Three Georgia Law Professors Weigh In On Trump's Indictment 39:59

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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Former President Trump has been indicted for a fourth time, now in Fulton County, for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

While the alleged crimes in this case relate to his federal indictment and special counsel Jack Smith's investigation, there are important differences. First, these are state crimes based in part on Georgia's racketeering laws, which have historically been applied much more broadly than federal racketeering laws.

Second, and relatedly, there's an alleged criminal enterprise at the core of this case, which resulted in the indictment of 18 other people also involved in some way in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That group includes names like Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, and other names you might remember from the months following the 2020 election, and some folks you've probably never heard of before.

Third, thinking about a possible Trump second term, these being state crimes, the president has no pardon power or power to make the case go away. Also, unlike in the other cases so far, Georgia allows its court proceedings to be televised. So if you're thinking about how the public might process all of this, perhaps that holds some significance.

There's more to get into, and we're going to dig into it right now with a group of Georgia legal experts. Here with me, our professor of law and associate dean of research at Emory University, Kay Levine. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Also joining us is attorney Christopher Timmons at Knowles Gallant Timmons, who specializes in Georgia's racketeering law. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks.

Thank you, Galen. Good to be here. And also here with us is Anthony Michael Christ, professor of law at Georgia State University. Welcome. Glad to be here. All right. So we have assembled three of the brightest Georgia legal minds on the podcast this morning to really try to untangle all of this.

Because there's a lot going on. I mean, this was a nearly 100-page indictment. So we're going to try to make sense of it all together. And first, I just want to say, I think there's a good chance that at this point, Trump's now four indictments are melding together in Americans' minds. I mentioned a few things at the top that make this a little bit different. But when we are trying to differentiate sort of what makes this fourth indictment unique, Kay, kick us off. What did I leave out? What are some other things we should think about here?

So I would say the similarity between this case and Jack Smith's most recent indictment of the former president for election interference, the similarity between those two cases is really the greatest. There is no, as far as I can tell, no similarity between this and the Mar-a-Lago documents case or the case brought by the New York attorney general for the business practices there. So the similarities really are between those two cases.

What I see when I look at both indictments is the Fulton County indictment is far more granular in terms of the specifics that it gives about every email, every tweet, every text, every meeting, every phone call, and not just those that were initiated by the former president, but sometimes it's an email between person A and person B discussing something or attaching a memo or suggesting a strategy.

or person X going to pick up person Y at the airport in order to bring person Y into Fulton for the purpose of doing something nefarious connected to the scheme. So compared to the federal indictment, this one has a lot of detail. I think it's one of the reasons that it goes on for so many pages. Even count one, which is the main RICO count,

has 160 something acts that are alleged to be in furtherance of that main conspiracy. It goes on for 71 pages. So that level of detail is really stunning. And for people like myself who followed as a resident of Georgia, you know, and a resident of Atlanta, I knew some of these things at the time that they were happening, but I don't think I had any idea the level of involvement, the number of people who were involved.

and just how many things were going on behind the scenes. We all knew about the phone call to Brad Raffensperger because it was publicized almost as soon as it was happening. We knew about the fake electors scheme. But so many of the other details

were really hidden from public view. And that I think is one of the great benefits of this grand jury process is just how much was brought to light publicly. And we'll see more of that, of course, once the case goes to trial. But the level of detail, the number of co-conspirators who are named personally really means that this feels like a very different charging document than what we saw in the federal case.

Yeah, Anthony, get in here. How are you thinking about the differences? Okay, so you know the whole story about Hansel and Gretel and the breadcrumbs being left everywhere? Never heard of it.

sloppy as can be. And I mean, I think for those of us who watch a lot of this unfold in real time, there was a sense that it was really sloppy and it was a sense that people were just doing whatever they wanted, however they wanted. And there was just no sense of repercussions, you know, in the works that would make them restrain themselves in some kind of way. But it is, I think, really shocking, the granular detail. Like,

