Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Sunday that the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) appears “tailor-made” for the Fulton County election indictment against former President Trump and his 18 co-defendants.
In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Raskin addressed concerns that initiating a RICO prosecution could potentially risk a jury annulment if the jury ultimately concluded that the charge is exaggerated.
“[RICO] refers to a pattern of extortion activity in which people are conspired to achieve an illegal goal – in this case, the overthrow of a presidential election and the replacement of the actual process being run by the people with a fake process made up of fake voters voted on it. So there’s a lot of criminal components and there were a lot of people involved,” Raskin said in the interview.
“And that strikes me as tailor-made for RICO law enforcement the way we designed it,” Raskin continued. “If people want to talk about reforming the RICO statute, then we can analyze that, but it has been repeatedly upheld against constitutional attacks.”
Raskin — who was the senior anti-Trump impeachment manager in January 2021 and sat on the Jan. 6 special committee investigating the attack on the Capitol — argued that RICO is not being used to prosecute the mafia in most cases today.
“Well, Rico hasn’t been used against the mafia for the most part if you look at all of the RICO prosecutions in the country at the federal and state levels,” Raskin said. “Of course, a law that only applies to one group would be something strange.”
Trump and 18 co-defendants have been charged in a wide-ranging RICO trial over his efforts to overturn the results of Georgia’s presidential election. He was tried in the Fulton County Jail last week and had to post $200,000 bail to be released.
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