Trump Indicted in Georgia
This makes four.
AJC (“Trump, 18 others indicted for trying to overthrow 2020 Georgia election“):
Former President Donald Trump orchestrated a sweeping criminal enterprise, committing more than a dozen felonies, as he tried and failed to overturn his defeat in Georgia’s 2020 election, according to an indictment handed up Monday by a Fulton County grand jury.
The indictment also lodged charges against 18 of Trump’s allies, who helped him spread false conspiracy theories and twist the arms of top state officials as he scrambled to cling to power.
The blockbuster 41-count, 98-page indictment said Trump and his co-defendants refused to accept the fact that Trump lost in Georgia. But “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.”
It marks the fourth time that Trump has been criminally charged ― and the second time this August the former president has been indicted for interfering in the 2020 election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
But the Georgia case is far different because it also charges a large cast of alleged accomplices – from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former state Republican Party chairman David Shafer.
Also charged: state Sen. Shawn Still; attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Bob Cheeley, Ray Smith III and Kenneth Chesebro; former assistant U.S. attorney general Jeffrey Clark; former Coffee County GOP chairwoman Cathy Latham; Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall; former Coffee County elections director Misty Hampton; GOP strategist Michael Roman; publicist Trevian Kutti; Illinois pastor Stephen Cliffguard Lee; and Harrison Floyd, who briefly ran for a suburban Atlanta U.S. House seat before serving as director of Black Voices for Trump.
The charges are the culmination of a 2 1/2-year criminal investigation launched by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis shortly after Trump’s leaked Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Brad Raffensperger, during which he asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him 11,780 votes.
The indictment lays out several different areas of alleged criminal misconduct.
Among them:
- The phone calls Trump made to Georgia officials, including Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp.
- The “alternate” GOP electors who cast Electoral College votes for Trump on Dec. 14, 2020 while the official Democratic electors cast votes for Joe Biden.
- The false testimony given to state House and Senate committees, which led to threats and harassment of Fulton County poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss.
- The copying of sensitive Georgia elections data in Coffee County, some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, the day after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Willis was expected to address reporters at a press conference Monday evening.
The DA took the unusual step of convening a separate special grand jury in 2022 which investigated election interference in Georgia for eight months. They heard from almost 75 witnesses and recommended who they thought Fulton prosecutors should indict.
The Georgia charges come two weeks after a federal grand jury returned a four-count indictment that charged Trump with using lies to advance a widespread national effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. That indictment, spearheaded by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, covers a lot of the same ground as the Fulton charges. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the federal case.
It is unclear when Trump and his co-defendants will have to surrender to Fulton authorities and whether they must do so at the troubled county jail. It is also unclear whether Trump will have his mugshot taken and when the former president must make his first appearance in court.
Trump’s legal team is expected to use a little-known federal statute to try and move his case out of Fulton County and into U.S. District Court in Atlanta just a few blocks away. The benefit of shifting jurisdictions would be to get a more conservative jury pool.
Jurors from the U.S. District Court’s Atlanta division are culled from 10 metro counties. This includes Fulton County, where President Joe Biden won more than 72 percent of the vote in 2020. The DA’s office is expected to fight the move and attempt to keep the case in Fulton.
The Fulton charges add to an increasingly packed calendar for Trump, who is running for the Republican nomination for president for the third time.
The NYT provides an annotated version of the indictment if you’re interested in a deep dive.
AP’s Kate Brumback explains “How a law associated with mobsters is central to charges against Trump.”
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opened her investigation into Donald Trump after the release of a recording of a January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger.
Trump suggested during the call that Raffensperger, a Republican and the state’s top elections official, could help “find” the votes needed to overturn his narrow loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
More than two years later, the indictment brought Monday by a grand jury went far beyond that phone call, alleging a web of crimes committed by Trump and others. Willis used Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, law to charge Trump and 18 associates for allegedly participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
She told reporters late Monday that she intended to try all 19 defendants together and noted her prosecutors’ experience with racketeering cases, saying this was the 11th RICO case brought by her office. Willis became district attorney in 2021.
I’ve been conditioned by former US Attorney Ken White, known online as Popehat, that it’s never RICO because it’s so hard to make the case stick in federal court and it’s almost always simpler to convict on underlying crimes. But the Georgia version seems to be a different animal.