Like Professor Levine said, this is the detail that's laid out. I've always seen this as a subset of Jack Smith's case, right? Jack Smith had the big, large Section 241 conspiracy to deprive civil rights case as an election law, law of democracy, con law person. That's the stuff that really got me energized. Fannie Willis is going to just bore into the Georgia aspect of things and be done. That's just not what happened. I mean, she really tried, I think, in this document to do two things. Show one,

how a national criminal enterprise, a national conspiracy was formed and how Georgia was disproportionately targeted and Georgians were disproportionately harmed by that enterprise and our laws violated. And then two, I think the narrative and all the detail in it

is really meant to communicate something about this being essential for the preservation, the health, and the promotion of democracy. She's got to explain to people why she's doing this because this is not a run-of-the-mill case. And I think she is communicating not in a direct way, but she's winking and nodding to the idea that our democracy needs some –

I don't want to say saving, but our democracy requires some accountability for what happened here in 2020. So, I mean, I think the biggest thing is that you've got a RICO Act charge, which you can't have nationally because they don't have continuity. So there's a requirement on national RICO that the scheme lasts.

It's kind of up in the air depending on the court, but at least 12 months or have the possibility of lasting longer. And here this was a much shorter scheme, but you can use that under the Georgia RICO Act. I think one of the big things, and I've tried, I think, at least seven RICO cases at this point. One of the nice things about using RICO

is that the level of evidence that you can use in a RICO case is much broader than you can use in another case because anything that anyone did in furtherance to the conspiracy is relevant to the case as opposed to when you've got individual indictments you can really only talk about

what individual defendants are up to. The other thing that you'll see in this indictment that's different than the federal indictment is you've got a number of what we refer to as acts in furtherance of the conspiracy, which aren't actual crimes. I believe it's number 56 paragraph in there where they talk about David Schaffer

having reserved a room at the state capitol. That's not a crime unless it's an act in furtherance of the conspiracy, which it was here, which is an act that ties him back to the conspiracy. It's the same thing like as an armed robbery. It's not a crime to buy a gun. It's not a crime to rent a car. But if you buy that gun and hand it to somebody to commit an armed robbery or you rent that car as the getaway vehicle for the armed robbery, then you've committed a criminal act, the criminal act being conspiracy.

And so that's probably the big difference is you've got RICO here, which is a complete game changer. So yeah, as I mentioned in the intro, Georgia's RICO laws, their racketeering laws are significantly different from federal laws, which makes this whole case basically possible. I've also heard on top of that, you know, some perhaps early criticisms of the approach that Fannie Willis is taking here, that it's really like,

Charge absolutely everything possible, charge everyone possible. It's extremely broad. It's throwing the whole book and sort of seeing what sticks and that that may, you know, for people who think that, you know, she's an elected Democrat who wants to sort of just target Trump that perhaps gives credence to their views. But for people who are like,

hey, you know, this is a priority. Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination and he may be president again and want to see this case tried expediently. That may also mean that this gets held up for a long time because you now have 19 defendants going in and out of court and, you know, new evidence and just a vast, wide-ranging case here. Unbelievable.

Both of those different points, what do you think of those analyses of the case so far? Let me not be an expert for a second, just an average citizen. I find some of – so Spalding-Willis, for example, recently charged this rap group –

rap gang, the YSL gang. I don't know what it is because it just basically it's a Rico charge for around this rapper and his friends essentially. Anyway, and she's using like, you know, rap lyrics as part of the conspiracy. And it just seems so, you know, heavy handed. And they did the same similar thing with a bunch of teachers who were cheating on test scores in the Atlanta public schools.

And to me, it's like, ah, that is just, you know, as somebody who is into the whole progressive prosecutor movement as a voter and as just a kind of average citizen looking at the world, you know, RICO just seems so ripe for abuse and especially Georgia RICO, right? It seems so ripe for abuse.

And so I've got issues with that. At the same time, you know, I'm a self-professed liberal and I also really believe in democracy. And so as a liberal democracy believer, I'm like, get this guy, like get them all, throw the book at them. And so there's this tension for me as a progressive who doesn't like and is skeptical of heavy handed prosecutions and prosecutorial tactics.

who also thinks like justice really needs to be done here. And I think a lot of people were torn with that. And that's how, you know, I've been thinking about it lately. But that sounds exactly like the kind of message that would play into this is BS. Trump is being targeted. You know, the liberals, they criticize the law when it's going after Atlanta public school teachers or rappers, but like they want it used to its maximum ability when you're going after a Republican president. Like that doesn't seem like the kind of message that's going to

fly for me. Well, I would have to say that prosecutors often, you know, are accused of overcharging and other kinds of cases, oftentimes indictments,

or complaints or informations, depending on what jurisdiction you're in, contain a lot of overlapping charges. And that's the case for this indictment as well. A lot of the things that are alleged as acts in furtherance of the conspiracy are crimes in their own right that form the basis then of counts two, three, four, ad nauseum down on to 41. So whether it's forgery or making false statements,

perjury, and some of the others, you know, numerous acts show up in numerous places inside this indictment. But it's not an unusual thing for a prosecutor to start out big with the charging document and then tailor it later, both in terms of defendants and charges. So we have 19 defendants right now

If this case goes to trial, I would be very, very surprised if we still have 19 defendants. I suspect it will be whittled down to maybe four or five who do not accept the prosecutor's plea deal. And the other...

