We begin today with Norm Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland of The New York Times, writing about the indispensability of Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ indictment of former President Donald Trump and his minions for their attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia … and beyond.
When Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed criminal charges against former President Donald Trump and over a dozen of his allies for their attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results, she did something ingenious.
In contrast to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest laser-focused federal indictment of Mr. Trump, Ms. Willis charges a wide range of conspirators from the Oval Office to low-level Georgia G.O.P. functionaries and is the first to plumb the full depths, through a state-focused bathyscope, of the conspiracy.
[...]
The overall charge includes four core schemes. The first was to pressure government officials to advance the objective of securing Georgia’s electoral votes for Mr. Trump, even though he lost. For the evidence here, in addition to Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Raffensperger, Ms. Willis details other efforts by Mr. Trump and his co-defendants, ranging from Mr. Giuliani’s pressuring of state legislators to Mr. Meadows’s pressure on election authorities to the co-conspirators’ lies and intimidation targeting the ballot counters Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, who goes by Shaye. This also includes efforts in Washington that impacted Georgia, such as the D.O.J. lawyer Jeffrey Clark’s preparation of an allegedly fraudulent draft letter targeting the state.
Much, much, MUCH more punditry will be incoming over the next few days.
Amber Phillips and Salvador Rizzo of The Washington Post explain Willis' use of Georgia's RICO statutes.
The indictment approved on Monday describes the former president and 18 co-defendants as “a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities” to try to change the election results. Its introductory pages cite a litany of alleged offenses by Trump and his advisers and supporters, including “false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.”
Willis had strongly signaled she would use the RICO law to seek charges against Trump and his associates. In an interview with The Washington Post last year, she said she likes applying the RICO statute because it “allows you to tell jurors the full story.”
[...]
When people “hear the word ‘racketeering,’ they think of ‘The Godfather,’” Willis told the New York Times. But the concept of racketeering “has been extended to include any kind of organization that engages in a pattern of prohibited criminal activity to accomplish its goals,” Cunningham said. So this could be applied, legal experts theorize, to the collection of lawyers, political operatives and Republican legislators who tried to overturn the results in Georgia, allegedly at Trump’s behest.
Joan E. Greve of The Guardian sees the Georgia indictments as a vindication of Georgia’s Black voters who helped turn the state Democratic.
For the voting rights leaders who worked tirelessly to deliver Democratic wins in Georgia, Trump’s indictment in Fulton county marked a clear rebuke of his extensive efforts to disenfranchise the state’s voters, reaffirming the sanctity and the power of the ballot.
“This indictment is a win for voting rights and democracy because it strengthens our ability to defend it from its most imminent threat: Donald Trump,” said Xakota Espinoza, a spokesperson for the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight. “It is critical that we send a message that our democracy is sacrosanct, whether it is at the ballot box or courthouse.”
The Fulton county indictment represents a crucial turning point in a drama that has been unfolding since Biden was declared the winner of Georgia in November 2020. Two statewide recounts in Georgia confirmed Biden defeated Trump by roughly 12,000 votes, making him the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state since 1992. The victory was heralded as a landmark achievement for Democrats, particularly the Black voters who make up much of the party’s base in Georgia.
Charles Bethea of The New Yorker looks at how Atlanta-based journalist George Chidi found himself in the middle of the presidential election scandal.
“It’s a little weird,” George Chidi told me on Monday, hours before he headed into the Fulton County Courthouse—a day earlier than he’d been expecting—to offer witness testimony to a grand jury weighing election-interference charges against Donald Trump. “I’m uncomfortable, but I’m doing it.” Chidi is a journalist who has written over the years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Guardian, and the Intercept, and has a modest but devoted following on Substack. Now fifty, he has lived for the past two decades in the Atlanta area, where he’s earned a reputation as a dogged reporter with a broad understanding of complex systems and an eye for meaningful details that a lesser reporter might miss.
[...]
The night before, Chidi had pulled up a list of Georgia’s official Republican electors—which included a young rising star named C. J. Pearson, whom Chidi had spoken to in the past. He told me he saw Pearson walk into the capitol that day. “I thought he might be there for the pomp and circumstance of it all,” Chidi said. “Only he doesn’t make eye contact with me. He just goes into Room 216,” an office on the second floor. “I’m, like, Holy shit, you guys are gonna pull something.” (Pearson had been the first named plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s former lawyers, alleging “ballot-stuffing” in the Presidential election in Georgia. Pearson had recently moved to Alabama for college, and so was no longer eligible to be an elector, and was ultimately replaced. “I don’t want to imply that he broke the law,” Chidi told me.)
