KaBoom! Georgia Grand Jury Throws the Book at Trump & Co.
Instead of seeing hypocrites blathering about Hunter Biden or any of a host of other distractions, we’ll get to watch Donald Trump sweat.
The charges leveled against former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-conspirators in Georgia are the most serious to date.
It’s not that Special Counsel Jack Smith has weaker cases; his laser focus and attention to detail will make for an impressive prosecution. Alvin Bragg’s hush money case in New York includes many of the same facts that sent Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to prison, and now Cohen is a witness for the prosecution.
What Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis has going for her case can be summed up in one four letter word: RICO.
The initials stand for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a federal statute enacted in 1970 as part of the Organized Crime Control Act. Georgia and 32 other states plus the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have enacted variations on this law to include state offenses not in the federal statute.
The bottom line is that RICO was designed to allow prosecutors to hold groups of people accountable for ongoing criminal activity. While organized criminal outfits –specifically the mafia– were popularly characterized as the reason for these laws, they are used for other groups. Connecting the dots in crime schemes is another way of looking at RICO.
Here’s former federal prosecutor and current law professor Joyce Vance:
Georgia law is broader than federal law in some ways. One is that more crimes qualify as predicate acts—the pattern of criminal behavior needed to meet the statute’s requirements.
Although the laundry list of crimes that qualify start with violent crimes you would expect like murder, kidnapping, and “smash and grab” burglary, it goes on to list other crimes including forgery, bribery, making false statements to state officials, perjury, influence or tampering with witnesses, and violation of the Georgia Computer Protection Act
In a RICO case, non-criminal acts leading up to the law breaking can be considered as evidence, provided there was a joint effort underway and provable connections between defendants. Thus, the GOP apologists’ free speech arguments are irrelevant.
The introduction for the Georgia indictment reads as follows:
Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined 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.
The 161 instances of acts taken in furtherance of the conspiracy are mind numbing. In sum, they tell the story of 19 people who knew they were lying about election fraud and took dozens of affirmative steps to get other people to undertake actions to overturn the election.
The former president stands accused of sitting atop of a criminal racketeering enterprise beginning before votes were even counted and continuing for months after the election.
Given the scope of all these steps in the conspiracy –which in a RICO case can go beyond a specific jurisdiction or state– there will be a larger pool of potential witnesses than the 75 who offered testimony before the grand jury.
The additional witnesses will likely include some Trump’s co-defendants, hoping to make a deal getting them past the minimum five-year sentence per count in Georgia RICO cases. Some observers believe the “flipping” has already begun, with a joke making the rounds about “more flipping than at an IHOP on Sunday morning.”
While some of those charged claimed to be investigating voter fraud, they allegedly committed election fraud. Data was stolen from the voting systems in Coffee County, Georgia, and spread across the country in an attempt to find weaknesses in the systems that might have opened the way to discovering instances of actual fraud.
None were found, and this seems like a good time to remind readers that accusations coming from MAGA-world are actually confessions.
Speaking of accusations, in addition to the usual venom (and fundraising letters) coming from the Trump camp, there was an announcement of a “Major News Conference” next Monday.
"A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete & will be presented by me at a major News Conference at 11:00 A.M. on Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey. Based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE Report, all charges should be dropped against me & others - There will be a complete EXONERATION! They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!"
I’m kinda hoping they allow Rudi Giuliani to organize this event, given the bang up job he did in front of the Four Seasons garden supply a couple of years back.
My imaginary wish list would also include:
Evidence from Hawaii dug up by his team of private investigators about Obama's birth certificate
The Very Powerful Health Care Plan, and
The Very Powerful Infrastructure Plan
It is amazing to me that various news outlets choose to repeat Republican talking points when indictments drop. Let us not forget the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) "War Games" meeting in late September 2020 to plan for a potential electoral defeat of President Trump. Just because they haven’t been indicted (yet) doesn’t mean that the entirety of the GOP legal brain trust wasn’t involved.
When various apologists go on TV and allege that President Biden has weaponized the Justice Department, it would be nice if the interviewers mentioned that all the major witnesses who testified to the Fulton County grand jury, all the major witnesses before the Jan6 panel, the FBI Head who authorized the Mar-a-Lago search, and the judge who signed that search warrant are all Republicans.