Georgia’s RICO Act, adopted in 1980, makes it a crime to participate in, acquire or maintain control of an “enterprise” through a “pattern of racketeering activity” or to conspire to do so. It’s important to note that the alleged scheme does not have to have been successful for a RICO charge to stick.
An “enterprise” can be a single person or a group of associated individuals with a common goal. “Racketeering activity” means to commit, attempt to commit — or to solicit, coerce or intimidate someone else to commit — one of more than three dozen state crimes listed in the law. At least two such acts are required to meet the standard of a “pattern of racketeering activity,” meaning prosecutors have to prove that a person has engaged in two or more related criminal acts as part of their participation in an enterprise to be convicted under RICO.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said that federal RICO allegations must show continuity, that is to say a series of related underlying acts over an extended period of time, not just a few weeks or months. But the Georgia Supreme Court has made clear there is no such requirement in the state law.
Axios’ Sareen Habeshian dives into “Why Georgia’s case against Trump could be so damaging.” I’d like to highlight this:
The complexity of RICO cases makes it difficult for lawyers to implement a coherent trial strategy, explained Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.
- The stiff penalties associated with RICO charges are also a major incentive for co-defendants to seek deals in return for new evidence.
- “The defendants who are left standing without plea deals and grants of immunity may especially feel squeezed as the process goes on,” Kreis said.
- Some Trump allies and supporters have already been informed by the DA’s office that they are targets of the investigation, including Rudy Giuliani and the GOP electors who falsely “certified” Trump as Georgia’s 2020 victor.
This actually makes me queasy. While it concerns me less in the case of Trump and other powerful people, the notion that the state can increase its already massive coercive advantage in criminal trials by trying people together and making it harder for defendants to mount a defense is troubling, indeed.
This, however, is a big plus:
Since Trump would face state charges in Georgia, the sitting president won’t have the ability to pardon him, Kreis said.
- In Georgia, the power to pardon is vested under the state constitution to a Board of Pardons and Paroles, which requires that a sentence be completed at least five years prior to applying for a pardon.
- “If he were to win the presidency or if a Republican sympathetic to him were to win … the president of the United States can’t pardon or can’t dismiss,” Kreis said. “That puts it in a very different light from the federal cases.”
She also adds that Georgia is big on televised trials, so the public will get to see this one.
LoL, yeah I was thinking the same thing. Looking forward to getting this commentary on this today.
I’d say Fani Willis released the Kraken.
This is a state case. A future President cannot pardon anyone from a Georgia conviction. And the minimum sentence for parole or pardon eligibility for a Georgia RICO sentence is 60 months.
Georgia RICO, by state law, has huge implications that hugely incentivises flipping and pleading out to a lesser crime and ratting out higher-ups.
No one wants to be on the outside when a rock-solid RICO case comes crashing down. And it looks like they have the goods.
@mattbernius: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiVkyD1yzJg
@de stijl:
Not only that, but (and this was mentioned above) in Georgia law a governor doesn’t have pardon power, and the board responsible for considering pardons can receive a request no earlier than five years into a sentence.
That should calm the nerves of anyone who fears Kemp will grow a MAGA conscience.
Isn’t there a history of the GA RICO is being used to prosecute black drug gangs? That would help explain the inclination towards state heavy powers.
A few linkies:
“Pix”
“Bios”
“Charges“
And the targeting was so obviously stupid in both Georgia and Michigan. Coffee County Georgia voted for Trump 70 v 28 Biden and change. It was a wipe out.
They went after voting systems in like +20 R leaning counties because they could buffalo the cultish local election official into betraying their oath of office. Same deal in Michigan. Same deal in Arizona. BS a local idiot into complicity into a federal crime.
Conspiracy is a catch-all.
Given the number of indictments and the fact that a few are relatively peons, I expect several to flip. Given the rumors that he is already cooperating with Smith the possible big Kahuna to flip will be Meadows.
I keep seeing that, have my doubts. 30 unindicted co-conspirators might be all the flippers DA needs, that ship may have sailed.
The people who harassed Ruby Freeman, for example – how would they have anything useful to flip with? Same for the Coffee county computer fiddlers.
I think lots of people good and shafted, find out time.
