Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/15/23 GA Trump Indictment Special: Krystal and Saagar REACT

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss the breaking Georgia indictment charges against President Trump and his team with Legal expert and Lawyer Bradley Moss (@BradMossEsq).To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. So wild day yesterday, partway through the day, they accidentally update uploaded what appeared to be charges against Trump to a Georgia County website. Then they took them down and we knew the grand jury was meeting. Witnesses were rushed in, et cetera. Late last night, we finally got the charges handed down and the DA there in Fulton County, Fonny Willis, gave a press conference

announcing some of the details. Let's take a listen. Today, based on information developed by that investigation, a Fulton County grand jury returned a true bill of indictment, charging 19 individuals with violations of Georgia law arising from a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in this state. The indictment includes 41 felony counts and is 97 pages long. Please remember that everyone charged in this bill of indictment is presumed innocent. Specifically, the indictment brings felony charges against Donald John Trump. Every individual charged in the indictment is charged with one count of violating Georgia's Racketeer

Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act through participation in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia and elsewhere to accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump to seize the presidential term of office beginning on January 20th, 21. So let's take a look at the actual indictment. This is just the first two cover pages so you can get a sense there. As Fannie Willis indicated, 19 individuals charged here. Some of them will be familiar names to you,

like the former president, Donald Trump, like Rudy Giuliani, like Mark Meadows, like some of the individuals who were also named as co-conspirators in Jack Smith's indictment, like Kenneth Cheeseborough. Others are less well-known. There's an individual who was a stylist for R. Kelly and Gay, who apparently tried to intimidate these women that were accused of committing election fraud completely erroneously. But you see the list of the charges here. And just so people understand, the fact that all these charges are listed doesn't mean that all of these people are charged with all of these things. Yes. All of them are charged, at least with the RICO,

the racketeering charge that Fannie Willis indicated. Basically, this is meant to roll up mobsters. And in Georgia, they have a very expansive RICO law. According to the analysis I was reading, it's one of the most expansive in the country. Prosecutors love it. Defense attorneys despise it. And they made it really broad to roll up, for example, low-level street drug dealers, along with kingpins. And so the allegation here is that all of these individuals, plus 30 additional unindicted co-conspirators that they say are known to the grand jury, that all of them were part of a criminal conspiracy, a criminal enterprise to overturn the rightful election results in Georgia. To go through specifically what Trump is charged with, because, again, he's not charged with all of the things that are listed there. He faces 13 different charges. Let me just take a moment to go through them. Number one is

violation of that RICO Act that I was just discussing. Two, solicitation of violation of oath by public officer. Conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer. Conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree. Conspiracy to commit false statements and writings. Conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree. Conspiracy to commit false statements in writings. Conspiracy to commit filing false documents. Conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree. Conspiracy to commit false statements in writings. Filing false documents. Solicitation of violation of oath by public officer.

False statements in writings. Another count of solicitation of violation of oath by public officer. And another count of false statements in writings. So that's specific to Trump. There are additional charges in here that some of these individuals face, like Sidney Powell, that have to do with that breach of computer systems that we discussed yesterday. But, Sagar, something that you brought up yesterday, which I think is really important for people to understand

as they get a little bit of indictment, they're a little overwhelmed by all these different indictments. Part of why this one is significant is because it is state charges. That means if Trump, even if he's elected president, he can't get out of it. He can't pardon himself. The other reason is because there are limits. Even if you have a friendly governor in office in Georgia, there's an expansive time limit in terms of when they are allowed to pardon,

even if they have a governor there who wants to go ahead with that. And the other piece is, Jack Smith, when he was looking at some of these similar alleged crimes, he had to use statutes that haven't traditionally been used in terms of election fraud and election crimes. Well, states are where they traditionally prosecute election crimes. So they have statutes in the books that are really directly designed for these types of acts. Let me hammer that home. Another issue that Trump will run into is that there is a similar process in the RICO law in Georgia, that you have a minimum of five years to serve in jail if you are convicted of under the RICO statute. I also want to underscore what you

said. The law was written, ironically enough, by a lot of Republicans in the 1980s. It was like some tough on crime stuff. This is basically a lock them up law in order to make it easier for RICO statutes to apply to any criminal enterprise, including a gang. It doesn't even require you to all be sitting in the same room deciding to prosecute the same crime. As long as you are all working toward the same end, even if you did not actually specifically talk to each other, you could still be prosecuted under the RICO statutes. The law as written and has yet to face

constitutional challenges, had numerous convictions under it, including under the current grand jury. This is a real tough one for Trump. You got a minimum five-year sentence if convicted. You cannot be pardoned by a governor. It actually goes to a board of pardons, as you were saying. They basically wrote it into the law to make it as difficult as possible if convicted by a jury in the state to get out of it. And then also the minimum, the minimum prison sentence. And then the fact that there is no novel interpretation of law here. I actually think the

