[This is how Trump is behaving as his presidential campaign
lumbers toward 2024: its as if he’s running against the
prosecution.]
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OF THE CRIMINAL CASES AGAINST TRUMP, GEORGIA’S MAY BE THE MOST
IMPORTANT  
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Moira Donegan
August 15, 2023
The Guardian
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_ This is how Trump is behaving as his presidential campaign lumbers
toward 2024: it's as if he’s running against the prosecution. _

The Fulton county prosecutor Fani Willis holds a press conference
after the indictment of Donald Trump on Monday., Elijah
Nouvelage/Reuters

 

Whether they like it or not, the three prosecutors who have now
indicted Donald Trump
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cases – the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who is
bringing charges in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; the special
counsel Jack Smith, who is bringing federal charges against Trump in
the Mar-a-Lago documents and January 6 cases; and now Fani Willis, the
Fulton county district attorney who is bringing state charges against
Trump regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential
election result in Georgia – are now the former president’s
political opponents. They pose a greater risk to his political future
than any of his primary rivals.

This, at least, is how Trump is behaving as his presidential campaign
lumbers toward 2024: as if he’s running against the prosecution. For
one thing, Trump is acting like the prosecutions are political
attacks. In the lead-up to the Georgia indictment, he aired TV ads
attacking Willis
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And for another, the cases are costing him a tremendous amount of
money. A Pac that the former president is using to pay his mounting
legal fees, Save America, recently requested a refund of a donation it
had made to another group supporting Trump’s re-election effort. The
money couldn’t go to campaign efforts, as had been planned, because
it was needed to pay the legal fees. That’s how rapidly lawyers’
bills are adding up for the former president and his long list of
indicted allies.

That list got a lot longer late Monday night, when Willis’s office
unsealed an indictment
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charging Trump and 18 others on charges derived from Georgia’s
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or Rico. Trump
himself was charged with 13 felony counts stemming from his attempts
to overturn the 2020 election, including not just racketeering but
also soliciting a public officer to violate their oath, and numerous
conspiracy and false statements charges.

The wide-ranging indictment is the result of a two-and-a-half-year
investigation undertaken using a special grand jury, and charges stem
from incidents ranging from election day 2020 to September 2022, when
defendants allegedly perjured themselves in testimony to the grand
jury in an attempt to cover up the scheme. The query began after the
release of audio of a call
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in which Trump urged the Georgia secretary of state, Brad
Raffensperger, to invalidate votes for Biden in majority-Black Atlanta
and “find 11,780 votes” to allow Trump to win the state.

Willis has taken a broad view of her mandate, taking advantage of
state law’s expanded purview to charge much more expansively in
Georgia [[link removed]] than
Jack Smith has under federal law. Willis has said in the past that she
uses Rico charges to tell a complete story of a criminal enterprise to
a jury, and the indictment is designed to allow her prosecutorial team
to bring in out-of-state conduct in order to add context to the
broader effort to overturn the election. The indictment depicts the
effort to overturn the election results in Georgia and elsewhere as a
criminal enterprise engaged in a conspiracy to commit illegal activity
and then cover it up, with Trump as the syndicate boss.

In addition to false statements about election fraud made by the likes
of Rudy Giuliani to the Georgia legislature, the indictment also
surveys conduct in places as far afield as Pennsylvania and Arizona;
includes charges related to the false electors scheme in Georgia; and
details a bizarre incident on 7 January 2021 in which a firm employed
by the conspiracist Trump lawyer Sidney Powell illegally confiscated
confidential election data from voting machines in rural Coffee county
with the help of one of those fake electors, the Georgia state
Republican official Cathy Latham.

Giuliani, Powell and Latham are all co-defendants, along with figures
such as the disgraced law professor John Eastman, the fake electors
scheme architect Kenneth Chesebro, the Department of Justice official
Jeff Clark, the Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, the former Trump chief of
staff Mark Meadows, and the then Georgia Republican party chairman
David Shafer. In addition to the 19 defendants, the indictment lists
30 unindicted co-conspirators.

Willis has said that she plans to try all defendants at the same
trial. That’s a recipe for chaos: 19 defendants means that there
will be multiple defense teams, using multiple strategies to throw
sand in the procedural gears of the court and delay, delay, delay. But
it also creates many vulnerabilities for the former president: there
will be a lot of opportunities for people to flip, and testify against
Trump. And those co-defendants may have even more incentive to turn on
their old boss than in the other cases, because in Georgia, the Rico
charge faced by Trump and other defendants carries a mandatory minimum
of five years in prison.

Of the criminal cases against Trump, this is the most expansive and
ambitious. It may also be among the most significant for the country.
As a state charge, it cannot be crushed if Trump returns to power; in
Georgia, due to a history of corruption and Klan affiliations among
state officials, the governor does not have pardon power, and so Trump
cannot look to the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for reprieve.
Alvin Bragg’s hush money case seems the weakest of the charges, and
Jack Smith’s documents case appears to be the strongest. But though
Trump’s flouting of the law both in and outside of office has been
prolific, it is his attempts to overturn the will of the voters and
illegally retain power that are the most dangerous for our country,
most offensive to our nation’s shared aspiration to democratic
self-rule.

The fact that the scheme has not been punished – and that it seemed,
for a while, as if neither Congress nor prosecutors would have the
courage and political will to punish it – was a profound insult to
American citizens. The coming months promise to be chaotic, vitriolic
and stupid. Trump will try to spin the indictments as evidence of his
martyrdom; his Republican allies will rally to his defense in
whichever way they think will improve their own electoral prospects
while also keeping them out of jail; journalists will be tasked with
repeating, over and over, the bare facts, trying to etch out a legible
sketch of reality for their readers amid the onslaught of cynical
fictions.

But the upcoming trials of Donald Trump, some of which appear to be on
track to happen at the height of the presidential election, might also
offer a thorough reckoning with what happened after the 2020 election,
and an opportunity, for the first time, to truly hold the perpetrators
accountable. That, at least, is much needed.

Another specter hangs over this latest indictment of Trump, however.
The conspiracy that followed the former president’s 2020 election
loss seems to have been a scheme not just to stay in power but to
spare the man humiliation. “I don’t want people to know that we
lost,” the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that
Trump told his advisers. “This is embarrassing.”

If Trump loses again in 2024, he will face not only the prospect of
embarrassment, but the prospect of jail time. We should all fear what
he might do to avoid it.

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Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

* Donald Trump; Georgia Indictments; US Presidential Politics;
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