Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis could pursue charges using the state’s RICO law.
The legal investigations against former President Donald Trump for his alleged attempt to interfere with the 2020 election results in Georgia are reportedly expanding to cover some actions in Washington, DC, and other states under Georgia’s broad Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute.
The Georgia investigation is just one of three ongoing probes into Trump’s potentially criminal activities during his presidency. It focuses on the former president’s efforts to have Georgia officials dispute or alter the results of the state’s 2020 presidential vote, which narrowly favored President Joe Biden. The two other investigations, both overseen by federal special counsel Jack Smith, concern the alleged mishandling of classified documents at the end of Trump’s presidency and efforts in other states to falsely certify the 2020 election results in his favor.
The Georgia investigation is led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat. Her office has been investigating allegations that Trump tried to convince Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both Republicans, to deny that Biden won their state. In a 2021 phone call with Raffensperger, Trump urged him to “find” the campaign 11,780 more votes — one more vote than the 11,779 by which Biden won Georgia — “because we won the state.” Trump also told Raffensperger that he was taking “a big risk” if he did not overturn the state’s election results, and that Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the former general counsel for the secretary of state, could face unspecified criminal charges if they did not comply with Trump’s demands that they substantiate false claims of thousands of ballots being destroyed in Fulton County.
According to reporting from the Washington Post, Willis has been seeking information from two businesses, Simpatico Software Systems and Berkeley Research Group, which Trump hired to investigate claims of voter fraud in other states. Trump’s campaign spent more than $1 million to hire the firms in late 2020 to investigate claims of voter fraud in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The companies found no evidence of voter fraud and have reportedly cooperated with Smith’s investigation as well.
Willis’s requests for information from both companies indicate that her nearly three-year-long investigation will likely pull in evidence from other states and perhaps utilize the federal RICO statute to prosecute the Trump campaign.
The broadening effort to hold Trump accountable for election interference
In Georgia, Willis’s case is built around the Trump team’s efforts to reverse the 2020 elections in a few different ways: Trump’s call to Raffensperger telling him to find the 11,780 votes; Trump and former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark’s call for a special session of the General Assembly to select Trump-supporting Electoral College electors and arrange a December 2020 meeting of alternate electors in which they cast their votes for Trump; and the Trump team’s possible involvement in a plan to access voting equipment without authorization in Georgia’s Coffee County.
Georgia’s RICO law has a broad definition of what constitutes racketeering behavior: “knowingly and willfully making a false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government” to carry out a crime, as Clark Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University’s College of Law told the Guardian in January. “If you do that, you’ve committed a racketeering activity. If you attempt to do that, if you solicit someone else to do it or you coerce someone else to do it — it’s all considered racketeering under Georgia law.”
Willis has utilized the RICO statute in high-profile cases, including against rappers Gunna and Young Thug for allegedly helping found a violent street gang and to prosecute a cheating scandal in Atlanta public schools in 2015. Indications that Willis intends to use the RICO statute in the Trump investigation have repeatedly surfaced during the probe as well.
“The reason that I am a fan of RICO is I think jurors are very, very intelligent,” Willis said during a press conference last year regarding the Young Thug case. “They want to know what happened. They want to make an accurate decision about someone’s life. And so RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office and law enforcement to tell the whole story.”
Georgia’s RICO laws require only two incidents of racketeering behavior to justify an indictment and define a wide variety of activities, including illegally distilling liquor and prostitution, as racketeering. In the Trump case, it’s likely that Trump’s and his campaign’s false statements to Georgia officials constitute racketeering activity to further the scheme of overturning the 2020 election results; information from other states can be used because the intended outcome of all the campaign’s efforts to overturn the election was to do so in other states and nationally, in addition to Georgia.
But just because Willis can point to behavior that breaks Georgia’s RICO statute in other places, she won’t necessarily file charges in those instances — she may merely use that evidence to build out her office’s case that the Trump campaign’s behavior amounts to a large-scale, illegal scheme.
