There’s no other way to say it: the 98-page indictment handed down by a Fulton county grand jury on Monday represents the most aggressive effort to hold Donald Trump and allies accountable for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The document is staggering in its breadth and the ambition of its charges. The 41 counts of crimes in it, including 13 against Trump, detail the lies the former president and his co-defendants told the public about fraud to try and keep him in power. It doesn’t back away from charging Trump’s attorneys and inner circle with crimes for coordinating a plan to create slates of fake electors and to stop Congress from counting votes. Some of the state’s 16 fake electors themselves also face charges. And it also casts a wide net, not letting those who breached voting equipment and intimidated poll workers off the hook.
Instead, the indictment tells perhaps the most comprehensive story to date of one of the most brazen efforts to subvert American democracy.
Legally, the Georgia case may represent the biggest legal peril for Trump. If he wins the presidential election next year, Trump cannot pardon himself, something he could theoretically do if he is convicted on similar charges pending in federal court. In Georgia, a defendant must serve five years in prison before a pardon is even considered by the state board of pardon and paroles. Unlike many other states, the governor of Georgia does not have the ability to unilaterally pardon people.
The focus of the indictment – Trump’s efforts to stay in power – is the same as the federal charges Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel, filed earlier this month. But the two cases are significantly different. Smith’s case focuses squarely on Trump and his specific efforts to overturn the election, leaving other co-conspirators unnamed and uncharged (for now). The Fulton county case, brought by Fani Willis, the district attorney, uses precise detail to place Trump at the center of a large criminal enterprise that includes nearly 50 people (19 of them are named, 30 are not).
Of course, there is more of a risk to bringing a sprawling criminal indictment. The case is likely to be tied up in extensive procedural battles before even moving forward to a trial. Willis said Monday she intends to try all 19 defendants together, setting up a potential blockbuster, but complicated trial. Willis has not shied away from such challenges in the past, relying on the same Georgia racketeering statute at the heart of the Trump case to successfully get convictions against Atlanta teachers and is currently using them in a Rico case against the rapper Young Thug and the YSL gang.
“Jack Smith seems to be on a mission to get this done and to focus on Donald Trump,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University. The Georgia case, he said, was “very different”.
“All of these actors are being held to account,” he said. “What might lack in efficiency and expediency in Georgia is made up for in the fact that I think Fani Willis is really trying to tell a narrative here about what these individuals did in her view to undermine and destroy American democracy.”
That story, according to the indictment, began the morning after election day in 2020. Speaking at the White House, Trump lied about the election results. As votes were still being counted, Trump claimed there was “a fraud” on the American public and said “frankly, we did win this election”, he said. The speech is “Act 1” in the indictment – the start of the conspiracy to keep Trump in power.
The indictment goes on to do something extraordinary – it translates lies that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell told about the election into criminal acts. When Giuliani and Powell falsely claimed fraud at a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters, they were furthering a criminal conspiracy. When Giuliani appeared at a Georgia legislative hearing and lied about fraudulent ballots being cast, he made false statements, a crime in Georgia, the indictment says.
In one of its most significant sections, the indictment also brings criminal charges against two people who sought to intimidate and harass Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Fulton county election workers who were at the center of false claims of fraud amplified by Giuliani. Both women faced vicious harassment after the 2020 election that upended their lives. The indictment details how Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for Kanye West and R Kelly, worked with two other men, Harrison Floyd and Stephen Lee, to try and pressure Freeman into confessing to voter fraud. Kutti showed up at Freeman’s doorstep, eventually met with her, and told her to confess to voter fraud or else people would come for her within 48 hours and she would go to jail.
Willis’s decision to translate the episode into criminal charges is significant. It underscores the breadth with which Willis is framing the conspiracy – no episode is too tangential, or harebrained, to escape her scrutiny. It also amounts to the first time that anyone has faced criminal charges related to the harassment of Freeman and Moss, two Black women who have come to symbolize the human toll of Trump’s lies about the election.
Willis also doesn’t shy away from charging the cadre of lawyers who sought to provide legal cover for Trump with fringe ideas. Ken Chesebro, a little-known lawyer who authored a key memorandum laying out a strategy for fake electors, was charged with multiple crimes, including conspiracy to commit forgery, conspiracy to impersonate a public officer and conspiracy to commit false statements and writings. Jeffrey Clark, a justice department official who tried to pressure superiors to send a letter claiming fraud in Georgia, was charged with multiple crimes. As is John Eastman, the lawyer who tried to provide a legal pretext for Congress to overturn the election.
For the first time, a high-level White House aide, Mark Meadows, also faces criminal charges. The indictment cites multiple meetings Meadows had with state lawmakers across the country to get them to try and overturn the election results. It also cites a December meeting Meadows and Trump held with John McEntee, another White House aide, in which he and Trump requested McEntee prepare a memo outlining how to delay the counting and certification of electoral college votes. The document outlines Meadows presence on the telephone call in which Trump infamously pressured Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the election. In doing so, Trump and Meadows committed a felony by soliciting Raffensperger to violate his oath as a public officer.
Lastly, Willis makes it clear the story of Trump’s subversion includes efforts by his allies to breach voting equipment. Similar to charges filed in Michigan earlier this month, this marks a significant attempt to hold Trump accountable for efforts to sow doubt about the actual machinery of elections. As Trump claimed fraud, an election official in Coffee county helped his allies gain unauthorized access to voting equipment. The information extracted was passed on to other election deniers who were trying to prove the outlandish idea that the equipment was rigged.
While Willis’s indictment is complex and contains 161 overt acts, she boils down the heart of it before even listing the charges.
“Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on 3 November 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other defendants charged in this indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” she says.
While she goes on to list all of the complex crimes Trump and allies committed, many of the paragraphs in the indictment end the same way, reminding the public that each action was “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy”.
