What to know
- A grand jury in Georgia voted Monday to indict former President Donald Trump in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ investigation into 2020 election interference.
- The grand jury charged 19 individuals, including Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark, with 41 total felony counts. Read the full 97-page indictment here.
- This is the former president’s fourth criminal indictment. He was federally charged in special counsel Jack Smith’s 2020 election probe on Aug. 1.
- Last year, a separate special grand jury in Fulton County conducted a wide-ranging investigation that heard from dozens of witnesses before submitting its recommendations on charging decisions.
Probable cause vs. proof beyond a reasonable doubt
This is a good moment to remember that there is a large gulf between probable cause and proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The grand jury has concluded that there is probable cause that Trump committed the crimes alleged in the indictment. That means that the members of the grand jury believed it more likely than not that Trump engaged in criminal behavior. Phrased another way, the grand jury concluded that there is more evidence for these charges than there is against them.
But for the jurors to conclude at the end of trial that Trump is guilty of a charge, they must be satisfied that the prosecution proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. In Georgia, jurors can be specifically asked whether there is enough evidence to “satisfy the mind and conscience beyond a reasonable doubt.”
For any prosecutor, there is a long road between an indictment and a conviction, and this case is no different. Here, the prosecution will rely on a fairly novel use of the RICO, or racketeering, statute. There is plenty of work left for them to do.
Remember, Fani Willis knows her way around RICO
Andrew Weissman was just on MSNBC talking about the complexity of cases involving several co-defendants being charged together, as Fani Willis said she intends to do with the 19 co-defendants charged in her 2020 election case. That reminded me of a post I wrote almost a year ago to the day, noting that Willis’ RICO case against rapper Young Thug and his crew, YSL, would give her a bit of practice trying more than a dozen co-defendants on the same charge. In the YSL case, there were reportedly 28 co-defendants at one point.
I continue to think the YSL case in Fulton County is instructional for anyone who wants to see how a Trump RICO case might play out.
Fani’s revealing FAQ
After announcing a 41-count indictment that includes Trump and 18 others, the Fulton County district attorney answered reporters’ questions about whether a person convicted using Georgia’s RICO statute could avoid prison time and whether, as Trump says, she’s politically motivated against him.
“I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law,” Willis told reporters. “The law is completely nonpartisan. That’s how decisions are made in every case. To date, this office has indicted, since I’ve been sitting as the district attorney, over 12,000 cases. This is the 11th RICO indictment. We followed the same process. We look at the facts. We look at the law, and we bring charges.”
The prosecutor’s other answers were revealing as well.
Asked whether defendants could avoid jail if convicted, Willis noted that a RICO conviction would not lead to probation, and would result in prison time.
Asked when she would like the fairly complicated trial to begin, Willis set the ambitious goal of a start date “within the next six months.”
She also expressed her desire to try all 19 defendants together.
The 19 defendants in the Fulton County indictment
While Trump’s three other criminal indictments this year have named only him, or him and a couple of co-defendants, his latest indictment names 19 defendants. They are:
- Donald Trump, former president of the United States
- Rudy Giuliani, former personal lawyer for Trump
- Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff
- John Eastman, former personal attorney for Trump
- Kenneth Chesebro, pro-Trump lawyer
- Jeffrey Clark, former acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division
- Jenna Ellis, lawyer for the Trump campaign
- Ray Smith III, lawyer who represented Trump during litigation attempting to overturn Georgia’s result in 2020
- Robert Cheeley, lawyer involved in litigation related to the 2020 election
- Michael Roman, Trump campaign adviser
- David Shafer, “fake elector” and current chair of the Georgia Republican Party
- Shawn Still, “fake elector” and Republican Georgia state senator
- Stephen C. Lee, pastor
- Harrison Floyd, former leader of “Black Voices for Trump”
- Trevian Kutti, publicist (Kutti, Floyd and Lee are implicated in efforts to intimidate election workers.)
- Sidney Powell, lawyer and Trump ally
- Cathy Latham, “fake elector” and former chair of the Coffee County Republican Party
- Misty Hampton, former election supervisor of Coffee County
- Scott Hall, Trump supporter and business owner (Powell, Latham, Hampton and Hall allegedly participated in the “unlawful breach” of election equipment in Coffee County.)
Capone: ‘Some call it racketeering. I call it a business.’
Here’s how Trump’s ‘fake electors’ plot fit into Willis’ indictment
Of the 41 counts contained within this massive indictment, more than a dozen of them go back to a plot to replace Georgia’s 16 members of the Electoral College with a slate of alternates. The idea was that those “fake electors” would cast votes for Trump instead of Joe Biden. Those votes would either throw the election for the then-president on Jan. 6 or cause enough confusion to have GOP-controlled state legislatures decide Trump actually won.
It’s a wildly complicated plot, one that got three of the “fake electors” themselves charged in the sprawling case. Luckily, I’ve gone ahead and laid out the whole thing — including how it came about and why it’s so central to the overall scheme — in this article.
The clock has started for defendants to turn themselves in
Willis, speaking to the press just now, said that warrants have been issued for all of the defendants in tonight’s indictment to be taken into custody. She then said that the 19 defendants, including Trump, have until noon on Friday on Aug. 25 to turn themselves in.
Some charges are related to the effort to intimidate Ruby Freeman
This indictment reveals the charges related to an incident that Rachel Maddow has spoken about a couple of times tonight: the effort to pressure former election worker Ruby Freeman into a false confession that she committed election fraud and effectively cheated Trump out of an election win in Georgia.
As Rachel mentioned, Trevian Kutti, a publicist who previously worked for Kanye West, is alleged to have played a large role in that pressure campaign, which you can read about in this Reuters report.
The indictment charges Kutti and two men — Stephen Lee and Harrison Floyd — with solicitation of false statements and writings for allegedly pushing Freeman to “knowingly and willfully” make false statements about her election work at State Farm Arena on Nov. 3, 2020 (the night of the election). And it charges Kutti, Lee and Floyd with influencing witnesses for allegedly attempting to convince Freeman that she needed their protection with the intent “to influence her official testimony in an official proceeding.”
The indictment says these crimes were “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
Trump tried to humiliate Black women for years. Then one indicted him.
Monday was the fourth time this year that a prosecutor has persuaded a grand jury to indict former President Donald Trump of multiple crimes. This time, however, Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, a Black woman, is in charge of the prosecution, and, given Trump’s history of hurling virulent insults at Black women, the fact that Willis is leading the latest effort to convict him must be especially infuriating for him.
Trump will likely hurl insults as he often does. But Willis has shown no signs of backing down, and she remains committed to sending the message that the rich and powerful are not immune from prosecution. Given everything he’s said about powerful Black women, her convicting him wouldn’t just be justice, it would also be poetic justice.
Trump as mob boss
The indictment says Trump and his co-conspirators “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, 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.”
The framing drives home how prosecutors are attempting to frame Trump’s behavior in Georgia not as careless transgression, but as part of an organized agenda advanced by a group of people with shared goals.