Trump's Present and Future possible indictments

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A grand jury in Georgia that has been investigating former President Donald Trump over his efforts to undo the 2020 election results in that state returned at least one indictment Monday, though it was not immediately clear against whom.

Documents were presented around 9 p.m. by the county courts clerk to the Fulton County judge who for months has been presiding over the investigation.

The grand jury heard from witnesses into the evening Monday in the election subversion investigation into Donald Trump, a long day of testimony punctuated by the mysterious and brief appearance on a county website of a list of criminal charges against the former president that prosecutors later disavowed.

Prosecutors in Fulton County presented evidence to the grand jury as they pushed toward a likely indictment, summoning multiple former state officials including the ex-lieutenant governor as witnesses.

But the process hit an unexpected snag in the middle of the day, when Reuters reported on a document listing criminal charges to be brought against Trump, including state racketeering counts, conspiracy to commit false statements and solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer.

Reuters, which later published a copy of the document, said the filing was taken down quickly. A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said the report of charges being filed was “inaccurate,” but declined to comment further on a kerfuffle that the Trump legal team rapidly jumped on to attack the integrity of the investigation.

The office of the Fulton County courts clerk later released a statement that seemed to only raise more questions, calling the posted document “fictitious,” but failing to explain how it got on the court’s website. The clerk’s office said documents without official case numbers “are not considered official filings and should not be treated as such.” But the document that appeared online did have a case number on it.

Asked about the “fictitious” document Monday evening, the courts clerk, Che Alexander, said: “I mean, I don’t know what else to say, like, grace … I don’t know, I haven’t seen an indictment, right, so I don’t have anything.” On the question of whether the website had been hacked, she said, “I can’t speak to that.”

Trump and his allies, who have characterized the investigation as politically motivated, immediately seized on the apparent error to claim that the process was rigged. Trump’s campaign aimed to fundraise off it, sending out an email with the since-deleted document embedded.

“The Grand Jury testimony has not even FINISHED – but it’s clear the District Attorney has already decided how this case will end,” Trump wrote in the email, which included links to give money to his campaign. “This is an absolute DISGRACE.”

Trump’s legal team said it was not a “simple administrative mistake.” Rather it was “emblematic of the pervasive and glaring constitutional violations which have plagued this case from its very inception,” said lawyers Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg.

It was unclear why the list was posted while grand jurors were still hearing from witnesses in the sprawling investigation into actions taken by Trump and others in their efforts to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. It was also unclear whether grand jurors were aware that the filing was posted online. They still would need to vote on charges, so the counts listed in the posting may or may not ultimately be brought against Trump.

Legal experts said it was likely a clerical error listing charges prosecutors were planning to ask the grand jury to vote on. Prosecutors draft indictments and present them to the grand jury, which ultimately decides whether to hand charges down.

“I think this tells us what they are planning to present to the grand jury, and the grand jury could say no,” said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor. He said while the error will give Trump’s legal team fodder to complain, “it will not scuttle the case.”

“Will his lawyers make a lot of noise about it? Yes, they will. Will Mr. Trump make a lot of noise about it? Yes, he will. I’m sure there will have to be an explanation for it,” Cunningham said.

One person who said he’d been called to testify to the grand jury suggested on Monday that the process may be moving more quickly than anticipated. George Chidi, an independent journalist, had tweeted previously that he was asked to testify on Tuesday, but later posted he was going to court on Monday, adding: “They’re moving faster than they thought.”

Chidi wrote in The Intercept last month that he barged “into a semi-clandestine meeting of Republicans pretending to be Georgia’s official electors in December 2020.” He described being thrown out of the room just after entering, told that it was an “education meeting.”

Former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, who over the weekend said he’d also been asked to testify Tuesday, instead appeared before the grand jury Monday. He told reporters outside the courthouse that the 2020 election had been “fair and legal” and said now was the “opportunity to get the real story out.”