13 or 14 will become state witnesses testifying against their co-conspirators. And there are rules of evidence that limit the way certain statements can be used against accomplices. But I suspect that there will be, at least the cast of characters will be whittled down in terms of the number of defendants.

And the range of charges that are in here, it is a little bit reminiscent of the Atlanta public school cheating scandal, you know, like identifying every act in furtherance of the conspiracy and so on. I mean, it does have that same flavor. And Fannie Wells, of course, was front and center in that prosecution as well.

It's not an accident that the APS indictment looks like this indictment. John Floyd, who was over Fannie Willis's right shoulder yesterday at the press conference, is a RICO expert. He drafted the APS indictment. I don't think that's a secret. And I would imagine that he is the main architect of the

the Trump indictment as well. So, I mean, not to take anything away from Fonny Willis, but when you've got an expert on RICO on your team, you're going to use them. And having worked with John closely on certain cases and worked on indictments with him closely, you know, he's an excellent drafter. He's a partner at Bondurant, Mixon & Elmore. He comes in unpaid as a special prosecutor from that firm and works as a special assistant district attorney. So that was my thought on that.

Well, Chris, can I actually ask you something? So do you think the grand jurors had any individual drafting role in this indictment or the document is presented to them by the DA's office and they vote and then sign? Sure. So great question. I mean, I presented probably thousands of indictments to grand jurors. And so what happens is they're drafted by the prosecutors first.

They're brought to the grand jurors. If the grand jurors decide that they don't like a particular charge or they don't like an element of a charge, they do have the ability to edit that document because at the end of the day, it's their document. It's what they're voting on. So I have had – and it's unusual, but I have had grand jurors tell me, take out this particular paragraph, take out this particular charge. They do have to decide on each individual charge separately.

but it's going to be a document drafted by the district attorney's office here, most likely John Floyd. I don't know that for a fact. We were joking around about trying to get a beer, and he said he was busy, but I don't know. I suspect that's what he was busy with. He's one of my close friends, and John's my mentor. I learned everything I know about the RICO Act is coming directly from him, but of course I've forgotten some stuff.

So don't take it as gospel if it's coming from my mouth that John Floyd said it. But we're good to go. And he is likely the person that drafted it. It looks like a John Floyd indictment, having read that many of them. And so it's well drafted. And it's not an accident that it looks like APS. Why reinvent the wheel? I think they had 11 out of 12 convictions and pretty much everybody else pled guilty in an indictment that was wider in scope than this one. Yeah. And of course, too, yesterday—

Reuters, I mean, we were all on the, you know, everybody who's watched this closely was kind of looking at the Fulton County docket and Reuters must have refreshed the docket at just the right time because the charging sheet that the prosecution or the DA's office seemingly presented to the grand jury magically popped up on the docket.

And so, which triggered Reuters into saying, oh, Donald Trump's been charged, which was not true at that point. And so, you know, there's some evidence to suggest like that's exactly what happened. So I have a theory as to why those charges popped up, if you guys want to hear it.

So the Fulton County District Attorney's Office and the clerk's office uses a program called Odyssey. And a lot of those charges were not charges that are typically charged in the state of Georgia. So my thought is they were coding Odyssey to make sure that all the charges would go through when they finally got the indictment through there. So I think that that was a test run and Reuters happened to hit it at the exact second.

