Gastonia, NC
The word doing the work in this indictment is “enterprise,” and I want to start there because I spent two days last week finding out that the word does not mean what I assumed it meant.
My assumption, and I suspect most people’s, was that a racketeering statute reaches organizations whose business is crime. Crews, rings, syndicates. On that understanding, calling a presidential campaign and its lawyers an enterprise is a category error, and I was fully prepared to say so. Then I read the Georgia statute. Georgia defines enterprise to include any person, partnership, corporation, business trust, union, or other legal entity, and any association or group of individuals associated in fact though not a legal entity — and it says explicitly that the term includes licit as well as illicit enterprises.
Licit as well as illicit. In the text. So a lawful organization can be an enterprise under Georgia law, and a prosecutor who says so is not stretching the statute. That is what the statute says.
I am a copy editor. When a word turns out to be defined in the document, I do not get to argue from what the word means elsewhere. So the objection I would have made — this is a gang law and a campaign is not a gang — is not available to me, and I would rather retire it in public than repeat it because it sounds good.
What remains is a narrower objection and I think a better one. Georgia requires a pattern of racketeering activity: at least two qualifying predicate acts, connected through the enterprise. The statute does not require that crime be the enterprise’s purpose. It does require that the enterprise’s affairs were conducted through the pattern. That is a real element with real content, and it is where the whole case ought to be fought — not over whether a campaign can ever be an enterprise, which Georgia has already answered, but over whether the affairs of this one were conducted through crime or merely included alleged crimes at the edges.
That distinction is almost grammatical, which is how I tend to see things. A narrow charge says: this person did this act, with this intent, violating this statute. An enterprise theory says: these acts, meetings, calls, and legal theories formed one operation whose affairs were carried out through a pattern of crime. The first sentence requires precision. The second gains its force from aggregation, and aggregation is where the political weight enters.
Nineteen defendants. Forty-one counts. More than a hundred and sixty acts listed in furtherance. Thirteen counts against the former president. That chart is now the most portable summary of the 2020 dispute in existence, and it will be reproduced far more often than any individual predicate will be examined. The indictment stopped looking like a prosecution of discrete conduct the moment it was released and started looking like a county government’s criminal narrative of the entire post-election fight.
That packaging is what I mean by nationalization, and I want to be careful about what I am accusing the office of. Not fabrication. Not bad faith. A choice about scope that had a predictable national effect, made by an elected official who could see the effect coming.
The booking photograph is the same phenomenon and I would resist making too much of it. The sheriff said in advance that every defendant would be processed like any other, and all nineteen were. The image is not evidence of a prosecutorial stunt; it is evidence of a policy applied without exception to an unprecedented defendant. But its circulation tells you the audience, and the audience was not Fulton County.
My preferred rule would keep the categories narrower than Georgia law requires them to be, and I should be honest that I am arguing for a change rather than describing existing law. If a person made a criminally false statement, charge it. If someone forged a document or impersonated a public officer, charge it. Let each count rise or fall on its elements. What I would resist is treating a political coalition as the enterprise unless the state can show that criminal activity was how the organization operated, not merely that it occurred within one.
Campaigns are organized by nature. They have hierarchy, lawyers, meetings, money, strategy, and coordinated action. If organizational complexity plus disputed legal conduct suffices, then RICO becomes unusually attractive in political cases, and the statute begins rewarding prosecutors for turning a political network into a criminal map. That precedent should trouble people who dislike this defendant, because the next county prosecutor may be Republican and the next national campaign may be Democratic.
So I place the case on the nationalization side of the question, with the qualification that Georgia’s statute permits what was done. Permitted is not the same as ordinary, and statutory permission does not answer the institutional question of whether a county courtroom should be the forum in which the country’s account of a presidential election is written.
