Trump's trial won't be first, but his shadow looms large
Within weeks, jury selection in Fulton County, Georgia, will be underway. Cameras will be in the courtroom. And prosecutors will present their case alleging a sprawling conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.
But the star defendant — former President Donald Trump — won't be there.
Instead, the defendants in the first trial in the racketeering case against Trump and 18 of his allies, scheduled to begin Oct. 23, will be two of the lawyers who tried to keep him in power after the election: Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, who were the only ones to seek speedy trials, as Georgia allows.
The former president will loom over the courtroom, though, even if he is not in it. That has much to do with how racketeering cases work.
“It is absolutely the trial of Donald Trump,” said Keith Adams, an Atlanta defense lawyer and former prosecutor. “Everyone else — they're not extras, necessarily, but they're bit characters.”
Trump and the other defendants are moving more slowly, potentially going to trial in the second half of next year or even later, though Atlanta prosecutors have been seeking plea deals with some of the accused. Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman, accepted a deal last week in which he pleaded guilty to five misdemeanors and was sentenced to five years of probation.
A lawyer for another defendant, Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign staffer, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week that he rejected a plea offer.
The two heading to trial later this month — weeks after the start of a civil fraud trial against Trump in New York — could not be more different.
Powell is a voluble Texan who spouted conspiracy theories and courted cameras after the 2020 election, promising to “release the kraken,” or a trove of evidence proving that Trump had won. Chesebro, a quiet Harvard Law graduate from Wisconsin, worked behind the scenes, devising the legal theory that drove the recruitment of bogus electors in swing states lost by Trump.
Prosecutors will not focus solely on the accusations against the pair; rather, they will lay out what they have described in charging documents as a far-reaching “criminal organization” that committed computer theft and perjury, filed false documents, impersonated public officers and carried out other crime.
Adams, who is representing the rapper known as Young Thug in another high-profile racketeering case in Atlanta, said that by delving into the alleged misdeeds of Trump and other co-defendants, prosecutors would be making things harder for Chesebro and Powell.
In a racketeering case, he said, “every defendant becomes responsible, and is drawn into the conspiracy, based not just on their own actions, but based upon the actions of other individuals who may or not be there in a courtroom with them.”
The first trial may also provide clues as to how the former president will fare when his turn before a jury comes. And Trump's Atlanta lawyer, Steven Sadow,
will be watching closely.
Sadow has been a regular presence at pretrial hearings for other defendants, observing from the back of the courtroom and occasionally cracking wise. During a recent hearing, Sadow, wearing ostrichskin cowboy boots, remarked on lapel pins worn by the prosecution team and joked that perhaps the defense could fashion some pins bearing the widely distributed mug shot of the former president.
The indictment describes various strands of a broad effort to keep Trump in power, including appeals the former president made to Georgia's Republican leaders to help him “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to overturn his defeat in the state. There were also efforts to harass rank-andfile election workers that Trump and his allies had accused of fraud.
Chesebro and Powell each had a major role in other phases of the operation. Powell coordinated a successful effort by other Trump allies to infiltrate a rural Georgia county's elections office, where they copied sensitive and proprietary software used in voting machines throughout the state in a fruitless hunt for ballot fraud.
As Hall said in a recorded phone call, the team that visited the office in early January 2021 “scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot.” His plea deal is not good news for Powell, who has asserted in legal filings that she did nothing wrong because the group was invited into the office by the local elections administrator, Misty Hampton, who is also a defendant.