As I pointed out in parts 1 and 2 of this article, the main thrust of the U.S. government’s case against Ian Freeman involved money-laundering and conspiracy to launder money.
The money-laundering charge came after the undercover IRS agent Pavel Prilotsky posed as a drug dealer in an attempt to entrap Freeman into committing a money-laundering offense. But that was the charge that the presiding judge in the case, Joseph Laplante, determined was invalid and threw out.
Freeman was convicted of the conspiracy charge even though, as I pointed out in part 2, there was no evidence whatsoever that he ever entered into any illegal agreement with anyone to launder money. By any objective standard of justice, Laplante should have issued a judgment of acquittal on that charge as well, as he did with the money-laundering charge.
That left two other sets of charges that Freeman was convicted of: (1) operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and conspiring to run an unlicensed money-transmitting business and (2) attempting to “evade and defeat taxes” in the years 2016–2019.
Add-on charges and plea bargains
I call these particular charges “add-on” charges. What federal prosecutors do when they are charging someone with a crime is load up with as many charges as they can against the accused. They do that to pressure the accused into accepting a plea bargain in which he pleads guilty to one offense and has all the other add-on offenses dismissed. It looks like a great deal for the accused until he realizes that the offense to which he is expected to plead guilty is a felony that entails a very long jail sentence.
Recall what I stated in part 1 of this article regarding the disgraceful actions of the IRS undercover agent Pavel Prilotsky. If he had come up with anything substantial after secretly investigating Freeman for almost a year — that is, something more than licensure violations and tax violations — he never would have resorted to fraud in his effort to entrap Freeman into committing a crime. By doing so, it is clear that he didn’t consider the licensure violations and tax violations that Freeman was later charged with to be very substantial.
In every federal criminal case, the Constitution guarantees the right of trial by jury. But another dark secret of the federal criminal-justice system is that if an accused person elects to exercise that right, he is punished more severely by many federal judges for doing so. That is, they impose a much longer jail sentence on him than they would have imposed if he had pled guilty. That’s because they feel that the defendant “rolled the dice” by making federal prosecutors and judge go through the time, effort, and expense of a trial, and for that, the defendant needs to be punished if he is convicted. Given Ian Freeman’s steadfast insistence on his innocence, however, there was never any chance that he would accept a plea bargain in which he had to plead guilty to anything.
The concept of money
Let’s focus first on the licensing charge. Notice that the charge involves failing to secure a federal license for operating a money-transmitting business. That’s important because the prosecution had to prove that bitcoin was “money.” The Bank Secrecy Act, which governs money transmission at the federal level, was enacted in 1970, long before bitcoin was invented in 2009. Obviously, Congress has had more than sufficient time to enact clarifying legislation as to whether it wants the money-transmission provisions of the Bank Secrecy Act to extend to bitcoin. For whatever reason, it has chosen to not enact such clarifying legislation.
Nonetheless, Judge Laplante held that when Congress enacted the Bank Secrecy Act, it surely meant to include any future forms of money, including bitcoin. Since Laplante is certain that bitcoin is “money,” he decided to uphold the jury’s verdict finding Freeman guilty of those two offenses and sentenced him to jail for operating a money-transmission business without a federal license.
It’s not clear what made Laplante so certain that bitcoin constitutes “money.” The prosecutors certainly didn’t present any expert witnesses at trial establishing that bitcoin is “money.” One gets the impression that Laplante is just personally certain that bitcoin is “money.”
Yet there is an article posted on forbes.com dated June 29, 2021, entitled “Bitcoin Is a Cryptocurrency, But Is It Money?” by Forbes contributor Rick Miller. That was about a year and half before Freeman’s trial. I think most people would acknowledge Forbes magazine to be rather expert in financial matters. After providing a detailed and careful analysis of the characteristics of money, Miller concluded, “Cryptocurrencies have been designed to serve as currencies, but they don’t yet fulfill the central functions of money.”
