If whistleblower is right, Trump may have committed extortion and bribery

The federal bribery statute makes it a crime for a public official to demand anything of value in exchange for performing an official act. A statute known as the Hobbs Act defines extortion as obtaining property from another, with his consent, under color of official right. “Property” is defined to mean anything of value, tangible or intangible. The essence of both crimes is a demand by a public official to obtain something for himself to which he is not entitled in exchange for performing an official act of his office.

When I served as U.S. Attorney in Detroit, I supervised the prosecution of the city’s former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and some of his associates in a public corruption scheme that included extortion. Kilpatrick was convicted of using his office as mayor to extort municipal contractors by demanding that they include his friend Bobby Ferguson in public contracts and share with Ferguson a portion of the revenue. If contractors wanted the multi-million dollar public works contracts, they were required to pay off the mayor’s friend. Ferguson’s share of these contracts totaled $83 million. These types of schemes are sometimes referred to as “pay-to-play.”

Here, if the reporting is correct, Trump may be similarly committing bribery and extortion by using the power of his office to demand a thing of value, dirt on Biden, in exchange for an official act, the provision of $250 million in military aid. This is precisely the kind of old-fashioned corruption scheme that the bribery and extortion statutes were designed to punish.