This is way bigger than RICO. Is There a Legal Strategy That Could Put the Entire Trump-GOP Criminal Enterprise in Jail Without Waiting for an Election?

Tier 3 Primer.

Image By Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

Note from the author: this piece contains an article, followed by links to free books and activist training materials, followed by four template emails, amd then a references section. Now let's get after it. Also you should follow Wendy Lawrence on Substack.

On January 16, 2025, four days before his father returned to the White House, Eric Trump signed a contract.

The counterparty was Aryam Investment 1, an Abu Dhabi entity linked to Tahnoun bin Zayed, the United Arab Emirates national security adviser and brother of the UAE president. The deal transferred forty-nine percent of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's cryptocurrency venture, in exchange for five hundred million dollars. One hundred eighty-seven million flowed directly to entities controlled by the Trump family within weeks.

The Wall Street Journal published the underlying contract on January 31, 2026, after reviewing the documents.¹

A foreign government official bought a piece of the incoming American president's family business four days before he was sworn in. The contract's on paper, the wire transfers cleared, and the beneficiaries are named. The Trump Organization is a New York entity, the signatories live in New York and Florida, and the transaction touches New Jersey banking infrastructure.

Sixteen months later, no one's been charged.

This is the part of the story where most political writing reaches for outrage, and the outrage is appropriate, and the outrage changes nothing. So we're going to do something different.

We're going to talk about how federal prosecutors took down the Five Families in 1985, and we're going to apply that methodology to what's available to every Democratic governor, attorney general, district attorney, county prosecutor, state legislator, mayor, and city council member in America right now.

The Commission case worked because the prosecutors stopped trying to charge the bosses directly. For decades, the federal government had tried to put John Gotti and Paul Castellano and Anthony Salerno in prison, and for decades it had failed. The bosses were too insulated, the witnesses were too scared, and the conduct was too hard to trace upward through the layers of soldiers, capos, and consiglieres standing between the street and the man at the top.

The breakthrough came when prosecutors turned the pyramid upside down. They started at the bottom, charging construction extortion in Queens and loan sharking in the garment district. They charged the soldiers running the rackets, and the soldiers, facing real prison time, gave up the capos. The capos gave up the underbosses, who gave up the bosses.

By the time the indictment came down in February 1985, the Commission had already been established as a criminal enterprise through prior convictions and admitted pleas, and the bosses were the obvious endpoint of a documented organization.

That methodology built American organized crime prosecution for the next thirty years. It works because criminal enterprises of any real size operate through layered command. The boss doesn't move the money, write the document, or pull the trigger.

The boss sits at the top of a structure where the people who actually do those things have careers, families, and exposure. Some of those people, faced with prosecution, will trade what they know for what they have left, and enough of those trades, the boss runs out of insulation.

Here's the principle that does the work. When conduct happens in a state, it violates the laws of that state, and that state's prosecutors have authority to charge it.

A federal officer doesn't get a federal force field that turns off state criminal codes when he crosses the state line. He's a person doing things in a place, the place has laws, and if he breaks them, the place can charge him. The Supreme Court confirmed the dual-sovereignty principle in Gamble v. United States in 2019, and Justice Barrett confirmed it specifically for presidents in Trump v. United States in 2024.

The federal apparatus has spent the last sixteen months pretending this principle doesn't exist, but it does.

If the president walked into a liquor store in your state tomorrow and robbed it, no one would seriously argue your state lacked the authority to charge him. The conduct happened there, your laws applied, and your prosecutors could pick up the case.

That same principle reaches the unauthorized data access of your state's residents, the federal-officer misconduct on your state's soil, the securities fraud touching your state's markets, and every other crime the Trump enterprise has committed within your state's borders.

We're going to apply this to the Trump enterprise.

The soldiers are the operational personnel. The DOGE engineers who accessed Social Security Administration data without authorization, conduct the Department of Justice itself confirmed in a January 16, 2026 Notice of Corrections to the Record filed in AFSCME v. Social Security Administration, Case No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH, in the District of Maryland.² That data belonged to residents of every state in the country, which means the unauthorized access broke the computer crime and identity theft laws of every state where those residents live.

