The Patriot Post® · In Brief: The Absurdity of DA Fani Willis's RICO Case
The persecution of Donald Trump continues apace. Another member of his legal team, Jenna Ellis, pled guilty this week in the absurd RICO case brought by Fulton County DA Fani Willis, a rabidly anti-Trump Democrat. Sidney Powell did the same thing. Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has previously explained why the RICO case is terribly flawed. Now, he says Ellis’s plea illustrates just that.
Former Trump 2020 campaign attorney Jenna Ellis pled guilty this morning in the Georgia election-interference case to a minor offense — aiding and abetting the provision of false information to the state — for which she will receive no jail time.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has hyped her prosecution of Donald Trump, Ellis, and 17 others affiliated with the Trump campaign as a racketeering-conspiracy case, depicting the former president as the head of an organized-crime enterprise. I have contended that Willis does not have a RICO case under Georgia’s analogue to the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971. The throng Willis has indicted did not function as an identifiable criminal “enterprise” as defined in RICO, and she lacks a single criminal objective as to which she can say all 19 defendants agreed. (It is not a crime to seek to reverse an election result — indeed, Georgia law provides for legal challenges to election outcomes.)
What Willis has, instead, is evidence that some state criminal offenses — minor in comparison to those at issue in the typical RICO case — were committed in the course of the campaign’s schemes to overturn the 2020 election. Consistent with that, Ellis is now the fourth defendant to plead guilty in recent days. None has pled guilty to the RICO conspiracy that Willis alleged in Count One — the overarching “offense” that frames her prosecution.
Because all four guilty-plea defendants are now cooperating with the state, the lack of a RICO plea is telling: Ordinarily, prosecutors require the first cooperators in a major case to plead guilty to the major charges, offering them sentencing leniency in exchange for their testimony against other defendants. Those kinds of pleas convince the public that there is a strong case and put pressure on other defendants to plead guilty. But not only have none of Willis’s cooperators conceded that there was a RICO conspiracy, much less pled guilty to it; none of them faces even a single day of imprisonment.
In fact, Ellis pled guilty only to “aiding and abetting false statements and writings,” which McCarthy says “is about as trivial as it gets.” In short, she assisted a more senior attorney, probably Rudy Giuliani, in working to appeal the results in Georgia.
While the media-Democrat complex is salivating that Trump will be sunk by the cooperation of Ellis and the other three defendants who’ve pled out to minor charges with no jail time in recent days (Kenneth Cheseboro, Sidney Powell, and Scott Hall), that seems like wishful thinking. …
As I noted in connection with Powell’s plea last week, she may have relevant testimony regarding Trump, but it’s not necessarily incriminating (in fact, at a White House meeting in mid-December 2020, Powell reportedly made a lunatic proposal that Trump seize state voting machines, which Trump actually rejected). Ellis, like Cheseboro, had direct communications with Giuliani; that may implicate the former New York mayor more deeply in the alleged provision of false information to state officials and the so-called fake electors scheme, but it does not necessarily implicate Trump. The former president appears to have dealt directly with Giuliani much more than with the other lawyers; he will undoubtedly claim that he was relying on his lawyers — such as Giuliani, Eastman, Powell, Cheseboro, and Ellis — to ensure the accuracy of information on which the campaign was relying.
In any case, he concludes:
The recent spate of pleas is being presented by DA Willis’s office and her champions in the press as a sign of prosecutorial momentum. But it would be more accurate to say that Willis wildly overcharged the case and is now picking off some defendants on minor charges — with no-incarceration sentences that hardly befit a grand conspiracy capable of bringing American democracy to the brink of destruction.