Last Tuesday, Donald Trump sauntered into Joe’s Seafood in occupied Washington, DC, presumably to order the chain’s $83 filet mignon extra-well done and drenched in ketchup. For about forty-five seconds, the Dear Leader also received a complimentary amuse bouche in the form of a handful of Code Pink protestors chanting “Free DC, free Palestine, Trump is the Hitler of our time.”
Catchy!
The restaurant promptly escorted the protestors off of the premises, which it had every right to do. Although perhaps the franchise owners might have reacted differently had they chatted with Stephanie Wilkinson first. Wilkinson, who famously tossed then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders out of her restaurant the Red Hen back in 2018, says that standing up to Trump was “great for business.” After Trump trolls flooded the Red Hen with thousands of one-star Yelp reviews, she worried she’d go woke, go broke. But actual diners voted with their wallets, and Wilkinson actually grew her restaurant, which is now called “Zunzun.”
“Resistance is not futile, for you or your business,” she says.
Joe’s chose Trump’s corpulent maw instead and showed the nice Code Pink ladies the door. But whatever the restaurant served up failed to quiet the colicky leader, and soon he was frothing at the mouth about prosecuting “paid agitators.”
"I'm doing a great job for peace in the Middle East. I should get a lot of awards for that, with the Abraham Accords and everything else,” he whined. “But a woman just stood up and started screaming, and she got booed out of the place, too."
"She was a paid agitator, and you have a lot of them, and I've asked Pam” — meaning Attorney General Pam Bondi — to look into that in terms of bringing RICO cases against them. Criminal RICO,” he went on, citing no evidence. “They should be put in jail, what they’re doing to this country is really subversive.”
And so Pam dutifully scurried off to figure out how to charge First Amendment protected speech under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970. Luckily she had her trusty sidekick Todd Blanche to help out. The Deputy Attorney General, who was an actual federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York, was dispatched to explain to CNN’s Caitlan Collins that “to the extent” those forty-five seconds of chanting were “part of an organized effort to inflict harm, and terror, and damage, on the United States,” it might be RICO.
Todd Blanche knows damn well it’s not RICO.
RICO Suave
Trump and Blanche suggest that anyone who disagrees with the administration must be secretly bankrolled by unknown (((wink, wink))) funders. But even if George Soros were paying each and every member of Code Pink to go hang out in DC-area restaurants shouting, it wouldn’t be a crime. And it’s doubly not RICO.
The RICO statute, in and of itself, doesn’t criminalize anything, least of all yelling at the President. Instead, it enhances criminal and civil penalties when an organization invests in or otherwise participates in multiple existing crimes known as “predicate offenses.”
The paradigmatic RICO case involved the Gambino crime family, where low-level muscle did the bosses’ dirty work. RICO lets prosecutors go after the entire org chart, no matter who actually pulled the trigger. The Department of Justice manual notes that the “purpose of the RICO statute is the elimination of the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations operating in interstate commerce.” And although Blanche is technically correct that RICO may apply to any organization that funds such predicate offenses, unless your hirelings have engaged in “a pattern” of such offenses, it’s not RICO.
The statute (18 U.S.C. § 1961) lists 35 separate predicate offenses. That list includes the sorts of things you would expect the mafia to do, like murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, drug dealing, money laundering, counterfeiting, and embezzlement. It does not (yet) include “slightly annoying the thin-skinned President of the United States for less than a minute.”
Apparently, Blanche thinks Code Pink’s protest could be characterized as some kind of terrorism. But not even all forms of terrorism qualify as RICO predicate offenses. Only international acts of terrorism, defined as “conduct transcending national boundaries,” fall within the ambit of the statute.
So even if Code Pink hatched a plot to spoil Trump’s dinner from Buckingham Palace, it still wouldn’t be RICO, since an isolated event is not a “pattern of racketeering activity.” And a pattern of saying the president is “the Hitler of our time” isn’t gonna do it. (Which is a lucky thing for JD Vance.)
If you’ve got a problem, Ted can make it worse
But while it’s fun to make fun of Todd and Pam, their lies about the law can’t be divorced from context. The administration is vowing to crack down on left-wing organizations, and Trump’s less-stupid allies, like Senator Ted Cruz, have proposed a Stop FUNDERs Act, an acronym for “Financial Underwriting of Nefarious Demonstrations and Extremist Riots.”
Cruz’s bill would amend 18 U.S.C. § 1961’s list of predicate RICO offenses to add criminal rioting, defined as a public disturbance involving acts of violence. Which… is not the sort of thing one typically associates with racketeering.
The Senate isn’t going to pass Cruz’s bill, perhaps because they realize it would have made criminals out of the president’s allies who paid for buses to transport his supporters to DC on January 6. And even if Cruz’s doomed statute were codified, it still wouldn’t apply to Code Pink’s heckling.
But all the hilarious bumbling and mischaracterization aside, we have multiple branches of the federal government equate dissent with terrorism and demanding twenty-year prison sentences for critics of the administration. This is a blatant effort to criminalize free speech and intimidate protesters. And that’s not funny at all.