Sweeping Georgia Indictment Adds to Trump’s Mounting Legal and Political Woes - Horowitz

Sweeping Georgia Indictment Adds to Trump’s Mounting Legal and Political Woes - Horowitz

The season of Trump indictments was capped off last week by a Fulton County, Georgia grand jury handing down a detailed and sweeping indictment of the former President and 18 others, including Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows, for their corrupt, illegal efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. In his 4th indictment, Mr. Trump is charged for overseeing a broad conspiracy, scheming and then either conducting or greenlighting numerous illegal actions, all designed to negate the will of the majority of Georgians who voted in the 2020 presidential election.   

 

As Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis put it in a media conference held the evening the indictment was unsealed, “The indictment alleges that rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result.” The district attorney is prosecuting the former president under Georgia’s version of the federal racketeering influence and corruption law (RICO).  This state law has been employed successfully in Georgia not only in cases against gangs and mobsters, but in previous cases of political corruption, most prominently in a standardized test rigging scheme conducted by Atlanta school officials.

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Arguing that Ms. Willis is on sound legal ground,  Andrew McCarthy, a conservative columnist, former federal prosecutor and noted legal expert, aptly summarized the charges in a recent New York Post column: “Willis depicts Trump and his campaign as the overarching racketeering enterprise, and alleges that this group engaged in a variety of schemes all aimed at corruptly reversing the election outcome — from Trump’s efforts to pressure Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to invalidate ballots cast for Biden, to the so-called “fake electors” plot to substitute a slate of Trump electors for the slate of electors who cast the state’s electoral votes for Biden, consistent with the popular election result.”

 

In his public response to the indictment, Donald Trump continued to falsely claim that he actually won Georgia, while continuing to fail to provide any credible evidence that this was the case. His false assertions were immediately refuted by Governor Kemp and Secretary of State Rafffensberger, the 2 most prominent statewide Republican elected officials in Georgia. Both forcefully and accurately reasserted that the election was not stolen. Even if this case does not come to trial until after the 2024 election, the publicity surrounding it, along with Mr. Trump’s predictable efforts to relitigate the Georgia results and defend his indefensible actions in the state, will make it even less likely that the former president will win Georgia in 2024, if he emerges as the Republican nominee.

 

Taken together, the mounting impact of the 4 indictments are making what was already a daunting general election in which Mr. Trump would have been the decided underdog even more uphill. More than half of Americans (53%) and more than 60% of independents (62% )“believe Trump did something illegal when it comes to efforts to change the 2020 election results,” according to a recent Fox News poll. “An additional 20% believe Trump did something wrong, but not illegal, while one quarter say he did nothing seriously wrong (24%),” documented the Fox News poll.

 

Similarly, about half of Americans say he did something illegal in his efforts to overturn the Georgia results, as shown by a series of recent national polls.  Additionally, more than 6-in-10 Americans (63%) think that “the charges approved by a grand jury in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state are serious (47%) or somewhat serious (16%),” according to a an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted in the wake of the indictment.

Currently, nearly 2-out-of-3 Americans (64%) say they will definitely not (53%) or probably not (11%)  vote for Donald Trump. according to an AP/NORC poll. Similarly, more than 6-in-10 Americans have an unfavorable view of the former president, according to the same poll. As his various criminal cases play out between now and the general election, it is hard to see how these strongly negative overall perceptions of him improve. This is especially the case when one considers that Mr. Trump’s defiant responses, attacking prosecutors, judges and potential witnesses, as well as continuing to insist he was the real winner of the 2020 election in the face of the 70% of Americans that disagree with him, may play well with his base-- but turn off the rest of electorate.

 

Nominating Donald Trump is the surest way to reelect President Biden.  It will be interesting to see if a critical mass of Republican elected officials and primary voters wake up to this political reality—before it is too late.