But I don't think it's an accident. Now, it's interesting that it said Judge Carnesale on it because it looks like they wheeled it to Judge McAfee later. But that's my theory as to why that happened and why you've got that dummy indictment out there is just to make sure that the charges matched in Odyssey. I fully appreciate how nerdy this podcast has gotten, bringing it back to probably things that most lay people –

are going to be paying attention to in this case. Not Odyssey. Y'all don't care. So the 13 charges here, like what is going to be the biggest challenge for prosecutors here in terms of getting a conviction and what are going to be the biggest challenges for Trump's team? So let's start with prosecutors first. Chris, having tried these kinds of cases, looking at the

indictment, what are you thinking? So strategic decisions in terms of what you want to present. It's funny. So I did one RICO trial where the judge, and a very long indictment, although probably half the size of this one, the judge gets through the first 30 pages of reading the RICO count and then says, count two.

And the entire jury audibly gasped. They couldn't believe that they were going to have to listen to more information. So it's information overload is one of the things. But they'll probably tailor it down, although I don't know. I mean, the APS trial was something like nine months long.

So trying to keep 12 people's attention over nine months is difficult. And so trying to figure out how much is too much. Are we boring the jurors? Are we keeping them entertained? What do we need to do to get it over the line, to get it beyond it?

reasonable doubt, but not get it so far over the line that our jurors are bored, want to go home, don't understand exactly why they're there is going to be the trick with this one. So it's the strategy. Now, interestingly enough, Fannie Willis said yesterday that she's got a six-month time frame. And we know that the defendants have got some say over that. And we'll probably ask for some continuances. But six months is very ambitious. That's lightning fast for a RICO case. I had one

Probably not as complex as this case, although it did have some international elements to it. But it was only one defendant, and it still took us a year from the time that the defendant went into custody until the time that we tried the case. So that being a less complicated document trying to try, and it took us a year to be ready to go, six months is crazy. So my guess based on that is by the time they walked into the grand jury room and some of what we saw in the delay case,

between the time the special purpose grand jury ended and the regular grand jury met, was they're getting this thing ready for trial. But again, and I see Anthony shaking his head. I mean, you know, he's right. This is not going to go in six months. Well, and of course, too, the other really complicating factor is that Donald Trump is going to attempt to bring this into federal court.

and use the removal statutes to say that he was acting in his official capacity under the color of law as president of the United States. And therefore, this should be tried before a federal judge and a federal jury impaneled by a federal court.

And I think that Mark Meadows will try that and I think that Jeff Clark will try that. It's – the Supreme Court has said and the 11th Circuit has said that we should – that this – the removal statute should be read very liberally at the same time.

It seems pretty clear that these folks were acting in their personal capacity to keep Donald Trump as president, and they were acting more as a candidate in a campaign than they were as officials, although Jeff Clark was very ready to use the official power of the Department of Justice. So I –

I don't know that how that'll shake out. I mean, I, I've talked to a lot of law professors who say, oh, absolutely. It's going to get removed. And I talked to a bunch who say, absolutely not, not going to get removed. And I have, I'm like on the fence here saying, I don't know what the hell is going to happen, but it's a, it's another tactic that's going to, um, not necessarily delay proceedings because proceedings can continue in Fulton County court while the federal court hears this, these issues. Um, but it's a, it's another, you

you know, another set of issues that, you know, there's going to have to be time and resources and staff dedicated to. And so, you know, and that's just one issue of multiple other issues. So six months, I mean, no way. And the other thing too is nothing ever seems to happen in Fulton County seamlessly. I love this county. I love Atlanta. I love, you know, the staff works hard. I have many friends in the prosecutor's office. I've got lots of friends in the defense bar.

And, you know, one thing I think I can honestly say is something's going to happen. Like, you know, there's always drama. There's always drama. Wait, so what are we talking here? Is there a trial before the election? Like, if it's not six months, is it a year? Is it two years? How long is a ball of string, man? I mean, that's the question. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think there's really any way to know. I mean, certainly with 19 defendants,

each of whom has at least one lawyer. Even if just finding a courtroom to hold everybody, again, reminiscent of the APS cheating scandal case, making sure that everybody, whenever hearings are scheduled,

They can all attend. It's just going to, it is going to be a challenge. So I definitely agree with Anthony and Chris that six months seems ambitious, but I was thinking, Gail, and as you asked the question about the challenge for the prosecution, I think it's kind of walking a fine line between the technocratic aspects

aspect of he sent this email on this date or she made this phone call on this date, which can sound a little bit boring. And yet the hedge against not being so overly emotional and that it tends to cast a kind of overly political impact.

