Nah. We're full banana republic now.
Time to throw your political opponents in jail on made up charges.
And questioning if the election was legitimate is now a conspiracy charge.
To #1, the charges aren’t actually made up. Some of them (most notably the Manhattan charges, which can probably be tossed on summary judgment) are basically a prosecutor contorting the law to make something stick. Ironically, charges related to “bad legal advice” could well be used against the current prosecutors, but I’m not sure that that could even withstand a constitutional challenge.
To #2, in this case it isn’t “questioning the election” so much as it is Trump trying to apparently* browbeat a Georgia election official into overturning the results. The “perfect phone call” was anything but, although the real question that’s going to be put before a jury is “Did Trump actually try to force Raffensperger to overturn the election, or is he just a complete idiot who doesn’t understand that he shouldn’t rely on third hand information from dubious sources?”
Unlike the federal charges, though, election law violations are clearly spelled out at the state level so this isn’t a stretch like the last round of federal indictments. Except for the RICO bit, which definitely is a reach.
I haven't seen a single article discussing the number of acts. There's a lot because it takes a lot to describe a complicated and widespread plot. I believe Trump has been hit with 13 actual charges. That isn't actually a huge number, and easily could have been inflated to several times that if that was their real goal.
Neither of those is actually close to describing this or any of the other cases.
No, but I think the RICO charge (which by itself takes up a whole 71 pages) is excessive, and doesn’t really fit. As far as listing the “acts” I think that just stems from the fact that most people aren’t familiar with legal proceedings and don’t understand that every important fact has to be spelled out before drawing conclusions based on them.
As to why Willis didn’t just charge conspiracy instead of RICO, I don’t know, especially since the bar for proving that would be a lot lower.