Georgia starts investigation into Trump's election interference

I can't wait. Sure to be a good way for him to grift some extra cash from his cult. He will probably have the my pillow guy with him to add extra credibility.

 

Ted trying to earn another patch on his brown shirt from Trump.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald...brad-raffensperger-cd592c20?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

Indictment Four: Trump as Racketeer
Alleging a RICO conspiracy makes the Georgia 2020 election case less credible.
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 15, 2023 at 6:47 pm ET

The fourth indictment of former President Donald Trump reads like an exercise at throwing everything at the jury to see what might stick. Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has assembled a 98-page charge sheet with 41 counts and 19 defendants, yet little fresh evidence regarding Mr. Trump.

The big news is the DA’s use of the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. It treats Mr. Trump’s attempt to reverse the 2020 election as if it were a mafia operation rather than bumblers who controlled no election machinery in Georgia or anywhere else. The alleged behavior was rotten, but inflating it into a RICO conspiracy makes the case less credible, not more.

We should add that these columns criticized the use of RICO for uses other than against organized crime when then U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani used it against Wall Street in the 1980s. Now Mr. Giuliani, in an irony noticed by the New York Sun, is charged with violating RICO. Its use now is no better than it was then.

Unlike the federal indictment from special counsel Jack Smith, the Georgia filing doesn’t address Mr. Trump’s free speech under the First Amendment. Every half-baked tweet from Mr. Trump is presented as another RICO act: “DONALD JOHN TRUMP caused to be tweeted from the Twitter account @RealDonaldTrump, ‘The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.’ This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.” Ms. Willis is reading genius calculation into desperation.

Mr. Trump is also charged with soliciting a public officer to violate his oath, based on his infamous call urging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find enough votes to overturn the Georgia result. The worst part of the call was Mr. Trump’s warning that Mr. Raffensperger was taking “a big risk,” because failing to report fraud, “that’s a criminal offense.”

But can Ms. Willis prove that Mr. Trump’s conduct was criminal, not delusional? “I didn’t lose the state, Brad,” Mr. Trump said. “People have been saying that it was the highest vote ever. There was no way.” He was bewildered that other Republicans hadn’t lost, while he had. “They had people in Georgia, for instance, that won, and I was way ahead of them,” Mr. Trump told a state investigator on a December 2020 call. “They call it coat tails, right, and we pulled them across, and they say, ‘there’s no way I beat you by 15 points.’”

The obvious answer is that a decisive share of suburban Republicans didn’t want Mr. Trump for four more years. A hand recount of wards in Wisconsin found areas where 10.5% of ballots for President Biden went GOP for Congress. Mr. Trump lagged Wisconsin’s five Republican Congressmen by 63,547 votes, as Mr. Biden ran ahead of Democrats in those races by 64,880. In Milwaukee Mr. Trump actually improved his margin, to 19.6% of the vote, from 18.4% in 2016.

But Mr. Trump had serpents whispering the opposite into his ears. “There was no point in time,” former Vice President Mike Pence said last week, “that the President ever told me that he knew he had lost.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers will first seek to move the case out of Georgia to a federal court, and they have a point. Many of the alleged RICO acts relate to events in Pennsylvania, Arizona and other contested states.

As with the Smith indictment, Mr. Trump also has a reasonable claim of “absolute immunity” for actions taken related to his duties as President, including trying to uncover voter fraud. See the Supreme Court’s 1982 ruling in Nixon v. Fitzgerald. The press corps is ignoring this defense, but then they are often caught by legal surprise.

The most damaging parts of the indictment are the counts alleging that lawyer Sidney Powell hired a Fulton County contractor to travel to Coffee County, where the team apparently met up with the sympathetic then-elections supervisor. The intent, says the indictment, included “tampering” with election equipment and “removing voter data.” Physical security of voting machines is crucial, but those counts don’t include Mr. Trump and could be filed as separate indictments for computer crimes.

