Georgia Indicts trump and his Big Lie

At last.

Stephen Fowler over at NPR has the basics: 

A grand jury in Georgia has indicted Donald Trump for his role in failed efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results, implicating the former president as the head of a sweeping conspiracy to subvert his defeat.

It's the fourth indictment in as many months for Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. And it's part of a massive case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis under Georgia's racketeering law, ensnaring a number of defendants that the DA alleges acted as part of a coordinated effort to pressure officials to change the election outcome.

In an indictment handed up Monday, an Atlanta-based grand jury outlined a series of charges against Trump, including violation of the Georgia RICO law and solicitation of a violation of an oath by a public officer.

RICO by the by is a racketeering charge, meaning trump and others engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to commit multiple crimes. Emptywheel - you know what I need to call her by name, so hello Marcy Wheeler! - has more details on the implications of trump getting hit by RICO:

To explain how, I want to first show that the indictment is, fundamentally, about protecting the integrity of Georgia’s government and elections. To see that, it helps to read counts 2 through 41 before reading the RICO charge, which is laid out in 70 pages describing 161 overt acts, many of which took place outside of Georgia...

LIES TO AND SOLICITATION OF GEORGIA OFFICIALS

Count 2 though Count 7: False claims and illegal requests made, many by Rudy Giuliani, before the fake electors scheme. These were lies told to official bodies of Georgia state government, and charging them is an attempt to prevent corruption in state government.

Count 23 through Count 26 charge Rudy, Ray Smith, and Robert Cheely with false claims and solicitations on December 30 — similar in structure and purpose to Counts 2 through 7.

Count 28 charges both Trump and Mark Meadows for the January 2 call to Brad Raffensperger. Count 29 charges Trump for the lies he told during the call.

Counts 38 and 39 charge Trump with lies and solicitations of Brad Raffensperger on September 17, 2021.

FAKE ELECTORS

Count 8 through Count 19: These are a series of six paired charges tied to various kinds of fraud involved with the fake electors. In each pair, the first count charges David Shafer, Shawn Still, and Cathleen Latham for doing the fraudulent thing, and the second count charges Trump, Rudy, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro, Ray Smith, Robert Cheely, and Mike Roman with soliciting the fraudulent thing. They’re a near parallel to the Michigan charges against the fake electors, except that in Georgia only the three most culpable fake electors are charged, and there’s a mirror charge for Trump’s side of the conspiracy.

ATTEMPTS TO ENTRAP RUBY FREEMAN

Counts 20 and 21 and : These charge two efforts to defraud Ruby Freeman by offering her help when in fact they were an attempt to entrap her.

Count 30 and Count 31 charge aspects of a plot to get Kanye’s publicist to travel from Illinois to Georgia to entrap Ruby Freeman into making false claims.

LIES ABOUT GEORGIA

Count 22 charges Jeffrey Clark for his attempts to get DOJ to claim the Georgia election was fraudulent.

Count 27 charges Trump and Eastman with lying about Georgia’s results in a lawsuit.

TAMPERING WITH COFFEE COUNTY TABULATORS

Count 32 through Count 37 charge Sidney Powell, Latham, and two others for tampering with the Coffee County vote tabulators. Again, this has a parallel in the Michigan charges against Matt DePerno and two others.

LIES DURING THE INVESTIGATION

Count 40 charges David Shafer with false statements told during the investigation.

Count 41 charges Robert Cheely with perjury for false claims made during the investigation.

As I understand it, these are the charges on which the RICO conspiracy is built. The RICO conspiracy gives prosecutors additional tools and penalties with which to prosecute this (similar to the conspiracy law charged at the federal level)...

That's a lot of criming (relax, Spellchecker, we can use slang while blogging), but what are the implications surrounding these particular indictments compared to the other three (and counting) trump and cohorts are facing? Why is this one a bigger deal than most?

One of the common elements in the Georgia indictment is the word "lies". Over and over, DA Willis spells out how trump and company lied and kept lying to other state officials in order to get them to violate the integrity of the 2020 election results. They have trump lying in a lawsuit, they have one underling Robert Cheely charged with straight-up perjury to the grand jury, they had people lying to county-level elections official Ruby Freeman to get her to "confess" to rigging ballots.