The case made in Fulton County is built upon documentable instances of false statements, in many instances in violation of oaths taken by state officials. Are we really supposed to believe all those statements were not what they seemed to be?
The special-purpose grand jury made up of citizens in Fulton County, Georgia, examined evidence and heard from 75 witnesses in the case, and issued a report in January recommending indictments. A second -regular- grand jury took the final report of the special grand jury into consideration and brought an indictment after hearing further witness testimony.
If you think about it, the number of Republican witnesses offering testimony in all of Trump travails must number in the hundreds. How is it that they are all so weak kneed that an 80 year old President can summon them to testify against their Dear Leader?
John Dean, who served as White House counsel to President Richard Nixon, summed up the latest indictment of former president Trump, saying: “It’s much bigger than Watergate.”
One thing the Georgia indictments do have in common with Watergate is that they’ll largely be fought out in public, as there will be cameras in the courtroom broadcasting live. Instead of seeing hypocrites blathering about Hunter Biden or any of a host of other distractions, we’ll get to watch Donald Trump sweat.
Even if this trial gets moved past the November 2024 elections, Trump’s attacks on prosecutors and witnesses won’t be winning him any new votes. And -although I loathe the man- the fact that the former New Jersey Governor has leapfrogged over Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis and other candidates in New Hampshire polling indicate Chris Christie’s attacks are working.
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Tuesday Tales of Woe and Wickedness
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More Americans Are Ending Up Homeless — at a Record Rate Via the Wall Street Journal. I’m sure reactionaries will just continue to say things like drugs and insanity are to blame, or that people want to live that “lifestyle.”
The data so far this year are up roughly 11% from 2022, a sharp jump that would represent by far the biggest recorded increase since the government started tracking comparable numbers in 2007.
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She Wasn't Able to Get an Abortion. Now She's a Mom. Soon She'll Start 7th Grade Via Time Magazine
Ashley just had a baby. She’s sitting on the couch in a relative’s apartment in Clarksdale, Miss., wearing camo-print leggings and fiddling with the plastic hospital bracelets still on her wrists. It’s August and pushing 90 degrees, which means the brown patterned curtains are drawn, the air conditioner is on high, and the room feels like a hiding place. Peanut, the baby boy she delivered two days earlier, is asleep in a car seat at her feet, dressed in a little blue outfit. Ashley is surrounded by family, but nobody is smiling. One relative silently eats lunch in the kitchen, her two siblings stare glumly at their phones, and her mother, Regina, watches from across the room. Ashley was discharged from the hospital only hours ago, but there are no baby presents or toys in the room, no visible diapers or ointments or bottles. Almost nobody knows that Peanut exists, because almost nobody knew that Ashley was pregnant. She is 13 years old. Soon she’ll start seventh grade.
In the fall of 2022, Ashley was raped by a stranger in the yard outside her home, her mother says. For weeks, she didn’t tell anybody what happened, not even her mom. But Regina knew something was wrong. Ashley used to love going outside to make dances for her TikTok, but suddenly she refused to leave her bedroom. When she turned 13 that November, she wasn't in the mood to celebrate. “She just said, ‘It hurts,’” Regina remembers. “She was crying in her room. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t want to tell me.” (To protect the privacy of a juvenile rape survivor, TIME is using pseudonyms to refer to Ashley and Regina; Peanut is the baby’s nickname.)
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Michigan mom is charged with buying guns for son who threatened top Democrats, prosecutors say Via Associated Press
Authorities say Michelle Berka knowingly lied when she bought five guns that were eventually given to another person, according to an indictment unsealed in federal court Tuesday and first reported by The Detroit News. While the indictment dated Aug. 2 does not name who Berka gave the firearms to, her son was arrested with four of the same firearms in March.
Randall Berka II — who lives with his parents — is accused of having written on a YouTube channel that “biden deserves to die,” a reference to President Joe Biden, and that he was “more than willing to kill whitmer,” a reference to the governor.
Randall Berka II was involuntarily committed for mental health care in 2012 and declared incapacitated, which bars him from possessing guns or ammunition, the FBI said.
The RICO charge made my day.