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Hey weeds listeners.
As you've probably noticed,
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But we need your help to do that.
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Thanks.
It's the weeds. I'm John Flunhill.
And I'll be honest,
this episode has been a long time coming.
As I'm sure you know, former President Donald Trump
has run into a bit of legal trouble since he left office.
Back in April, he was indicted for the first time.
And honestly, I was ready to throw
what we had already done that week to the side
and do a totally new episode.
And I was ready to do that two more times in June
and at the beginning of August too.
Thankfully, the rest of the Weeds team
was able to get me to sit tight.
And patience truly is a virtue.
Because now, three more indictments later,
the legal challenges facing the former President
are coming into view.
And the latest indictment out of Fulton County, Georgia
is unique.
It's a Rico charge, something that's most commonly
associated with prosecuting organized crime.
AKA the mob.
But before we get into Rico,
here's a quick refresher for anyone not up to speed
on all 91 charges facing Donald Trump.
I'm Andrew Prokop.
I'm senior politics correspondent and vox.
And I cover a lot of the investigations
that have been going on.
Trump has been indicted in four different jurisdictions.
The first was in New York.
Earlier this afternoon, Donald Trump was
arraigned on a New York Supreme Court indictment
on 34 felony counts of false fine business records
in the first degree.
Then he was indicted in Florida related
to charges of mishandling classified documents.
This indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens
in the Southern District of Florida.
Now, I invite everyone to read it in full,
to understand scope, and the gravity of the crimes charged.
Then he was indicted in Washington, DC,
about essentially his plot to stay in power
and overturn the 2020 election result.
Today, an indictment was unsealed,
charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring
to defraud the United States, conspiring
to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring
and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.
And finally, he was indicted in Georgia,
also about his efforts to overturn
the 2020 election result in Georgia, specifically.
Every individual charged in the indictment
is charged with one count of violating
Georgia's racketeer, influenced, and corrupt
organizations at.
Can you walk us through each of these cases?
Like, what do they each mean?
When did they happen?
Like, what's going on here?
So the first indictment that came down
was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
And so this was about the hush money payments
that were made to Stormy Daniels,
who had alleged a sexual encounter with Trump.
A Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen,
had paid her just before the 2016 election,
so she would keep quiet, and Trump reimbursed Cohen
for those payments.
So he's facing 34 counts of falsifying business records.
So next was the second indictment overall,
and the first one brought by special counsel Jack Smith,
who is leading the federal investigations into Trump.
It was filed in Florida, and it relates to a whole set
of classified documents that Trump took with him
when leaving office, and kept with him at Mar-a-Lago,
his Florida estate.
And eventually, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago
and found a good deal, more documents, that were still there.
This indictment came down on June 8th,
but then on July 27th, there were a set of other charges
added to this related to an alleged attempt
by Trump to cover up what the security camera footage
at Mar-a-Lago actually showed
about how he was handling these documents.
What about the third indictment?
So then Jack Smith went ahead with his other indictment,
filed in August 1st in the District of Columbia,
and this was the big one about Trump's effort
to steal the election.
It is a pretty lean, clean indictment,
charging Trump with just four counts
that are related to conspiracy or obstruction.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States,
conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding,
obstruction of an official proceeding,
and conspiracy to disenfranchise voters.
So he's essentially trying four different ways
to charge Trump's actions criminally,
and this will all be litigated and contested in the courts
as Trump tries to argue that,
no, he was just exercising his political speech rights.
And what about this fourth indictment out of Georgia?
So then, Fulton County District Attorney, Funny Willis,
followed up with her own election-related indictment,
where Jack Smith's was pretty lean and stripped down.
This is big and sprawling.
Trump himself is charged with 13 counts,
but he is charged with being a part
of an overall racketeering conspiracy
under the Georgia RICO law,
which is essentially a law modeled after a federal law,
that's similar, that allows prosecutors to basically say,
you are part of a corrupt enterprise
that is trying to do a corrupt thing,
and we are going to basically charge you for that.
