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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Trump wants to target liberal groups and protesters with a decades-old
law once used against the mob
By Fredreka Schouten, CNN
Updated:
5:00 AM EDT, Wed September 17, 2025
Source: CNN
As President Donald Trump threatens legal action against his
adversaries, particularly after , he’s repeatedly talked about using
one federal law: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act, .
Trump wants to bring racketeering charges against left-wing groups
he’s accused of promoting violence. Some influential Republicans
agree with him and have been pushing to include rioting as one of the
crimes that falls under the racketeering statute, a decades-old law
once aimed at cracking down on organized crime.
Kirk’s death and the resulting calls by influential conservatives to
crack down on the left using the federal government’s official powers
has called new attention to that push. Trump and his aides have said
publicly they into efforts to take on the president’s political
rivals, including potentially pursuing RICO charges and seeking to
designate some liberal groups as domestic terrorist organizations.
Trump this week said he was discussing with Attorney General Pam Bondi
using RICO to bring racketeering charges against left-wing groups. Last
month, the president also called for a RICO investigation of a specific
person: liberal billionaire George Soros, one of the nation’s biggest
funders of Democratic causes and candidates.
Trump has provided no specific evidence of wrongdoing by Soros and
there’s no evidence liberal groups had anything to do with Kirk’s
death. The president on Democratic politicians, notably when Minnesota
State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed in June.
He also suggested RICO charges could be brought against people to
promote his crime crackdown in the nation’s capital. “They should
be put in jail,” he said.
Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday night about Trump’s
comments, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche responded: “Is it,
again, sheer happenstance that individuals show up at a restaurant
where the president is trying to enjoy dinner in Washington, DC, and
accost him with vile words and vile anger and meanwhile he’s simply
trying to have dinner?”
“To the extent that it’s part of an organized effort to inflict
harm and terror and damage to the United States, there’s potential
investigations there,” Blanche said.
A bill sponsored by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and a handful of other
Republicans on Capitol Hill tries to expand the law’s powers. The
proposed legislation – dubbed the Stop Financial Underwriting of
Nefarious Demonstrations and Extremist Riots or the STOP FUNDERs Act
– would add rioting to the list of offenses that could be used as
part of a RICO probe by the Justice Department.
If successful, it would enable federal prosecutors to seek charges
against and seize the assets of organizations and individuals who fund
or coordinate riots that result in violence, according to a .
“There is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension,
that is spreading violence,” Cruz said Tuesday as he discussed his
bill during a Senate hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel.
Critics of the measure say they are lobbying lawmakers in both parties
in the hopes of keeping the Cruz proposal from gaining momentum on
Capitol Hill in the wake of Kirk’s death.
The legislation “would dangerously lower the bar for government
investigations into Americans exercising their right to peaceful
demonstration,” said Cole Leiter, executive director of Americans
Against Government Censorship, a coalition of progressive and labor
groups that launched late last year.
“By branding protest as a criminal activity, this bill threatens to
intimidate people from engaging in peaceful, lawful advocacy and puts
everyday Americans at risk of being dragged into sprawling
investigations,” he added.
The lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, a powerhouse conservative
think tank in Washington, is among the groups supporting the Cruz
measure.
Cully Stimson, a former federal prosecutor who is a senior legal fellow
at Heritage, said concerns that the law could be weaponized against
peaceful protesters and their supporters are overblown.
“Rioting has nothing to do with words. It has to do with actions,”
he said. To secure a RICO conviction against the financial backer of a
group that engaged in rioting, prosecutors would have to prove that the
donors provided money with the intention that violence would be carried
out, he added.
Proponents of the Cruz effort, Stimson said, view it “as a necessary
tool in the toolbox to dissuade people (from) funding violent acts.”
Jeffrey Grell, who teaches about RICO cases at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas and has written a book about the law, said
racketeering cases are complicated because prosecutors must prove
several elements, including that the enterprise involved interstate
commerce and a pattern of criminal activity.
A prosecutor is more likely to charge people disrupting ICE arrests in
Los Angeles with obstruction of justice, he said, rather than pursuing
racketeering claims. “To prove obstruction of justice, you have to
prove like four things,” he said. “To prove RICO, you have to prove
20.”
But even RICO cases that fail can prove punishing for their targets,
Grell noted.
“They are very expensive to litigate,” he said. “Money is money
and whether you take it in the form of a judgment or you caused someone
to go bankrupt through legal fees, you’ve still destroyed the
group.”
Notably, Trump faced state RICO charges in Georgia over his push to
reverse his 2020 election loss there. That case is now in limbo, with
Georgia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday to let Fulton County District
Attorney Fani Willis prosecute the case after she was disqualified over
her romantic relationship with a special prosecutor.
In recent days, administration officials have they could take against
what they describe as a network of organizations they accuse of
organizing and funding riots.
“I’ve been speaking to the Attorney General about bringing RICO
against some of the people that you’ve been reading about that have
been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation,”
Trump said this week in the Oval Office.
“These aren’t protests. These are crimes,” he said, before citing
attacks on vehicles used by federal agents carrying out his deportation
campaign.
Trump, who has long singled out Soros for scorn, has escalated those
attacks as well, suggesting the 95-year-old financier and
philanthropist should be jailed.
Soros has been a major donor to Democrats, and his Open Society
Foundations has an array of liberal groups, including Indivisible,
which has organized protests against Trump’s agenda.
His organization has denied any wrongdoing.
“We oppose all forms of violence and condemn the outrageous
accusations to the contrary,” Open Society said in a . “Our work is
entirely peaceful and lawful. It is disgraceful to use this tragedy for
political ends to dangerously divide Americans and attack the First
Amendment.”
Norm Eisen, a prominent Trump critic who serves as executive chair of
the Democracy Defenders Fund, said he’s hopeful that efforts to add
rioting to underlying RICO offenses won’t succeed. He said lawmakers
in both political parties grasp that if it becomes law, it “can be
turned against any organization.”
“If somebody happens to be a member of a church and that person
commits a crime, under the bill, is the church now going to be
investigated?” he asked. “People understand that this way madness
lies.”
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