What happened: President Donald Trump and 18 other "co-conspirators" were indicted in Georgia this week on a variety of charges for allegedly trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
• Trump was charged with violating Georgia's version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute.
• The federal RICO statute has been used to convict mafia bosses and other organized crime figures. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani utilized the tactic while serving as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s.
• Georgia's RICO statute is not the same as the federal statute. In 2015, for example, it was used to convict three court reporters for altering the margins on court transcripts to increase the number of pages—and the fees they charged attorneys and taxpayers for copies.
What happened next: The mainstream media wet themselves. Liberal journalists seized on the RICO indictment in Georgia, enthusiastically comparing Trump to the "mobsters and gangsters" previously convicted under the federal statute.
• They keep repeatedly making the false claim that Trump, if convicted under RICO, would have to serve a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison. Georgia state law gives judges broad discretion to impose a sentence of probation rather than prison time.
• The lib journos were blindly repeating a false assertion (regarding the minimum five-year sentence) made by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, the ambitious politician who unveiled the sprawling indictment against Trump.
• Willis was being either incompetent or dishonest.