So this is where Trump was indicted,
but also allegedly part of the conspiracy
are 18 other defendants,
as well as more than 30 unindicted co-conspirators.
Funny Willis is basically arguing
that this was a pretty big criminal conspiracy
to deprive Georgia voters of the rightful result
in their state, which was Joe Biden's victory.
Andrew Prokop, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
So that's the overview of Trump's legal troubles.
Now that we have the 10,000-foot view,
it's time to zoom in on the most recent indictment.
If you read through this indictment,
you'll see that Fulton County District Attorney,
Funny Willis, has crafted a narrative
alleging a corrupt enterprise,
and she charged former President Donald Trump
and over a dozen co-conspirators under the state's RICO law.
RICO stands for racketeer influence
in corrupt organizations.
That's David Skolansky.
He's a professor at Stanford Law School
and an expert on criminal law and criminal procedure.
And RICO, as we know it, goes back about 50 years.
In 1970, Congress enacted and President signed into law
the federal RICO statute.
And that is the model for RICO statutes
in most states now, including Georgia.
All of these statutes at both the federal and the state level
operate as kind of erector sets for prosecutors.
They let prosecutors take particular crimes
that they have the authority already to charge
and make a new crime out of them.
The crime of participating in an enterprise
through a pattern of racketeering activity.
An enterprise, basically, is any group of people
who are organized either in a formal or informal way.
It could be a criminal gang.
It could be a university.
It could be a union or a public school system
or it could be a group of people
who are working to overturn the results
of a presidential election in a particular state.
Each RICO statute specifies particular crimes
that can count as so-called predicate acts.
The list of crimes that can qualify in Georgia
significantly longer than the list
that can qualify under the federal statute.
A pattern of racketeering activity is two or more
of these specific crimes that are related in some way.
But the basic idea is that if you commit certain crimes
in Georgia and you do that as part of a pattern
that involves some sort of enterprise,
either a formal organization or a loose collection of people,
that's an additional crime, the crime of RICO,
and it works the same way at the federal level.
That's so interesting because this sounds a lot like conspiracy.
What's the difference between RICO and conspiracy charges?
A conspiracy charge requires that everybody in the conspiracy
be part of the same agreement.
Whereas a RICO charge just requires that everybody
who's charged was participating in the same pattern
of racketeering activity through the same enterprise.
So a RICO charge can be much broader.
Not everybody has to have been part of the same agreement
as long as they're part of the same pattern
of racketeering activity using the same enterprise.
So I want to go back in time
and I want you to describe what the lead up to this statute
was like, what was organized crime like prior to 1970?
Was it all just, you know, we've seen the Godfather.
Was it, is this what we're talking about?
Yeah, kind of.
So the phrase organized crime can be used in two different ways.
Sometimes when people use the phrase organized crime,
they mean any crime that's carried out in an organized way
through some sort of system
that more than one person is involved in.
But sometimes when we talk about organized crime,
we have something particular in mind, the mafia.
I want to make them an awfully kind of refuse.
And the mafia was a bigger deal
through the first half of the 20th century than it is today.
And Rico is part of the reason why
it's no longer such a big deal.
In 1970, Congress passed a huge anti-crime bill
that did all kinds of things.
But one of the things that did was create this new offense
of Rico and the motivation for the statute
was concern about the mafia infiltrating
and taking over legitimate businesses.
And that was the heart of what Congress was trying to get at.
But everybody recognized even back then
that you can't have a statute that's only aimed
at Italian-American criminals.
So the statute casts a wider net.
From my understanding the whole kind of point of this
is to get like the big people at the top,
the people who aren't getting their hands dirty.
I mean, Rico is like a lot of statutes
aimed at patterns or combinations of crime
in that the idea often is that you'll be able
to get to the people at the top
in part by going after people who are further down.
Rico has sometimes been used to sweep in people
who operated a much lower level in criminal enterprises.
But it has also been used to go after people towards the top.
Ironically, some of the most famous examples of that
are anti-Mafia prosecutions that Rudy Giuliani led
when he was the US attorney in Manhattan back in the 1980s.
Oh wow, can you tell us a little bit about that?
