The indictment of Donald Trump filed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is, to put it mildly, complicated.
The core allegation is simple — that Trump and others engaged in a criminal racketeering conspiracy to try and overturn Joe Biden’s win in Georgia (and nationally). But sprawling out from that, the indictment features 19 defendants, 41 charges, and 161 enumerated acts “in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
While every defendant is charged with the main count of being part of the overall conspiracy, the specific charges against them vary. Trump, for instance, is charged with 13 counts overall.
There’s a lot going on. But having dissected the indictment, here’s how I see it: In Willis’s telling, the Trump team’s overall effort to steal the election breaks down into five distinct conspiracies that she argues violated the law in their own right.
Trump is at the center of three of them — the effort to get Georgia officials to change the election outcome, the fake electors plot, and the effort to enlist the US Justice Department to make false claims about Georgia’s results.
Then, there were two other conspiracies carried out by lower-level figures, without known involvement from Trump directly: an effort to intimidate poll worker Ruby Freeman (who Trump’s team had falsely accused of ballot fraud), and a breach of voting data in Coffee County, Georgia.
1) Trump’s effort to get Georgia officials and legislators to change the outcome
Both in public and in private, Trump and his allies repeatedly urged various Republican officials in Georgia, who controlled the legislature and all state offices, to make him the winner of the state instead of Biden. (These efforts all failed.)
This was criminal, Willis argues, both because it’s a solicitation that officials violate their respective oaths of office, and because the conspirators made false statements (fictional claims of ballot fraud and vote-counting malfeasance) as part of…
Read the full article here