ATLANTA – A Fulton County grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump Monday night, charging the Republican with trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia that saw Joe Biden become the first Democrat to carry the Peach State since 1992.
Monday’s indictment was the fourth for Trump, following federal charges arising from his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his retaining of classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida after leaving office. He also is accused in a New York case of paying hush money to ex-porn actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign to cover up a sexual relationship.
Unlike the other cases, Monday’s indictment was wide ranging, naming 18 other defendants and covering 41 counts. The list of defendants includes former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer; Mark Meadows, who served as the former president’s chief of staff; former Georgia Republican Chairman David Shafer; and state Sen. Shawn Still, R-Norcross.
Charges listed on the indictment included violation of Georgia’s RICO law (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), submitting false documents and false statements, forgery, conspiracy to commit election fraud, and perjury. The RICO charge, which was leveled against all 19 defendants, carries a mandatory minimum prison term of five years.
While the other cases against Trump were narrowly focused on specific incidents, the 97-page Georgia indictment encompassed several episodes. The list includes then-President Trump’s infamous phone call asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger at the beginning of January 2021 to “find” 11,780 votes, the margin Trump needed to overcome Biden’s winning margin in Georgia.
The indictment also cited a meeting of “fake” Republican electors inside the state Capitol in December 2020 to certify Trump as the winner of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes rather than Biden, presentations Giuliani made to state lawmakers – also in December 2020 – leveling false allegations of election fraud, and a data breach at the elections office in Coffee County.
“Rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results,” Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis told reporters after the indictments were unsealed.
Trump took to his social media website to blast the indictments as politically motivated by Willis, a Democrat, while sticking to his claim that he won the election in Georgia.
“[The] only election interference that took place in Fulton County was done by those that rigged and stole the election, not by me,” he wrote.
Willis took exception to Trump’s accusations.
“I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law,” she said. “The law is nonpartisan.”
The grand jury had not been expected to act on Monday, as some final witnesses had been summoned to testify on Tuesday, including former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan. Instead, Duncan, who has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics among Georgia Republicans, spent more than an hour testifying early Monday evening.
“I was honored to answer their questions to the best of my ability,” he said shortly after completing his testimony.
The grand jury also heard Monday from two Georgia Democrats, former state Rep. Bee Nguyen and former Georgia Sen. Jen Jordan. Both ran unsuccessfully for statewide office last year, Nguyen for secretary of state and Jordan for attorney general.
“No individual is above the law,” Nguyen said after giving her testimony. “I believe that every individual who wrongfully and illegally tried to overturn our valid elections should be held accountable.”
Willis said she will give the defendants until noon Aug. 25 to turn themselves in. She said she plans to try all 19 at the same time.
While the timetable for that trial is up to the judge, Willis said she will ask for the case to be heard within the next six months.
ATLANTA – The mayor of Tifton asked Georgia lawmakers Monday to fix a system of distributing local sales tax dollars that favors counties at the expense of cities.
Under current state law, cities and counties that can’t agree on how to allocate local sales tax revenues between them must submit to an arbitration process that skews toward counties, Julie Smith told a Senate study considering potential changes to the system.
A county that doesn’t like a city’s offer has the right to abolish its local option sales tax (LOST) in favor of an alternative called the homestead option sales tax (HOST), which is used to reduce property taxes on owner-occupied housing and infrastructure.
Since counties don’t have to share HOST revenue with cities, counties can use it to threaten cities during negotiations over allocating local sales tax dollars, Rusi Patel, general counsel for the Georgia Municipal Association, said Monday.
“One party has that as a hammer,” he said.
Smith said that’s what happened last year when the city of Tifton and Tift County sat down to negotiate. She said the city had built a strong case for its request that Tifton get 45% of the local sales tax revenue but was forced to settle for 30% after the county threatened to adopt a HOST and the talks got confrontational.
“It got ugly, and it got ugly publicly,” Smith said. “The people who are suffering because of that are the citizens when we can’t sit down and look out for their wellbeing.”
Patel said similar controversy has marred local sales tax negotiations between other Georgia cities and counties.
“While it’s not most local governments that are fighting, it’s probably too many,” he said.
Smith said the process needs greater transparency. The agreement Tifton and Tift County reached last year was accomplished without a public hearing, although the city asked for one, she said.
“The voters want to see the process,” Patel added. “If you don’t see what the counties and cities are doing, it’s hard to know why they’re fighting.”
Smith said one potential solution could be to link negotiations between cities and counties over distribution of local sales tax revenue with service delivery agreements between the two parties. As with allocating local sales taxes, state law requires local governments to negotiate new service delivery agreements every 10 years to avoid service duplication and double taxation.
“This has got to be fixed,” Smith told members of the study committee. “Please do what you can to help us.”
Sen. Derek Mallow, D-Savannah, said the study committee will hold two more meetings in Griffin and Savannah before returning to Atlanta for a final meeting that could lead to recommendations for the full Senate to consider early next year.
ATLANTA – An Atlanta man has been indicted on federal charges of money laundering and wire fraud in connection with funds allegedly obtained fraudulently through a COVID-19 relief program.
Austin Martin Siampwizi, 46, is accused of laundering money procured from fraudulent unemployment claims filed with the Washington State Employment Security Department. The claims were submitted using personal information stolen from more than 50 people, according to Ryan Buchanan, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.