All of these lies, serving to the Big Lie that trump pushed and keeps pushing about the 2020 results. trump's Big Lie that the election "was stolen" and he "fairly" won.

I blogged about trump's Big Lie before, and why he can't stop:

Trump has made it clear he views the world in the simplest of terms: That people are divided into Winners and Suckers, and that HE (champion and most excellent of the former group) shall never be lumped in with the latter.

So just on this mindset alone, trump cannot admit – not to others, not to himself – that he lost... 

In one respect, trump lost in 2016: The Popular vote clearly went for Hillary. But due to the broken and anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College, trump squeaked into winning three battleground states with literally mere hundreds of votes that gave him their Electoral Votes instead. It should be noted that trump promptly crowed – against all evidence – that he had won a LANDSLIDE, not just the College but also the Popular vote, and claimed it was the greatest victory in history (ignoring the Electoral and Popular vote blowouts of 1984 and 1932 (we don't count Nixon's 1972 blowout because the cheating exposed by the Watergate scandal negates that)).

Trump can't crow like that this time. The illusion of the Electoral College can't grant him that excuse. So he has to settle on denial. Constant, whining denial that he's the victim of voter fraud and to get us to pity him back into office...

The horrifying thing was how easily trump got fellow Republicans to buy into his Big Lie all because the GOP fears the loss of political power:

The Republicans are stuck with the Big Lie because it happens to fit this One Truth:

The Republican Party cannot and will not share power with a Democratic Party they view as un-American and thus illegitimate.

Somewhere back in time - you can argue happening between the rise of the conservative Southern Strategy in the late 1960s or the rise of Saint Ronnie in the 1980s or the corruption of Newt's Contract On America in the 1990s - the Republican Party bought into the idea that only they were true God-fearing God-chosen Gun-worshiping patriots...

But the Republicans have a problem. Where their One Truth was merely a world-view that did not expose itself to self-destructive implosion (Republicans could keep believing it and still function rationally in polite society), the Big Lie is a direct attack on the Real World that sooner rather than later is going to hit the Brick Wall of Unbreakable Facts. The Big Lie compels trump's believers into direct action - SEE the January 6th Insurrection - and these actions have legal consequences where the Big Lie has not and cannot prevail.

The Republicans are betting on their Big Lie carrying them forward into the future. But it's a Big Lie stuck in the past of a failed 2020 election, pushed constantly by a Big Liar in trump who cannot avoid his impending fate either in civil or criminal courts.

With the Georgia indictments, we are at that moment of Truth for the Republican Party as a whole. DA Willis and her team are making a direct rebuke to trump's Big Lie, confronting it with facts and evidence that not only were the voted counted fairly but that trump and his people intentionally worked to subvert those fair counts.

I am paraphrasing Jean-Luc Picard here, in one of the greatest quotes about the quest for justice. Courtrooms are crucibles: In a courtroom we burn away irrelevancies (the lies and misunderstandings) until we are left with a pure product - the truth (based on fact), for all time. For all of trump's bullshitting at his rallies, for all of the deflection and deception by the Far Right media, for all the spineless quibbling of other Republican leaders who fail to hold trump to the factual truth, in a court of law those lies and deceptions cannot withstand scrutiny. trump will confront - at last - the lies he's been telling to everyone and even to himself, and that those lies have no power to keep him in power.

The reason why I remain so optimistic - giddy, even - about the criminal cases leveled against trump is that these courtrooms are going to be the few places where trump will be held accountable for the ongoing costs of destruction and ruin he has built up over the decades. trump's greed, trump's racism, trump's sexism, trump's rage, trump's delusions of grandeur... All of that finally getting added up and presented as a bill way past due that he has to pay.

Let trump face his lies and failures before the 2024 elections. Let the nation come to terms with the reality that trump should never hold any elected office again.

Let justice be done. Let truth prevail. At last.