The Pentagon contracting officers who participated in steering the $5.92 billion National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 award to SpaceX on April 4, 2025³ and the $200 million Chief Digital and AI Office contract to xAI on July 14, 2025⁴ acted in Virginia, where Pentagon procurement happens, and broke Virginia conflict-of-interest and procurement-fraud statutes if the source-selection record shows what reporting suggests.

The ICE agents whose conduct in Operation Metro Surge produced state-jurisdiction predicates from Minneapolis to Chicago broke Minnesota and Illinois assault, homicide, false-imprisonment, and excessive-force statutes on Minnesota and Illinois soil.

These are people with weak personal defenses, real exposure to state criminal liability, and powerful incentives to cooperate when a state prosecutor walks them through what twenty years inside looks like.

The capos are the cabinet. Kristi Noem at Homeland Security, named in pending state-AG suits with federal-court findings of widespread misrepresentations under oath, with conduct touching every state where DHS operations have produced unlawful detentions.

Stephen Miller, the operational hub of the immigration enforcement architecture, with recorded directives that contradict what the Justice Department's told federal courts in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and California.

Howard Lutnick at Commerce, whose March 2025 Tesla buy recommendation on Fox News while Cantor Fitzgerald held hundreds of millions in Tesla shares is a textbook New York Martin Act predicate, charged in New York where the broadcast originated and where Cantor's headquartered.

Pam Bondi, fired by President Trump on April 2, 2026⁵ after two grand juries refused to reindict Letitia James⁶ in the prosecution that Judge Cameron Currie voided as unlawful on November 24, 2025.⁷

Each one's a discrete case with its own venue, its own predicate acts, and its own statute of limitations clock.

The consiglieres are the lawyers. They've got bar cards they want to keep, and they leave paper trails. Lindsey Halligan, the sole signer of the voided James and Comey indictments. Emil Bove, now confirmed to the Third Circuit despite the Adams quid-pro-quo conduct documented in Danielle Sassoon's resignation letter.

Boris Epshteyn, under active indictment in Arizona for the fake-elector scheme, and identified in an internal investigation as having solicited monthly payments from cabinet officials and defense contractors for Mar-a-Lago access. The lawyers who drafted the Office of Legal Counsel memos providing cover for impoundment, for military strikes, for the records-destruction guidance that flowed from the White House Counsel's office.

The underbosses are the family. Donald Trump Jr., whose 1789 Capital portfolio companies received over seven hundred thirty-five million dollars in Trump-administration contracts including a $620 million Pentagon loan to Vulcan Elements three months after 1789 invested.⁸

Eric Trump, the Aryam signatory.

Jared Kushner, whose Affinity Partners disclosed $6.16 billion in assets under management on its March 22, 2026 Form ADV, with ninety-nine percent non-U.S. clients, while Kushner served concurrently as a Trump-administration foreign-policy envoy.⁹

The Trump Organization itself, against which the New York Appellate Division, First Department issued a fractured plurality ruling on August 21, 2025 that left the Executive Law § 63(12) liability findings on the docket while vacating the disgorgement order on Eighth Amendment grounds.¹⁰

The boss is Donald Trump.

The architecture runs from soldiers to capos to consiglieres to underbosses to boss. The methodology says we build from the bottom and let the cooperators walk us upward, and the operational question becomes who's got the authority to charge, in which state, under which statute, against which tier first.

That's where every level of state and local power comes in.

Democratic governors can act tomorrow morning. A governor can issue an executive order creating a state task force on federal corruption affecting state residents, direct the state Attorney General to investigate specific predicate conduct under state criminal law, or request emergency appropriations from the legislature to staff a complex-prosecution unit.

Twenty-three states currently have Democratic governors, and each one can begin tomorrow.

Democratic Attorneys General hold statewide prosecution authority. In New Jersey, the Attorney General holds plenary statewide criminal jurisdiction under the New Jersey Constitution and N.J.S.A. 52:17B-97, supervises twenty-one county prosecutors, can supersede them, and routinely lead-prosecutes RICO cases directly.

The state's RICO statute is the most prosecution-friendly in the nation, and State v. Ball, 141 N.J. 142 (1995), expressly rejects the federal management test that limits federal RICO and the ascertainable-structure overlay that limits New York.¹¹ The predicate list incorporates chapter 20 theft, chapter 21 forgery and fraud, and federal RICO predicates by reference.

