6 ms·

And how is it money laundering if it turned out the money wasn't proceeds of crime.

brookst 2y ago
I spent a few minutes trying to figure that out, but Reason is incredibly slanted, they just link to some even nuttier site, and even starting with news I couldn't find specifics of the one count he was convicted on. But I'd be a little skeptical of Reason's handwave "properly reported to the government". Reported on taxes? To SEC? As part of disclosure for this trial? One way it could be money laundering without being proceeds of a crime is if he took $1M from Pablo Escobar for a huge advertising commit and then refunded $900k to Able Paleo Bars, LLC for unused ad spend.
- dannyobrien 2y ago
  What is this "nuttier" site you're talking about? Do you mean https://frontpageconfidential.com/aboutfpc/ https://frontpageconfidential.com/aboutfpc/ , the site run by Lacey and Larkin and their fellow journalists, in order to defend themselves?
- webspinner 2y ago
  Reason is not slanted. It's a very libertarian site and a lot of people come from the left.
  - klausa 2y ago
    >X is not slanted. It's a <specific slant being described>.
    - webspinner 2y ago
      I meant like say brieghbart is, it's a conservative source. I've never known of reason to be such thing though.
      - catlover76 2y ago
        [dead]
  - yareal 2y ago
    All news media has a bias, it's literally impossible to serve a finite news set and not exert some editorial control. However, if you describe a news site as (very political ideology) I think it's fair to consider it slanted.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      While that is philosophically true, but this thread is illustrating why that isn't a helpful perspective . Consider a media organisation has a bias towards accurate reporting with a view to helping readers achieve the best outcome for themselves and good outcomes for society. We could correctly call such an organisation "slanted", but it is missing the point that there some slants are privileged by virtue of leading the reader to act in a reasonable and rational manner while others don't. I'm not sure if the US - or the world - has any of those. But the generic "there is a slant" point is useless. What matters is what the slant leads people to do, what information the slant is omitting and whether said slant is a good one on balance. If calling a media organisations "slanted" doesn't imply "slanted [in a way I think is potentially bad and relevant]" then the word is useless and shouldn't be used.
      - klausa 2y ago
        > Consider a media organisation has a bias towards accurate reporting with a view to helping readers achieve the best outcome for themselves and good outcomes for society. I think you'll find that literally every media organisations thinks it's doing exactly that — the issue is that people have _wildly_ different conceits of what "best outcome" for them is.
        Nevermark 2y ago
        The correspondences revealed in Fox News court cases do not paint a picture of a company with their own principled view to having a positive impact, that included respect for facts. All companies "serve" their customers, including news organizations, and inevitably have subjective ways of organizing their efforts. But there is a big difference between ones that have a mission geared to a positive society outcome, a commitment to customer well being, and respect for facts, with profits following from that service, vs. a mission to print whatever they can legally afford to, to maximize profits. And of course, that difference is a continuum. Some companies take value creation seriously. Others optimize for opportunities to extract value and prey on dysfunction.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    “libertarian” is as much of a slant as left or right is; that its largely orthogonal to the left/right axis, and lots of people think only in terms of that axis (on which Reason is clearly on the right, but not as far from center on that axis as it is on the libertarian one) doesn't change that.
    - webspinner 2y ago
      There's about a 50/50 split in the libertarian party so it really isn't. Actually, I would say most of the people there lean left, or center.
      - solumunus 2y ago
        I don’t think you understood their comment as yours doesn’t seem to make sense as a response. They’re saying that libertarian can be left/right but Reason in particular skews right.
      - DonHopkins 2y ago
        Oh, come on. Face it: The US Libertarian party has been totally been taken over by far right wing racist populist LINO assholes who like to snort coke and bang underage hookers and are embarrassed to call themselves Republican but always vote that way just to stay in power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz >Gaetz has self-identified as a "libertarian populist".[102] Observers have described his views as far right.[2] Gaetz was an early supporter of Donald Trump and his appeal to the Republican Party base, echoing his talking points. In several commercials during his 2016 congressional campaign, Gaetz promised to "kill Muslim terrorists and build the wall".[103] Trouble for Matt Gaetz: Witness Says She Was Paid for Sex Parties With Him: https://newrepublic.com/post/179070/matt-gaetz-witness-house-ethics-paid-sex-parties https://newrepublic.com/post/179070/matt-gaetz-witness-house... >The House Ethics Committee is now weighing that evidence to determine whether or not the MAGA politician paid for sex with women and an underage teenager.
        phone8675309 2y ago
- Niten 2y ago
