The Georgia Indictment Is Serious, but It Also Overreachesnce again, a Democratic prosecutor has indicted Donald Trump, this time in state court in Fulton County, Ga. Skepticism of these charges, and of the decision to bring them at this time, is appropriate. District Attorney Fani Willis is a blue-city arch-partisan who has used the investigation as a political fund-raising tool. Moreover, the indictment has real flaws, some of them repeating special counsel Jack Smith’s errors. As with Smith’s January 6 case, this one treats as a crime his campaign to get political actors to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election through political processes. The Georgia case also makes additional mistakes. But that does not mean that the charges are unserious. The indictment alleges an array of real criminal activity that deserves the sanction of the law.
We reiterate our oft-stated view that Trump’s misdeeds were impeachable, and that Republican voters should avoid the folly of renominating him as a result of his actions. Those decisions, however, are for the Senate and the voters, not for local district attorneys unrepresentative of the nation and unaccountable to it.
In the latest indictment, Willis charges 41 distinct felony counts, including an overarching charge (Count One, running 71 pages) under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute. Trump is named in twelve of the specific felony counts; all 19 defendants are named in the RICO count.
The RICO charge allows Willis to accuse Trump of being ultimately responsible for the acts of the other defendants, who include his lawyers, a Justice Department official, and people who purported to cast electoral votes for him after he lost Georgia. This is a heavy-handed use of a law originally written for the Mafia. There could be significant legal challenges regarding whether the sprawling hubs of Trump supporters going about their hopeless, half-baked schemes to maintain him in power amounted to a racketeering “enterprise,” and whether a number of acts Willis portrays as the criminal peddling of false information were actually instances of constitutionally protected — albeit false — speech. Moreover, there are fair questions as to whether Trump or others should be blamed for some of the consequences of what he set in motion, though that is a proper question for a jury to resolve.
RICO aside, the specific felony charges mostly do not require the sort of legal adventurism required by Smith’s January 6 indictment, or by Alvin Bragg’s in Manhattan. There are charges of false court filings, false testimony to legislative committees, false evidence presented to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, unauthorized access to a county computer database, and an effort to pressure a local election official into giving false testimony during the controversy. There are also process-crime charges involving perjury to the grand jury.................
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/the-georgia-indictment-is-serious-but-it-also-overreaches/
