Georgia looms next after Trump’s N.Y. felony case
ATLANTA — The indictment of Donald Trump in New York over hush-money payments to a porn actress was a global spectacle, with the former president glumly returning to his old stomping grounds in Manhattan as TV networks closely tracked his procession of black SUVs on their way to the courthouse.
But strip away the high drama, and the actual charging document in the case was far less grand: 34 felony counts of a fairly narrow and common bookkeeping charge that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, described as the “bread and butter” of his office’s white-collar criminal prosecutions.
In Georgia, however, there is another criminal investigation of Trump nearing completion, this one also led by a local prosecutor, Fani Willis of Fulton County. While nothing is certain, there are numerous signs that she may go big, with a more kaleidoscopic indictment charging not only Trump, but perhaps a dozen or more of his allies.
Her investigation has targeted a wide range of conduct centered around efforts to subvert the democratic process and overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss. Nearly 20 people are already known to have been told that they are targets who could face charges, including Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.
For Trump, the possibility of a second and potentially more complex criminal indictment in another state underscores the blizzard of legal challenges he is facing, even as he emerges as the clear front-runner among Republican presidential candidates.
For Willis, the choice to pursue a narrowly focused indictment or a more sprawling one — a classic prosecutor’s dilemma — carries with it potential risks and benefits on both sides. And American history offers few examples in which the stakes are so high.
“Certainly, prosecutors would have this conversation of what’s in the best interest of justice and what is strategically preferable for a case,” said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former federal prosecutor. A narrow case can be easier for jurors to understand. But it is also possible to go “too narrow,” McQuade said, denying a jury the ability to see the entire scope of a defendant’s criminal behavior.
If, on the other hand, a wide-ranging scheme is charged, “you allow them to see the full scope of criminal conduct,” she said. But going big could cause jurors to become lost amid a profusion of evidence, with a long trial increasing the possibility of a mistrial.
In Georgia, the investigation is focused on myriad efforts to overturn Trump’s narrow loss in Georgia after his 2020 election defeat, including his January 2021 phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” him enough votes to win.
If Willis chooses to seek indictments in the Georgia case, she may do so after a new grand jury begins its work in the second week of May, though nothing is set in stone. Typically, presenting such cases to a regular grand jury is a short process that takes a day or two.
The wide scope of the investigation has been evident for months, and Willis has said that seeking an indictment under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute is an option that she is considering. Like the similar federal law, the Georgia RICO statute allows prosecutors to bundle what may seem to be unrelated crimes committed by a host of different people if those crimes are perceived to be in support of a common objective.