61 Cop City Protesters in Atlanta Are Being Hit With RICO Charges

Over 60 protesters have been indicted on RICO charges for their efforts to block construction of the massive police training facility known as “Cop City” outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

The indictment out of Fulton County court last Tuesday charges 61 protesters with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Many are facing additional charges of domestic terrorism or money laundering. The indictment was handed up by the same grand jury that handed up the indictments against Donald Trump and his co-defendants, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and is being prosecuted by Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr.

Over the past year and a half, Georgia police have made dozens of arrests at the proposed site for Cop City, with charges ranging from alleged property damage and trespassing to domestic terrorism.

In May, Atlanta police arrested the organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund for the protesters of Cop City. One of the fund’s organizers who was arrested, Marlon Kautz, had predicted in February that the state would level RICO charges at the protesters. 

“We understand that this movement is as broad as society itself. It includes environmental activists, community groups, faith leaders, abolitionists, students, artists, and people from all over,” Kautz said in February.

“But police, prosecutors, and even Governor Kemp have been trying to suggest in the media and in court that the opposition to Cop City is actually the work of a criminal organization whose members conspire to commit acts of terrorism. In essence, they’re trying to concoct a RICO-like story about the movement.”

Kautz along with fellow Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers Adele Maclean and Savannah Patterson are listed in the RICO indictment, and are also facing an additional 15 counts of money laundering.

The date listed on the indictments is May 25, 2020, the day George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. Although this date predates any Stop Cop City protesting, it’s possible that the Attorney General’s office plans to link the Stop Cop City movement with the larger protests that followed Floyd’s death.

The Cop City Vote coalition, an Atlanta-based campaign leading a referendum to halt the construction of the police facility, released a statement condemning the indictment.

“Today, Republican Attorney General Chris Carr, who used his platform to recruit for the January 6 insurrection, announced blatantly authoritarian RICO charges against 61 people,” the statement said. “These charges, like the previous repressive prosecutions by the State of Georgia, seek to intimidate protestors, legal observers, and bail funds alike, and send the chilling message that any dissent to Cop City will be punished with the full power and violence of the government.”

In June, Atlanta District Attorney Sherry Boston announced that her office would withdraw from criminal cases tied to the Cop City Protests the state’s Republican Attorney General had leveled at protesters. Boston cited the domestic terrorism charges specifically and said that she and Attorney General Chris Carr had “fundamentally different prosecution philosophies.”

The new indictment out of Fulton County is the state’s latest attempt to suppress political protest and dissent, even in the wake of violent police brutality—and to push through the massive $90 million police facility, no matter the cost.

This story has been updated.

Democratic state Representative Gloria Johnson, a member of the Tennessee Three, announced Tuesday that she will run to unseat Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn in 2024.

Johnson, alongside Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, gained national attention in March when she joined thousands of pro–gun control protesters in the state Capitol in the wake of a school shooting in Nashville. Republicans accused all three lawmakers of violating House decorum rules and voted to expel Jones and Pearson, both of whom are Black. The GOP fell one vote short of expelling Johnson, who is white.

Johnson used that same sense of activism when she launched her Senate campaign Tuesday near Knoxville’s Central High School, where she worked for years as a special education teacher and survived another school shooting in 2008. Johnson referred to the recent Tennessee legislature’s special session, which ended abruptly last week with no resolutions on gun control.

“I’m tired of Tennessee families being betrayed by those that represent them, over and over and over,” she said.

Several hundred people attended the launch event. Johnson will make stops in Nashville, which Jones represents, and Memphis (Pearson’s district) throughout the rest of the day. Pearson is also co-chairing the campaign.

In addition to gun control, Johnson has made abortion rights a central part of her campaign. Supporting abortion rights has proved massively beneficial to other Democratic campaigns, even in traditionally Republican strongholds.

“Republicans and Marsha Blackburn specifically … have taken away equality for women,” Johnson said at her launch event. “When you take someone’s bodily autonomy away, you have taken away equality.”

It won’t be an easy fight. Tennessee hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1995, and the last Democrat who won a statewide race was Governor Phil Bredesen, who was in office from 2003 to 2011. Blackburn beat Bredesen for her Senate seat in 2018 by nearly 11 percent.

But Johnson is confident she can mobilize enough grassroots support. She pointed to how the political landscape has changed dramatically, particularly with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and said that people who have historically voted Republican are telling her they plan to support her instead.

