Trump and 18 allies charged with racketeering in a bid to overturn the 2020 election: live updates
The indictment alleges a sweeping scheme to overturn the state's 2020 election results. Experts say the former president and his co-defendants may try to move the case to federal court to delay a trial and gain a more conservative jury pool.
Here's what we're following:
- Fani Willis: The Fulton County District Attorney said she will propose a trial within six months.
- Trump's codefendants: Former Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman and Jenna Ellis, and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were also charged by the grand jury, along with a number of so-called fake electors.
- RICO charges: Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute allows prosecutors to pursue criminal enterprises, including organized crime activities like money laundering, bribery, drug trafficking and other serious offenses.
- Read the indictment.
This will be the last post for today. But there are still plenty of ways to follow the latest news on Donald Trump, his co-defendants and U.S. politics.
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It may be Donald Trump's fourth criminal indictment in five months, but in a few ways, these charges coming out of Georgia are some of the heftiest he has faced so far.
Here are three reasons they're different than what the former president is already facing (and why you might be hearing a lot about them this election season):
1. The scope is huge
Trump has been charged alongside 18 other defendants — all of them allies who prosecutors say conspired toward the same goal: keeping Trump in office.
This is not a case of one person allegedly trying (and failing) to overturn an election; it's a case of an organized network of false claims and potentially illegal action.
Unlike the previous federal indictments, the use of RICO for charging may send a chilling message to anyone thinking of assisting Trump in spreading future election fraud claims: You could be legally liable.
2. These are state charges
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former Trump ally who's now one of his GOP primary rivals, changed the narrative pattern he has followed for the previous three indictments.
Instead of using the moment to take a full swipe at Trump, he said he thought the indictment was "unnecessary" because Trump has already been indicted on the federal level for his efforts to overturn the election.
But that narrative may be a tough sell: State charges and federal charges are not the same.
That's true on both a practical level (a president cannot pardon himself from state charges, for example) — and it's also true on a narrative level.
In the U.S., the states administer all elections, including presidential ones. And in Georgia, it was a slate of Republican office holders — from Gov. Brian Kemp to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — who pushed back against his election fraud claims.
You can expect Trump to still claim the state's politicians are biased against him, but it'll be a bit harder for him to pin that on his favorite scapegoat: Democratic President Biden.
3. There's compelling evidence the public can see and hear
So much of the evidence cited in this case was first shared by the media months or even years ago. There is video of hearings where an army of Trump loyalists tried to convince Georgia lawmakers they had the right to choose the state's victor. There are fake documents from Republicans claiming to be presidential electors.
And, of course, there's the phone call in which Trump begs Raffensberger to "find" over 11,000 votes.
If anything will move the needle in the court of public opinion, it's probably this sort of straightforward, accessible evidence. Sound bites are easier to digest than jargon-dense indictments with a page count that often numbers in the triple digits.
Donald Trump's infamous phone call with Georgia's secretary of state may be the most high-profile example of what state prosecutors are calling a pressure campaign to reverse Trump's election loss.
In the audio recording of that hourlong call, Trump urged Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" again and again while Raffensperger and his team continued to patiently knock back false claims.
Today, Raffensperger published a short and simple take on the news of this indictment:
“The most basic principles of a strong democracy are accountability and respect for the Constitution and rule of law," he said, according to his office. "You either have it, or you don’t."
Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene urged supporters of the former president not to show up at the Fulton County Courthouse to protest, though she didn't specify when such a protest might happen.
"Don’t give them an ounce of your flesh," she wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. "Let them have their empty streets, barricades, and media circus. In Georgia, we will SHOW UP at the polls!!!"
It's one of a series of posts she made on Tuesday morning, in which she also slammed the district attorney for using "Communist tactics to interfere in a presidential election," calling for her removal and arguing that Democrats should face RICO charges for conspiring against Trump.
Greene's calls for people not to show up at the courthouse are particularly notable because she led a rally outside the Manhattan courthouse where Trump was arraigned in April.
She did not stay long, making brief and barely audible remarks to the crowd through a seemingly broken handheld megaphone before being whisked away by security. She walked back to a waiting car, swarmed by protesters, supporters and reporters along the way.
The scene outside the Fulton County Courthouse appeared relatively calm on Tuesday morning, after the indictment's late-night unsealing.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Tamar Hallerman tweeted that there was plenty of law enforcement and a small but sizable media presence on the scene.
The Georgia indictment comes from Fulton County, but includes a number of charges related to incidents in Coffee County.
There, in the southeastern corner of the state, allies of Donald Trump gained access to a voting machine as they searched in vain for evidence of widespread voter fraud after the 2020 election.
Among those charged for the Coffee County breach is campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, who allegedly helped coordinate a plan to access voting machines in battleground states, including Georgia.
Court documents filed last year as part of a lawsuit over Georgia’s voting machines show that Trump associates, with the help of county officials and an Atlanta IT firm, appear to have obtained data from an election server, ballot scanners, memory cards and voter check-in computers.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation opened a criminal investigation, which remains ongoing.
The details were first reported last year by The Washington Post — which also found a rag-tag group of conspiracy theorists and election deniers downloaded the data.
A lawyer for the IT firm, Sullivan-Striker, told WABE last year they had no reason to believe they were hired to do anything improper or illegal.
Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, has said that any wrongdoers will be prosecuted and voters should have confidence that election security is the top priority of election officials.
The indictment out of Fulton County also charges Misty Hampton, a former Coffee County election supervisor; Cathy Latham, a former Republican Party official in Coffee County; and Scott Hall, who took part in the plan.
The election management server and local workstation in Coffee County have been replaced and several elections have been held since without issues.
“The state is in a good position to mitigate the worst risks of whatever the hell you want to call what Powell and company did,” Dan Wallach, a Rice University professor who studies election technology, told WABE.
