December 09, 2024

Anti-Money Laundering Enforcement And De-Banking

December 09, 2024/ Francis Menton

In a government full of nasty, obnoxious and extra-legal regulatory initiatives to harass the people, the effort to regulate “money laundering” out of existence has to rank at the top.
The basic idea is for the government to require all banks to become involuntary deputies of law enforcement to spy on their customers behind their backs, so that the bureaucrats can gain access to detailed information on what every single person is doing all the time. And thus will all criminality be stomped out!
In the real world, what anti-money laundering (AML) regulation means is that the government gains vast information on the innocent citizenry. This information in almost all cases has nothing to do with criminality and instead finds its principal use in hobbling and harassing the political opponents of the régime.
Meanwhile, the real crooks have plenty of ways (cash, Bitcoin, ten other forms of crypto, gold, MoneyGram, etc., etc.) to continue business as usual.

December 07, 2024

How The Régime Treats Is Enemies, And Its Friends

December 07, 2024/ Francis Menton

Throughout my life, no matter who has been in charge of federal or state prosecutions, there have been voices alleging some level of politicization of the law enforcement process. Mostly, those allegations have been about improper use of government resources to protect those in power, who should be relying on their own private lawyers when their own conduct is at issue.
But then there is the subject of use of the government’s law enforcement and regulatory authority to harass, disable and convict political opponents of the régime. Prior to the Trump Derangement Syndrome era, those sorts of abuses had been notably rare during my lifetime.
But there is nothing remotely comparable in our history to the diversion of law enforcement resources during the past four years toward the effort to take down the political opponents of the régime.

October 12, 2024

October 12, 2024/ Francis Menton

A couple of weeks ago I posed the question of whether the recently-initiated federal prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams is legitimate, or whether it is yet another instance of abject corruption by our Department of Justice and FBI, in this instance pay-back by the prosecutors for Adams’s criticism of the regime’s immigration policies.
To help you as you ponder that question, it might be useful to look at a few other things that the DOJ and FBI are recently up to.
As Item Number 1, Justice “Special Counsel” Jack Smith chose the date of October 2 — 34 days before the upcoming election — to file his brief laying out his reasons why ex-President Trump does not qualify for immunity from prosecution under the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States. . . .

September 26, 2024

September 26, 2024/ Francis Menton

The answer to the question is that it’s not a close call. The Biden-Harris DOJ/FBI is far more corrupt.
For the latest evidence, consider the new federal criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Yesterday, a federal grand jury, acting at the behest of the Biden-Harris Department of Justice and FBI, handed down an indictment of Adams. The indictment was then released today. The full text can be found here.
Plenty in the Democrat Party media took the occasion to credit the work of the feds and jump all over Adams.

September 09, 2024

September 09, 2024/ Francis Menton

As many readers likely know, New York is the center of the legal profession in this country.
New York City has a large community of major law firms that advise the business community both across the country and also internationally. This is the industry in which I had my own career prior to retiring from it in 2016.
There are large numbers of distinguished practitioners who are highly sought out for every sort of legal problem. We have multiple well-known bar associations — notably the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (known as the City Bar) and the New York State Bar Association — once respected for their contributions to the betterment of the legal system and the rule of law.
All of which makes what follows nearly incomprehensible to me. In recent years the law enforcement and court systems of New York have become highly politicized in ways that are the antithesis of the rule of law.

July 02, 2024

July 02, 2024/ Francis Menton

In the 235 or so years since our Republic was founded, until now, no ex-President has ever been prosecuted for allegedly criminal acts committed while in office.
This has been a political norm of great consequence. Any such prosecution of an ex-President cannot avoid being inherently problematical, inevitably bringing to a head the conflict between, on the one hand, constraining the President in the exercise of his constitutional duties and, on the other hand, declaring him “above the law.” By far preferable would be for this conflict never to arise, and for the applicable legal rules never to get defined and to remain ambiguous.
You might think that people abrogating a political norm like this, so central to the proper functioning of the Republic, would only do so in the face of the most clear-cut circumstances of obvious and significant statutory violations, crying out for criminal redress. But of course that is not the MO of our current garbage political powers-that-be. Instead, we see broadly-worded criminal statutes that would never be so used against anyone else, twisted out of context in the effort to take down a hated political foe. Now, the Supreme Court has been forced to rule on several issues in these cases, and has come out in unsurprising ways.
During the past week, the lawfare campaign against Trump suffered three major blows from Supreme Court decisions.