So Rudy Giuliani first gained national fame
as a crusading federal prosecutor in New York City
and among his most famous prosecutions
were Rico cases against mafia figures,
including very high level mafia figures.
The biggest of these cases was called the Mafia Commission
trial, which was a very significant case
in the mid 1980s against 11 mafia leaders,
including the heads of New York City's five families.
In this indictment alone, we mentioned
five specific murders in other indictments.
In other cases, you've got 20, 30 murders
and mentioned in another indictment,
alleged in another indictment.
Eight of those defendants were tried and convicted under Rico.
And most of them were sentenced to 100 years in prison.
In that case, and others like it,
played a significant role in reducing
the influence of the mafia.
Can you explain how trying a Rico case
differs from trying a regular criminal case?
What is that like?
Yeah, it's really different in two ways.
First of all, Rico introduces a bunch of new legal issues.
If you and I are charged with fraud,
the prosecutors have to prove that we've committed fraud.
But if we're charged with committing fraud and with Rico,
then the prosecutors have to charge
not just that we've committed fraud,
but that we did it in a way that constitutes a pattern
and that we did it through the activities of an enterprise.
So there are additional legal issues
that get added on when Rico's brought into play.
The biggest difference, though,
is that Rico is often charged precisely
because it allows prosecutors to sweep in lots of different events
and lots of different defendants
who ordinarily couldn't be combined in the same case
or at the same trial.
And that means that you wind up with enormous cases
with many, many defendants.
I mentioned that the Mafia Commission case
involved eight defendants.
The Rico case against Donald Trump in Georgia
involves 19 defendants.
And when you have a case involving 19 defendants
and the wide range of crimes that they've been charged
with committing, it creates all kinds of complications.
You have to figure out,
can they all be tried together?
Or is that unfair to one or more of the defendants?
And if they are tried together,
how do you run a trial with 19 separate defendants?
Where do they all sit?
Where do their attorneys sit?
Who gets to question the witnesses first?
How do you handle objections
from 19 different lawyers,
from 19 different parties in the same case?
It can be very unwieldy.
Yeah, I have to admit,
I did not stop and think about the logistical hurdles
of a case this large.
They're enormous.
If you think about trials you've seen,
either real trials or trials in movies or TV,
you have two tables in front of the judge.
The prosecutors are at one table.
The defense is that the other table,
one side calls a witness, the other side
gets the cross-examine them.
Sometimes there are objections and the two lawyers
will go to sidebar with the judge
and argue outside of the jury's hearing.
If you have 19 defendants and lawyers for 19 defendants,
just orchestrating that,
figuring out physically where everybody sits,
figuring out what order you're gonna allow people to talk in,
who gets to question which witnesses when?
It's very complicated.
Okay, so that's Rico 101.
Next up, what's gonna happen
when the Donald goes down to Georgia?
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OK, so we're back and David,
we just learned about the Federal Rego statute.
But now I want to talk about how state statutes
can differ from federal ones.
You mentioned before that Georgia has a longer list of what can qualify under a Rico charge.
Why is that significant?
It's significant because it means that lots of specific Georgia crimes can be part of
this indictment.
So the predicate acts that are charged in this case include offenses that seem narrowly
tailored precisely for circumstances like the ones that are alleged to have occurred
here.
So Georgia, for example, makes it a crime to try to get an elected official to violate
his oath.
So that's a very close fit for what it's alleged Donald Trump did when he called the Secretary
of State in Georgia to swing Georgia from Joe Biden's column into Donald Trump's.
So look, all I want to do is this, I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more
that we have.
That activity is also charged in the special councils indictment against Trump in Washington
DC, but it's charged in connection with a much bigger, more general allegation that Trump
was trying to defraud the United States or conspiring to deprive people of their voting
rights.
Similarly, the fake electors scheme in Georgia is part of the federal indictment in Washington
DC.
It's alleged by the special counsel that this was part of an effort to defraud the United
States, which is a very general allegation.
Georgia makes it a crime to impersonate a state officer or to commit forgery.
And both of those are also predicate crimes for Rico in Georgia.
