A Riot of RICO in Georgia

Racketeering is all the rage these days, at least if you are a Georgia prosecutor. To the indictment of President Trump and his 18 co-defendants by District Attorney Fani Willis add the charging of more than 60 people by the state attorney general, Christopher Carr. They are accused under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of trying to stop a police training center from being built. What does RICO’s reach say about due process? At first glance, it is hard to think of two cohorts more different than Mr. Trump and his camarilla and Defend the Atlanta Forest, whom the indictment describes as an enterprise of “militant anarchists, eco-activists, and community organizers.” Mr. Carr says they are “anti-police,” and arose after George Floyd’s murder, when they transformed a Walmart parking lot into a lawless “autonomous zone” strafed with gunfire. An 8-year-old boy died there. It is far from our intention to defend what Mr. Carr calls the “threatening, violent, anti-police sentiment” that courses through Defend the Atlanta Forest. Some accountability for the abuses of the summer of 2020 is overdue. The confluence, though, of this case and Mr. Trump’s — if they do not encompass the entire political spectrum, then they cover a good chunk of it — is a moment to mark. Racketeering laws, in both their state and federal incarnations, have become a prosecutorial tool so malleable and mighty that, like God at Sodom, they threaten to pull in the guilty with the somewhat innocent. Once a “criminal enterprise” is established, nearly anything anyone does gloms onto the case against them. These “overt acts” need not be criminal — out of context, they could appear innocuous. Convictions can be hung on such reeds.In Ms. Willis’s case, these acts include presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows’s request to “send me the number for the speaker and leader” of the Pennsylvania legislature and Mr. Trump’s tweet that read “Georgia hearings now on @OANN. Amazing.” Mayor Giuliani is accused of having joined a meeting “by telephone.” This is not to say that no crimes were committed. It is to say that racketeering can reflect back nigh anything as part of a crime. Mr. Carr’s indictment lists 225 overt acts, including payment of $12.52 for “forest kitchen materials” and a reimbursement of $93.04 for “camping supplies.” There was, too, expenditures on a “lock for a trailer” and “rain tarps and rain equipment.” More acts involved “climb-training sessions in the woods” and the erection of a “welcome area.” We wonder if jurors will be persuaded that these expenses, which could mirror their own bills, are evidence of guilt. There are more serious accusations — joining a mob, overwhelming police officers, pooling funds to buy ammunition, acts of domestic terrorism and Molotov cocktails hurled and buildings burned. Would it be wiser to charge just those crimes, to amplify the signal at the expense of the noise? There are prudential considerations, too — the RICO case against the rapper Young Thug is in its eighth month and a jury hasn’t even been seated yet. The Supreme Court, in 1989, ruled that RICO was to be understood broadly. Ms. Willis said last summer that she is “a fan of RICO,” and why not? A word of warning, though. The Department of Justice, no shrinking violet, warns its lawyers against “imaginative” uses of RICO and bans its lawyers from bringing cases under its rubric “without the prior approval” of higher-ups. Who is minding the store, though, in Georgia?

A Riot of RICO in Georgia

A Riot of RICO in Georgia

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