Miller was not alone in his opinion. A web page of the Reserve Bank of Australia about digital currencies states the following: “A frequently asked question is whether cryptocurrency can be defined as ‘money.’ The short answer is that cryptocurrency is not a form of money. To understand why, we can ask whether the characteristics of cryptocurrencies match the key characteristics of money.”
And in an article on Medium dated November 27, 2017, entitled “Why Bitcoin is not Currency,” by Anson Zeall, the cofounder of CoinPip, a platform for international payments using Bitcoin, Zeall writes, “Bitcoin does not fulfill the definition of money.”
Now, I’m sure that a number of articles could also be found arguing the opposite — that bitcoin is money. But I have a simple question: Are we really going to convict people of a federal felony and sentence them to jail over a definition of money when there is a clear conflict of perspectives on the issue and without any clarifying legislation by Congress? According to the federal prosecutors and the federal judge in the Freeman case, the answer is yes. They are obviously convinced that lawyers and judges know a lot more about economics and financial matters than economists and financial experts.
Occupational licensure
Another question that arises is: Where is the constitutional authority for the federal government to be issuing licenses for businesses to transmit money? One would search the Constitution in vain to find such authority. Indeed, why should anyone who wishes to go into the money-transmission business have to secure the permission of the federal government before doing so?
That is Ian Freeman’s perspective, just as it is the perspective of every libertarian. Government has no more business issuing licenses for engaging in occupations and professions than it does issuing licenses for engaging in religious activity. In fact, if truth be told, licensure is nothing more than a protection racket for those who hold those licenses — a protection racket designed to protect the rich and privileged from the competition of the poor and the non-elites.
A protection racket for lawyers
A classic example of this phenomenon is the law profession to which all U.S. prosecutors and federal judges belong. In order to practice law, one has to secure a license from the state, and most states will not issue a law license to a person who hasn’t attended a state-approved law school and then passed a state-administered bar examination. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to get into a state-approved law school without first graduating from a state-approved college or university.
All of that costs a lot of money. It’s not something that many people can afford. Thus, in most states, those people who are in the lower economic brackets are prohibited from, say, apprenticing with a lawyer and becoming a lawyer that way, without having to secure a license from the state.
If a person without a law license opens up an office offering to handle uncontested divorce cases for, say, $100, the bar association will immediately go into court and secure an injunction against him. That’s because he is cutting into the business of the licensed lawyers who are charging $1,000 for handling uncontested divorces, and the judges, who themselves are lawyers, will grant the injunction.
Lawyers and judges will argue that licensure protects the public from incompetent and unethical lawyers. And they will say that with straight faces. But consider a February 2, 2022, article in the Concord, New Hampshire, Monitor entitled, “Federal Prosecutor Facing New Accusations of Misconduct.” It states that a federal prosecutor in the New Hampshire U.S. Attorney’s office — that is, the same office that prosecuted Freeman — “was accused of withholding evidence in two recent federal cases.” The article quotes Judge Landya McCafferty, chief justice of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire: “The government’s failure to learn of and disclose these facts was patent prosecutorial misconduct. The fact that highly similar misconduct has happened at least twice in this United States Attorney’s Office within a short time span raises concerns about the seriousness to which the government takes its constitutional disclosure obligations.”
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that very same federal prosecutor received a license to practice law, a license that supposedly protects people from incompetent and unethical lawyers.
The inside-the-box mindset
Libertarian opposition to statist measures like occupational licensure — and the lack of respect that libertarians have toward such measures — is only the tip of the iceberg, however. The fact is that libertarians oppose the entire welfare-warfare state and government-regulated society to which statists are so deeply devoted. It is that opposition and disdain for statism that explains the deep enmity that federal officials have toward Freeman and other libertarians.
One can explain the statist mindset as one of thinking “inside the box.” It is that inside-the-box mindset that is inculcated in every child in the government-approved schools to which his parents are forced to send him when he reaches the age of six years old. It is the aim of the state’s educational system to produce what can be called “good little citizens” — that is, ones who are indoctrinated into accepting and embracing the welfare-warfare state, regulated-society way of life into which they are born and raised and then grow up convinced that they are “free.” That’s why adult statists feel very comfortable doing such things as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, thanking the troops for their “service” for protecting our “freedom” by killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and singing, “Thank God I’m an American because at least I know I’m free.”