  Media Bias Fact Check ranks Reason as a "Right-Center" biased website with a "High" rating for factual reporting: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reason/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reason/ They certainly approach stories with an editorial perspective, but they're generally factually reliable and hardly "incredibly slanted".
  - Retric 2y ago
    Reason’s libertarian bias sits outside the mainstream Left-Right axis of US political discourse. So what looks centrist or right leaning on a 2D scale is actually heavily biased in a different political direction.
    - yareal 2y ago
      I don't think there's much Left in US politics, unless you mean in the language of US politics, where somehow Democrats are considered "Left".
      - Retric 2y ago
        Party stances are always going to reflect the country they operate in. On an absolute scale Republican’s support for expanding Medicare drug coverage was left leaning compared to at the time current law even though it’s to the right of many countries and Democrat’s stance on the issue.
        stareatgoats 2y ago
        yeah, the left/right dichotomy is gradually becoming outright meaningless - usually just sloppily slapped labels that fit an agenda. Important nuances go completely unnoticed in the left/right universe, like libertarians siding with communists, and neocons siding with democrats - or whoever thinks regime changing from above is a good idea. Anarchism, militarism, libertarianism, conservativism, fascism, welfarestateism, social democracy, etc, these are all useful terms. Left and right; not so much.
- ianhawes 2y ago
  Reason would indeed seem slanted compared to traditional liberal media, specifically as it relates to not regurgitating the DOJ’s narrative. Happy Reason subscriber here.
  - fieryscribe 2y ago
    Fellow Reason subscriber here. They're more balanced than most.
- ciabattabread 2y ago
  Reason may be "slanted", but you can follow their logic in their articles, regardless of your stance.
dmurray 2y ago
You could receive money legitimately (let's say, donations to your synagogue) and funnel it to politically disfavoured causes (for example, anti-war protesters in the Middle East). It doesn't fit the metaphor of money laundering, of turning dirty money into clean, but it's usually prosecuted under the same statutes.
- petertodd 2y ago
  That isn't what money laundering is. Money laundering is taking illegally gotten funds and turning it into apparently legal funds. What you're describing is fraud: you took money for one purpose, and used it for something the donators didn't want it used for. Notably, it is not money laundering to obscure the source of funds when they didn't come from an illicit source. Nor is it money laundering to simply obscure the source of funds, so they don't come from any apparent source. If that were money laundering, it would be illegal to withdraw cash from an ATM, which is obviously absurd.
  - bagels 2y ago
    What statute? I don't know either way what the actual definition is.
  - CPLX 2y ago
    Money laundering can be defined as concealing either or both the source and destination of the funds. Channeling legal money into illegal activities qualifies as well. Not clear either is applicable to this case however.
  - dmurray 2y ago
    No, the donators gave you the money to use as you see fit. You're not betraying their trust: you're betraying your government, by funding a movement with aims inimical to them. A relevant statute in the US is the USA PATRIOT Act [0], specifically Title III, which deals with "International money laundering abatement and terrorist financing". It absolutely does restrict transmission of clean money to non-favoured political entities, often in the same breath as it forbids actual money laundering. It does not forbid withdrawing cash from an ATM, but it does forbid a bank from issuing you an ATM card if they should have guessed you would use the money for the wrong purposes. [0] https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ56/PLAW-107publ56.htm https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ56/PLAW-107publ56.htm
refurb 2y ago
Money laundering laws doesn't require that the money be proceeds of crime. It only requires that you do things in an attempt to obscure the source of the money. For example structuring cash deposits. If you have a pile of legitimate cash, say through a cash business (you pay all taxes), but you intentionally make multiple $9,000 deposits to avoid generating a CTR (currency transaction report for cash deposits over $10,000), congrats, you violated money laundering laws.
- dale_glass 2y ago
  So out of curiosity, what if you run a business that just happens to generate $9K of cash regularly, for any reason? Are you supposed to risk keeping it on premises until enough adds up, or you should tell the bank to file a CTR, or something else?
  - dzonga 2y ago
    like tax evasion laws -- they're like a joker card/ wildcard -- to law enforcement. to be played when they wanna arrest you. that's what mobsters get nabbed on, corrupt gvt officials etc. it's not difficult to prove anyone has tax evaded.
  - mason55 2y ago
    It’s not the $9k deposit that’s illegal, it’s structuring your deposits to avoid the $10k limit. The same actions can be legal or illegal depending on your in intent. In your example, the $9k deposits are perfectly fine. Although if you really always deposit $9k you’ll probably get some questions.
  - refurb 2y ago
    You’re at risk of some over zealous prosecutor accusing you of structuring.

