The Weird Link Between Donald Trump’s Georgia Indictment and the Rapper Young Thug

Donald Trump has a new lawyer. Like Gunna and the 27 other people indicted by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis in the YSL case, Trump and his 18 codefendants—including his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows—are being charged, also by Willis, with violating the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Willis has called herself a “fan of RICO” because it “allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story.” In the case of Trump, that story came in the form of a 98-page indictment with 40 non-racketeering charges and one massive RICO charge tying them all together. Within that large racketeering charge are acts that the prosecution claims demonstrate Trump and his cohort “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election.” Like the RICO case against YSL, several of those acts—13 of the 161 total—involve the use of social media. For Trump, they include things like tweeting “People in Georgia got caught cold bringing in massive numbers of ballots and putting them in voting machines.” Both cases show how prosecutors use social media to build RICO cases, and the outcomes of both will be high-profile examples of whether or not such tactics work.