Bothers me not at all. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
@de stijl: It seems wasn’t as blatantly stupid as that. They attacked friendly counties because they were attempting to seize voting machines, and in fact did so in at least one case. It’s a little unclear what they hoped to do with these voting machines, but it couldn’t have been anything good…
I have a different question (quite adjacent) for the mob here:
I’ve listened to chatter about how the Constitution says nothing about an indicted or convicted person serving as President. My question is this: at the state level, does any indictment or conviction prevent being put on a ballot in the first place?
@Jon:
Brilliant.
@MarkedMan:
It was blatantly stupid. No foolin
In their eyes, they thought they had captured an instance of the bad anti-Trump software. They are idiots.
We hide that stuff on the servers. The password is “hailsatan”.
@Scott:
I believe such laws would only affect state elections, federal rules would supersede. (That is how it is with “sore loser” laws, which do not affect presidemtial elections).
@Scott:
Not as far as I know. James Michael Curley ran for office in Massachusetts from a prison cell.
@OzarkHillbilly:
So, again, I’m stating a general proposition rather than complaining about its specific application here. But the whole point of our system is that the state has the burden of proving, beyond reasonable doubt, that the citizen committed the crime in question. RICO essentially lowers that burden by creating a massive prisoner’s dilemma that encourages plea bargains and coerced confessions. I see that as problematic.
@James Joyner:
Yeah, RICO was created to go after guys everyone knew ran the Mafia. The ethics of doing this for obvious gangsters aside, applying it elsewhere has been a mixed bag. Ironically, Guiliani was a pioneer in doing this…and given how close he has always been to being a mobster, and how much MAGA takes from the 80s John Gotti story, it’s pretty fitting that they’re using this law on Trump and his people.
@James Joyner: True, but it also attacks the problem of the low level mob guys getting convicted while the upper echelons skate, because they didn’t actually do the crimes themselves. So yes, it can be abuse. But also, yes, it is useful to get the bosses into cells as well as the minions. The question is: Is it it being justly applied in this particular case.
@James Joyner:
If you are part of a conspiracy to conduct an illegal act like obviating and negating millions of votes from seven specific states to overturn a duly approved election in favor of the candidate who lost by every measure. His pleas to the court system lost at every turn.
I used to think America hates a sore loser. I updated my thinking in regards to Donald Trump.
They were trying to pull a coup. Trying to subvert a duly elected president by foul and illegal means. They are treasonous. Traitors.
Donald Trump is the Tonya Harding of American politics.
Not a false conspiracy theory.
Trump is a illegitimate President who stolen the election from Hillary Clinton with $100,000 of Facebook ads and $10,000 donated to the NRA from his collusion with Russia.
WhatAboutism.
Well, pay heed, all you naysayers. Donald Trump will, next Monday, present a “Large, Complex but Irrefutable Report” on the “Presidential Elction Fraud” that took place in Georgia. There will be a press conference at 11 a.m. at Bedminster. Excuse me: Make that a “major News Conference.”
Be there or be square.
Trump has promised a press conference on Monday in which he will present a “large” and “complex” report that will be “conclusive” and fully exonerate him.
He claims the report is “almost complete.”
I, for one, cannot wait.
@CSK:
Was Four Seasons Total Landscaping booked?
@Kathy:
Must have been.
@CSK:
This is yet another example where Trump’s choice of language is more revealing than he realizes. Another word for “irrefutable” is unfalsifiable, one of the prime characteristics of conspiracy theories. It’s not a virtue.
@CSK:
@Daryl:
His attorneys should think long and hard about withdrawing from representation before he drops that thing. $10 says it’s all jury tampering and harassment. I would not want to explain that to any of the judges.
Also, I’m waiting for the DC to jail him for contempt and then Cannon to order him released. That’ll be fun.
@James Joyner:
I see it as problematic that mobsters can and do easily circumvent culpability for their actions through attorney-client privilege, coded language, and goon squad terrorism. This is especially dangerous and bad in the era of social media. Then there’s the constant “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” question coupled with the vague Cold War era nostalgia “ruling” that Presidents could conduct crimes while in office as part and parcel of their Presidential duties.
Is RICO a kludge aimed at coercing confessions and pleas? Sure. Sometimes the cure is better than letting the disease run its course.
