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Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis is leaving no stone unturned in her investigation of Donald Trump's interference with the 2020 election. In fact, she is now examining his activities outside Georgia. Specifically, she is now looking at his hiring two firms to look for election fraud and has sent at least one of them a subpoena. The two companies are Simpatico Software Systems and Berkeley Research Group. Since neither firm found any election fraud, Trump never released the results of their studies. What Willis is up to is seeing if Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute would apply. To see if it would apply, she needs to know if there were other parties besides Trump involved—for example the two companies he hired. So she wants to know what he told them.
The Georgia RICO law is patterned on the federal one but more expansive. A conviction requires proving that someone engaged in a pattern of crime as evidenced by two or more criminal acts, not all of which have to have been committed in Georgia. The two criminal acts could be federal or state and one of them could be violations of some other state's laws. It can be applied to many patterns of activity from dogfighting to conspiracy. In 2015, Willis used the RICO law to send eight teachers and administrators to prison for their parts in a massive cheating scandal in the Atlanta schools. In Trump's case there are numerous possible underlying crimes, including intimidating state officials, arranging for false electors to cast fake electoral votes, and more. Coconspirators could include Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and many others. The penalty for conviction is up to 20 years in state prison.
One of the rules you learn early on in Hole Management 101, is that when you are in a hole, stop digging. Trump seems to have missed that. Last month on his CNN town hall, he explained his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger by saying: "You owe me votes because the election was rigged." This could show that his intent of the call was to get Raffensperger to switch votes, which would be a crime under Georgia law.
Another area where Willis has probably struck paydirt is in the fake electors scheme. She has offered immunity to 12 of the 16 fake electors. It is rumored that something like half the fake electors are cooperating with her. Their testimony could implicate Trump (and possibly Giuliani) in a second crime (other than the call to Raffensperger), which would be enough to activate the RICO law.
Willis has indicated that she will probably bring charges in the middle of August. The out-of-state connections are interesting, but Trump committed enough crimes in Georgia that the ones in other states aren't really essential to the prosecution. (V)