narrative underneath absolutely everything that's happening. I mean, of course, that is the narrative around the whole indictment, but making sure that you can walk the fine line between, you're just sort of proving the nuts and bolts of absolutely everything without seeming like you are really over the line every moment that you're in court, such that jurors who

might have had some sympathy for Trump at some point, might have been Trump voters at some point, would tune you out because they feel like the prosecution then is entirely politically motivated. I think it's a hard line to walk here. When it comes to challenges facing the prosecution, this is maybe like a stylistic or a logistical challenge. But when it comes to actually proving what they have, what's being alleged,

One of the talking points that we heard after the indictment in the January 6th investigation, the federal indictment in the January 6th investigation, was like, OK, well, one of Trump's defenses is going to be that he truly believed that the election was stolen and he was acting in a way that was appropriate given what he believed. And that in order for prosecutors to be successful, they would have to prove that Trump actually knew that the election wasn't stolen, that he was actually lying.

And he acted this way regardless. And that spawned something of a debate of like, no, you don't actually have to prove anything about what he thought, because if you commit a crime and you can prove that you actually committed that crime, then how far do you have to go in terms of proving intent or knowledge or whatever? What is that like in this case? I mean, will the prosecutors have to determine that Trump knew that he lost the election?

How geeky do you want to go here? All right. So there's two different potential defenses in the state of Georgia. One is mistake of fact. One is mistake of law. Mistake of fact is I have this bag of white powder. I thought it was flour. Turns out it's cocaine. I am not guilty because I didn't know that it was cocaine.

The second one is mistake of law, which is I'm in possession of a bag. I know it's cocaine. I thought it was perfectly legal for me to possess the cocaine. That's not a defense in Georgia. The mistake of law is not a defense. And so one of the defenses that I've heard trotted out here is advice of counsel. That works federally. It does not work in the state of Georgia. I've won that motion several times before courts that advice of counsel is not a defense.

So getting back, I think there's a couple of things. One, practically to prove false statements in writings, you have to prove that the defendant knew that the statement was false, that Donald Trump knew what he was saying at the time was a false statement. And so that's an obvious defense is,

Look, sure, there was no voting fraud, but he absolutely believed that there was voting fraud. He believed the world was flat. And so it doesn't matter that the world is round. The world – his world is flat and that's what he thinks and so therefore he's not guilty. So as a practical matter, as far as false statements in writings is concerned, that is going to be a defense to that particular charge and a defense to that particular predicate act or what we refer to in Georgia as an act of racketeering activity.

Not only that, though, you've got to remember that jury nullification is a thing, and that's going to be huge in all four trials. You can have a case where Donald Trump was in Brad Raffensperger's office with an AK-47 to his head telling him to change the election, and you're going to find one or two jurors that—

quite possibly could make this jury who will think that, yeah, I know he threatened Brad Raffensperger. I don't care. He's not guilty. I want him to be president. Flip side of that, you could have people who, you know, there could be proof that Donald Trump was in Nicaragua at the time of the phone, not any phone call, not anywhere near a phone call, never even heard of the phone call, this perfect phone call

And you're going to have people on the jury who are willing to convict him no matter what. My public defender friends from Facebook, no matter how much they talk about, OK, they probably wouldn't go that far. But there are a lot of folks that are super liberal that would convict regardless. So I would be very surprised if we don't have at least out of the four, at least one hung jury. And getting back to your question, one of those reasons is

He may be actually in violation of some of the statutes, but at the end of the day, if the jurors feel like he didn't know he was violating the statute, they're going to be hard pressed to convict. There's one caveat though, right? The defendants very regularly say, I didn't know. That doesn't mean that that's evidence that jurors will believe.

So, prosecutors often use circumstantial evidence to try to counter what the defendant claims was his state of mind. So, you know, and so I often teach students that like just because the defendant has said, oh, I didn't know, you don't, you're not just going to pack up and go home. You're going to look at all of the other circumstances which say he must have known. It's not should have known.

It's must have known. So if you, if you know, it's not what a reasonable person have known, but if you look at all of the other evidence, and in this case, it would be the number of times that all of the lawyers surrounding Trump, I suppose with the exception of Giuliani said to him, you lost the election. His children said to him, you lost the election. There's this, whatever he must have known. And he was deciding in light of, in spite of all of those entreaties by all of these other people to challenge it anyway, then,

he must have known that he lost and decided he was just going to take his own approach to the transfer of power. So I just, I don't want people thinking that just because a defendant says, I didn't know that that's really the end of the story when it comes to proving intent. Yeah. And of course the thing that really makes Georgia in many respects unique to some of these other states is the number of times we've counted votes. So we counted votes initially after the election and

Joe Biden won. We counted them again in a recount because there's a right recount process that can be requested. Joe Biden won. Then we had an audit again.