Jack Smith indictment is far weaker than this one because this Georgia indictment is specifically, they are the ones who administer their elections in our federalist system. So there are multiple different things here where the federal government doesn't have, the federal government does not have the same novel interpretation. Trump doesn't have actually the same federal protections that he's going to pursue if he does get convicted in the DC court that he can bring to the Supreme Court whenever it comes to free speech. This is a much different and frankly, a stronger case. We also have the Atlanta Journal Constitution just to put some of this in plain English. One of the things that they write, and this is just to make it easier for people to understand, the phone call specifically that Trump made to Georgia officials, Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp. Then you have the alternate GOP electors

who cast electoral college votes for Trump December 14th, 2020, while the official Democratic electors were casting their votes for Biden. The false testimony given to state House and Senate committees, which led to the threats and the harassment of Fulton County poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shea Moss. The copying of sensitive Georgia elections data in Coffey County, 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, the day after the January January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. So you put those all together and they constitute the actual acts, not just the counts that are listed there against Trump, part of the RICO enterprise that they are bringing against him. I will say just on a political level, because of course, and we have to step back and be like, this is political. It was an extremely odd situation yesterday, Crystal, whenever this docket got,

what the charges, got posted to the Fulton County website, then removed from the website. They claimed it was fake. Not everything that they posted didn't end up being charged. We were trying to figure that out this morning. Very odd, considering the fact that the grand jury had not even yet voted. Also, there's a lot being made of, and I can't help but lie. I mean, it does look ridiculous. Whenever you are reading said indictments, a 99-page indictment, of which both of us were going through extensively this morning, they will list things like, Trump tweeted, turn on OAN, Georgia hearing. This was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. To be clear, he's not being criminally charged, but the way that they lay out the case, it's like tweeting to tune into a hearing about what

happened or whatever in Georgia is what they're citing. If you are consuming Fox News or any of those other things, you are going to be hearing quite a bit about that. So look, on a political level, it's a real issue for not only Trump, but I mean, we didn't even know this, Rudy Giuliani, now he's facing two charges, Mark Meadows, ironically, Jenna Ellis, who is one of those campaign lawyers, she's actually currently backing DeSantis, which makes it even more hilarious. Oh, for real? Yeah, she's currently a DeSantis person.

So this lady who basically turned on Trump to back DeSantis for the nomination is now being charged by the state of Georgia and is being charged by the state of Georgia for trying to overturn the election on Trump's behalf. She was the woman who was standing right next to Rudy Giuliani at that infamous press conference. But then you have numerous others, as you said, people alleged to have intimidated some of these election workers. I mean, this is going to be, I think, a very difficult case for Trump. And really, I mean, Trump probably has the best chance of surviving this because if he does get elected president, then there's a whole other jurisprudence and all that stuff that kicks in. If you were Rudy or Jenna Ellis or any of these

normal other folks, like you are looking at actual prison time here, considering the charges, considering how weak, the burden that you have to reach to be convicted under RICO in Georgia, it's just not that high. And, you know, specifically whenever we were talking about entering false statements for the records, like the electors scheme, that, you know, once again, on a federal level, it takes a novel interpretation. On a state level, it really doesn't in order to prosecute that charge. The computer charges, too, which, again, Trump isn't doesn't have those charges, but people like Sidney Powell and others do. Those are pretty cut and dry, too. Yeah. You can't. Yeah. You straight up like you got access to these voting systems. Exactly. That, by the way, if Democrats had did that,

oh my God, they would be going wild over on Fox News about election fraud. I want to read off. So to underscore what you were saying, Sagar, yeah, if you go through this indictment, which I confess I got probably about halfway through this morning when I woke up, it's chapter and verse of this email was sent, this phone call was made, this meeting occurred, this person said that, Trump tweeted X. It really goes through step by step by step. Now, those individual pieces are not all charges, but they're all what they consider to be or what Bonnie Willis and the grand jury agreed were acts in furtherance of the conspiracy. So this is all sort of like context laying out the scheme. And this is part of why

