FILE – Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis poses for a photo in her Atlanta office on Jan. 4, 2022. Willis last year launched a criminal investigation “over attempts to interfere with the conduct of the 2020 Georgia general election.” At her request, a special grand jury with subpoena powers was set up in May. A group of Georgia Republicans who have been told they face criminal charges amid an investigation into whether former President Donald Trump and others unlawfully interfered in Georgia’s 2020 election are fighting subpoenas to testify before the election Special Grand Jury. (AP Photo/Ben Gray, file)
Those who want to see Donald Trump and his allies in court should welcome the indictments in Atlanta against the former president and 18 others that District Attorney Fani Willis called “criminal racketeering” and intended to nullify the Georgia 2020 election result.
The lengthy indictment covers not only Trump’s widely publicized direct attempts to pressure Georgian and federal election officials to reverse the verdict of Georgian voters, but also related events such as recruiting fake voters, a campaign to defame voter registrars, and a burglary of voting equipment all rolled into one district electoral office.
However, the scope of the indictment earlier this month, which follows more than two years of investigation, could demonstrate the wisdom of US Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith when he narrowed the indictment against Trump in Washington to a narrow four-count indictment only the former president, but including six unnamed co-conspirators.
Both Willis and Smith say they are eager to get their cases to court promptly, presumably before voting begins in the Republican primary, where polls show Trump leading the Republican field. Smith has targeted a Jan. 2 hearing date and Willis said she hopes to bring her case to court within six months.
But bringing Smith’s narrow four-count case against a single defendant, the former president, to trial seems far easier than Willis’s series of 41 counts against 19 defendants (13 against Trump), which are somehow intertwined .
And Willis’ statement that she intends to try all 19 defendants together sparked some skepticism in the legal community.
“There’s no courtroom that can handle that,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said Tuesday, noting that each of the 19 defendants could have multiple attorneys who are allowed to question witnesses. “The process would take forever.”
The Washington indictment detailed Trump’s attempts to overthrow the election even though he knew his fraud allegations were false. They charged him with conspiring to defraud the United States by dishonestly interfering with the counting and certification of the election results, with conspiring to obstruct the official process on January 6 at which the results were certified, and with conspiring against voter rights to make their votes count.
Two cases of obstruction centered on Trump’s attempts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into violating the law that requires him to oversee voter counting by falsely claiming Pence could refuse it.
In Georgia, Trump has been charged with two counts of conspiracy, three counts of solicitation of oath violation and making false statements, and one count each of racketeering, forgery and impersonating an official.
Those charges include ten other defendants, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney during the election challenges; former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; and four other attorneys who, along with Giuliani, are believed to be among the six unindicted co-conspirators in the Washington indictment.
All 19 defendants are charged with involvement in a criminal enterprise under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corruptions (RICO) Act, a state equivalent of federal law often used by federal prosecutors against crime syndicates, such as Giuliani in the 1980s. The indictment lists 161 individual acts, the most notorious of which is Trump’s phone call to Georgia’s Foreign Minister Brad Raffensperger, seeking to change the outcome in Georgia.
Others Trump is involved in are pressuring Georgia’s law leaders to call special sessions to change the state’s outcome, organizing the wrong voters to replace the duly selected ones, filing false allegations of fraud in court, and prompting Raffensperger to break his oath.
A potential complication is the fact that there are multiple defendants in all of these indictments, sometimes including Trump and sometimes not. This could lead to inevitable complications.
In a sense, the Atlanta indictment is both politically and legally important because, like the earlier Washington indictment, it provides a very detailed factual account of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, including some after he left office.
But things can actually get complicated when a legal case arises that is so complicated and involves so many people that it will be difficult to conduct a trial.
Carl Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. ©2023 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
