The Mueller probe has indicted Paul Manafort and Richard Gates with conspiracy to defraud the United States, but the law appears to be extremely nebulous. Clearly fraud charges could apply to crooked government contractors, but courts have taken a very broad interpretation to include “any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of government . . . or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.”
My observation is that rigorously applying this definition could lock up most of congress and most of the leadership of multiple presidential administrations. The basis of much of modern political discourse is based on trickery and means that are dishonest. For example consider these quotes from the Obama and members of his administration about Obamacare:
And consider this Obama adviser explaining how they used trickery to pass Obama care and game its evaluation by the Congressional Budget Office:
I am not holding my breath on any charges moving forward on this apparent “conspiracy to defraud the United States”.
What value is the law if it appears to only be applied based on the political bias of a prosecutor?
So you would have no objections to a special prosecutor to go after Gruber and other Obama officials for tricking the CBO in the way it scored Obamacare?
From what I see, application of the law beyond cases involving government contractors is going to effectively end the first amendment. Any campaign ad or public statement that raises controversial questions related to government policy could logically result in felony conspiracy charges.
Even if a court eventually throws out the charges, the damage is done by forcing the defendant to spend large amounts in legal bills to defend themselves.
What is interesting to me is that the prosecutors are going after these two guys but with a vengeance but have shown no interest in prosecuting thousands of other “politically exposed persons” that had secret overseas accounts. Instead they prosecuted the whistleblower and sent him to prison, while allowing the tax evaders to their back billions in taxes in civil proceedings without even releasing their names to the public. Ironically the IRS awarded the whistleblower more than $100 million as reward for his information after he was released from prison.
Perhaps the Trump administration can reopen the handling the tax violations by the “politically exposed persons” in Washington. That could go a long way in draining the swamp.
Manafort and Gates are peanuts compared to the billions in taxes that the elite was able to evade. The IRS collected $5 billion in back taxes. The Swiss bank had to pay big fines, but even then the fines were only a fraction of the profits the bank got out of the deal. Somehow no one faced charges about “conspiracy to defraud the US” in that case. Why is that?
To piggyback on that point, why doesn’t Trump actually have Hillary arrested? The charges don’t need to stick. I’m all for giving conservatives the perp walk they’ve been gnashing their teeth over for years.
No “vengeance” has been at play with the prosecution of Manafort. None at all. Has there been a very intensive execution of the prosecution of the man? Hell yes. His many crimes and the extent of the evidence lent itself to such a prosecution.
Please do petition the government to have those tax cheats you discussed be prosecuted. But Mueller’s charge did not include pursuing any alleged criminals that were not directly involved in Russian interference in the 2016 Election or that his probe had not discovered in the probe investigstion.
