Two things can be true at once: Donald Trump pretty obviously violated classified document statutes. Should he be prosecuted or not? In any normal circumstance, the answer would be, sure — why not? If you commit a crime, you should be prosecuted for the crime.
But here’s the issue: Once James Comey let Hillary Clinton off the hook for crimes, the answer became, no, Trump should not be prosecuted. That’s because if only one side has to play by the rules, then the rules are not rules — they are just a double standard. They are just a weapon.
The notion that it is unprecedented for a president of the United States to engage in borderline criminal activity that violates RICO is not true. In 2014, I advocated for a full-scale use of RICO to target politicians. I said I would prefer widespread use of RICO to go after various criminal enterprises run by politicians. I wrote an entire book titled “The People versus Barack Obama,” in which I suggested that Obama had very likely engaged in, by Fani Willis’ definition, RICO violations.
Take the IRS scandal. In the IRS scandal, Barack Obama and his minions repeatedly said in public it would be amazing if the IRS audited and removed tax exemption from virtually every conservative group in America leading up to the 2010 election. Then they did it. The IRS did it. But Obama claimed he never meant for them to do it. That looks very much like the sort of mafioso activity RICO was meant to stop in the first place.
Now, when I made this argument back in 2014, the entire press that reviewed the book said, “This is crazy. You could never do this. How could you possibly suggest something like this?” And my answer was, “You know what? Perhaps if we finally started holding politicians accountable for their various criminal enterprises, they would stop doing crimes.” But then they ignored Barack Obama’s crimes and ignored Hillary Clinton’s. And now they’re ignoring Hunter and Joe Biden’s. The sort of RICO violations that we are currently talking about with regard to Trump and the election of 2020 would fit the criminal violations committed by Hunter and Joe Biden much better.
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You want to talk about a RICO criminal enterprise? Let’s say you had an actual honest family, not a mafia family, but a regular family. And that family sent a bag man to foreign countries to pick up cash on behalf of every relative of the vice president of the United States while the vice president was presiding over foreign policy in those countries.
Does the plausible deniability there sound like a mafia situation? Joe Biden was calling into Hunter Biden’s business meetings and saying, “How is the weather over there?” Doesn’t that sound exactly like what a mafioso would do? You get the Don on the line and tell the local bartender, “How is the weather down there?” And then everyone knows that if the bartender doesn’t pay off the mafioso, then the place goes up in flames. That looks like a RICO violation.
If you’re discussing RICO violations, you can find RICO violations pretty much anywhere. I’d be sanguine about that if they were even remotely applied evenly, but that has not been the case. The treatment has only been applied to Trump. No one else is getting this sort of treatment. If you want to have a set of rules that applies to everybody evenly, I’m totally for it. But if the rules only apply to Trump, we can all see what you’re doing.
What will end up happening is there will be motivated Republican prosecutors who do bring RICO violations against Joe and Hunter Biden. All there needs to be is a prosecutor with courage in a local jurisdiction to do this with a friendly jury. Once they have made this a one-sided tactic, get ready. We now have a bunch of local DAs all over the country deciding that they want to get their name on the paper. That’s why Fani Willis in Georgia is doing this. It’s why Alvin Bragg of Manhattan is doing this. People want their names in the paper.
You can expect this on all sides now. One of the predictable results is that people who have families, people who have a sense of shame and do not wish to see their lives investigated, are simply going to stay away from politics. The best people will not go into politics. The only people left will be the ones willing to slug it out in court every single day, because that’s what it’s going to take from here on out.
We have now entered the era of mutually assured destruction. And the only way to go back to something resembling normality is to pursue criminal indictment in some sort of state law against Hunter and Joe Biden, in exactly the same way that a local Georgia RICO violation is being pursued against Trump.
I would argue there’s something with regard to the Biden family that looks a lot more like a mafioso family than anything that Trump did.
And that makes Trump’s RICO prosecution utterly wrong.