But with a SCOTUS that has decreed that stare deices means shit, maybe we really are living in interesting times.
The comments about the power of the state to create prisoner’s dilemmas making it difficult to mount a defense reminds me of the posts we’ve had here about plea deals and why they are so problematic.
If what I read this AM is correct, they still have to prove an underlying crime as a condition of any RICO charges. Can’t prove an underlying crime? Can’t prove RICO.
Oh and for those talking about RICO for mobsters, Willis’ first RICO case was for Atlanta teachers rigging test scores.
@James Joyner:
Could you unpack that a little? I’m failing to see how RICO creates an incentive for people to confess who aren’t actually guilty. Or how it “coerces” confessions for those who are. “Coerced confession” is strong language, and inappropriate if all you really mean is additional incentives to be truthful at the margin.
Perhaps participating in a conspiracy to overthrow the Government isn’t a wise lifestyle decision?
Rudy Giuliani will die either in a Georgia prison, or a federal prison. America’s mayor. I remember the first show Letterman did after 9/11 praising Giuliani’s leadership. Such a fall from such a height. It’s Shakespearean.
These indictees will either roll over quick – and still do time – or refuse to flip and, given the ages of the individuals, also die in prison. And there is not a single thing that even a re-elected Trump could do to save them.
Good news for you, though, @Paul L.: : you can send gifts to your cult leader and his minions.
You can order three pairs of underwear per quarter. And yes, they do carry extended sizes.
@Jon: @mattbernius: Made me laugh.
@Daryl:
Only if you fail. This whole conspiracy seems to have been hatched by a bunch of morons who have always believed they are the smartest people in the room.
@DrDaveT:
Here’s a pretty good article on RICO and how any kind of banal criminal activity–like a kid selling weed–can be built up into being part of a conspiracy. The people busted with Trump love the idea of taking a 16-year old kid in public housing and making the kid part of a massive criminal conspiracy for selling a small amount of weed, so screw them. But it’s a pretty shifty law.
@OzarkHillbilly: My bad:
Not 1, 2 crimes.
@Michael Reynolds: But can you send Depends? Or is that a burden the Georgia taxpayers have to bear?
@de stijl:
I really like the Tonya Harding analogy. It fits on so many levels.
Pettiness, total dumbass conspiracy, idiot co-conspirators. Obvious, blatant criminality. Whining. Begging for attention. Displacement.
@Pete S:
No question about it.
@Modulo Myself:
I will consider it a worthwhile law when they use it to bring down the US branch of the global Catholic pedophile ring. Until then, I understand your qualms.
What do you make of the claim that Willis has no jurisdiction in Coffee county, ergo can not charge any crime committed there.
(or is the theory that the conspiracy/plan to commit was created in Fulton, and carried out in Coffee?)
@Pete S:
Thus far the salient lesson of the Cheeto coup is: For a coup contingent on an election result, you need to have the means, people, and elements of the coup in place ahead of time, not ad-lib various actions afterwards using what you find at the bottom of the Dunning-Kruger barrel.
Other lessons may await results. The coup hasn’t quite ended yet.
https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1691457710842408960
Teachers case:
“Teachers”
Oh come on people! Is nobody going to reference “I’m leaving…on that midnight train…to Georgia.”??? And other immortal lyrics from that song (repetitions removed):
“He said he’s going back to find/What’s left of his world
The world he left behind/Not so long ago
He’s leaving/On that midnight train to Georgia
Said he’s going back/
He kept dreaming/Oh, that someday he’d be a star (A superstar, but he didn’t get far)
But he sure found out the hard way/That dreams don’t always come true…”
@Kathy: Part of the reason it failed is that the US possessed the institutional barriers to withstand it. I don’t like the term “guard rails,” which makes it sound like something inanimate. I prefer to describe it more as the US system being so decentralized that any attempts to seize power are likely to run through people who don’t have the same interests or incentives as the perpetrators, even if they are from the same party. This decentralization has not always been a friend to democracy; it helped Jim Crow survive for as long as it did, and it continues to pose a barrier to attempts to reform the system in a more democratic direction. (It shouldn’t be forgotten that Kemp and Raffensperger, who did the right thing in 2020, were both involved in throwing minorities off voter rolls.) But it also precludes full-scale takeovers.
