[ Ms. Willis in trying to tell the full story, made sure the high
cost paid by lesser-known figures was also recorded. Specifically, the
indictment focuses on the outrageous accusations made against Ruby
Freeman, the Atlanta election worker singled out]
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THE GEORGIA INDICTMENT SPEAKS TO HISTORY  
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David Firestone
August 16, 2023
New York Times
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_ Ms. Willis in trying to tell the full story, made sure the high
cost paid by lesser-known figures was also recorded. Specifically, the
indictment focuses on the outrageous accusations made against Ruby
Freeman, the Atlanta election worker singled out _

A woman waiting in line to cast her ballot in Atlanta in the 2020
presidential election., Credit: Christopher Aluka Berry/Reuters // New
York Times

 

Decades from now, when high school students want to learn about the
great conspiracy against democracy that began in 2020, they could very
well start with the 98-page indictment
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Monday night in Georgia, in which former president Donald Trump is
accused of leading a “criminal enterprise” to stay in power.

No one knows whether these charges will lead to convicting Mr. Trump
and the other conspirators or to keeping him from power. But even if
it doesn’t, the indictment and the evidence supporting it and the
trial that, ideally, will follow it will have a lasting value.

Unlike the other three cases against Mr. Trump, this one is an
indictment for history, for the generations to come who will want to
know precisely how the men and women in Mr. Trump’s orbit tried to
subvert the Constitution and undermine American democracy and why they
failed. And it is a statement for the future that this kind of conduct
is regarded as intolerable and that the criminal justice system, at
least in the year 2023, remained sturdy enough to try to counter it.

History needs a story line to be fully understood. The federal special
counsel Jack Smith told only a few pieces of the story in an
indictment limited to Mr. Trump, focusing mainly on the groups of fake
state electors that Mr. Trump and his circle tried to pass off as real
and the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to certify
them. But in Georgia, Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton
County, was unencumbered by the narrower confines of federal law and
was able to use the more expansive state RICO statute to draw the
clearest, most detailed picture yet of Mr. Trump’s plot.

As a result, her story is a much broader and more detailed arc of
treachery and deceit, naming 19 conspirators and told in 161
increments, each one an “overt act in furtherance of the
conspiracy,” forming the predicate necessary to prove a violation of
the RICO act. (Neither of the indictments, unfortunately, holds Mr.
Trump directly responsible for the Jan. 6 riot — a tale best told
in the archives of the House Jan. 6 committee
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Not each of the acts is a crime, but together they add up to the most
daring and highest-ranking criminal plot in U.S. history to overturn
an election and steal the presidency — and a plot that appears to
have violated Georgia law, leaving no question about the importance of
prosecuting Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators. Ms. Willis has risen to
the occasion by documenting a lucid timeline, starting with Mr.
Trump’s brazenly false declaration of victory on Nov. 4, 2020, and
continuing with scores of conversations between the president and his
lawyers and aides as they try to persuade a number of states to
decertify the vote.

The narrative contains tweets that might be just eye-rolling on their
own — such as Mr. Trump’s utterly false claim that Georgia
Democrats had fed phony ballots into voting machines — but that in
context demonstrate a relentless daily effort to perpetrate a fraud
well past his forced exit from the White House on Inauguration Day.

The world knows about people like Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia
secretary of state, who was asked by Mr. Trump to “find
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him enough votes to overturn the state election and who refused. It
knows about how Mr. Pence rebuffed his boss’s demands to decertify
the vote on Jan. 6 and of officials in other states and in the Justice
Department who collectively helped save democracy by resisting
pressure from the conspirators.

But Ms. Willis, in trying to tell the full story, made sure the high
cost paid by lesser-known figures was also recorded for the books.
Specifically, the indictment focuses on the outrageous accusations
made against Ruby Freeman, the Atlanta election worker who was singled
out by Mr. Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani for what they insisted
was ballot stuffing and turned out to be nothing of the kind
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Mr. Giuliani told a Georgia House committee on Dec. 10, 2020, that Ms.
Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, were “quite obviously
surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of
heroin or cocaine” in order to alter votes on “crooked Dominion
voting machines.” For this, Mr. Giuliani — who admitted last
month
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he had made false statements about the two women and is facing a
defamation suit they filed — was charged in the indictment with the
felony offense of making false statements.

Ms. Freeman was also targeted by other conspirators charged in the
case, and she may well have been chosen for that role because she is
Black and was thus a more believable villain to the kinds of people
who have most ardently swallowed Mr. Trump’s lies for many years. As
the indictment painstakingly lays out, Stephen C. Lee, a Lutheran
pastor from Illinois, went to Ms. Freeman’s home and tried to get
her to admit to election fraud; he was charged with five felonies. He
enlisted the help of Willie Lewis Floyd III, a former head of Black
Voices for Trump, to join in intimidating Ms. Freeman; Mr. Floyd was
charged with three felonies. Trevian Kutti, a publicist in the worlds
of cannabis and hip-hop, was also recruited to help pressure Ms.
Freeman, who said Ms. Kutti
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to get her to confess to voter fraud. Ms. Kutti now faces three felony
charges.

In the “vast carelessness”
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their scheme, to use F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, the plotters
smashed up institutions and rules without regard to the resulting
damage, willfully destroying individual reputations if it might help
their cause. Ms. Freeman was one of those who was smashed, exposed by
Mr. Trump to ridicule and abuse, though he never paid a price. Now,
thanks to Ms. Willis, Ms. Freeman’s story will reach a jury and the
judgment of history, and the record will show precisely who inflicted
the damage to her and to the country.

_[DAVID FIRESTONE, a former reporter and editor for the Washington
bureau and the Metropolitan and National desks of The Times, is a
member of the editorial board
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* Trump Indictment
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* criminal conspiracy
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* RICO
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* overthrow elections
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* orderly transfer of power
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* voting rights
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* Voting Restrictions
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* voter suppression
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* Fani Willis
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* 2020 elections
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* election fraud
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* Ruby Freeman
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