Trump and 18 allies face charges of interference in Georgia election as former president faces fourth criminal case – The Oakland Press

FILE – Former President Donald Trump speaks at a fundraiser for Alabama Republicans Friday, August 4, 2023, in Montgomery, Alabama. Just a month after Donald Trump’s January 2021 phone call in which he hinted that Georgia’s foreign minister could reverse his electoral defeat, District Attorney Fani Willis announced that she was investigating potentially illegal “attempts to influence the results.” (AP Photo/Butch Dill, file)

By KATE BRUMBACK and ERIC TUCKER (Associated Press)

ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump and 18 allies were charged Monday in Georgia over their efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the state, using “criminal enterprise” to keep him in power.

The nearly 100-page indictment details dozens of actions taken by Trump or his allies to reverse his defeat, including asking Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes to win the embattled state; harassing a poll worker who faced false allegations of fraud; and trying to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new list of Electoral College electors pro-Trump.

One particularly brazen episode also details a conspiracy in which one of his attorneys in a rural Georgia county is to access voting machines and steal data from a voting machine company.

“The indictment alleges that the defendants did not comply with Georgia’s legal process for contesting elections, but engaged in a criminal extortion operation to overturn the results of Georgia’s presidential election,” said Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office filed the case at a late date. night press conference.

Other defendants include former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; Trump attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and a Justice Department official in the Trump administration, Jeffrey Clark, who spearheaded the then-president’s efforts to redeem his Georgia election defeat. Other attorneys, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who supported legally questionable ideas to reverse the findings, were also indicted.

Willis said the accused had until 12:00 p.m. on August 25 to surrender voluntarily. She also said she plans to request a trial date within six months and intends to try the accused together.

The indictment in Georgia against former President Donald Trump was photographed on Monday, August 14, 2023. Trump and several allies have been charged in Georgia over efforts to recoup his 2020 election defeat in the state. The criminal case announced on Monday is the fourth launched against the ex-president in just a few months. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

The indictment represents a remarkable spate of criminal cases — four in five months, each in a different city — that would be daunting for anyone, let alone someone like Trump, balancing the roles of criminal defendant and presidential candidate at the same time.

It comes just two weeks after the Justice Department’s special counsel charged him with a grand conspiracy to overthrow the election. This underscores how prosecutors have acted against him, now two and a half years after the indictment, following a protracted investigation in the wake of the January 6, 2021 US Capitol riots. Six months later, he took steps to hold Trump accountable for an attack on the very foundations of American democracy.

The Georgia case covers some of the same issues as Trump’s recent indictment in Washington, including attempts he and his allies made to disrupt the voter count in the Capitol. But in its extensive network of defendants — 19 in total — the indictment differs from the more focused case of special counsel Jack Smith, who so far has only named Trump as a defendant.

In indicting close Trump associates, whom Smith has described as merely unindicted co-conspirators, the Georgia indictment alleges a level of criminal conduct that goes well beyond the ex-president.

The indictment document, whose language evokes the seedy underworld of mob bosses and gang leaders, accuses the former president, his former chief of staff, Trump’s lawyers and the former New York City mayor of being members of a “criminal organization” and “corporation” that worked in Georgia and other states.

The indictment capped a chaotic day at the courthouse caused by the brief but mysterious release on a county website of a list of criminal charges set to be brought against the former president. Reuters, which published a copy of the document, said the file was quickly deleted.

A Willis spokesman said in the afternoon it was “inaccurate” to say an indictment had already been returned, but declined to comment further on the panic, which Trump’s legal team was quick to exploit to attack the integrity of the investigation.

Trump and his allies, who described the investigation as politically motivated, immediately seized on the apparent error and claimed the process had been rigged. Trump’s campaign aimed to raise funds by sending an email embedding the now-deleted document.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks at the Fulton County Government Center during a news conference Monday, August 14, 2023, in Atlanta. Donald Trump and several allies have been charged in Georgia over their efforts to redeem his 2020 election defeat in the state. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

In a statement after the indictment, Trump’s legal team said: “The events that unfolded today were shocking and preposterous, from the leak of an alleged and premature charge before witnesses testified or the jury deliberated, to… “The District Attorney was unable to provide an explanation.”

The attorneys said prosecutors “relyed on witnesses representing their own personal and political interests — some of whom campaigned to tout their efforts against the defendants” in presenting their case.

Many of the 161 acts of Trump and his associates detailed in the indictment against Georgia have already attracted significant attention. That includes a January 2, 2021 call in which Trump asked Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to reverse his election loss. The call, prosecutors say, violates a Georgian law that forbids asking a public official to break their oath.

Trump is also accused of making false testimonies and writings about a number of claims he made to Raffensperger and other state election officials, including that up to 300,000 ballots “mysteriously ended up on the electoral roll” in the 2020 election. voted more than 4,500 people who were not on the registration lists and that a Fulton County poll worker, Ruby Freeman, was a “professional voter fraudster.”

Giuliani, meanwhile, faces allegations of misrepresentation, allegedly lying to lawmakers by claiming that more than 96,000 mail-in ballots were counted in Georgia, despite no record of them being returned to a county election office, and that there is a voting machine In Michigan, 6,000 votes for Biden were incorrectly recorded that were actually cast for Trump.

In a statement, Giuliani did not respond directly to the allegations, but called the charges an “affront to American democracy” and “just the next chapter in a book of lies.”

Also charged are individuals who prosecutors say helped Trump and his local allies in Georgia influence and intimidate campaign officials.

One man, Stephen Cliffgard Lee, has been charged by prosecutors for allegedly traveling to Freeman’s home “with intent to influence her testimony.” Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, testified before Congress last year how Trump and his allies used November 2020 surveillance footage to accuse both women of voter fraud — allegations that were quickly debunked but spread widely in the conservative media.

Both women, who are black, faced death threats for several months after the election.

The indictment also alleges that Powell and several co-defendants tampered with voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia, and stole data from Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of tabulation devices that has long been the focus of conspiracy theories.

According to evidence released by the Congressional Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riots, Trump’s allies have targeted Coffee County for evidence that could support their theories of widespread voter fraud that allegedly involved data and software copying.

In addition to the two election-related cases, Trump faces a separate federal indictment alleging that he illegally hoarded classified documents and a case in New York state alleging falsification of business records.

As indictments mount, Trump — the leading Republican presidential nominee in 2024 — often cites his distinction as the only past president to have faced criminal charges. He campaigns and raises funds around these issues and portrays himself as a victim of Democratic prosecutors who are out to get him.

Republican allies once again quickly banded together in Trump’s defense. “Americans are seeing through this desperate deception,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

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Associated Press writers Jeffrey Martin, Brynn Anderson, Bill Barrow, Jeff Amy in Atlanta; Jill Colvin and Michael R. Sisak in New York; Russ Bynum of Savannah, Georgia; Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston; Farnoush Amiri in Washington; Christine Fernando in Chicago; Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho; Denise Lavoie in Richmond, Virginia; and Lea Skene in Baltimore contributed to this report.