Law school professors express Republican empathy for media bias of Trump trials.

• Author: Schuster, Steve

Byline: Steve Schuster, sschuster@wislawjournal.com

During an exclusive interview with the Wisconsin Law Journal on Monday, North Carolina-based attorney Cleta Mitchell (former Milwaukee Foley & Lardner partner) provided the Wisconsin Law Journal with a number of recently filed court documents in Georgia involving the special purpose grand jury that investigated former President Donald Trump and various allies and associates, including Mitchell.

Among those documents was a motion filed Sept. 8 in Fulton County, Georgia, on behalf of attorneys for Rudy Guiliani.

"There has been zero coverage in any publication about the motion filed on Friday, Sept. 8, in Fulton County by lawyers for Rudy Guiliani to require the district attorney to specifically state which statements, acts and plans were criminal in nature or would give rise to a RICO charge," Mitchell said, noting opportunities for improvement with mainstream media's coverage of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans.

"The coverage of these indictments and everything leading up to them has been nothing short of astonishingly vacuous and one-sided against President Trump and anyone associated with him. The criminalization of the practice of law should concern every lawyer and judge in America because that is exactly what is happening here and has been happening for more than 2- years. These proceedings against President Trump and his associates and lawyers are tyrannical. They mutilate every principle of American jurisprudence. The legal profession needs to step up, speak out and demand an end to this partisan manipulation of the rule of law. It is time," Mitchell added.

According to court documents, Guiliani's attorneys argued, "the state has comingled the alleged overt acts and purported racketeering activity without specifying the manner in which they are to be used."

Attorneys further argued, "by incorporating these foreign criminal offenses (which, if proven, would be crimes in these other states) into a Georgia indictment to establish the RICO violation here, the state has eliminated this defendant's constitutional protection against subjecting him to punishment for the same offenses twice."

Court documents also noted Georgia's RICO statute is modeled after the Federal RICO statute and, as such, can derive guidance from interpretations of the Federal statute.

Mitchell also said, "There has been zero coverage in the 'news' about the report issued by the Congressional...