News

1751 readers

1 users here now

Breaking news and current events worldwide.

founded 1 year ago

Rudy Giuliani, who pioneered the use of RICO when he was a US attorney, just got indicted on RICO charges (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Giuliani went from RICO charge prosecutor to a defendant in Fulton County DA Fani Willis' RICO case over Trump's alleged 2020 election interference.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] moistclump 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can someone eli5 RICO?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am grossly unqualified to answer this, but I'm going to anyway because it's the internet and you can't stop me.

Sometimes when a group of bullies does bad things, each bully only does a little bit of a bad thing, but all the bad things together make for a really, really bad thing. Before RICO, good guys could only punish bad guys for the little bit of the bad thing they did. But with RICO, the entire group of bullies (be it an organized crime family, a corporation, a political administration, etc.) all get in trouble for participating in the overall really, really bad thing.

This is especially helpful when the leaders of the bullies barely do any bad things at all and just instruct (or even imply for) others to do bad things. The leaders can get in trouble for that, and the regular bullies are even encouraged to to give the good guys more information about the leaders so they (the regular bullies) can get in a little less trouble.

Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Law

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you for this ELI5 breakdown! It’s very helpful in understanding how the law works in its most basic sense.

It also helps show how Trump can still be implicated. He always has his henchmen do all the dirty work.