Fani Willis’s Monstrous Trump Case | National Review
If Willis is to be believed, a person need not commit or agree to commit any statutory crime in order to be guilty of RICO conspiracy.
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Excerpts…
As previously explained, I don’t believe Willis’s racketeering-conspiracy charge states a crime. A conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime — meaning a statutory offense. If the agreement is aimed at achieving a lawful objective, it is not a criminal conspiracy — period. If people who agree to a lawful objective commit crimes while pursuing that objective, then they are guilty of those crimes; that, however, does not transmogrify the lawful objective into a criminal conspiracy. Let’s say you and I agree to buy a house; finding ourselves without sufficient funds, we defraud a bank to try to get the money we need. That makes us guilty of bank fraud. We are not guilty of conspiracy to buy a house, because buying a house is not a crime.
Seeking the reversal of a presidential election is not a crime. Hence, agreeing to pursue that objective cannot be a criminal conspiracy. In fact, state law anticipates challenges to the outcome of presidential elections. So does federal law — see, e.g., Section 5(c) of presidential-election law, which provides that a state certification of electors could be “revised by any State or Federal judicial relief” prior to the meeting of the Electoral College.
Furthermore, the Constitution protects the right of citizens to petition the government, which obviously includes petitioning state legislatures and election officials. And as any Democrat who has pleaded with President Biden to cancel student debt could tell you, it is not a crime to petition the government to do something lawless. As Representative Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) could tell you, the Constitution even enables partisan-hack congressmen, in blatant violation of federal election law, to petition the vice president not to count state-certified electoral votes.
Willis, nevertheless, seeks to criminalize such constitutionally protected activity by framing it as the Georgia crime of solicitation to commit a felony. The notion is that these state legislators and election officials would not just have been flouting the civil law but would have been guilty of a criminal offense if they had taken official action to undo the election result — notwithstanding that those officials would have had immunity for even wrongheaded actions taken within their official duties.
