With racketeering charges, Georgia prosecutor aims high

ATLANTA — For more than 50 years, prosecutors have relied on a powerful tool to take down people as varied as mafia capos, street gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods, and pharmaceutical executives accused of fueling the opioid crisis.

Now a prosecutor in Georgia is using the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, to go after former President Donald Trump, who along with 18 of his allies was indicted Monday on charges of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

One power of RICO is that it often allows a prosecutor to tell a sweeping story — not only laying out a set of criminal acts, but identifying a group of people working toward a common goal, as part of an “enterprise,” to engage in patterns of illegal activities.

Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, is using a RICO indictment to tie together elements of a broad conspiracy that she describes as stretching far outside her Atlanta-area jurisdiction and into a number of other swing states, a legal move made possible by the racketeering statute. Her investigation also reached into rural parts of Georgia — notably Coffee County, where Trump allies got access to voting machines in January 2021 in search of evidence that the election had been rigged.

Signaling its breadth, the indictment brought Monday night laid out a number of ways the defendants obstructed the election: by lying to the Georgia legislature and state officials, recruiting fake pro-Trump electors, harassing election workers, soliciting Justice Department officials, soliciting Vice President Mike Pence, breaching voting machines and engaging in a cover-up.

Willis indicated that she would like the case to move quickly. She said that she wanted all 19 defendants to surrender by Aug. 25 at noon — two days after the first Republican presidential debate — and a trial to begin within six months. But many of the defendants are likely to file challenges that could slow down the case.

The challenge for Willis will be to convince jurors that the disparate group of 19 people charged in the indictment were all working together in a sprawling but organized criminal effort to keep Trump in power. Besides the former president, the defendants include his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows; several lawyers; a local bail bondsman; and a onetime publicist for Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.

Trump and his allies have argued that their efforts to challenge his 2020 election loss in Georgia were well within the bounds of the law. Indeed, Trump has been laying the groundwork for his defense for months, arguing repeatedly that there was nothing illegal about his now-famous call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021.

In that call, Trump told Raffensperger he hoped to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win Georgia.

But the RICO indictment forces Trump to push back against a broader allegation — that he was part of a multipronged criminal scheme that involved not only calls to state officials, but the convening of bogus pro-Trump electors, the harassment of Fulton County elections workers, and false statements made by Trump allies, including Giuliani, before state legislative bodies.

In Georgia, RICO is a felony charge that carries stiff penalties: a potential prison term of five to 20 years, a fine or both.

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