“Prosecutors have found racketeering laws to be powerful tools in targeting not only foot soldiers in a criminal enterprise, but also high-level decision makers.” — The New York Times
Yeah, that’s right, it’s me, Racketeering Charges, and I’m bursting into this ex-president judicial drama like the Kool-Aid Man of inscrutable justice. How bad am I? Very bad. What do I mean exactly? Unclear. But will I get the job done? You better believe it.
Sure, the old president has already been indicted a whole bunch of times. We’ve got some obstruction of justice charges, some false statement charges—but that’s kiddie stuff. Nothing gets the job done quite like me.
What even is racketeering, you ask? Honey, what is air? What is time? I cannot be defined in simple human language, and this only strengthens my powers.
The fact that no one really understands my exact deal only works in my favor. I’m awesome but mysterious. I’m like that guy in your sophomore chem lab, the guy whose actual name was like John but everyone called “Blaster,” who looked twenty-five years old with a full beard and a leather jacket full of cigarettes and a seemingly endless supply of “that’s what she said”-type jokes about igniting your burners and combining your acids. How could Blaster possibly be a high school sophomore? No one knows. No one cares. Just be happy Blaster is here.
I see you refreshing the New York Times homepage over and over again. You’re wondering desperately: Are they finally gonna get this loser? We all know he did horrible dipshit things, but were they actually crimes? Can it even be proved if Mueller couldn’t get it done? The line between crimery and dipshittery is razor thin, so how can we be sure he’ll get bagged for real?
Well, worry no more because that’s exactly what I’m here for. I live for this. You don’t need to understand the fine print. The rackets? You better believe they’ll be ’teered.
Mob bosses. Disgraced FBI agents. Allison Mack from Smallville. I’ve seen a million vaguely criminal faces, and I’ve rocked them all. There’s nobody Racketeering Charges can’t handle, including former presidents.
“But he gets away with so much.” “But he’s a professional grifter, and he’ll somehow con his way out of all these indictments.” Wake up and smell the racket tea. Nobody cons their way past me. Nobody. I mean, just say it out loud. “Racketeering.” Sounds pretty bad, right? That’s mostly all we need. A general sense of sinister malice gets you 70 percent of the way to a conviction. That’s just how Racketeering Charges rolls.
Listen. We live in a nation of laws. But sometimes, those laws sound more like spells. And spells are more powerful than any nitty-gritty rules. That’s just how it works. If you wanna vanquish Sauron, you can’t nab that crusty bitch on a technicality. You gotta hit him with a universal force that’s never really fully explained. And that’s where I come in.
So kick back and relax. You can stop googling whether storing boxes of classified documents about nuclear programs next to your home toilet is technically illegal. Because clean, simple Racketeering Charges is here. And Racketeering Charges always gets her man.