By Laura Harris
Prominent conservative attorney Andrew McCarthy, a typical Trump-basher, wrote an article last week completely blowing up corrupt Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ garbage indictment of President Trump. It turns out there is a “giant hole” in the indictment that should be grounds for immediate dismissal.
As Cristina Laila and Jim Hoft previously reported, Trump and 18 other Republicans were indicted by corrupt Fulton Country District attorney Fani Willis late Monday night on 41 total charges. These include RICO and Conspiracy.
Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, Mike Roman were some of the other notable names indicted by Willis.
Andy McCarthy wrote an explosive article in the Messenger Thursday which provides the clearest case yet for Trump’s total exoneration from these garbage charges. He focuses precisely on the key part of Willis’s indictment: the RICO conspiracy.
McCarthy writes:
Why has DA Willis invoked Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which is typically applied to mobsters engaged in the familiar rackets of murder, extortion, trafficking in narcotics and stolen goods, gambling, prostitution and so on? Because there’s a giant hole in her case: the lack of a clear crime to which Trump and his co-defendants can plausibly be said to have agreed.
McCarthy briefly puts aside RICO and explains in full detail what a conspiracy means. A conspiracy, McCarthy notes, is an agreement to violate a criminal statute. This takes at least two people.
Moreover, McCarthy explains that “there must be a meeting of the minds about the crime that is the objective of the conspiracy.” If there does not exist an agreement regarding the crime, a conspiracy does not exist.
The constitutional process dictates that Americans cannot be charged with a crime and forced to stand trial unless probable cause exists that a crime has been committed.
McCarthy in his article next emphasizes the importance of Americans understanding why defendants have been charged in a particular case. He then points out that Willis is charging Trump with a crime for engaging in a completely legal action (trying to reverse the 2020 election results). McCarthy calls this “strange.”
Even though prosecutors bear the burden of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt before there can be a conviction, we can easily understand why the defendants have been charged. If they are charged with conspiracy, the indictment will clearly state the crime they allegedly agreed to commit — e.g., drug trafficking, bank robbery, murder, extortion.
That is what’s so strange about DA Willis’s indictment. She alleges that the 19 people named in her indictment are guilty of conspiracy because they agreed to try to keep Donald Trump in power as president — specifically, to “change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”
Trying to change an election outcome is legal; the end doesn’t become illegal if pursued by illegal means — instead, those illegal means can be charged as crimes. But there is no conspiracy unless the objective itself is clearly a crime. You don’t see prosecutors alleging, say, that defendants were in a “conspiracy to unlawfully” commit murder or robbery. Murder and robbery are crimes.
If two or more people agree to commit murder or robbery, that is an agreement to commit a crime — a conspiracy. To the contrary, an agreement to try to reverse the result of an election is not an agreement to commit a crime.
McCarthy goes back to the RICO conspiracy charges which Willis laid out against Trump and the 18 other defendants. As he notes, a RICO conspiracy is an agreement to participate in such an enterprise — to belong to the group and sustain the group so that it continues to generate power and profits.
There was no organized effort and no crime. The fact is that Trump is getting charged by a partisan prosecutor for exercising his constitutional rights.
**Source
I happen to be a lawyer, and although I do not practice law in the USA, the criminal codes and requirements are similar across all Western countries (while procedural law, i.e. the rules for how the court case is treated in court, is vastly different from continental European law, and US law).
It has always been obvious that there isn’t so much a “giant hole” in Fani Willi’s case (the one against Trump, not the case against herself and her lover, which appears to be very substantian), as a complete lack of a “case”, precisely because what she is seeking to punish Trump for is him doing things that are extremely legal, i.e. claimning that there was election
fraud in 2020 (which there was), and demanding that this be rectified by the State of Georgia (and maybe also ny the US Congress, I haven’t read the indictment in the case). At no point did Trump ask or seek to pressume somebody to do something that was illegal.
So there never was a case.
But we saw in Judge Enrogon’s case that this judge was willing to convict Trump of a purely fictional crime, while the facts of the case CLEARLY exonorated Trump. The Engoron case is funny in that the judge forces Trump to repay to the banks a purely fictional loss, i.e. a loss that they never suffered, but that the judge alleges they have suffered, because they COULD have charged higher interest rates, had they known that the collateral (liens) that Trump offers for the loans had a lower value
than he states.
That is absurd for several reasons:
1) The banks always due their own due diligence and check the value of the property themselves -they must, of course, for in many cases the debtor will indeed inflate the value of the property – that is sort of standard behaviour by debtors, and this is well known,
2) In order to reach his verdict, Jugde Engoron sets the value of the Mar-a-Lago estate at USD 18 million, which is impossibly low. Even if he were right the other bases for his judgement (and he is not), this alone invalidates his verdict, and
3) normally you can only be forced to pay damage to a person or company that has actually SUFFERED damage, which the bank have not, they even asserted that in the case themselves.
On top of this, judge Engoron stated that Trump and his two sons may not act as company executies for 3 years in New York, which can only be a penalty for something that approaches criminal wrongdoing. Since no wrongdoing has been committed, that part of the verdict is also obviously wrong.
So there are 3 options:
1) Judge Engoron is corrupt
2) Judge Engoron is criminally incompetent
3) 1 & 2 applies
Personally I think 1) is the correct one, but there is no option 4 that the verdict is correct.
Note, however, that the judge overseeting Fani Willi’s case seems to be following the rule of law. It is a sign of the times that I must praise him for that, but so it is.
Quality post, Francis. I enjoyed reading that.
I agree, except, it was my understanding that the 350 million dollar will go to the state NYC, not the banks. I can be wrong, I have not followed every minute of the case.