It was not just Donald Trump. The people who allegedly helped the then-president try to overturn the results of the 2020 election constituted a large, loosely linked, and surprisingly diverse army of longtime allies and newly minted supporters.

That’s reflected in the state election interference charges in Fulton County, Georgia. According to prosecutors, those involved in Mr. Trump’s efforts to “find” enough votes to change Georgia’s results include Rudy Giuliani, the famous former mayor of New York – but also lesser-known defendants such as Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman, and Stephen Lee, a pastor from Illinois.

Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, is one of those indicted. So are Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for rapper Kanye West (who now goes by Ye), and Harrison Floyd, an ex-Marine active in the group Black Voices for Trump.

The sheer scale of the Georgia case against Mr. Trump and his 18 co-defendants, all of whom have pleaded not guilty, will likely tax both prosecutors and defense attorneys, say legal experts. That’s perhaps why special counsel Jack Smith streamlined his federal election case, charging only Mr. Trump and leaving six alleged co-conspirators unindicted.

But in a way, the sprawling Georgia case could be seen as just one piece of a larger picture. According to the federal indictment, the Trump team pressured officials in at least six other key states – Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – to help it block Joe Biden’s election as president.

Jim Vondruska/Reuters

Pastor Stephen Lee, an alleged co-conspirator related to the harassment of election workers in Georgia, stands for a portrait outside Living Word Lutheran Church in Orland Park, Illinois, Aug. 27, 2023.

Mr. Trump’s false charges of Democratic election fraud in 2020 implied a vast national conspiracy for which no evidence has emerged. In the Georgia and federal election cases, prosecutors will in essence assert that the conspiracy was on the other side.

“If the facts are true as reported, this was a pretty wide-reaching, many-tentacled operation that was trying through any means possible to prevent certification of the presidential election, or reverse its outcome,” says Caren Morrison, a former assistant U.S. attorney and associate professor at Georgia State University’s College of Law.

One case, 19 defendants, disparate charges

The 19 Georgia election interference defendants were scheduled for a Wednesday arraignment, in which they enter a plea before a judge and are told the charges against them. State law allows defendants to waive their right to appear in person, however, and all opted to enter their “not guilty” pleas remotely, thus avoiding televised courtroom appearances.

Mr. Trump and other top defendants are charged with multiple offenses. The former president and Mr. Giuliani both face 13 felony counts in the Georgia case.

Among other things, Mr. Trump participated in a recorded phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the then-president falsely claimed he had won the state by “hundreds of thousands of votes.” 

Meanwhile, Mr. Giuliani claimed that Georgia’s voting machines had been rigged. He falsely charged that two state election workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, had been caught on tape participating in election fraud. In a separate case last month, Mr. Giuliani conceded that he had made defamatory statements about the two women.

Brynn Anderson/AP

Rudy Giuliani speaks at the Fulton County Jail, Aug. 23, 2023, in Atlanta. Mr. Giuliani surrendered to Georgia authorities to face an indictment alleging he acted as former President Donald Trump’s chief co-conspirator in a plot to subvert the 2020 election.

Other defendants were charged for one or two particular actions. Trevian Kutti flew to Atlanta from her Chicago home on Jan. 4, 2021, and allegedly tried to get Ms. Freeman to confess to election fraud. At a meeting in an Atlanta police precinct, she told Ms. Freeman she “needed protection and purported to offer her help,” according to the indictment. 

Mr. Floyd allegedly helped recruit Ms. Kutti to talk to Ms. Freeman. According to the indictment, he joined in the conversation via phone.

Mr. Lee also traveled to Ms. Freeman’s home to pressure her, according to prosecutors. They said Mr. Hall was involved in an effort to illegally access voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia, to check them for alleged fraud.

Three other defendants were charged with participating in a scheme to replace Georgia’s 16 presidential electors with an unauthorized, unelected pro-Trump slate.

