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This is a regulation created to combat organized crime and which in the past served to convict the heads of the main mafia families in New York. Now, a Georgia prosecutor is using the RICO Act to prosecute former President Donald Trump and 18 others for allegedly conspiring to reverse the results of the 2020 election. This is just one of four criminal cases facing the Republican tycoon and for which who is expected to go to trial in 2024, the same year he hopes to be re-elected.
In 2020, Donald Trump lost the election against Democrat Joe Biden by a difference of seven million votes. The Republican falsely claimed for weeks that his rival’s victory was due to “widespread fraud.” These statements deeply divided the country and framed the violent takeover of the Capitol that the United States experienced on January 6, 2021.
In the midst of multiple cases against him, some of them for his alleged attempts to reverse the results of the elections, Trump now faces an indictment by a grand jury in Georgia, a state where the magnate lost by just under 12,000 votes against Biden. . The document that indicts him ensures that after the elections, Trump and 18 other defendants “refused to accept” that the then-president lost and says they all participated “knowingly and wholly in a conspiracy to illegally change the outcome of the election.”
The process is carried out under the Corrupt and Influenced by Extortion Organizations Act, known as RICO for its acronym in English, passed in 1970 to combat organized crime. Various states then created their own versions of this legislation, but Georgia’s was the most stringent of all, due to the fact that it included more charges.
The RICO law marked a before and after in the fight against the mafia because it made it possible to consider the facts of all the actors in an organization and relate them to those who gave the orders. RICO became famous when Rudy Giuliani, top prosecutor in Manhattan in the 1980s, managed to prosecute the top families in New York with it. Paradoxically, Giuliani, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, is one of the co-defendants in this case.
Trump was charged with 13 of a total of 41 charges in the case. Among the charges brought together by the tycoon are extortion, document falsification, perjury and false statements.
If convicted in the Georgia case, the Republican could face between five and 20 years.
But, in addition, in recent months, the tycoon has been charged in three other criminal cases.
At the federal level, the so-called case of January 6 in Washington it also investigates the president’s alleged efforts to remain in office. It is led by special counsel Jack Smith, in charge of Trump investigations at the Justice Department. The trial will begin in March 2024.
Also, at the federal level, Trump was charged for the improper handling of classified documents, to take them and hide them at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. Trump faces 40 criminal charges and a trial is expected in May 2024.
The former president also faces state indictment in New York for allegedly creating a secret money scheme to avoid a sexual scandal with the porn actress Stormy Daniels in the presidential campaign of 2016.
These four criminal cases and other civil processes are on the magnate’s agenda, who appears as the favorite candidate of the Republicans for next year’s elections, in which he hopes to be re-elected.
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