ON A TENSE Monday morning in January 2021, Fani Willis started her new gig as chief prosecutor in Fulton County, the seat of Atlanta and several adjoining suburbs. The night before a tape had been released of Donald Trump begging Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes”—the exact number needed to overturn the swing state’s 2020 election results in his favour. Though she later admitted to praying that Mr Raffensperger had been outside the county when he took the now-infamous phone call, Ms Willis has come to embrace her role of top cop on Georgia’s biggest case. On August 14th, after a two-and-a-half year investigation, she accused Mr Trump and more than a dozen others of orchestrating a master plan to overturn the election results in the state. As the sun set over the downtown courthouse a grand jury swiftly indicted them.

The news conjures up feelings of whiplash. It has not even been two weeks since Jack Smith, a federal prosecutor, brought the Department of Justice’s case against Mr Trump for conspiring to reclaim the Oval Office. The new charges are the former president’s fourth set in five months, raising his felony-charge tally to 91.

The primary charge levelled against Mr Trump this time is more commonly used to ensnare mob bosses than to keep politicians in check. Ms Willis contends that Mr Trump and 18 named acolytes violated Georgia’s capacious Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act by arranging a criminal ring that conspired to defraud the state and obstruct the counting of votes. The group, she alleges, solicited high-ranking officials to commit crimes, made false statements, influenced witnesses and impersonated public officers, among other offences. The state law, which is broader than the federal one, allows her to bring evidence that would otherwise be inadmissible and to charge more suspects if she can prove collective conspiring. And although Ms Willis could have focused on Georgia alone, she has also roped in Mr Trump’s behaviour in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states. That makes her probe more consistent with the federal case. It may also strengthen it.

The 97-page document points to several events that the federal indictment also homed in on. The phone call with Mr Raffensperger, which the former president has since called “perfect”, is perhaps most likely to convince a jury—either in Georgia or Washington, DC—of his guilt. Not only did Mr Trump explicitly ask Mr Raffensperger to tip the tally, but after being rebuffed, he threatened that not doing so could put the secretary of state in criminal jeopardy. Although Mark Meadows, Mr Trump’s then chief of staff, was notably missing from the federal indictment, Ms Willis charged him alongside the former president for soliciting Mr Raffensberger to violate his oath of office. The same charge pops up again in relation to a call between Mr Trump and David Ralston, former speaker of the Georgia house. Though Ms Willis deems it worthy of a felony charge, its contents remain a mystery to the public.

Both prosecutors also investigated a slate of Republican electors who submitted false paperwork to Congress alleging that Mr Trump had won Georgia after it became clear he had not. Emails between an aide and a campaign official show that Rudy Guliani, one of Mr Trump’s top former lawyers, intended to hide the scheme and hoped to keep an early elector meeting “quiet until all the voting is done”. Whereas the federal indictment just targets Mr Trump as the choreographer, this one goes after Mr Guliani and John Eastman, another lawyer, for pushing the plot. At least eight of the electors took immunity deals in April. They could aid her case that all of them knew it was a sham and “knowingly, willfully and unlawfully” created false documents.

Team Trump also tried to tamper with election machinery, the document asserts in a divergence from previous charges, and made unfounded claims of extraordinary voter fraud. The day after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6th 2021, it says, “members of the enterprise” raided a polling station in Coffee County, a rural Republican stronghold 200 miles south-east of Atlanta, and stole voting data in an attempt to prove shady business. Ms Willis claims that the ex-president’s proxies also committed perjury, by telling lawmakers and state officials that tens of thousands of felons, dead and underaged Georgians voted and that poll workers in the State Farm Arena in Fulton County rigged the vote by pulling out “suitcases” of ballots and passing flash drives to one another “like vials of heroin” during counting.

The racketeering charge, which fuses all these episodes and more into one grand democracy-defying scheme, is the broadest yet brought against the former president. It is also Ms Willis’s strong suit. In her first important case, as a budding prosecutor, she used the same statute to indict schoolteachers in a test-cheating scandal. As district attorney she has employed it 11 times, most notably to bust Atlanta’s street gangs. During her tenure she has brought over 12,000 indictments. That enthusiasm has made Ms Willis, a Democrat, a bogeyman of both the right and the left. Progressives, who now hope she will entrap Mr Trump, have in the past condemned her for prosecutorial overreach. While waiting for the indictment to be unsealed the Trump campaign sent out a late-night statement asserting that she is a “rabid partisan” who deliberately stalled her probe to “maximally interfere” with the presidential race. Trolls have called her a “Jim Crow Democrat whore”.

Ms Willis’s decision to charge the ex-president’s allies—in contrast to the federal indictment—will slow the case. Though she intends to start the 19-defendant trial within six months, the district attorney is not known for speed: her past RICO trials were the longest in Georgia’s history. Mr Trump is expected to try to delay the trial and appeal to move the case to federal court in the hopes of getting a moderately more sympathetic jury, as he aimed to do in New York over a separate hush-money indictment.

The Georgia case will probably be the only one televised (and the only one that may result in a mugshot). And if Mr Trump is indeed convicted of crimes in the state, no president or governor will have the power to pardon him. ■