victory. But democratic decay was precipitous. Over time, South Carolina imposed new limits on voting, moving precincts into white neighborhoods and creating a confusing system. Legislators passed the Eight Box Law, which required voters to submit a separate ballot for each elected office in a different box and invalidated any votes submitted in the wrong box. This created a barrier to voting for people who could not read.The lack of repercussions for political violence and voter suppression did little to curb the impulse to crush biracial democracy by mob rule. The backsliding spread like cancer to Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina.In Georgia, just before the state was initially readmitted to the Union, Georgians elected a Republican to the governorship and a Republican majority to the state senate. Yet the promise of a strong Republican showing was a mirage. Conservative Republicans and Democrats joined forces to expel more than two dozen Black legislators from the Georgia General Assembly in September 1868. From there, tensions only grew. Political violence erupted throughout the state as elections drew closer that fall, most tragically in Camilla, where white supremacists killed about a dozen Black Georgians at a Republican political rally.The democratic failures of that era shared three common attributes. The political process was neither free nor fair, as citizens were prevented from voting and lawful votes were discounted. The Southern Redeemers refused to recognize their opponents as legitimate electoral players. And conservatives abandoned the rule of law, engaging in intimidation and political violence to extinguish the power of multiracial political coalitions.At bottom, the theory behind the Fulton County indictment accuses Mr. Trump and his allies of some of these same offenses.The phone call between Mr. Trump and the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (“Fellas, I need 11,000 votes,” Mr. Trump demanded) is crucial evidence backing for a charge relating to soliciting a public officer to violate his oath of office. Mr. Trump’s coercive tactics persisted even though he should have known that Joe Biden fairly won the state’s Electoral College votes. But facts never seemed to matter. Mr. Trump’s false allegation of a rigged contest — a claim he and others made well before voting began — was grounded in a belief that opposition to his re-election was never legitimate.Mr. Trump and his allies could not accept that an emerging multiracial coalition of voters across the state rejected him. Election deniers focused on Atlanta, a city whose Black residents total about half the population, as the place where Georgia’s election was purportedly stolen. The dangerous mix of racial grievance and authoritarian impulses left Trump loyalists feeling justified to concoct the fake electors scheme and imploring the General Assembly to go into a special session to arbitrarily undo the will of Georgians.Political violence and intimidation are some of the most obvious symptoms of democratic decay. The charges in Fulton County are an attempt to use the criminal justice system to repudiate political violence.The sprawling case is stronger because the conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results was replete with acts of intimidation by numerous people. Mr. Trump and Rudy Giuliani engaged in a full-scale harassment campaign against Fulton County election workers when they baselessly alleged that two individuals added fake votes to Mr. Biden’s tally. Mr. Trump threatened Mr. Raffensperger and a state employee with “a criminal offense” if they declined to join his corruption, warning them they were taking “a big risk.” A healthy democracy cannot tolerate this behavior.Democracy is not guaranteed, and democratic backsliding is never inevitable. The country avoided the worst, but the past few years have still been profoundly destabilizing for the constitutional order in ways akin to some of the nation’s darker moments.Indeed, the case by Ms. Willis can be seen as an effort to avoid darker moments in the future, especially for a critical swing state like Georgia. We should remember the words in 1871 of Georgia’s first Black congressman, Jefferson Franklin Long, who spoke out when Congress debated relaxing the requirements for restoring certain rights to ex-Confederates without meaningful contrition: “If this House removes the disabilities of disloyal men … I venture to prophesy you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before.”His prediction proved all too accurate. It now may be up to the people of Fulton County to stop election denialism’s widening gyre.Anthony Michael Kreis is an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, where he teaches and studies constitutional law and the history of American politics.Source photographs by Bettmann, Buyenlarge, and Corbis Historical, via Getty.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Inside Fani Willis’s Georgia Investigation of Donald Trump

