The Dastardly Nineteen Who Tried to Overturn Democracy in the United States
This is my effort to makes sense of the Trump team indicted on racketeering charges by a Grand Jury in Fulton County Georgia. It is largely based on coverage in the Washington Post. Former president Donald Trump and eighteen co-conspirators were indicted for their efforts in Georgia to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election. If convicted, Trump faces a potential twenty-year prison sentence.
In the 98-page RICO indictment prepared by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Donald Trump is accused of thirteen different, but related, criminal acts. There are both federal and state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Acts (RICO). Because Trump and his co-conspirators are charged with violating Georgia laws, even if Trump or another Republican was elected President, they could not waive the charges or issue pardons to anyone convicted.
The Georgia version of RICO allows a prosecutor to combine several interrelated alleged crimes. Trump and his co-conspirators are accused of conspiracy to defraud the State of Georgia, false statements made both orally and in writing, impersonating a public officer, forgery, computer theft, and dozens of other illegal actions. Donald Trump now faces criminal charges in New York City for hush money payments, in Florida for refusing to return classified documents he took from the White House when he left office, in Washington DC for events connected to the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress, and in Georgia.
There are three groups of defendants named in the Georgia RICO conspiracy indictment. Group one includes Donald Trump and his legal team and fellow plotters. Group two are people brought in to intimidate Ruby Freeman and her daughter to falsely testify that they committed fraud during the vote count. Group three consists of Georgia Republican officials who assisted the plotters in pushing their phony narrative or joined the phony alternative slate of electors. For fans of the Sopranos or the Godfather movies, Donnie Defendant is the mob boss and Rico Giuliani is his consigliere. Ironically, Giuliani first became well-known in the 1980s for RICO prosecutions against organized crime.
The Big 7 other than Trump include Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Jeffrey Clark. Giuliani was Trump’s personal attorney and is a central figure in the conspiracy to overturn Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Giuliani spread unsupported lies about a vast election fraud including in Georgia where he made false and defamatory statements about election workers. Meadows was White House chief of staff in 2020 and he played a key role in efforts to overturn Trump’s loss in Georgia. He was part of the infamous phone call where Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find an additional 12,000 Trump votes to reverse the election outcome in Georgia. Jeffrey Clark was a middle-level Justice Department official Clark was a mid-level Justice Department official that Trump wanted to make acting attorney general to push bogus claims of massive voter fraud. According to the House of Representatives January 6 committee investigation, Clark proposed sending official DOJ letters to election officials in several states, including Georgia, stating that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” about the vote and that they should select “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.”
John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis were Trump “legal advisors” who promoted a series of outlandish legal strategies in efforts to overturn the election result. All their accusations of election fraud were dismissed in over sixty court cases, including by some Trump appointed judges.
The weirdest group of co-conspirators includes Stephen Cliffgard Lee, Harrison Floyd, and Trevian Kutti. Lee is a Lutheran pastor in the suburban Chicago area. He is accused of trying to intimidate election worker Ruby Freeman into confessing that she had counted suitcases full of fraudulent pro-Biden votes. When Freeman, who is Black, refused to talk with Lee, who is white, Lee recruited Floyd, a director of Black Voices for Trump, and Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for singer R. Kelly, who is in federal prison after convictions for sexual offences against minors and was also an associate of rapper Kanye West. Floyd and Kutti, who are both Black, pressured Freeman to admit election fraud and claimed they were trying to help her avoid legal trouble.
Georgia small potatoes include local Republicans Ray Smith, David Shafer, Shawn Still, Mike Roman, Misty Hampton, Cathy Latham, Scott Hall, and Robert Cheeley. Faced with prison, some of these may opt to “cop a plea” and agree to testify for the prosecution in exchange for leniency.