prosecutors love RICO, because they can look not just at these individual criminal acts as one-offs, they can really paint a whole portrait of all these people that allegedly contributed to the scheme. And that's what you get if you go through the indictment. I just want, in the interest of, you guys having complete information, I want to read off the list of names of all the people, 19 people who were charged here, so you can get a sense of the breadth of this indictment. Of course, you've got Trump, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, who is the lawyer who's also implicated in Jack Smith's indictment, Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff, Kenneth Cheesbrough, also part of that Jack Smith indictment, Jeffrey Clark,

former ex-assistant attorney general, another one who was in the Jack Smith indictment. Jenna Ellis, as Sagar was just mentioning. Ray Smith III, who I don't even know, who apparently is also a lawyer. Bob Cheely, another lawyer I don't know. Michael Roman, a GOP strategist. David Schaefer. You've got some local Georgia officials here. He was the Georgia GOP party chair. Sean Still, a state senator. Stephen Cliffguard Lee, who was a pastor in Illinois. Harrison Floyd, black voices for Trump leader. Trevian Cuddy, the publicist. That's the one I alluded to before as like connections to R. Kelly and also to Ye, who was trying to intimidate and coerce these election workers. Sidney Powell, Kathy Latham, she's the one who was the former Coffey County GOP chair. That's where that alleged breach of computer systems

occurred. Scott Hall, who's a bail bondsman, and Misty Hampton, another former Coffey County, this one elections supervisor who we discussed yesterday, who appears to have been the individual based on some recordings that they have from Coffey County, who invited some of the Trump folks in in order to allegedly illegally breach these computer systems. So in addition to that, there are 30 more people who they describe as unindicted co-conspirators. So, you know, it really is, to me, there are a couple of things that jump out at Sager. First of all, you know, I don't give the Trump team a lot of credit for like competence and organization. But there was clearly a very widespread organized effort in order to achieve this and attempt to, you know, institute the fake electors and pressure campaign happening at every level, not just the Brad Roffensperger call that we're all familiar with. That's number one.

Number two, I got to say the part that is almost most galling to me is the way they treated those two election workers, the mother and daughter. And this was really Rudy Giuliani specifically, but all of Trump was apparently obsessed with this as well. There was this clip of them floating around. They're election workers. Election workers are like out there. Don't, don't, don't need their time. They are volunteers. They don't get paid. This is like a public service. I really appreciate the work that these people do. They were there late at night counting. And one of them, his mother and daughter, hands a mint to the other one. Well, Republicans got video of this and alleged Rudy Giuliani leading the way that they were sharing USBs back and forth and said they look like drug dealers passing vials of cocaine or crack

or something like heroin, I don't know, back and forth. And this just total and complete lie. And then this character, this R. Kelly Yee publicist character, apparently tricked one of them to meeting up with him and then tried to coerce them into confessing to crimes they didn't, it's just complete insanity. And these women's lives have been destroyed because of the scrutiny that they've gotten and the threats

that have come at them. So the ordinary people that got caught up in this and the way that their lives were impacted was almost the most galling part of it for me. And don't forget that Rudy ended up in terms of having to apologize or to admit that one of the statements that he made. Yeah, he's being sued for defamation. and he admitted that he lied about this and that it was not true. Now he still claims his only defense is like, oh, you weren't actually harmed by it. Okay. Okay. Right. But the actual allegation, because I still see this crap. I said this yesterday. I mean, I see this stuff literally going everywhere. Even today, you can go and search on Twitter, like Fulton County videos, and they're still focusing on these people claiming that it is some sort of widespread fraud. I have to come

back to this. It's like you lost every single suit in court, every audit, not a single thing ever turned up anything. It's like, when are you ever going to give up on this idea? But the truth is, is that it's all fake. And, you know, they'll point to insinuations, which I admit, you know, they do sound crazy. Like, what was the pipes burst and they had to stop counting in the middle of the night. Even if you go back and you want to roll the tape, I even said at that time, I was like, what the hell is going on in here? I agree. I think it's crazy. But that doesn't mean that it means that doesn't mean that they've been able to prove any sort of widespread fraud as a result of that. The reality is when you have an election

that's taking place in how many thousands, tens of thousands of jurisdictions across the country, you're gonna have some anomalous things occur that people can then point to and be like, aha, there's the conspiracy. When really, you know, the odds of having an election where there aren't weird, you know, pipe breaks in some office or whatever