The document listing criminal charges filed midday Monday listed more than a dozen felony counts, including Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO. Willis has long been expected to levy that charge against Trump and his associates, accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Two counts — including solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer — listed the date of offense as Jan. 2, 2021, which was when Trump during a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he wanted to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in the state. Other counts list the date of offense as Sept. 17, 2021, which is the same day Trump sent Raffensperger a message urging him to investigate “large scale voter fraud,” decertify the election and “announce the true winner” if the investigation found the fraud.

Former Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan, who had been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury, said as she left the Fulton County courthouse late Monday morning that she had been questioned for about 40 minutes. Former Democratic state Rep. Bee Nguyen also confirmed that she testified. News outlets reported that Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the secretary of state’s office, was seen arriving at the courthouse earlier Monday.

“No individual is above the law, and I will continue to fully cooperate with any legal proceedings seeking the truth and protecting our democracy,” Nguyen said in a statement.

Nguyen and Jordan both attended legislative hearings in December 2020 during which former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and others made false claims of widespread election fraud in Georgia. Trump lawyer John Eastman also appeared during at least one of those hearings and said the election had not been held in compliance with Georgia law and that lawmakers should appoint a new slate of electors.

Sterling and his boss, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — both Republicans — forcefully pushed back against allegations of widespread problems with Georgia’s election.

Trump famously called Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, and suggested the state’s top elections official could help “find” the votes Trump needed to beat Biden. It was the release of a recording of that phone call that prompted Willis to open her investigation about a month later.

Trump indicted in Georgia | Times Leader

ATLANTA — A grand jury in Georgia that has been investigating former President Donald Trump over his efforts to undo the 2020 election results in that state returned at least one indictment Monday…

www.timesleader.com

 

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https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/08/CRIMINAL-INDICTMENT-Trump-Fulton-County-GA.pdf

 

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5 Facts About Trump’s Indictments​

 

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The indictment of President Trump and 18 others in Georgia for concocting a “criminal enterprise” intended to overturn the results of the 2020 election — they are accused of being racketeers — is the last legal shoe to drop, and it’s as big a boot as can be imagined.

The indictment, handed up by a grand jury at Fulton County, will be prosecuted by District Attorney Fani Willis. In its multitude of defendants and roster of charges — 41, all told — it exceeds in scope and severity the indictments drafted by Special Counsel Jack Smith and District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

In comments late Monday night, Ms. Willis stressed the scale of the 97-page indictment, as well as the fact that those accused should be presumed innocent.

She set a deadline for Mr. Trump and the other defendants to “surrender” by Friday, August 25, at noon, and said she envisioned beginning the trial within six months. The judge in the case, though, she told a reporter, would set the schedule. Ms. Willis said that she intended to try the 19 accused plotters in one trial together.

Mr. Trump faces 13 criminal charges, which comprise, among other crimes, conspiracy, the making of false statements, solicitation of violation of oath, and the filing of false documents. A preview of the true bill was offered on Monday afternoon, when a document prematurely appeared on Mr. Trump’s docket. In addition to those 19 defendants, Ms. Willis alludes to 30 unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators.

In going big, Ms. Willis, the last prosecutor to charge Mr. Trump, has put herself at the van of those seeking to hold him to account for efforts to undo President Biden’s victory in the last election. While Mr. Smith’s cases exhibit a more circumscribed focus, her indictment makes defendants out of Mayor Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and a bevy of lawyers and advisers.

These include among others, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and Kenneth Chesebro. The defendants all face a racketeering charge, in addition to their own dockets. Messrs. Trump and Giuliani face the most charges, suggesting that Ms. Willis sees them as the alleged conspiracy’s leaders.

It is a stunning reversal for the former mayor, who as a New York prosecutor pioneered the use of racketeering charges against organized crime. He was much criticized for that at the time, but defeated at the Supreme Court a challenge to his use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Its use was subsequently curbed as a matter of policy by the Justice Department. Ms. Willis has brought charges under a state RICO law.

Across those 41 criminal counts, Ms. Willis accuses this host of “knowingly and willfully’ joining a “conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.” All of them were charged under Georgia’s racketeering statute. The prosecutor alleges that the defendants formed a “criminal organization” that exhibited a “common plan and purpose,” manifested across 162 discrete criminal acts.

