Trump DOJ Lackey Wants to Hit Protesters With RICO Charges

Former Trump impeachment lead counsel and current Representative Daniel Goldman aimed some sharp remarks at Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as his Justice Department seeks to hit CodePink with a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charge for yelling at President Trump while he was at dinner last week.

Trump called for the protestors to be jailed on Monday via RICO. On Tuesday Blanche told CNN he was happy to oblige.

“RICO is available to all kinds of organizations committing crimes and committing wrongful acts, not just organized crime, or ISIS, or terrorist organizations, and so it depends,” Blanche said Tuesday on CNN when asked to justify treating CodePink like the mob or a terrorist group. “It is again, sheer happenstance, that individuals show up at a restaurant where the president is trying to enjoy dinner in Washington, D.C. and accost him with vile words and vile anger … does it mean that it’s completely random that they showed up? Maybe. But 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.”

Goldman rebuked Blanche’s comments online.

“I charged RICO cases. Yelling at the President is not a racketeering act and cannot be the basis for a criminal charge. @DAGToddBlanche knows better,” Goldman wrote Wednesday morning on X. “He is corrupting the DOJ with ridiculous comments like this.”

This all comes as the Trump administration moves to crack down on free speech as part of a mass disinformation campaign in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing. But to use RICO charges to achieve that is an extreme overreach at best.

Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has thrown his hat in the ring for governor.

Raffensperger garnered national attention in 2021 when he refused to “find” Donald Trump enough votes to throw Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results. Five years on, Raffensperger’s candidacy will prove a political litmus test for conservative appetites in the South, and whether or not they’re willing to veer away from MAGA’s clutches.

“I’m a conservative Republican, and I’m prepared to make the tough decisions. I follow the law and the Constitution, and I’ll always do the right thing for Georgia no matter what,” Raffensperger said in an announcement video.

Raffensperger will join an already crowded Republican primary for Georgia’s top position. His challengers include Georgia Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones—a Trump loyalist who has already received the president’s endorsement—and state Attorney General Chris Carr, who has similarly embraced the president’s politics in an effort to curry favor with his supporters.

But no one else on the ticket will likely draw MAGA eyes like Raffensperger, who half a decade later is still mired in the political turmoil of standing up to the movement’s figurehead.

In campaign videos, Raffensperger frames himself as a tough-on-liberals Republican who fought “and won” against the likes of former state Representative Stacey Abrams and former President Joe Biden, upholding traditional party ideals such as lowering taxes while focusing on the production of “good paying jobs.”

Raffensperger didn’t shy away from participating in the conservative culture war, either. In the same video, the secretary of state promised to deliver a “bold conservative agenda” as Georgia’s next governor. That plan, though vague, partly focused on putting parents “in charge” of their kids’ education, as well as banning transgender surgery for minors.

How seriously Georgia is affected by transgender surgeries is unclear, though a study by UCLA found that just 3.3 percent of American youths across the country identify as transgender or gender nonconforming.

Raffensperger is now the second gubernatorial hopeful to have openly defied Trump. Georgia’s former Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan announced Wednesday that he is running for governor—as a newly minted Democrat.

The immigration raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia earlier this month, which saw more than 300 South Korean workers detained and, last week, flown back to Seoul, has proven to be an enduring, self-inflicted disaster by the Trump administration.

Reports of the harrowing conditions the workers experienced continue to emerge, as South Korea this week announced its intention to investigate human rights violations. “One by one, we were cuffed at the wrists, then chained at the waist and shackled at the ankles. Then we were put on the bus. I couldn’t understand why we were being treated this way,” one worker told the BBC for a Tuesday story.

The worker said the detention center was “very cold. We weren’t even given blankets for 2 days. I was wearing a short sleeve T-shirt, so I put my arms inside my clothes and wrapped myself in a towel to try to stay warm at night,” he said. “The worst part was the water. It smelt like sewage. We drank as little as possible.”

Meanwhile, the raid seems poised to inflict significant economic harm on the U.S. and the Peach State. Construction on the raided facility is reportedly paused until 2026. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has warned that South Korean firms “will be very hesitant to make direct investments in the United States” in light of the incident—and indeed, several have already suspended U.S. projects.

