Pastor Indicted W/Trump in Georgia Says He Was just Doing “Pastoral” Things

 The Rev. Stephen C. Lee says he was pastoring to people in Georgia after the 2020 election. The indictment says he was pressuring an elections worker.

 

The Rev. Stephen C. Lee is one of the lesser-known figures indicted with former President Donald J. Trump in Fulton County, Ga., on charges of unlawfully conspiring to keep Mr. Trump in power after the 2020 election.

But on Thursday night at an evangelical church near Chicago, dozens of people held their arms aloft and prayed over Pastor Lee at a fund-raiser where he was portrayed as an American hero — and a victim of religious persecution.

“We’re going to be talking about the weaponization of government against religion,” Gary S. Franchi, Jr., a host on a conservative online news channel, declared from the pulpit at Families of Faith Ministries in Channahon, Ill., at the start of the event. “We’re going to be supporting ‘America’s chaplain,’ and religious liberty, here tonight.”

Pastor Lee, 71, is a former law enforcement officer who became a Lutheran minister and currently leads a small church in Orland Park, Ill. He says he has offered spiritual support to police officers and victims after some of the worst American tragedies of the last quarter-century, including the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado and the Sept. 11 attack in New York. 

His lawyer, David Shestokas, has argued that Pastor Lee was doing something similar — engaging in “pastoral activities” — when he showed up in Georgia after the 2020 election.

 Pastor Lee, 71, is a former law enforcement officer who became a Lutheran minister and currently leads a small church in Orland Park, Ill. 

Pastor Lee, 71, is a former law enforcement officer who became a Lutheran minister and currently leads a small church in Orland Park, Ill. Credit...Jim Vondruska/Reuters

There, he tried to meet with Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County elections worker whom Mr. Trump and his allies had falsely accused of ballot fraud, a conspiracy theory that ricocheted around the internet. At the time, Ms. Freeman was being barraged with threats and harassment.

Takeaways From Trump’s Indictment in Georgia

A fourth criminal case. Former President Donald Trump was indicted for a fourth time on Aug. 14, this time over what prosecutors in Atlanta described as his efforts to unlawfully undo his election loss in Georgia in 2020. The indictment includes 13 charges against Trump, as well as charges against 18 of his allies. Here are some key takeaways:

Trump was charged under Georgia’s RICO Act. Prosecutors charged Trump and his allies under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, which allows them to link various crimes committed by different people by arguing that they were acting together for a common criminal goal. At its heart, the statute requires prosecutors to prove the existence of an “enterprise” and a “pattern of racketeering activity.”

The charges reach far beyond Trump. Among the 18 Trump allies charged in the case are Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and lawyer for Trump, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. Also charged are several more lawyers who are accused of working to try to overturn the election, including John Eastman and Sidney Powell.

The charges fall into several baskets. Several of the individual counts stem from false claims of election fraud that Giuliani and two other Trump lawyers made at legislative hearings in December 2020. Another batch of charges concerns a plan to vote for a false slate of pro-Trump electors. A third raft of charges accuses several Trump allies of conspiring to steal voter data and tamper with voting equipment in Coffee County, Ga.

The indictment of Mr. Trump and 18 others on Aug. 14, and statements from Ms. Freeman, tell a different story. They place Pastor Lee at the center of efforts to pressure Ms. Freeman into falsely admitting to election fraud, raising questions about why a Midwestern clergyman was so determined to make contact with an Atlanta elections worker.

Pastor Lee has been indicted on five felony charges, including violating Georgia’s racketeering law, and has pleaded not guilty. In his presentation on Thursday night, he noted that he could face up to 20 years in prison for the racketeering charge alone. 

“That’s a death sentence,” he said.

Four defendants in the case have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors; the rest, including Mr. Trump, are still facing trial, perhaps sometime next year.

In recent weeks, Pastor Lee’s version of what he was doing in Georgia after the election has been gaining purchase in the Illinois evangelical community, as he and Mr. Shestokas have done numerous interviews with right-wing media outlets. Thursday’s event drew roughly 200 people.

Mr. Franchi, the M.C., said falsely that the 2020 election “was stolen right out from under every single American.”

The gulf between the two narratives of Pastor Lee’s time in Georgia says much about a country fraying along political and cultural battle lines as Mr. Trump, the most prominent of the Georgia criminal defendants, ramps up his campaign for a second term and continues to push the false narrative that the previous election was rigged.

By Richard Fausset

Reporting from Atlanta and Channahon, Ill.

The New York Times