would be close to zero because things just happen. And I would be open to, I'm like, okay, prove it then. What are you pointing to? But literally, all they can ever come back to is like, oh, well, this happened. And then eventually, it's like the state was close. I'm like, yeah, it's been a close state. Guess what? It also happened again. It's actually not a novel phenomenon. Two Democrats won the state in the special election months later. And then what happened in 2022? Look at some of that. And then people like Brian Kemp and all them actually won reelection. So clearly there is a genuine organic constituency. It's not actually a mystery. So look, I mean,

you know, Trump at the funniest thing is like with all this effort, if he had just said, yeah, go mail in your votes, he would have won Georgia and he probably would have been president in any way. But it's his own damn fault, you know, in the beginning. And then really, you know, a lot of these people who worked on his behalf, his aides, you know, and all of them, they don't have executive privilege. They don't have the same constitutional protections that the president of the United States have. And a lot of these people are facing some serious jail time, even if they do take a plea deal because of the minimum sentencing requirements that the judge has to, by Georgia law, abide by should this ever come to that. So regardless, like this is going to be a serious problem, I think, for many of the

people involved. To give you the Trump side of things, his campaign put out a statement. They said, among other things, you know, they go through chapter and verse of the Jack Smith charges and the Alvin Bragg charges. They describe Fannie Willis as a rabid partisan who was campaigning, fundraising on a platform of prosecuting President Trump through these bogus indictments. They go on to say they could have brought these charges two and a half years ago, that they chose to do this for election interference reasons in the middle of President Trump's successful campaign. They go on to talk about free speech. They're taking away President Trump's First Amendment right to free speech and the right to challenge a rigged and stolen election that Democrats do all the time. The ones who should be prosecuted

are the ones who created the corruption. Let's also take a listen to Senator Lindsey Graham, of course, has been an ally of Trump's in all of this, defending him on Fox News. Let's take a listen. He's spending more money on lawyer fees than he is running for office. January the 6th, I was there. I saw it. He was impeached over it. The American people can decide whether they want him to be president or not. This should be decided at the ballot box, not a bunch of liberal jurisdictions trying to put the man in jail. They're weaponizing the law in this country. They're trying to take Donald Trump down, and this is setting a bad precedent. I think this is probably their best political argument and case that Lindsey Graham is making there.

It's one that a lot of Americans agree with. They have qualms with the timing. They do feel like the prosecutions are political. The issue with this particular set of indictments is unlike the others, the political case doesn't really matter. This one, they're going to have to really make a legal case and we're going to bring an expert in. He can tell us we're wrong if we're getting this, you know, if we're off base on this. But I think he's got a pretty tough uphill climb in terms of making a legal case on these particular charges. And Sagar, the last thing that I will say on all of this, and then we'll bring in Bradley Moss,

is one other way that this is different is this trial is going to be on TV. Yes. Good point. In terms of the federal trials are unlikely to be on television. We're just going to get the reports of whatever is happening in the courtroom. This one is going to be a made for TV event. It is going to be the Trump show. You know, we're used to presidential campaigns where you got debates and rallies and that's the focus of attention. This right here is what a lot of the campaign is going to be focused around. It is going to be. Because he's at state charges, he can't pardon himself. He's going to have to actually prove

it in the courtroom. And I think He's going to have to actually prove it in the courtroom. And I think it's going to be pretty tough. Yeah. And it's going to, well, at least we'll all get a nice good TV show about it. Let's go ahead to Bradley Moss. We've got him on standby. Let's get to it. Very pleased to be joined now by Bradley Moss.

He, of course, is a national security lawyer, has helped us out on a variety of these indictments. Great to have you, Bradley. Good to see you, Brad. Absolutely. Anytime. Yeah, absolutely. So just give us your first reactions as you read through this indictment, took a look at all the charges against Trump and his 18 co-conspirators here. Was this what you expected? What were some of your big takeaways? Yeah. First reaction. Wow. This was everyone and anyone tied up in the Trump schemes in the later weeks of 2020 and going in past his departure from office leading up into 2021,

