Tag Archives: RICO

Caddell Unloads On ‘Racketeering’ GOP Consultants

By Breaking News

Caddell CPAC Caddell Unloads On Racketeering GOP Consultants

Pat Caddell, the Fox News Contributor and Democrat pollster who engineered Jimmy Carter’s 1976 Presidential victory, blew the lid off CPAC on Thursday with a blistering attack on “racketeering” Republican consultants who play wealthy donors like “marks.”

“I blame the donors who allow themselves to be played for marks. I blame the people in the grassroots for allowing themselves to be played for suckers….It’s time to stop being marks. It’s time to stop being suckers. It’s time for you people to get real,” he told the audience that included two top Republican consultants.

Caddell stole the show as a panelist in the breakout session titled “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?” He spoke with a fire and passion that electrified the room. When the session began the large room was half filled, but as word spread of the fireworks going on inside, the audience streamed in. By the end, it was standing room only.

Breitbart News spoke with Caddell prior to his talk, and he promised he would deliver a “brutal critique” of the Republican establishment and its political consulting class. He did not disappoint, pulling no punches with an unyielding evisceration of a small group of Republican consultants, the Romney campaign, the Republican National Committee, and Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS Super PAC.

“When you have the Chief of Staff of the Republican National Committee and the political director of the Romney campaign, and their two companies get $150 million at the end of the campaign for the ‘fantastic’ get-out-the-vote program…some of this borders on RICO [the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] violations,” Caddell told the crowd. “It’s all self dealing going on. I think it works on the RICO thing. They’re in the business of lining their pockets.”

 Read More at breitbart.com . By Michael Patrick Leahy.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism

Down The RICO Rabbit Hole: John Reynolds And The Hospital For Special Surgery

By Robert Radick, Contributor

To state that the federal RICO statue has long since slipped the bounds of Congress’s original intent is hardly a novel observation.  Although the U.S. Attorney’s Manual points out that “the purpose of the RICO statute is ‘the elimination of the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations,’” the very same paragraph of the Manual proclaims that “the statute is sufficiently broad to encompass illegal activities relating to any enterprise affecting interstate or foreign commerce.”  The varied range of successful federal prosecutions premised on the RICO statute only proves the point, and numerous industries, including health care, have thus come within the statute’s reach.  In fact, in a recent article in the United States Attorney’s Bulletin, an official with the Department of Justice’s Organized Crime and Gang Section (which must approve all federal RICO prosecutions) writes about the growing use of the RICO statute to attack coordinated schemes that jeopardize the health care fraud trust fund, discusses specific RICO health care fraud cases brought in the Southern District of Florida and the Southern District of New York, and describes DOJ’s efforts to include more health care offenses as potential RICO predicates. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest