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In the end, there wasn’t too much suspense about whether the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, would charge Donald Trump with a crime. The police barriers had long since gone up outside a downtown-Atlanta courthouse, and the grand jury and witnesses had been summoned to appear earlier this week. By midday on Monday, a copy of the purported charges against the former President was even posted online, but, after Reuters reported this news, the Fulton County clerk’s office denied that there was any truth to the “fictitious document.” By late afternoon, Trump was already fund-raising off the “LEAKED CHARGES.” “The Grand Jury testimony has not even FINISHED—but it’s clear the District Attorney has already decided how this case will end,” he lamented in an e-mail that hit my in-box just before 4:00 P.M. “This is an absolute DISGRACE.” As it turns out, the reported charges were not fictitious but merely premature, if only by a few hours: just after 9:00 P.M., on Monday evening, Trump’s fourth and presumably final criminal indictment was finally official.
When the sweeping ninety-eight-page document was released in its entirety a couple of hours later, the biggest surprise was not that Trump was charged but that eighteen other defendants were, too—a list that includes familiar characters from the post-2020-election drama, such as Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the former Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, and John Eastman, the law professor who pushed a bogus constitutional theory allowing slate legislatures to appoint their own slates of electors, and who said that the Vice-President could delay certifying the election on January 6th. All of them, along with thirty unindicted co-conspirators, were charged with being part of a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn the 2020 Presidential-election results in Georgia. The sprawling plot, according to Willis, extended far beyond Trump’s notorious recorded phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in early January of 2021—“I just want to find 11,780 votes”—to encompass a scheme to appoint fraudulent electors, an effort to break into voting machines in rural Coffee County, and actions in other battleground states, such as Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Despite the large cast of characters, this is most definitely a case about Trump. The former President’s name is mentioned more than a hundred and ninety times in the indictment, as the former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal pointed out, and the bill of particulars seemed clearly aimed at showing that Trump himself directly violated the law. Even before Monday’s indictment, Trump was facing seventy-eight counts in three pending criminal cases against him—two federal cases filed by the special counsel Jack Smith and a New York criminal case being prosecuted by the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg. With thirteen Georgia counts added in, that means Trump is looking at ninety-one separate criminal charges. If he is found guilty, the seventy-seven-year-old could be sent to prison for the rest of his life. And, though we don’t know the outcome of all these cases, we can already unequivocally say this: after a very slow start, the American justice system now seems determined to throw the book at the former President of the United States for the unprecedented act of attempting to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Yet, bizarrely, there is a temptation to not even bother with the details, no matter how remarkable they may be. That which was unthinkable has now become something of a political routine: another week, another indictment. Trump’s poll numbers against his Republican-primary rivals have continued to go up since the parade of prosecutions against him began this spring. The conventional wisdom has now solidified that, whatever his legal peril, the indictments are somehow a great thing for Trump’s 2024 G.O.P. campaign, boosting his polling, fund-raising, and coverage in the fawning right-wing media. “We need one more indictment to close out this election,” Trump bragged to a dinner of Party stalwarts in Montgomery, Alabama, earlier this month. “One more indictment, and this election is closed out.” This bit of bluster sounded Trump’s typical note of supreme overconfidence—though, to me, it had the ring of false bravado from a man who most surely wants to avoid spending the rest of his life in an orange jumpsuit. Given the near-complete Trumpification of the Republican Party, however, there is no reason to think that he is wrong about the short-term political benefits that one more indictment against him may bring him with his fanatic base.
But, of course, there is nothing in the least bit routine about an ex-President being charged with the gravest offenses against the nation that one can imagine. And, even in this summer of Trump indictments, this new Georgia case stands out in several respects. For starters, it’s the broadest, most ambitious prosecution yet—a stark contrast to Smith’s decision, in the federal case involving Trump’s post-election activities, to stick narrowly to the ex-President and not to charge co-conspirators such as Giuliani, who are named as co-defendants in the Georgia indictment. In another notable departure from the other cases, the Georgia indictment cites the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, law against Trump, essentially defining him and his gang of alleged conspirators as an actual criminal gang. Among the acts they allegedly committed are 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. Trump, who learned much of his aggressive legal playbook from the late celebrity Mob lawyer Roy Cohn, has been compared many times throughout the years to a mobster. But this is the first time anyone has done so in a court of law.
Another big difference between the Georgia case and the others now pending against Trump is that all or part of it could be televised. Unlike the federal courts, which have been wary of broadcasting the proceedings, Georgia state law puts a premium on this kind of transparency, and Robert McBurney, who has been the presiding judge in the Trump case, showed his openness to the cameras on Monday, allowing them to film him as he received and signed off on the indictment. It’s entirely possible that the whole world will get to watch as Willis, sometime in the middle of the Presidential election, presents her evidence against the ex-President and his eighteen accomplices. There is nothing, as we all know by now, that Trump loves more than appearing on television. In attacking the 2020 election, he may have got himself a new reality show in time for the 2024 race: The State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump, et al. After everything we’ve already been through with Trump, this seems to me a truly ominous new prospect. Can this possibly be good for democracy?
A final striking aspect of the Georgia case is the simple fact of its venue. Should Trump actually win another term in the White House—a prospect which remains chillingly possible, if not yet likely—many believe that he would seek to use his executive powers to grant himself a sweeping pardon or to order the Justice Department to drop its prosecutions of him. In recent weeks, I’ve heard many elaborate theories here in Washington for how this doomsday scenario might play out: What if the Senate, for example, refused to confirm any officials to a Trump Justice Department so that there would be no one to carry out his orders? Or what if the election came after Trump was already convicted and behind bars? Could he spring himself from prison by winning? Trump may believe the executive office comes with a magic get-out-jail-free card, but, even if the courts were to agree that it does, the card would only apply at the federal level. Georgia is outside the President’s jurisdiction. These are charges that Trump can’t kill.
It’s been a long two and a half years since the 2020 election. The investigations have dragged out and the country has been unable to move on. The four criminal cases now filed against Trump may linger with us for months, if not years, to come. When Willis gave a brief press conference just before midnight, on Monday, there was little news that was not already contained in the remarkable document she had filed with the court, aside from her answer to the question of when she wanted to try Trump and his co-defendants. She promised to ask for a trial within six months. The TV lawyers were doubtful that, or anything close to it, would come to pass. To which I say: Let’s get on with it. Please. ♦
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