Trump Indicted in Georgia for Election Interference Scheme

A grand jury in Georgia voted to indict Donald Trump on Monday for trying to reverse his election loss in the state and stay in power for another term, the fourth criminal case leveled against the former President this year and the second related to his efforts to stay in power. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The charges in Georgia are almost certain to further pad Trump’s already packed court calendar as he works to win his party’s presidential nomination and return to the White House, while also adding to his mounting legal bills. Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith charged Trump earlier this month with four federal charges for defrauding the government with slates of fake electors and spreading lies about election fraud that encouraged his supporters to violently storm the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021. Smith is separately prosecuting Trump for mishandling classified material at Mar-a-Lago, in a case set to go to trial in May. And Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is scheduled to take Trump to trial in March for 34 counts of falsifying business records. Now Fani Willis, the District Attorney for Georgia’s Fulton County, has levied additional charges with Trump Several of Trump’s rivals for the GOP presidential nomination have said they would pardon him if elected. Trump has also claimed in the past that a president has a right to pardon himself. Notably, no president could pardon Trump in the Georgia and New York cases, as presidential pardon power only applies to federal charges. In Georgia, the authority to grant pardons belongs to an independent state board. Trump fought to stop Willis’s case before it got this far. In July, he filed and lost a petition to the Georgia state supreme court to bar Willis from prosecuting him and throw out the final report of an investigative special grand jury that met last year in the case. The Georgia case will test just how far someone in power can influence the election process. Willis began investigating Trump in 2021 shortly after a recording was released of a Jan. 2, 2021 phone call during which Trump can be heard asking Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn Biden’s narrow win in the state. Raffensperger refused. At that point, Georgia officials had already counted the votes three times, addressed lawsuits over the outcome, and run down fraud claims from Trump’s team, all of which confirmed Biden had won the state. Trump has said the call was “perfect” and he did nothing wrong. But while many legal analysts have characterized the leaked conversation as something of a smoking gun, Willis has presented a much broader case, as her investigators have examined an extensive and multi-faceted effort by Trump to exert political muscle and disseminate brazen lies to remain in office despite the will of the voters.  Trump’s allies, including Rudy Giuliani, harassed election workers and propagated patently false claims of a rigged election. On Dec. 14, 2020, the same day Biden’s electors were confirmed, a group of 16 fake electors met separately at the state capitol building to sign a false certificate stating that Trump had won the election.  A separate grand jury investigated the matter last year, and concluded that some witnesses may have lied under oath and recommended that indictments be sought, according to that grand jury’s report, portions of which were released by a Georgia judge. That grand jury also found “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning the election,” according to the report. Willis’s prosecution against Trump may not only increase his criminal vulnerability liability. It could also provide a road map for other jurisdictions to pursue election interference charges. Special Counsel Smith’s indictment alleges that Trump tried to influence the outcome in Georgia as well as six other states. “It certainly raises the question of whether there [are] going to be investigations in those states and potentially, if there are, if those investigations will lead to further indictments,” says Richard Serafini, a former federal prosecutor. The more cases Trump faces, the harder it will be for him to maneuver his way out of the grip of the justice system, where lying and other tactics that he often deploys in the political arena, are more likely to yield far more severe consequences.