Joe Biden won. So we had three different counts statewide of the votes and the ballots in Georgia, all same result. And then just for an audience of one, there's no legal mechanism really for this. Brad Raffensperger said, let's have a audit of the signatures in mail ballots in Cobb County. And that was really for Donald John Trump, nobody else, right? There was no other reason for that.

Mark Meadows comes down to review it. Mark Meadows allegedly tells Donald Trump, hey, they're really doing a good – they're acting in good faith down there to make sure this is all in the up and up.

No fraud discovered. And then all – right? So all of that in addition to his own people and his own administration telling him there's no fraud and people in Georgia telling him there is no fraud. And then he still calls Brad Raffensperger and says, hey, give me these votes. And by the way, it's criminal and you better watch out. That's – there's just no way a reasonable person of ordinary intelligence, much – or even the president of the United States –

could reasonably think that there was a lawful way for Brad Raffensperger to find votes at that point in time. There's just no way. He's Donald Trump though. I mean he's got a history of not listening to people and so that's probably going to be one of the defenses is that he doesn't care. He is the ultimate CEO and CEOs –

A lot of times don't listen to their vice presidents. They don't listen to the folks that are telling them what to do. So that would be the defense is, look, at the end of the day, everybody is telling him that the sky – the world is round and he believes in his heart of hearts that the world is flat is going to be the argument there.

So yeah, he was being told by all these people that these things were going on. But unless you find that smoking gun, which would be an email from him that says, I know there was fraud here. I think there may have been one statement where he said something along the lines of, well, this will be for the next guy, where it was Biden. That might be something where they can get a hook in. But again, you know, and jurors are tough. I mean, we did a perjury case where we had proof that this woman had been arrested. She claimed that because the old charge

had been expunged, she thought she was able to say that she had not been arrested despite the fact that cuffs went on and the jury acquitted her. So, I mean, anytime you get into these crimes where mens rea intent is a requirement and knowingly is one of the standards,

you're up against it as a prosecutor. So I get Anthony's point. I know, Anthony, there is a mountain of evidence of what people were telling him. I don't think he's listening to it, or at least that's going to be the defense on the other side is, yeah, he got this from 100 different people, none of whom he believed. Now, that may be problematic for the other folks that are involved in this case,

who are following the orders of this guy, because I think it's going to be more difficult for them to say that they didn't know that there was fraud here. But I guarantee you one of the defenses here that Trump is going to say, at the end of the day, he's not going to say, he's never going to say it, but his lawyers are going to say that, look, he didn't know. Yeah, and this is the difference between the criminal law folks who are very apt at this stuff and the election law people who are just mad about everything. So...

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So we've laid out here some of the challenges ahead for the prosecution in this case, some of the challenges for Trump himself.

Some of the analysis has suggested that this of all four cases is the most threatening to Trump, the most precarious for him to try to navigate because it's in Georgia and there can be no sort of like federal interference here in terms of ousting a prosecutor or pardoning any crimes or whatever. But also just because of how unique Georgia's racketeering laws are and how widespread and ranging this actually is.

Do you think that's the case? Because most people would think, wow, he was charged federally for trying to subvert an election. That seems awfully serious and maybe more serious than sort of like a Georgia law that was designed to try to prosecute gang criminal activity. I think it's hard to say. If any of us could really penetrate the mind of Donald Trump at this point, we would probably be billionaires. So I don't know. I think he's...

The fact that he would have no ability to pardon

Because in Georgia, pardons are controlled by the Georgia Pardons and Parole Board. Right, like not even a governor can pardon. Right, not even the governor. It's the Georgia Pardons and Parole Board, and there's a whole process and so on. So he may try to have influence over that, but were he to be elected president or a Republican were to be elected president in the next election, they would not be able to directly release him from liability or any of the co-defendants for that matter. Right.

