"The simpler your case is, with fewer charges and fewer defendants, the faster it can move. The federal prosecution looks like..."

"... it’s an attempt to do the sprint. As for [the Fulton County, Georgia, case], it is hokey to say it’s a marathon, but basically it’s more like an epic with a giant cast of characters. The other one’s Raymond Carver, and this is Dickens... A RICO charge is the kind of charge you bring when you have a lot of different people connected in different ways, but who form a loose organization, or sometimes a very tight hierarchical one—say, a Mob family—who are all working toward a common goal. But that common goal has been achieved during a long period of time and in potentially all sorts of different places. So, it’s the perfect charge for something where there are a lot of moving parts. It’s the most narrative-driven of the types of cases you can bring, to some extent, because some part of the trial has to be spent establishing the fact that there was an enterprise...."

Says Georgia State lawprof and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Caren Myers Morrison interviewed by Isaac Chotiner in "The Benefits and Drawbacks to Charging Trump Like a Mobster Racketeering statutes allow prosecutors to arrange many characters and a broad set of allegations into a single narrative. Making the story cohere can be a challenge" (The New Yorker).

The "enterprise" was winning a second term for Trump. The various defendants were working toward that common goal.

Prosecutors love RICO statutes because, like I say, they allow you to go back in time, and fold a whole bunch of people into it. It’s a very powerful tool. Obviously, whenever prosecutors have a very powerful tool, they like to use it. And then that raises issues on the defense side and sometimes on the public side that the prosecutors are overreaching or going too far....