https://spectator.org/team-muellers-illegal-unethical-hunt-for
In the early 1970s, when I was a freshly minted Special Attorney with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the U.S. Justice Department, my fellow newly hired colleagues and I attended a lecture at Main Justice given by John Dowd, a well-regarded veteran prosecutor. His topic was the then little known and almost never used Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
Dowd explained in detail the vast sweep of the statute and described the mind-boggling powers that Congress had conferred on us. In those long gone days of limited federal jurisdiction, we had a hard time processing what he was saying. According to him, Congress had effectively federalized almost every form of state criminal activity and had provided draconian and almost unimaginable punitive measures designed to strip defendants of their liberty and property.
Frankly, we thought Dowd was crazy. As he described it, RICO seemed too good to be true. But it wasn’t. We soon learned that he wasn’t nuts but a prophet, and, within a few short years, RICO became a standard prosecutorial bat that we enthusiastically swung with both hands.
I lost track of John Dowd until he became co-lead counsel of the president’s legal team dealing with Robert Mueller’s investigation of purported collusion between the Trump campaign and unnamed Russian operatives. To my dismay, I watched Dowd and co-counsel Ty Cobb pursue a course of complete transparency and cooperation with Mueller. According to media reports, they voluntarily produced over a million pages of documents and made administration witnesses available for interrogation. All of this was premised on the stated belief that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russia and that the president did not obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James Comey.