President Trump, evidently feeling the heat, took to Truth Social on Sunday: “I don’t want to frighten off or disincentivize Investment into America by outside Countries or Companies,” he wrote. “We welcome them, we welcome their employees, and we are willing to proudly say we will learn from them.”

Much of the blame for the incident and its fallout belongs to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, according to a Tuesday report in Forbes. Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer representing several of the workers (who he says were in the U.S. on business visas and though a visa waiver program) told the publication that the arrests were “entirely driven” by Miller’s quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day.

“ICE agents screwed up by arresting people who did not abuse the visa, were eligible to engage in the type of work for which they were admitted, but ICE considered it a successful operation because they met Miller’s quota,” Kuck said.

President Donald Trump is mounting a pressure campaign to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, without providing any evidence to support the charges against her, ABC News reported Wednesday.

After five months of digging, investigators have yet to produce a shred of evidence that James falsified bank documents to secure favorable terms on a mortgage for her Virginia home, multiple sources briefed on the probe told ABC News.

Still, Trump has directed top officials at the Justice Department to aggressively pursue an investigation against James. Two Trump stooges, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Ed Martin, the head of the DOJ’s Working Weaponization Group, have urged U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert to seek an indictment against James.

When federal prosecutors declined, Pulte encouraged Trump to fire Siebert and have him replaced with someone who would do his bidding, sources told ABC News.

Pulte and Martin have staked their claim that James committed mortgage fraud on a single document claiming that the home she purchased in 2023 would be her primary residence. But investigators haven’t been able to prove she knowingly lied, or that the document was even considered by loan officers. Lawyers that drafted the document said the error was the result of a template that wasn’t corrected, sources said. Every other document submitted for the mortgage accurately stated she would not reside at the home.

Pulte has also lobbed similar claims of mortgage fraud at other Trump opponents, such as Democratic Senator Adam Schiff and Federal Reserve Chair Lisa Cook—which have already begun to fall apart.

Since Trump entered office, the administration has set off on a campaign of retribution against James. Months after the probe into her residences started in April, the DOJ launched an investigation into whether she violated Trump’s constitutional rights in taking legal action against him in a winning bank fraud case, costing him $454 million for his family’s business practices.

The Trump administration wasn’t even trying to determine if Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony could be deemed credible.

In a CNN interview Tuesday night, in which he urged Americans to hear out the convicted sex offender’s side of the story, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the point of his August interviews with Maxwell was to “give her an opportunity to speak,” which he claimed no one had done before.

“She had been in prison for many many years, and she had offered to speak on many many occasions, and she was never given that opportunity,” Blanche told CNN, referring to Jeffrey Epstein’s media-savvy criminal associate and girlfriend.

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. She was deposed in the 2016 defamation lawsuit against Epstein brought by one of his most vocal victims, Virginia Giuffre, and refused to testify in her own criminal trial in 2021. She is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.

“So what I did is I gave her that opportunity to speak,” Blanche—Trump’s former personal attorney—continued. “Whether her answers were credible or truthful, there’s a lot of information out there about Mr. Epstein, about her, and whether what she said is completely wrong or completely right or a little of both—that’s the reason why we released the transcript.

“It’s really up to the American people to determine what they believe [whether] her answers were credible or whether they found her not credible,” Blanche said, again referring to an individual who refused to testify on multiple occasions and was already found guilty by a jury of her peers for sex-trafficking children.

Despite already having the Epstein files on hand, Blanche interviewed Maxwell again last month regarding details of Epstein’s potential associates, in an apparent attempt to satiate the president’s restless base.

The information exchange resulted in a very convenient transfer for Maxwell—one of the worst sex criminals of the century—shipping her from a Florida prison to a low-security prison camp in Texas that lawmakers have described as “not suitable for a sex offender.” Maxwell’s attorneys are also pressing the White House for a pardon.

While Trump administration officials attempted to publicly justify reopening conversation with Maxwell, questions abound about her credibility and why her answers in 2025 would differ from her original interviews with federal officials.