State Senator Brings Impeachment Charges Against Trump's Georgia Persecutor, Fani Willis

I'd like to see her impeached, but I'm not sure if Georgia is red enough for that any longer:

I think she should be impeached. Prosecutors should never "get sexy" in interpreting the law in strange and unintended ways just to get a conviction. Citizens have a right to know what the law is, and that right is violated when a prosecutor twists it to invent new law when it suits her.

Prosecutors should especially not make up new law to interfere in a political election and plunge the nation down the bloody path of civil war.

But Fani Willis is a modern leftist, and is fueled by arrogance, hatred, and stupidity.

She is bringing a RICO case against Trump because she can't prove Trump committed any crimes. So she is using the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to claim that Trump was the head of a mafia, and that the crimes of his capos and soldiers are his crimes.

RICO was created because mafia dons rarely committed proveable crimes. When they did commit a crime, like conspiracy to murder, it was usually impossible to prove. The government knew that a mob soldier had killed a shop-owner, but there was no proof to convict the don in the crime.

So RICO was created to... creatively paper over this lack of evidence. To bring a RICO case, you first have to establish that the figure you want to charge with another man's crimes is guilty of engaging in an ongoing criminal enterprise. Not just any enterprise. The CEO of McDonald's can't be charged with a RICO violation if one of the corporation's cashiers robs a truck. No, the figure targeted must be engaged in an ongoing criminal enterprise. And then crimes committed by others in the organization in furtherance of the ongoing criminal enterprise can be charged to other figures in the organization, even if they honestly had nothing to do with those crimes.

If a mobster is engaged in buying and selling stolen goods, the theft of cars by one of his associates can be charged against the mobster, even if the mobster never gave the order to steal these particular cars and in fact didn't even know about these particular cars.

So this is neat if constitutionally-sketchy way to charge someone with a crime they did not commit.

But the predicate of all this, to keep RICO from being used to charge anyone of any crime in a prosecutorial game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, is the establishment that there is an ongoing criminal enterprise which all the other alleged crimes can be said to be "in furtherance of."

This is where the RICO case against Trump collapses. What "ongoing criminal enterprise" was he engaged in? He was protesting his loss and claiming the election was crooked. There is no crime in that. People are allowed to protest election losses and claim elections were "stolen."

From Joe Mannix, here's the "farcical" claim of the ongoing criminal enterprise, from the indictment:

Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.

I can't be charged with the crimes of the cobloggers, or the readers, and they can't be charged with my crimes, because we cannot be said to be engaged in an ongoing criminal enterprise (despite Victor Davis Hanson's cruel insinuations to the contrary). There is no such crime as "conspiracy to run a blog." There is no such crime as conspiracy to make Jonah Goldberg develop an eating disorder. There is no such crime as conspiracy to encourage David French come "out" to the world.

Trump similarly was engaged in a legal effort -- to challenge an election. The Regime angrily despises that effort, but we do not have a system, quite yet, in which noncriminal behavior becomes criminal just because The Regime disapproves of it.

The right to challenge an election is one that Democrats have infamously used to the full themselves, in every single presidential they lost since 2000.

The criminal justice system to put their chief political opponent in jail escalated again Monday night, with the release of an indictment pursued by Georgia's Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis against former President Donald Trump. The indictment, targeting not just Trump but 18 of his lawyers and advisers, is a clear message that if you're a Republican, challenging election results -- something Democrats have done after every GOP presidential victory this century -- is now a criminal offense.

...

Hillary was one of many, many Democrats who screeched for Donald Trump's entire presidency that the 2016 election was stolen and Trump's win was illegitimate.

So when are we charging Hillary Clinton? Not only did she induce her hired help to destroy government evidence and then lie about it, but she was the head of the ongoing criminal conspiracy to gin up a fake prosecution of Trump for "Russian Collusion." And crimes were in fact committed "in furtherance of this conspiracy." Iggy Danchenko, who craved a job in a Hillary Clinton administration, lied to FBI investigators about who his sources were. (Spoiler: His sources did not exist, he was making it up.) A Democrat lawyer brought one of Hillary's fake charges to the FBI and then lied about not being associated with the Clinton campaign.

