Slashdot Mirror
Why Is It a Crime For Dennis Hastert To Evade Government Scrutiny?
HughPickens.com writes: Dennis Hastert is about the least sympathetic figure one can imagine. The former House Speaker got filthy rich as a lobbyist trading on contacts he gained in office, and his leadership coincided with Congress's abject failure to exercise oversight or protect civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Now, Hastert stands accused of improper sexual contact with a boy he knew years ago while teaching high school and trying to hide that sordid history by paying the young man to keep quiet. If federal prosecutors could meet the legal thresholds for charging and convicting Hastert of a sex crime, they would be fully justified in aggressively pursuing the matter.
Yet, as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic, the Hastert indictment doesn't charge him for, or even accuse him of, sexual misconduct. Rather, as Glenn Greenwald notes, "Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him." It isn't illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute Hastert for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue. "In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him with it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers," says Greenwald. "What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one's views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that."
Yet, as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic, the Hastert indictment doesn't charge him for, or even accuse him of, sexual misconduct. Rather, as Glenn Greenwald notes, "Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him." It isn't illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute Hastert for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue. "In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him with it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers," says Greenwald. "What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one's views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that."
Never talk to the cops...and seven times never talk to the FBI...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Hiding large cash transactions was made illegal in the Bank Secrecy Act and has been illegal since 1970.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
I'm not sure there's any mandatory reporting on withdrawals,
Yes. Any time you take or drop $10k in cash in a bank or $5k in cash in a casino, there will be a report.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It isn't illegal to withdraw money from the bank
It is illegal to withdraw money from a bank in a manner designed to avoid detection. It's called structuring. If you withdraw large amounts (over $10,000US) the bank is required by law to investigate whether the transaction might be related to illegal activity. The bank is also obligated to investigate unusual or suspicious patterns of money movement. This is primarily due to laws aimed at combating money laundering and financing criminal and terrorist groups. In this case it appears Mr. Hastert was moving money to cover evidence of other (allegedly) illegal activity. That is exactly what these laws are designed to catch.
lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him
Lying to a law enforcement officer is always illegal. They may or may not care about why you engaged in the activities you did but lying about it is clearly a crime in our justice system. Realistically it cannot be otherwise if you wish to have effective investigations of crimes.
So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government?
It may be that the statute of limitation on the original crime has expired and these follow on crimes are what is still possible to prosecute. Obviously I don't know what the prosecutors are planning but I'm pretty sure there is a good reason. I doubt they would be worrying about these lesser charges if statutory rape were a charge they could use.
To answer the question however, it's a crime because there is no legitimate reason for him to lie. He (allegedly) was attempting to cover up other illegal activity. If his actions were honest he had the option to either decline to answer in accordance with his 5th amendment rights or to answer truthfully. Saying "none of your business" doesn't apply when we are talking about evidence of rape.
The crime, structuring, is unchanged with the Patriot act
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
It is a lot broader than that. The Houston Chronicle has a decent article summarizing Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs).
Then there is that question about taking more than $10,000 in cash out of the country when traveling.
And, of course, seizures of suspicious amounts of cash when stopped by a law enforcement officer anywhere for anything.
(Suspicious being anything the local LEO decides it is. How fucked up is that?)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The enhancements on the patriot act that made structuring a crime were designed to prevent money laundering associated with terrorism. There is nothing illegal about paying blackmailers. That was not not exactly the kind of crime this was designed to deal nor was money laundering in general what this was designed to deal with.
That would be $62,284.35 in 2015 dollars.
Dennis Hastert was 6 years old when the current version of the law making it illegal to lie to the FBI was created. It's origin goes back to the False Claims Act of 1863, long before the FBI existed.
His big issue, as was Martha Stewart's and a bunch of other folks, was lying about it.
The secondary issue of reporting financial transactions is based on a law from 1970, the Bank Secrecy Act. The requirement of the bank to report suspicious activity was part of the Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act from 1992.
