Rov_Scam
23hr ago
Except in a realpolitik way it doesn't make sense to release it. If I'm in the DNC and want the party to have success in the future, the best situation is to move on entirely from anything that had to do with Biden. There are plenty of younger politicians out there without any of the political baggage that comes with being tied to an unpopular president and losing bid. If they release it now it's news for a week, only political junkies pay attention to it, and a year from now when people start announcing their candidacies the whole thing is yesterday's news.
If you really think that Harris candidacy is a threat to the party, then you tell her not to run with the implicit threat that if she does then it may get leaked at an inopportune time. If she doesn't announce then it never sees the light of day. If she does, then she isn't a team player and they won't mind throwing her under the bus. If it's leaked and she wins the nomination anyway, then she's a stronger candidate than anyone thought and she deserves to have it.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
I think that if Trump had been assassinated in Butler it would have been "successful" insofar as it would have influenced the upcoming election. the GOP convention was scheduled to begin the following week, and while it probably would have gone forward as an opportunity to eulogize Trump, it wouldn't have actually selected a nominee. While there was some controversy over Biden's passing the baton to Harris, it was nothing compared to the all-out war that would have happened in the Republican Party if their nominee had been killed on the eve of the convention. J.D. Vance, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis all had claims to the nomination that were equal parts credible and ludicrous. Haley had won the second most primary votes, but those all came from people specifically voting against Trump. DeSantis probably would have been the nominee if Trump hadn't run, but he got even fewer votes in the primary than Haley, had a frosty relationship with Trump, and there's no way of proving what would have happened besides taking the word of Ron and other people who want him to be the nominee. J.D. Vance was the named heir apparent, but that wasn't public at the time, and anyone claiming that he was Trump's pick would just be accused of being self-serving, similar to people fighting over a will based on "what dad really wanted". And that leaves out opportunists who would throw their hat into the ring as "compromise candidates", and people who would throw their hat into the ring as full on Trump stans who would claim that none of the candidates represent the true MAGA spirit.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
it seems you've shifted the goalposts -- creating an entirely new argument for why the indictment falls flat
Courts don't operate like a Harvard debate club, and I don't argue here like I'd argue in court. I try to do my homework but I don't have the time or inclination to fully research my position as I would if it were for an actual client. When I read the statute I didn't get the impression from the language used that it would apply to opening a checking account, so I stopped right there and didn't bother to analyze the case further. You helpfully pointed to a case that demonstrated that such an interpretation would work, and I owed it to you to continue with the analysis.
Anyway, to answer you questions, the statement was colloquially false, but whether it was literally false depends on how you define "conducting business". They were, in fact, accepting money from one party and giving it to another. Maybe this doesn't fit your personal definition, but I can assure you that it's not an uncommon arrangement. In fact, several companies I represent only exist to do exactly that. Basically, they exist to get sued. The insurance companies pay them, and the money is used to pay settlements. The reasons for this are complicated and I'm not going to bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that these companies have no offices, no employees, and don't do anything that would conventionally be described as business. There are thousands of similar shell corporations that exist in the country, and I've never heard of any suggestion that if one of their officers signed a form with a bank that had language about "conducting business" it would subject him to criminal prosecution for lying to a bank. We can argue about this all day long if you want to, but it's ultimately irrelevant, because the indictment alleges that they lied by concealing the ownership of the companies, not because they lied about whether or not they were conducting business.
Do you agree that at the time that statement was made, the individual was acting on behalf of the SPLC?
Yes, but like I said, there's nothing in the indictment that suggests the individual in question ever made a statement to the bank that this was not the case. The document with the alleged false statement is simply confirming that the individual had the legal authority to open the account in the company's name, and the government hasn't presented any evidence to the contrary. The only person with the authority to open those accounts was the person whose name was registered as the dba.
If (1) an organization states on its website that it opposes a particular event; (2) it actually donates money to help organize and support that event; but (3) it doesn't explicitly say that it won't donate money to support the event, then there's no fraud?
I'm not going to get into all the elements right now, but at minimum the government would need to identify a particular person that saw the representation, relied on the representation, and that the organization made money off of that reliance. The indictment doesn't indicate that. That doesn't even begin to touch the prevailing theory that the SPLC was manufacturing racist incidents to increase donation numbers which, again, isn't alleged in the indictment, and would be difficult to prove without a witness within the SPLC willing to testify to it. Again, at the very minimum they would need to identify at least one incident that the SPLC caused to happen.
It wasn't that long ago that you were arguing how it was similarly clear that Letitia James totally committed mortgage fraud, a couple weeks before multiple grand juries failed to indict her. This case is similarly going nowhere,
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I think it's a bit premature to say Trump was the target. Apparently the gunman started shooting in the hallway outside the dinner while Trump was still inside, at least from what I can piece together from Wolf Blitzer's firsthand account.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
If there's case law suggesting that it applies to opening a checking account, I'll concede the point. But that doesn't mean there's criminal liability in this case, because we still have to meet the elements of the crime. As @odd_primes points out, there are three elements:
- Make a false statement to a Federally insured financial institution
- Knew the statement was false, and
- Did so for the purpose of influencing in any way the action of the institution.
