According to the Washington Post and the New York Times, Donald Trump has raised over $150 million since the election, falsely claiming that the election was stolen from him and that the money will be used to fight the nonexistent election fraud.
As Business Insider reports,
In reality, only a small fraction of small-dollar donations is being used for Trump's legal challenges, with the vast majority instead being put into an account the president can use to fund his post-White House political career.
Trump knows that he’s running a scam. As CNN reports,
Asked whether the President realizes that he's been defeated, a close adviser who has been in contact with Trump about his legal strategy said Monday: "Yes, he does."
Yet Trump continues falsely claiming, in tweet after tweet and in unhinged media interviews, that he was the victim of a grand conspiracy to steal the election for Joe Biden — knowing that it’s all lies.
I’m not a lawyer, but from a layman’s perspective it appears that Donald Trump and his enablers are committing fraud and racketeering, which are very serious crimes.
Here is a legal definition of fraud:
Fraud is a broad term that refers to acts intended to swindle someone. In essence, it's the use of intentional deception for monetary or personal gain. ... The purpose is to gain something of value, usually money, by misleading or deceiving someone into believing something that the perpetrator knows to be false.
Trump is certainly doing that. He is swindling millions of small donors out of their hard-earned money by deliberately deceiving them with wild conspiracy theories, and then using most of the money raised through his post-election fundraising campaign to line his own pockets rather than for legitimate legal cases with any chance to change the results of the election. He and his lawyers know it’s a scam, but they do it anyway. They are guilty of fraud.
What about racketeering? Here is how Wikipedia describes it:
A racket … refers to an organized criminal act in which the perpetrators fraudulently offer a service that will not be put into effect, offer a service to solve a nonexistent problem, or offer a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket.
A service that will not be put into effect, to solve a nonexistent problem. That sounds like a perfect description of what Trump is offering his donors. The election wasn’t stolen and it won’t be overturned — and he knows it. Even though his legal cases are being laughed out of court by judge after judge, Trump just keeps the racket going, raising more and more money on a fraudulent basis.
Although I’m not a lawyer, common sense tells me that state and federal prosecutors owe it to the country to prosecute Donald J. Trump and his accomplices for fraud and/or racketeering. If they do not, then scamming the American people for hundreds of millions of dollars based on outrageously false conspiracy theories about the integrity of our elections will have been normalized.
Any input from attorneys would be welcome. I hope that what Trump is doing is not somehow technically legal even though it seems obviously criminal. Cheating people out of their money should cause a person to go to prison in America… right?