I am not being complacent. I believe with full sincerity that a democratic collapse in this country is still very possible, and as incompetent as he’s been, Trump may be the one who achieves it. There are many examples across the world of unsuccessful coups being followed by successful ones. All he really has to do is win back the presidency (through legitimate means or not), and then he can get to the work of compromising the institutions which previously held him back, by replacing the Deep Staters with loyalists.
@CSK:
From the Daily Beast:
The trial of this case will be a logistical nightmare for the Judge. Unless there have been major renovations to the courthouse since the last time I was there, there is no courtroom large enough to accommodate this number of participants. For 19 defendants with 2 lawyers each, not to mention the prosecution and its staff, this trial is likely to end up being tried in a school auditorium . I’ve tried many multi defendant cases but never one of this magnitude. If the judge is not careful the actual trial can get out of hand quickly.
“DailyBeast”
@Kylopod:
Many coups have been successful due to the intervention of much larger powers. Had Trump pulled this in a small Central American country with the backing of the CIA and State Department it might have worked.
@DrDaveT: I don’t see the problem with the law as it stands. It is specifically meant to deal with the reality that the heads of criminal conspiracies hire underlings to do the actual dirty work, and frequently avoid making their instructions explicit and on the record. Yes, the law can be misapplied or misused, as can every other law. I still contend that the only germane question is: Is the Georgia RICO law being fairly and appropriately applied in this case? I don’t see the purpose of clouding this up simply because there are other cases where it is inappropriately used.
@charontwo: I assume Trump is counting on everyone forgetting he made this promise by Friday. We will get the report right after we get his tax returns.
@Joe:
And his Health Care Plan, and Infrastructure Week, and his “Big Beautiful Sea-to-Shining-Sea” Wall.
@charontwo: “The 12 who chose to stand trial faced up to 20 years in prison because the jury convicted them of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a statute typically reserved for those involved in organized crime.”
That right there should make your blood run cold. They nabbed 30-ish teachers, turned the screws on them all regarding the “cheating scandal”, secured pleas from a bunch of them, then used those pleas to convict a dozen, handing down harsh sentences to all the ones that went to trial. All using evidence acquired by threatening punishment for asserting innocence.
These sorts of laws are specifically used not to ensure the guilty are convicted, but simply to ensure conviction.
You tell me:
Cops haul you in and say they know about falsified documents that you signed on your server at work. If you give them Documents X, Y, and Z, and sign an affidavit that the author knowingly falsified them, you’ll be fined $100 and sent on your way. If you don’t, they say they’ll vigorously pursue a legal case against you. You have no idea about the veracity of the documents, or the mindset of the people who produced them. What do you do? Do you know how many of your colleagues have been given the same offer? If the documents were falsified, can you prove you didn’t know and were just an innocent bystander?
That’s how the RICO statute has been employed recently, just as often as it has been employed to take down a drug kingpin or whatever. It’s a garbage pile law that’s been levered into the role of making prosecution easier. In this case it appears to be applied the way it was intended, since several of the participants are essentially “at arms reach” but the obvious crimes occurred at the lower level. That does not exculpate the law.
@charontwo:
My mind is slowly being boggled as I digest this. I had long given up hope that Trump would so beclown himself that some significant number of his fans would have to walk away in embarrassment. This, though, gives me renewed hope. Is Trump going to try to out-Lindell the Pillow-Meister himself?
@MarkedMan:
His attorney, Alina Habba, was on Fox this morning claiming that they have “inside information.”
But you are correct – he will beclown himself.
@MarkedMan: some significant number of his fans would have to walk away in embarrassment.
I think there is a better chance of winning PowerBall than any of his cult members being embarrassed. He could be convicted a hundred times and it still wouldn’t matter.
@James Joyner:
This is true AND it’s critical to note that it’s not unique in our Criminal Legal System. We have a system that is optimized to heavily incentivize accepting plea deals in all circumstances. RICO laws typically make that underlying structure just more apparent.
https://guiltypleaproblem.org/
Note: This isn’t to say that everyone who takes a plea is innocent of what they are being charged with. Simply that we have long since passed the point where our Criminal Legal System can reliably function without plea deals. I, for one, hope that this might get folks who typically fall into the “Law and Order” category a bit more curious about the downsides of our current system and more interested in meaningful reform.