That’s what life is like inside the box. And then along comes someone like Ian Freeman, or some other libertarian, who challenges the existence of the box itself, or even worse, refuses to play by the rules of the box. Statists go absolutely ballistic. People like Freeman are considered to be a threat to society because they are a threat to the box, and they have to be dealt with. They have to be monitored, spied on, investigated, and set up and entrapped into committing bogus crimes. They need to be removed from society by locking them away in a federal penitentiary for as long as possible. They need to have their life’s savings taken away from them. The threat they pose to the box needs to be eliminated or significantly diminished.
In fact, in a way, Freeman is lucky to have been sentenced to serve his eight years in a federal penitentiary. They could have instead declared him insane for his radical, outside-the-box mindset and sentenced him to an indefinite term in a federal insane asylum, just as Soviet authorities used to do to their citizens who thought outside the box.
The drug war
Consider, for example, the war on drugs, the governmental program that has been going on for at least 60 years. It is a classic inside-the-box program. People like the federal attorneys and federal judges in New Hampshire, including Judge Laplante, all do their part to “win” the war on drugs.
For example, according to a press release issued by the DEA just last month — June 2024 — five people pled guilty to drug-related offenses and are now scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Laplante. They are facing up to 20 years in jail and a fine of $1 million. According to another press release issued by the New Hampshire U.S. Attorney’s office, again just last month, a Manchester, New Hampshire, man pleaded guilty before Judge Laplante to a drug-related offense and is also now facing up to 20 years in jail and a $1 million fine.
It’s probably worth mentioning that a large number of drug busts arise out of the sale of drugs to federal undercover agents or “informants.” For example, according to an article at Foster’s Daily Democrat, a man named Elmer Valladares Rivera pled guilty before Judge Laplante to selling heroin to an “informant.” The problem is that sometimes these “informants,” desperate to make arrests, induce people to commit the crime, which, needless to say, reminds us of what the IRS fraudster Pavel Prilotsky unsuccessfully tried to do to Ian Freeman.
Libertarians, including Ian Freeman, oppose the drug war entirely. We hold that it is none of the government’s business what a person decides to distribute, possess, or ingest. We hold that any society in which government wields the power to punish people for possessing, ingesting, or distributing drugs cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a genuinely free society.
This libertarian mindset causes inside-the-box statists, especially those in the DEA, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and many federal judges to go ballistic. “How can we stop the drug dealers and the drug cartels if we legalize drugs, like you libertarians want to do?” they cry.
Given their public-school indoctrinated inability to think outside the box, what the inside-the-box statists simply cannot see is that it is their beloved war on drugs that brings into existence the very unsavory drug dealers that they lament. What they cannot see is that with the legalization of drugs, the unsavory drug dealers that they spend so much of their time, effort, and taxpayer money targeting would be put out of business immediately.
The drug war is everything for federal prosecutors and federal judges because it serves to keep them in high cotton with their generous tax-supported salaries. Without drug cases that clog court dockets all across the country, there would be no need for the massive army of federal bureaucrats who wage the war on drugs, including DEA agents, federal prosecutors, federal judges, court translators, drug-war law-enforcement personnel, and court clerks, not to mention the bribes and asset forfeitures that come with the drug war.
In fact, even though they would be loath to admit it, the truth is that the Freeman case is all about the drug war. Oh, sure, they wrapped it up in terms like “money laundering,” but the fact is that their money-laundering statutes were enacted to fight the unsavory drug dealers that their own drug war has created. Their plan was that by tightening control over the ability of drug dealers to deposit their money into banks, thereby making it “clean,” the drug warriors could finally — finally! — win their decades-long drug war.