Owatonna, MN
A Minnesota county attorney who described a national campaign as a racketeering enterprise would face an immediate and impolite question about whether the office was prosecuting crimes or prosecuting the organization in which the crimes were said to have occurred. That is the question I wanted to put to Fulton County. Then I went looking for how that office has used its racketeering statute before, and the answer complicated my argument considerably.
The signature Georgia RICO prosecution of the last fifteen years was not a gang case. It was the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. Thirty-five educators — teachers, principals, administrators — were indicted in 2013 on the theory that the district’s testing operation constituted an enterprise whose affairs were conducted through a pattern of false statements and document tampering. Eleven were convicted at trial in 2015. The lead prosecutor on that case was Fani Willis, then an assistant district attorney.
So the objection I was going to make — that a lawful institution should not be recast as a criminal enterprise merely because people inside it allegedly committed offenses — was tested in Georgia a decade ago against a school system, and it lost. Whatever one thinks of that outcome, and I have my doubts about it too, this indictment is not a departure from how this prosecutor has used this statute. It is a continuation of it. That is a fact I would rather put on the table myself than have someone else use against me.
What that leaves is not an argument about novelty but an argument about scale, and I think the scale argument is the honest one.
The school-cheating case was contained. One district, one testing regime, a defined set of documents, and a jurisdiction that plainly owned the conduct. The Fulton indictment reaches phone calls made from Washington, legal memoranda drafted in other states, elector slates assembled across several jurisdictions, and a computer breach in a rural Georgia county, and it binds all of it to a national political operation whose leader was, at the time of indictment, the leading candidate for the presidency. The statute may permit it. The consequences of permitting it are of a different order.
I spent years in financial planning, and one thing that trade teaches is what aggregation does to perception. A portfolio looks safer or riskier depending entirely on how the holdings are grouped, and the grouping is a choice made by the person presenting it. Prosecutors using enterprise liability have the same power. They take many acts — some serious, some ambiguous, some that would never be charged standing alone — and place them inside one structure, and the structure lends each act weight it would not have separately.
That may be justified when the structure itself is criminal. It is more troubling when the structure is a campaign, because campaigns generate coordinated behavior as a matter of function rather than conspiracy.
I also want to be fair about the strongest fact on the other side, since I have been asking others in this Forum to be fair about theirs. The most concrete predicates in this indictment are not the political ones. They are the counts arising from the breach of election equipment in Coffee County — computer trespass, computer theft, conspiracy to defraud the state. That conduct is Georgia conduct, it involves Georgia machines, and it has nothing to do with the merits of anyone’s election argument. If those counts are what they appear to be, they are ordinary state crimes committed in Georgia, and no theory about nationalization answers them.
The same is true, more arguably, of the Raffensperger call. It was made to Georgia officials about Georgia’s count. Of all the conduct in all four of the prosecutions this Forum has examined, that is the most locally anchored, and a correspondent who calls this case a nationalization of a national dispute has to reckon with the fact that the single most famous piece of evidence in it is a phone call to an Atlanta office about Atlanta’s ballots.
My conclusion is therefore narrower than I expected it to be when I started. The statute permits the theory. The office has used the theory before against a lawful institution. Some of the predicates are genuinely local and genuinely ordinary. What I object to is the decision to bind all of it into a single enterprise narrative rather than charging the concrete offenses concretely, because that choice converted a set of Georgia crimes into a county-level account of a national election — and the voters were already scheduled to render their own account next November.
Prescott Valley, AZ
Out here we would not call a cattle association a criminal gang because one rancher falsified a brand record. That was going to be my opening, and it is a good line, and I have to set it aside because Georgia law does not work the way the line assumes.
Georgia’s racketeering statute defines an enterprise to include legal entities and associations in fact, and it says in so many words that the term covers licit as well as illicit enterprises. A lawful organization can be the enterprise. Beyond that, this same office prosecuted the Atlanta Public Schools cheating case on precisely that model — a school district as the enterprise, false test documents as the pattern — and obtained convictions. So when I ask whether it is conventional to treat a lawful organization as a racketeering enterprise in Georgia, the honest answer is that it is.