Similar groups of fake electors were organized in six other states. In a Tuesday court filing, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis compared such efforts to claiming that “a homemade badge” could turn someone into “a genuine United States Marshal with all the powers afforded that position.”

Will some defendants be tried separately? 

The federal case filed by special counsel Smith has only one charged defendant: Mr. Trump. Legal experts say it is designed for speed – speed to trial, speed in the courtroom, perhaps a quick verdict prior to the 2024 presidential election.

The Georgia case isn’t like that. With its cast of characters and interweaving plotlines, it recounts a lengthy story. This may reflect Georgia’s expansive racketeering law, which Ms. Willis has often used to bring charges against what she deems to be organized criminal enterprises.

“By its very nature, the Georgia case is sprawling,” says Daniel Urman, a law professor at Northeastern University.

Trying a case with 19 defendants can be challenging for prosecutors. At a Sept. 6 hearing, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee sounded highly skeptical of such an all-inclusive approach, saying it sounded “unrealistic.”

At the same time, Judge McAfee denied a request from former Trump lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell to sever their cases from each other, for now.

If defendants do split into groups, those scheduled for later might have the advantage of getting an early look into the prosecution’s case and courtroom methods.

“It’s almost like you’re a football team and you get to see your opponent in preseason games,” says Professor Urman.

But if the prosecution gets an early conviction, the pressure on the remaining defendants might increase. Should they cut a plea deal and testify against the others? If they don’t, will someone else turn against them?

In such a situation, “there’s a really great incentive for [co-defendants] to provide evidence, strike deals, and get out from under these charges,” says Anthony Michael Kreis, an assistant professor at Georgia State University’s College of Law.

The legal strategies of the defendants are already beginning to diverge, in ways that could perhaps damage the person at the top. The three Georgia defendants charged with serving as fake electors now say they did so because they were acting upon the instructions of then-President Trump. An attorney for Mr. Meadows has intimated that his client may similarly point at Mr. Trump as the primary force behind the Georgia effort.

Dustin Chambers/Reuters

Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows (center, below arrow) walks out of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, where a hearing on his petition to move the Fulton County case to federal court in the 2020 election case took place, in Atlanta, Aug. 28, 2023.

A busy legal calendar ... and a coming election

At the least, the complications of the Georgia prosecution and the various other court cases Mr. Trump will face in coming months are likely to produce a frenzied period of legal motions, disputes, countermotions, and hearings that could steal voter attention away from U.S. politics.

The first major court date will come in early October, with the beginning of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil suit against Mr. Trump, his business, and family members for allegedly fraudulently inflating the value of their assets by billions of dollars.

Trials will then ramp up through 2024, beginning in January with a second defamation case against Mr. Trump filed by writer E. Jean Carroll. The federal election interference case is currently scheduled to begin in March, and the federal trial on illegal retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is scheduled to start in May.

Given the legal competition and the size of the case, the trial of Mr. Trump in Georgia could wind up being pushed back past next November, says Professor Morrison.

“I think it will be hard to get it done before the election,” she says.

Marc Loustau

Students hang out in the school courtyard between classes at the Dr. Ambedkar School, May 3, 2023, in Miskolc, Hungary. Teachers prepare students for Hungary’s national graduation exams, but students also learn lessons drawn from Dr. Ambedkar’s life of activism.

Classes begin with a gong, not a bell, at the Dr. Ambedkar School.

Each morning, 125 students in grades nine through 12, all from the local Romani community, enter the school grounds beneath a brass plaque embossed in both Hungarian and Hindi. The text marks the life of the school’s namesake, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, India’s first post-independence minister for law and justice.

The inscription finishes by invoking the school’s religious mission: “[Dr. Ambedkar] is a Buddhist saint,” it reads.

