The Fulton County, Georgia DA's Ridiculous Case Against Trump and Republicans, Part One
This is just another Democrat led weaponization of law enforcement against political opposition
Summary: The Fulton County District Attorney’s indictment of President Trump and over a dozen other Republicans is an unprecedented assault on Constitutionally-protected activity of political opposition. The indictment twists and contorts facts in an effort to stretch criminal legal statutes and theories beyond the breaking point. The indictment literally charges over two dozen people with being a part of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 Presidential election using lawful action. The indictment is yet another abomination by the radical leftist fringe of the Democrat Party. The indictment is ridiculously extensive and presents several different claims. This article will break the claims down and try to make sense of it all.
The Article: On Monday, August 14, 2023, the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney, Fani Willis, announced President Trump and 18 other Republicans were indicted on a variety of alleged violations of Georgia law. (Interestingly, the Fulton County clerk actually posted court documents to its website about the indictment hours before the indictment itself was actually handed down.) The indictment itself consists of 98 pages of political diatribe, misrepresentations, misinformation and nonsense.
RICO Counts. The indictment presents several basic categories of charges in separate counts. The first count involves “RICO” claims. RICO stands for the “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The original RICO statute is a provision of Federal law commonly used to target the Mafia and other criminal organizations. Many States passed their own version of the law. Georgia is one such State. Essentially, the indictement claims Trump and the other Defendants “unlawfully conspired” to “unlawfully change the outcome of the election.” These charges consume roughly 70 pages of the indictment.
Alternate Electors. Several of the counts pertain to the efforts by the Trump team to prepare a slate of alternate electors for the State of Georgia. Some background is in order here. In Presidential elections, Americans do not actually vote directly for their candidate of choice. We actually case ballots for a slate of “electors” that will meet to cast your State’s electoral votes in the Electoral College for the candidate who won your State. (See here for a good explanation of this process.) Trump and company arranged for a slate of “alternate electors” to be presented in Trump’s favor in the event the efforts to prevail in Georgia were successful. The Fulton County DA convinced the Grand Jury to level all manner of charges about this effort.
Legal Challenges. Another group of counts and charges were brought against Trump and company for their efforts to mount legal challenges to the election and for presenting claims to the Georgia Legislature and to Georgia State elected officials, such as the Secretary of State. (Readers will recall, a Georgia Senate Committee held hearings in December 2020 and heard from eyewitnesses and experts about the chicanery sorrounding the 2020 Presidential Election in Georgia. The Committee issued a report on December 17, 2020, finding the results of the election “could not be trusted.” According to the Fulton County DA, the efforts to present the election issues to the Georgia Legislature and to try to get the GA Secretary of State to investigate the campaign’s claims were criminal.
False Statements. Several counts deal with what the indictment claims were “false statements” made in lawsuits or in testimony before the Georgia Legislature. Another count deals with a draft of a letter from a DOJ lawyer named Jeff Clark to others at the DOJ.
There are additional claims, including counts concerning efforts to obtain the cooperation of Ruby Freeman (one of the Fulton County election workers involved with the State Farm Center) and charges about accessing voting machines in Coffee County, GA. (I intend to write separate substacks about Ruby Freeman and the Coffee County issues.)
Problems with the Indictment. At its most fundamental level, a RICO case requires an illegal object. Stated another way, a RICO conspiracy requires the object of the conspiracy, i.e., what the conspirators seek to accomplish, to be a crime. The conspirators, in RICO language, must constitute an “enterprise” (defined in Georgia law to include an “association in fact”) and must engage in a “pattern of racketeering activity” (also defined in Georgia law). While the 19 people charged in the indictment were not associated “in fact” in the first place, Georgia law requires an “interrelated pattern of criminal activity, the motive or effect of which is to derive pecuniary gain.” See Sevech v. Ingles Market, 474 S.E. 2nd 4 (Ga. Appeals 1996). This critical element is lacking in this case, even if one entertains the remainder of the indictment’s ludicrous claims.
Thus, the case fails to present an “enterprise” within the meaning of Georgia’s RICO statute and fails to present illegal activity, but certainly none for pecuniary (financial) gain.
(Former Federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy wrote a good article about this for the National Review for those interested in further reading.)
Constitutional Activity. The indictment alleges all manner of Constitutionally-protected activity as “acts” in “furtherance” of the alleged “conspiracy,” including legal filings, efforts to resolve civil suits (election cases), presentations to legislative bodies, calls for the public to view such filings, attending rallies and press conferences, to name a few. This use of the Georgia RICO law implicates the constitutional rights of the accused and subjects the law to constitutional challenge. See generally, Hoffman Estates vs. Flipside, 455 U.S. 489 (1982).
