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Just before his visit to an Atlanta jail to be booked on 13 felony counts, Donald J. Trump has shaken up his Georgia legal defense team, adding Steve Sadow, a veteran criminal defense lawyer who has taken on a number of high-profile cases. Mr. Trump’s decision comes soon after one of his lawyers, Drew Findling, and his two other lawyers in Atlanta, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg, negotiated a $200,000 bond for Mr. Trump, who is one of 19 defendants in a sweeping racketeering indictment charging them with engaging in a “criminal enterprise” that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. Mr. Findling is unlikely to be kept on, according to a person familiar with the matter, while Ms. Little will be retained. On Thursday, Mr. Trump is expected to surrender at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, where he is likely to be fingerprinted, photographed and have his weight recorded, the protocol for all criminal defendants in the county.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Steve Sadow, Trump’s, Drew Findling, Jennifer Little, Marissa Goldberg, Findling, Little Organizations: Jail Locations: Atlanta, Georgia, Fulton

The case is the fourth time criminal charges have been brought against former President Donald J. Trump this year, but Thursday was the first time that he was booked at a jail and had his mug shot taken. Mr. Trump spent about 20 minutes at the Fulton County Jail, submitting to some of the routines of criminal defendant intake. He was given an identification number — P01135809 — in the Fulton County criminal justice system. He was finished in 20 minutes and on his way back to the airport, where his private plane was waiting. That weight is 24 pounds less than the White House doctor reported Mr. Trump weighing in 2018.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Trump’s Organizations: House Locations: Fulton, Fulton County, Fulton County’s

Rudolph W. Giuliani plans to turn himself in on Wednesday at the Atlanta jail where defendants are being booked in the racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, Mr. Giuliani’s local lawyer said Wednesday morning. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump face the most charges among the 19 defendants in the sprawling case. A former mayor of New York, Mr. Giuliani served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer in the aftermath of the 2020 election and played a leading role in advancing false claims that the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump. Bernard Kerik, who served as New York City’s police commissioner during Mr. Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, planned to accompany him to the jail in Atlanta, two people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s plans said. Mr. Kerik is not a defendant in the case.

Persons: Rudolph W, Giuliani, Donald J, Trump, Mr, Bernard Kerik, Giuliani’s, Kerik, John Esposito, Willis Organizations: Mr Locations: Atlanta, New York, Mr.Giuliani, Fulton County

Some of Donald J. Trump’s co-defendants in the election interference case in Georgia began turning themselves in on Tuesday, while others tried to get the sprawling criminal case moved out of state court and into federal court. Those motions lay the groundwork for what will be the first major legal fight in the case, which was filed in Superior Court in Atlanta last week. Most of the defendants, including Mr. Trump, plan to turn themselves in this week, as ordered by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., who is leading the investigation. Another prominent Trump ally, John Eastman, turned himself in on Tuesday and was booked at the jail. Mr. Eastman, a chief architect of Mr. Trump’s effort to reverse his 2020 election loss, said in a statement that the indictment “represents a crossing of the Rubicon for our country, implicating the fundamental First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances.”

Persons: Donald J, Trump’s, Jeffrey Clark, David Shafer, Mark Meadows, Trump, Fani T, Willis, Clark, Meadows, John Eastman, Eastman, ” Organizations: Justice Department, Georgia Republican Party, White House Locations: Georgia, Superior Court, Atlanta, Fulton County ,

A judge in Atlanta set bail for former President Donald J. Trump at $200,000 on Monday in the new election interference case against him, warning Mr. Trump not to intimidate or threaten witnesses or any of his 18 co-defendants as a condition of the bond agreement. Mr. Trump, who is expected to surrender to the authorities in Atlanta this week, is also sorting out logistical details in three other criminal cases that have been filed against him this year. Earlier on Monday, federal prosecutors pushed back on a request from his lawyers to postpone a separate election interference trial in Washington, D.C., until at least April 2026. Under his bond agreement in Georgia, Mr. Trump cannot communicate with any co-defendants in the case except through his lawyers. In the past, Mr. Trump has made inflammatory and sometimes false personal attacks on Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, who is leading the case.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Willis Organizations: Washington , D.C Locations: Atlanta, Washington ,, Georgia, Fulton County