I get why 1 and 2 would seem self-evident, but it isn't clear to me whether either of these prongs have been met. The alleged false statements were contained in documents called "Sole Proprietorship Resolution of Authority", which stated, for each of the at-issue accounts:
I, [Employee], certify that I am sole owner of the above named proprietorship, Federal Tax ID number [9788], engaged in business under the trade name of [Company].
The evidence that they present of these statements being false is that, following an investigation by the bank, the accounts were closed and the SPLC had a discussion with the bank memorialized in a letter stating that the accounts were opened for the benefit of SPLC operations and under their authority. The confusion here arises from the difference between legal ownership and beneficial ownership. To cite an example that explains the difference, we'll go with one I'm familiar with, the lawyer trust account.
Suppose a client hires my law firm to handle a commercial real estate transaction worth several million dollars. They give me a check for 5 million dollars so that when the closing date arrives, I will have the cash on hand and be able to pay the seller. In the meantime, though, there will be due diligence and continuing negotiations, and the actual closing date may be several months from when the client gives me the money. I can't just deposit the check in my firm's operating account, because it's not mine to spend, and comingling client funds with my own would get me in trouble. Since the money is likely to generate a non-negligible amount of interest during the time the transaction is pending, I have to open up a client trust account with a bank so that the client doesn't lose anything because of the delay. I am legally responsible for this money and I'm legally the only one with the authority to spend it. But the only way I can spend it is by paying the seller of the property, and if the deal falls through I have to return it, along with any interest it accrued. I am the legal owner, and the client is the beneficial owner.
This distinction comes up a lot in the context of contemporary FinCen and KYC regulations because criminal enterprises will often try to hide behind webs of LLCs. The LLC is the legal owner of the money, but since the LLC has an owner, that owner is the beneficial owner. So If I start a single-member LLC it's easy because I'm the beneficial owner. It gets more complicated when the LLC in question is owned by other LLCs, which are in turn owned by other LLCs, and it takes a day on the Secretary of State's website and lots of money spent ordering incorporation documents that are on microfilm in order to figure out who the physical person is behind everything. The implication that the prosecution appears to be making here is that since the accounts were being used for SPLC purposed, the SPLC was actually the beneficial owner of the accounts, and the statements that the employee was the sole owner of the accounts were therefore false.
There's one problem with this theory, though—sole proprietorships do not have beneficial owners. All a sole proprietorship is is a business name that an individual uses. There is no separate corporate structure apart from the individual. The way counties record them is instructive, either as "fictitious names" or "doing business as". e.g. Robert T. Beck dba Beck Paving Company. The idea of a sole proprietorship having a separate beneficial owner is similar to the idea of an individual having a separate beneficial owner. For that reason, all the various regulation that's been put in place over the years regarding disclosure of beneficial owners doesn't apply to sole proprietorships. The point of the Resolution of Authority is to certify to the bank that you are the person legally authorized to open the account, and to appoint agents who will have access the account. A beneficial owner does not have this authority; if I open a client trust account the client doesn't have any authority to access the account or to designate agents. The same is true for an LLC. If there is a web of legitimate LLCs, and the one I'm in charge of running is owned by another LLC with a different board and different management four layers above, those owners/managers can't open bank accounts in their capacity as beneficial owners. If you look at Resolutions of Authority for LLCs, they don't ask about beneficial ownership at all; in fact, they don't ask about ownership at all. All they ask is for the person opening the account to affirm that they have been authorized to open the account and to provide paperwork to that effect.
Assuming that the person who opened the accounts was indeed the legal owner of the sole proprietorships, and the indictment doesn't suggest that he wasn't, you have imply that the language in the Resolution of Ownership implied that it was also refering to some type of beneficial ownership, which wouldn't make any sense. Now, one could make the argument that due to some kind of collateral agreement between the legal proprietor and the SPLC that some sort of beneficial ownership did exist. I can't find any law suggesting that such an arrangement is possible; maybe you can. But even then, in order to prove that the statement was a lie, you'd have to prove that the bank contemplated such an interpretation at the time, and it's highly unlikely that the government has such proof, since the nature of the paperwork they are using as evidence isn't used to determine beneficial ownership even when a beneficial owner who would not appear on that paperwork could theoretically exist. And that still doesn't get you all the way there, because that only gets us to the second prong, that the person opening the account interpreted it this way as well, and thus knew they were making a false statement. If someone asks you if you own a company without any qualification, and you are the only legal owner, and you say yes, you can't say they knew they were lying because some obscure interpretation that you weren't made explicitly aware of exists which would make the statement untrue.