Misinformation. The indictment accuses Trump and his alleged “conspirators” with making all manner of false claims about the election. The indictment lists the Trump camp’s claim that the poll watchers were sent home on election night from the State Farm Center in Fulton County, and vote counting stopped, due to a “water leak,” as reported by media. Yet, the Fulton County DA herself tweeted about the “water leaks” on November 4, 2020:
The indictment claims Trump lied about over 1,000 people illegally voting despite illegally using a Post Office Box as an address. In truth, there were over 1,400 people in GA who voted in the 2020 Presidential race who illegally registered to vote using a PO Box as their address.
Furthermore, affidavits from Gwinnett County, Georgia residents challenge over 22,000 Gwinnett County voter roll entries as invalid.
In 2020, Georgia had as many as 364,000 ineligible voter records and 67,000 actually voted, according to research conducted by True the Vote.
According to investigation done by Voter GA over 100,000 ballots from GA drop boxes lacked proper chain of custody documentation. And guess what? The video cameras that were supposed to be mointoring the drop boxes? Over 100 of Georgia's 159 counties could not produce the videos, some because they apparently destroyed the videos.
The Coffee County Georgia Elections Board issued a statement in December 2020, stating the reasons why the county's vote could not be certified properly in light of Dominion Voting System issues.
The documentary 2,000 Mules presented compelling evidence of the use of illegal ballot harvesting in the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia.
A complaint filed in GA by True the Vote led to the State opening an investigation into illegal ballot harvesting in the 2020 election. One witness located by True the Vote claimed he was paid $45,000 to harvest 4,500 ballots.
Investigation by Voter GA also determined 74 Georgia counties could not produce all of the ballot images for the votes cast in the 2020 election. Voter GA obtained admissions from 56 of the counties that all or most of the ballot images were unavailable.
Garland Favorito, co-founder of Voter GA stated:
Furthermore, both Federal law and Georgia State law require the records to be retained for 24 months. This apparently was not done.
Readers may also be unaware that a lawsuit challenging Georgia elections and the Dominion Voting Systems in Georgia has been in litigation for several years. The case is Curling v. Raffensberger. Shortly before the 2020 election, the Judge in the case rendered an extensive opinion highlighting the vulnerabilities in the Dominion system in Georgia. The Judge allowed the election to move forward despite these vulnerabilities, in part, because the State may not have been able to hold the election. But the Court noted:
The expert report of Professor J. Alex Halderman, one of the cybersecurity experts in the case, outlines the host of vulnerabilities in Georgia’s Dominion Voting systems, including ways voters could be deprived of their votes. The Court’s opinion, linked above, characterizes Prof. Halderman’s testimony on this issue as follows:
The Court went on to note:
Stated in layman’s terms, the GA voting machines were suspectible to hacking or malware attacks which could change the voting results and potentially be impossible to audit or detect.
There were a host of additional issues with the Georgia 2020 Presidential election and a massive amount of evidence pertaining to those issues, but suffice it to say, President Trump and his campaign had colorable claims they were entitled to litigate. Despite the fact Georgia law required the Trump campaign’s lawsuit (which was filed on December 4, 2020) to be heard in within 20 days, the case encountered one delay after another and did not even have a judge appointed to hear it by January 2021.
The point is this: the Georgia 2020 Presidential election results were suspect, to be polite. President Trump was right to challenge the results. There certainly was nothing illegal about doing so.
Fulton County DA Should be Disqualified. Have you ever heard of a District Attorney who was so biased, so ethically challenged and partisan that he or she was prohibited by a Court of law from conducting an investigation into someone? No? Me either. But, that is precisely what happened to Fulton County DA Fani Willis in connection with this very investigation.
One of the alternate electors for President Trump in Georgia was current Georgia Lieutenant Governer Burt Jones. In July 2022, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney disqualified Willis and her office from continuing to investigate then State-Senator Burt Jones due to her bias and conflict of interest (Willis was an active supporter of Burt Jones’ opponent for the Georgia Lieutenant Governor’s office).
This DA was too biased and conflicted to investigate a Georgia State Senator, but she is allowed to hound everyone else. What a farce.
I will have more to say about this indictment in the future, but hopefully, this will get my readers up to speed on the high points.
(Don’t forget my new book, Fake News Exposed: 25 of the Worst Media Lies about Conservatives, Guns, COVID and Everything Else. To book download a free copy, just visit my website DanielRStreet.com. You may pick up a copy of one of my other books at Amazon.)