On its face, the criminal case accusing former President Donald J. Trump and 18 of his allies of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia has little in common with the other high-profile racketeering case now underway in the same Atlanta courthouse: that of the superstar rapper Young Thug and his associates. But the 15-month-old gang case against Young Thug — which, like the Trump case, is being prosecuted by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney — offers glimpses of how State of Georgia v. Donald John Trump et al. may unfold: with a plodding pace, an avalanche of pretrial defense motions, extraordinary security measures, pressure on lower-level defendants to plead guilty, and a fracturing into separate trials, to name a few. Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, was indicted in May 2022 along with 27 others under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, known as RICO. Like Mr. Trump’s RICO indictment, the charging papers described a corrupt “enterprise” whose members shared common illegal goals.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Young Thug, Young, Fani T, Willis, —, Donald John Trump et, Jeffery Williams, Georgia’s Racketeer, Trump’s, Williams Organizations: Prosecutors, Young Locations: Georgia, Atlanta, Fulton County

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., said on Monday that she hoped her criminal racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies could go to trial in the next six months. But racketeering cases are not built for speed. One defendant, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, has already filed a motion to move the case to federal court. Mr. Trump himself has a long history of using delay tactics in his various legal entanglements, and he, too, is likely to file pretrial motions seeking to get the case thrown out or moved to federal court. The judge in the case may also determine that six months is not enough time for defense lawyers to prepare for a trial involving so many defendants and 41 total charges, including a racketeering count that took prosecutors nearly 60 pages to describe.

Persons: Willis, Donald J, Trump, Mark Meadows, Trump’s Locations: Fulton County ,, Georgia, Florida , New York, Washington

To locals, the jail is known simply as “Rice Street.”And over the next nine days, the sprawling Atlanta detention center is where defendants in the racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies will be booked. On Wednesday, the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office prohibited news media from gathering near the jail as it prepared for the defendants to be processed. Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, has said that she wants all 19 people charged in the case to be booked by noon on Aug. 25. Her office has led a two-and-a-half-year investigation into election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies that culminated this week with a 98-page racketeering indictment. But whether Mr. Trump himself is processed there will very likely depend on the Secret Service.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Rudolph W, Giuliani, Trump’s, Mark Meadows, Willis Organizations: Justice Department, Sheriff’s, Service Locations: Atlanta, Fulton, Fulton County

Fani T. Willis was barely three days into her new job as district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., when a potential case caught her attention. A recording had emerged of Donald J. Trump, in his waning days as president, telling Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state and a fellow Republican, that he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse his narrow 2020 election loss there. The call fell squarely in Ms. Willis’s new jurisdiction, since Fulton County includes the State Capitol building in Atlanta where Mr. Raffensperger works. Ms. Willis had inherited an office with a deep backlog of cases exacerbated by the pandemic, and had limited staff. But she knew almost immediately that she would investigate.

Persons: Willis, Donald J, Trump, Brad Raffensperger, Raffensperger, Ms Organizations: Republican, Capitol Locations: Fulton County ,, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta

Donald J. Trump has raised the idea in the past that as president he could pardon himself from federal crimes. But in the Georgia case, Mr. Trump would have no such power if he is re-elected, because a president’s pardons apply only to federal crimes. Beyond that, getting a pardon in Georgia is not just a matter of persuading a governor to grant clemency. People convicted of state crimes are eligible to apply for pardons only five years after they have completed serving their sentences. Even then, it’s not the governor who decides but the State Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, it’s, ” Organizations: State Locations: Georgia

Former President Donald J. Trump has until no later than noon on Aug. 25 to voluntarily surrender to authorities in Fulton County, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney, said on Monday. The script that officials in Atlanta will follow for his arrest and booking is likely to deviate from the standard operating procedure, just as it did when Mr. Trump was arrested on separate charges in New York in April. In New York, prosecutors contacted a lawyer for Mr. Trump on the evening of March 30 “to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s Office for arraignment,” according to a post on Twitter by the district attorney, Alvin Bragg. A few days later, Mr. Trump was fingerprinted and escorted through a Manhattan courthouse after surrendering to investigators from the district attorney’s office. But he was also allowed to forego certain procedural indignities, including being handcuffed and having his booking photo taken.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Willis, Alvin Bragg Organizations: Manhattan, Twitter Locations: Fulton County, Atlanta, New York, Manhattan

