WE’RE ALL CRIMINALS NOW

I’m writing this from a place called Mea Culpa City. It’s not a lot of fun being here, but it’s where I have to live until I finish this essay. It turns out that I have wronged a friend. The silver – well, pewter – lining is that in attempting to rectify it I learned how easy it has become for the Federales to turn any of us into criminals.

The Cato Institute in Washington has just published a book on this:
Go Directly To Jail: The Criminalization Of Almost Everything. It documents how the federal government now views its jurisdiction as limitless – which means almost anything you or your business does can be a federal crime. The Cato book paints a frightening picture – but the truth is, it’s much worse.

It’s worse because of the depraved collusion between politicians and their buddies in the media to demonize and criminalize someone on the front pages of newspapers. This of course is not exclusive to Washington. States are on to the game as well. New York’s Elliot Spitzer has turned the State Attorney General’s office into his private Gestapo. But he’s New York’s problem. Federal agents and federal politicians are a problem for all of us.

Suppose, for example, you are called to testify at a Senate hearing. The committee you must testify before subpoenas your records and correspondence, including all your personal emails. The committee staffers proceed to examine your emails, pluck some juicy quotes from them that, taken out of any context, are the most damaging – and gives them to a reporter for the Washington Post who writes a hit piece on you.

Unlike court-subpoenaed documents, there is no confidentiality with Congressional-subpoenaed documents. Whatever you are compelled to give a House or Senate committee, the committee is legally free to distribute to the world. And that is just what Senator John McCain and his staffers did to Jack Abramoff.

After the WaPo’s first hit piece on Abramoff, McCain’s staffers then went to his clients, the Indian tribes for whom he had lobbied for years. The staffers didn’t bring copies of entire emails, just selected quotes which, with no context, could be imaginatively construed as criticizing them. “Look what Abramoff said about you in these private emails,” the staffers told the tribal leaders. “We think you should consider canceling your contract with him, and testifying against him at our hearings.” They successfully convinced the tribal leaders – who had previously told a WaPo reporter that Abramoff had saved them hundreds of millions of dollars – they were now “victims” of a racist scheme.

I’m going to state this very clearly. John McCain’s reputation for being “prickly” means he is a professional jerk. What he should have a reputation for is being a fascist thug. His staffers should have the same reputation as well. No wonder he’s the Democrats’ favorite Republican.

For it is not enough for McCain and his staffers to have someone they have taken a disliking to crucified in the press and deprived of his livelihood. They want to send him to jail for wire fraud.

Congress has now increased the penalties for mail and wire fraud to 20 years in prison. What constitutes wire fraud? Anything the prosecutor wants. All he needs is a “victim” and the use of the “mail” – which need not have anything to do with the federal Post Office, and includes electronic transmissions (“wires”) over privately-owned Internet services.

I want you to think very hard and long on this: any email you have ever sent can be grounds for felony federal wire fraud prosecution threatening you with 20 years in prison. The email, or “electronic transmission,” does not itself have to be fraudulent. It can still be “wire fraud” if it is only somehow “involved” in what the government deems to be a “fraudulent scheme.”

Nervous now? It is a complete illusion that anything legally stands in the way between federal prosecutors and American citizens.

A month ago, I wrote an attack on Jack Abramoff entitled “Prodigal Conservative Son” (you won’t find it anymore on TTP because I pulled it). I was so ticked at him for lobbying for Indian casinos (because I think the tribal “sovereignty” which allows them should be abolished) that it blinded me to the nefarious game McCain was playing to add another “gotcha” notch to his fascist belt.

That Abramoff gained a tiny fraction of the Indians’ multi-billion dollar gambling shtick by lobbying for them should have stayed his business, not mine. What is all of our business is the capacity of Washington politicians and their staff to ruin anyone’s life they capriciously choose. From now on, every time any of us sends an email, we get to ponder the accuracy of Ayn Rand’s prediction of where government was headed. It’s from Atlas Shrugged, Chapter Three, aptly entitled “White Blackmail”:

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on the guilt.