Dr. Ambedkar never set foot in Hungary, much less in the provincial northwestern city of Miskolc where the school was established in 2006. But members of Hungary’s Roma community learned about Dr. Ambedkar’s transformative work, in which he helped outlaw India’s caste system last century and improved the lives of his fellow Dalits in India. And they recognized a kindred spirit.

The Dr. Ambedkar School is working to empower intellectual and political leaders from within Hungary’s Roma community, based on the Indian social reformer’s example. And while his neo-Buddhist worldview may seem like an odd bedfellow for Roma activism, the two are finding remarkable synchronicity among the school’s students.

“The role of the school is more than that of an educational institution, but rather a community institution that treats students with respect and dignity, providing a sense of hope and respect to Roma who are otherwise treated as outcasts by the mainstream society,” says Jekatyerina Dunajeva, a political scientist with Central European University’s Romani Studies Program. “What permeates the culture of the school is a keen awareness of justice, fairness, and opposition to oppression.”

Lessons from the Dalits

Dr. Ambedkar was a leader in India’s independence movement in the 1930s as well as a member of the country’s oppressed Dalit group. In 1956, he founded the neo-Buddhist movement, also known as Ambedkarite Buddhism, which looked at Buddhism as a vehicle for social reform. In particular, neo-Buddhism turned into a means for Dalits – who face rampant discrimination at the bottom of Hinduism’s caste ladder – to leave the system that was oppressing them.

Romani activist János Orsós learned about neo-Buddhism in the late 1990s by reading a biography of Dr. Ambedkar. Then in 2005, he traveled to India, from which the Roma ethnic minority originally emigrated nearly 1,000 years ago.

There he saw that both members of the Roma community and Indian Dalits struggle with problems like racism, discrimination, and segregation. In his memoir about finding Buddhism, Mr. Orsós noted he was most impressed by his visits to Dalit Buddhists’ schools.

“The Dalit people run these institutions themselves, not white people,” he wrote, “I saw people like me take their destiny into their own hands through Buddhism and that is what I wanted to do.”

Hungary’s educational system is highly segregated. Many Romani children attend Roma-only schools that are often underfunded and staffed by poorly trained teachers who do not understand Roma’s distinctive culture and history. Today, 60% of Romani children drop out of school, compared with 8.9% of the general population.

Mr. Orsós believed that his Roma community could be empowered and emboldened by Ambedkarite Buddhism’s basic principles: educate, agitate, organize. So he founded the Dr. Ambedkar School in 2006.

Marc Loustau

Like Dr. Ambedkar, János Kun has grown up in extreme poverty and struggles against racism. “I would call myself an activist, too,” he says.

“We are a caste”

The school draws its 125 students from Miskolc, which has a population of around 161,000, and its surrounding villages, of which around 58,000 are Romani, according to Hungary’s 2012 census. Teachers prepare students for Hungary’s national graduation exams in areas like mathematics, literature, and history. But students also learn lessons drawn from Dr. Ambedkar’s life of activism.

“I would call myself an activist, too,” student János Kun says. Like Dr. Ambedkar, Mr. Kun has grown up in extreme poverty and struggles against racism.

“There are eight of us in my family,” the 20-year-old says. “Six of us children live in one room.” His parents have only a sixth grade education, and he will be the first of his family to graduate from high school. He is the eldest child and helps care for his younger siblings in a house without running water.

Romanis and the Dalits are the same, Mr. Kun says, down to their social status. “We are a caste,” he declares. “We are at the very bottom level of society. But I’m not embarrassed to be poor.”

Mr. Kun is honing his activism by organizing summer camps for younger Romani children where he helps show them paths out of poverty. But he also organizes on behalf of his school. He personally recruited nearly half of his graduating class to attend the school, including Petra Békési, Mr. Kun’s 21-year-old classmate, who says that he first told her about the school when they ran into each other on a Miskolc city bus.

“My friends and I who go to this school strive to show people that it doesn’t have to be this way,” Mr. Kun says. “Anyone can learn. Anyone can develop themselves.”

