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The No. 2 official at the Department of Justice was so aghast at the idea of anti-Trump demonstrators protesting the president while he was “trying to enjoy dinner” that they could face federal anti-racketeering charges that were designed to bust up organized crime.
In recent days, the Trump administration has threatened to prosecute demonstrators and groups that support them as part of a wider campaign against left-wing opposition, raising alarms that it will crack down on dissent by infringing First Amendment rights.
Asked Tuesday how, exactly, a protester could be charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN that the law is “available to all kinds of organizations committing crimes.”
“Is it 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?” Blanche asked CNN host Kaitlan Collins.
“And meanwhile, he’s simply trying to have dinner,” Blanche continued. “Does it mean it’s just completely random that they showed up? Maybe, 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, potential investigations there.”
Collins asked whether those protesters can really be considered “inflicting harm or terror damage by protesting the president of the United States.”
“I mean, they were just shouting, basically, in his vicinity,” she said.
“Repeat what you just said. I mean, honestly. So you’re asking whether there was damage done by four individuals screaming and yelling at the president of our United States while he’s trying to have dinner. That can’t be a serious question,” Blanche fired back.
As Trump entered a restaurant, during a rare visit to a Washington establishment last week after touting his federal takeover of the district, a group of protesters inside the venue shouted “Free DC! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!”
In videos of the protest, the demonstrators got up from their table at Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab and got within feet of the president, who smirked at the group and waved for Secret Service personnel to remove them.
The protesters appeared to be connected with feminist antiwar group, Code Pink.
Trump suggested Monday that Attorney General Pam Bondi would be investigating and labeled the group “paid agitators.”
“I’ve asked Pam to look into that in terms of bringing RICO cases against them — criminal RICO,” he said.
Blanche’s remarks echo escalating demands from administration officials, right-wing groups and allies to target Charlie Kirk’s critics after his assassination last week, raising baseless claims that the conservative activist’s death is the result of a coordinated effort among left-wing groups to incite violence.
Following Kirk’s death, Trump and right-wing figures have quickly sought to punish left-wing voices for rhetoric they blamed for his killing, with a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the “radical left.”
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said in a speech from the Oval Office.
“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” he added. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
The president said Monday that he may consider naming antifascist groups as domestic terrorists. It remains unclear how the administration could designate “antifa” — a loosely organized movement without a distinct leader — as a terror group.
Trump has also suggested his administration could revoke tax-exempt status for left-leaning nonprofit organizations.
Earlier this week, Bondi pledged to go after people who spread “hate speech,” but later appeared to walk back her comments by clarifying that “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.”
Between the January 6 insurrection and the 2024 election, there were at least 300 cases of political violence, marking the largest surge in such attacks since the 1970s, according to a Reuters analysis.
Yet a large body of research has found that right-wing extremists have killed more people than those associated with any other political cause in the United States within the last two decades, though many of those attacks don’t map neatly onto one political ideology.
“There’s nothing wrong with peaceful protest,” Blanche told CNN.
“But what [Trump’s] talking about, and what the administration is talking about, is organized efforts by individuals who are not present at the protest but they’re funding these protests, and they’re not protests,” he said. “They’re inflicting damage and harm and actually assaulting officers, they’re damaging vehicles, and that’s the conduct we’re trying to stop.”
