Trump has another indictment coming his way in the next two weeks and the charges are likely to be racketeering charges, which were designed to take down the mafia.
Here’s more via the WSJ:
Already facing three criminal indictments, Donald Trump is bracing for a potential fourth in Georgia that is likely to come with a legal twist he hasn’t faced yet: sprawling racketeering charges.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a prosecutor who made a name for herself bringing such charges in high-profile cases, has been tight-lipped about what case she will make against the former president and others.
But lawyers who have followed the investigation, including some who have worked with Willis in the past, expect her to invoke Georgia’s RICO Act, modeled after the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970.
“Signs are certainly pointing in that direction,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.
Within the next two weeks, a grand jury is expected to consider whether criminal charges are appropriate for Trump and GOP allies who sought to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.
Trump has said many times he did nothing wrong and that his call to Georgia’s secretary of state was perfect.
The WSJ explains the RICO law which Trump will likely be charged with violating and how it’s successfully been used by Willis in the past:
Georgia’s RICO law is a powerful tool for Willis, who has skillfully applied it in the past, legal experts say. The state code is modeled after the federal statute, enacted in 1970 to help take down the mafia. Before RICO, it was difficult for prosecutors to connect mob bosses with their underlings who carried out crimes. More than 30 states have adopted RICO statutes based on the federal law.
Under both the federal and Georgia’s RICO law, if prosecutors show that there is an organization of people who commit crimes together on a recurring basis, then members can be prosecuted for crimes the group committed.
Back in 2021, when Willis first launched her election-interference investigation, she retained one of Georgia’s leading experts on racketeering charges, John Floyd, to advise on the investigation, which he still does. Floyd has worked on high-profile cases for the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, including the Atlanta school-cheating case, in which Willis was a key prosecutor.
That case involved a group of public-school administrators and teachers conspiring to inflate test scores of students to improve the test ranking of individual schools and the district. The case led to 11 convictions in 2015—all under the state RICO law.
Clint Rucker, a former top Fulton County prosecutor who worked closely with Willis on the case, said the team was sent to a hotel in Macon for a week to study RICO.
“It was a big deal because it wasn’t a gang case,” said Rucker, who is now in private practice.
Rucker said he expected Willis, who he has known well for years, would use RICO in the 2020 election case, since she has already used it with success in the complicated cheating-scandal case.
The RICO statute lends itself well to the Georgia investigation because Trump allies around the country tried a range of tactics to keep him in power, legal experts said.
“It gives prosecutors lots of choices as far as venue goes, and it leads to very long complicated trials that wear down defense attorneys,” said Andrew Fleischman, a defense lawyer in Atlanta.
Critics of RICO said it allows the government to join defendants with little connection to each other into a single prosecution that, absent RICO, would be too disjointed to proceed in the same trial under the rules of criminal procedure and evidence.
The bottom line is that Willis has to prove that a crime was committed and I just don’t see that happening.