How the Start of Trump’s Georgia Trial Might Look

On Monday, the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants, charging them collectively with racketeering and 40 other counts.

At a future trial, once a jury is sworn, District Attorney Fani Willis or one of her assistants will deliver an opening statement. As two former federal prosecutors, we offer this draft opening statement as an example of what Willis’ opening case against Trump might look like.

Members of the jury,

You probably know some of what happened after the 2020 election, but it took a grand jury for us to learn the full story the evidence in this case will tell you. It’s a case about one man trying to keep presidential power by ending democracy and the army of confederates he employed to help him do it.

It’s about a self-interested commander in chief, Donald John Trump, trying to stay in office by overturning the will of the majority. We’re here because the former president placed a special emphasis on our state.

In America, voting by majority rule is what protects our rights and freedoms. Where individuals conspire to bury our democratic system, as we will show happened here, accountability to the law must follow.

You have undertaken a sacred and not-always-pleasant duty to ensure such accountability. But without a jury of a defendant’s peers performing this profound obligation, our liberty is but a wisp in the wind. Thank you for your service.

You are going to hear evidence from a lot of witnesses about multiple unlawful schemes. Here’s how we are going to make it simple for you.

There is one overarching framework. The first count of this 41-count indictment alleges a violation of our state’s RICO Act. That abbreviation stands for “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.”

Don’t let that title confuse you. Not everyone who commits crimes in violation of this law is a Mafia gangster. The Georgia Legislature recognized that people who are up to no good can abuse our citizens’ security and the public order just as gravely while wearing a business suit.

You can be a racketeer without being a mobster.

If, as the evidence will establish, the defendants decided to try to overturn the election through a series of frauds, threats, and other crimes, then they violated the RICO law. Georgia criminal law does not exempt powerful politicians and operatives from the same rules that apply to everyone else. No one is above the law.

Here’s what RICO means, in a nutshell.

It’s unlawful for anyone to acquire or maintain an interest in an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering. A pattern of racketeering means two crimes on a list of 40 offenses that the Legislature has set out.

We call these crimes RICO’s “predicate acts.”

In this case, the predicate acts that the grand jury alleged include:

We will show that the defendants committed at least two of these crimes as part of a “criminal enterprise.” It consisted, as we shall prove, of the 19 co-defendants’ running multiple unlawful schemes to overturn the election, like the plot to present fake Electoral College votes from our state to Congress on that tragic day of Jan. 6.

RICO allows us to tell you virtually the entire crime story through the indictment’s first count. The same evidence, of course, will prove the other charges.

They include other counts charging conspiracy. A conspiracy is an agreement among the defendants requiring at least one overt act taken to achieve the unlawful objective—here, overturning your election.

The criminal enterprise charged in the RICO count came close to succeeding. It almost ended our constitutional republic.

The evidence will prove that in 2020’s closely contested election, Georgians cast over 11,000 more votes for President Joe Biden than for then-President Trump.

In a country and a state that prizes democracy, a one-vote majority, an 11,000-vote majority, or a million-vote majority produces the winner.

And a rule-of-law society functions safely only if the candidate who loses accepts the will of the majority. The evidence will show that Trump did not.

We’ve all read about countries where generals who are unhappy with the results of an election take the law into their own hands and try to throw out results they don’t like.

You will hear that, in this case, the defendants conspired to do the same thing, not with tanks and guns, but with lies and threats.

Let’s move to what happened here in Fulton County. You will hear from Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. His testimony connects defendant Trump personally to his corrupt organization’s illicit RICO scheme.

The then president tried to pressure and threaten Raffensperger to change the certified results of the election. In a Jan. 2, 2021, recorded phone call, you will hear defendant Trump tell Raffensperger: “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” That was one more than he needed to reverse Biden’s Georgia win.

Promulgating dangerous disinformation was also part of the corrupt enterprise. You will hear how the defendants repeatedly broadcast multiple false narratives aimed at convincing citizens to buy into Trump’s ‘big lie’ that the election was stolen in order to pressure elected officials to yield.

Georgia’s never did.

The evidence will prove that, in pursuing their scheme, the defendants went so far as to falsely proclaim that honest officials and citizens had betrayed their public responsibilities.

Those false charges, deliberately amplified via the defendants’ extraordinary access to the public media, irresponsibly endangered lives, exposing individuals and their families to threats of death.

For example, you will hear how, over and over, the defendants falsely accused Georgians such as Fulton County poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss of exchanging real ballots for fabricated ones. You will hear these women testify that lies about their good names and threats of violence by Trump followers were these two poll workers’ unwelcome reward from this criminal organization.

They will tell you that they had undertaken, with complete integrity, the front-line Election Day tasks that we need citizens to perform. They were helping officials sort completed ballots so they could be properly counted.

Let me specify some of the “predicate acts” through which the defendants operated their RICO organization, the Trump campaign.

Remember I spoke of defendants making “false statements and writings” and of “forgery”? The evidence will show that these predicate crimes were part of the defendants’ organized scheme to create fake electors in Georgia and elsewhere. That plot was part of their attempt to overturn the election.

Had Trump won the state vote, Republicans would have been Trump’s official electors when the Electoral College votes were counted on Jan. 6. But when Trump lost, his campaign solicited individual Republicans to create fraudulent slates of electors. They were meant to provide a pretext for Vice President Mike Pence to reject or delay Congress’s Jan. 6 certification of President Biden’s victory.

To try to achieve that goal, the fake electors signed phony certificates falsely attesting to their official status. Those were false written statements and therefore forgeries under the law.

They were therefore predicate acts alleged within the RICO charge. In other counts in the indictment, those false writings and forgeries are also charged as substantive offenses and overt acts in support of separate conspiracies.

Let me preview evidence about another set of predicate RICO acts, the solicitation of criminal computer trespass. You will hear testimony that the certain defendants affiliated with the Trump campaign solicited individuals in Coffee County to take unlawful possession of voting machines and the computer software within them. The evidence will show that they did, and then illegally distributed the information to individuals across state lines.

We will prove that they were endeavoring to show, through disinformation if necessary, that the machines switched votes from Trump to Biden.

Of course, as the evidence will show, nothing was further from the truth. And while little came of the unlawful trespass, it was dangerous. Importantly, it was a predicate RICO crime, whether or not it succeeded in attaining its unlawful objective.

At the close of the trial, the court will explain the provisions of Georgia criminal law that you are to apply to the evidence. The witnesses and the documents will leave you without any reasonable doubt that these defendants violated the laws of this state in a multifaceted RICO violation and conspiracy.

You have undertaken a grave responsibility, among the most important that any citizen can perform. You will ensure that the law governs fairly and honestly. It must apply evenly to the rich and powerful, just as it does to individuals without means or influence.

No one is above the law.