I spent a few minutes trying to figure that out, but Reason is incredibly slanted, they just link to some even nuttier site, and even starting with news I couldn't find specifics of the one count he was convicted on. But I'd be a little skeptical of Reason's handwave "properly reported to the government". Reported on taxes? To SEC? As part of disclosure for this trial? One way it could be money laundering without being proceeds of a crime is if he took $1M from Pablo Escobar for a huge advertising commit and then refunded $900k to Able Paleo Bars, LLC for unused ad spend.

dannyobrien 2y ago
What is this "nuttier" site you're talking about? Do you mean https://frontpageconfidential.com/aboutfpc/ https://frontpageconfidential.com/aboutfpc/ , the site run by Lacey and Larkin and their fellow journalists, in order to defend themselves?
webspinner 2y ago
Reason is not slanted. It's a very libertarian site and a lot of people come from the left.
- klausa 2y ago
  >X is not slanted. It's a <specific slant being described>.
  - webspinner 2y ago
    I meant like say brieghbart is, it's a conservative source. I've never known of reason to be such thing though.
    - catlover76 2y ago
      [dead]
- yareal 2y ago
  All news media has a bias, it's literally impossible to serve a finite news set and not exert some editorial control. However, if you describe a news site as (very political ideology) I think it's fair to consider it slanted.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    While that is philosophically true, but this thread is illustrating why that isn't a helpful perspective . Consider a media organisation has a bias towards accurate reporting with a view to helping readers achieve the best outcome for themselves and good outcomes for society. We could correctly call such an organisation "slanted", but it is missing the point that there some slants are privileged by virtue of leading the reader to act in a reasonable and rational manner while others don't. I'm not sure if the US - or the world - has any of those. But the generic "there is a slant" point is useless. What matters is what the slant leads people to do, what information the slant is omitting and whether said slant is a good one on balance. If calling a media organisations "slanted" doesn't imply "slanted [in a way I think is potentially bad and relevant]" then the word is useless and shouldn't be used.
    - klausa 2y ago
      > Consider a media organisation has a bias towards accurate reporting with a view to helping readers achieve the best outcome for themselves and good outcomes for society. I think you'll find that literally every media organisations thinks it's doing exactly that — the issue is that people have _wildly_ different conceits of what "best outcome" for them is.
      - Nevermark 2y ago
        The correspondences revealed in Fox News court cases do not paint a picture of a company with their own principled view to having a positive impact, that included respect for facts. All companies "serve" their customers, including news organizations, and inevitably have subjective ways of organizing their efforts. But there is a big difference between ones that have a mission geared to a positive society outcome, a commitment to customer well being, and respect for facts, with profits following from that service, vs. a mission to print whatever they can legally afford to, to maximize profits. And of course, that difference is a continuum. Some companies take value creation seriously. Others optimize for opportunities to extract value and prey on dysfunction.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  “libertarian” is as much of a slant as left or right is; that its largely orthogonal to the left/right axis, and lots of people think only in terms of that axis (on which Reason is clearly on the right, but not as far from center on that axis as it is on the libertarian one) doesn't change that.
  - webspinner 2y ago
    There's about a 50/50 split in the libertarian party so it really isn't. Actually, I would say most of the people there lean left, or center.
    - solumunus 2y ago
      I don’t think you understood their comment as yours doesn’t seem to make sense as a response. They’re saying that libertarian can be left/right but Reason in particular skews right.
    - DonHopkins 2y ago
      Oh, come on. Face it: The US Libertarian party has been totally been taken over by far right wing racist populist LINO assholes who like to snort coke and bang underage hookers and are embarrassed to call themselves Republican but always vote that way just to stay in power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz >Gaetz has self-identified as a "libertarian populist".[102] Observers have described his views as far right.[2] Gaetz was an early supporter of Donald Trump and his appeal to the Republican Party base, echoing his talking points. In several commercials during his 2016 congressional campaign, Gaetz promised to "kill Muslim terrorists and build the wall".[103] Trouble for Matt Gaetz: Witness Says She Was Paid for Sex Parties With Him: https://newrepublic.com/post/179070/matt-gaetz-witness-house-ethics-paid-sex-parties https://newrepublic.com/post/179070/matt-gaetz-witness-house... >The House Ethics Committee is now weighing that evidence to determine whether or not the MAGA politician paid for sex with women and an underage teenager.
      - phone8675309 2y ago
Niten 2y ago
Media Bias Fact Check ranks Reason as a "Right-Center" biased website with a "High" rating for factual reporting: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reason/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reason/ They certainly approach stories with an editorial perspective, but they're generally factually reliable and hardly "incredibly slanted".
- Retric 2y ago
  Reason’s libertarian bias sits outside the mainstream Left-Right axis of US political discourse. So what looks centrist or right leaning on a 2D scale is actually heavily biased in a different political direction.
  - yareal 2y ago
    I don't think there's much Left in US politics, unless you mean in the language of US politics, where somehow Democrats are considered "Left".
    - Retric 2y ago
      Party stances are always going to reflect the country they operate in. On an absolute scale Republican’s support for expanding Medicare drug coverage was left leaning compared to at the time current law even though it’s to the right of many countries and Democrat’s stance on the issue.
      - stareatgoats 2y ago
        yeah, the left/right dichotomy is gradually becoming outright meaningless - usually just sloppily slapped labels that fit an agenda. Important nuances go completely unnoticed in the left/right universe, like libertarians siding with communists, and neocons siding with democrats - or whoever thinks regime changing from above is a good idea. Anarchism, militarism, libertarianism, conservativism, fascism, welfarestateism, social democracy, etc, these are all useful terms. Left and right; not so much.
ianhawes 2y ago
Reason would indeed seem slanted compared to traditional liberal media, specifically as it relates to not regurgitating the DOJ’s narrative. Happy Reason subscriber here.
- fieryscribe 2y ago
  Fellow Reason subscriber here. They're more balanced than most.
ciabattabread 2y ago
Reason may be "slanted", but you can follow their logic in their articles, regardless of your stance.