I taught for a long time and the discipline that survives is refusing to teach a rule I have not checked. So let me teach the rule that actually exists and then say where I would change it, which is a more useful exercise than pretending the law says what I wish it said.
Here is the rule. Georgia requires an enterprise, which may be lawful; a pattern of racketeering activity, meaning at least two qualifying predicate offenses; and a connection such that the enterprise’s affairs were conducted through that pattern. That is the whole test. Nothing in it asks whether the organization was formed to commit crimes.
Now the question I would put to a class, and I would put it without using anybody’s name. A campaign disputes an election result. It assembles lawyers, advances legal theories, organizes public pressure, and files litigation. Several participants allegedly commit defined offenses — a false document here, a false statement there, an unauthorized access to a voting system somewhere else. At what point does the political organization become a racketeering enterprise?
Under the statute as written, the answer is: as soon as the state can connect two predicates through the organization. That is a very low threshold for a very heavy consequence, and I think a class of seventeen-year-olds would spot the problem in about four minutes. They would ask what stops the same reasoning from reaching a union political committee, an advocacy organization, a state party, or a campaign of any description whose members break laws while pursuing its goals. And I would not have a satisfying answer, because the statute does not supply one.
That is my objection, and I want it understood as a proposal for a better rule rather than a claim that the prosecutor exceeded the existing one. She did not. The legislature wrote a statute broad enough to permit this, and the remedy for a statute that is too broad is legislative, or it is a court reading a limiting principle into the connection element, which is where I would put my hope.
The school-cheating precedent is what makes this hard to teach cleanly, and I want to sit with it rather than wave at it. Those defendants were teachers. Not a crew, not a syndicate — teachers in a school system, prosecuted under a racketeering law for falsifying documents in service of an institutional objective. If a person believes that prosecution was legitimate, it becomes very difficult to explain why a campaign’s lawyers occupy a different category. If a person believes it was an overreach, then the objection to Fulton County is not about this defendant at all; it is about a decade of Georgia practice that nobody outside Georgia noticed.
I lean toward the second view, which means my complaint is older and broader than the current case and I should say so.
Two things I would keep separate from the legal analysis. The booking photograph is not a prosecutorial choice worth arguing about — the sheriff announced in advance that every defendant would be processed identically, and all nineteen were. Treating a former president like every other defendant is precisely what the people defending the case said should happen, and it is odd to object when it occurs. What the photograph tells us is about audience, not about the prosecutor: the image traveled worldwide within an hour, which confirms the case is a national event whatever the county intended.
And the Coffee County counts deserve separating out. A breach of election equipment in a rural Georgia county is an ordinary state crime in the most literal sense, and it would be chargeable if no election dispute had ever occurred. Those counts do not need an enterprise theory. That they were folded into one is, to me, the clearest illustration of what the enterprise theory was actually for.
Dayton, OH
A plant that loses a quality argument with a customer does not become a racketeering enterprise because several managers participated in a bad decision. You isolate the defect, identify the cause, determine whether a rule was violated, and correct the process. You do not reclassify the organization unless crime is how the organization actually operated.
That was my framework going in, and the Georgia statute does not use it. I want to deal with that before I make my argument, because a process engineer who ignores the actual specification is not doing process engineering.
Georgia defines enterprise to include lawful entities and expressly covers licit as well as illicit enterprises. The pattern requirement is two predicate acts. The connective element is that the enterprise’s affairs were conducted through the pattern. There is no requirement anywhere in the statute that crime be the organization’s purpose. So the classification I wanted — political organization in which offenses occurred, as distinct from enterprise conducted through crime — is a distinction I am proposing, not one the legislature drew.
Fine. Then let me argue for it as a specification change rather than pretend it is already in the print.
