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An even better example would be if investigators discovered several invoices to contractors for "trail obliteration" totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Trail obliteration is the process of disbanding and renaturalizing eroded, worn out trails to limit additional damage and provide a better user experience through reroutes. At minimum, this can be done by volunteers in an afternoon by disguising the entrance of the old trail with brush for the first 50 yards or so. At maximum, this can involve going in with heavy equipment to regrade the entire corridor, followed by covering the disturbed area with brush and new plantings. It's a necessary management practice where appropriate, but it's always a hard sell to donors, land managers, and even within the organization, because when you have to fight tooth and nail to get every mile of trail built no one wants to hear how much money you plan on spending to get rid of mileage. But identifying old, unsustainable trails and getting rid of them is a best practice, and this type of work is related to the core mission of any trail development organization, regardless of how contradictory or unpopular it may be. It is not, however, evidence that the organization hates trails and is trying to get rid of them.
Do you seriously believe that the reason the SPLC gave these groups money is because their directors are actually white supremacists who are trying to fleece their liberal donors? Because that's what would be required for their donations to constitute the kind of fraud that you're alleging. It seems more likely to me that, whatever their exact thought process, it was part of a scheme that they thought would benefit their mission. It may have been a dumb, misguided scheme that was unlikely to work and that would have pissed off their donors had they known about it, but wire fraud isn't about making misleading statements over the internet that some people don't like. It's a crime with specific elements that must be satisfied, and there's no evidence that they were satisfied in this case.
Whether or not it seems like money laundering to you is irrelevant. Let's look at the statute:
I've omitted a lot of irrelevant surplussage, but the upshot is that you can't launder legally earned money. It isn't a crime to play secret Santa. If there's no fraud, then there's no laundering.
Would the SPLC claim I was a white supremacist if I gave money to those groups for no other reason than giving them the money?
The SPLC is, as defined by the SLPC, a white supremacist hate group. Seriously.
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The argument the other poster is making is that SPLC:
Rinse and repeat. They basically are creating the demand for their funding
Now whether that’s fraud is a different story I’d want to think through.
But only because the legal and popular definitions of "fraud" are different. Maybe it doesn't satisfy the former; it trivially satisfies the latter.
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The ideal self-licking ice cream cone.
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For your comment on “Is the SPLC secret white supremacists” I think people are saying it’s a “no”.
The idea would be that the SPLC needed white supremacists incidents to show their donors in order to continue to raise money from their donors. The SPLC couldn’t find any white supremacists so they funded some guys to be white supremacists. Then they show their donors what they did to combat the white supremacists. Basically like finding 10 guys saying stuff on Twitter and giving them money to meet in person and have a gathering.
The fraud was the issue was non-existent but the management of SPLC didn’t want to shut down and wanted to keep their jobs. So they created a problem so they could raise donations to pay their own salaries.
That's fine as a theory, it just suffers from the critical weakness that there's no evidence for it whatsoever, and it doesn't mesh with the current indictment, though the indictment is so poorly drafted that I don't know that any theory really meshes with it. Unless you're aware of some memo that the US Attorney is not that lays all this out in detail, trying to prove this through extrinsic evidence is going to be tough sledding indeed.
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