Willis’s case will be challenging to prosecute; some of it depends on whether the people involved knew they were making false statements, or whether they actually believed the false claims they were repeating to state officials. Whether Trump and other campaign officials explicitly told people to break the law in order to overturn the election in Trump’s favor will also likely play a factor.
More is expected to become clear in the near future; Willis has indicated her office may bring charges as soon as August.
Georgia is just one of Trump’s problems
Trump’s legal troubles have come to define his third run for the presidency, but there’s no certainty about what they indicate for his future. They may end up playing into his narrative as a political martyr, persecuted by Democrats bent on keeping him out of office — or actually result in accountability for his and his followers’ attempts to subvert democracy.
In addition to the Georgia probe, the two federal investigations continue. On Friday, CNN reported that federal prosecutors had a 2021 tape of Trump telling his aides and two people working on an autobiography of former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that he had retained a classified Pentagon plan to attack Iran. On the recording, Trump indicates that he would like to share the contents of the document but has limited power to declassify documents after leaving the White House. That evidence potentially contradicts his claims that he declassified all of the documents removed from the White House during the wind-down of his presidency, as well as indicating that he may have broken the law by keeping documents pertinent to national security outside of a protected domain.
Smith, the special counsel, and federal prosecutors are also continuing to look into the Trump campaign’s false claims of election fraud — particularly whether they knew those claims were untrue but continued to make them in order to stay in power and profit financially.
Though the outcomes of those investigations are yet to be seen, recent cases against Trump have not gone in his favor.
In April, Trump was indicted in a Manhattan district court on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to alleged hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels, a porn actress with whom Trump allegedly had an affair in 2006, during his 2016 campaign. Trump’s former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, already served time in federal prison for his part in the scheme to keep Daniels from speaking openly about the affair; the charges against Trump relate to the manner in which he reimbursed Cohen for the payments to Daniels, labeling them as legal expenses. Though Trump has been indicted, that case likely will not head to trial till 2024.
E. Jean Carroll, the former advice columnist for Elle, also won a victory against Trump last month, eliciting $5 million in damages in her civil suit against the former president. The jury in that case found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation regarding his attack on Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s and the later maligning of her in the media after she made the allegations public in 2019. Carroll has sought additional damages against Trump for repeatedly denigrating her after the verdict.
The desire to define ourselves, from love languages to Myers-Briggs types.
Juanita Hernandez is a 25-year-old Miami-based anxiously attached Aries (Scorpio moon, Taurus rising), ENFJ, Enneagram Type Two. Until recently, she considered quality time her love language, but after listening to an episode of the podcast If Books Could Kill, she now thinks love languages are “kind of bullshit.”
Her path toward inner omniscience first began with a foundation in astrology, which Hernandez says she discovered as a child. Then came Enneagram — a personality test labeling respondents with one of nine types — which predated learning her attachment style at the behest of her therapist. Later, she took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Just as a medical diagnosis can explain a patient’s symptoms, Hernandez sees personality identifiers as succinct validation for why she is the way she is. She attributes descriptors such as “insecure,” “reliable,” and having an “intense relationship with your mother” to her various personality types. Whenever she mentions her astrological sign or attachment style to other similarly personality-informed conversation partners, “I feel like they understand who I am just by these signifiers,” Hernandez says. “It makes conversations easier.”
People have long been motivated to define the inner workings of their minds, but never quite had the wide array of tools or language to clearly communicate who they are until fairly recently. From Myers-Briggs and Enneagram to love languages and Hogwarts houses, we are sufficiently armed with the means to classify and define ourselves — and with bite-sized descriptors in which to broadcast our findings.
These assessments and quizzes and identifiers, though, only tell one side of the multidimensional story that is a human life. Self-reflection has its utility, but a test or a rigid personality type may not provide the answers we’re looking for. The question of whether we can ever truly know ourselves — and whether the means of obtaining that information from a quiz is legitimate — isn’t as important as what we do with that insight.