(full article online)

President Trump, in a Sweeping Indictment in Georgia, Is Charged as a Racketeer and Boss of a ‘Criminal Enterprise’

Fani Willis, last to indict, will prosecute a case of wide scope and complexity against the 45th president and 18 others, including Mayor Giuliani.

www.nysun.com

 

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Part 1

“It’s a little weird,” George Chidi told me on Monday, hours before he headed into the Fulton County Courthouse—a day earlier than he’d been expecting—to offer witness testimony to a grand jury weighing election-interference charges against Donald Trump. “I’m uncomfortable, but I’m doing it.” Chidi is a journalist who has written over the years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Guardian, and the Intercept, and has a modest but devoted following on Substack. Now fifty, he has lived for the past two decades in the Atlanta area, where he’s earned a reputation as a dogged reporter with a broad understanding of complex systems and an eye for meaningful details that a lesser reporter might miss.

It was one such detail that drew him into the story of Trump’s alleged attempt to interfere in the 2020 Presidential election. On December 14, 2020, electors met in each state to vote on paper for President and Vice-President. Just after midnight, Trump had angrily tweeted, once again, at Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp: “What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is. Could have been so easy, but now we have to do it the hard way. Demand this clown call a Special Session.” It seemed, perhaps, like a call to arms.

“There was all of this online chatter about disrupting the elector votes,” Chidi recalled. Much of the talk centered on supposed plans in other swing states—Arizona, Pennsylvania—but Chidi knew Georgia would likely see much of the same. “I thought the Proud Boys were going to come through,” he told me. “They’d been all over the capitol grounds for weeks.” He added, “I also thought there could be some weird elector stuff.”

The night before, Chidi had pulled up a list of Georgia’s official Republican electors—which included a young rising star named C. J. Pearson, whom Chidi had spoken to in the past. He told me he saw Pearson walk into the capitol that day. “I thought he might be there for the pomp and circumstance of it all,” Chidi said. “Only he doesn’t make eye contact with me. He just goes into Room 216,” an office on the second floor. “I’m, like, Holy shit, you guys are gonna pull something.” (Pearson had been the first named plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s former lawyers, alleging “ballot-stuffing” in the Presidential election in Georgia. Pearson had recently moved to Alabama for college, and so was no longer eligible to be an elector, and was ultimately replaced. “I don’t want to imply that he broke the law,” Chidi told me.)

Chidi followed him into the room, taking out his phone and going live on Facebook as he did so. “If somebody snatches my cell phone, at least the recording is out there,” he told me, explaining his thought process. “So I walk in. ‘Hi, I’m Georgie Chidi. I’m a journalist. What are you doing?’ Someone says, ‘We’re having a meeting.’ Another person: ‘Oh, he’s got a camera!’ Somebody starts hustling me out of the room. I think about making a stink, but decide against it.” He went on, “As I’m getting swept off the stage, I’m, like, ‘What kind of meeting?’ A woman answers that it’s an ‘education meeting.’ ” Chidi is reasonably certain, he told me, that the person who said this was Cathy Latham, the chairwoman of the Coffee County Republican Party, who was eventually implicated in a scheme to breach an electronic voting machine, allegedly at the behest of Powell, who was Trump’s lawyer at the time. (The Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein also noticed Republican electors in the room and was also told it was an “education meeting.”)

After Chidi was hustled out of the room, he said, “They closed the door and posted a guy outside.” Chidi called his editor at the Intercept. “I’m, like, ‘They’re doing a thing! The Republicans are here and they’re going to try to do a set of electors, too!’ My editor is, like, ‘That’s interesting, monitor it.’ They didn’t want a story. I’m, like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me! I have a scoop!’ ”

A Witnessâs Strange Day at the Trump Grand Jury in Georgia

The journalist George Chidi saw a Georgia Republican walk into a conference room and became a significant witness in a potentially historic prosecution.

www.newyorker.com

 

