{"id":16079,"date":"2021-06-07T12:29:18","date_gmt":"2021-06-07T16:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=16079"},"modified":"2021-06-07T12:29:18","modified_gmt":"2021-06-07T16:29:18","slug":"will-bidens-sham-corruption-crackdown-endanger-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/07\/will-bidens-sham-corruption-crackdown-endanger-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Biden\u2019s Sham Corruption Crackdown Endanger Freedom?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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American Institute for Economic Research, June 7, 2021<\/h3>\n

Will Biden\u2019s Sham Corruption Crackdown Endanger Freedom?<\/a><\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
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\"JamesJames Bovard<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Denouncing corruption is the easiest way for rascally politicians to appear honest.<\/strong> Upholding a venerable Washington Kabuki tradition, President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that he was \u201cissuing\u201d a memo to \u201cestablish combatting corruption<\/a> as a core U.S. national security interest.\u201d But Biden\u2019s crackdown is more likely to subvert financial freedom than to create a new era of trustworthy politicians.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Though Biden\u2019s announcement evoked predictable praise from the media, the latest push for purity will likely include the same exemption used in federal anti-money laundering regulations. Federal agencies require banks to take far more precautions when handling financial transactions involving \u201cpolitically exposed persons\u201d \u2013 which includes almost all foreign politicians, their family members, friends, associates, and anyone else likely to take the money and run. But, as a 2020 federal regulatory notice declared, federal banking agencies \u201cdo not interpret the term \u2018politically exposed persons\u2019 to include U.S. public officials<\/a>.\u201d Biden and his appointees are castigating foreign corruption but his crackdown will likely exclude corruption by the U.S. government and American politicians.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The administration issued a background statement last Thursday declaring, \u201cWe will crack down on tax havens and illicit financing that contribute to income inequality, fund terrorism, and generate pernicious foreign influence.\u201d What is \u201cpernicious foreign influence?\u201d The term is not defined: will it include any foreign criticism of Biden or his initiatives? \u201cIllicit financing\u201d is another vague term that could produce plenty of both mischief and government revenue.<\/p>\n

The Biden administration is trumpeting the Justice Department\u2019s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, designed to snare money stolen by thieving governments. Unluckily for American citizens, this is another virtue-signaling campaign which exempts federal, state, and local governments. As a powerful senator in the 1980s and 1990s, Joe Biden was the architect of asset forfeiture programs<\/a> that unleashed official looting across the United States. Biden championed laws that enabled government agencies to confiscate the property of hapless citizens who have been convicted of no crime<\/a>, often based solely on unsubstantiated accusations by government agents. Federal law enforcement agencies used asset forfeiture programs in 2014 to seize more<\/a> property from Americans than all the burglars stole nationwide. Government agencies routinely keep most of the money they confiscate, sometimes using it to pay bonuses to the lawmen<\/a> who plundered private citizens.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s corruption crackdown could pose even more perils to Bitcoin than Elon Musk\u2019s tweets.<\/strong> The Treasury Department is seeking to make sure that \u201claw enforcement is able to view the proceeds of corruption<\/a> such that illicit actors can\u2019t hide behind anonymity,\u201d declared an anonymous \u201csenior administration official\u201d in a briefing last week. Biden\u2019s enforcers will examine the \u201cimpact of cryptocurrency as a means of illicit finance\u201d and will look for ideas on how \u201cto modernize [the Bank Secrecy Act] to deal with issues like crypto.\u201d This could be especially troublesome considering a proposal by the Treasury Department\u2019s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) that could compel reporting to the feds the identity of anyone who purchased a single bitcoin. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that the proposed regulations \u201cwould undermine the civil liberties<\/a> of cryptocurrency users, give the government access to troves of sensitive financial data beyond what is contemplated by the regulation, and\u2026 could chill innovation\u201d in blockchain technology. Government tax collectors have always lusted to treat financial anonymity as a \u201cpre-crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a background briefing on the morning of Biden\u2019s announcement, a \u201csenior administration official\u201d declared that \u201cthe way that corruption is exposed is through the work of investigative journalists and investigative NGOs.\u201d The spiel omitted a hat tip to Jeremy Scahill, an American journalist who revealed how the Obama administration\u2019s drone assassination program<\/a> became an automatic killing machine that fraudulently denied slaughtering many innocent civilians. Biden\u2019s Justice Department recently browbeat former intelligence analyst Daniel Hale into pleading guilty to \u201cretention and transmission<\/a> of national security information\u201d for leaking documents to Scahill. Hale continues to face charges of Espionage Act<\/a> violations. This was the favorite censorship tool of the Obama administration, which prosecuted<\/a> twice as many Americans for Espionage Act violations than all the presidents combined since Woodrow Wilson.<\/p>\n

At least Biden has gold-plated precedents for his latest crusade. A dozen years ago, President Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations that the U.S. government is \u201cleading a global effort to combat corruption<\/a>.\u201d Five years ago, speaking at an Anti-Corruption Summit in London, Secretary of State John Kerry lamented, \u201cI\u2019ve been shocked by the degree to which I find corruption pandemic<\/a> in the world today.\u201d Kerry sounded like the French detective in Casablanca <\/em>who was \u201cshocked<\/a>\u201d to discover gambling. Kerry vowed: \u201cWe have to get the global community to come together and have no impunity [sic] to corruption.\u201d The London conference produced one day\u2019s worth of positive headlines for Kerry and the Obama administration.<\/p>\n