But I have some questions for the federal prosecutors in New Hampshire and Judge Laplante: How is all that working out for you? Have all those rules and regulations placed on banks, which have destroyed the financial privacy of the American people, succeeded in winning the war on drugs? Has that $10,000 reporting requirement for bank deposits won the drug war? How about the asset forfeitures totaling millions of dollars seized from innocent people, principally blacks and other minorities? How about all the violent drug raids and the multitudes of searches and seizures, both legal and illegal? Indeed, have your endless criminal prosecutions, convictions, incarcerations, fines, and forfeitures for drug-related offenses or money-laundering offenses that have destroyed the lives of so many people, including that of Ian Freeman, brought you victory in your beloved drug war? I don’t think so.
Decades of mindless drug warfare
What is fascinating about this issue is that federal prosecutors and federal judges today cannot see that what they are doing is no different from what federal prosecutors and federal judges were doing 50 years ago. For example, in the 1970s, there was a federal judge in San Antonio named John H. Wood, Jr., who was called “Maximum John.” The reason he had acquired that moniker was because he would blindly impose the maximum jail sentence on drug-war defendants regardless of the facts and circumstances surrounding each case.
For example, Wood was once faced with sentencing three young men who had been convicted of a one-count drug conspiracy indictment. Mind you, they had never actually distributed or possessed the drugs. All they had done was agree to purchase them. Wood gave all three of those young men the maximum 15-year jail sentence on that one-count conspiracy charge, and the conviction was upheld by federal judges on appeal. It was Wood’s way of doing his part to win the war on drugs.
In 1979, Wood was assassinated. It turned out that he was unethically cooperating with federal prosecutors to help them win drug-war cases. The drug lord who hired the assassin held the quaint view that a judge should be fair and impartial, even in drug cases. Of course, Wood was just another casualty among all the other countless casualties in the decades-long war on drugs, the government program that is so beloved to every single inside-the-box statist, especially those who make their living off of it.
In the drug case I cited above, the one in which Elmer Valladares Rivera repeatedly sold drugs to a federal “informant,” another man in the same case, Israel “Izzy” Cruz, also pled guilty before Judge Laplante to drug-related offenses. Reflecting a classic example of the inside-the-box mindset that characterizes federal officials, Assistant U.S. Attorney Terry Ollila declared, “Israel Cruz, for the next 12½ years, will be off the streets.” It’s the same type of pronouncement that federal prosecutors were making back in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.
I have a question for Terry Ollila: What difference does it make that you have removed Israel Cruz off the streets or, for that matter, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Pablo Escobar, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, or all the other countless drug dealers? It obviously doesn’t occur to Ollila or, or for that matter, to any other federal drug warrior that, under the natural laws of supply and demand, Cruz will immediately be replaced by another drug seller, which, of course, enables U.S. officials to play this deadly and destructive whack-a-mole game into perpetuity. Just google “drug lords” to see the endless nature of the drug war.
The statists waged the war on drugs throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, employing an ever-increasing array of totalitarian police-state measures. Federal prosecutors tried an endless number of drug cases, and federal judges imposed long jail sentences. And all for what? For nothing! The drug war just kept going on and on, with no end in sight, but with an ever-growing trail of destruction of lives, liberty, and privacy. Those federal prosecutors and federal judges who were doing their part to “win” the war on drugs in the 1960s and 1970s are now dead or living on their fat federal tax-supported pensions, while their successors, such as the federal prosecutors and the federal judge in the Freeman case, just mindlessly continue doing the same things on their generous tax-supported salaries as their predecessors back in the 1960s and 1970s were doing.
It’s a classic “inside-the box” mindset, one that is threatened by anyone who questions the box itself, especially the much-beloved drug war and government-regulated society, including government-issued licenses for operating money-transmitting businesses.
During Freeman’s trial, federal prosecutors made a big deal out of Freeman saying to the IRS undercover agent Prilotsky (who, interestingly enough, was falsely posing as a drug dealer) that Freeman would not KNOWINGLY sell bitcoins to a drug dealer. Freeman had capitalized that word in his communications with Prilotsky. The prosecutors argued that this proved that Freeman was using a “wink and a nod” to tell Prilotsky that it was okay for him to go buy bitcoins from Freeman’s unmanned kiosks, even though Freeman specifically told the fraudster that he didn’t have Freeman’s permission to buy bitcoins from his kiosks. It was a classic case of inside-the-box thinkers unable to understand the mindset of an outside-the-box thinker.
