As per the assertions made earlier this week by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the racketeering trial pertaining to former President Donald Trump could potentially persist into the early months of 2025, surpassing the 2024 election.
“I believe in that case there will be a trial. I believe the trial will take many months,” Willis said in a Tuesday interview at the Washington Post Live’s Global Women’s Summit. “And I don’t expect that we will conclude until the winter or the very early part of 2025.”
The date of the trial’s commencement has not been disclosed as of yet. In addition to 18 other co-defendants, Donald Trump has been formally charged. It is noteworthy to mention that four members of this cohort have engaged into plea agreements in the past.
Former President Trump’s legal teams have been actively seeking to defer the commencement of his multiple proceedings, which are currently underway in New York, Washington, D.C., Florida, and Georgia, until the period following the 2024 election. Willis, in recent statements, maintained that the ongoing presidential election did not exert any influence on her determination to pursue charges against the individual who presently occupies a substantial lead as the Republican Party’s primary candidate.
“I don’t, when making decisions about cases to bring, consider any election cycle or an election season,” she said. “That does not go into the calculus. What goes into the calculus is: This is the law. These are the facts. And the facts show you violated the law. Then charges are brought.”
As per the findings of Axios, President Trump is presently faced with the potential initiation of two criminal prosecutions in March, which coincides with the Super Tuesday primaries.
Willis’ decision to commence legal proceedings against the former president has been met with considerable scrutiny, including censure from individuals espousing far-left political ideologies.
Amos Barshad, a London-based writer, discussed multiple occurrences in which Willis employed the RICO provisions of the state to file charges against individuals, including former President Donald Trump and two musicians based in Atlanta, in an article published in Jacobin. Barshad utilized these instances in order to substantiate his thesis.
“Known for prosecuting Donald Trump on election subversion charges, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is using another high-profile RICO case involving rapper Young Thug to boost her image. But critics say her popularity is obscuring the wrongful nature of the case,” Barshad began.
He disclosed that rapper Lil Duke, whose real name is Martinez Arnold, flew from Los Angeles to Atlanta on May 9, 2022. Subsequently, he proceeded to the domicile of his longstanding associate and colleague, the illustrious rapper Young Thug, whose actual name is Jeffrey Williams.
Later that day, when police stormed Williams’ residence, they arrested twenty-six additional individuals in addition to the two men. Willis levied an indictment against them, alleging that YSL, the record label and rap group associated with Williams, operated as a criminal enterprise. Arnold’s participation in YSL, as stated in the indictment, constituted a violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). According to Barshad, a RICO violation in Georgia is punishable by a prison term ranging from five to twenty years.
He continued, saying:
Willis has become a nationally recognized name thanks both to the YSL case and a concurrent RICO case: the prosecution of former president Donald Trump on election subversion charges. The Washington Post proclaimed Willis’s actions in the latter case could “save democracy.” But defense attorneys working the YSL case say that as Willis is embraced by the national media for her pursuit of Trump, the local people caught in her legal system — people like Arnold — are left harmed.
The national media’s fixation on the Trump case has further lionized the role of the American prosecutor — and boosted the archetype of the “prosecutor politician,” a mainstay of both major political parties. That lineage includes everyone from former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R), former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, US Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Vice President Kamala Harris. All of them built their political careers in part off their work as prosecutors.
The participant continued by stating that the phrase “prosecutor politician” was first proposed in 2017 by Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Boston University.