So the Georgia Rico indictment against Trump and his 18 co-defendants also lists as part
of the pattern of racketeering activity, the forgery of the document identifying the fake
electors as the real electors, and the fact that the electors tried to pass themselves
off as the lawfully selected electors from Georgia.
Similarly, it is a predicate crime for under Georgia's Rico Statute to access computer
records without authorization, which is what some of the defendants are charged with
having done with regard to computerized voting records in Georgia.
It's so fascinating because I mean, the crimes are so specific and the fact, I don't
know, it just, I'm like, how are there such specific crimes that I would never think
of?
Like, you know, I mean forgery, yes, but I would never think of making that a predicate
crime, but it happens to be in, wow.
Yeah, it's another difference between the Georgia case and the federal case.
And it's something that, if there are convictions in this case, might later wind up being important
on appeal.
There's been lots of litigation in the federal courts about how widely federal fraud
statutes should reach.
And I think if Trump is convicted in the Washington DC case, we can anticipate litigation
on appeal about whether the statutes that the Special Counsel has used in that case really
are designed to reach and should reach the conduct that Trump is charged with having
carried out.
Whereas in the Georgia case, the fit of the statutes for the conduct that's charged
is much tighter and much more natural.
It feels very bespoke almost.
I'm like, how, how?
Yeah, I like that word.
Yeah.
Georgia has a statute that makes it a crime to try to convince a public official to violate
his oath.
And one imagines that when that statute was passed, this is exactly the kind of conduct
that the legislators had in mind.
So we know that Trump and 18 named co-defendants have been indicted.
And there are also 30 unindicted co-conspirators.
What's up with that?
How do they factor into this and why aren't they indicted?
That just, that stuck out to me as something that maybe go, huh?
We don't know why they're not indicted.
It could be that the prosecutors are not convinced that they have enough evidence to convict
those people beyond a reasonable doubt.
It could be that the prosecutors are engaged in plea negotiations with some of those
people to see if they want to work out a pre-indipement deal.
So funny Willis is the district attorney who's brought these charges and she's planning
to charge all 19 defendants together.
Can you talk about the advantage of trying everyone together, like, what does, what does
that do?
From a prosecutor's perspective, it allows the prosecutor to tell a more complete panoramic
story.
And it prevents what prosecutors call the empty chair defense.
It prevents defendants from saying, oh, the person who's really responsible for this
criminal activity is somebody who's not even in the courtroom.
Prosecutors are worried that if they try one defendant and then another defendant in the
first trial, defendant one will say, oh, this is really all defendant, two's responsibility
and he's not here.
And then in the second trial, defendant two will say, what was really all defendant one?
And she's not here.
And if you try everybody together, then they're all pointing fingers at each other, which
prosecutors like, because they feel that they can then pursue a strategy of dividing
conquer.
And what about the disadvantages?
It's logistically far more complicated to try a whole bunch of people together.
But it also makes it more difficult to get to trial in the first place, because when
you have multiple defendants, they can raise different legal issues.
And among the issues they can raise is whether it's fair for them to be tried together, whether
they need to have separate trials.
So it can take a long time to work through all those motions and get to the point where
you can have a trial.
Fahni Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, has significant experience
with Georgia's Rico Law.
She's in dieted cases with that statute before and she succeeded in prosecutions with
that statute before.
But the cases in which she's used the statute, I think, show both the advantages and the
disadvantages.
So before she was district attorney when she was just a line prosecutor, Fahni Willis played
a large role in a prosecution under Georgia's Rico Law of 35 educators in the Atlanta area
who were charged with cheating on standardized tests.
That case was successful.
There were most of the defendants played guilty, 12 of them went to trial, 11 of them were
convicted.
But that took a long time.
The case took a year and a half from indictment until the point when trial began and then
the trial itself stretched on for six months.
As district attorney, Willis has also used Georgia's Rico statute to go after the rapper
Jeffrey Williams and his record label, YSL, which Willis's office has charged, has been
operating as a criminal gang.
28 defendants were charged under Georgia's Rico statute in that case.
All of them have entered into plea deals.