Siampwizi also was charged with wire fraud for allegedly submitting a fraudulent loan application to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), according to an indictment handed down late last month.
The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act created a temporary federal program that provided up to 39 weeks of unemployment benefits for Americans out of work because of the pandemic. The CARES Act also authorized the SBA to offer funding to business owners negatively affected by COVID-19.
“Money launderers used the COVID-19 pandemic to financially benefit while millions of Americans were suffering,” Buchanan said Monday. “We will continue to prosecute individuals who defrauded this program at the expense of vulnerable citizens in need of this critical relief.”
The case is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General, the IRS, the FBI, the federal Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Postal Service.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland established the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force in May 2021 to work with other federal agencies to prevent and combat pandemic-related fraud.
ATLANTA – Legal limits on how Georgia teachers can approach potentially divisive subjects are spreading from elementary and secondary school classrooms to university lecture halls.
Controversial changes to rules for teacher training the Georgia Professional Standards Commission (PSC) adopted in recent months take effect Aug. 15. The new rules delete words including “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion,” and replace them with phrases including “fair access, opportunity, and advancement for all students.”
Those required changes in nomenclature also are tucked into broader legislation the Republican-controlled General Assembly passed last year prohibiting the teaching of “divisive concepts” in Georgia elementary and secondary schools. At the time, legislative Democrats, teachers, and civil rights advocates argued the restrictions would prevent teaching students the full reality of Georgia and U.S. history, both the good and the bad.
The new rules are sowing confusion among teachers, said Sarah Hunt Blackwell, First Amendment policy advocate for the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Educators don’t know what they can and can’t say,” she said. “It’s a continuation of the divisive concepts bill.”
But supporters say the changes were adopted in an effort to avoid confusion.
Brian Sirmans, the commission’s chairman, said the University System of Georgia (USG) asked for the new rules to clarify expectations for incoming teachers. The words the commission voted unanimously to delete from teacher preparation standards have come to mean different things to different people in recent years. which has made interpreting them difficult, Sirmans said he was told by university system officials.
The changes are not aimed at reducing educational opportunities for minority students in Georgia, Sirmans told his commission colleagues before a vote in June.
“We still expect to prepare educators who are well prepared to meet the needs of all of the students they encounter,” he said.
The university system, in a statement issued Thursday, said the new rules came about after the system asked the commission for improvements in literacy education and in what’s required of teacher education programs on how to teach children to read.
“The proposed changes are the result of USG and PSC working together to review and revise rules for teacher preparation based on research-based practices that have been demonstrated to work best in teaching reading,” the statement read. “USG teacher preparation programs will follow these rules as updated and approved by the PSC.”
But critics say Georgia’s new rules are part of a multi-state effort by conservative Republicans aimed at “woke” policies in education, including the “Don’t Say Gay” bill Florida lawmakers passed last year prohibiting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the schools.
“These rules changes indicate the commission doesn’t see the necessity of teachers being prepared to teach diversity,” Hunt-Blackwell said.
Hunt-Blackwell said the proposed rules changes were moving “under the radar” until the Georgia Coalition for Education Justice – an alliance of students, educators, parents and civil rights advocates – got wind of them. The coalition sent a four-page letter to the commission opposing the changes, held news conferences, and assembled speakers to testify against the rules at commission meetings.
“This has made a huge splash,” Hunt-Blackwell said. “This was the first time in decades people came to testify at their meetings.”
Hunt-Blackwell cited a study released last year by Hanover Research – a think tank that encourages school districts to adopt diversity, equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies – that reported a link between teachers prepared in DEI and a narrowing of academic achievement gaps for students.
“We as educators recognize our student body reflects our communities and state, and the population of our state is more diverse than ever,” said Lisa Morgan, president of the Georgia Association of Educators. “Aspiring educators need the course work, information, and resources so they are not overwhelmed by the diversity of their classrooms.”
Morgan said Georgia’s teacher preparation programs have improved significantly in recent years.
“Changing these rules is taking a piece of that away,” she said. “Taking out these words is, in a sense, watering down.”
ATLANTA – The Georgia Ports Authority is off to a strong start in the new fiscal year.
The ports of Savannah and Brunswick handled 447,590 twenty-foot equivalent container units (TEUs) in July, the first month of fiscal 2024. That represents a 17% increase over June but was 16% below July of last year, when the ports set a record for the month.
The July numbers were boosted by the reopening of Container Berth 1 at Savannah’s Garden City Terminal.
“The expanded berth and four of the largest ship-to-shore cranes in North America came online last month, providing faster vessel service and an increase of 1.5 million TEUs in annual berth capacity,” said Ed McCarthy, the ports authority’s chief operating officer. “The Port of Savannah can now serve five big ships simultaneously and has eliminated its vessel backlog.”
The authority has ordered eight new ship-to-shore cranes for the Garden City Terminal. The first four began operating last month, with the next four due to go into service by December.
The various improvements will increase the Port of Savannah’s container capacity by about 3.5 million TEUs per year, bringing the total capacity to 10 million TEUs annually by 2026.
Meanwhile, the Georgia ports handled nearly 71,000 units of Roll-on/Roll-off cargo in July, up 23% over the same month last year. That made July one of the top-five months ever for Ro/Ro.
“The strong showing in finished vehicles last fiscal year has continued into the first month of FY2024,” ports authority President and CEO Griff Lynch said. “The primary driver is increased production supported by better microchip availability.”
