With last week’s indictment in Fulton County, GA, we have probably seen the last of four cases that could send Trump to the slammer, although that would most likely be a customized one-person jail with surrounding facilities for the twelve members of his Secret Service detail. The Georgia case, brought by District Attorney (DA) Fani Willis, is a RICO case, which stands for Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization. The RICO statute was originally developed for prosecutions of the mafia and it allowed whole crime families, from the Don via the CAPOs to the Soldiers, to be charged in single indictments. One of its advantages was that it gave room for the smaller crooks to flip and testify against their crime bosses in exchange for leniency. Another advantage is that in a state prosecution like the one in Georgia it allows the DA to bring evidence about events that happened outside of the state into the courtroom. As a federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York Rudy Giuliani was a master in using RICO indictments against organized crime, and it is almost surreal that he is now charged as one of Trump’s co-conspirators in a case that will most likely land him in jail, unless he flips and starts ratting on Trump.
But Giuliani is not the only one. Next to Trump three kinds of people have been charged: White House officials like Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who participated in the planning and execution of the plot to overturn the election; lawyers who developed the plot and advised Trump on it; and some of the fake Electors who were ready to take the place of the real Electors and bring out a vote for Trump in the Electoral College. They are all part of the ‘criminal enterprise’ that functioned as an organized crime family with Trump, fittingly, as the Don. Some of the Soldiers, the fake Electors, may very well start ‘singing’ after they have turned themselves in and have been informed about the severity of the charges against them, although Trump, in the best mafia tradition, has already threatened those ‘who come after him.’ Mark Meadows has immediately requested that the case be moved to federal court, and it is expected that Trump will file a similar request, but it’s hard to see how plotting to overturn an election is part of the regular job duties of either the US President or his Chief of Staff, which is a requirement for facilitating such a request, so it looks like the case will stay in an Atlanta courthouse.
The Georgia case essentially covers the same events that are covered by one of the two federal cases prosecuted by Jack Smith, but it is expected that Smith’s case will move faster through the courts than Fani Willis’s case because there is only one defendant, Trump, so there will be significantly fewer motions and hearings and nobody will flip on Trump for fear of a potential sentence. In all there are now four criminal cases where Trump is the defendant: A financial fraud case in Manhattan, the stolen documents case in Florida, the conspiring to subvert American democracy case in Washington, DC, and the criminal enterprise case in Georgia. In total Trump has been charged with 94 felonies, all carrying prison sentences, and a presidential pardon would not apply to state sentences in New York and Georgia. There will be a legal rat race to get the cases to court before the 2024 elections, with as the front runners the Manhattan case and the DC case, both scheduled or requested to be scheduled in January 2024. Trump’s lawyers have indicated that they would like the DC case to be scheduled somewhere in 2026, and that is just one example of Trump’s usual legal strategy, which comes down to delay and maybe it goes away.
In his public comments Trump has relentlessly attacked Jack Smith, whom he calls ‘deranged,’ and Fani Willis, whom he blames for all the crimes that are committed in Atlanta, GA. He has been a bit more cautious with Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will preside over the DC trial and has already informed Trump that any public misbehavior on his part may result in her moving the trial date up. For a short period of time he used the term ‘riggers’ in his messages, an obvious reference to the n-word, and it must drive him nuts that both Willis and Chutkan are black women representing the two things he hates most in the world, but it appears that his current lawyers have made it clear to him that it is not in his interest to antagonize prosecutors and judges, although he can fall off the wagon any time in that respect.
Instead he now directs his anger at Biden, whom he accuses of masterminding the prosecutions in order to get rid of a competitor for 2024, which apart from the fact that Biden stays away as far as possible from the legal process is bizarre because practically all observers agree that Biden has an interest in running against Trump and not against a younger and smarter Republican. Another Trump defense, echoed by most Republican politicians, is that Trump was ‘only’ trying to make sure that the 2020 election had been fair, but this doesn’t really explain why he asked state authorities to throw away the results and install fake Electors. A final argument from the Trumpist cult is that Trump had every right to challenge the results of the election. This is true, and Trump’s lawyers did it in over sixty cases in court, all of which they lost.
Hugo Kijne
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