But there are eight defendants who are still scheduled to be tried.
The trial in that case actually started this past January.
But we still haven't finished jury selection in that case.
When you introduce this many defendants and this many legal issues, it can complicate
things both before trial and during trial.
Yeah, I have to admit that this Donald Trump case isn't the first time I've seen Georgia's
Rico laws in the news.
I've been following the YSL case and I can tell you I did not have young thug and Donald
Trump facing similar charges on my 2023 bingo card.
What does Willis's affinity for Rico charges tell us?
I think she's comfortable with the statute and she's comfortable with big cases involving
lots of defendants.
She doesn't seem afraid of these cases and she seems very comfortable with trying to
address the complexities in a Rico case and using the law to allow her to present a panoramic
picture in court and also using the law to sweep in lots of people with the hope that
some of them will decide to plead guilty and cooperate with the government.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the YSL case and how long it's taken.
So Trump is booked and busy this next year between all the court cases and his presidential
campaign.
The Georgia DA wants to start that trial in March and the DOJ wants its trial in January.
Trump's lawyers have said that to go through all the terabytes of documents that they need
to for the federal case that they're going to need a 2026 start date.
You know, that sounds like a long time, but when you just think of the sheer volume of
documents and discovery, it does seem reasonable.
I mean, what should we expect as far as timelines go?
The timeline is the whole battle here.
We're used to thinking of the battle in a criminal case being what happens at trial.
But in these cases, the real battle is whether there's going to be a trial at all.
Sometimes criminal defendants will say, I look forward to vindicating myself in court.
That's not anything you ever hear from Donald Trump because from his perspective, any criminal
trial in which he's a defendant is a disaster set aside for a moment, the possibility that
he'll be convicted and sentenced to prison, which I think is a real possibility in all
these cases.
The mere fact of a trial is a disaster for him.
It's a disaster because it takes him off the campaign trail, and it's a disaster because
it's completely inconsistent with his whole method of operating.
His strategy is to act the big man, to be the tough guy, the guy who's in charge, and
he likes to talk in settings where nobody contradicts him, nobody tells him what he's
supposed to talk about, nobody challenges him.
That's not what's going to happen in a trial.
In a trial, the discussion is run by the judge who applies rules of evidence and rules of
relevance.
The discussion proceeds at trial through proof that has to be introduced in court.
And Trump, for the most part, will be sitting in court, listening to other people, talk
about him.
So this is as far as can be imagined from the setting that he likes to be in, which is
when he's on some stage in front of an adoring crowd.
So his whole strategy in the weeks and months to come will be to stay out of court, not
to have a trial.
And the question is, how successful will he be in that endeavor?
I think some of these cases are likely to be able to move faster than others.
The Washington DC prosecution of Trump may be the one that is most likely to be tried
soon because it's a stripped down case.
It has only one defendant.
It's narrowly focused on Donald Trump.
And it's true that Trump's lawyers have suggested that the volume of documents in this
case means that the trial shouldn't be scheduled until 2026.
But I don't think that the judge is going to buy that.
And I think Trump's lawyers know that the judge isn't going to buy that.
One more quick break, and we'll jump into some of the unknowns of this Rico case, and
the complicated legal landscape Trump is facing.
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Okay, David.
So there are a lot of what ifs right now and that's because this is a gigantic case with
some very serious and some very obvious implications.
But before we get into what that guilty verdict could mean, I want to talk about logistics.
Are we going to see this trial happen during the primary or are things going to get shuffled
around?
I will be surprised if this case can go to trial as quickly as the DA says that she wants
it to go to trial.
She said that she would like to see a trial date within six months.
But I think with 19 defendants, that is a real stretch in the Atlanta Educator's case
that Fannie Will has tried under Georgia's Rico Statute.
It took a year and a half to get to trial after indictment.
The YSL case is still in jury selection, which started in January.
And neither of those cases have some of the additional complexities that this case has.
Neither of those cases, for example, are going to involve efforts to remove the case to
federal court, which this case does involve.
Mark Meadows, one of Trump's co-defendants in the Atlanta case, has already said that
he wants his case moved to federal court.
