DOJ Should Think Twice Before Aiming RICO at Capitol Rioters

Everything old is new again.

Democrats and the new administration have gotten the confirmation of their new attorney general tangled up in their Trump Impeachment II choreography, but things are nonetheless humming at the Biden Justice Department. This week, right on cue from the White House’s messaging on equity — not to be confused with its antithesis, equal justice under the law — the DOJ dropped a major civil-rights case against Yale, thus endorsing the university’s racially discriminatory admission practices. (And aren’t you just loving President Biden’s notions of fulfilling commitments to national unity and keeping partisan politics out of law enforcement!) Meantime, media reports say prosecutors are debating among themselves whether to charge Capitol rioters with RICO. That’s the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, an innovative criminal statute from early Seventies law, eventually used to great effect — ironically under the circumstances, by then-heralded prosecutor Rudy Giuliani — in dismantling the mafia and other organize-crime cartels.