The Biden administration is calling for the adoption of \u201canti-corruption best practices\u201d for foreign assistance programs. President George W. Bush made the same pledge to reform foreign aid 19 years ago: \u201cWe won\u2019t be putting money into a society<\/a> which is not transparent and corrupt.\u201d (He probably meant \u201ccorruption-free.\u201d) But U.S. aid programs \u2014 which cost taxpayers more than $40 billion a year<\/a> \u2014 continued to bankroll many of the world\u2019s most crooked regimes. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the barricades on this issue in 2011, except on the wrong side. When a congressional committee sought to stop payouts to political bandits abroad, Clinton warned that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption tests \u201chas the potential to affect a staggering number of needy aid recipients<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden has first-hand experience on foreign aid corruption. In early 2009, when he was Vice President-elect, Biden visited Afghanistan to admonish President Hamid Karzai to stop the corruption<\/a> that was destabilizing that nation. But the Obama administration continued deluging Afghanistan with cash regardless of the government\u2019s depravity. Corruption became so bad that at Afghanistan\u2019s premier military hospital, some wounded Afghan soldiers starved to death<\/a> because they could not afford to bribe the hospital staff for food. Obama\u2019s ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, later admitted:\u201cOur biggest single project<\/a>, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior to last week\u2019s announcement, Biden\u2019s most visible assault on corruption occurred in the Ukraine. In a 2015 speech to the Ukrainian parliament, Biden denounced the \u201ccancer of corruption\u201d and admonished that \u201ca lot of hard work remains including reform of Ukraine\u2019s law and justice sectors.\u201d After the Obama administration promised massive aid to Ukraine in 2014, Biden\u2019s son Hunter jumped<\/a> on the gravy train, collecting $83,000 a month<\/a> for a \u201cceremonial position\u201d as a board member with Burisma, a natural gas company. The absurdity of Biden visiting Ukraine to denounce corruption while his son was dough-raking was widely recognized in Ukraine at the time as well as the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> and New York Times<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

When he was challenged on this issue in a 2019 Democratic presidential candidates debate, Biden declared, \u201cI did nothing wrong. I carried out the policy of the U.S. government in rooting out corruption in Ukraine.\u201d Biden also dismally failed on that score. The Wall Street Journal<\/em> reported in 2019 that the International Monetary Fund, which has provided more than $20 billion in loans to<\/a> Ukraine, \u201cremains skeptical after a history<\/a> of broken promises [from the Ukraine govt]. Kiev hasn\u2019t successfully completed any of a series of IMF bailout packages over the past two decades, with systemic corruption at the heart of much of that failure.\u201d Voters only recently learned that Biden, while he was Vice President, attended a private Washington dinner<\/a> with a Burisma official arranged by Hunter in April 2015.<\/p>\n

Biden proclaimed on Thursday that \u201cthe United States will lead by example and\u2026 stand in support of courageous citizens around the globe who are demanding honest, transparent governance.\u201d But it is unlikely that Biden\u2019s \u201cleadership by example\u201d will extend beyond yapping about secretive foreign regimes.<\/strong> What are the chances that Americans will learn the full reasons why the Biden administration shut down a State Department task force<\/a> probing whether Covid-19 leaked out of a Wuhan laboratory? Will the Biden administration come clean on the rigged investigation of Covid-19<\/a> origins exposed last week by Vanity Fair<\/em>? After Biden fueled fears of Covid-19 to capture the White House (exaggerating the death toll<\/a> by a hundredfold), his credibility might be fatally damaged by a full exposure of all the machinations and cover-ups inside the federal government and beyond.<\/p>\n

Biden has never provided any evidence that he is more trustworthy on corruption than any other career Washington politician. If Biden\u2019s anti-corruption crackdown goes awry, will the media cover it up the same way that they made Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop vanish before the election<\/a>? Regardless of the plaudits that Joe Biden receives, new federal crackdowns on cryptocurrency and \u201cpernicious foreign influence\u201d could roil financial markets and undercut freedom of the press.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Institute for Economic Research, June 7, 2021 Will Biden\u2019s Sham Corruption Crackdown Endanger Freedom? James Bovard Denouncing corruption is the easiest way for rascally politicians to appear honest. Upholding a venerable Washington Kabuki tradition, President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that he was \u201cissuing\u201d a memo to \u201cestablish combatting corruption as a core U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16081,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[42,539,2124,2871,2873,83,2316,2869,202,45,137,2842,339,2423,1877,2872,849,2244,2875,116,38,1107,2874],"class_list":["post-16079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-afghanistan","tag-asset-forfeiture","tag-biden","tag-bitcoin","tag-burisma","tag-corruption","tag-covid-19","tag-daniel-hale","tag-fraud","tag-freedom","tag-george-w-bush","tag-hamid-karzai","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-hunter-biden","tag-international-monetary-fund","tag-jeremy-scahill","tag-john-kerry","tag-kleptocracy","tag-laptop","tag-money-laundering","tag-obama","tag-ukraine","tag-wuhan-laboratory"],"yoast_head":"\nWill Biden\u2019s Sham Corruption Crackdown Endanger Freedom? - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Biden announced a crackdown on corruption that will likely exclude crooks in the U.S. government. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. 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