Other defendants, including Trump, may join in that request, and that's yet another layer
of complication.
And then, of course, we have the complication that the defendants, in this case, including
Trump, have legal complications elsewhere, particularly Trump, who's facing three other
criminal indictments.
And I am sure that part of Trump's lawyer strategies will be to try to use each of these
cases against the other, to try to use the New York, Florida, and Washington case to slow
down the Georgia case, and to try to use the Georgia, Florida, and New York case to slow
down the Washington DC case.
So I think each of these cases involves its own challenges, but particularly with 19 defendants
and the range of legal issues that the Georgia case raises, a trial starting six months
from now strikes me as ambitious.
I'm glad that you mentioned the Mark Meadows request, because to me, the reason behind
it seems very obvious, you know, if it's federal, and then, you know, one of your co-defendants
becomes president, there's a good chance you'll get pardoned, or, you know, you could
be more hopeful towards that.
But I kind of, I kind of want to talk out more of that, tease out more of that, not just
the results, but what would happen to this case if it's moved from Georgia to a federal
case?
What would happen?
So I don't think it's clear that it would mean that a conviction would be subject
to presidential pardon.
In fact, I think it probably would not be subject to presidential pardon, even if it's
a move to federal.
Yeah, because if it's moved to the federal court, it's still
a trial for state crimes.
The only thing that changes is the courtroom and the procedural rules that attach to the
trial.
So if the case gets moved to federal court, the federal rules of criminal procedure
get applied, the federal rules of the evidence get applied, and the jury is drawn from the
area that is covered by the federal court, which would be larger than Fulton County.
So one possible advantage for a defendant like Meadows in moving the case to federal court
is that jury pool change, and you might get a more favorable jury pool.
Another possible advantage is that his lawyers may feel that a federal court is a friendlier
venue for them because they are more familiar with federal procedures than the state prosecutors
will be.
I'm going to be interested to see whether Trump joins in this request, because I think
it has advantages and disadvantages for Trump.
For Trump as for Meadows, it may mean a more favorable jury pool, but it may also mean
that once the case gets moved, it can move along faster rather than slowly, because
federal courts in general are more used to large complicated cases, and it's not clear
that Trump would be better off with this case in federal court.
Nonetheless, if I had to bat, I would bat that his lawyers would join in the request.
The reason is that it's yet another thing that could slow things down, at least in the
near term.
Every additional legal issue, I think, is good from Trump's perspective, because it creates
more things that have to be argued about, and what Trump wants most, what his side wants
most, are things that we have to argue about in court where Trump doesn't have to be sitting
in court as a defendant.
So legal issues are perfect in this regard, because he doesn't have to be in the court
room.
He can let the lawyers duke it out.
I think the jury pool thing is so interesting, because, you know, Fulton County is bright
blue, like it's Atlanta.
And then, you know, I was listening to our colleagues over at Today Explained.
They did a wonderful episode when the news initially broke, and Georgia kind of in general
has Trump fatigued.
They're a little bit over it, even the Republicans, when you look at his relationship with the
governor, like they, they are ready to move on.
Yeah, it's hard to know how that would play out in a criminal case, but it might well
mean that the larger jury pool wouldn't wind up helping Trump or any of the other defendants,
because there are lots of Republicans in Georgia who seem fed up and done with the efforts
to overturn their election results and meddle in their state governance.
So what, what the possibility of moving this from, you know, Fulton County to federal court
mean that the mandatory prison time changes, like what does that mean as far as sentencing,
do we know?
It doesn't change anything in terms of sentencing, because it would mean that the procedural rules,
the rules about how the court operates would be the federal rules and not the state rules.
But the substantive law that gets applied, the criminal prohibitions, the sentencing provisions,
those would all be Georgia law, which I know sounds odd.
You would think, well, if it's all Georgia law, why would you be moving it to federal court?
And it might not move to federal court precisely because generally cases involving state
crimes are handled in state courts.
What complicates things here is that there's a statute, a federal statute that says criminal
defendants have a right to move their trial from state court to federal court if they have
a plausible defense that centers around their federal responsibilities.
