Legal experts and lawyers in Georgia who know the workings of the Fulton County district attorney expect her to levy state racketeering charges against former President Donald Trump, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
The DA, Fani Willis, has successfully prosecuted similar cases under Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. Georgia's RICO Act is modeled after the federal statute of 1970, which was first hatched to battle the sprawling crime network of the mafia.
RICO allows prosecutors to charge individuals for crimes that the group committed, providing prosecutors can show that an organization of people are committing the crimes together.
Further, charging Trump under the state RICO Act makes the outcome of conviction one that cannot be pardoned by a president.
"It gives prosecutors lots of choices as far as venue goes, and it leads to very long complicated trials that wear down defense attorneys," Atlanta-based defense attorney Andrew Fleischman told the WSJ.
Atlanta is already bracing for the indictment to be handed down; the timing seemingly certain to happen within the next two weeks, if not sooner.
And while it would be the fourth indictment levied on Trump, it would be the first to charge the former president of racketeering.
Similar to the federal charges that dropped last week in Washington, D.C., accusing Trump of four counts of conspiracy and obstruction to overturn the 2020 election, the impending indictment out of Georgia will focus on Trump allegedly trying to overturn the results in the state.
The counts are sure to hinge, in part, on Trump's call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to "find 11,780 votes."
While Willis is keeping this investigation and her charging intentions under close wraps, she herself last year extolled the benefits of bringing RICO charges, albeit in a very different case, a gang indictment.
"I'm a fan of RICO. I've told people that. And the reason that I am a fan of RICO is I think jurors are very, very intelligent," Willis said at the summer of 2022 press conference. "They want to know what happened. They want to make an accurate decision about someone's life. And so RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor's office and law enforcement to tell the whole story."
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