For more than 50 years, prosecutors have relied on a powerful tool to take down people as varied as mafia capos, street gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, and pharmaceutical executives accused of fueling the opioid crisis. Now a prosecutor in Georgia is using the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, to go after former President Donald J. Trump, who along with 18 of his allies was indicted on Monday on charges of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. One power of RICO is that it often allows a prosecutor to tell a sweeping story — not only laying out a set of criminal acts, but identifying a group of people working toward a common goal, as part of an “enterprise,” to engage in patterns of illegal activities. Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is using a RICO indictment to tie together elements of a broad conspiracy that she describes as stretching far outside of her Atlanta-area jurisdiction into a number of other swing states, a legal move made possible by the racketeering statute. Her investigation also reached into rural parts of Georgia — notably Coffee County, where Trump allies got access to voting machines in January 2021 in search of evidence that the election had been rigged.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Fani Willis, Georgia — Organizations: Bloods, Trump Locations: Georgia, Fulton County ,, Atlanta, Coffee County

The grand jury will likely decide within days whether Mr. Trump should be indicted for interfering in the presidential election in Georgia. Here is what we know about the investigation in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Why is Mr. Trump under investigation in Georgia? Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, began looking into whether Mr. Trump and his associates violated Georgia law shortly after a recording was released of Mr. Trump talking by phone to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. During the call, Mr. Trump insisted that he had won the state of Georgia and made baseless allegations of fraud, even though multiple recounts confirmed that he had lost.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Trump’s, Joseph R, Biden, Willis, Brad Raffensperger Organizations: Republican, New York Times, Siena, Mr Locations: Fulton County ,, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a central figure in the investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia, was among those charged on Monday night in the case. A former federal prosecutor and mayor of New York City, Mr. Giuliani served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer during the waning days of his presidency and led the legal efforts in several states to challenge Mr. Biden’s victories and keep Mr. Trump in power. Prosecutors have scrutinized false allegations of election fraud that Mr. Giuliani made before state legislative committees in December 2020, as well as his role in a plan to send a slate of electors who supported Mr. Trump to Congress — even though Georgia had already certified electors who supported Joseph R. Biden Jr., who won the state by about 10,000 votes. State prosecutors in Atlanta informed Mr. Giuliani last year that he was a target of their investigation, but he sought to avoid testifying to a special grand jury investigating the matter. He was ordered to do so in August of last year by a judge who told him to come to Atlanta “on a train, on a bus or Uber.”

Persons: Rudolph W, Giuliani, Trump, Congress —, Joseph R, Biden, Mr, ” Organizations: Prosecutors, Congress Locations: Georgia, New York City, Atlanta

When President Donald J. Trump’s eldest son took the stage outside the Georgia Republican Party headquarters two days after the 2020 election, he likened what lay ahead to mortal combat. “Americans need to know this is not a banana republic!” Donald Trump Jr. shouted, claiming that Georgia and other swing states had been overrun by wild electoral shenanigans. He described tens of thousands of ballots that had “magically” shown up around the country, all marked for Joseph R. Biden Jr., and others dumped by Democratic officials into “one big box” so their authenticity could not be verified. Mr. Trump told his father’s supporters at the news conference — who broke into chants of “Stop the steal!” and “Fraud! Fraud!” — that “the number one thing that Donald Trump can do in this election is fight each and every one of these battles, to the death!”Over the two months that followed, a vast effort unfolded on behalf of the lame-duck president to overturn the election results in swing states across the country.

Persons: Donald J, Trump’s, Donald Trump Jr, Joseph R, Biden, Trump, —, Donald Trump, Willis Organizations: Georgia Republican Party, Democratic Locations: Georgia, Fulton County

Mr. Trump is facing four separate criminal cases, a staggering legal burden for a politician running for another term. It remains unclear when the former president will face trial, and in what court system, since he and his co-defendants have varying legal strategies. Some have filed to move the case to federal court, while others are seeking speedy state trials. As of Sept. 5, all 19 defendants had pleaded not guilty and had waived their right to a formal arraignment. This is the second of the four criminal cases facing Mr. Trump to be centered on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Persons: Trump, Scott McAfee, Trump’s, Mark Meadows, Rudolph W, Giuliani, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, Biden Organizations: White House, New York Times, Siena Locations: Georgia, Fulton County

