Donald Trump: Ex-prez, 18 allies face law used to prosecute mafia

For more than 50 years, prosecutors have relied on a powerful tool to take down people as varied as mafia capos, street gangs, and pharmaceutical executives accused of fuelling the opioid crisis.

Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, is now using the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as Rico, to go after Donald Trump and 18 of his allies for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Willis is using a Rico indictment to tie together elements of a broad conspiracy that she describes as stretching far outside of her Atlanta-area jurisdiction into a number of other swing states, a legal move made possible by the racketeering statute.
The statute requires prosecutors to prove the existence of an “enterprise” and a “pattern of racketeering activity.” Her challenge will be to convince jurors that the disparate group – including an ex-president, a White House chief of staff and a former publicist for Kanye West – were all working together in a sprawling but organised criminal effort to keep Trump in power. A person convicted of racketeering faces up to 20 years in jail and a fine.

For Trump, a packed diary of trial dates
Donald Trump could stand trial four times before the elections on November 5, 2024. The justice presiding over the New York case concerning hush-money payments to a porn actress has scheduled a trial to begin March 25, 2024. The trial in federal case concerning Trump’s retention of classified documents is scheduled to begin May 20, 2024. The dates for the other two trials — in the federal case concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and now in the Georgia case — are still to be determined. Special counsel Jack Smith has proposed Jan. 2, 2024 for the opening of the trial of . Prosecutor in the Georgia case said she would seek a trial within 6 months — Feb 2024 .