And we haven't even gotten to the third prong yet, and it's likely to fail here as well, that the false statement was made to mislead the bank. It's unclear why the person opening the account would have a motive to mislead the bank. In the case you cited, it was clear that the guy was trying to mislead the bank because he was using the accounts to deposit checks made out to somebody else. The indictment alleges that the accounts in the present case were used to mislead third parties as to the source of the funds, but that isn't an element of the offense. The SPLC had its own account with the same bank, and there's nothing in the indictment to suggest that the bank would have refused to open the accounts had they known that the SPLC was behind them, or that the employee who opened them was deliberately trying to conceal their purpose. This is the weakest argument, since one could argue that any false statement was made to mislead the person to whom it was made, but it would take a miracle to even get this far, and such an implication is just as weak for the prosecution.
Are we assuming that the organization boasts on its website about how it opposes "trail obliteration"?
No, but if you want to split that particular hair then it works both ways. Where on the SPLC website did it say they wouldn't give money to a particular group? That's beside my point though, which is that the language is simply too vague to prove fraud. Look at a typical fraud case: I tell you that if you invest your money with my firm I'll put it in the stock market, and you chose a few funds to invest in. In the meantime, I use your money to make loans to my son's unsuccessful woodworking business, and I produce fraudulent statements showing the amount of money you would have had if I had invested the way I told you I was going to. In other words, there was a clear promise that I would do something, made to you in particular, you relied on that promise, and you can imply from the circumstances that I never intended to invest your money the way I promised. That's a very different circumstance than a general statement made on a website that you can't prove that any individual donor actually saw, let alone relied upon. In the nonprofit environment, misusing restricted funds comes looks a lot more like traditional fraud than using general funds that may be at odds with what is said on a website, in that you made a specific promise to a specific donor to use funds a certain way, and then used them for something else. And even in those cases, the result isn't a fraud prosecution, but a civil suit from the state AG to recover the money, and possibly loss of tax status.
Look, I don't have much love for the SPLC, would never consider giving them money, and I understand your arguments. But I'm not willing to squint hard enough to believe that this indictment is any more than an attempt to spin straw into gold.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Yeah, I'll get to the question later. I've been working quite a bit and didn't have time to give a proper answer. Hopefully I'll get to it later today.
Paging @ToaKraka, since you're the resident civil engineer/rules aficionado, I have a question about construction zone safety, and what I can do to combat the rash of confusing and/or nonsensical flagging situations that seem to have proliferated in the past year or two. Last night I was sitting at a 5-way intersection in the southbound center lane, intending to continue on the same road. There is also a left turning lane for those making one of two left-hand options, as well as a lane for those turning right. The lane I was traveling in, on the far side of the intersection (about 200' away), was blocked by construction vehicles, a sign saying "Road Work Ahead", and two flaggers, one with a flag and one with those light batons. The opposing lane of traffic had cars sitting at the light traveling northbound, and at some point one of the flaggers waved them through. The light was operating throughout this whole time so I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to follow the light or the flaggers, but when I had the first cycle of green there was nowhere for me to go so I just sat there watching the flaggers who, mind you, were 200' away from me.
At one point the guy with the light batons, who was standing near the trucks behind the guy with the flag, started doing some dance that I at first couldn't tell if it was because he was trying to direct traffic or because he was bored, but it soon became obvious that it was the latter. Then the guy with the flag started making a waving motion that was so vague I couldn't tell which cars he was waving through or where he wanted them to go, but given that I had been sitting there a while and the northbound lane was clear I interpreted to mean that that lane was available for southbound traffic. Of course, as soon as I start heading for the open lane the guy starts yelling "No" quite loudly, and I have to beat a retreat to making a right turn, which was only a minor detour but still irritating given that I knew as soon as I saw the construction that I wasn't going to be given any straightforward instructions.
To summarize: There were two guys controlling a road at an intersection with four approaches, two of which were too far away to see anything clearly, the other two with bad sight lines. One of the guys was treating his traffic control device like a toy. There was no signage indicating that the southbound lane was closed, or any posted detour. A simple sign indicating that the road was closed would have been sufficient, but instead they seemingly decided to create a situation that was intentionally confusing in the hope that people would just not bother. I was half tempted to pull up and roll down my window and demand to speak to who was in charge of this and see a safety plan, lie about being an engineer from PennDOT and make up a state law saying that the contractor had to have a copy of the safety plan on site that was available upon request.
If this were an isolated incident I wouldn't care that much, but something similar has happened about a half dozen times, all in the past year or two, once last summer at the exact same intersection. I don't recall it happening at all in the previous 20 years of driving, so either I'm getting dumber or people are getting more lax. I'm sure there's some way to lodge a formal complaint, but that's no fun. I want to know what the actual regulations and best practices are so I can go into full-blown dick mode the next time this happens and have some ammunition to back me up. I can understand if this was some kind of emergency repair but they repaved the entire road last summer and have been doing more work for the past week.
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