he was still pressuring the Georgia officials to decertify the election somehow. This was the entire scheme of all the different lawyers he managed to co-opt into pushing these various criminal acts. He's got Sidney Powell and her squad, you know, breaking into the Coffey County, you know, state's election systems and taking ballots. He's got Rudy Giuliani going before the state legislators and talking to the Georgia state officials, pushing these what he knew to be false claims about dead bodies, dead people voting and all these missing ballots and the Ruby Freeman nonsense that Rudy Giuliani is facing a separate defamation lawsuit over. He got John Eastman, he got Jeffrey Clark. They're all tied up in this. And it's put in the context of RICO because it was one overarching criminal conspiracy. There were

different people playing different roles, but under Rico, they were all pushing towards one core common goal, which was to overturn the election, to reverse the results, what the American people in their decision and their logic chose to do, which was to elect Joe Biden. And Donald Trump could not accept that. He was willing to look for anyone, willing to push any garbage he could to prevent that from happening. Now he and all of them are going to be co-defendants, at least for the moment, in this proceeding. So Brad, I want to ask you something that we got into a little bit last time, which is, if we want to, so we've gone and described the charges now, you've done a good job here. What possible avenues of defense does

Trump have here? Because this seems difficult. Last time we talked about free speech, but that's whenever it's a federal context. This is actual state election law. So reading the indictment, what avenues of defense does Trump himself and even some of his alleged co-conspirators, what do they have against the charges that have been levied against him? Some of the defenses will be similar to what we're gonna see Donald Trump bring at the federal level. One of them is obviously gonna be that free speech angle

we've talked about. He'll have both, you know, a First Amendment right under the US Constitution. He'll have his free speech rights under the Georgia State Constitution. And there is, of course, the intent element, whether or not the DA, Fannie Willis, is able to prove the various individuals' intent that they knew these statements were false, that Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis knew their factual allegations that they were presenting to the state legislator, that they were presenting to the Secretary of State, were in fact false.

That's going to be a factual burden she'll have to meet. But if you read through the indictment, and we've seen some of this from the January 6th committee, we've seen some of this through Jack Smith's speaking indictment. We have extensive documentation already showing how much these individuals knew these facts were false. They went hunting for anyone who would tell them, sure, you can make it. But the facts they knew were not accurate. They knew they didn't have verification. We have Rudy Giuliani saying, we have lots of theories, no evidence. We have John Eastman in emails saying,

the complaint that Donald Trump's about to sign with these allegations, those allegations are false and Donald Trump's been told they are false. They put it down in writing. So we know that they can meet that intent element, but that's gonna be an element of their defense. They're gonna try to poke holes in it. What I'm looking for, who starts making plea deals? We know some of these people are on

the peripheral side of it. You know, think of Jenna Alice has the least exposure, for example. John Eastman, Jeff Clark have far more exposure on the federal side. Look for them to start making plea deals to try to get this off the table and to cooperate to bring down the bigger fish, which is Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Donald Trump. Got it. So I have a bunch of potentially stupid questions, but let me, we've got you here. No such thing. Let me just ask you. So first of all, on the free speech part, even when it comes to Trump's call with Brad Raffensperger, can't they argue, you know, this is just, this is political speech, this is free speech, and this is one of the pieces that, you know, that's a component of this indictment. And the indictment goes through chapter and verse of, you know, Trump's tweets,

which certainly seem like they would be political speech and emails that were sent and phone calls that were made and comments that were made at press conferences, et cetera. So where is the line between these are, you know, things that the president is allowed to say and things that are actually part of a criminal conspiracy? Yeah, so it's not a dumb question. It's a very good question. It's certainly going to be raised in pretrial motions, both in Georgia and in the federal case. The distinction, according to the Supreme Court in recent years, is that free speech only goes so far until you are seeking or commanding someone to themselves engage in

a criminal act. That's what's being outlined here, for example, with the January 2nd call, that he was trying to get Raffensperger to do something Raffensperger could not do, and that Trump was relying on information he knew to be false in order to get Raffensperger to do it. Raffensperger didn't have the authority to decertify the election. He didn't have the authority to throw out those votes or to just declare Trump the winner. Same thing goes with his conversations with Jeff Clark. He just wanted Jeff Clark to send this letter to the Georgia officials saying the Justice Department has concluded there were irregularities, so go call a special session. They knew. They had just been told by the other White House lawyers and by the DOJ lawyers, none of that's true. We found no such thing. But they were going to try to ask the Georgia officials to do it anyways. That's where the distinction comes. You can use free speech to do a lot of things in this country, but you can't use it as a means to further a criminal conspiracy or to seek other criminal acts to be done for you.