dmurray 2y ago

You could receive money legitimately (let's say, donations to your synagogue) and funnel it to politically disfavoured causes (for example, anti-war protesters in the Middle East). It doesn't fit the metaphor of money laundering, of turning dirty money into clean, but it's usually prosecuted under the same statutes.

petertodd 2y ago
That isn't what money laundering is. Money laundering is taking illegally gotten funds and turning it into apparently legal funds. What you're describing is fraud: you took money for one purpose, and used it for something the donators didn't want it used for. Notably, it is not money laundering to obscure the source of funds when they didn't come from an illicit source. Nor is it money laundering to simply obscure the source of funds, so they don't come from any apparent source. If that were money laundering, it would be illegal to withdraw cash from an ATM, which is obviously absurd.
- bagels 2y ago
  What statute? I don't know either way what the actual definition is.
- CPLX 2y ago
  Money laundering can be defined as concealing either or both the source and destination of the funds. Channeling legal money into illegal activities qualifies as well. Not clear either is applicable to this case however.
- dmurray 2y ago
  No, the donators gave you the money to use as you see fit. You're not betraying their trust: you're betraying your government, by funding a movement with aims inimical to them. A relevant statute in the US is the USA PATRIOT Act [0], specifically Title III, which deals with "International money laundering abatement and terrorist financing". It absolutely does restrict transmission of clean money to non-favoured political entities, often in the same breath as it forbids actual money laundering. It does not forbid withdrawing cash from an ATM, but it does forbid a bank from issuing you an ATM card if they should have guessed you would use the money for the wrong purposes. [0] https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ56/PLAW-107publ56.htm https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ56/PLAW-107publ56.htm

refurb 2y ago

Money laundering laws doesn't require that the money be proceeds of crime. It only requires that you do things in an attempt to obscure the source of the money. For example structuring cash deposits. If you have a pile of legitimate cash, say through a cash business (you pay all taxes), but you intentionally make multiple $9,000 deposits to avoid generating a CTR (currency transaction report for cash deposits over $10,000), congrats, you violated money laundering laws.

dale_glass 2y ago
So out of curiosity, what if you run a business that just happens to generate $9K of cash regularly, for any reason? Are you supposed to risk keeping it on premises until enough adds up, or you should tell the bank to file a CTR, or something else?
- dzonga 2y ago
  like tax evasion laws -- they're like a joker card/ wildcard -- to law enforcement. to be played when they wanna arrest you. that's what mobsters get nabbed on, corrupt gvt officials etc. it's not difficult to prove anyone has tax evaded.
- mason55 2y ago
  It’s not the $9k deposit that’s illegal, it’s structuring your deposits to avoid the $10k limit. The same actions can be legal or illegal depending on your in intent. In your example, the $9k deposits are perfectly fine. Although if you really always deposit $9k you’ll probably get some questions.
- refurb 2y ago
  You’re at risk of some over zealous prosecutor accusing you of structuring.