The Aryam transaction touches New Jersey banking infrastructure. The case is sitting on the desk.

In New York, Attorney General Letitia James already secured the underlying fraud findings against the Trump Organization. New York Penal Law Article 460, the Enterprise Corruption statute, incorporates Martin Act securities fraud as a predicate offense through Section 460.10(1)(b).

The TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins generated over three hundred twenty million dollars in fee revenue captured by CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC through May 2025. The First Department's August 21, 2025 ruling, while vacating the disgorgement, left the underlying liability findings on the docket as the operative court determination of the pattern of false financial representations.¹⁰

James already has the case file built and the institutional capacity to charge it.

In Minnesota, Attorney General Keith Ellison co-investigates with Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. Federal District Judge Patrick Schiltz has documented more than two hundred court-order violations by ICE personnel during Operation Metro Surge.¹²

The April 16, 2026 Hennepin County charging of ICE Agent Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. under Minn. Stat. § 609.222 established that state prosecution of federal officers on duty is operationally viable when state authorities control the investigation rather than the FBI.¹³

The case file extends from Morgan upward through the operational chain to Bovino, to the Border Patrol commanders, to Noem, and to Miller, and it sits on the Attorney General's desk waiting for the next charging decision.

Watch what the federal apparatus has done with Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renée Good in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. The administration knows mob rules. You keep the heat off your foot soldiers, because the second a soldier feels the cell door closing, he starts naming names.

So they've protected Ross, shielded the agents in the Pretti killing, and fought every state subpoena, every state investigation, and every attempt to put a state prosecutor in front of a soldier. They know exactly what happens if Ross has to choose between twenty years in a Minnesota prison and telling Mary Moriarty who gave him the orders.

Every soldier the federal apparatus protects this hard is a soldier who'd flip the second the protection ends.

The same methodology reaches Rob Bonta in California, Andrea Campbell in Massachusetts, Kwame Raoul in Illinois, Nick Brown in Washington, Anthony Brown in Maryland, Raúl Torrez in New Mexico, Kris Mayes in Arizona, and the rest of the twenty-four-state Democratic Attorney General universe.

Each has authority, each has venue, and each has predicate conduct documented in the public record. The case file hasn't been built for them yet, but we're going to build it.

District Attorneys and county prosecutors hold something even harder for the federal government to neutralize: independent charging authority over conduct in their counties, answerable to the voters who elected them, with no state Attorney General or governor sitting between them and a grand jury.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg secured Donald Trump's felony conviction in 2024 working from this exact authority, and he was reelected in November 2025 with his term running through 2030. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty already charged Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. for Operation Metro Surge conduct on Minnesota soil.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner holds independent charging authority over conduct in Philadelphia County, which matters more now that Pennsylvania's Attorney General flipped Republican in 2024.

Every other District Attorney in a Democratic-majority county in this country holds the same charging authority over conduct in their county, and predicate acts in their jurisdictions are predicate acts they can charge, regardless of what the state Attorney General does or doesn't do.

Democratic state legislatures can change the political calculation. A state legislature can pass a statute creating a state-level public corruption task force with subpoena power and dedicated funding, appropriate emergency funds to the Attorney General specifically for complex-prosecution work, and pass a resolution formally requesting the Attorney General investigate documented predicate conduct.

Fifteen states currently have Democratic trifectas, and each one can begin tomorrow.

What stands between this prosecution architecture and the actual indictments is the political calculation each official's currently running. The calculation goes like this. If I move on the Trump enterprise, I become a target, the federal government will retaliate, Trump and the Republican apparatus will attack me personally, and my career's in danger.

The safest political move is to say there's nothing I can do, this isn't my job, and the federal government should handle it.

That calculation's wrong on the facts. The federal Department of Justice won't charge any of this, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation won't investigate any of this, because the federal apparatus has been captured.