So, Galen, my thought on the cases and which ones I would be worried about if I were him, I'd probably be New York and D.C. because of the jury pool. You know, Fulton County is thought of as an extremely liberal county, but it's not. When you think of the jurors that actually show up for jury duty, a lot of them are from the northern part.

of Fulton County, which is Johns Creek, Milton, Roswell, Alpharetta. And so when they're trying a case there, it's a much more balanced jury than you're typically going to get. And so when you're looking at cases like this, and I've actually prosecuted police officers. And so the jurors that you want to get when you're prosecuting a police officer are the exact opposite of the jurors that you want to get when you're trying a murder case or an armed robbery.

And so in this particular case, absolutely you're going to want typically liberal jurors, typically folks that would be likely to acquit in any other type of case. In this type of case, they're going to be good for you because they think that they want to see Donald Trump in a prison cell. And so looking at the jury polls here in the four different situations,

I think either a New York or a D.C. would be my top two. After that, probably Georgia and then followed by Florida. And so when looking at the case, it's not so much the charges. It's the people that are going to be making the decision on guilt or innocence. Which opens up a whole other can of...

when it comes to legal theory and sort of if the charges are kind of beside the point and it's really jury selection, like how blind is the law? But anyway, we'll save that for another day. I'm teaching that class this semester at Georgia State. Jury selection for the first time. Can I audit? Can I audit the class? Yeah.

Absolutely. I have a bunch of people there. It'll be crowded. You know, wrapping up here, I want to talk about public perception because that's usually what we talk about on this podcast. According to recent New York Times polling, 51 percent of Americans say they believe that Trump committed serious crimes. Thirty five percent say they don't think he did so. And that's up a bit over last year. You know, the thing that's happened since then are.

were three indictments and now there's going to be this fourth one. And we'll see how the public reacts and we'll talk about it on this podcast when we get the data. But from the perspective of this being the one case where Americans are going to watch everything play out on television, what exactly are they going to see that might end up shaping public opinion?

Yeah, I mean, it's all about public opinion when you're dealing with a locally high profile or nationally high profile. There are two different cases that are going on. There's the court of public opinion, which is really what most politicians care about. And then there's what's going on in the courtroom. At a case where I tried a local politician, we offered him a misdemeanor after we got done selecting a jury that we absolutely knew and he knew that was going to convict him. He decided he would rather go to prison than take the misdemeanor and admit wrongdoing.

So, I mean, keep in mind the prosecutors are going to be bent on getting a conviction. The defense team is looking at two different things. One, and most importantly to them and their client, court of public opinion. Second, there's going to be, you know, the prison piece. And there are story after story, and Anthony and Kay probably know this better than me, but there are a lot of people that have gone to prison who've later on had recoveries and run for political office.

I'll put my political scientist hat on, right? Which is people are just so...

entrenched in their views. And often that's a byproduct of our trend towards polarization, but it's also a reflection of how people consume media. And so to me, the one breakthrough that might be possible is the fact that the Fulton County case could be potentially televised if it remains in Fulton County and not in the federal court. But I think people are just so

entrenched in their views. And so it'll really be hard to see how any of this will shake anybody from their priors. So, I mean, the only thing I can add is that watching a trial in real time is very different than watching it on Law & Order. You know, in Law & Order, like two questions are asked of a witness and then they step down. And in real trials, the witness is on the stand for five hours sometimes or five days.

I think the real question is how many of the Fox News viewers, and I'm using that term just very broadly, will actually watch the real trial instead of the Fox News reproduction of what is happening in the trial. Because I think for many of those Fox News viewers,

viewers, if they were to watch the testimony that was actually coming out to hear about all of the details of the fake electors scheme, all of the details of the attempts to intimidate Ruby Freeman, who was the election worker here in Georgia, and all of the other pieces of it, if they saw it in real time without the gloss provided by the Fox News organization,

some of those people may well change their minds. I don't know how many of them, but my sense of Fox News viewers is that most of them tend to get their information only from conservative news sources. And so they very rarely have a chance to see this kind of unfiltered view. And I think the same has been said of CNN, people who consume a lot of CNN as well. But that's the one benefit of having the trial broadcast in real time is at least provides the opportunity for some people who want it

to get an unfiltered look at the evidence. I get all my news from Anthony's Twitter feed. Oh, no. I'm sorry. It's good stuff. Keep it up.

All right. Well, I think we're going to leave things there for today. Thank you, Kay, Anthony, and Chris. Thank you, Galen. It was fun. Thank you for having us. Thanks. My name is Galen Drew. Tony Chow is in the control room. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon.