What Might Georgia’s Prosecution of Trump Look Like Without Fani Willis and Her RICO Charges?

As the Georgia Court of Appeals is mulling reviewing the question of whether the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, can stay on the case against President Trump, an attorney for one of the 19 defendants is envisioning how things might go were she to be removed. At the moment, Ms. Willis is guiding the case because Judge Scott McAfee ruled that the departure of her ex-boyfriend, Nathan Wade, was a sufficient remedy for what he called the “odor of mendacity” that has attached to Ms. Willis’s behavior. She’d hired her former lover as special prosecutor in the case and paid him more than $650,000 for his services.The judge discerned a “significant appearance of impropriety.” Now comes a lawyer, Harvey Silverglate, for one of Ms. Willis’s defendants, the attorney John Eastman, to envision the day after a possible disqualification of the district attorney. There is, he says in respect of Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade, “no reason to disqualify one and not both of them.” He is confident that the appeals court will find them to have been in cahoots. Pushed on whether the relationship between Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade amounted to an actual conflict of interest, Mr. Silverglate declared, “I am not a paranoid, but even paranoids have real enemies.” In this case, those “enemies” are the two prosecutors whose relationship, he alleges, amounts to an actual conflict of interest. Their romance, he asserts, is crucial to understanding Ms. Willis’s theory of the case. Mr. Eastman was charged with nine felonies, though one of them was quashed by Judge McAfee. His alleged crimes relate to efforts in Georgia to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Silverglate allows that the theories of Mr. Eastman, a law professor, were “way out on the edge” — he was instrumental in the development of the “alternative elector” scheme — but contends that they were “perfectly lawful.” Whether a jury agrees could depend on whether Mr. Eastman and his fellow defendants are prosecuted, as Ms. Willis would have it, under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Every defendant in this case is charged with racketeering in addition to any other felonies. Mr. Silverglate calls RICO a “conspiracy statue on steroids.”While conspiracy is an old crime known to the common law, RICO, signed into law in 1970, is a more recent invention, originally intended to prosecute the mob. Its elastic nature makes it, in Mr. Silverglate’s estimation, “much easier for prosecutors to get convictions.” It has proven to be a favorite of Ms. Willis, who has used Georgia’s version against public school teachers, rappers, and now Mr. Trump and his camarilla.Mr. Silverglate explains that, in the parlance of organized crime, Mr. Eastman would be merely the “chauffeur,” or tangential to the allegedly criminal enterprise. That attachment to RICO — Ms. Willis declares herself a “fan” and lauds it as a “tool that allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story” — might not, if Ms. Willis is disqualified, be shared by the next prosecutor, who would be appointed by a body called the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia. Mr. Silverglate reckons it could be a district attorney from an adjoining county.Mr. Silverglate asks: “How can you justify the time and expense of a RICO case if it wasn’t to enrich her boyfriend,” meaning Mr. Wade. Judge McAfee, though, did not find that Ms. Willis chose her prosecution strategy in order to provide more billable hours to her former lover. The jurist also found it plausible that she paid him back in cash for the trips they took together. Those conclusions could be reversed on appeal. If there is a replacement prosecutor, Mr. Silverglate urges that person to “substitute an ordinary conspiracy charge for RICO,” a change Mr. Silverglate reckons would shave months, and millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees, off the case. In the interim, Ms. Willis remains atop the case, and it remains a RICO one. Mr. Silverglate tells us that he has “never seen anything like this, and I’ve been practicing since 1967.” He and his client, though, appear to be praying for a fresh start with a new and uncompromised prosecutor, and new charges.

What Might Georgia’s Prosecution of Trump Look Like Without Fani Willis and Her RICO Charges?

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