“I have never seen people so excited in my life as they are right now for 2024 to happen,” Johnson told Knox News.

A federal court on Tuesday struck down Alabama Republicans’ latest discriminatory congressional map and assigned a special master to ensure the state actually creates a second majority-Black district this time around.

The Supreme Court shocked everyone in June, ruling 5–4 that Republican-drawn congressional districts in Alabama discriminated against Black voters under the Voting Rights Act. The high court ordered Alabama to redraw the map to include at least two majority-Black districts. But Alabama has repeatedly tried to redraw districts in a way that keeps the status quo and dilutes Black votes.

“Based on the evidence before us, including testimony from the Legislators, we have no reason to believe that allowing the Legislature still another opportunity to draw yet another map will yield a map that includes an additional opportunity district,” the three-judge panel said in the Tuesday ruling. “We are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”

“We are disturbed by the evidence that the State delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.”

The judges assigned a special master to oversee the remedial map. Alabama has until October 1 to finalize a new map to ensure that there is enough time to prepare for the 2024 election, according to Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen. State officials will need to reassign voters and print and distribute ballots.

More than a quarter of Alabama residents are Black, but currently only one of Alabama’s seven congressional districts is majority-Black. Black voters are scattered throughout the other districts, dramatically reducing their ability to elect their preferred candidates. As a result of the racial gerrymandering, the state only has one Black representative.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices in the June Supreme Court ruling that found Alabama’s congressional map illegally diluted Black votes. Roberts wrote the majority opinion, and repeatedly rejected Alabama’s arguments in favor of keeping the current map as “unpersuasive” or of “little merit.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling—and the outcome of the new map in Alabama—could have bigger implications across the South, and even help Democrats retake the House in 2024. Several other states including Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia are facing legal challenges to their racially gerrymandered districts. Those states could see a very different map in the coming election.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s former chief of staff and co-defendant in the Georgia indictment may flip, one of the most high-profile defections from Team Trump yet.

Mark Meadows served as White House chief of staff at the end of Trump’s presidency. He was charged alongside Trump and 17 other co-defendants with felony racketeering for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results. At his hearing last week, Meadows’s legal team signaled that their main defense strategy will include blaming Trump as the principal force behind efforts to thwart the election, Politico reported Tuesday.

Meadows organized and participated in the now-infamous phone call during which Trump begged Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes—the exact amount needed to flip the state’s election results to Trump. Meadows also sent an email pressuring Georgia Republicans to sign slates of fake pro-Trump electors.

“What I didn’t want to happen was for the campaign to prevail in court action and not have this [organized]”, Meadows said during his August 28 hearing.

When asked why, he explained, “Because I knew I’d be yelled at by the president of the United States.”

Meadows has already shown himself willing to undermine his former boss in order to save his own skin. In mid-August, Meadows and former Vice President Mike Pence said separately that they had no knowledge of Trump declassifying a large number of documents, completely undermining the former president’s main defense in the Mar-a-Lago case.

Other former Trump allies are also starting to turn. In July, a Mar-a-Lago employee named Yuscil Taveras changed his testimony in the indictment against Trump for mishandling classified documents. Taveras was assigned a new public defender in July, replacing his Trump-appointed lawyer, and “immediately” recanted his testimony denying that there had been any conversations about security footage that prosecutors subpoenaed in 2022 as part of the investigation.

Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani may also soon turn on his boss (who is refusing to pay him). Giuliani met in June with special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump in Florida for mishandling classified documents and in Washington for trying to overturn the 2020 election. It’s not clear what happened during the meeting, but it’s not unthinkable that Giuliani may try to reach a deal with prosecutors to save his own skin.

Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee ordered Thursday that all court proceedings in Georgia’s election interference case against former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants will be televised and livestreamed.

Trump has been indicted four times. In the Georgia case, he faces 13 charges, including racketeering, related to his attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Judge Tanya Chutkan has set the trial date for March 4, 2024, which falls one day before Super Tuesday, the busiest day in the Republican presidential primaries. McAfee says the trials will be accessible to watch through the Fulton County Court YouTube channel.

McAfee also said journalists will be able to use cell phones and computers inside the courtroom for non-recording purposes during the trial and hearings—a departure from the federal election interference case against Trump.

Read more at the Atlanta-Journal Constitution.