Here is the process reason. In engineering, the corrective action has to be proportionate to the failure mode, and the failure mode has to be identified before the remedy is selected. A bad measurement requires recalibration. A falsified inspection record requires discipline and a records audit. A deliberate scheme to ship known defective parts requires something much larger. Selecting the largest remedy for every failure mode is not rigor. It is the absence of diagnosis.
Now look at what this indictment contains, because it is not one failure mode. It is at least three, and they are not alike.
There are the political-pressure counts — the calls, the solicitations of officials to violate their oaths. Those are contested, novel in application, and inseparable from arguments about what a candidate may lawfully ask a state officer to do. There are the document counts — the elector certificates, the alleged false statements to the legislature. Those are more concrete and turn on ordinary questions of intent and falsity. And then there are the Coffee County counts: computer trespass, computer theft, conspiracy to defraud the state, arising from the breach of election equipment in a rural county in January 2021.
That third set is the one nobody discusses, and it is the one that most resembles ordinary crime. Someone accessed voting systems they had no authority to access. That is a defined offense with defined elements, provable or not on its own facts, and it has nothing whatever to do with whether the election argument had merit. It needed no enterprise theory. It would be chargeable in any state in the country.
Folding it into a forty-one-count racketeering structure with eighteen co-defendants does not make it easier to prove. It makes it part of a story. From a process standpoint, that is scope selected for narrative rather than for operational need, and scope selected for narrative is the thing I would flag in any design review.
Because scope creates consequences. Scope creates defendants — nineteen of them. Scope creates overt-act lists — more than a hundred and sixty. Scope creates a chart, and the chart becomes the public output of the case long before any element is tested. The most recognizable product of this indictment two weeks after it landed is not a predicate offense. It is a diagram and a photograph.
I am not claiming the office brought the case in order to produce those things. Effect is not motive and I would not accuse anyone of that. I am saying that institutional designers have to account for predictable effects, and a sprawling enterprise case against a former president who is the leading candidate for the nomination was always going to become national political content. That was foreseeable at the design stage.
So my prescription is a tighter connection element, applied by courts if the legislature will not supply it. Require the state to show that criminal conduct was a method by which the enterprise operated rather than an incident of its operation. Require the enterprise theory to add something legally necessary rather than something dramatically useful. Charge the Coffee County breach as the computer crime it is. Charge the document offenses as document offenses. Let each rise or fall.
That is the difference between correcting a defect and reclassifying the plant, and the second has far larger consequences — including for the next plant, run by the other party, when a different county decides it has found the same pattern.
Wheeling, WV
RICO is for a crew whose business is crime. That is what I would have told you two weeks ago, and I said something close to it out loud to two people before I bothered to check whether Georgia agrees. It does not.
Georgia’s statute says the enterprise can be a legal entity, an association in fact, or a group of individuals, and it says the term covers lawful enterprises as well as unlawful ones. Right there in the definitions. And this same district attorney built her reputation on a racketeering prosecution of the Atlanta school system — teachers and principals, charged as an enterprise for falsifying test documents. Her office also used the statute against a rap label two years ago, which is closer to what I had in mind. So the office runs it both ways, and has for a decade, and nobody in my part of the country noticed until now.
I do not enjoy finding that out and I am not going to pretend I did not. A man who spent thirty years telling management to read the contract before it grieves an employee has no business arguing from what he assumed a statute said.
So here is the argument that survives, and I think it is the better one anyway.
The question is not whether a lawful organization can be an enterprise. Georgia answered that. The question is what the connection has to look like — whether the state has to show that crime was how the outfit did business, or only that two crimes happened inside it. On the school case, the answer was closer to the second, because falsifying scores was the actual mechanism by which the district’s testing operation ran. There was no separate lawful version of that scheme. The crime was the method.
That is what I would make the state prove here, and it is a real question rather than a rhetorical one. Was the post-election operation a political and legal effort inside which some people allegedly broke laws, or was breaking laws the method by which the operation pursued its object? Reasonable people will answer that differently on the same facts, and it is exactly the fight a jury should have.
