Trump, 18 others charged under Georgia’s RICO Act. Here’s what that means

The latest indictment against Donald Trump accuses the former U.S. president and 18 other defendants of allegedly participating in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia — and it uses a law typically levied against organized crime networks.

Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, otherwise known as the RICO Act, is modeled after a similar but narrower federal law that was introduced to combat the mafia in the 1970s.

Many other states quickly introduced their own, broader RICO laws that can be used to prosecute any kind of criminal enterprise in which alleged participants commit crimes in furtherance of a larger scheme.

“RICO laws punish more severely the participation in a criminal enterprise to commit a series of crimes, recognizing the greater harms posed by a group of people acting with the purpose of committing multiple crimes,” Mary Fan, a law professor at the University of Washington, explained in an email.

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Within the RICO charge applied to all 19 defendants, the other felony counts — 40 in all — are portrayed as further criminal acts in service to the overall conspiracy. They range from election fraud and forgery to influencing a witness, urging public officials to violate their oath of office, computer theft and lying to or misleading investigators.

Beyond Trump, who faces 13 charges alone, the defendants listed in the indictment handed down by a grand jury Monday night range from high-profile lawyers and legal advisers like Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell and Jenna Ellis who pushed false claims of voter fraud, to lesser-known Republican operatives and Trump campaign officials who participated in parts of the alleged election scheme.

That includes some of the so-called “fake electors” who allegedly attempted to submit themselves as electors for Trump and his then-vice-president Mike Pence in the Electoral College, despite President Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

Also included are Trump supporters whom the indictment says allegedly worked to pressure Ruby Freeman, an Atlanta election worker falsely accused by Trump and Giuliani of ballot stuffing and tampering with voter machines, to admit to those crimes under oath — which would have bolstered the campaign’s arguments of widespread fraud.

Still more defendants, including Powell and local Republican leaders, are accused of illegally accessing data from voting machines in a rural Georgia district in the days immediately following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters.

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Legal experts say the broad range of defendants and the allegations against them are typical of a RICO case.

“The defendants don’t all have to be working hand in hand, or even necessarily to be aware of each other,” David Sklansky, a criminal law professor at Stanford Law School and a former prosecutor, said in a blog post on the university’s website Tuesday.

The law does not require prosecutors to prove that defendants directly engaged in criminal activity, just that they were part of a larger organization that worked towards a common criminal purpose — in this case, overturning the election.

That means prosecutors would not necessarily have to prove Trump personally broke the law, but knowingly coordinated with others who did.

The indictment repeatedly notes phone calls Trump allegedly made to various co-defendants, as well as his promotion on social media of public hearings where Giuliani, Ellis and others made false allegations of fraud to lawmakers in Georgia and other contested states.

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Monday’s indictment came after a more than two-and-a-half-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ office into whether Trump and his allies broke state laws in their efforts to overturn the election results.

Willis, an elected Democrat, once used the law to prosecute more than two dozen Atlanta educators for allegedly scheming to cheat on standardized test scores in 2014.

Attorneys for the teachers said Willis overreached by deeming Atlanta’s public school system a “criminal enterprise,” but the convictions held up on appeal.

Prosecutors across the U.S. have applied RICO laws to all sorts of groups that they characterize as criminal “enterprises,” including Wall Street banks and traders engaged in market manipulation.

Notably, Giuliani himself used RICO laws to go after New York mafia bosses in the 1980s when he was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. That famous case exposed that the kingpins knew of the criminal activity committed by underlings to maintain and grow their organizations and wealth, including extortion and murder, despite claiming otherwise.

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Unlike the federal RICO law, Georgia’s RICO Act does not require criminal enterprises to be long running and lists nearly 50 underlying crimes that qualify as racketeering, compared with 35 under its federal counterpart.

That could explain why federal special counsel Jack Smith’s own election interference indictment against Trump is not a RICO case.

Fan, the University of Washington law professor, said the Georgia indictment uses the state’s RICO law in an “expansive” way “to reach modern-day concerns such as the spread of misinformation with the purpose of subverting free and fair democratic elections.”

Willis said Monday night she would seek a trial within “the next six months.” She added she intended to try all 19 defendants together.

The defendants were given a deadline of noon on Aug. 25 to voluntarily turn themselves in for arraignment on the charges.

Experts say each co-defendant could be coaxed by prosecutors into testifying against the others.

The indictment mentions 30 other unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators whose identities are known by the grand jury and who allegedly participated in the overall election plot — including most of the 16 fake electors — suggesting they may have cooperated with prosecutors and provided evidence implicating the named defendants.

— with files from Reuters