What Freeman was saying was that as a libertarian, he had no objection to selling bitcoins to drug dealers or drug users. As far as Freeman and other libertarians are concerned, what people do with their consensual drug transactions is their business. Thus, what he was saying with his use of the word “knowingly” was simply that if someone admitted to him of being a drug dealer, he would then refuse to sell him bitcoins for fear that the feds would target him for violating their money-laundering rules and regulations — a fear, as we have seen, proved to be well-justified.
Corruption and the drug war
There is something else to note about the corrupting nature of the drug war. Notice that the federal prosecutors in the Freeman case had no reservations about trying to convict an innocent man based on the testimony of an undercover IRS agent who was falsely posing as a drug dealer and doing his best to induce Freeman to commit a crime. Notice also that Judge Laplante, although entering a judgment of acquittal on that particular charge, expressed no moral outrage over what would be considered to be outrageous conduct to any outside-the-box thinker. Perhaps the reason for that lack of moral outrage is that Laplante has become so accustomed to presiding over drug-war cases involving drug sales to government “informants.” That’s what the drug war has done to the moral compass of so many government lawyers and judges in the federal system. As soon as Laplante learned what Prilotsky had done, he should have dismissed the entire case as a way to send the prosecutors the following message: While this type of thing is done in Russia, it’s not going to be done here in the United States.
America’s outside-the-box heritage
It’s worth noting that this statist inside-the-box mindset under which we have all been born and raised has not always been the prevailing one among Americans. If we go back to, say, 1890, we see that the mindset of libertarians like Ian Freeman was the more common one, and statists were in the extreme minority. Just think: no income tax or IRS or federal criminal prosecutions for “attempting to defeat or evade taxes.” No Social Security, Medicare, or other socialist programs. No drug war or DEA. No money-laundering statutes. Hardly any immigration controls (or illegal immigrant cases clogging the federal courts). Very few economic regulations, including regulations on banks. No Federal Reserve System. No paper money. No governmental debauchery of money. No gun control. No Pentagon, CIA, or NSA. No foreign empire of military bases. No Gitmo. No torture, indefinite detention, or state-sponsored assassinations. And no FBI.
An American Gestapo
It’s worth pointing out something about the FBI, given that the federal prosecutors called FBI agents to the witness stand to help them convict Ian Freeman. We shouldn’t forget that those agents are working for an entity that honored its longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover, by naming the FBI building in Washington, D.C., after him. What’s wrong with that? Hoover was a serial blackmailer who used his position to spy on American citizens and kept secret files on them so he could blackmail them into doing whatever he wanted them to do. We also shouldn’t forget that it was the FBI who shot (and killed) 14-year-old Sammy Weaver in the back and shot (and killed) his mother Vicki in the head at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. And that it was the FBI who murdered scores of Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, the following year by injecting flammable gas into their compound knowing that it would ignite and burn all the inhabitants, including women and children, to death, and who then immediately bulldozed the site to prevent forensics investigators from determining the truth. And that it is was the FBI (and the CIA) that President Harry Truman was concerned was becoming an “American Gestapo.”
And yet federal officials have no reservations about convicting American citizens on the testimony of people who work for an entity that honors the biggest serial blackmailer in U.S. history, an entity that murders innocent people, and an entity that is clearly an American Gestapo. As far as inside-the-box statists are concerned, there’s nothing wrong with that.
There was an amusing part of the Freeman trial relating to the FBI. An FBI agent was testifying about the violent paramilitary raid that was launched in the dark early morning hours to arrest Freeman and search his home, which included the use of an armored vehicle called a “Bearcat” to break in a window so that they could send a drone into the house.
Freeman’s attorney asked about why they had felt the need to disable cameras that Freeman had installed in his house.
FBI Agent:“I think it’s for tactical purposes so, you know, these types of recordings aren’t put out on some platform of social media that would cause us harm in future arrest.”
