Monday, August 14, 2023

Tuesday Briefing: Trump hit with racketeering charges

Plus: Finding Bélizaire
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By Whet Moser

Writer/Editor, Briefings

Good morning. We're covering the indictment of Donald Trump in Georgia and the search for answers after the Hawaii wildfires.

The grand jury met at the Fulton County courthouse in Atlanta yesterday.Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Trump faces racketeering charges in Georgia

Donald Trump and others — including Rudolph Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff — have been indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in a sweeping racketeering case focused on Trump's efforts to reverse Georgia's results in the 2020 election.

Nineteen defendants are named in the indictment. The 41 counts, including racketeering charges, perjury and conspiracy to commit forgery, are by far the most sweeping set of accusations Trump has faced in his four indictments. Read the Georgia indictment here.

At the heart of the indictment are charges under the state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which may allow prosecutors to knit together the myriad efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia. The indictment spells out 161 separate acts that prosecutors say were taken to further the alleged criminal conspiracy.

The indictment lays out eight ways the "criminal enterprise" obstructed the election: by lying to the Georgia state legislature, by lying to state officials, by creating fake pro-Trump electors, by harassing election workers, by soliciting Justice Department officials, by soliciting Vice President Mike Pence, by breaching voting machines and by engaging in a cover-up.

Other defendants: Those charged in the indictment include Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, architects of the plan to use fake electors to circumvent the popular vote in a number of swing states; Jeffrey Clark, a former senior official in the Justice Department who embraced false claims about the election; and a number of Georgia Republicans.

What's next: Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, gave defendants until "no later than noon on Friday 25th" to voluntarily surrender, and said she was seeking a trial date "within the next six months."

Background: Here's how Georgia prosecutors pursued the case, and a tracker of the four separate criminal investigations into the former president.

Members of the Honolulu Fire Department in Lahaina.Go Nakamura for The New York Times

Lahaina's water system collapsed as wildfire raged

When a wildfire jumped a containment line near a residential neighborhood in Lahaina, Hawaii, firefighters rushing to slow the spread were distressed to find that their hydrants were running dry.

Maui County's director of water supply said that backup generators allowed the system to maintain sufficient overall supply. But he said that as the fire began moving down the hillside, many properties were damaged so badly that water spewed out of their melting pipes, depressurizing the network that supplies the hydrants.

What's next: In the hunt to determine what caused the fire, the focus has increasingly turned to Hawaii's biggest power utility, which did not pre-emptively shut off power before high winds reached Maui and felled power poles and lines.

From the scene: With its building destroyed in Lahaina, Grace Baptist Church found sanctuary in a cafe.

The Russian currency passed 101 rubles to the dollar on Monday.Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press

The ruble hits a new low

The Russian central bank said it would hold an emergency meeting after the ruble slumped yesterday to its lowest level since March 2022, shortly after Moscow began its invasion of Ukraine.

The bank, which three weeks ago raised its benchmark interest rate a full percentage point to 8.5 percent, has signaled it is willing to raise rates further. The ruble's value is down by about 25 percent against the dollar since the start of the year, leading to fears of rising inflation.

In other news from the war:

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Few paintings of enslaved Americans remain. Paintings of enslaved children are even more rare in the historical record. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently acquired such a painting — in which the enslaved figure had been painted out and remained as a spectral outline for a century.

It might have been lost but for Jeremy K. Simien, an art collector and historian of African descent from Baton Rouge, La. He found two auction listings from a few years apart, one showing the young domestic with the white children of the family, one with a ghostly shadow.

"The fact that the young boy was covered up, it haunted me," Simien said.

The painting sat in storage at a museum for 32 years before it was auctioned. Its buyer, an antique dealer, had it restored, revealing the figure. Simien bought the restored painting, and, with the help of a historian who specializes in finding enslaved people, identified the figure who had been painted out of existence — a boy of mixed race named Bélizaire, who was sold at the age of 6.

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That's it for today's briefing. Thanks for joining me. — Whet

P.S. Desiree Ibekwe, an audience editor in Audio, is joining The Morning team as a writer based in London.

The latest episode of "The Daily" is on what Lahaina lost in the wildfires.

You can reach Whet and the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

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