A Georgia grand jury indicted former president Donald Trump on a racketeering charge, the same offense that House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) believes Hunter Biden committed when he wired money in an elaborate scheme through multiple shell companies.
According to legal experts, federal law defines 35 offenses that constitute racketeering, including gambling, murder, kidnapping, arson, drug dealing, and bribery.
The law was originally intended to catch mobsters. In 1987, former United States Attorney Rudolph Giuliani indicted the heads of New York City’s “Five Families” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Eight of them were convicted under RICO.
On Monday night, a grand jury in Georgia indicted Trump for violating the state’s RICO act – O.C.G.A. § 16-14-4(c).
Georgia lawmakers passed the law in 1980 and designed it to include any behavior “through a pattern of racketeering activity” that an accused uses to acquire or maintain “interest in or control of any enterprise, real property, or personal property of any nature, including money.”
As Breitbart News reported, the Georgia case invokes the state’s RICO statute, the kind of law used to prosecute mobsters for large criminal enterprises. Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz noted that RICO prosecutions are often overturned on appeal.
Comer, who was a bank board member for ten years, argues Hunter Biden violated federal RICO law a different way than the Fulton County prosecutor alleges Trump did. He believes the Biden business opened more than 20 shell companies in an elaborate scheme to hide payments and launder money.
“When you set up a bunch of shell companies for the sole purpose to launder money, that is called racketeering,” Comer said on the Verdict with Ted Cruz in July.
Through banking transactions, the Biden family business received over $20 million from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan while President Joe Biden was vice president, Comer revealed last week.
The committee unveiled two tranches of Biden business bank records. Those records showed the Biden business received at least $10 million from business schemes in Romania and China. In total, nine Biden family members received payments from the family foreign business ventures, including two of Joe Biden’s grandchildren.
Comer predicted in June that the committee’s work would ultimately reveal that the Biden family accepted up to $30 million from its foreign business dealings. “We have more bank records coming in going to exceed $10 million, this week. And I think we will get between $20 and 30 million,” Comer told Fox News.
Comer said in July the Biden family business caused six banks to flag more than 170 “large” amounts of money in Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to the treasury for review, 20 more than previously known. SARs “often contain evidence of potential criminal activities, such as money laundering and fraud,” according to a 2020 Senate report.
WATCH — GOP Rep. James Comer: Joe Biden “Changed the Rules” to Prevent Congress from Viewing “Suspicious Activity Reports”
C-SPANFollow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