What I object to is skipping it. And I want to be careful about who I am accusing of skipping it, because the honest answer is: not the prosecutor, who has to prove her case, but the public conversation, which has already accepted the enterprise frame as though it were established rather than alleged.
I have watched this exact thing on a plant floor. Management gets a real grievance against an organization, and instead of proving the specific violation it puts out a narrative about the whole outfit being rotten. Sometimes the outfit really does have rot. The narrative still poisons the process, because after that every worker reads every decision as political, and management loses the next ten arbitrations it should have won.
There is one more thing I have to say against my own side, because leaving it out would be dishonest. The strongest evidence in this indictment is not the enterprise chart. It is a recording of a phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State about Georgia’s ballot count, and a breach of election equipment in Coffee County, Georgia. Those are Georgia facts. When I say a county prosecutor is nationalizing a dispute that belongs to the voters, I have to explain why the most concrete conduct in the file happened in her state, to her state’s officials, involving her state’s machines.
I can explain it, but the explanation is narrower than the accusation. It is that those counts did not need nineteen defendants and forty-one counts wrapped around them. Charge the call under whatever statute fits. Charge the computer breach as a computer breach. The enterprise theory does not make those cases stronger; it makes them bigger, and bigger is where politics lives.
The next prosecutor will remember the method whichever way this comes out. Maybe next time it is a Republican county attorney and a Democratic campaign. The people cheering the theory this month will discover that politics is not a gang. Better to work out the limiting principle now, while everyone still has to argue for it honestly.
Tyler, TX
East Texas would be suspicious of a county attorney who took a recount fight, found several alleged offenses inside it, and called the whole political operation a criminal syndicate. That suspicion is where I started, and I want to test it the only way I trust, which is to turn the parties around and see whether the objection still stands up.
First, though, an honest correction to my own premise. I assumed Georgia’s racketeering statute was built for crews whose business is crime, the way the federal one is generally understood. It is not. Georgia defines enterprise to include lawful entities and says outright that licit enterprises are covered. And this office has used it that way before, most notably against the Atlanta school system a decade ago, where a district’s testing operation was the enterprise and eleven educators were convicted. So the theory in this indictment is not an invention. It is a decade-old Georgia practice applied to a defendant nobody expected.
That changes my argument from “this is lawless” to “this is lawful and I still do not want it available,” which is a weaker-sounding position and a more defensible one.
I write commercial insurance. The habit that matters here is defining the covered peril before the loss rather than after it. So define the peril. Is it discrete criminal conduct by identified people — a false document, a false statement, an unauthorized access to a voting system? Or is it political organization that becomes racketeering because two participants crossed lines? Those are wildly different exposures, and the second one has no natural boundary.
Now the test. Take everything in this indictment and change the names.
A Democratic presidential campaign loses a close state by twelve thousand votes. Its lawyers advance theories about uncounted ballots. The candidate telephones a Republican Secretary of State and asks him to find the votes. Advisers assemble an alternate slate of electors and send certificates to Washington. Two operatives gain unauthorized access to county election equipment looking for evidence of fraud. Several people make statements to a state legislature that turn out to be false.
Now a Republican district attorney in a county that voted seventy percent for the other party indicts the candidate and eighteen associates under a state racketeering statute, forty-one counts, a hundred and sixty overt acts, and books the former president at the county jail alongside her lawyers.
Two questions. Would the theory be lawful? Under a statute drawn like Georgia’s, probably yes — and I have to accept that, because I just accepted it in the other direction. Would I want it brought? No, and I would say so loudly, and I would say the county had taken ownership of a national argument that belonged to the electorate.
Since my answer to the second question does not change when I turn the names back around, I trust it. That is the whole value of running the test rather than asserting the conclusion.
So my objection is to the tool rather than to the prosecutor’s authority to reach for it, and the limiting principle I want is at the connection element. The state should have to show that criminal conduct was a method by which the enterprise operated, not merely that predicate offenses occurred within a political organization pursuing lawful political ends. That standard would still permit prosecution here if the evidence supports it. It would prevent the next office from charting any campaign it dislikes.
