He's been indicted again, good and hard this time

The NYT reports about the latest indictment against DJT and 18 other miscreants:

Former President Donald J. Trump and 18 others have been indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in a sweeping racketeering case, accusing Mr. Trump and some of his former top aides of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

The 41-count indictment, an unprecedented challenge of presidential misconduct by a local prosecutor, brings charges against some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff at the time of the election.

Donald J. Trump’s legal team includes a former prosecutor with experience in white collar cases and a career defense lawyer who started as a public defender and is best known for defending hip-hop artists.

The defense lawyer, Drew Findling, is known in rap circles in Atlanta as a “magician” because of his effective defense of clients like Cardi B, Migos and Gucci Mane.

It is very good to see Meadows, a rabid, morally rotted Christian nationalist, finally nailed for his role in the coup attempt. Where the hell is the US DoJ?

The WaPo reports that DJT faces 13 counts if illegal acts, presumably felonies. All the defendants have been indicted for racketeering, which carries a mandatory minimum jail sentence for a conviction. The perjury count contradicts DJT's defense in the federal lawsuit. Another WaPo article reports: 

A core Trump defense in the federal Jan. 6 case is the idea that he was merely exercising free speech.

But that defense won’t work as easily in Georgia, which has a broad prohibition against making “a false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation … in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government.”  

That law figures heavily in the indictment, with the phrase “false statement” appearing more than 100 times, including as individual counts and as part of the alleged racketeering. (The indictment lists 161 overt acts as part of the latter.) Defendants like Trump and Giuliani are accused of making false statements about voter fraud publicly, in legal filings, in hearings in Georgia and elsewhere.  

One of the more striking details comes in the 38th and 39th counts — the last charges against Trump — which date to Sept. 17, 2021, nearly eight months after Trump left office.

The charge has to do with a letter Trump sent to Raffensperger in which he enclosed a report alleging that 43,000 ballots in Atlanta-based DeKalb County were not properly handled using chain-of-custody rules. Trump suggested that Raffensperger “start the process of decertifying the election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner.”

The indictment accuses Trump and others of having “corruptly solicited Georgia officials, including the Secretary of State and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to violate their oaths to the Georgia Constitution and to the United States Constitution by unlawfully changing the outcome of the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia in favor of Donald Trump.”

One can only hope that the coup attempting dictator wannabe lying liars face non-trivial consequences for their filthy lying lies, and their power-lust driven coup attempt.

Part of the 1st page

of the indictment

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