Fox News Legal Expert Calls Georgia Indictments ‘Most Perilous Threat to Trump’
Fox News legal analyst Andy McCarthy argued that Donald Trump’s indictment in Georgia could be more of a legal threat to the former president than any of his previous indictments.
Before Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis officially charged Trump with 13 felonies over his attempts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, McCarthy published a New York Post column calling her indictment the “most perilous threat” to Trump. While he addressed the “significant overlap” between Willis’ charges and the charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, McCarthy assessed that “Smith’s problem is that the federal penal statutes he has invoked — relating to fraud, obstruction, and civil rights — do not clearly and narrowly target the kind of conduct in which Trump engaged.”
“By contrast,” McCarthy added, “Willis could have smoother sailing.”
That’s because the federalist system designed by our Constitution gives the states primary responsibility to conduct and police elections.
Ergo, the states have laws that are tailored specifically to election irregularities and attempts to subvert state processes for tabulating and certifying votes.
Unlike Smith, Willis can invoke laws that are specifically designed to deal with election-interference conduct of the kind Trump engaged in.
From there, McCarthy correctly summarized that Willis would charge Trump under the Georgia RICO Act to accuse him and his allies of a racketeering enterprise with the conspiratorial goal of overturning the election result.
“It sounds like ambitious charging, but it may not be all that much of a reach,” McCarthy said.
To be sure, Willis’s election case may not be as cut-and-dried as Smith’s Mar-a-Lago documents indictment. I still regard the latter as the most perilous case for Trump: It involves an easily provable retention of national-defense intelligence, and it occurred after the election so there are fewer constitutional ramifications.
But Willis’s case may well be more straightforward — less legally problematic — than Smith’s election-interference case, and it will surely be more compelling than [Alvin] Bragg’s nakedly partisan business-records indictment.
What should most concern Trump is that the Georgia case could be the most enduring of all the criminal indictments.
If Trump or another Republican were to win the 2024 election, the new president could issue a pardon or otherwise have his Justice Department drop Smith’s federal indictments against Trump.
Indeed, that is why Smith is pushing so hard to get the federal courts in Washington and Florida to accelerate the schedule and get the cases to trial in the next few months — before Election Day 2024.
Presidents, however, have no authority to pardon state crimes.
It remains to be seen whether Wills can convince a jury of Atlantans to convict Trump. But even a newly elected President Trump could not make the Georgia prosecution go away.
If he were convicted, it would stick.