Plenty of obstacles

Dr. Ambedkar’s story and the activism-oriented school of Buddhism that he founded help students develop a positive self-image, says Tibor Derdák, the school’s director. “We are all equal in our spiritual development,” he says.

Few students actually convert to Buddhism, he adds, although he says the message of equality and self-esteem touches everyone: students, teachers, and parents alike. But while several staff members, including Mr. Orsós, are Buddhist, the school does not offer courses on Buddhism and does not condone proselytizing. Publicity about Buddhism in the school and community has incurred harassment from the authorities in the past.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Even without the suspicion that authorities show toward Buddhism, the school and its community still have to deal with the government’s prejudice against Roma and desire to control the country’s education system.

Hungary’s current government, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has drawn broad criticism for using racist rhetoric to promote xenophobic, anti-migrant policies. On campus, Mr. Orbán’s hostility to minorities is nothing new.

Governments have come and gone in Hungary, says Mr. Derdák, but none have improved living conditions for Roma. “Thirty-four years have passed since the fall of communism, and nothing has changed,” he says.

Mr. Orbán’s allies in his Fidesz party donated the school’s Miskolc building as well as 100 million forints ($280,000) for renovations. However, as a private, independent school, the Dr. Ambedkar School does not receive regular government funding and opted against receiving any additional state aid.

Other private schools serving Roma communities decided to accept state funding – and saw the government immediately step in to replace teachers and staff. Mr. Derdák calls it a cautionary tale. “We don’t like the way the state is influencing the school’s day-to-day functioning,” he says.

The school’s independence has limits, though. The same economic policies that affect Roma throughout Hungary are also negatively impacting the Dr. Ambedkar School.

The biggest threat to the school’s future, Mr. Derdák says, is the Fidesz government’s “work-based society” program. Under this scheme, the government lowered the mandated school attendance age from 18 to 16, and expanded government work programs to provide employment to young people. Mr. Orbán has promoted the idea that those who aren’t succeeding in school should be diverted into the workplace where they can practice practical trades.

But the work-based society program creates problematic incentives for Romani students, who are already struggling against discrimination in hostile school environments, to leave and seek out an easy and immediate paycheck, according to Mr. Derdák. Instead, they end up in dead-end, menial employment for village and town governments, which have little incentive to provide additional professional training. “The vast majority end up in the same subordinated, oppressed situation,” he says.

But the Dr. Ambedkar School’s empowerment-centered educational model could change that, says Dr. Dunajeva, the political scientist. Dr. Ambedkar’s philosophy is the key. “It’s the inspiration for Roma youth to not only acquire basic skills,” she says, “but also develop a strong identity that will equip them in their future quest for social justice.”

Laura Meckler never intended to write a book, but then she stumbled on a story about racial equity that she didn’t want to stop reporting. The narrative unfolds in her Ohio hometown of Shaker Heights – a Cleveland suburb that over the decades has been lauded for its racial integration efforts. Did that lead to racial equity within the city’s public schools, though?

Ms. Meckler, a national education reporter for The Washington Post, started to explore that question in a story published in 2019.

“When I was done with that, I just had this feeling like there was more to say,” she says. “Even though the story that ran in the Post was quite long, I still felt like I was barely scratching the surface on so many elements.”

Her first book, “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” finishes what she started with the initial newspaper story. Ms. Meckler spoke recently with the Monitor. 

Your book digs deep into how housing policies shaped Shaker Heights and, in some cases, encouraged residents to band together for the sake of racial integration. Why is that so important?

Where we go to school depends on where we live, and the diversity of our schools very often depends on the diversity of our neighborhoods. So these two things cannot be separated.

I think, innately, people understand how tightly those are tied. The way it usually works is a couple gets married, and maybe they’re living in the city or they’re living in an apartment somewhere. Then they decide that they’re going to move. They’re thinking about having kids or they have young kids. Where they decide to move is always informed, for most people, by what the schools are like. 

