America’s Careening Into a Constitutional Crisis

What Trump’s Latest Indictment Means, and Why It Matters

Image Credit: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

There are sweeping indictments — and there’s the one just handed down in Georgia. 19 people charged — from Trump, to his lawyers, to fake electors, to election officials. 161 acts alleged. 41 charges — including, for the first time, RICO, or racketeering charges. DA Fani Wills put it this way: the defendants “engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result.”

This indictment is different. It’s broader than Jack Smith’s — the Special Counsel. It’s the first time that Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani have been charged. And it attempts to paint a fuller portrait of a conspiracy, too, reaching down into the lower echelons of fake electors and election officials, even a poll watcher — making it clearer what’s at stake here.

This indictment isn’t just about Trump — it’s about the GOP’s fanatical wing. Which, of course, while it resorts to conspiratorialism of all kinds was out there in plain sight, as the indictment alleges, engaged in a conspiracy of its own.

So what does all this really mean? Here are some insightful takes — and then I’ll share mine.

From Slate: 

In Georgia, the RICO charge has a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. Presidents cannot pardon state convictions, which means that even if Trump, or another Republican, were to win the presidency, they could do little to scupper this prosecution. In Georgia, even the governor’s power to issue commutations and pardons is severely limited compared to other states. 

Interesting, no?

From the Washington Post: 

Prosecutors brought charges around five subject areas: false statements by Trump allies, including Giuliani, to the Georgia legislature; the breach of voting data in Coffee County; calls Trump made to state officials, including Raffensperger, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory; the harassment of election workers; and the creation of a slate of alternate electors to undermine the legitimate vote. Those charged in the case were implicated in certain parts of what prosecutors presented as a larger enterprise to undermine the election.

From the Washington Post, again: 

A core Trump defense in the federal Jan. 6 case is the idea that he was merely exercising free speech. But that defense won’t work as easily in Georgia, which has a broad prohibition against making “a false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation … in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government.

Now let’s come to what many people see here as the Biggie: RICO charges. RICO was a statute of course designed to deal with the mafia and drug kingpins — the justice system had the problem that the heads of such criminal enterprises weren’t often directly implicated. RICO’s a scary set of charges to be hit with.

Here, Al-Jazeera has a good explanation:

Georgia’s RICO Act, adopted in 1980, makes it a crime to participate in, acquire or maintain control of an “enterprise” through a “pattern of racketeering activity” or to conspire to do so. It’s important to note that the alleged scheme does not have to have been successful for a RICO charge to stick. An “enterprise” can be a single person or a group of associated individuals with a common goal.

“Racketeering activity” means to commit, attempt to commit — or to solicit, coerce or intimidate someone else to commit — one of more than three dozen state crimes listed in the law.

RICO charges also carry a heavy potential sentence that can be added on top of the penalty for the underlying acts. In Georgia, it’s a felony conviction that carries a prison term of five to 20 years.”

That explanation clarifies why RICO’s so powerful. Just like when dealing with mafias — the higher crime is to solicit or coerce someone else to commit a crime. And that can happen even in indirect ways — through the coded language, of course, that mafias are notorious for, or “asking for” 11,000 votes, perhaps.

That’s another key way this indictment differs: RICO charges are amongst the heaviest mechanisms of justice that exist in the American system. They’re not something you want to be charged with, because now you’re under the auspices of what’s the closest thing in America to a special justice system — and they’ll follow you around for life, allow every bit of your life to be investigated, and all your communications and records and so forth examined meticulously, for, of course, evidence of the solicitation of lesser crimes — leading a criminal conspiracy. This is heavy, heavy stuff — beyond Jack Smith’s charges.

That brings me to my take.

Let me try to put all this in context for you.