I also want to concede the strongest fact against me, because an underwriter who only reads the favorable exhibits is not underwriting. The most concrete allegations in this file are Georgia allegations. A recorded call to Georgia’s Secretary of State about Georgia’s count. A physical breach of Georgia voting equipment in Coffee County. Those are not nationalized theories. They are local crimes if they are crimes at all, and the county unquestionably owns them.
That is exactly why I would have charged them by themselves. A clean set of Georgia counts against the people who committed Georgia acts would have been harder to attack and easier to explain, and it would have carried none of the freight that forty-one counts and nineteen defendants brought with it. The office chose scope. Scope is where the political multiplier lives, and once a multiplier is demonstrated both parties will want it.
Same rule under the next prosecutor. Same rule under the next party. That is how I know it is worth keeping.
Long Island, NY
I draft charging theories, and enterprise liability changes the object of a prosecution. A discrete offense asks what a defendant did. A racketeering theory asks what an organization was, how its affairs were conducted, and how multiple acts formed a pattern. That shift is why this indictment deserves closer reading than it is receiving, and why the reading produces a more complicated answer than either side is offering.
Start with the statutory text, since that is where I always start. Georgia’s definition of enterprise reaches any legal entity, any association in fact, and any group of individuals associated in fact though not a legal entity, and the code says expressly that the term includes both licit and illicit enterprises. The pattern requirement is at least two acts of racketeering activity. The operative element is that a person employed by or associated with the enterprise conducted or participated in its affairs through that pattern.
There is no requirement that the enterprise be criminal in purpose. Anyone arguing that Georgia RICO is a gang statute misapplied is arguing against the code, and Georgia courts have sustained the broad reading — most prominently in the Atlanta Public Schools prosecutions, where a school district’s testing program was treated as the enterprise and convictions followed. That is the doctrinal ground this indictment stands on, and it is firmer than the criticism assumes.
So the drafting question is not whether the theory is available. It is whether the connective element has been pleaded with enough content to mean anything.
Look at what the predicates actually are, because they are not homogeneous and the difference matters for notice. Solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer. Conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree. Conspiracy to commit false statements and writings. Filing false documents. Impersonating a public officer. Influencing witnesses. Perjury. Computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, and conspiracy to defraud the state, arising from the Coffee County equipment breach.
That last cluster is doing something different from the rest. It alleges physical, unauthorized access to Georgia voting systems, and its elements have nothing to do with anyone’s theory of the 2020 election. It is an ordinary state computer-crime case. The solicitation counts, by contrast, ask a jury to determine when a candidate’s request to a public official crosses from advocacy into criminal solicitation — a question with almost no Georgia precedent and enormous First Amendment freight.
Binding those two categories into a single enterprise means a jury will consider them together, and the more ordinary counts will lend credibility to the more novel ones. That is not improper. It is what enterprise liability is designed to do. It is also the reason I would want a court to police the connection element seriously rather than treat it as satisfied by the fact that everyone involved wanted the same electoral outcome.
The federalism dimension is where my real concern sits, and it is sharper than the commentary suggests. Georgia may unquestionably prosecute Georgia crimes touching a federal election — the call was to Georgia’s Secretary of State about Georgia’s count, and the equipment was Georgia’s equipment. Nobody serious disputes the county’s authority over that conduct. What a county’s authority does not obviously extend to is supplying, through a state enterprise theory, the organizing account of a nationwide effort involving conduct in Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada, most of which is charged here as acts in furtherance rather than as offenses.
That is the move I would examine most skeptically. Not the Georgia predicates, which are the county’s business. The use of Georgia predicates to anchor a narrative whose scope is national and whose defendants are largely not Georgians.