Those crimes are chargeable to Hillary Clinton. (And I do not think it matters that both of those men were acquitted of those crimes by a Typical DC Jury. Those verdicts don't mean the crimes didn't happen, just that these stacked Democrat juries refused to say the prosecution had carried its burden of proof.)

If Trump can be indicted on RICO, so can Hillary.

In fact, so can most Democrats.

Obama even admitted that Democrat vote-counters tended to "tilt things" in Democrats' direction.

Trump will "one hundred percent" certainly move to have this case removed from the Fulton County court to a federal court. That will also be located in Georgia -- but not in 95% Democrat Fulton County.

Willis and Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat have relished their chance to get their man. Labat told reporters that the county would "have mugshots ready" for Trump and presumably the other 18 defendants in the indictment. There's no doubt that Willis and Labat are milking this indictment for all its worth.

But the Trump team may have an ace up its sleeve. Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, told WSB Radio that Trump could have the case moved from state court to federal court. Cunningham also believes that Trump's attorneys are likely to do just that.

"One hundred percent," Cunningham said. "That's the first thing he's going to do."

Trump has the prerogative to move the case from state court to federal court because he's a former president.

"As a former president, because the acts for which he would be prosecuted took place while he was still president, federal law would allow him to ask for his trial to be moved to federal court, called removal," Cunningham told WSB.

There are plenty of advantages to changing the venue from state court to federal court, not the least of which is that it would be a genius way to stick it to Willis. She has been so dogged in her attempts to nab Trump that taking her out of the equation would be a thumb in the eye, and don't think that's not somewhere in the Trump team's minds. Additionally, if Trump's case moves to federal court, all 18 other defendant's cases will move as well, taking Willis out of the equation in a massive way.

Another factor in moving the case to federal court is that Trump is more likely to find a sympathetic jury in a federal case than he would in Fulton County, one of the state's most heavily Democrat locales. "Plus, he might draw a federal judge that he appointed," WSB adds.

The Fulton County clerk leaked a "dry run" of the indictment. She said it was just a Great Big Oopsie!

Fulton County clerk who leaked Trump charges says she accidentally hit 'send' instead of 'save'

The Fulton County Clerk of Courts admitted to accidentally releasing the fourth indictment on former President Donald Trump. She said she pressed send instead of save on the document.

"I am human," Ché Alexander told Channel 2's Tom Jones on Tuesday. She was apparently under a lot of pressure to make sure the process went smoothly and made the oncoming indictment public.

Alexander told Jones that she wanted to get the indictment to the public as soon as possible. "And that's how the mishap happened," she said.

"I have no dog in this fight," Alexander added.

A copy of the leaked indictment soon made its way onto social media. Vivek Ramaswamy, another presidential candidate in the Republican primary, posted some of its content online.

The copy posted was what she called a "dry run" or an "unofficial document" that indicated the upcoming indictment. She said if it had been the official copy, it would have had an official stamp on it.

"That was the best word that I could come up with. It was fictitious. It wasn't real. It didn't have a stamp on it," Alexander told Jones. "I tell my staff we just want to be transparent. I don't have anything to hide."

...

Alexander insists that the public release of the documents did not have any impact on the jury. Trump's legal team said that it could not have been "simple administrative mistake," but that the release showed the prosecutor's office did not have "respect for the integrity of the grand jury process."

Whoops!

Whoopsie!

Update: Are you sure this did not affect the trial?

Some people were pointing out the system automatically assigned a judge to the case when the clerk did this. I wonder if an enterprising journalist could look into what judges were available to be selected at that time and whether this was actually intentional to ensure a specific judge caught the case.

Posted by: bonhomme

posted by Ace at 02:30 PM

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