Trump, 18 Co-Conspirators Charged With Election Racketeering

Thirteen days after a federal grand jury indicted Donald Trump alone for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, a Fulton County grand jury indicted him along with 18 co-conspirators of doing the same in the state of Georgia. In both cases, all the major witnesses who testified to the grand juries were Republicans.

While the federal indictment brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith was crafted for a quick uncomplicated trial, setting aside six unnamed co-conspirators, the Georgia indictment brought by Fulton County DA Fani Willis was crafted for completeness, so that the whole criminal enterprise could be held accountable in a single trial within the framework of Georgia’s racketeering or RICO statute. What’s more, the trial will be televised, so the whole nation will be able to judge the evidence first hand. And it could come to trial within six months, Willis said — though that decision lies with the courts, not with her.

“If Jack Smith’s tightly focused election interference indictment vs Trump is Hemingway, Fani Willis’s sweeping 19 defendant charging document is Dickens,” the Brookings Institute’s Norm Eisen tweeted, “We need both but make no mistake—the state case is essential.”

“Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia,” the indictment states. “Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.”

It went on to allege that the conspiracy “engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.”

In addition to the RICO charge, there were 40 other counts alleged (13 against Trump). To obtain a RICO conviction a prosecutor must prove at least two specific acts. The indictment lists 161 of them.

Also charged were Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, John Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, as well as his chief of staff Mark Meadows and D.O.J. lawyer Jeffrey Clark.

There were four main facets to Trump’s scheme. First was to pressure Georgia officials to give Trump the state’s electoral votes. Trump’s infamous tape-recorded call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger pressuring him to “find 11,780 votes” was the prime example of this, but Trump made several other similar calls, while allies like Giuliani, Meadows and Clark mounted related pressure in various different ways.

The second facet was the false elector scheme — a scheme replicated in six other states as well. While most of this was carried out by underlings, Trump himself was directly involved at times. For example, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, told the House Jan. 6 Committee that Trump had called her and put Mr. Eastman on the phone “to talk about the importance of the R.N.C. helping the campaign gather these contingent electors.”

The third facet was the unlawful accessing of voting machines in rural Coffee County, purportedly to find evidence of supposed vote theft. While Trump was not directly involved in this, a RICO indictment does not require such involvement in every particular act.

The fourth facet was Trump’s trademark practice of obstruction and cover-up, reflected in charges of filing false documents, making false statements to government investigators and committing perjury during the Fulton County judicial proceedings.

In a press conference following release of the indictment, Willis responded to Republican charges of politicization.

“I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law,” Willis said. “The law is completely nonpartisan. That’s how decisions are made in every case. To date, this office has indicted, since I’ve been sitting as the district attorney, over 12,000 cases. This is the 11th RICO indictment. We followed the same process. We look at the facts. We look at the law, and we bring charges.”

Trump’s response, via a campaign email, “The Truth About Fani Willis,” was to call her out as “The Daughter of a Former Black Panther.” He was also a college professor who later became a lawyer. In contrast, Trump is the son of a man who was arrested at a KKK rally in 1927. As Faulkner wrote, “The past isn’t dead, It isn’t even past.”

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