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Part 2

Other journalists eventually began waiting outside Room 216, too. An hour or so later, David Shafer, the chairman of the state’s Republican Party, stepped out of the room and into the hall. “He says, ‘We’re gonna submit our slate of electors as well,’ ” Chidi recalled. “ ‘There’s a precedent. We’re doing this to preserve our legal challenge, and, if we don’t, the court will moot our legal challenge because we didn’t have electors to present.’ That was his argument.” (Lawyers for Shafer insisted that the meeting was public and have maintained that what he did “as a presidential elector nominee or contingent elector in 2020 was specifically undertaken in conformity with and reliance upon the repeated and detailed advice of legal counsel.”) Camerapeople were allowed in the room to record the signing of documents, which asserted, falsely, that the people in Room 216 were Georgia’s “duly elected and qualified electors.” “Meanwhile,” Chidi said, “there are a bunch of folks who are supposed to be Republican electors who are, like, ‘Nah, I ain’t doing that.’ ” He described the situation as “basically playing pickup basketball and finding some folks at the last minute to stand in for the starters.”



I asked Chidi what he thought Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani Willis, might be interested in from his testimony. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I think it’s because one of the electors”—the one he thinks was Cathy Latham—“told me something that wasn’t true, and then the group of them kept me from observing and photographing what they were doing. It was a sign they knew what they were doing is wrong.” He added, “Why do it behind closed doors?”

Chidi was first called before the special-purpose grand jury in Fulton County last summer, when Willis was building the case that she was expected to present to a second grand jury this week. He described the members of that previous grand jury as “skeptical in a good way.” They seemed to have an eye for “bullshit artists,” he said, “which is part of why I think that they were willing to recommend perjury charges for people.” In February, a judge released a portion of the special grand jury’s final report, which revealed that perjury charges were recommended for at least one witness who was believed to have lied under oath during the eight months of testimony. Chidi added, “I’m assuming I’m not one of them.”

Chidi’s father is Nigerian, and his mother is from Massachusetts. “I’m the biracial child of an African immigrant and a working-class white mother,” he told me—adding, with a laugh, “I lived in Hawaii and I’m politically progressive and I am not President of the United States. My family is very disappointed in me.” Chidi served in the Army as a journalist and was a substitute teacher before establishing himself as a reporter focussed on inequality and corruption.


I asked Chidi how he thought his high-profile role as a witness in the election-interference inquiry might affect his career as a journalist. “I’d like to be able to do bigger and better things now,” he told me. “It’s, like, I didn’t just stumble into the room and go, ‘Oh, fake electors!’ I had enough institutional knowledge to get that while other journalists missed it.” Still, when the big networks come calling, he often feels that he’s being patronized. “CNN, MSNBC, and others sort of talk to me like I’m some cub reporter who made out good. I’m, like, ‘I know more shit than any of you! You all suck.’ I had a chip on my shoulder before, and it’s larger now. Maybe I need therapy at this point.”

He acknowledged to me the awkwardness of being a “a loudmouthed journalist brought before a secret grand-jury proceeding” and having to adopt, as he put it, “this very stentorian public persona, as I talk about the gravity of a weighty, constitutionally fraught court case.” He went on, “But this is just goofy. I feel goofy. I look goofy. I’m increasingly self-aware of the schlubby news reporter that I look like.” There’s also the awkwardness of social media. “People online are, like, ‘Go get ’em, George!’ and ‘Put that guy in jail!’ But it’s not my job to put somebody in jail. It’s my job to testify honestly to what I saw.”

Hours after we spoke, he got a call informing him that he would have to testify on Monday, rather than Tuesday, as he’d expected. But he was ready. “I’ve been on the horse before,” he had told me, earlier that day. Getting inside is an ordeal, he’d explained, but, he added, “I have yet to be threatened—I can’t be fucking threatened, but nobody is even trying and I’m starting to feel bad about it. I might take that personally.” Chidi tweeted as he waited to be called, noting that he had tickets to see “Oppenheimer” later that night: “I thought I’d be safe at a 11 p.m. showing,” he wrote. “Fingers crossed.” He also observed Fani Willis walking past him, at one point, “with her shoes off,” and noted that waiting witnesses were served “great plantains” from a nearby Jamaican place. In the end, the jury was ready to vote before every witness was called. A sealed indictment was handed to Judge Robert McBurney around 9 p.m., and the world waited to learn what it contained. “It’s a victory for journalism,” Chidi wrote, of not having to testify again, “because none of the bigger problems of confidentiality or government influence come into play. Perhaps the jury understands that as well. I’ve said all along that they may not need my testimony. But I am present.” ♦