And that's what Neto says, Neto says, look, my defense, and he says it's a good one, is
that I was just pursuing my duties and doing my job as the president's chief of staff.
And that's my defense.
And because it's my defense and because it's at least a plausible defense, the statute says
we can move this trial to federal court because there's a big federal issue involved that
has to do with the supremacy of federal law to state law.
And that's what the federal district court is going to have to decide whether there really
is a plausible defense here that arises from the federal position that Neto has had at
the time.
And if Trump joins in the request, the issue will be the same with regard to Trump.
Would the federal court would it still be in Georgia or would it be like somewhere else?
It would probably be in Georgia.
I mean, you could conceivably move the trial out of the state, but that's generally not
done.
And I doubt it would be done here.
So the trial would be held in Georgia.
It would be in a federal court, though in Georgia, not in a state court.
So we've already established that this is one of two Rico cases out of Georgia that
I have had my eye on.
The other is the YSL case and we've seen in that case, people take plea deals.
Are we going to see the same likely in this other case, like our people going to start
singing like birdies, like what, what are we about to see take place?
I think you'll see some plea deals with 19 defendants.
The odds that all of them will decide to go to trial is low.
And that hasn't happened in the other cases where Willis has charged lots of defendants.
It's just the law of numbers that when you have this many people involved, it's unlikely
that they will all decide that they want to throw in there a lot with the lead defendant
in the case, particularly when even if Trump wins the election, he won't be in a position
to pardon any of them.
Before I let you go, I'm really curious about your thoughts on this case and the grand scheme
of things.
Like, what is this telling us about our judicial system and our politics and the state
of our democracy right now?
Yeah, well, the jury is still out, you could say.
Because I think Donald Trump is putting American democracy to a test in all kinds of ways.
One of the ways he's putting it to the test is by pressing to see whether our legal system
can deal with the kinds of blatant violations of the rule of law that Donald Trump has been
engaging in for years.
And we've never had a president who tried to throw out the results of the election in which
he was voted out of office by gaming the electoral college, by putting together fake groups
of electors by pressuring the vice president to violate his oath and pressuring a state,
secretary of state to violate his oath.
So it's not clear whether our legal system and our democracy are up to these challenges.
I think the indictments are good news in the sense that they suggest that our system
is at least healthy enough to get these charges filed and to start moving them towards trial.
But it remains to be seen whether the system will be strong enough to actually get them
to trial.
I think they will be, but we'll have to see.
David Skolanski, thank you so much for joining us on the weeds.
Thank you, Jake here.
This is a lot of fun.
Before we go, I wanted to circle back to that conversation we had earlier with Andrew,
because none of this is happening in a vacuum.
I asked him what this could mean for the 2024 presidential race.
There's nothing stopping Trump from being a presidential candidate.
He's going to be on the ballot for the Republican nomination.
If voters pick him, he'll get that nomination and then he'll be on the ballot in the fall
of 2024, likely running against Joe Biden.
You know, there's a question of how long these trials will take.
Some of them have dates that have been set up.
We don't know if those dates will move, but it is possible he could be found guilty or
even sentenced to prison before the 2024 election.
But even if that happens, you know, there's no automatic, like, magical legal trick that
just knocks him out of contention for the presidency.
He'll still be on the ballot and it will still be up to the voters.
And I mean, it's hard to game out exactly how it would play out because it's pretty unprecedented
situation, but I think most people's assumption at this point is that, you know, if he wins
the election, he's going to be the next president.
The 19 co-defendants have until noon on Friday, August 25th to surrender themselves to the
right street jail in Fulton County.
Donald Trump is expected to turn himself in for booking on Thursday.
To stay on top of this story and the rest of the news, head to Vox.com.
That's all for us today.
Thank you to Andrew Prokop and David Skolansky for joining me.
Our producers Sophie LaLonde, Erica Wong engineered this episode, Caitlin Pinsy-Moog fact-checked
it, our editorial director is A.M. Hall, and I'm your host, John Glenn Hill.
The weeds is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Vox Creative
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