A televised trial with no pardons on the horizon: why Trump’s fourth indictment is different from the previous ones

Donald Trump is facing an investigation —another one— that will lead him to the accused. The case on attempts to manipulate the result of the presidential elections in the State of Georgia in 2020 is the most detailed and extensive of the four charges against the former president of the United States. This new indictment, which was announced Monday night, may become the most spectacular. Unlike federal or New York trials, Georgia law provides that, with few exceptions, your hearings be televised. Something that opens the perspective of seeing Trump – the person best placed to be the Republican candidate for the White House – and his collaborators on the defendant’s bench in the middle of the 2024 election campaign.

The new charges make the former president already accumulate almost a hundred of them, exactly 91, in his various cases around his presidency. The crimes that are imputed to him range from the falsification of accounting documents to the violation of the espionage law. If found guilty in all of them, he would face tens of years in prison.

Georgia can be very expensive for Donald Trump. Of all the States that in November 2020 awarded the presidency of the United States to Joe Biden, the defeat in this one was the one that hurt the former president the most. By his smallest margin – less than 12,000 votes – and because the defeat occurred in a state that had always voted Republican in the last 30 years. His pressures, and those of his team, to turn the results around were especially intense and left many traces, according to the detailed statement of charges presented by the Fulton County prosecutor, Fani Willis, after two and a half years. research.

Willis has combined those fingerprints to use against the 19 defendants the state version of one of the toughest legal tools available to prosecutors in the United States: the law against organized crime and corrupt associations, known as RICO for its acronym in English. It is a regulation designed to fight the mafia and other criminal groups and which imposes long prison sentences: those found guilty of violating it face a minimum of five years in prison. The maximum is 20.

Giuliani’s irony

One of the ironies in this case is that one of the defendants, Trump’s personal attorney and former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani, made a name for himself as a ruthless lawyer by frequently turning to RICO while he was a metropolis prosecutor.

The Georgia prosecutor, also considered a RICO specialist, has accused the 19 defendants of forming a mafia group, a “criminal association”, to keep Trump in the White House. “Trump and the rest of the defendants accused in this pleading refused to accept that Trump lost and knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to illegally change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment document states. . It is a step further than that raised by special prosecutor Jack Smith in his charge for attempting to manipulate the federal elections: although he alludes to other collaborators, whom he does not name, the only defendant in his statement of charges is the former president .

“Rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process to dispute the election results, the defendants engaged in a criminal conspiracy to change the results,” Willis said around midnight Monday after the indictment was made public.

That the case takes place in the southern state also carries potential complications for Trump in the future. The current presidential candidate has pointed to the possibility of issuing a self-pardon for his court cases if he reaches the White House. As president, he could also appoint an attorney general—the US equivalent of the attorney general—to close open federal cases. But the law blocks both possibilities in Georgia: The federal attorney general has no jurisdiction over state cases. Presidents cannot pardon in state cases. It is something that generally corresponds to the governor, as is the case in New York, where Trump is charged with accounting falsification. But Georgia law prevents a governor from granting a pardon. Such measures can only be taken by a committee of jurists.

Trump and the rest of the defendants now have until Friday, August 25 at noon (7:00 p.m. in Spain) to appear in court and attend a hearing in which the charges will be read to them so they can plead guilty or not. The case has been assigned to Judge Scott McAfee, a recent appointment to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp: he has been on the job for just six months. Mark Meadows, one of the defendants and former White House chief of staff, has requested the transfer of his case to the federal circuit, with the hope that those judges decide to file it.

no special treatment

It is still unknown if that first hearing would be televised or if some kind of special measure is planned for the former president and his collaborators. In the preceding cases, he was exempted from appearing in handcuffs or from taking the photo of those on file. But Fulton District Sheriff Patrick Labat had previously indicated that he did not contemplate granting special treatment to any of the detainees.

Even before the terms of his indictment were known, Trump lashed out at prosecutor Willis. It is a tactic, that of charging against the lawyers who accuse him, that he has used systematically in each of his legal cases. This Tuesday he has repeated his criticism, describing the new process as a “witch hunt” with the sole purpose of preventing his return to the White House.

He has also called a press conference for next Monday in which he promises to present a report that —he assures— will demonstrate his allegations that serious electoral fraud occurred in November 2020.

“They never went after those who rigged the elections. They only went after those who fought to find the MANIPULATORS! ”, Wrote the presidential candidate on his social network, Truth. Giuliani, for his part, has accused the Prosecutor’s Office of being “the real criminals.”

So far, Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination in next year’s presidential election have mostly opted for cautious silence. Former Governor Chris Christie, very critical of the former president, has limited himself to considering that the new indictment is “unnecessary”, since it overlaps with the one that special counsel Jack Smith has already presented for attempts to annul the 2020 elections in all the country. For his part, the candidate Vikram Ramaswamy, who on several occasions has insisted that if he wins the elections he would pardon Trump, has denounced that the new case demonstrates the existence of a “police state”.

Prosecutor Willis opened the investigation after a recorded telephone conversation surfaced in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State, Republican Brad Raffensperger, on January 2, 2021, to “find” 11,780 votes, one more than the ones Biden got the upper hand in that state. The charge sheet documents that conversation among a whole range of harebrained attempts to keep the tycoon in power.

Among them was a plan to replace voters who were required to represent Georgia to vote for Joe Biden, the state’s winner, at the official certification of election results on Capitol Hill in Washington on January 6, 2021. The idea was to send an alternative group to vote for Trump and force Vice President Mike Pence, at the head of the ceremony, to recognize those votes as legitimate. Other attempts include pressure against election officials, from calls to Raffensperger – the head of state election management – to harassment of grassroots personnel who participated in the recount.

illegal access to electronic voting machines in the Republican-majority Coffee County to try to access voter data. also pressure

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