I am trying to predict how this indictment will be pooh-poohed and down-played by Rs.
This is protected First Amendment speech.
We actually believe/believed Trump won.
After that I got nothing. I’d be a crappy defense attorney in this instance.
There is no excuse.
I am a firm believer in civics class for teenagers. Maybe 8th or 9th grade. This is the existing voting structure. Here is how that happened. Here is what that means.
Do schools (excluding Florida) still do civics education? If not, why? If so, how?
@charontwo:
I’m getting strong echoes of the spring of 2011, when Trump said the detectives he had sent to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama had actually been born there “could not believe what they’re finding.”
Whatever these investigators found, it was never shared with the rest of the world.
@Kylopod:
I wonder what Kemp and Raffensperger would have done if Benito had approached them to fix the election before it was held.
@Scott:
As I recall (perhaps not accurately, back in the early 1980’s then-Newark Mayor Hugh Addonizio may have run for office while under indictment, and he may well have, for a short time, been in office while jailed on bribery/kickback convictions.
@ptfe:
I don’t see 1-2 years for the low level teachers as all that harsh. It was the bosses who got the stiff sentences. (Just to get pedantic, 1 of the 12 was acquited).
I think your hypothetical example is pretty far-fetched.
And what’s with the quote marks on “cheating scandal”? Why?
@de stijl: Last week one of Trump’s lawyers in the Jan. 6 case was on TV parroting some of the 2020-denialist talking points (the red mirage, the bellwether counties) even though it had no direct relevance to the case. It suggests his goal during the interview wasn’t to help Trump win the legal battle, but simply to spread Trumpist propaganda.
https://twitter.com/madrid_mike/status/1691250212986404864
When you consider that anyone in another country that attempted what Trump attempted would likely be executed by now…being charged under the “Rico Act” ain’t an awful thing.
And, yeah, I realize he’s innocent until proven guilty, but we all saw this conspiracy unfold in real time for months before J6.
@Daryl:
The justice system is obligated to give Trump and his co-defendants a presumption of innocence. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I, however, am under no such obligation.
@MarkedMan: @Daryl:
If all Trump did at this “major News Conference” was moon the reporters and pick his nose, the MAGAs would say he was brilliant.
@James Joyner: That, and that it requires expensive attorneys to mount an effective defense. Expensive beyond the reach of a lot of lower level people like Cassidy Hutchinson or some nump the cops may have planted weed on. Even if acquitted, the accused is severely punished by the process and the expense. Of course with Trump this bothers me not at all.
@CSK: I think his “evidence” will be something like this (no subscription required).
@Daryl: I bet he finally saw that report from Mike Lindell! He’s going to slap a new cover on it and say it’s all his.
@Matt Bernius:
I think it’s more likely that Florida will indict Biden on RICO charges based on nonsense. Or Texas.
@MarkedMan:
I’m sure it will–if it’s ever revealed. I’m sure some Trump-manufactured crisis will intervene.
@Matt Bernius:
“Law and Order” has always been nothing more than a dogwhistle for “I’ll protect you from scary black and brown people on the streets.” And the hypocrisy behind the very politicians who use the term the most turning out to be corrupt as hell is nothing new, either. After all, the one who helped popularize the phrase more than anyone else was Richard Nixon.
It’s a mistake to think Republican voters will ever reflect on the fraudulent nature of their favored slogans, whether it be this or “small government” or “parental rights” or “free speech” or anything else. These are people with minds devoid of any capacity for introspection, who embrace these labels because they stand for stories reflecting how they want to see themselves, and therefore any sort of critical examination of whether the labels accurately describe their behavior is totally alien to them.
@ptfe:
I have some recollection of this case and I’m not sure why you are putting this in scare quotes. If I remember correctly, they were definitely cheating and it was to insure tax payer dollars continued to flow to their schools so there was money as well as kids grades being scammed. The lower level teachers got low sentences and the higher ups got significant ones. My impression was that it was a righteous case (as the AG’s like to say).
@Michael Reynolds:
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is that Trump’s best case scenario in all these cases is jury nullification. He only needs one maga lunatic to hold their mouth long enough to get on the jury and save their savior. That juror would probably be hailed as a hero to the chud caucus.