The quest for self-knowledge is as old as humanity
We’ve been attempting to make sense of our minds, our personalities, our motivations, for millennia. The origin of the age-old axiom “know thyself” extends as far back as Ancient Greece, after all. In contemporary times, the rise of psychoanalysis and the belief that an all-knowing shrink can mine your psyche was a strong “cultural prompt” inspiring people toward introspection, says Mitch Green, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and author of Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge.
In 1917, American personality testing began in earnest with Woodworth’s Personal Data Sheet, an assessment given to soldiers during World War I to identify those who might react negatively to enemy fire. In the 1940s, Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator based on the work of Carl Jung, who posited that people were either introverted or extroverted; that test ascribes one of 16 personality types based on where test-takers lean when it comes to extraversion versus introversion, judging versus perceiving, intuition versus sensing, and thinking versus feeling.
Less than a century later, there are hundreds of assessments and classification systems, measuring everything from emotional intelligence to how you display love, and ranging in scientific validity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is notoriously based on unproven theories and was conceived of by a mother-daughter pair with no formal psychology training. Attachment styles are ever-changing and can vary from relationship to relationship. Research about love languages is not definitive regarding whether the five love language categories — acts of service, physical touch, quality time, gifts, and words of affirmation — are accurate.
Other assessments are revenue drivers in a $2 billion industry based on the premise of self-enlightenment: know how you react and respond in situations both professional and personal and crack the code to interpersonal relationships. Most people recognize BuzzFeed quizzes such as “What Succession character are you?” as purely for entertainment purposes, but when your company requests employees take an evaluation commonly used in work settings, like the 16 Personalities assessment, which remixes the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types by adding another letter — A or T, for assertive or turbulent — the line is blurred.
“There’s just so many random supposed ‘personality assessments,’” says Jennifer Fayard, an associate professor of psychology at Ouachita Baptist University. “And they’re absolute rubbish. They are made by random people with no training or no understanding. Just because you get a result on a personality quiz doesn’t mean that it means anything.”
Poor design is a feature, not a bug, of personality assessments, says Randy Stein, a professor of marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. In a study of personality assessments, Stein found that the more opaque or confusing the questions, the “deeper” respondents considered the test. “The more disconnected the questions and the results, the more it seems to be getting at something underlying who you really are,” or so the reasoning goes, according to Stein. If questions on a personality quiz can be interpreted five different ways by as many people, test-takers trick themselves into thinking the assessment is uncovering something so profound that they never considered it before. However, legitimate personality assessments have questions so specific that each respondent interprets them in the same way, Stein says. It’s the difference between an abstract question like, “Are you drawn more to (a) fundamentals (b) overtones and nuance?” and rating how strongly you agree with a clear statement like, “I get stressed out easily.”
In reality, the results of personality tests and self-identifiers are never wholly surprising. If they were, the assessment was either poorly designed or you answered the questions inauthentically. “We live with ourselves, we watch what we do, and we watch how we feel and how we think,” Fayard says. “Despite that insider information, I think there’s still a tendency for people to assume that if they take a test, it’s going to spit out some magical secret that’s going to help them understand themselves better.” On the contrary, these quizzes are like a mirror, reflecting back exactly what you show it. If I always feel anxious when people are slow to text me back, and I know this to be a hallmark of anxious attachment style, then I can deduce I am anxiously attached.
But life is a mosaic of experiences and emotions. It is nearly impossible to put one label on a person’s existence, one box in which to place yourself. In parallel with the rise of online self-diagnosis — where memes and TikToks seemingly describe symptoms of many conditions, from ADHD to autism spectrum disorder — self-categorization allows people to put a stamp on what is typically a complex condition. Explanations of each type are simplified and broad, meant to have as wide an appeal as possible for those looking for “a simple explanation for the complex mess that is my life and my relationship with people,” Green says. “It’d be nice if there was a single one-paragraph narrative that puts it all together. We tend to gravitate toward those things.”