State prosecution following federal non-action remains constitutionally available under Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678 (2019).¹⁴ State prosecution is structurally pardon-proof, the Office of Legal Counsel's presidential immunity memo is internal Department of Justice policy with no force outside that Department, and In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890), doesn't protect federal officers from state prosecution for corrupt conduct because no federal duty includes accepting a bribe, taking a kickback, selling a pardon, or trafficking confidential data for personal gain.¹⁵

Justice Barrett's concurrence in Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), confirmed it directly: the Constitution doesn't authorize a President to seek or accept bribes, and the Government may prosecute him if he does so.¹⁶

The calculation's also wrong on the politics. The official who moves first becomes the official who history records as the prosecutor who began the chain, and the official who declines becomes the official who history records as the one who left the constitutional remedy on the table during a federal capture event.

We're the piece that changes the calculation.

Every Democratic governor needs constituent contact telling them to issue the executive order, every Democratic Attorney General needs constituent contact telling them to open the investigation, every District Attorney and county prosecutor in a Democratic-majority county needs constituent contact telling them to open the investigation in their county, and every Democratic state legislator needs constituent contact telling them to pass the funding bill.

The officials are running a political calculation that says inaction's safer than action, and we make action safer than inaction by making the cost of inaction higher than the cost of action.

The work runs state by state, county by county, office by office, and predicate act by predicate act. The Trump enterprise operates in the open, on the public record, with predicate conduct documented in court filings, SEC disclosures, federal-court findings, and major investigative journalism.

The methodology that took down the Five Families teaches that the boss falls last, after the soldiers and capos and consiglieres and underbosses have already been convicted, after the enterprise has been established as fact through the prior cases.

Eric Trump signed the Aryam contract on January 16, 2025, the wire transfers cleared, and neither the federal Department of Justice nor the Federal Bureau of Investigation will act.

Twenty-four Democratic Attorneys General have authority over some part of the Trump enterprise, twenty-three Democratic governors can direct that authority, hundreds of District Attorneys and county prosecutors in Democratic-majority counties hold independent charging authority over predicate conduct in their counties, and fifteen Democratic state legislatures can fund and structure the work.

None of them have moved at the scale this moment requires.

They'll move when they feel their feet to the fire.

We are the heat. Justice is the fire.

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Below are four short templates, one for each office that can act on what's described above. I wrote these from my perspective. Feel free to make changes so they're about you. These belong in the inbox of every governor, attorney general, district attorney, and state legislator you have, regardless of party. Republican officials run political calculations too, and the demand on the record matters in every state.

For your Governor

Dear Governor [Name],

I'm a constituent in [city], an Air Force veteran, and a journalist.

If the president walked into a liquor store in our state and robbed it tomorrow, our prosecutors would charge him without hesitation. The same principle reaches the conduct of the Trump enterprise that has occurred in our state.

I'm asking you to issue an executive order this week creating a state task force on federal corruption affecting our state's residents. The task force should investigate predicate conduct in our state including unauthorized data access affecting our residents, federal-officer misconduct on our soil, securities fraud touching our markets, and any other state-level criminal exposure connected to the enterprise, including conduct documented in unsealed federal filings.

The Trump enterprise has been operating in the open for sixteen months, the federal Department of Justice will not charge any of it, and state governments have the authority. The first governor to act is the one history remembers.

When can your constituents expect that order?

[Name]

[Zip code]

For your State Attorney General

Dear Attorney General [Name],

I'm a constituent in [city], an Air Force veteran, and a journalist.

If the president walked into a liquor store in our state and robbed it tomorrow, your office would charge him without hesitation. The same principle reaches the conduct of the Trump enterprise that has occurred in our state.

I'm asking your office to open a criminal investigation into predicate conduct in our state including unauthorized data access affecting our residents, federal-officer misconduct on our soil, securities fraud touching our markets, and any other state-level criminal exposure connected to the enterprise, including conduct documented in unsealed federal filings.

The Department of Justice itself confirmed in court on January 16, 2026 that DOGE personnel accessed Social Security data belonging to our state's residents without authorization, Gamble v. United States and Trump v. United States both confirm you have the authority, and the federal apparatus will not act.

When can your constituents expect that investigation to begin?

[Name]

[Zip code]

For your District Attorney or County Prosecutor

Dear District Attorney [Name],

I'm a constituent in [county], an Air Force veteran, and a journalist.

If the president walked into a liquor store in our county and robbed it tomorrow, your office would charge him without hesitation. The same principle reaches the conduct of the Trump enterprise that has touched our county.

