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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."
Ironically, its a crime because he made it one. Hiding large bank transactions was made reportable to the FBI and lying to the FBI about them was made a crime both by the Patriot Act that was pushed for and voted for most vociferously by then House Speaker Dennis Hastert.
And ironically enough it appeals to the authoritarian crowd too, since it brings up aspects of Hastert that, if true, probably should be prosecuted if they could be, and demonstrates an alternate means of getting at him if other channels are not available. Kind of like how the US Government got Al Capone on taxes when they couldn't get him for the really awful things his organization did to people...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Will you feel sympathy for the next small business owner who gets caught up in this "structuring" bullshit?
I certainly will. It's a tragedy that sometimes innocent people get accused of crimes they didn't commit. However that doesn't make the laws bullshit. If you have a better way to catch criminals engaged in money laundering, by all means let us know. They certainly are imperfect laws. However here we have a guy who apparently was engaging in structuring to avoid detection of a statutory rape. It is unlikely his actions would have been discovered otherwise. This is EXACTLY the sort of crime these laws were intended to deal with.
The $10,000 limit was set forth in 1970 and never indexed for inflation.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Back in the 20s and 30s in the US, the mob ran roughshod over the land. The only way devised to corral them-- because of massive corruption on local, state, and federal levels-- was to invoke tax laws. It worked. It got Capone, and a bunch of the mob.
Hastert is caught in a similar pickle. Meet the reporting requirements; they're designed to trap this, and other kinds of illicit behavior. Trillions of dollars have left the USA, some of it legally (Apple Computer) and some of it not. The laws were designed to trap floods of untracked cash (Dennis Hastert's payments). It worked. I want the law; I want the reporting requirements; don't presume you understand the motivations of /.ers.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
First of all, I do agree, that neither bank-withdrawals (in whatever "pattern"), nor lying to anyone (unless under oath) should be a crime. Absolutely not.
But, as long as it is a crime, people like Dennis Hastert — who had the power to do something about these laws, but did not, absolutely must be prosecuted under them. To the fullest extent and without mercy. (I argued the same thing about Spitzer — whose case was even worse, for he not only kept the laws he broke on the books, he strengthened them.)
He is not a regular citizen — employee, student, businessman. He had the power — and more of it, than even an "average" Congressman.
All that said about him, I find it disturbing, that the ruling party would prosecute the opposition's politicians. It does not look good. At all... They should be focusing on their own — like the aforementioned Mr. Spitzer, whose sole "punishment" for breaking federal laws, was resignation...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There's no way to rule innocent men.
You could try being a leader......someone that people want to follow. That's what George Washington did (and many other great Kings throughout history, for that matter). Ayn Rand was wrong in that quote.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If the intent is to catch actual criminal wrongdoing, rather than make large swathes of the population criminal, the structuring rules are a very good examples of a bad law. First off, the reporting requirements are poorly understood by banking officials who should know better, and the actual reporting can be for cash amounts of as little as $3000.
A few years back I was involved in what became a rather complicated transaction to buy a rather expensive used car. Because the owners were extremely flakey and confused there ended up being a number (I think five) wire transfers to different accounts. This produced a blizzard of enquiries from my bank and later from federal officials with various agencies with three-letter acronyms. All of the enquiries were worded in a maximally threatening way. All I wanted to do was buy a stupid car. Which turned out to be a piece of shit anyway.
There are lots of examples of this. The Migratory Bird Treaty act is a great example. Say you find some bird feathers in your yard, and decide to keep them. Say your kids find some more and keep them too. Oops! $5000 fine per feather. Remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse. And by the way, if you can identify your bird feathers and they came from non-migratory birds, you are fine. Unless they are eagle feathers, in which case you are screwed. Except if you are Native American and using the eagle feathers for legitimate cultural purposes.
Don't even get me started on insider trading laws. Oh hell, as the insider trading laws are written, there is no way to be employed by a company doing useful work and not be at least technically in violation of said laws. Whatever guidance your corporate attorneys give you is based on the SECs guidance on what they actually want to prosecute. That guidance could change tomorrow if they decide to go after you.
I remember somewhere that this kind of administrative law crap was a substantial factor in what caused the American Revolution.
Did you read what I wrote? The fact that he tried to hide what he did with his money is not a crime. Your pointing this out means nothing as I made the exact same comment. But it is a simple fact that making suspicious financial transactions triggers investigations, as they should. The police can and should investigate when it looks like people are trying to launder money. And then he made false statements to the police during the investigation, which is a crime. You never have the right to lie to the police, even if you feel you've done nothing wrong.
It's his bed that he's made and he has to lie in it.
The stupid thing is all he had to do was plead the fifth. Which any lawyer would have advised him to do. But he was so concerned with trying to sweep this thing under the rug that he didn't want to do anything that might make it look like he had something to hide and decided that lying to the police was the best option.
"Who the **** put an emergency exit in the interrogation room?!" -- Police chief, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
One restaurant owner used to make a $10,000+ cash deposit every three days. After the restaurant got robbed at gunpoint, the owner made daily cash deposits to reduce the amount of money stolen at one. Because the restaurant didn't accept check or credit cards, the IRS viewed the daily cash deposits as structuring and confiscated the cash. The owner won in court but the IRS refuses to return the money. That's a typical story.