For former President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and their 17 other co-defendants, the threat of jail time is getting very real for those charged, arrested and booked in the Georgia election fraud case.
Some are pointing the finger at each other, including John Eastman, a legal architect of Trump’s allegedly illegal effort to stay in power by contriving a false slate of electors to replace those who represented the votes of Americans who picked Joe Biden to win the 2020 presidential election. He says his case is much stronger than that of some other defendants, especially Trump’s lead ally in the effort to overturn the election, Giuliani, the former New York mayor.
Lawyers for another legal architect of Trump’s effort to stay in power, Kenneth Chesebro, have filed a motion demanding a speedy trial in the sweeping election interference prosecution of Trump and his allies. That’s the legal equivalent of throwing a bomb into the RICO, or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, case built over the past 2½ years by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
After trying desperately to avoid arrest by having his case transferred to federal court, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows surrendered Thursday afternoon. He is now in the same boat as his 18 fellow defendants in the Georgia case, even as Meadows is widely believed to be cooperating – to some degree – with Special Counsel Jack Smith and his federal prosecutors, who brought their own conspiracy case against Trump in Washington.
And one of the Georgia state false electors has blamed Trump, saying his group was only following the orders of the commander-in-chief.
In short, now that they’ve seen the inside of the notoriously dangerous Fulton County jail and had their fingerprints and mug shots taken, the alleged co-conspirators are mulling their options in terms of how to fight the case as it moves to court.
And by all appearances, it’s going to get complicated, contentious and potentially ugly, as the Fulton County 19 weigh how much they want to fight for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.
“This case has all the indicators of a classic mob case,” says former federal prosecutor and Justice Department official Gene Rossi, who has done a lot of these cases.
“When prosecutors at the federal and state level charge RICO, the multiple defendants initially are one team. But at some point in the process, each defendant realizes I have to be out for myself, I have to think about me,” Rossi told USA TODAY. “And at some point, I don’t know how many defendants will decide, ‘Let’s call the prosecutors. Let’s offer our cooperation and let the chips fall where they may, and we will take our punches and hopefully get a lighter sentence.’ ”
“That decision may not happen soon, but it will happen,” Rossi adds. “And that decision will be made quickest by the people who are at the lower end of the totem pole. So, 15 through 19 will likely cooperate a lot faster than somebody in the top seven.”
Here’s a status report on what’s next for the 19 defendants in the Fulton County case:
Defendant #1 – Trump still loving the attention
Trump himself appears to be enjoying the legal attention, especially as his poll numbers – and legal and campaign war chests get bigger with each indictment.
Initially, after the 41-count Georgia indictment was unsealed last week, the former president railed against the state charges – and Willis specifically − on social media and announced plans to hold a “news conference” to prove how the charges were baseless. He canceled that event but has been milking the publicity for all it’s worth, including his booking into Fulton County jail.
“I have four of them now if you look. I mean, this is not even possible,” Trump said on Fox Business. “Four, over the next, last couple of months. And frankly, it discredits everything. And they’re all very similar in the sense that they’re, there’s no basis for them.”
Defendants #2 through #7 – the alleged inner circle
At least three of the defendants are trying to move their cases to federal court; Meadows, former senior Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and David Shafer, the former Georgia Republican Party chairman.
U.S. District Judge Steve Jones is set to hold a hearing Monday on Meadows’ request, but he refused to block the arrest of Meadows and Clark, who is also charged with trying to help Trump illegally overturn the election.
At the federal level, Meadows has also asked to dismiss the case, for the same reason, which is that any actions he took to help Trump were done in his official capacity as White House chief of staff.
Willis called the urgency of request “meritless” and “futile.”
Several of Trump’s lawyers − Giuliani, Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis surrendered Wednesday.
Ellis is one of several of Trump’s lawyers who have complained that Trump isn’t paying their legal bills, despite his vast and high-profile fundraising effort to mount an aggressive legal defense. She has turned to social media to ask why the former president and his donors aren’t doing more to help.
And Trump campaign aide Michael Roman is charged in connection with allegedly instructing an unnamed co-conspirator to coordinate with Trump campaign officials to contact state legislators in Georgia and other battleground states on behalf of Trump and encourage them to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.
The Georgia defendants
Shafer, one of the alternate presidential electors who supported Trump despite Biden winning the state, also asked to move his case to federal court. He faces eight charges, including impersonating a public official, forgery and making false statements.
Shafer has argued that serving as a Republican presidential elector chosen in March 2020, he was a federal official acting in his official capacity. He seeks to present several federal defenses to his actions, including official immunity, supremacy clause immunity and the First Amendment.
But Shafer has also said attorneys for Trump, his campaign and the local GOP were responsible for urging him to assemble a slate of false presidential electors that are now at the heart of a sprawling racketeering case.
“Mr. Shafer and the other Republican Electors in the 2020 election acted at the direction of the incumbent President and other federal officials,” Shafer’s attorney wrote in a petition seeking to move the Fulton County case to federal court.
Other local defendants include Georgia lawyers Ray Smith and Robert Cheeley and Shawn Still, one of 16 Georgia Republicans who signed a certificate falsely stating that Trump had won the state and declaring themselves the state’s “duly elected and qualified” electors.
The Georgia list also includes pastor Stephen Cliffgard Lee, publicist Trevian Kutti and Harrison William Prescott Floyd, who allegedly tried to pressure local election workers to confess to election fraud.
And three others, Cathleen Latham, Scott Hall and Misty Hampton were charged, along with Powell, with election interference for allegedly unlawfully tampering with electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines in Coffee County, Georgia., on Jan. 7, 2021. They were also charged with unlawful possession of ballots, computer theft, computer trespass and computer invasion of privacy. And they were charged with conspiracy to defraud the state by stealing voter data.
Dig deeper:Booking photo of Donald Trump made public after arrest in Georgia election case