Relationships and personalities aren’t so neatly defined. Personality traits are measured on a spectrum, not in binaries, says Simine Vazire, a professor of psychology ethics and well-being at the University of Melbourne. Rather than being extroverted or not, most people have some percentage of extraversion. The Big Five personality test, which Vazire considers an accurate assessment, measures to what degree you inhabit the “big five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Rather than sort test-takers into strict types, it merely informs you whether you’re high in neuroticism or low in agreeableness. But percentiles aren’t sexy; they don’t make for good conversation. “It’s not how we communicate,” Vazire says. “I say, ‘How are you?’ … You don’t tell me, ‘Well, I’m 17 percent as good as yesterday.’” That we’d lean toward clear-cut terminology to describe ourselves isn’t altogether shocking.
Because descriptions of many “types” or “styles” or “signs” — from zodiac sign to Enneagram type — are vague and broad, people often find something in it they identify with, known as the Barnum effect. Any person who reads any vague descriptor claiming to explain who they are could realistically find something in the passage that resonates with them, Stein says, something that makes them say, “This is so me.”
Personality types as a force for change
To feel seen, of course, is often what people want.
A few years ago, Andrew Flynn was in a turbulent period of his life: He’d just finished grad school in Scotland, moved to Westminster, Colorado, where he lives now, and started a job in renewable energy tech. All the while, his relationships felt more tenuous than ever. He was embroiled in conflict with his roommates, romantic relationships weren’t panning out. In an effort to understand himself — and how he connected, or didn’t, to the people in his life — he took a free version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator online and discovered he was an ENTP. Described as “innovative,” “entrepreneurial,” and “unpredictable,” Flynn, now 33, says the ENTP signifier “summarizes my existence in a really succinct, bizarre way.” From his penchant for procrastination or conversations some might not consider “polite,” he says, learning his personality type provided context for his interpersonal relationships, both romantic and platonic. He’s become more observant about how other people react at work or while dating, noticing others’ behavior in contrast to his own impulses. “I can see a lot of the ways that I could be doing things better and then I just choose not to,” Flynn says. “I understand how I’m going to fuck this up and I’m just going to continue to carry on this way anyway.”
The validation provided by self-identifiers can inspire tangible change. Knowing your attachment style within a particular relationship can explain why you feel clingy or distant and help illuminate areas for growth. However, it’s arguably easier and cheaper to watch a YouTube video or take a quiz online than it is to seek out a mental health professional, pay for therapy, and spend time working through those issues (though that’s hardly necessary).
Taking stock of past trauma helped 35-year-old Randy Kakumei develop healthier relationships — all thanks to attachment style. Following a breakup nearly a decade ago, Kakumei’s only motivation was to reconcile with his ex. Like any web-savvy millennial, he searched YouTube for videos on how to get back together with a former partner. Instead, he found a video explaining attachment styles. The clip, Kakumei says, illustrated the qualities of a relationship between an anxiously attached person and an avoidantly attached person: The anxious character feels needy and insecure, the avoidant party pulls away. “It was like she was describing my relationship between me and my partner,” Kakumei, who lives in Slidell, Louisiana, says, “like, to a T.”
From the video, Kakumei deduced he had an anxious attachment style with his former partner, stemming from fraught relationships with parental figures in his childhood. Kakumei was adopted as a child to an older couple with military backgrounds who he says were cold and unloving. “It’s been a constant battle of feeling like I’m not enough,” he says. “Nobody’s going to accept me. Nobody loves me. Nobody cares about me.” In his adult relationships, he says, he constantly sought validation to compensate for the affection he lacked growing up.
Learning his attachment style was revelatory. Suddenly, Kakumei had a name for emotions and fears he believed were singular to his experience. Through working with a life coach and confronting his past — realizing the stories he told himself about being undeserving of love were just that: stories — Kakumei says he now is securely attached. About six months after their breakup, Kakumei reconciled with his ex. They are still together.