Chidi followed him into the room, taking out his phone and going live on Facebook as he did so. “If somebody snatches my cell phone, at least the recording is out there,” he told me, explaining his thought process. “So I walk in. ‘Hi, I’m Georgie Chidi. I’m a journalist. What are you doing?’ Someone says, ‘We’re having a meeting.’ Another person: ‘Oh, he’s got a camera!’ Somebody starts hustling me out of the room. I think about making a stink, but decide against it.” He went on, “As I’m getting swept off the stage, I’m, like, ‘What kind of meeting?’ A woman answers that it’s an ‘education meeting.’ ” Chidi is reasonably certain, he told me, that the person who said this was Cathy Latham, the chairwoman of the Coffee County Republican Party, who was eventually implicated in a scheme to breach an electronic voting machine, allegedly at the behest of Powell, who was Trump’s lawyer at the time. (The Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein also noticed Republican electors in the room and was also told it was an “education meeting.”)
Heather Cox Richardson writes for her “Letters from an American” Substack about a legal win in a Montana courtroom for a group of young Montana residents regarding climate change.
In 1972, after a century of mining, ranching, and farming had taken a toll on Montana, voters in that state added to their constitution an amendment saying that “[t]he state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations,” and that the state legislature must make rules to prevent the degradation of the environment.
In March 2020 the nonprofit public interest law firm Our Children’s Trust filed a lawsuit on behalf of sixteen young Montana residents, arguing that the state’s support for coal, oil, and gas violated their constitutional rights because it created the pollution fueling climate change, thus depriving them of their right to a healthy environment. They pointed to a Montana law forbidding the state and its agents from taking the impact of greenhouse gas emissions or climate change into consideration in their environmental reviews, as well as the state’s fossil fuel–based state energy policy.
Today, U.S. District Court Judge Kathy Seeley found for the young Montana residents, agreeing that they have “experienced past and ongoing injuries resulting from the State’s failure to consider [greenhouse gas emissions] and climate change, including injuries to their physical and mental health, homes and property, recreational, spiritual, and aesthetic interests, tribal and cultural traditions, economic security, and happiness.” She found that their “injuries will grow increasingly severe and irreversible without science-based actions to address climate change.”
Brian Allnutt reports for Inside Climate News on the flooding issues affecting a historic neighborhood in Detroit.
Jefferson Chalmers has been called the “Venice of Detroit.” It’s a unique, historic neighborhood, oriented around a canal system and waterfront parks, and built on one of the vast swamps that once lined the Detroit River and Great Lakes.
Neither the overbank flooding from the canals nor the sewer backups have put Grannum off the neighborhood. She now lives with her fiancé in a house that sits a few feet beneath the flood wall, next door to her childhood home.
And it’s clear why she might want to stay. From the dock in Grannum’s backyard, you can watch boats idle past and look out on the many ramshackle boathouses on Harbor Island in a neighborhood surrounded by water.
“It’s just a vibe here,” Grannum said. “You have different income groups, different cultures, different types of people living in this area.”
But some worry the costs that come with flooding could potentially create a process of “climate gentrification” here. In cities like New Orleans and Miami, this process has seen wealthier and whiter residents displace low-income residents and people of color in less flood-prone areas.
Finally today, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer that Elon Musk’s rebrand of Twitter has rendered dictionary entries about Twitter obsolete.
Elon Musk broke it. Add it to the list along with the SpaceX Starship, self-immolating Teslas, and all of Twitter.
Dictionary editors went out on a tree limb for Twitter, which launched in 2006. Typically, they like to wait until a word has been in circulation for at least a decade before adding it — doing so prevents flash-in-the-pan neologisms from receiving more credit than they’re due.
When Merriam-Webster added the verb tweet in 2011, and Oxford English Dictionary followed suit in 2013, they believed the word wasn’t going anywhere.
Now in 2023, Twitter is no more. In one of the more head-scratching rebrandings in history, Twitter has become X, and tweet no longer sings as a verb.
Have the best possible day everyone!