Note: FFF will be at FreedomFest in Las Vegas starting tomorrow (Wednesday) through Sunday. Therefore, there will be no FFF Daily or my blog published for the rest of this week. We will resume publication on Monday, July 15.
*****
I fully realize that my 3-part article “The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case” is extremely long. I also know that many people prefer to read short articles online. However, I have absolutely no doubts that anyone who takes the time to read my entire article will reach one conclusion: An innocent man — libertarian Ian Freeman — is being made to serve an 8-year-jail sentence in a federal penitentiary.
I would like to share with you how it is that I decided to investigate the Ian Freeman case.
A while back I had learned that a federal jury had convicted Freeman of fraud. Those two factors — a jury trial and a fraud conviction — caused me to not delve into the case to see what it was all about. That’s because libertarians do not countenance the initiation of force or fraud against others. Moreover, it was a jury, rather than a judge, that had found Freeman guilty, which made the conviction more credible.
PorcFest
Last month, I was giving a talk at PorcFest, the annual libertarian festival that the Free State Project holds in Lancaster, New Hampshire. I heard a speaker make reference to the Ian Freeman case. I turned to a friend of mine — Jim — and asked him, “Do you know what Ian supposedly did to defraud people.” He responded that Ian had not defrauded anyone.
I have known Jim for many years and trust his judgment. Curious, I returned home and began searching articles on the Internet about the Freeman case. There are, I think, hundreds. Some of them stated that he had been convicted of fraud and money laundering. Some of them labeled him a “fraudster.” Some of them described older people being scammed out of their money by “romance scammers.” Some of the articles stated that the scammers had used Freeman’s bitcoin-selling business to facilitate their scams. I could understand why the romance scammers would be guilty of fraud but it still wasn’t clear to me how Freeman himself had defrauded the romance-scam victims or anyone else.
I ultimately came across an excellent article by Brian Doherty of Reason magazine that was dated December 30, 2022, eight days after the jury verdict on December 22. It was the first and only article I came across that criticized Freeman’s conviction. I highly recommend reading it. Since I have the utmost respect for Doherty’s scholarship, I decided to delve more deeply into the case.
Trial transcript
I texted my friend Jim and asked him if he could get me a copy of the transcript of the trial. The transcript is the verbatim proceedings during the trial, including the testimony of all the witnesses, that the court reporter records and later transcribes into a transcript.
Before too long, Jim sent me an online link to the transcript. It was an 11-day trial. I read all the testimony. As I detailed in part 1 of my article, I was absolutely stunned when I read what the government had done with its IRS undercover agent, a man named Pavel Prilotsky. Since I cover the sordid details about what Prilotsky did in part 1 of my article, I won’t repeat the story here. Suffice it to say that when I read what the government had done, I immediately concluded that the reason they had tried to entrap Freeman into committing a money-laundering offense was because they knew that had nothing else to target him with. That’s because if they had anything substantial with which to charge Freeman, they wouldn’t have had to resort to deceit and attempted entrapment.
Jury verdict
The jury verdict was the last page of the transcript. When I read the verdict, I was absolutely shocked. There was no fraud conviction! In fact, there was nothing whatsoever about fraud in the jury verdict! It wasn’t even mentioned.
I’d like you to see that for yourself. The following is a verbatim transcript of the jury verdict. I have added the brackets for clarification purposes.
[Count 1: Licensure violation]
THE JUROR: With regard to the count described in Count One of the indictment, operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty.
[Count 2: Conspiracy—licensure violation]
THE JUROR: With regard to the count described in Count Two of the indictment, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty.
[Count 3: Money laundering—the judge issues a judgment of acquittal on this count, thereby nullifying the jury verdict on this count]
THE JUROR: With regard to the crime described at Count Three of the indictment, money laundering, we the jury, find the defendant guilty.
[Count 4: Conspiracy to launder money]
THE JUROR: With regard to the crime described in Count Four of the indictment, conspiracy to commit money laundering, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty.
[Count 5: Tax violation]
JUROR: With regard to the crime described in Count Five of the indictment, attempt to evade or defeat tax in 2016, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty.
[Count 6: Tax violation]
THE JUROR: With regard to the crime described in Count Six of the indictment, attempt to evade or defeat tax in 2017, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty.
[Count 7: Tax violation]
THE JUROR: With regard to the crime described in Count Seven of the indictment, attempt to evade or defeat tax in 2018, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty.
[Count 8: Tax violation]
THE JUROR: With regard to the crime described in Count Eight of the indictment, attempt to evade or defeat tax in 2019, we, the jury, find the defendant guilty.
That’s it. That is the entire jury verdict. Do you see any conviction for fraud? Or even any mention of fraud? In fact, as I discovered by reading the trial transcript, at trial Freeman wasn’t even charged with fraud.
