By Fredreka Schouten

(CNN) — As President Donald Trump threatens legal action against his adversaries, particularly after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, he’s repeatedly talked about using one federal law: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.

Trump wants to bring racketeering charges against left-wing groups he’s accused of promoting violence. Some influential Republicans agree with him and have been pushing to include rioting as one of the crimes that falls under the racketeering statute, a decades-old law once aimed at cracking down on organized crime.

Kirk’s death and the resulting calls by influential conservatives to crack down on the left using the federal government’s official powers has called new attention to that push. Trump and his aides have said publicly they plan to channel the mounting conservative anger over Kirk’s killing into efforts to take on the president’s political rivals, including potentially pursuing RICO charges and seeking to designate some liberal groups as domestic terrorist organizations.

Trump this week said he was discussing with Attorney General Pam Bondi using RICO to bring racketeering charges against left-wing groups. Last month, the president also called for a RICO investigation of a specific person: liberal billionaire George Soros, one of the nation’s biggest funders of Democratic causes and candidates.

Trump has provided no specific evidence of wrongdoing by Soros and there’s no evidence liberal groups had anything to do with Kirk’s death. The president either has not addressed or has downplayed attacks on Democratic politicians, notably not lowering flags to half-staff when Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed in June.

He also suggested RICO charges could be brought against people protesting his recent appearance at a restaurant to promote his crime crackdown in the nation’s capital. “They should be put in jail,” he said.

Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday night about Trump’s comments, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche responded: “Is it, again, sheer happenstance that individuals show up at a restaurant where the president is trying to enjoy dinner in Washington, DC, and accost him with vile words and vile anger and meanwhile he’s simply trying to have dinner?”

“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 investigations there,” Blanche said.

A bill sponsored by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and a handful of other Republicans on Capitol Hill tries to expand the law’s powers. The proposed legislation – dubbed the Stop Financial Underwriting of Nefarious Demonstrations and Extremist Riots or the STOP FUNDERs Act – would add rioting to the list of offenses that could be used as part of a RICO probe by the Justice Department.

If successful, it would enable federal prosecutors to seek charges against and seize the assets of organizations and individuals who fund or coordinate riots that result in violence, according to a statement from Cruz’s office.

“There is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension, that is spreading violence,” Cruz said Tuesday as he discussed his bill during a Senate hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel.

Critics of the measure say they are lobbying lawmakers in both parties in the hopes of keeping the Cruz proposal from gaining momentum on Capitol Hill in the wake of Kirk’s death.

The legislation “would dangerously lower the bar for government investigations into Americans exercising their right to peaceful demonstration,” said Cole Leiter, executive director of Americans Against Government Censorship, a coalition of progressive and labor groups that launched late last year.

“By branding protest as a criminal activity, this bill threatens to intimidate people from engaging in peaceful, lawful advocacy and puts everyday Americans at risk of being dragged into sprawling investigations,” he added.

The lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, a powerhouse conservative think tank in Washington, is among the groups supporting the Cruz measure.

Cully Stimson, a former federal prosecutor who is a senior legal fellow at Heritage, said concerns that the law could be weaponized against peaceful protesters and their supporters are overblown.

“Rioting has nothing to do with words. It has to do with actions,” he said. To secure a RICO conviction against the financial backer of a group that engaged in rioting, prosecutors would have to prove that the donors provided money with the intention that violence would be carried out, he added.

Proponents of the Cruz effort, Stimson said, view it “as a necessary tool in the toolbox to dissuade people (from) funding violent acts.”

Jeffrey Grell, who teaches about RICO cases at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and has written a book about the law, said racketeering cases are complicated because prosecutors must prove several elements, including that the enterprise involved interstate commerce and a pattern of criminal activity.

A prosecutor is more likely to charge people disrupting ICE arrests in Los Angeles with obstruction of justice, he said, rather than pursuing racketeering claims. “To prove obstruction of justice, you have to prove like four things,” he said. “To prove RICO, you have to prove 20.”

But even RICO cases that fail can prove punishing for their targets, Grell noted.

“They are very expensive to litigate,” he said. “Money is money and whether you take it in the form of a judgment or you caused someone to go bankrupt through legal fees, you’ve still destroyed the group.”

Notably, Trump faced state RICO charges in Georgia over his push to reverse his 2020 election loss there. That case is now in limbo, with Georgia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday declining to let Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis prosecute the case after she was disqualified over her romantic relationship with a special prosecutor.

In recent days, administration officials have floated a variety of actions they could take against what they describe as a network of organizations they accuse of organizing and funding riots.

“I’ve been speaking to the Attorney General about bringing RICO against some of the people that you’ve been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation,” Trump said this week in the Oval Office.

“These aren’t protests. These are crimes,” he said, before citing attacks on vehicles used by federal agents carrying out his deportation campaign.

Trump, who has long singled out Soros for scorn, has escalated those attacks as well, suggesting the 95-year-old financier and philanthropist should be jailed.

Soros has been a major donor to Democrats, and his Open Society Foundations has helped fund an array of liberal groups, including Indivisible, which has organized protests against Trump’s agenda.

His organization has denied any wrongdoing.

“We oppose all forms of violence and condemn the outrageous accusations to the contrary,” Open Society said in a statement Monday. “Our work is entirely peaceful and lawful. It is disgraceful to use this tragedy for political ends to dangerously divide Americans and attack the First Amendment.”

Norm Eisen, a prominent Trump critic who serves as executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, said he’s hopeful that efforts to add rioting to underlying RICO offenses won’t succeed. He said lawmakers in both political parties grasp that if it becomes law, it “can be turned against any organization.”

“If somebody happens to be a member of a church and that person commits a crime, under the bill, is the church now going to be investigated?” he asked. “People understand that this way madness lies.”

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