Trump is in Grave Legal Jeopardy in Georgia – Former President Donald Trump is not known for remaining silent.
On any given day, the forty-fifth president is blustering on his social media site, Truth Social, about whatever tickles his fancy in the most controversial ways.
The man is even incapable of avoiding self-incrimination when it comes to the various legal woes the frontrunner in the GOP Presidential Primary is facing today.
Therefore, whenever Trump avoids commenting on a topic, especially one in which he is the star, that should be all the indication you need to know the former president is worried.
Donald Trump is one of 18 defendants in a Georgia state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) trial. Trump and his fellow defendants, some of them are his attorneys from the 2020 Election challenge that he mounted after it was reported that the forty-fifth president had lost to Joe Biden, are accused of attempting to unduly influence the results of the 2020 Election count in Georgia.
The state prosecutor, Fani Willis, chose to make her case against Trump into a RICO Act trial because, traditionally, the standards used in a RICO trial are easier for prosecutors to get convictions than in your typical criminal proceeding.
Understanding RICO
In a RICO trial, all a prosecutor must do is prove the guilt of one of the defendants in the case in order to get convictions for the rest of the defendants.
The RICO Act was enacted at the height of the federal government’s war against organized crime in the 1970s, because it was exceedingly difficult for the government to prove the criminal kingpins of America were directly involved in the crimes they were suspected of perpetrating.
Way too many criminal organizations were surviving prosecutions because, most often, the people at the top of criminal organizations were smart enough to always have a person able to take the fall for them at a lower level of the organization.
Thus, RICO made it easier for prosecutors to not just get the lowly henchmen in a criminal conspiracy. It allowed for them to have a real shot at getting the brains behind a criminal enterprise.
Donald Trump is the Master of a Vast Criminal Conspiracy?
According to Fani Willis, Donald Trump was the master of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the voters of Georgia during the contentious 2020 Presidential Election. In her possession is a particularly damning tape of the former president demanding that Republican Georgia election officials “just find” him 11,780 additional votes to put him over Joe Biden in that key state.
On top of that damaging recording of the former president, Willis has evidence that the Trump Campaign deployed its top legal advisers to Coffee County, Georgia, in an effort to illegally gain access to the voting machines in that small, Republican-controlled district.
The Trump lawyers, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney, Sydney Powell, and election law expert, Kenneth Chesebro, were all involved in an attempt to gain access to the voting machines in the overwhelmingly pro-Trump Coffee County.
Their goal was to inspect the machines, learn about its inner workings, and then use that information to prove that the voting machines had been corrupted by pro-Biden elements to steal the election from Trump in 2020.
Fani Willis’ team has since uncovered a series of text messages between the Trump Campaign lawyers and Coffee County officials in which they discussed in detail their plans to gain access to the voting machines.
There is also videographic evidence of two people affiliated with the Trump Campaign’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 Election, gaining entry to the facility where the Coffee County voting machines were stored.
What’s more, it has been proven that those individuals made detailed copies of the proprietary systems.
The Trump lawyers have argued that they were merely engaged in a robust defense of their client during his election challenge. Yet, the way in which the Trump Campaign legal team went about their challenge to the 2020 Election, according to Georgia prosecutors, was inherently illegal.
That is why Willis has been able to get a RICO case out of the mess that Trump now finds himself in. In the conduct of this RICO case, both Trump lawyers, Chesebro and Sydney Powell, have made plea deals with prosecutors.
What the Flip?! Sydney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro Turn on Their Former Client, Donald Trump
It is never good when one’s own attorneys begin flipping on their former client. Further, the fact that both Powell and Chesebro have plead guilty increases the former president’s legal exposure to this RICO case that involves the possibility of being sent to jail, if he were to be found guilty.
When news of the plea deals broke, Trump said little.
Over the weekend, however, the forty-fifth president broke his silence and proceeded to issue a wordy denunciation of the ongoing RICO case.
In a statement, chock full of spelling errors, Trump then claimed Powell was not one of his election attorneys—which is ridiculous, because everyone knows that she was (and there is further evidence on Trump’s former twitter, now X, account from 2020 in which he praised the selection of Powell as one of his campaign attorneys).
Trump is up a legal creek. Not only are two of his campaign lawyers flipping on him, but there are rumors that his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is a cooperating witness for the prosecution. If that is the case, the former president will not be able to get out of this legal predicament.
Donald Trump’s Time to Be President Has Long Passed
Beyond that, should it be proven that he attempted to overturn the results of a lawful election, the concerns over him being removed from the national ballot under the so-called “Insurrection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment, the threat which (for now) has been ameliorated by the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case regarding that issue, will be reopened again.
The last thing the GOP needs is to have a legally compromised, aging Donald Trump challenging a legally compromised, ancient President Joe Biden in 2024.
We need bold colors to differentiate our side from the pale, aging pastels of the Democrats this election cycle. Donald Trump is not the man to do that.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor and an energy analyst at the The-Pipeline, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert occasionally serves as a Subject Matter Expert for various organizations, including the Department of Defense. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
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