You write about two school systems within one: “Black and white students were together – but also apart.” Given that scene, what would true racial equity look like in practice?

In Shaker Heights, you have something that most of the country does not, which is this economic diversity and racial diversity within one school district. Some people are paying much higher taxes, and that’s benefiting people who have higher needs. That is a huge step toward equity. But what this book tries to do is look at it the next level up, which is what’s happening inside those walls once everybody gets into the school system together. And true equity looks like everybody having the same opportunities for success. There are a lot of systemic barriers built into schools everywhere – and in Shaker – that have stood in the way of that happening.

What are examples of those barriers?

There are issues of implicit bias. I heard so many stories from Black parents and students who had tales of assumptions being made about them. Not knowing about an advanced class that was an option. Being discouraged when somebody else might have been encouraged.

There are also institutional barriers. Some parents have jobs that allow them to stop by the school more often. Other people might be working more than one job or be so exhausted from being on their feet all day that they just don’t have the energy to go into something at school.

The book also examines the school district’s more recent “detracking” efforts, which put students of mixed abilities in the same classroom. From your observations, what was the key to making that work?

I’m not sure we yet know whether it was successful or not. Truthfully, I think that the detracking initiative was pretty poorly implemented.

One of the lessons actually from the detracking initiative is that if you’re going to try to do some hard things like this, you really need to do it very carefully and in a way that communicates with people and brings people along. You’re never going to win over everybody.

To the extent that it did work, though, ... it was because of the commitment of those teachers, I think, who were working really hard to do differentiated teaching. So, for instance, one person might reflect on a novel by making a podcast about it. Somebody else might write a paper. Somebody else might deliver a speech. Someone else might do a graphic novel-type drawing.

You note that Shaker Heights is far from perfect, but it’s still trying. What can other communities learn from the city’s racial equity efforts?

If this is something that’s important to you – to try to create a more equitable community and a more equitable system – it takes work and it takes commitment. You have to sustain that commitment over a long period of time. There is no one magic bullet, perfect solution. 

I concluded that this is really a story that’s more hopeful. Even if these problems don’t get solved, the fact that they’re still working on them and pushing the ball forward ... that is meaningful, and it puts them ahead of a lot of this country.

AP

A motorcyclist drives past a poster of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi welcoming delegates ahead of this week’s summit of the Group of 20 nations in New Delhi, India, Sept. 4.

In an opinion survey this year in 12 leading economies, people from Italy to China said they were more concerned about corruption than climate change. Such a popular expectation of integrity in governance helps explain why this week’s summit of the 20 biggest economies, known as the Group of 20, includes a renewed focus on lifting standards on accountability and transparency – which range from whistleblower protection to anti-bribery enforcement.

Together, the G20 countries can set an example for the rest of the world because they account for 80% of the global economy – and more than 90% of foreign bribery convictions. This year’s summit host, India, has won some consensus among the group on how to cooperate better on asset recovery, or the winning back of stolen money sent abroad by corrupt players.

One recent example of asset recovery includes the United States’ repatriating $332 million linked to the former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and his co-conspirators. Britain is considering a measure to give law enforcement new powers to seize digital assets, which are often used to transfer ill-gotten gains. Such progress builds on the G20’s work over nearly a decade of summits to use the group as a vehicle for improving clean governance everywhere.

“Corruption is a crime that crosses borders,” according to the Accountability Lab, an anti-corruption activist group. “That is why international cooperation and collaboration are essential and have been a key area of focus for the G20 for many years.”

One helpmate for the G20 on fighting corruption is a Paris-based group of 38 developed countries called the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 1999, the OECD approved the Anti-Bribery Convention, the first binding international instrument to focus exclusively on bribery in business transactions. The work against corruption, says former OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría, makes economies more productive, governments more efficient, and institutions more trusted.

“In short,” he said, “integrity delivers better lives.”