The RICO case should never have been brought.
As has seemed inevitable for a couple of years, a court in Georgia has dismissed the absurd RICO case that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought against President Trump.
Willis was previously (and scandalously) removed from the case. The court dismissed it on the motion of what the New York Times describes as “the state’s nonpartisan prosecutor council.” Pete Skandalakis rightly pointed out that most of what Willis tried to criminalize as “racketeering” involved challenging the election results. Even if Trump went about this in a heavy-handed manner, it is not illegal to petition courts, legislators, and election officials to alter the outcome of an election. There is, indeed, a legal process for doing so.
I’ve extensively described many of the legal problems with Willis’s RICO indictment. (See here, here, here, and here.)
The prosecutor opined that the proper vehicle for investigating and potentially prosecuting the president would be a federal case, such as the one brought by Biden special counsel Jack Smith — although Skandalakis offered the caveat that such a prosecution would have to adhere to the Supreme Court’s July 2024 immunity ruling in Trump v. United States. The notion of bringing a case of the type Willis envisioned in a single state, rather than concentrating on any concrete violations of state law, was impractical. Similarly impractical, the prosecutor concluded, is the notion of beginning a prosecution — that might take two or three years to litigate immunity issues — after Trump leaves office in 2029.
Skandalakis also pointed out that the evidence thought to be most damning as to Trump — his telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that he needed to “find” enough votes to reverse Trump’s narrow loss to Biden in the state (by less than 12,000) votes — is capable of an innocent explanation. As the Times quotes the prosecutor, “An alternative interpretation is that President Donald J. Trump, genuinely believing fraud had occurred, is asking the Secretary of State to investigate and determine whether sufficient irregularities exist to change the election outcome.” Again, it ought to be possible to recognize that it was abusive for the president to have done this while also acknowledging that it was not a violation of the criminal law beyond a reasonable doubt.
The case against Trump and his 18 co-defendants should never have been brought, certainly in the manner charged. Now, it’s over.