One of the 19 defendants charged in the indictment is Trevian Kutti, a Chicago-based publicist who previously worked for scandal-plagued rappers R. Kelly and Ye (formerly known as Kanye West).
Prosecutors say Kutti was one of a trio of participants in a plot to pressure Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman to falsely admit to committing election fraud.
Kutti is being charged with one count each of Georgia's RICO act, influencing witnesses and conspiracy to commit solicitation of false statements and writings.
Weeks after the election, as Freeman became the target of racist harassment and even death threats, Kutti traveled to Freeman's suburban home, knocked on the door, and — describing herself as a "crisis manager" — offered to help.
"She said she was sent by a 'high-profile individual,' whom she didn’t identify, to give Freeman an urgent message: confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail," Reuters reported in 2021.
A representative for West later told the outlet that Kutti was not associated with him when she met Freeman.
Freeman asked police to send an officer to keep watch while she stepped outside to talk to Kutti, and the two agreed to meet at the police station.
"You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up,” Kutti said, according to body-camera footage worn by an officer present and obtained by Reuters. She also said that “federal people” were involved.
Freeman said Kutti put someone she described as a man with "authoritative powers to get you protection" on speakerphone, and that he spent the next hour offering legal assistance if she would admit to committing voter fraud on Election Day.
Freeman told Reuters she ended the conversation after growing suspicious, and after getting home she Googled Kutti's name and discovered she was a Trump supporter.
West, a friend and supporter of Trump's, also ran for president that year and conceded the morning after Election Day.
People did indeed turn up at Freeman's house later: Freeman wrote in her defamation lawsuit that a crowd of strangers surrounded her house on Jan. 6, some with bullhorns. She had temporarily left her home at the advice of the FBI and wasn't able to return for two months.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee was sworn in to his judgeship in February after a long career as a prosecutor and state inspector general.
His biography for that last role says he was “responsible for investigating allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse in the Executive Branch of state government." Now, he'll be overseeing the case against the former head of the federal executive branch, Donald Trump, plus 18 codefendants.
Despite his short tenure, McAfee has already issued one ruling on public statements Trump made about the Georgia presidential election results. In June, he fined attorney Lin Wood for being in contempt of court, ruling that Wood violated an order against insulting his former legal associates, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
McAfee is a lifelong Georgian who studied law at the University of Georgia after receiving an undergraduate degree in music (he played cello in Emory University's orchestra).
Before becoming inspector general, he worked as the assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Georgia and a senior assistant district attorney in the Fulton County Judicial Circuit.
He also is a volunteer scuba diver with the Georgia Aquarium and plays tennis, according to his biography.
He's already running for reelection for his bench seat in 2024, according to his campaign website.
Some of the charges in the indictment focus specifically on the defendants' alleged intimidation and harassment of Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County election worker who has since found herself at the center of conservative conspiracy theories — and is now suing for defamation.
The document says several defendants falsely accused Freeman of committing election crimes, including repeating those claims to Georgia lawmakers in an effort to overturn the results.
"In furtherance of this scheme, members of the enterprise traveled from out of state to harass Freeman, intimidate her and solicit her to falsely confess to election crimes that she did not commit," it reads.
Trump allies — most prominently, his attorney Rudy Giuliani — shared edited video after the election claiming to show Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, processing fake ballots for Joe Biden.
While election officials were quick to debunk the claims, conspiracy theories about the duo took off online, prompting real-life harassment and racist threats that forced them to hide their identity.
Freeman and Moss testified about their experience at a televised session of the Jan. 6 House panel last summer, describing the impact of the harassment on their daily lives, physical security and well-being.
"There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere," Freeman said in a video aired at the hearing. "Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you? The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stand up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic."
The Georgia indictment charges Giuliani with making false statements pertaining to his sharing of conspiracies about Moss at a December 2020 Georgia House of Representatives committee meeting.
Among other accusations, Giuliani accused Moss and Freeman of "surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine." Moss testified in front of the committee that her mom had actually been handing her ginger mints.
Freeman and Moss also sued Giuliani for defamation in 2021. He conceded in a court filing late last month that he had made false statements against them.
Georgia's case against Trump and 18 other defendants may not stay in state court, one legal expert says.
Stephen Gillers, professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law, told Morning Edition on Tuesday that "the first thing that may happen in the next 30 days is an effort to remove the case to federal court."
He says that would be to the advantage of the defendants, since a jury would be picked from a more conservative area than the one in Fulton County. Plus, he adds, it could delay the case for several months.
"Ultimately the federal court might send it back to state court, or federal court might keep it if the court concludes that the conduct alleged was under color of federal law," Gillers adds, predicting "a real fight over that ... in the next two months."
Notably, Georgia's RICO act is broader than its federal counterpart. But Gillers stresses that any change in venue would only affect the setting of the trial, not the underlying allegations at stake: "The state RICO act would be litigated in federal court."
Generally, legal experts will tell you that one of Donald Trump's best legal defenses is to win the 2024 presidency.
But even if he was controlling the very government that's prosecuting him, Trump would struggle to pardon himself if convicted of these particular charges coming out of Georgia.
For one, presidents don't have the power of pardon in state cases. And in this state case, some of the other usual figures don't either.
Even if, say, Trump ally-turned-rival Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, did a complete 180 on his election fraud stances and decided to pardon Trump, he couldn't.
Georgia constitutionally removed its governor's power to pardon in the late 1930s, after then-Gov. E.D. Rivers was indicted by a grand jury for selling pardons, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Under the state's constitution, a five-member board votes to decide on pardons and paroles. And any chance of rigging that board would be tricky, too: The members are appointed by the governor, confirmed by the state Senate and serve staggered, seven-year terms.