It’s ‘more the merrier’ in Georgia indictment of Trump

An Atlanta-area lawyer, Robert Cheely, faces 10 charges for aiding in the presentation of the purported surveillance videos to Georgia lawmakers with Giuliani. He claimed that poll workers were double- and triple-counting votes and compared what he said had happened to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

John Eastman, a Trump campaign attorney also testified remotely before the Georgia Legislature that there was evidence of widespread election fraud. The indictment discusses the prominent role Eastman played in developing pressure tactics that would force Pence to reject the official Democratic electors in Georgia and other swing states in favor of “alternate” Trump electors.

While Eastman faces nine counts, Atlanta-based lawyer Ray Smith faces 12. Smith sent a letter to state officials raising concerns of voter fraud and also filed one of the Trump campaign's election challenges in state court. At least 63 lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting and the vote-certification process were filed by the Trump campaign in multiple states, nearly all of which have been dismissed or dropped due to lack of evidence.

Smith was among those present at the Dec. 14, 2020, meeting of Trump's electors in Atlanta, where he explained that their voting was purely to preserve their legal remedy in case their election challenge succeed in court. That meeting was organized by David Shafer, who was chairman of the Republican Party of Georgia at the time but stepped down from the role in June. Shafer has said he was just following the advice of Trump's lawyers to preserve the former president's legal options in the state. He faces eight charges in the indictment.

Kenneth Chesebro, another one of Trump's campaign attorneys, faces seven charges for his role in facilitating the plot to create the slate of “alternate” Republican electors in Georgia and across other states as well. In his Dec. 6, 2020, memorandum outlining the plan to “prevent Biden from amassing 270 electoral votes” — even though Biden had legitimately won more than that number — Chesebro even describes his legal theory as “bold” and “controversial."

Now a state senator in Georgia, Shawn Still was the finance chairman of the state GOP in 2020. Prosecutors say he helped organize the Trump elector meeting and even served as one of the "fake" electors, purporting to represent the electoral votes from Georgia. In a court filing that he ultimately withdrew after three weeks, Still even sued to decertify all of Georgia’s presidential election results based on allegations of problems with voting equipment in South Georgia’s Coffee County.

Still faces seven charges, as does Mike Roman, who worked for the Trump campaign as director of election day operations and allegedly helped in the organization of the slates of phony Trump electors in Georgia and other battleground states.

Another integral pawn of the alleged criminal "enterprise" is Cathy Latham, who was one of the 16 Republican electors who signed certificates falsely claiming Trump won in Georgia and faces 11 charges in the indictment. The former chairwoman of the Coffee County Republican Party in rural Georgia was also a notable part in the unauthorized copying of confidential election data in January 2021at the county's election office — an incident that became a vital piece of the investigation. Latham allegedly greeted the computer forensics team that copied the election files in an apparent attempt to prove fraud.

Latham joined Trump's motion seeking to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from her own investigation and to quash the findings produced by a special purpose grand jury that Willis had impaneled two years earlier to collect the evidence that ultimately led to this week's indictment. The Georgia Supreme Court the motion, and Judge Robert McBurney with the Fulton County Superior Court struck it down as premature as it was filed before any charging decisions were ever announced.

Sidney Powell, an attorney who worked with the Trump campaign after the 2020 elections, also faces seven charges, largely for her alleged coordination of obtaining the sensitive election data from the Coffee County voting equipment and paying Atlanta tech company SullivanStrickler to do so. She has voiced a series of baseless election fraud conspiracy theories, including that voting machines had been rigged for Biden.

Also present at the Coffee County elections office after the election, according to surveillance video and facing seven charges, is Scott Hall. The Atlanta bail bondsman allegedly said in a recorded telephone call that he had arranged for a plane to send people to Coffee County and accompanied them as they “went in there and imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment."

Misty Hampton, also known as Misty Martin, was Coffee County’s elections supervisor during the 2020 election and is captured on video during the coordinated data breach. Soon after the election, Hampton made a video that went viral online, trying to show that voting machines used in her county could be manipulated. She faces seven charges for her role in furthering the election fraud conspiracy as alleged in the indictment.

Mark Meadows faces two charges. The former White House chief of staff was on Trump’s infamous phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which the former president pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to overturn Biden's victory in that state.

The indictment mentions how Meadows visited Cobb County in December 2020 to observe the secretary of state's audit of absentee ballots, how he worked to coordinate the “alternate” state electors, and the emails in which he lobbied top Justice Department officials to investigate allegations of voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere.

Jeffrey Clark, a former senior Justice Department official who advocated for Trump's claims of election fraud, faces two charges. In December 2020, Clark drafted a government letter stating that DOJ had “significant concerns” about fraud that may have affected the outcome of the election in Georgia and other states, even though there was no evidence that such concerns existed. The unsent letter urged Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and other state officials to convene a special session of the General Assembly to invalidate official election results and to send Congress a separate slate of electors supporting Trump. Trump briefly considered appointing Clark to serve as acting attorney general in place of Jeffrey Rosen, who refused to legitimize the fraud claims. The former president backed down from this idea only after several senior officials threatened to resign in protest.

The grand jury issued arrest warrants, and the defendants have until noon on Friday, Aug. 25, to voluntarily surrender. Willis said said she’s aiming for a trial date to be within the next six months and intends to try all 19 defendants together.

This could be problematic for Willis, given her difficulty in an unrelated high-profile RICO case that has yet to seat a single juror since jury selection began in January.

The case accuses hip-hop artist Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, of being a co-founder and leader of an alleged Atlanta gang called Young Slime Life, although the rapper’s attorneys strongly deny the charges and assert that YSL refers to the name of the musician's record label, Young Stoner Life.

Young Thug's case is on track to be the longest trial in Georgia history, as attorneys and court administrators struggle to find potential jurors that are unbiased and able to take off the six to nine months that is expected to try all of the defendants. The original indictment named 28 defendants, but since jury selection began in January, eight have taken plea deals, six were tried separately, and six others were severed.

In a press conference Monday night on the Trump case, Willis emphasized that all of the defendants are entitled to the presumption of innocence until they are proven guilty.

Follow @Megwiththenews

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