Jenna Ellis pled guilty on Tuesday in an Atlanta courtroom to “aiding and abetting false statements and writings” in connection with the 2020 election and received probation. Kenneth Chesebro received a similar sentence for one count of conspiracy to file “false documents.” Sidney Powell also avoided jail by pleading guilty to misdemeanors. Does this help or hurt Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis in her broader anti-racketeering case against former President Donald Trump?
The mainstream media by and large are playing up the legal significance of these three plea deals and a previous one but, as a Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out yesterday, “it’s difficult to know how much dirt these attorneys really have on the former president, and some of his potential defenses are legal, not factual.”
Steve Sadow, a Democrat who is Trump’s lead Georgia lawyer, says: “For the fourth time, Fani Willis and her prosecution team have dismissed the RICO charge in return for a plea to probation. What that shows is this so-called RICO case is nothing more than a bargaining chip for D.A. Willis.”
Willis’s indictment of Trump leans on Georgia’s expansive Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, treating the former president like some sort of Mafia kingpin who oversees a “crime enterprise.” Yet, the editorial says, Willis let these three Trump supporters cop to minor charges without racketeering. Along with Sadow, several other Georgia lawyers have told James Magazine Online that this is actually evidence of underlying weakness in her case. As the Journal asks, Trump in 2020 surrounded himself with kooky advisers, but do they qualify as an “enterprise” under the RICO statute?
Such questions are valid. Andrew McCarthy, a one-time assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, writes for National Review. He is another prominent attorney who believes Willis has a faltering anti-racketeering case against Trump and his allies in the Georgia case.
“As I pointed out throughout the Mueller investigation,” McCarthy says, “when prosecutors cut plea deals with cooperators early in the proceedings, they generally want the pleading defendants to admit guilt to the major charges in the indictment. That indicates to the public that the major conspiracy charged is real. It puts pressure on other defendants to plead guilty to serious charges and cooperate. And it shores up the case against the major culprits. Here, to the contrary, Willis is not only abandoning the RICO charge; she’s not even getting felony guilty pleas of any kind.”
McCarthy continues: “If these were serious prosecutions, we would not be seeing probation sentences. If Willis truly believed in her ballyhooed RICO charge — the flaws of which I’ve discussed here, here, here, here, and here — she’d induce her cooperators to plead guilty to the RICO charge and explain, in the plea allocution, what they did, particularly in conjunction with Donald Trump, that makes them guilty.”
Bottom line and a fact: The Fulton DA’s legal theories relating to use of a state RICO law remain untested. In the words of the Journal editorial: “… (I)f she overcharged her case, it could redound to Mr. Trump’s political benefit, which is what he most cares about.”
