Guardian: Fulton County prosecutors prepping a “Kraken on steroids” racketeering case against Trump

Will the “Kraken on steroids” end up turning on its sponsor? Fani Willis has remained mainly mum about what charges might end up in an indictment of Donald Trump, as Karen noted this morning, but the Guardian has sources claiming that prosecutors have prepared a rather sweeping racketeering case. The basis of this would involve some known elements of the investigation, including the ill-advised call from Trump to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 12,000 votes to reverse the outcome of the election.

Note the curious inclusion of “computer trespass,” however:

The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter. …

In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.

Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.

Computer trespass? It turns out that the conspiracy theory regarding Dominion and Sidney Powell herself may play a role in the racketeering case too. According to the Guardian, a group of operatives allegedly paid by Powell allegedly breached Dominion machines in nearby Coffee County, who then copied data and uploaded it to a website in an attempt to prove their allegations against Dominion — presumably by crowdsourcing the code.

The breach itself is not “alleged,” though. Last September, CNN and other media outlets reported that one of the fake electors promoted by the “Stop the Steal” effort from Team Trump had spent “hours” in the office when and where the breach occurred, the day after the January 6 riot:

Newly obtained surveillance video shows for the first time what happened inside a Georgia county elections office the day its voting systems are known to have been breached on January 7, 2021.

A Republican county official in Georgia and operatives working with an attorney for former President Donald Trump spent hours inside a restricted area of the Coffee County elections office that day. Among those seen in the footage is Cathy Latham, a former GOP chairwoman of Coffee County who is under criminal investigation for posing as a fake elector in 2020. …

The new video, obtained as part of a years-long civil lawsuit in Georgia related to the security of voting systems there, shows Latham remained in the office for hours as those same operatives set up computers near election equipment and appear to access voting data.

The footage also features the two men Latham escorted into the building earlier that day, Scott Hall and Paul Maggio, both of whom have acknowledged they were part of a team that gained access to Coffee County’s voting systems.

Call it a “Kraken on steroids” racketeering case. The breach was real. But can Willis tie it to Powell, and then tie that into a racketeering-qualified organized effort?

Those questions become important if the Guardian’s sources are accurate. One can grasp why Willis would structure this as a racketeering case, under the circumstances. For instance, Willis’ jurisdiction only includes Fulton County. How can she charge a crime in another jurisdiction? A racketeering charge allows Willis to go beyond her specific jurisdiction — and also wrap up a number of other acts that might not get charged otherwise:

The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately. …

Though Coffee county is outside the usual jurisdiction of the Fulton county district attorney’s office, the racketeering statute would allow prosecutors to also charge what the Trump operatives did there by showing it was all aimed towards the goal of corruptly keeping Trump in office.

Needless to say, tying Trump personally to the hack in Coffee County would present a rather foreboding challenge to Willis. But the racketeering charge may allow her to work around that. At least at the federal level, the RICO statute only requires that prosecutors prove that each defendant belongs to a criminal racket or corrupt organization; if they do that, then each member becomes legally responsible for all of the crimes committed by the organization. That’s how the feds eventually busted up the Mafia, among other types of organized crime. Presumably, Georgia’s racketeering law works the same way or at least similarly in that regard.

Willis’ argument would then become something like this: Powell worked for Trump at the time around this plot to commit a felonious criminal trespass to advance Trump’s interest in overturning the election. At or around the same time, Trump attempted to unduly influence Raffensperger into changing the outcome of the election. Ergo, a criminal racket is established with election fraud as its purpose. There may well be other acts offered in support of a racketeering charge; Georgia’s statute requires two separate “qualifying” crimes, but the more the merrier. Also, solicitation of a crime can be used as a predicate for one or both — and Willis will likely allege that the call to Raffensperger was a solicitation to election fraud.

This is still going to be a tough lift, though. Latham and the hackers certainly have some potential legal exposure in Coffee County, but it seems interesting that apparently nothing has been done about that so far, even with the video and testimonial evidence in hand last September.  But does Willis has evidence that ties that crime to Powell? And can she firmly establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump’s intent with the call to Raffensperger was corrupt, or did he truly believe that votes hadn’t been fully counted and wanted Raffensperger to fix what he saw as a real problem?

We’ll likely start getting some answers soon on these questions. Whether we get enough answers is another question. After the past few years, we have all learned to take “Kraken on steroids” claims about legal cases with a Zeus-sized grain of salt.