You hold independent charging authority over conduct in our county, answerable to voters, with no state Attorney General or governor between you and a grand jury. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg used that authority to convict Donald Trump in 2024, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty used it to charge an ICE agent in April 2026.

I'm asking you to open an investigation into predicate conduct in our county including unauthorized data access affecting our residents, federal-officer misconduct on our soil, financial crimes touching our local markets, and any other state-level criminal exposure connected to the enterprise, including conduct documented in unsealed federal filings.

When can your constituents expect that investigation?

[Name]

[Zip code]

For your State Legislator

Dear [Senator or Representative] [Name],

I'm a constituent in your district, an Air Force veteran, and a journalist.

I'm asking you to introduce or co-sponsor legislation this session that creates a state public corruption task force with subpoena power and dedicated funding, appropriates emergency funds to the Attorney General for complex-prosecution work, and passes a resolution formally requesting the Attorney General investigate documented predicate conduct in our state, including unauthorized data access affecting our residents, federal-officer misconduct on our soil, securities fraud touching our markets, and conduct documented in unsealed federal filings.

The legislatures that move first set the template every other state follows.

Can I count on you to introduce or co-sponsor that legislation?

[Name]

[Zip code]

This work compounds when other people join in. A single letter from one constituent registers as constituent contact, and fifty letters from a single zip code registers as a political calculation officials struggle to ignore. Indivisible chapters, union locals, book clubs, group chats, and neighborhood email lists are where four templates become four hundred. Sharing these with the people who'd send their own is how the cost of inaction goes up faster than the cost of action.

Works Cited

AFSCME v. Social Security Administration, Notice of Corrections to the Record, No. 1:25-cv-00596-ELH (D. Md. Jan. 16, 2026).

Dexter, M. (2026, March 25). Dexter moves to subpoena Donald Trump Jr. for $670 million taxpayer-funded deal [Press release]. U.S. House of Representatives. https://dexter.house.gov/media/press-releases/dexter-moves-subpoena-donald-trump-jr-670-million-taxpayer-funded-deal

Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678 (2019).

Gregorian, D., Grumbach, G., & Reilly, R. J. (2025, November 24). Judge dismisses cases against James Comey and Letitia James after finding prosecutor was unlawfully appointed. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/judge-dismisses-cases-james-comey-letitia-james-finding-prosecutor-was-rcna244775

In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890).

Kessler, S., Ballhaus, R., Brown, E., & Berwick, A. (2026, January 31). UAE "spy sheikh" secretly bought 49% stake in Trump crypto company. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/spy-sheikh-secret-stake-trump-crypto-tahnoon-ea4d97e8

Manson, K., & Capoot, A. (2025, July 14). Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI granted up to $200 million for AI work from Defense Department. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/anthropic-google-openai-xai-granted-up-to-200-million-from-dod.html

NPR. (2026, April 2). Attorney General Pam Bondi out at DOJ. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/02/g-s1-115077/trump-bondi-attorney-general-departure

NPR. (2026, April 16). Minnesota has charged an ICE officer with assault for alleged actions during immigration surge. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/16/nx-s1-5787958/minnesota-charged-ice-officer-assault-immigration-surge

People v. Trump, Index No. 452564/2022, Appellate Division, First Department (N.Y. App. Div. Aug. 21, 2025).

Reilly, R. J., Grumbach, G., & Gregorian, D. (2025, December 4). Grand jury declines to indict N.Y. Attorney General Letitia James, less than two weeks after the first case was dismissed. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/grand-jury-declines-indict-ny-attorney-general-letitia-james-less-two-rcna247310

Siegelman, W. (2026, March 23). Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners investment firm just filed a disclosure showing over $6 billion in assets under management for 6 clients in 2025. https://wendysiegelman.substack.com/p/jared-kushners-affinity-partners-477

Space Systems Command. (2025, April 4). Space Systems Command awards National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 contracts. United States Space Force. https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4146459/

State v. Ball, 141 N.J. 142, 661 A.2d 251 (1995), cert. denied sub nom. Mocco v. New Jersey, 516 U.S. 1075 (1996).

Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024) (Barrett, J., concurring).

Yahoo News. (2026, February 28). ICE in MN: Judge blasts U.S. Attorney's "attack" on courts, repeated violations. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ice-mn-judge-blasts-u-194847015.html