Just read through Fani Willis’ RICO indictment. I worked with the Department of Justice on the very first billion-dollar white-collar RICO case in 1988, and also did a Georgia RICO investigation shortly thereafter, so I know the US and Georgia law well.
Willis’ case is even stronger than Jack Smith’s — though a state conviction can’t stop Trump from running.
The core of the crime is a somewhat abstruse: Americans don’t vote for President, we vote for Electors to the Electoral College. The scheme Trump promoted, suggested by John Eastman and seized on by Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, was to sign up a bunch of schmucks to claim they were “Electors” who, in fact, never even ran for Elector and were never on the ballot.
If they had convinced Trump’s actual Electors to join this scheme, the ones on the Georgia ballot who committed to vote for Trump, there would be no indictment. In fact, the scheme might have worked as it did when the GOP stole the election of 1876 when the Electors for the Democrat, Samuel Tilden — who won the election — were rejected by Congress, giving the presidency to the loser, Republican Rutherford Hayes.
The fact that Trump lost the popular vote in Georgia is actually insignificant to the indictment; the fact that he made nasty calls to the Secretary of State, that Giuliani testified to whack-o claims of stuffed ballot boxes and fake dropbox votes is secondary. By themselves these were ugly lies, but they are in the indictment to show a wide “enterprise”, a large, coordinated conspiracy — which is required for a RICO conviction.
Strong-arming the Secretary of State, intimidating poor election worker Ruby Freeman, etc., those are individual crimes that would almost certainly have been ignored, but they were all part of the scheme to get the Georgia Senate and Mike Pence to accept the fake Electors, hence these small crimes become felonious “predicate acts” required for a RICO conviction.
Jack Smith’s indictment asserts that Trump “knew” that he’d lost, but nevertheless, Trump fraudulently pursued a plan to overturn the vote. But how does a jury reach into the gelatinous orange goo that is the Donald’s brain?
Willis’ indictment doesn’t require that Trump know anything except that he was on a campaign to get several states, not just Georgia, to endorse the election victory of Electors who never even ran in the election.
It’s a simple, hammerlock case. Fani is a serious badass.
Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and the book and documentary,
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
His latest film is Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman
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