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      Fani T. Willis faced hiring challenges, threats, a judge’s reproach and a series of legal obstacles over her two-and-a-half-year investigation of Donald J. Trump.Fani T. Willis was barely three days into her new job as district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., when a potential case caught her attention.A recording had emerged of Donald J. Trump, in his waning days as president, telling Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state and a fellow Republican, that he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse his narrow 2020 election loss there. The call fell squarely in Ms. Willis’s new jurisdiction, since Fulton County includes the State Capitol building in Atlanta where Mr. Raffensperger works.Ms. Willis had inherited an office with a deep backlog of cases exacerbated by the pandemic, and had limited staff. But she knew almost immediately that she would investigate.“When allegations come about — about anything that would hamper society’s ability to believe in fair elections, or if there is even conduct that rises to the level of suspicion, I don’t think that I have a choice,” Ms. Willis said in February 2021, shortly after announcing that she had opened a criminal inquiry into the matter.Over the next two and a half years, what began as an examination of a single phone call became a sprawling investigation stretching across multiple counties and states and into the federal government. On Monday, Ms. Willis announced that a grand jury had indicted 19 people on 41 felony counts, including Mr. Trump and a number of his former top aides and allies, on charges that they had criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election in her state.That the most expansive case against Mr. Trump and his associates would emerge from a local prosecutor’s office in the Deep South was never a given.Her office faced frequent security concerns and threats as the investigation played out, many of them racist, leading Ms. Willis to have staff members outfitted with bulletproof vests.There was a parade of legal challenges from witnesses reluctant to testify in her investigation — including from Senator Lindsey Graham and Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff — though most eventually did so after losing court battles.Ms. Willis’s own political judgment became a sticking point when a judge berated her for headlining a fund-raiser for a Democrat rival of a state lawmaker who was one of the investigation’s potential targets.Through it all, she made clear that she would not be deterred. When she and a lawyer for Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, got into a disagreement over the terms of Mr. Kemp providing testimony in her investigation, Ms. Willis wrote to the lawyer in an email: “You have taken my kindness as weakness,” adding, “Despite your disdain, this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”Ms. Willis, center, with her team during proceedings to seat a special grand jury in May 2022.Ben Gray/Associated PressSecurity around the Lewis R. Slaton Courthouse in Atlanta was increased leading up the indictment announcement.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesWhile Ms. Willis has been depicted by Mr. Trump and his allies as a left-wing zealot, she is actually a centrist, law-and-order prosecutor. Only a few months before taking office, when she was facing a primary against her old boss, an anonymous flier circulated that superimposed a photograph of Ms. Willis standing next to Mr. Trump and branded her as a Republican.Before becoming district attorney, she was best known for helping lead a high-profile case a decade ago against a group of educators in the Atlanta public school system who were involved in a widespread cheating scandal. Some attacked her for prosecuting teachers and other educators, but she retorted in a 2021 interview that she was sticking up for children.“Y’all can put it in my obituary,” she said of the criticism.From the start of the Trump investigation, Ms. Willis floated the possibility of bringing charges under the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, as she had done in the cheating case. One of her early hires as an outside consultant, in March 2021, was John E. Floyd, who wrote a guidebook on such laws, published by the American Bar Association.But the investigation was slow to develop. Today, Ms. Willis has about 10 people working on the case, including Mr. Floyd, out of a total work force of 370 people.Finding a lead prosecutor for what would be one of the highest-profile cases in the state’s history was another hurdle. After several candidates turned her down, she enlisted an old friend, Nathan Wade, a defense lawyer and former municipal court judge whose small firm handled personal injury cases as well as criminal defense.As the case heads toward trial, Ms. Willis’s office is prosecuting another sprawling racketeering case involving prominent local rappers accused of operating a criminal gang. That case has its own dramas slowing it down, including legal sparring over evidence of a goat sacrifice and jury selection that has already taken more than seven months.“We’re not one-dimensional, right?” Ms. Willis told a local radio station recently, adding that her office could pursue the election investigation “while making sure that, as you see, the murder rate is dropping in Atlanta. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”By last summer, the Trump investigation took a critical turn on two fronts. A special grand jury was empaneled at Ms. Willis’s request. In Georgia, such juries cannot bring indictments, but can gather information for longer periods of time than regular grand juries can, giving them the ability to dig into complex issues.At the same time, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol began its public hearings, and its fact-gathering would be a valuable source of information for the Georgia investigators.But Ms. Willis was soon found to have committed a misstep. In July 2022, the judge presiding over the case, Robert C.I. McBurney, barred her from pursuing charges against Burt Jones, a state lawmaker and Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia. Ms. Willis had headlined a recent fund-raiser for Mr. Jones’s Democratic rival.Ms. Willis, right, and Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, in the process of seating a grand jury in July.Brynn Anderson/Associated PressThe police removed flowers and photographs of Ms. Willis that were placed outside the courthouse the morning after the indictment was announced.Amir Hamja/The New York Times“This scenario creates a plain — and actual and untenable — conflict,” the judge wrote in his decision, after noting during a hearing on the matter that “the optics are horrific.” By then, Mr. Jones, one of the 16 pro-Trump “alternate electors” in Georgia, had been told that he could face charges, along with the other fake electors. But any potential prosecution of Mr. Jones, who eventually won election as Georgia’s lieutenant governor, would have to be handled by another prosecutor.The special grand jurors spent the second half of last year interviewing about 75 witnesses over seven months.“We definitely started with the first phone call, the call to Secretary Raffensperger,” said Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the special grand jury, in an interview in February.From there, they heard evidence about how votes and voting machines were handled. They discussed the vote counting that took place at State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta, and the false claims that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and other Trump allies made about ballot fraud taking place there.The jurors “talked a lot” about state legislative hearings that Mr. Giuliani spoke at in December 2020, spreading misinformation about the election, Ms. Kohrs said, “and then we talked some about events leading up to and immediately following the January phone call.”They also heard evidence about Trump allies breaching the election system in a rural county south of Atlanta in hopes of finding evidence that the election had been rigged.As the special grand jury’s work proceeded, Mr. Trump hired a high profile Atlanta lawyer, Drew Findling, who had represented rappers such as Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Migos.Mr. Findling tried repeatedly to derail the investigation, an aggressive strategy that is not unusual among Mr. Trump’s growing retinue of lawyers. Complications proliferated as a number of witnesses wavered, and by May more than half of the bogus Trump electors were cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office.Georgia judges also appeared to run out of patience with the Trump team’s filings. The State Supreme Court unanimously rebuffed Mr. Findling’s efforts to have Ms. Willis disqualified. And Judge McBurney, of Fulton County Superior Court, encouraged the Trump team to follow professional standards “before burdening other courts with unnecessary and unfounded legal filings.”This week, after the charges were announced, Mr. Findling and Mr. Trump’s other Georgia lawyers, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg, said in a statement that they “look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been.’”With the indictment in the books, a new set of legal battles is now sure to begin. Ms. Willis has made clear that this is not an ordinary prosecution, going so far as to instruct many employees to work from home for the first half of August as charges loomed and security concerns built.Yet she has also emphasized that in some ways, she will treat the case against Mr. Trump like any other.If anyone interfered with the election, “I have a duty to investigate,” she said, adding: “In my mind, it’s not of much consequence what title they wore.” More