☆ Trump Election Interference Case to Go to Grand Jury in Georgia Early Next Week
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-12 | by ( Richard Fausset | More About Richard Fausset | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Mr. Chidi informed The New York Times on Saturday that he had received the notice to appear. BackgroundFani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has spent two-and-a-half years investigating whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in the state. In New York, Mr. Trump was indicted in April on state charges stemming from his alleged role in paying hush money to a porn star. Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty in those cases. What’s NextIf Mr. Trump is indicted in Georgia, he will have to travel to Atlanta in the days or weeks afterward to be booked and arraigned.

Persons: Jack Smith, Trump, Chidi, Duncan, Fani, Willis Organizations: New York Times, Saturday, CNN Locations: Georgia, Fulton County ,, New York , Florida, Washington, New York, Miami, Atlanta

The fourth criminal case involving Donald J. Trump is likely to come to a head next week, with the district attorney in Atlanta expected to take the findings from her election interference investigation to a grand jury. The Georgia investigation may be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers undertook to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. Ms. Willis has signaled that she would seek indictments from a grand jury in the first half of August. Security barriers were recently erected in front of the downtown Atlanta courthouse, and at lunchtime on Tuesday, 16 law enforcement vehicles were parked around the perimeter. On Tuesday afternoon, two witnesses who received subpoenas to appear before the Fulton County grand jury said in interviews that they had not received notices instructing them to testify within the next 48 hours, a sign that the case will not get to the jury until next week.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Willis Locations: Atlanta, Georgia, Fulton County ,, Fulton

The sheriff of Fulton County, Ga., said on Tuesday that if former President Donald J. Trump were to be indicted in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the state, he would not receive special treatment, and would be booked and photographed like any other defendant. The Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, has signaled that she will bring indictments in the matter by the middle of the month. “Unless someone tells me differently,” the sheriff, Patrick Labat, said on Tuesday, his office would follow “normal practices, and so it doesn’t matter your status. We’ll have mug shots ready for you.”Sheriff Labat’s remarks raised the prospect that a former president could be booked at the county jail near downtown Atlanta. But it remains to be seen whether the Secret Service would weigh in and alter the sheriff’s plans, should an indictment of Mr. Trump come to pass.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Fani, Willis, Patrick Labat, Labat’s, Mr Locations: Fulton County ,, Fulton County, Atlanta

A Georgia judge on Monday forcefully rejected an effort by former President Donald J. Trump to throw out evidence collected by a special grand jury and to remove the current prosecutor from the investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state. Judge Robert C. I. McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court wrote in a nine-page order that Mr. Trump did not have the legal standing to make such challenges before indictments were handed up. The office of the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, a Democrat, is expected to present potential indictments in the matter to a regular grand jury by mid-August. A “special purpose” grand jury, which did not have indictment power, interviewed dozens of witnesses and subpoenaed documents over the course of roughly seven months. Then, the jury issued an advisory report that recommended the indictment of a number of people for violations of Georgia laws, according to the jury forewoman.

Persons: Donald J, Trump, Trump’s, Robert C, Fani, Willis Organizations: Court, Democrat Locations: Georgia, Fulton County

☆ Who is Fani Willis, the Prosecutor at the Center of the Trump Investigation?
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-16 | by ( Richard Fausset | More About Richard Fausset | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

ATLANTA — Fani T. Willis strode up to a podium in a red dress last year in downtown Atlanta, flanked by an array of dark suits and stone-faced officers in uniform. “If you thought Fulton was a good county to bring your crime to, to bring your violence to, you are wrong,” she said, facing a bank of news cameras. “And you are going to suffer consequences.”Ms Willis is the first Black woman to lead Georgia’s largest district attorney’s office. In her 19 years as a prosecutor, she has led more than 100 jury trials and handled hundreds of murder cases. Since she became chief prosecutor, her office’s conviction rate has stood at close to 90 percent, according to a spokesperson.

Persons: Willis strode, Fulton, ”, Ms Willis, —, Donald J, Trump Organizations: ATLANTA Locations: Atlanta, Georgia

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