Attachment style can be an effective tool for parsing the dynamics of different relationships, Fayard says. But when we too heavily ascribe to one classification or identifier, we run the risk of using these personality types to justify bad behavior. Introverts may feel their personality type gives them permission to avoid social contact or reject a potential romantic partner because they may have a supposedly conflicting personality type. Clinging to specific descriptors makes it easier for people to put blinders up to certain aspects of their personalities because they aren’t neatly aligned with their type, Fayard says. “People I know that are really into the Enneagram, if they have things that maybe are causing some relationship issues or [things they] just need to work on, you hear a lot of ‘That’s just my type, that’s just my type,’” she says. “It’s almost like, ‘I don’t need to examine myself or work on myself or make any concessions because this is my type.’ I think that could potentially be harmful.”
Some fans of Enneagram, like Jenna DeWitt, a 34-year-old from Redlands, California, see the personality type as a means for personal development. “You’re supposed to grow out of that type,” DeWitt says. About a decade ago, DeWitt took the Enneagram test and discovered she was a Type Three, which she describes as someone who believes they need to earn their worth, “believing you have to work really hard to get love from other people,” she says. But instead of fixating on the type’s shortcomings, like shame or burnout, DeWitt uses her type to understand what drives her and how to utilize qualities of other types — the strength of Eights, the creativity of Fours — to her advantage. “I have learned as a Three that I was using these accomplishments, the tasks that I had in front of me to get done for the day. … It really felt like every time I was trying to achieve more and more I wasn’t getting what I really wanted,” DeWitt says. “What I want is love and belonging. What I want is to have that security in my identity, to feel like I truly am worthy of the things around me.”
For all the self-insight we possess, we are not the most accurate judges of our personalities. We underestimate how much others appreciate us and overestimate our own competence. It’s more pleasant to think about all of the times we were kind over the instances we were not, and this selective memory can impact how we report seeing ourselves. Any quiz or category we lump ourselves into doesn’t take into account how others perceive us. Short of asking our friends to compile a Powerpoint presentation of all of our strengths and weaknesses, Vazire says a more holistic way of learning about ourselves is to share our personality test results with people we trust to see how it compares to their view of us. “I don’t know that I would recommend it,” she says. “I’ve never actually gotten that far in my research where we just literally told people how other people close to them saw them. I don’t know that we can know if we’re ready for that information.”
Perhaps all we can tolerate — all we’re willing to tolerate — is what we already knew about ourselves all along: our willingness to speak up in work meetings, how we react to our partners, our organizational skills. Ascribing labels to the way we see ourselves can be clarifying when so much of life is convoluted and without clear explanations. But it isn’t all we are.
“Simple explanations are good,” Green says. “But simple explanations are hard to find.”
Decades of neglect cause disaster after disaster on India’s railways.
A railway accident in the Indian state of Odisha has killed at least 280 people and injured more than 800 on Friday — the latest such tragedy to occur in a nation where trains are widely used but often lack up-to-date infrastructure.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Odisha Saturday and offered consolation for the victims and their families via Twitter on Friday, saying, “Distressed by the train accident in Odisha. In this hour of grief, my thoughts are with the bereaved families. May the injured recover soon.” Upon his arrival at the accident site, Modi promised that the government would leave “no stone unturned for the treatment of those injured” and vowed that those responsible would be “punished stringently.”
Early reports indicate that a passenger train headed to Chennai from Kolkata collided with a stopped commercial train in Balasore district; another passenger train, the Howrah Superfast Express, then hit the wreckage, though the exact sequence of events has been disputed, the BBC reports. The incident is still being investigated, and rescue operations have ceased as of Saturday, with those seriously injured taken to the state’s largest hospital in Cuttack, a three-hour drive away. People searching for missing or injured relatives have reported confusion and a lack of information about their status and whereabouts, highlighting some of the country’s many infrastructure challenges.
India’s railway system was constructed in the 19th century, when the country was a British colony, and serves millions of people each day. Though it’s an important part of the country’s transit system, it’s long suffered from underinvestment, and deadly, destructive accidents are not uncommon. Friday’s accident has been referred to as the worst in the 21st century thus far.