That only applies to Trump though. There is no way in hell any of those jurors would do the same for any of the other defendants. We all know that not only will Trump not protect them, if one of them flips, or isn’t obsequious enough, Trump will sic the freaks on them. Mark Meadows is an idiot and a coward, but he’s smart enough to know that Trump will have him rot or threatened if he doesn’t jump first. Rudy and Ellis are morons and true believers, they’re going to go down with the ship.
@charontwo:
GA Gov Kemp just went off on Trump’s BS…
@Beth:
To that end it seems to me his standard legal MO, used successfully for a long career of real estate/subcontractor bilking, is to claim everything he did was legal….or should be. Just one juror convinced even if it was illegal it was an “honest” mistake would serve.
@MarkedMan:
Mike Lindell was born in Mankota and raised in Chaska a TC suburb).
No one from Mankato or Chaska has that upstate Bemidji “Fargo” accent like Lindell puts on. Fake! Faker! Bullshit! Shenanigans! I declare Shenanigans. He is fronting.
Mankato is way downstate and Chasca is a Minneapolis exurb. We sound basically like Ohio or outstate Illinois or Iowa only with slightly broader o’s. Noticeable, yes, but we don’t sound like Fargo the movie.
Fuck that guy!
@Daryl: I expect that Kemp was responding to Trump’s promised “report” that charontwo first mentioned, which is supposed to be about fraud specifically in the Georgia election. This will put Kemp head to head with Trump again.
@Daryl: @Joe: Just watched the former Lt Gov Geoff Duncan go off on Trump and voting conspiracies. Fascinating that it seems the entire Georgia Republican establishment (Raffensberger, etc) (no, MTG is not part of that) is vigorously anti-Trump. Wonder what would happen if Kemp decides to jump in the race. He’s ruled it out but…
@ptfe: You’re missing the bigger picture. Trump is the enemy of many people both in the United States and within our own commenting community. These people are willing to use whatever means are necessary to accomplish their goals–just like the people they will criticize for doing it in other settings will.
It’s the nature of an adversarial system. The goal is what matters. Omelets and eggs.
I think Trump’s long and irrefutable report–which we’ll never see, along with the material uncovered in Hawaii by his detectives relating to Obama’s birthplace–will consist of him saying that the indictment proves there was election fraud.
@de stijl:
And I got civics both in junior high (grade 9 in those days) and in high school (in grade 12–just before they scheduled some of us to be shipped off to go and kill the yellow man). I’m really sad that the school systems everyone else was in so dramatically shortchanged all y’all.
@Scott:
I don’t think they are anti-Trump as much as they are pro GA Establishment Republicans.
Kemp has said he’ll vote for Trump no matter.
But if they take his side in this it makes them look incompetent.
@Michael Reynolds:
Just read that Trump is refusing to pay Jenna Ellis’ legal fees because she spoke well of DeSantis.
So if I’m her I’m already on the phone to Fani.
Fun times. But they go too far and are just confusing those not playing attention and angering those who aren’t in the Democrat bubble who are paying attention.
But was this late night indictment just to distract from Joe’s indifference, at least in public, to the Maui fire? Is Joe being told he’s out and so checking out? As I say, fun times and we really are 60 days from the start of the traditional campaign season.
And for those looking for the televised trial, RICO cases are notoriously dreary to follow.
@JKB:
Chef’s kiss. 10/10. No notes.
@Daryl: Ellis is counting on Pennies from Heaven.
@Daryl and Scott: The novelty here will be to have a significant and mainstream Republican administration of necessity go toe-to-toe with the Trump campaign and push back consistently and hard about the validity of that administration’s elections process. This isn’t Christie trying to make it on a debate stage. It’s an active state administration saying they know how to run an election and defend their ability to do so.
https://twitter.com/costareports/status/1691532975966486529
https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1691523681510449152
@JKB:
Right on cue, JKB shows up with the MAGAt talking points.
What a maroon…
“AJC”
@JKB:
Do ya think they might be mad when they wake up one day and discover Trump has made himself King and the entire MAGA Party has gone along willingly?
It’s a Republic if we can keep it. People have to pay attention if they want to keep it.
@charontwo:
snip
Bottom line, looks like Jones skates. Apparently, Willis unable to indict over a conflict of interest.