A Witnessâs Strange Day at the Trump Grand Jury in Georgia

The journalist George Chidi saw a Georgia Republican walk into a conference room and became a significant witness in a potentially historic prosecution.

www.newyorker.com

 

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The indictment approved on Monday describes the former president and 18 co-defendants as “a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities” to try to change the election results. Its introductory pages cite a litany of alleged offenses by Trump and his advisers and supporters, including “false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.”

Willis had strongly signaled she would use the RICO law to seek charges against Trump and his associates. In an interview with The Washington Post last year, she said she likes applying the RICO statute because it “allows you to tell jurors the full story.” [...]

When people “hear the word ‘racketeering,’ they think of ‘The Godfather,’” Willis told the New York Times. But the concept of racketeering “has been extended to include any kind of organization that engages in a pattern of prohibited criminal activity to accomplish its goals,” Cunningham said. So this could be applied, legal experts theorize, to the collection of lawyers, political operatives and Republican legislators who tried to overturn the results in Georgia, allegedly at Trump’s behest.


(full article online)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/14/rico-charges-trump/?link_id=8&can_id=6e84143cce349aec0c9a0b4e4a28c9c6&source=email-why-the-fani-willis-prosecution-of-donald-trump-is-indispensable&email_referrer=email_2017282&email_subject=a-witnesss-strange-day-at-the-trump-grand-jury-in-georgia

 

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Trumpâs Georgia charges are a win for voting rights leaders

Victory heralded as a landmark achievement for Democrats, particularly the Black voters who make up much of the party’s base

www.theguardian.com

 

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See Trump vet Roger Stone pushing elector plot on tape: Beat Exclusive​

 

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[ One Trump 70 year old fan threatened Biden, Garland and Bragg, then pointed a gun to Law enforcement and lost his life. Another Trump fan also made threats to Georgia Officials and was arrested. This is only the beginning of too many of those caught in the Trump imaginary world, who will end up arrested or lose their lives for him and his lies. Trump fans, time to wake up and learn the Constitution and the Rule of Law of your country ]

 

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[ The Party of Law and Order, not liking Law and Order ]

Users on far-right message boards are targeting the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jurors who voted to indict former President Donald Trump, including supposedly doxxing their addresses, threatening them with violence, and digging up their supposed online presences.

On August 14, Trump and 18 others were indicted “over their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss” in Georgia, “with prosecutors using a statute normally associated with mobsters to accuse the former president, lawyers and other aides of a ‘criminal enterprise’ to keep him in power.” The grand jurors who indicted Trump were named in the indictment, per state law.

A Media Matters review found that following the release of the indictment and the grand jurors’ names, users on far-right message boards began targeting them in retaliation.

On a message board that has been the home of “Q,” the central figure of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a user posted the names of the jurors alongside their supposed addresses (Media Matters has blurred the supposed doxxing to protect the jurors, and has chosen to blur and remove other material posted by message board users). And on another message board, where the QAnon conspiracy theory initially emerged, a user seemed to threaten to “follow these people home and photograph their faces.”

Other users on the message boards also issued direct threats against the jurors. One user wrote that the grand jurors’ names was a “hit list” to which another user responded, “Based. Godspeed anons, you have all the long range rifles in the world,” while another wrote that they were “about ready to go Turner Diaries on these treasonous n***** fucks” (referring to a violent white nationalist book). And another user ominously wrote that the jurors were “committing election interference” and so they “should indeed be careful.”

Additionally, message board users tried to dig into the jurors’ online presences and backgrounds, posting images of jurors’ supposed Facebook and LinkedIn pages as evidence that they were biased against Trump and posting a link to their supposed political contributions pages from the Federal Election Commission. (According to The Washington Post, “several of the jurors disabled their profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.“) Users also tried to determine the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the jurors.


(full article online)

Far-right message boards target the Georgia Trump indictment grand jurors after their names were made public

www.mediamatters.org