Three of these defendants have already moved to remove the case to federal court on the ground that they were federal officers acting within their duties, and Mark Meadows argued that petition this morning. However those motions come out, they identify the same structural tension I am describing: a county enterprise theory whose reach exceeds the county’s evident interest.
My limiting rule would be explicit and I would state it as a proposal rather than as existing law, because it is not existing law. Political organizations should not be treated as racketeering enterprises unless the state shows criminal conduct was a method of the enterprise’s operation rather than conduct occurring within it. That is not campaign immunity — the discrete offenses remain fully chargeable, and the Coffee County counts would be stronger standing alone. It is category discipline, and it is the difference between a county prosecuting crimes and a county authoring a national verdict before the voters render theirs.
Cheyenne, WY
RICO is a gang tool. That is what I would have told you, and it is wrong, and I would rather post the correction than let the entry stand.
Georgia’s statute defines an enterprise to include legal entities and associations in fact, and it says the term takes in lawful enterprises as well as unlawful ones. This district attorney’s most famous case before this one was a racketeering prosecution of the Atlanta school system — a lawful institution, teachers and principals as defendants, falsified test documents as the pattern. Eleven convictions. So a campaign as an enterprise is not a departure from Georgia practice. It is Georgia practice.
I keep books, and the first rule of the trade is that you post to the account the transaction actually belongs in, not the one you expected before you opened the file. I expected this to be a misuse of a gang statute. It is not a misuse. It is a use of a statute that is broader than I knew.
Which leaves me with a narrower entry and a harder question. The statute requires that the enterprise’s affairs were conducted through a pattern of racketeering. That element is where the argument belongs, and it is a real element. In the school case, falsifying the scores was how the testing operation ran — there was no lawful version of the scheme underneath. Here the state has to show something comparable: that the post-election operation did its business through crime, rather than that it was a political and legal operation inside which some people are alleged to have committed offenses.
That is a genuine question and I do not know the answer. Neither does anybody else two weeks in.
What I do want on the record is what the strongest and weakest entries in this indictment are, because they are being averaged together and averages hide things.
The strongest are the most ordinary. Somebody accessed Coffee County’s voting equipment without authority in January 2021. That is computer trespass in every state I know of. It is Georgia equipment, in a Georgia county, and it would be chargeable if there had never been an election dispute at all. And the Raffensperger call was a call to Georgia’s Secretary of State about Georgia’s ballots, recorded, with no dispute about what was said. Whether it was criminal is arguable. Whether Georgia owns it is not.
The weakest are the most political. Charging solicitation of violation of oath for asking public officials to do things is a theory with very little Georgia precedent, and it puts a jury in the position of deciding when a candidate’s request becomes a crime. I would want that count tried alone, where it would have to survive on its own, rather than seated at a table with nineteen defendants and a computer breach.
That is my objection stated properly. Not that the county exceeded its statute. That it merged accounts that should have stayed separate, and the merger does work that the individual entries could not do on their own.
I want to clear up one item that is being posted to the wrong account entirely. The booking photograph was not a prosecutorial decision. The sheriff said publicly before any surrender that every defendant in this case would be processed under the same policy as anyone else in that jail, and all nineteen were photographed. Treating a former president exactly like every other defendant is what the people defending this case said the country should do. It is strange to see the same fact entered as evidence of a stunt. What the photograph shows is the size of the audience, not the intent of the office, and those are different columns.
The audience is the real issue and it is the one I would put in the ledger under nationalization. Fulton County has jurisdiction over Fulton County. Nineteen defendants, forty-one counts, and more than a hundred and sixty acts in furtherance reaching six states produce something larger than a county case, and the country will read it as the account of the 2020 election because it is the most detailed account anyone has published. Meanwhile the voters have their own accounting scheduled for next November, and they are entitled to do it themselves.
Charge the Georgia acts. Prove them or do not. What I would keep off the books is a county enterprise theory that ends up carrying the whole national argument, because the next office to try it will not be in Georgia and will not be prosecuting anybody I am inclined to defend.
