What is it Republicans do not "get"? Donald Trump indicted in Manhattan, Washington DC, Florida and Georgia

Echo editorial opinion published in The Boston Globe:

EDITORIAL- Georgia indictment puts Trump at the top of an organized crime ring.

The district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, brought racketeering charges against the former president and 18 codefendants, showing the alleged attempt to overturn the 2020, election was not mere rhetoric but the work of an organized criminal enterprise.

Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, has been on Donald Trump’s case since he left office. One month after the former president was caught on tape, in January 2021, pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” — conveniently just enough to overcome Joe Biden’s victory there — she started probing Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the election results in her state. And on Monday, after investigating him and his inner circle for more than two years, Willis obtained an indictment of Trump and 18 codefendants on racketeering charges, marking the fourth time the 45th president of the United States has been criminally charged since leaving office.

While the move to indict a former president has gone from unprecedented to an all-too-familiar fixture in the news over the past five months, the Georgia indictment stands out for its breadth. Unlike federal special counsel Jack Smith’s last indictment of Trump, which focused on a narrow set of crimes Trump allegedly committed in his effort to overthrow the government, Willis delivered sweeping charges that outline the markings of an organized criminal enterprise. And by doing so, the indictment helps crystalize how Trump and his inner circle operated in brazenly illegal conduct, not just through deception and lies but through intimidation tactics and pressure campaigns against lawmakers and election workers, going so far as to breach voting machines.

Indeed, by bringing charges under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — or RICO, which was designed to target gangs and other organized crime groups — Willis was able to bundle together a set of criminal charges that connect all the dots and underscore a broader plot. 

Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment of Trump is devastating: A reckless criminal has finally met his match.

Rather than pursuing each involved individual for their own alleged misconduct in separate cases, this will put the whole scheme and its proponents on trial, telling the story of how a group of individuals, at the behest of the former president, conspired to achieve a common illegal goal — overturning the lawful presidential election results.

The case zooms out, in other words, from Trump’s individual actions to show that not only is he responsible for the specific instances of his own misconduct but also for crimes that others potentially committed in concert with, and because of, him and his attempt to hold onto power. His codefendants include high-profile figures like his former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows — an important step that will hopefully serve to deter a future president’s cronies from playing along with such a crooked plot, knowing that they could face prison time for doing so.

As the indictment alleges, the 19 codefendants, as well as an assortment of unindicted coconspirators, “constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.”

Those charges included a campaign to smear and harass an election worker, Ruby Freeman, by baselessly accusing her of election fraud. Some of the codefendants are charged with breaching voting machines and stealing data, including personal voter information — which would be breathtakingly hypocritical, given the former president’s purported concern for election integrity. The indictment goes on to say that the individuals listed “functioned as a unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise.”

What Willis does in these criminal charges is show the American public what has been clear about Trump since he demanded personal loyalty from his political appointees and retaliated against anyone who dared to cross him: that he operates like a mob boss. And what has been clear since the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Trump’s effort to overturn the election he lost was not simply a matter of him lying and telling his supporters that he had won but that he conspired with almost anyone willing to help him to find some way — any way — to stay in power, Constitution be damned.

For an elected Democratic prosecutor to bring charges against a former Republican president unavoidably looks partisan. But that appearance is deceiving. The crimes Trump is accused of reach a level of seriousness that merit both the state and federal justice systems holding him accountable. And with both the Georgia case and the Department of Justice’s criminal charges related to his alleged effort to overturn the election, the American justice system — at both the state and federal levels — is so far showing that it’s working as it should to protect elections from subversion.