Freeman’s attorney: “How do you know it wasn’t for some just vindictive nasty, destructive reason?”
FBI Agent: “I don’t work with people like that. We’re very professional. We’re extremely professional.”
For libertarians, especially those familiar with the FBI’s murderous actions and cover-ups at Ruby Ridge and Waco, that response would be extremely funny. And, in fact, the court reporter typed: “Laughter in audience.”
But federal Judge Laplante, failing to find any humor in the matter, was clearly not amused. Considering the largely libertarian audience’s spontaneous act of laughter to be a “disruption,” Laplante indignantly exclaimed, “No outbursts. This isn’t for your entertainment. This man’s in here accused of a crime and his lawyer’s defending him. Any more outbursts, it’ll be the last one.”
In my opinion, what Laplante was really saying was that he would not permit anyone, especially libertarians, to disrespect in his courtroom agents of the federal law-enforcement agency that President Truman had referred to as an American Gestapo.
The statist victory
By the late 1800s, the statist philosophy was already percolating and spreading in the United States. In 1913, the statists succeeded in securing the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which ushered in a system of continual, decade-after-decade monetary debauchery, and the passage of the 16th Amendment, which effectively converted the American people into income-tax, welfare-warfare state serfs, ones who live in constant fear of receiving any communications from the IRS, one of the most tyrannical agencies in U.S. history — and the agency for which Pavel Prilotsky was working undercover when he launched his fraudulent scheme to entrap an innocent American citizen.
The final statist victory came in the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the welfare-state, regulated-society way of life under which we now live, and which is considered to be “normal” by inside-the-box statists. But it is anything but normal. Instead, it is a combination of socialism and economic fascism. There is an excellent book titled Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, which I highly recommend. It describes the similarities between Roosevelt’s statist programs and philosophy and those of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. In fact, it’s no surprise to outside-the-box thinkers that Hitler himself sent FDR a letter commending him on his statist programs and philosophy.
For a while during this time, there were outside-the-box-thinkers who fought to preserve libertarian economic values. They included four justices on the Supreme Court — Butler, Sutherland, Van Devanter, and McReynolds, who came to be known as the “Four Horsemen” — who, along with Justice Roberts — declared much of FDR’s socialist-fascist program unconstitutional. A good example was the National Industrial Recovery Act, a regulatory program straight out of Mussolini’s fascist economic playbook, especially given its infamous Blue Eagle propaganda campaign. Although the Supreme Court rightly declared it unconstitutional, it set the foundation for a government-regulated society, one that would come with such things as federal offenses for operating a money-transmission business without a federal license.
The outside-the-box thinking effectively came to an end with the Supreme Court case of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish in 1937. That’s because Roosevelt had come up with a scheme to pack the Supreme Court with more than nine justices so he could choose legal cronies who would be expected to uphold the constitutionality of his unconstitutional programs. While Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme ultimately failed, it was, according to many legal scholars, sufficient to cause Justice Roberts to switch over to the statists in what became known as the “switch in time that saved nine.”
From that point on, U.S. presidents appointed statist inside-the-box lawyers to the federal bench, including lawyers serving as federal prosecutors. Over time, the entire federal judiciary became composed of inside-the-box thinkers. For example, Judge Laplante himself is a former federal prosecutor. Another example is Seth R. Aframe, one of the federal prosecutors who prosecuted Ian Freeman and who delivered the federal government’s final argument in the Freeman case; he was recently confirmed as a federal appellate judge in the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
The statist system that Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme launched back in the 1930s has, decade after decade, simply reinforced itself because there is virtually no possibility that any U.S. president would ever appoint a libertarian lawyer to the federal bench or that a statist U.S. Senate would confirm him. The closest the nation has ever come to having libertarian-oriented lawyer appointed to the Supreme Court was when President Reagan nominated Douglas H. Ginsberg, who is currently a professor of law at the libertarian-oriented Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, to the Court. But statists forced him to drop out of contention when it was discovered that he had smoked marijuana in his younger years, just like, we might recall, former President Clinton did. But I suppose the difference was that Ginsburg inhaled while Clinton supposedly did not.
