rico cases, any conspiracy case, is messy. you have got if you ve got ten defendants, you ve got ten people making opening statements and cross examining witnesses and jumping up and saying, your honor, i object. so, it is a little bit different than the normal trial. but it s nothing that a prosecutor, and particularly one like willis, who has a number of these rico cases under her belt, isn t well equipped to handle. joyce, let me ask a follow-up on that. in terms of the penalties these folks are actually facing, there s a lot of back and forth around whether rico charges in georgia have a mandatory five year sentence or whether a convicted person can serve probation. also, whether it is five years in jail or a fine, or both i mean, how real is the legal peril here? right. so, anyone who is confused by georges statutory scheme is doing a really good job of reading the lot. because it is, in fact, really confusing. the statute the rico statute itself says that people who a
it s back in 1983, i think ron, when ron came to visit me to talk about putting together a rico case. at that point, we all thought that there was a possibility of putting together a case on the commission of the mafia. but it was on the drawing board at the time. and there were an awful lot of people, including people within law enforcement that thought that that was totally unrealistic, ridiculous, could not be done. rudy giuliani did it. the top bosses in new york s most powerful mafias were given 100-year prison sentences. and the case may giuliani famous. and he used that fame to ultimately run for mayor of new york and, well, you know the rest of the story. but now a version of the same law georgia s rico statute a version of that law could be rudy giuliani s downfall. of all the indictments former president trump faces, one of the things that makes yesterday yesterday s unique is how many
two, because he doesn t believe the statutes in his state would allow him to bring a case. he actually stood up and supported nevada state legislators, who wanted to make being a fake elector itself a crime in nevada. but where it came to sort of more nebulous statutes that could apply to lots of different situations, like forgery or solicitation, he, unlike fani willis, thought that wasn t enough. so, he announced a in may he would not bring charges. i will be curious to see whether this indictment causes aaron forward, who is the democrat elected a. g. in nevada, to revisit that conversation. you would think and let s talk about josh kaul over in wisconsin the democratic a. g. with the sort of opening i don t know what you would call it a pandora s box? once one fulton county da says, look at what happened in our state. it was a miscarriage of justice, and you are sitting there as a democrat in your own state, where the same thing, basically, unfolded, it seems to me
but some of them it s just not so clear. and so i think we are going to have to wait and see what else comes out on this. but i think it is certainly clear that they have some people cooperating, and that they want some more, and that they have certainly added this large group as a pressure mechanism. yeah. so, joyce 18 other named an coconspirators, 30 unnamed, unindicted coconspirators. we are talking about a large number of people involved in this case in one way or another. they are directly indicted or floating around indictments potentially cooperating what is your assessment about how this case gets to trial? how practically this seem so unwieldy, so sprawling. for the layman, lay woman, lay person, how does fani willis get this done? you know, when fani willis indicted another rico case, the atlanta educators case, a
the important things about georgia s, so many other people who were part of this conspiracy also have been indicted. to the georgia case, what do you make of the washington post analysis this morning, effectively saying the case the d. a. willis has brought is overly broad and that that could ultimately help trump. this is a quote from that piece. if jurors eventually balk at the breadth of the charges in georgia, that could turn public opinion in trump s favor. this is according to a republican consultant in atlanta. i think the overreach hurts the credibility of the rest of the cases. do you think there s any merit in that? . i don t tell excitedly that our law enforcement officials should pursue wrongdoing, here regardless of politics or pr. at the end of the day, we have trump on tape. we have so many of his allies, including some white house chief of staff, actively engaging in threatening elected officials to overturn the