***
The Georgia indictment is unlikely to move public opinion, in part because of its breadth and timing. Ms. Willis spent two-and-a-half years investigating. Now she wants a trial in six months, smack in the middle of the 2024 primaries. After watching prosecutors, especially New York’s Alvin Bragg, stretch the law to encircle Mr. Trump, many Republicans rallied to his side. That hasn’t changed with more indictments.

There’s no defending Mr. Trump’s awful conduct after the 2020 election, and it would be a mistake for Republicans to try. But most Republicans look at these indictments, and the pass for Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden, and see partisan prosecutions and double standards. Four indictments later, prosecuting Mr. Trump, instead of leaving the judgment to voters and history, still seems like a bad idea for the country.

Appeared in the August 16, 2023, print edition as 'Indictment Four: Trump as Racketeer'.

​

 

TLDR: What about Hillary and Hunter!

 

Oh well then, by all means sir, please present this "complex" report to you minions, but please dumb it down, you know your audience. This is such a joke.................is it at the 4 seasons again

For real, just when I thought he could not get any dumber he does this, he knows he will lose in court (as he did 60 times already) he will play this out in the court of maga opinion...............I can see twitterverse now, "see, we told you he was innocent, this proves it all", no need for a trial now

 

As the opinion piece noted Giuliani himself used RICO to prosecute many crimes. RICO was developed and frequently used to go after the mafia but by definition it is a tool to go after a criminal conspiracy. Given the sprawling nature of the attempt to overturn the GA election it does fit.

 

The opinion piece actually does that:
“But most Republicans look at these indictments, and the pass for Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden, and see partisan prosecutions and double standards”

The WSJ is predictable.

 

More garbage. We all know who owns WSJ now. The once reputable paper is now a tool in the toolbox of Rupert Murdock, quite possibly one of the only people alive more dispicable than trump himself. Again they try to switch the narrative in comparing trump's crimes to what HRC and Hunter Biden are alleged to have done. I don't recall either of those people leading an insurrection or trying to get state legislatures to assist them in trying to change the voting results to illegally steal and election.

 

again, pay no attention to the argument itself but rather spend time crafting an ad hominem to make your point. That always works.

 

I'm not a big fan of:
"I did/read/investigated XXX so that you don't have to."

It's fine for "I ate square pizza so that you don't have to," or "I cooked turducken so that you won't ruin your thanksgiving."

EDITED: Okay, kinda sorta by request, I read it and kinda sorta responded below.

 

WSJ opinion assembled the entire editorial squad for this one!!

 

What is the argument again? Er… the opinion… I should say…?

To be fair… WSJ refused to run the Hunter story initially and the news section is still pretty top notch for news and reporting. The Opinion Section is where it gets pretty FOX Newsy

 

always a good idea to avoid analysis coming from a different perspective

 

How is this not considered jury tampering?

 

Well sir, we can't wait to see the biggly evidence at 11am on Monday. I am sure you have just been waiting and biting your toung waiting to unleash the kraken................color me excited

 

Given how much some posters here just repost op-eds, tweets, YouTube vids of influencers many seem to prefer that.

I mean it’s easier and faster than actually formulating your own opinion based upon evidence and critical thinking.

That said I would like to read a piece from Ann Althouse about how she ate square pizza so I don’t have to!

 

So I’m guessing you’re following Laurence Tribe and Robert Reich?

 

How many of his followers actually read this stuff and keep following him?

I read plenty of different perspectives. Powerlineblog, when I used to follow those links you shared, was not using much argumentation. It didn't offer me much of a different perspective.

But you know. If you think that's a valuable link, I will give it the benefit of the doubt, ignore the terrible title, and give it a whirl.

 

It's not a horrible article and not the only skepticism I've read about the indictments. Never-the-less, the best analysis seems to be from Georgia law profs, defense attorneys, and prosecutors, not national ones, since Georgia RICO is different from federal RICO. And this is the same DA that got convictions on 11 public school teachers for cheating on their students test scores using Georgia RICO. This is going to be an interesting televised trial.