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      Here Are the Possible Dates for Trump’s Trials

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      The unprecedented — a former U.S. president indicted, and while running for the office again — has now happened four times. Next up will be a presidential candidate going on trial. Possibly four times.We don’t yet know the timelines for all the trials, and the preliminary dates we have for some of them may still change. But it is already clear that across the board, prosecutors are seeking to move quickly.Extraordinary though the prospect is, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Donald J. Trump could stand trial four times before the presidential election on Nov. 5, 2024 — and have to leave the campaign trail each time.Justice Juan M. Merchan, who is presiding over the state case in New York concerning hush-money payments to a pornography actress, has scheduled a trial to begin March 25, 2024. If that date holds, it would be just under a year after the indictment in that case.Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is presiding over the federal case concerning Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents, has scheduled a trial to begin May 20, 2024 — again, just under a year after indictment. Judge Cannon rejected the government’s request to hold the trial sooner, in December, but also rejected the Trump team’s push to delay the proceedings until after the 2024 election.The dates for the other two trials — in the federal case concerning Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, for which he was indicted on Aug. 1, and now in the Georgia case — are still to be determined.Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing that federal case, has proposed Jan. 2, 2024, for the opening of the trial. That would be just two weeks before the Iowa presidential caucuses.Fani T. Willis, the prosecutor in the Georgia case, indicated on Monday that she would seek a trial within six months of the indictment, which would mean no later than mid-February 2024 — smack in the middle of the early primaries.There’s no guarantee that the judges in those cases will agree to those requests. More

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      Key Takeaways from the Trump Indictment in Georgia

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

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      Why the Fani Willis Prosecution of Donald Trump Is Indispensable

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

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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