Freeman’s bogus tax conviction
Finally, there were the tax-violation charges with which Freeman was convicted. They demonstrate perfectly the deep enmity that federal officials have toward libertarians like Ian Freeman. If the IRS had been dealing with, say, a high-school principal, the IRS would have scheduled an appointment with him, gone over his tax records, compiled any deductions or credits he was entitled to, and advised him about any back taxes owed. They would have then proposed a schedule for payment. Only if all that failed would they target the principal with criminal tax evasion charges.
Not so with Ian Freeman. There was no IRS meeting for him. They just issued an add-on indictment against him for not paying income taxes that he supposedly owed. In fact, the IRS agent who the federal prosecutors called to the witness stand to establish Freeman’s guilt even admitted as much:
Question: Generally, if somebody owes taxes or you think somebody owes taxes or if you want to check something out, you have the — the ability — in fact, you generally send out a letter and say let’s get together and talk about your taxes, right?
Answer: For civil purposes, yes.
Question: Well, let’s — let’s cut right to the chase. In 2016, the IRS didn’t send a letter, did not send a letter, to Ian Freeman or any of the church entities he identifies with, correct?
Answer: Yes, not to my knowledge.
Question. Right. You didn’t say we’d like to talk to you, come on in with your legal counsel, come on in with your documents, come on in so we can straighten out, you know, what you owe or what we think you owe, right?
Answer: Correct.
Question: All right. That — that — that’s generally what you do, right?
Answer: In general program, yes, that’s what would be done.
Sure, that’s what’s done with good little citizens who play by the inside-the-box rules, but not when it comes to lower-class libertarian citizens like Ian Freeman who question their entire statist box, including the income tax, the IRS, and criminal prosecutions for tax violations.
The IRS agent calculated the number of commissions that she estimated that Freeman must have earned on his bitcoin sales and then used what the IRS calls a “standard deduction” to calculate back taxes that Freeman supposedly owed. But Freeman himself stated that he and the church he organized made sizable donations to worthy causes, donations that might well have left Freeman owing no taxes whatsoever. But since the IRS witness never took the time to meet with Freeman and pay him the standard courtesy that is extended to good little inside-the-box citizens, she couldn’t really be certain whether Freeman actually owed any taxes at all.
In fact, the IRS witness admitted as much in her sworn testimony:
Question: You didn’t include things like overhead; you didn’t include things like property tax; you didn’t include things like charitable giving, stuff like that; right?
Answer: On the individual, no, I — we gave the standard deduction.
Question: Right. And the standard deduction generally could be much less than what he’s actually due, correct?
Answer: It could be.
Question: Right. In fact, if he went through an itemization, detailed, and you sat down with him, quite frankly, he may owe nothing, right?
Answer: Correct.
Notwithstanding that startling sworn admission, Ian Freeman was convicted of “attempting to evade or defeat taxes.” Again, that’s what passes for “justice” in the federal criminal-justice system.
Freeman’s appeal
Ian Freeman’s case is on currently on appeal. Does he have any realistic chance of getting his conviction and eight-year jail sentence reversed on appeal? Maybe. There are instances in which federal judges do the right thing, such as when Judge Laplante entered the judgment of acquittal on the bogus money-laundering charge. But the problem is that ordinarily federal judges, including those on the appellate level, are themselves “inside-the-box” thinkers who are deeply committed to upholding statist programs like the drug war and the government-regulated society. Even worse, some of them are former prosecutors who bend over backwards to give federal prosecutors the benefit of the doubt in criminal cases.
Meanwhile, an innocent man spends his time in a federal penitentiary serving a manifestly unjust eight-year sentence, not to mention the permanent loss of his $5 million in savings, most of which came from the fortuitous rise in the value of his bitcoins, which undoubtedly rankled federal officials who live on their tax-supported federal salaries.
If you would like to write to Ian Freeman (whose wife is named Bonnie and who also is a libertarian), this is his mailing address:
Ian Freeman
Register # 34755509 Unit JA
Federal medical center, Devens
PO Box 879
Ayer, MA 01432