Giuliani Plans to Surrender Wednesday in Georgia Election Case

 

Giuliani Plans to Surrender Wednesday in Georgia Election Case

 

Mr. Giuliani served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and advanced false claims that the election was stolen.

 

Danny Hakim Maggie Haberman Richard Fausset

By Danny Hakim, Maggie Haberman and Richard Fausset

Aug. 23, 2023

Updated 12:03 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/us/trump-giuliani-georgia-surrender.html

 

Rudolph W. Giuliani plans to turn himself in on Wednesday at the Atlanta jail where defendants are being booked in the racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, Mr. Giuliani’s local lawyer said Wednesday morning.

 

Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump face the most charges among the 19 defendants in the sprawling case. A former mayor of New York, Mr. Giuliani served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer in the aftermath of the 2020 election and played a leading role in advancing false claims that the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump.

 

Bernard Kerik, who served as New York City’s police commissioner during Mr. Giuliani’s tenure as mayor, planned to accompany him to the jail in Atlanta, two people with knowledge of Mr. Giuliani’s plans said. Mr. Kerik is not a defendant in the case. Also traveling with Mr. Giuliani, who arrived in Atlanta late Wednesday morning on a private plane, was John Esposito, a New York-based lawyer who is expected to take the lead in representing Mr.Giuliani, someone familiar with the arrangement said.

 

The former mayor’s bond has not yet been set. His lawyers plan to meet on Wednesday with the office of Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who is leading the investigation.

 

The bond for Mr. Trump, who plans to turn himself in on Thursday, has been set at $200,000.

 

“Based on the bonds that have been set, we would expect it to not be any higher than the president’s, but we’re going to negotiate that with the district attorney’s office,” said Brian Tevis, an Atlanta lawyer representing Mr. Giuliani.

 

A fourth criminal case. Former President Donald Trump was indicted for a fourth time on Aug. 14, this time over what prosecutors in Atlanta described as his efforts to unlawfully undo his election loss in Georgia in 2020. The indictment includes 13 charges against Trump, as well as charges against 18 of his allies. Here are some key takeaways:

 

Trump was charged under Georgia’s RICO Act. Prosecutors charged Trump and his allies under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, which allows them to link various crimes committed by different people by arguing that they were acting together for a common criminal goal. At its heart, the statute requires prosecutors to prove the existence of an “enterprise” and a “pattern of racketeering activity.”

 

The charges reach far beyond Trump. Among the 18 Trump allies charged in the case are Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and lawyer for Trump, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. Also charged are several more lawyers who are accused of working to try to overturn the election, including John Eastman and Sidney Powell.

 

The charges fall into several baskets. Several of the individual counts stem from false claims of election fraud that Giuliani and two other Trump lawyers made at legislative hearings in December 2020. Another batch of charges concerns a plan to vote for a false slate of pro-Trump electors. A third raft of charges accuses several Trump allies of conspiring to steal voter data and tamper with voting equipment in Coffee County, Ga.

 

The district attorney gave Trump 10 days to turn himself in. Fani Willis, the district attorney who led the lengthy investigation, gave Trump until noon on Aug. 25 to surrender in Fulton County, where he would be arraigned on the charges and enter a plea. The Fulton County sheriff said he expected that Trump would be booked in the same way as any other defendant.

 

Trump blasted the indictment and the prosecutor. The former president lashed out at Willis after the indictment, suggesting that she had charged him to better her own political standing. He said that he would hold a news conference on Aug. 21 that would prove his false claims of election. But late Thursday, he canceled the event.

 

The case against Mr. Giuliani is a striking chapter in the recent annals of criminal justice. A former federal prosecutor who made a name for himself with racketeering cases, he now faces a racketeering charge himself.

 

“This is a ridiculous application of the racketeering statute,” he said last week after the indictment was issued.

 

Several of the defendants in the case have already made the trip to the Fulton County jail to be fingerprinted and have mug shots taken. They include Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, the two architects of the plan to use fake electors to keep Mr. Trump in power after he lost the election to President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

 

David Shafer, a former head of the Republican Party in Georgia, has also turned himself in, as has Scott Hall, a pro-Trump Atlanta bail bondsman who was involved in a data breach at a rural Georgia elections office.

 

In a social media post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump — who is running for office again, leads the Republican presidential primary field and is skipping his party’s first debate on Wednesday night — sounded a defiant note on social media about his upcoming visit to the Atlanta jail, saying he would “proudly be arrested” Thursday afternoon.

 

Mr. Giuliani has struggled financially with mounting legal expenses, many of them related to his efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office for another term after the 2020 defeat. After repeated entreaties from people close to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump plans to host a $100,000-per-person fund-raiser next month at his club in Bedminster, N.J., to aid the former mayor, according to a copy of the invitation.

 

Three of the 19 defendants have begun trying to have the case removed to federal court: Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official; Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff; and Mr. Shafer.

 

Mr. Clark and Mr. Meadows have also filed court papers seeking to block their arrest.

 

Some defendants were granted bond this week after their lawyers met with prosecutors in Atlanta. Mr. Trump’s bond agreement includes stipulations that he not intimidate witnesses or co-defendants, whether in social media posts or otherwise.

 

Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting.

 

Danny Hakim is an investigative reporter. He has been a European economics correspondent and bureau chief in Albany and Detroit. He was also a lead reporter on the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. More about Danny Hakim

 

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman

 

Richard Fausset is a correspondent based in Atlanta. He mainly writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. He previously worked at The Los Angeles Times, including as a foreign correspondent in Mexico City. More about Richard Fausset