So, how in the world did all those newspapers conclude that Freeman had been convicted of fraud, or how did they come to label Freeman a “fraudster”?
A deceitful press release
I discovered that a big source of the fraud allegation had to be a press release issued by the New Hampshire U.S. Attorney’s Office dated October 2, 2023, the day of Freeman’s sentencing. The press release states in part: “Ian Freeman was sentenced today in federal court for laundering over ten million dollars in proceeds from romance scams and other internet fraud, U.S. Attorney Jane E. Young announces… ‘Ian Freeman’s sentencing shows that IRS Criminal Investigation is working vigorously to stop internet fraudsters like Ian Freeman,’ said Harry T. Chavis Jr, Special Agent in Charge of IRS Criminal Investigation’s Boston Field Office.”
New Hampshire U.S. Attorney Jane E. Young
Those were clearly false or misleading statements. Freeman was not sentenced for laundering money. As the U.S. Attorney’s office knew full well, the presiding judge, Joseph N. Laplante, had acquitted Freeman of the one money-laundering charge (Count 3) before sentencing. Since he was acquitted of that charge (Count 3), it would have been impossible for the judge to have sentenced him for that charge.
Moreover, even though IRS official Harry T. Chavis didn’t specifically say that Freeman had been convicted of fraud, his labeling of Freeman as a “fraudster” in a press release about Freeman’s sentencing certainly carries that implication. The fact that one IRS agent would engage in deceit in trying to entrap an innocent person into committing a crime and another IRS would engage in deceit in an official government press release about the person’s sentencing, does not, to belabor the obvious, speak well of America’s premier tax-collecting agency.
Generally, unless there is a pathological problem, people don’t lie without having a reason to lie. So, the question naturally arises: Why would these people feel the need to lie or mislead people about Ian Freeman in a press release issued after his trial? Moreover, I couldn’t help but ask myself some other pertinent questions: Did the three assistant U.S. Attorneys who prosecuted Freeman, including Seth Aframe, who was recently elevated as a judge to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, play any role in the preparation of that press release? Did they read the press release before it got sent out? Did they approve it or disapprove it? Did any of them ask that a corrected press release be sent out? Why wasn’t a corrected press release ever sent out?
An extraordinary reprimand
The false or misleading press release must be considered in the context of the recent reprimand of a prosecutor in the New Hampshire U.S. Attorney’s office by the chief U.S. District Judge in New Hampshire. Any lawyer in the land will tell you that such a reprimand is extraordinary. The judge reprimanded the prosecutor for his repeated failure to disclose exculpatory evidence (i.e., evidence pointing to innocence of the accused) in other cases. That would imply, of course, that at least for that prosecutor in the New Hampshire U.S. Attorney’s office, convictions are of primary importance and the innocence of an accused is only of secondary importance.
Conspiracy charge and innocence
Returning to the jury verdict in the Freeman case, I addressed the convictions relating to the licensure and tax violations in part 3 of my article. Suffice it to say that they lack any substance whatsoever, which was obviously why the feds resorted to trying to entrap Freeman — and then later convict him — on the bogus money-laundering charge relating to the IRS undercover agent Prilotsky– the charge that the judge ultimately threw out by entering a judgment of acquittal on that charge.
That left one substantive charge: Conspiracy to launder money (Count 4). As I point out in part 2, a conspiracy requires an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act. The only persons with whom Freeman could have conceivably entered into an agreement to commit an illegal act were the romance scammers who were defrauding some of Freeman’s bitcoin customers.
However, as I also detail in part 2, the entire trial record is devoid of any evidence establishing such an agreement. No evidence whatsoever. Not even a tiny bit of evidence. Not even an iota of evidence.
In fact, consider the following official admission made by the government in a motion referenced in Brian Doherty’s Reason article: “The Government does not allege that Freeman conspired with these fraudsters to launder proceeds…”
Thus, the critical question naturally arises: How does a man get sentenced to eight years in jail for “conspiracy to launder funds” when the government itself acknowledges that he never “conspired with these fraudsters to launder proceeds”?
There is no doubt that an innocent man — Ian Freeman — sits in a federal penitentiary unjustly serving an 8-year jail sentence, plus two additional years of supervised parole, plus a $40,000 fine, plus permanent forfeiture of his $5 million in bitcoin savings. That is, Freeman still loses his savings even if he is later adjudged innocent on appeal–that’s what passes for “justice” in the U.S. federal court system.
The unjust conviction of an innocent man should matter not only to libertarians. It should matter to everyone.
The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, part 1
The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, part 2
The Unjust Conviction of an Innocent Man: The Ian Freeman Case, part 3