Modi’s government has recently announced major spending on the transit and railway systems, including high-speed, indigenously produced trains between major transit corridors. But many such upgrades are years away, require mountains of outside investment, and must wind through a labyrinthine government bureaucracy to take effect.
India’s train system is one of the deadliest in the world
India’s railway system is in some ways a marvel, in that it connects a massive country together, is an affordable mode of transportation that serves 13 million people each day according to state-run Indian Railways, and connects India’s large rural population to its urban areas.
The railway system also spurred economic growth after it was first introduced in 1853, because it could move commodities both internally and internationally far more quickly than traditional transportation. The economy still depends on rail transportation, to an extent, though increased roadways and a large auto industry have increased Indians’ auto-ownership from 115 million in 2009 to 295.8 million in 2019, according to a report from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highway Transport.
Still, people all over the country depend on old, overcrowded trains for all aspects of life, despite the massive number of accidents and deaths that occur on India’s more than 40,000 miles of railway.
In October 2018, a commuter train slammed through a crowd gathering to celebrate the Hindu festival of Dussehra in Amritsar, leaving at least 59 dead and injuring at least 57. Some blamed the festival goers for gathering on the tracks; others, the guest of honor for his late arrival and the railways for not stopping the train. Train derailments caused serious incidents in 2005, 2011, 2016, and 2017, according to Reuters, and India’s deadliest train accident occurred in 1981, when a cyclone blew seven overcrowded coaches on a passenger train into a river in the northeastern state of Bihar.
According to India’s National Crime Records Bureau, there were around 100,000 railway-related deaths in the country between 2017 and 2021. About 69 percent of India’s 2,017 train accidents during that time period were due to derailments caused by old signaling equipment, poorly-maintained infrastructure, track defects, and human error, according to a 2021 report from India’s Comptroller and Auditor General. A lack of funding or refusal to use funding to fix railroad tracks also contributed to those accidents.
Indian Railways, the government-owned railway enterprise, has long given subsidies to help keep fare prices low; according to Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the government subsidy amounted to about 53 percent for each person traveling in the fiscal year 2019-2020. An announcement that the government would raise the price of tickets by 14.2 percent in 2014 spurred protests across the country, with people occupying rail stations and demonstrating in the streets to try to block the move.
Railways, which under Modi are improving, are still a popular transit option, and the government’s upgrades aim to make it even more so in order to counterweight India’s burgeoning reliance on automobile transportation. But while India’s economy is growing, that doesn’t necessarily translate to the average person, who still needs a low-cost, safe option to get where they want to go.
What will the government do to improve the train system?
Instead of visiting Odisha, Modi was supposed to be at the unveiling of a new Vande Bharat Express line from Goa to Mumbai, part of his announced investments in the transportation sector. The service initially launched in 2019, and Modi’s government plans to inaugurate 500 new such lines in the next three years, the Economist reports.
The high-speed railway system is just part of Modi’s transportation boom; his government is also building 10,000 kilometers of highway each year and has nearly doubled the length of the country’s rural road network since he was elected in 2014. Those efforts, along with increased domestic energy generation and improved broadband activity, all aim to boost India’s economic growth and turn it into a $5 trillion economy by 2026.
Though the extent to which the railway system was responsible for India’s economic growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries is debatable according to some scholars, Modi’s plans to shore up the aging system follow the generally accepted logic that improved transport will dramatically change the economy.
While infrastructure upgrades are clearly necessary, Friday’s deadly collision shows how much there is left to be done — and how critical the focus on passenger safety must be.
“India has achieved some success in making train journeys safer over the years, but a lot more needs to be done,” Swapnil Garg, a former officer of the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers, told the Associated Press. “The entire system needs a realignment and distributed development. We can’t just focus on modern trains and have tracks that aren’t safe.”
In the meantime, the government is offering cash payouts for victims of the crash and their loved ones. On Friday, Vaishnaw tweeted that victims were entitled to 1 million Indian rupees for a dead relative, Rs 200,000 in case of “grievous” injury, and Rs 50,000 for minor ones — about $12,000, $2,400, and $600 respectively.