Finally -- the "Answers" Part of the "Questions & Answers" With Readers

Thanks to all for the great questions -- I wish I had time to answer more of them right now. But I'll do this again in the future.

1.  ActBlue's money laundering has been well known for years, but only now are AGs in MO and VA interested. What are your thoughts on one (or more!) state RICO actions to ensnare and convict all ActBlue members of the RICO enterprise, including big donors and recipients? Seems like a clean shot with a big payoff to shut down or stymie their funding spigot.

A few thoughts here – first, generic references to using “RICO” as a as a tool of “lawfare” is both misguided and legally dubious.  At the federal level, RICO is a terribly convoluted and complicated prosecutorial tool that is resorted to mainly out of lack of a better option.  It is used to target “members” of an “organization” for the illegal conduct — as limited by the definition of “racketeering activity” — by other “members” of that organization where normal prohibitions on illegal conspiracies are difficult to establish.  It was a tool designed to prosecute “leadership” in circumstances where leaders had no actual involvement in the lower-level criminal activity, and establishing a "conspiracy” was made difficult by discipline within the organization.

Who are the “members” of ActBlue?  What are the illegal acts of those members? Who is the leadership?  There seem to be particular practices that ActBlue engages in that could be independent grounds for a criminal investigation.  But the biggest hurdle is simply that violations of campaign finance law are not “racketeering activity” as that term is defined in the statute. Congress did not make all federal crimes part of “racketeering” — it picked and chose among the various federal statutes that were most often the subject of “organized” criminal activity.  

The question suggests “money laundering” by ActBlue, which brings me to another pet peeve — the use of “money laundering” as generic description of any criminal activity that involves the used of funds. This layman’s shorthand inevitably mischaracterizes conduct the writer sees as objectionable as the “crime” of “money laundering” when that simply isn’t true.

The crime of money laundering has 4 elements: