The Biggest Difference Between the Georgia Indictment and the Jan. 6 Indictment

If the recent federal indictment of Donald Trump on charges related to his attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election was a streamlined surgical strike aimed at ensuring a clean case and a speedy trial of the former president before the 2024 election, Monday night’s Georgia indictment is the equivalent of a blitz. With 19 defendants and 41 charges, the heart of the indictment is a sprawling state racketeering charge that places Trump at the center of a vast conspiracy to lie to state officials, pressure election officials to change vote totals, turn in phony slates of fake electors to Congress, influence witness testimony, and gain access to voting machinery and software, all in an effort to turn Trump from an Electoral College loser into a second-term president. And although the action in the state complaint occurred primarily in Georgia, the indictment alleges that part of the conspiracy, which included the actions of his chief of staff and lawyers, spanned much of the continent, from Arizona to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin to Washington. The case will be messy and difficult to manage, especially given Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ stated intention to try all 19 defendants together.

But the biggest difference between the federal case and the state case isn’t the number of defendants or counts in the indictment. It’s about the central role that race is likely to play not in the federal case but in the state case, from the race of the prosecutor, to the focus on Black election worker Ruby Freeman, to the essential nature of the race-baiting bogus voter-fraud charges in Georgia that formed Trump’s basis for falsely claiming that he was the rightful winner.

First, expect Trump to attack Willis in especially harsh terms. It’s not as though Trump has treated Jack Smith, the special counsel in charge of the federal probe, kindly. He has called Smith “deranged” and a “lowlife prosecutor.”

But Trump has a record of being especially hostile toward Black women, from journalists, to Vice President Kamala Harris, to New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom Trump for no reason branded a “racist” after she brought tax charges against the Trump Organization. He recently said that Tanya Chutkan, the Jamaican-born U.S. district court judge hearing the federal election interference case, is “highly partisan” and “VERY UNFAIR & BIASED.” Indeed, even before the indictment was unsealed on Monday, Trump’s campaign was attacking Willis in personal terms, calling her a “radical Democrat” and “rabid partisan.”

Willis is especially a threat to Trump because he holds no power over her. Even if he becomes president again in 2024, he cannot stop her prosecution or attempt to pardon himself of state crimes. The best he could try to do is delay his prosecution until he is no longer president. In Georgia, the governor has no power to pardon either, so it is not as though Trump could appeal to someone over Willis’ head to get relief. And the RICO statute, which formed the basis for the indictment’s primary charge, carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

Willis’ indictment is full of legalese, but it essentially tells the story of Trump and his allies’ attempt to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. It includes the elements one would expect, from the pressure on Vice President Mike Pence not to count electoral votes, to the infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, thereby flipping Georgia’s Electoral College votes from Biden to Trump, to the fake electors schemes in Georgia and around the country.

But the indictment also goes out of its way to tell the story of another Black woman, Ruby Freeman, and her daughter, fellow election worker Shaye Moss. Freeman became a central figure in Trump and his allies’ false claims about the Georgia election being stolen from him. The indictment describes some of Trump’s lies, including that Freeman was a “professional vote scammer,” that she stuffed ballot boxes, and that she fraudulently awarded at least 18,000 votes to Joe Biden during ballot counting at the State Farm Arena. The mother and daughter were eventually cleared of the false claims, and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has essentially conceded in a civil defamation suit that the claims against the pair were false and made with knowledge of the falsity.

The complaint also alleges that Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for Trump supporter Kanye West, tried to mislead Freeman into giving false testimony about what took place at the arena. Freeman and Moss were at the center of a lie pinning the supposed theft of the 2020 election on two Black women, and they have faced threats and harassment ever since.

In important ways, the Georgia complaint is about getting justice for Freeman and Moss. But more broadly, the complaint vindicates the interest of all Black voters in Georgia and across the country. When Trump made his voter fraud claims in 2016 and 2020, he constantly focused his accusations on Democratic cities with large Black populations. On Nov. 27, 2020, for example, Trump tweeted: “Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he’s got a big unsolvable problem!” The message was clear: Minority voters were stealing the votes of Trump’s white rural supporters. These racist tropes were also a major theme of Giuliani’s public-facing efforts to overturn the election.

Race is not absent from the federal complaint, mind you. The Department of Justice charged Trump under the post–Civil War Ku Klux Klan Act for depriving voters of their right to vote. But race will be front and center in Georgia.

Willis’ constant presence in the public eye over the next year will be an important reminder that although Trump may have been unique in his complex racketeering conspiracy to subvert the election, this is hardly the first time Black voters have been targeted for disenfranchisement in Georgia and across the United States. Part of Willis’ job will be to make it that much more difficult to do so the next time around.