Trump and Associates Are Putting Georgia’s RICO Law in the Crosshairs

ATLANTA - The attorney for Kenneth Chesebro, a key defendant in the massive Georgia election racketeering case featuring Donald Trump, took aim at the state racketeering law itself on Thursday while speaking to reporters outside the Fulton County courthouse. 

“Unfortunately, I think the state RICO statute really makes it susceptible to abuse, and casting a very wide net,” Scott Grubman said following a tense pre-trial hearing in which he argued for the right to question the grand jurors who returned the sweeping indictment against the former president of the United States, as well as his client and 17 other co-conspirators. 

Grubman’s comments mirror similar statements he made last week outside the courthouse as well. And they follow a motion he filed that remains pending before the presiding judge challenging the sufficiency of the indictment on the grounds that Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law was misapplied. 

Trump’s attorney Steve Sadow signed onto that motion Monday, adopting the position that “the alleged pattern of racketeering is beyond the ambit of Georgia’s RICO statute, and alternatively, that count one fails to allege a nexus between the enterprise and the alleged racketeering activity.”

Chesebro, a pro-Trump attorney who is the alleged architect of the “false electors” scheme that Trump and his allies tried to use to change the electoral vote outcomes of several 2020 swing states, is set to stand trial alongside fellow pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell on Oct. 23. A trial date hasn’t yet been set for Trump and the other defendants, who on Thursday were officially separated from the case involving Chesebro and Powell. 

District Attorney Fani Willis’ use of the state RICO statute to go after Trump and his associates has drawn praise and criticism for its innovative application of the law. She argues it’s a critical law enforcement tool that can be used to “tell the whole story” of an alleged crime and that even the most complicated of cases still can lead to convictions.

"The reason that I am a fan of RICO is I think jurors are very, very intelligent,” Willis said last year during a press conference announcing the charges in a sweeping criminal case using the law against Atlanta rapper Young Thug and his alleged “Young Slime Life (YSL) gang. 

But legal experts and defense attorneys have signaled all manner of ambivalence about whether RICO is the best tool to prosecute these kinds of cases.

“Not only do you see it in this case… you see it and other high profile RICO cases that have gone on,” Grubman said on Thursday in reference to the challenges Willis has faced in seeing the Young Thug/YSL case through to completion. 

The YSL case has been criticized for its record-breaking length and the consumption of judicial resources, drawing on for nine months without yet having seated a jury. 

The original indictment implicated 28 individuals, of which only seven now remain on trial. Defendants were dropped or severed from the case for a range of reasons: Some took plea deals, others could not be apprehended or failed to retain attorneys, one was separately convicted of murder and dropped from the case this month. 

Scrutiny of Georgia’s RICO law isn’t new, and the ongoing YSL case in Fulton County as well as a case brought last week by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr against 61 individuals involved in the Stop Cop City movement, have drawn sharp criticism of the statute and its application.

The DA’s office initially took the position that  “they're all guilty, they're all violent, none of them could be let off on bond, and then they start making deals left and right and let them off on time served,” Grubman continued. 

Jay Abt, a defense attorney for Deamonte Kendrick, aka the rapper Yak Gotti in the YSL case is critical of the broad use of the RICO statute. 

“We're really testing the bounds of our democracy and our Constitution by prosecuting free speech in both the YSL case and the Trump case, using these RICO statutes,” Abt said in an interview with The Messenger last month. He added that is “because they are broadly written, and it gives the prosecutors a lot of power and authority.”

However, a RICO case involving Atlanta Public Schools officials implicated in a cheating scandal, serves as a counterexample of an effective use of RICO by Willis’ office. The original indictment implicated 35 officials, 12 of whom went to trial with the remainder taking plea deals. The trial ran from September 2014 to April 2015 and set the record for being the longest in Georgia history. Eleven of the 12 defendants were convicted. 

More recently, the case against “Stop Cop City” activists opposed to the development of a massive $90 million public safety training facility slated for construction in Atlanta’s South River Forest, has again inflamed criticism of the law.

The Cop City case indicts a broad swathe of activists, from protestors who threw Molotov cocktails to attorneys raising money for protestors’ bail. While progressives see the state’s case as politically motivated, conservative voices praised it as a template for cracking down on ‘Antifa’.

For Grubman, Chesebro’s attorney, it’s more evidence of a flawed statute.

“If the members of the public, and the members of the General Assembly, do not see the problems with having a statute on the books that you can use to prosecute attorneys who are helping to raise bail, then I don't know what,” Grubman said. “These are problems, and we are ready to go to trial, and we are ready to defend Mr. Chesebro’s rights because quite frankly, he shouldn't have been in this indictment”