While it might be nice to claim that Hastert was hoisted by his own petard with the Patriot Act, the fact is the Patriot Act's expansion of these previously existing money laundering and bank secrecy acts were related, primarily, to international money transfers. In fact, the title of that section is, "International Money Laundering Abatement and Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001."
Although the Patriot Act expanded the reporting requirements of a structured transaction, the banks were already required to report such structured transactions to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network by the 1992 law as part of a Suspicious Activity Report. The IRS already had authority to seize monies given a warrant based on Suspicious Activity Reports.
The big changes found in the Patriot Act were related to making it easier to recognize structured transactions, the expansion of the definition of a financial institution and a number of changes to the infrastructure and reporting mechanisms related to the reporting requirements.
What Hastert did was illegal long before the Patriot Act.
(There is a section of Wikipedia that claims that the Patriot Act made it illegal to to structure transactions in a manner that evades reporting requirements. However, that was already illegal and the wording in Wikipedia is more probably related to the structuring of foreign transactions or transactions that involve foreign currency and coin.)
I won't defend either Hastert or the Patriot Act - they both suck. But the fact is, these reporting requirements go back a long way and they sucked just as much before 2001 as they do now. This case is another example of why you don't answer the FBI's questions about anything without an attorney.
Money Laundering is a crime because, BY DEFINITION, you are trying to legitimise the proceeds of illegal activities.
All Hastert had to do was tell the government that he was compensating someone he had wronged (and arranged a settlement with out of court) and he could have taken out as much as he wanted. Instead, he demonstrated knowledge of the law by his attempts to evade/circumvent it, and then lied about his actions to the FBI when they inquired. I don't really see how he has any room to complain about what's happening as a result...
-AC
Kent Hovind is doing this now: http://freekenthovind.com/2015/05/18/there-was-never-a-case-against-kent-hovind-malicious-prosecution-being-looked-at/, but that doesn't stop the fact that he spent the last 8 years in jail for no reason (all charges have now been dropped except a contempt charge for filing a lis pendens from jail to stop the seizure of his property before his case is over!).
Sounds good on a Slashdot post, but in real life it's not looking all that useful.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Withdrawing money in a suspicious way was the crime (as in he might have withdrawn $5000 at a time many times... felony).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring#United_States
I don't think you grasp how depraved your country's laws are.
"Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying ..."
You are glossing over the 1st felony here because it rightly seems absurd according to your common sense world view. But it is very real.
IIRC, the original 1980's-era laws were only interested in transactions $10k or greater. The Patriot Act addiction/enhancements were to use semi-regular transactions of under $10k as 'structuring' (that is, to try and close the workaround of, say, withdrawing or depositing substantial amounts under $10k on a semi-regular or regular basis.)
The overall effect is to make you a felon if you cannot fully account for (and prove!) where you got or spent the money. The mortgage payment? Yeah - easy to account for, so you're not a felon. Taking money out on a regular basis to support a pricey hobby where you don't keep all the receipts? Now you're a felon if the Feds decide they want you to be one. This is why it's a bullshit law - it can be very easily abused by the first federal prosecutor who has a hate-on for you, and by the way, happens to know that you throw around a lot of money that you don't have all the receipts for.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
That's true to a point. The monies directly seized by the Feds go into a single pool that they have complete control over (it is not regulated by congress) but the various federal agencies often partner up with state or local agencies and when doing so offer them a cut of the take.
1 stat from 2012 had just the IRS seizures in the neighborhood of 640 cases (almost 6 times the amount from just 7 years before) with less than 20% even resulting in charges being filed.
Due to the length of time it takes to process a claim against the government to get your money back and the sums involved (usually in the ballpark of $40k) most people take the standard offer of 50% and go home. Even when the victims win in court or the government just gives in, they have been known to skip out on paying the court costs, back interest and other expenses to the victim like they are legally required to.
This was a letter written to the lawyers of Lyndon McLennan from the U.S Attorney after theiy seized his life savings and he went public:
He didn't settle and the case was later dropped and his money returned but none of his expenses were covered.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!