BTW, most tweets I post here I also retweet, here:
https://twitter.com/charontwo
Both Raffensperger and Kemp have kind of taken the stance of, “you have insulted my honuh, suh!” to Trump. This probably works reasonably well for them in GA politics, even on the R side.
@Daryl: “Right on cue, JKB shows up with the MAGAt talking points.”
And man, are they sad. The months-long Georgia investigation complete with two grand juries was all whipped up because sometime a year or so back the Dems knew that Republicans would accuse Biden of not speaking with sufficient compassion about the deadly Hawaii fire and so had this prepared as a distraction?
Even a Q-freak would laugh at that. Or just shake their head in pity.
“MeidasTouch”
According to CNBC, Trump stiffed his 19 co-conspirators. This is not the way to ensure loyalty.
@CSK:
Trump hasn’t got the money to cover 18 co-defendants. He’s the world’s poorest ‘billionaire.’ He’s already bilking the suckers like @JKB: and @Paul L.: out of their beer money and that well is going to run dry.
Trump is a fool if he doesn’t GTFO of the country. He’s not going to be re-elected, and he is going to prison. And his cult is not going to save him. He’ll die in a prison infirmary, attended by doctors with medical degrees from Bolivia and Tajikistan. He needs to pull his pumpkin head out of his flabby ass and get back in touch with reality, because we will try him, we will convict him, and we will put him behind bars where he richly deserves to be.
@charontwo:
Skandalakis is a great name.
A very long time ago I dated a young woman last name Popodopolous. It’s a not uncommon Greek surname, but it amused me. It’s fun to say – Popodopolous.
I can’t help but wonder how she can know that considering the fact that she sold it years ago.
@de stijl: It reminds me of the book from when I was a kid, The Fat Cat, featuring the characters Skolinkenlot and Skohottentot. It claimed to be from a Danish folktale.
@JKB: And you are still you: A complete and utter idiot.
Well done!
@wr: Now you know better than that. A true Q-freak would go along with whatever they were told to. That’s how they became Q-freaks.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
We had civics in 9th grade, I believe. It wasn’t just civics, voting, but also basic household management, budgeting, bill paying, taxes, carting around an egg for a week as if it were a baby, don’t write a check your ass can’t cash, etc. It was basically Adult 101.
We didn’t get a refresher senior year, but probably should have. Adult 101 is a hell of a lot more useful than trigonometry.
—–
After Algebra or Calculus all of the more advanced math stuff went directly over my head. Or in and directly out. And for a school-jock, smarty-pants like me it was a damn sobering lesson to learn. There will be stuff in life you can’t learn by diligence and sticking your head in a book.
Advanced math classes taught me how to cheat. Not cheat cheat, but to predict what questions were mostly to be asked and how to fake the right answer even though you did not understand and comprehend the underlying principles. I faked my way through two and a half semesters of math by predicting the questions the teacher was most likely to ask and by brute force rote memorization. That process was an extremely valuable life lesson. 1. There are things I do not intuitively understand. 2. How to cheese a test about things I do not understand.
I was too proud to get a shitty grade.
@JKB:
Thank you. I forgot about point three – rampant, unrelated, irrelevant whataboutism.
Like I said, I would be a crap defense attorney in this case.
@CSK:
The article you are referring to also says only $3 million remains of the $250 million raised in the hubbub prior to 1/6. If true, all this news about His ratings going up is being reflected in cash flowing His way. The sermons are not producing the sort of collection plates He has been accustomed getting from them?
The magical Well of the Faithful Sucker$ may be deep, but it isn’t bottomless.
@de stijl: I took the road more traveled by (in this case) by quitting halfway through the second semester of Trig in my junior year of high school (yet actually finishing the course with a passing grade–an interesting story for another day) and never darkening the door of a math class again until I needed to attempt a math credit in college. (Failed calculus spectacularly and never retook.) But already at the tender age of 16, I had already discovered that I wasn’t going to want to work arithmetic problems for a career no matter how “gifted” my teachers thought I was.
Later in life, I regretted not having put more effort into math because I suspect that I might have enjoyed teaching it. Then again, my overall view of math–it’s not hard as much as it’s labor intensive–might still be a tough sell for the average cracker in a HS class.
“Fox10PHX”