One of the things I'm really hearing from you is that they have to prove, basically beyond reasonable doubt, that he knew that these things were false when he was doing them. And not just Trump, but almost all of the co-conspirators. Given, you know, we've gone through some of the evidence you laid out here about some of the things that were in writing. Do you think that that is going to be enough? Like, will they have to be able to prove? What counter case can Trump make to that?

No, I didn't believe that. Or like, that was alleged to me, but that like trying to prove somebody's state of mind seems like a very difficult task and able to be undermined by reasonable doubt. So like to what burden do they have to rise to in order to prove it? Sure. So proving intent is always a difficult thing. Prosecutors have to deal with every day because by and large, you never truly know what's in someone's mind.

But let's be clear, you can't use delusion as a defense. You can't say I'm a deranged maniac. I always believe that, you know, the water is blue because that's what, you know, Alex Jones put in it or something. You have to have some basis for it. And they can provide to a jury, the jury can infer based off various circumstantial evidence from witnesses, from documentation, from emails, from texts, from any number of witness testimony, what the person's actual state of mind was. And that's gonna be very critical when it comes to Trump

and Rudy and Sidney Powell and people like that, what they were told. Donald Trump was told by everybody and their mother, there was no fraud. Everyone from the government told him it didn't happen. Everyone from his campaign told him it didn't happen. Some private lawyers told him it didn't happen. So he his campaign told him it didn't happen. Some private lawyers told him it didn't happen. So he just kept seeking out

someone who would say, I can make an argument. They didn't have proof, but they could, you know, throw out some crazy arguments. Sidney Powell's lunatic affidavits, which got her sanctioned, by the way,

for using that garbage. Those were what he was relying on. That's not going to be enough. Okay. Okay, Brad, how will this trial actually work? This, again, falls in the category of, you know, potentially stupid questions. Are they all part of the same trial?

Do they share a legal defense? Like how do all of these 19 indicted individuals, how do they relate and link up as this process moves forward? Sure. So right now, because this was brought onto the Georgia state recode, they're all in one big case. There's going to be one massive defense table with each defendant and their lawyers, and there's going to be the government on the other side. It's going to be like you think of when they went after mob bosses, and they're all their underlings. When you see a gang trial, which Fannie Walsh has done several of those, as well as when they went after state educators in Georgia who were inflating scores, and about 11 of them got indicted and convicted for that. It would be one big trial. Now, individuals, individual defendants might try to sever themselves.

I would certainly look for that to be something. You'll also have to wonder at what point, like I said before, when will people start making plea deals? When are some of the people on the periphery who don't have endless resources and rubes who are willing to keep sending them money to fight the man, when are they going to cut deals because they can't afford the lawyers? And so that's going to be what kind of shrinks down the pool. But in the end, I wouldn't be surprised if we get the trial, it's Donald Trump and maybe seven or eight other people with him at that defense table facing this prosecution. Wow. That's extraordinary.

The other thing that I'm trying to, you know, quick become a RICO expert here, as I'm sure many other commentators are, walk me through how this works legally, because I'm still having a little bit of trouble wrapping my head around it. So each one of these 19 individuals is charged under the RICO statute. And then they all have additional charges. Trump has, you know, 13 charges total, and they have different number depending on who they were

and what their involvement were. So to prove, if you just prove that they're part of the criminal conspiracy, they're part of, you know, the criminal organization and the criminal conspiracy, but you don't prove those other specific charges, do they still, you know, are they still guilty? Like, how does that all work out? Because I'm

having trouble kind of wrapping my head around exactly the mechanics of this. Yes. So RICO is basically a glorified conspiracy statute. It requires that you obviously still be separately charged with at least, I believe, two other crimes under state law in terms of the Georgia State RICO statute. So if they were to be found not guilty on the underlying offenses, then their Georgia RICO charge would also fail. But the reason to use RICO is when you have these different components of a larger criminal scheme all going towards one common goal, and you can bring it all into one giant case. That's why it was originally created in the 70s and 80s to go after the mob, to bring down the families, bring down the top bosses. It's been used against gang

members. It's been used against any number of what would be considered criminal enterprises. And that's why it's going to be used here. And that's the biggest problem for Donald Trump, is he's caught up with all the people he co-opted to engage in this behavior, and he's stuck with them. Well, we always appreciate your analysis, Brad. You always bring it. So we appreciate you joining us this morning, and it's been very helpful. Absolutely, anytime. Thanks, Brad. We'll see you guys later. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children.

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