Despite what some critics may say, former President Trump isn’t a mob boss. But he’s got a mob boss kind of problem.It’s called RICO—a law originally drafted a half-century ago to go after organized crime that’s now getting sized up for a former president. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is examining whether to apply her state’s version of the law, the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as Georgia RICO, to the Trump team’s attempts to reverse his 2020 electoral defeat in the state. Georgia RICO is a more flexible version of the notoriously complex federal RICO statute, which was created in 1970 to take down the mafia. Both the state and national versions effectively allow prosecutors to connect multiple crimes together into a pattern, and then apply a hefty sentence of up to 20 years in prison. Trump has called the multiple investigations swirling around him no more than a witch hunt perpetuated by his political enemies. A Trump spokesperson dismissed the idea that Trump did anything wrong and accused Willis, a Democrat, of attempting to harass Trump. “This is simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump, and everybody sees through it,” spokesman Jason Miller told VICE News. Willis is investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to find ways to flip the state from a loss into a win, after President Joe Biden carried Georgia by just 11,779 votes. On January 3, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and urged him to help the campaign “find” enough votes to win. The call, which included Trump, Raffensperger, Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and multiple lawyers, was tape-recorded and then leaked to the media, including the Washington Post.“All I want to do is this,” Trump told Raffensperger. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”Trump reportedly also placed calls to Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, to pressure him to convince state legislators to overturn the state’s result and to the state’s attorney general, Chris Carr, in which Trump reportedly warned Carr not to interfere with legal attempts to secure Trump’s victory. In the simplest terms, prosecutors charging a federal RICO case have to be able to prove a defendant became associated with an enterprise—which impacts interstate commerce via a pattern of criminal racketeering activity. Only a limited number of types of crimes actually count. Georgia’s state version of the law, however, doesn’t require an enterprise. And the pattern can be a lot shorter.
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