Former President and Allies Face 41 Charges
Oh What A Tangled Web We Weave, When First We Practice To Deceive.
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 Act
Prosecutors 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.”
Among 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.
The 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.
The 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.
Trump 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.
The indictment delivered Monday in the Georgia election interference investigation is expansive and complicated, charging a network of 19 people with 41 counts. Here is a breakdown of those charges by type.
The 41 Counts in the Georgia Indictment
22 counts
Related to forgery or false documents and statements
8 counts
Related to soliciting or impersonating public officers
3 counts
Related to influencing witnesses
3 counts
Related to election fraud or defrauding the state
3 counts
Related to computer tampering
1 count
Related to racketeering
1 count
Related to perjury
Donald J. Trump’s legal team includes a former prosecutor with experience in white collar cases and a career defense lawyer who started as a public defender and is best known for defending hip-hop artists.
The defense lawyer, Drew Findling, is known in rap circles in Atlanta as a “magician” because of his effective defense of clients like Cardi B, Migos and Gucci Mane. He brings decades of trial experience, ranging from high-profile murder cases to local corruption scandals.
Skilled in the courtroom, Mr. Findling is far more politically liberal than his client, Mr. Trump. When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, he said on Instagram that he was committed to “fighting to restore a woman’s right to choose which has been destroyed by the Supreme Court.”
Mr. Trump’s condemnation of the Central Park Five — the five Black men who were wrongly convicted in 1989 in the rape of a jogger in New York City — brought a strong response from Mr. Findling in 2017, who called Mr. Trump’s remarks “racist, cruel, sick, unforgivable and un-American.” And when Mr. Trump insulted the intelligence of the basketball great LeBron James in 2018, Mr. Findling said Mr. Trump was “pathetic once again.”
Mr. Findling said last August that he would strongly defend Mr. Trump despite their political differences, pointing to the example of John Adams, who took the unpopular position of representing British troops after the Boston Massacre.
“I do not believe that we choose our client or clients based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, political belief or the substantive issues involved in the crime,” he said, adding, “We have our personal lives and we have our personal politics, and I don’t apologize for my personal politics.”
He has called the investigation of Mr. Trump by the Fulton County district attorney “an erroneous and politically driven persecution” and said he was “fully committed to defend against this injustice.”
Mr. Findling’s teammate at the defense table is Jennifer Little, who began her career as a prosecutor in DeKalb County, Ga., handling major felonies, including murder and rape cases. Over eight years with the county district attorney’s office, she tried more than 50 cases and spent time on the office’s white collar crime units, according to her website.
After leaving the district attorney’s office, she was a partner in the firm Fried Bonder White for nine years, expanding into civil litigation. She later started her own boutique law firm, JLLaw.
“We absolutely do not believe that our client did anything wrong, and if any indictments were to come down, those are faulty indictments,” Ms. Little said on the CBS News show “Face the Nation” in February. “We will absolutely fight anything tooth and nail.”
In July, a federal judge rejected an attempt by former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers to move a pending criminal case against him in Manhattan from state to federal court.
Now that Mr. Trump has been charged with criminal conspiracy to change the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, his legal team in Atlanta is almost certain to try the same maneuver.
Moving the sprawling racketeering case against him and his allies to federal court would have advantages for Mr. Trump, the most obvious being that the jury pool for a trial would be drawn from a broader area than Fulton County, Ga., the Democratic stronghold where the charges were brought on Monday night.
And it could make it more likely that the U.S. Supreme Court, a third of whose justices are Trump appointees, would ultimately weigh in on where the trial should be held.
Ahead of Mr. Trump’s indictment, legal experts offered a variety of views about whether a motion to move the trial to federal court would succeed in the Georgia case.
As they did in Manhattan, Mr. Trump’s lawyers are likely to argue that the case should be moved to federal court because it concerns acts he took as president and so falls under federal jurisdiction.
That argument failed in New York, where the indictment focused on a hush money payment to a porn star who had threatened to go public with her story that she had had an extramarital affair with Mr. Trump.
“Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a president’s official acts,” Alvin K. Hellerstein, a federal judge in Manhattan, ruled in that case, adding that “it does not reflect in any way the color of the president’s official duties.”
Though the circumstances are different, Mr. Trump might have the same difficulty arguing that actions he took to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. — the focus of the Georgia case — were official acts as president.
The Georgia investigation has focused, for instance, on a call that Mr. Trump made weeks after the election to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to allow him to claim victory.
Several lawyers interviewed said it was a stretch to construe such actions as official presidential duties. Still, the lawyers had varying views about whether a motion to remove the case to federal court would succeed.
Gwen Keyes Fleming, a former district attorney in DeKalb County, Ga., near Atlanta, said she thought such a motion would have a good chance of succeeding.
“He would argue that he was an officer of the United States and acting in connection to his status as an elected officer,” she said in an interview.
But Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, said “the removal motion that Trump will inevitably try in the Georgia case should charges be filed is doomed to fail.”
Clark D. Cunningham, a professor of law and ethics at Georgia State University, said he thought that “ultimately his attempt to remove the state prosecution would be unsuccessful” but added, “I do think that it would drag on for a long time in the federal courts if the district attorney chooses to fight the removal. And it would not at all surprise me if the issue of the removal went up to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
If such a move succeeded, how would a potential jury pool change? Jurors for trials “are drawn from the counties that comprise the division in which the case is pending,” said Kevin P. Weimer, the federal clerk of court for the Northern District of Georgia.
The Northern District of Georgia has four divisions. Fulton County is in the Atlanta division, which comprises 10 counties. Moving the case from Fulton County Superior Court to the Atlanta division of the Federal District Court could give Mr. Trump a modest advantage: In the 2020 election, Mr. Trump received 26.2 percent of the vote in Fulton County; in the same election, he received about 33.5 percent in the counties that make up the Atlanta division.
“I think that the district attorney is faced with a difficult and complex strategic decision” should Mr. Trump seek to have the case removed to federal court, Mr. Cunningham said, referring to Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. “If she fights removal, she almost certainly delays the criminal case moving forward for a long time.”