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Kahre’s Prosecutors Are Going Nutso
by Jacob G. Hornberger

I have a hunch that things are not going well for the prosecution in the case of U.S. vs. Robert Kahre, which I blogged about last week. The reason that I say that is that it would seem the most likely explanation for the Las Vegas U.S. Attorney’s office going what can only be described as nutso.

You’re not going to believe what those federal prosecutors have done. I’ll guarantee it: You’re just not going to believe it because it just so happens to be one of most bizarre instances of federal prosecutorial abuse you’ll ever hear about.

Here’s what’s going on.

On May 26, a news article in the Las Vegas Review Journal detailed the U.S. government’s prosecution of a businessman named Robert Kahre. The feds are prosecuting Kahre for paying his workers in gold and silver coins, which U.S. law says is legal tender.

What’s wrong with that? Exactly! That’s what motivated me to blog about the case on June 3. As I stated in my blog, “What have they done that is illegal? If federal officials are stupid enough to make gold coins and silver coins legal tender, then what’s wrong with Americans’ using such coins as legal tender?”

In any event, like many other newspapers and websites, the Las Vegas Review Journal permits people to post comments underneath the article. So, innocently and naively thinking that people are free to do that sort of thing in America, several people posted critical comments about Kahre’s prosecution, paper money, the Federal Reserve, and inflation underneath the article.

That caused those federal prosecutors to go ballistic! So, guess what they did. Again, you’re not going to believe this. According to an article by Thomas Mitchell, the editor of the paper, the feds have served the paper with a grand-jury subpoena demanding the production of the “name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers ... the IP address” of the people who posted those comments.

Like I say, nutso! Have these people never heard of freedom of speech and the First Amendment? Can somebody get word to them that this is not the Soviet Union or Burma?

But maybe I’m being a bit hasty here. Maybe those federal prosecutors have secret information that I’m not privy to. Maybe those critics are … terrorists! Yikes!

After all, don’t forget that one of al-Qaeda’s expressed aims is to make the U.S. government spend its way into bankruptcy. Well, maybe those critics are acting on behalf of al-Qaeda in exposing how the U.S. government is, in fact, spending our nation into bankruptcy.

As I pointed out in my June 3 blog, it’s clear to me that they’re going after Kahre for one reason only: He’s embarrassing the U.S. government by shining the spotlight on what the Federal Reserve has done to people with its paper-money scheme for the past several decades. They don’t like that, and so they doing precisely what Russian officials do to recalcitrant businessmen. They figure out some ridiculous tax or regulatory violation to go after the guy with.

My hunch is that the prosecutors might be sensing that the jury is seeing through their prosecutorial scam, causing those prosecutors to go off the deep end with their ludicrous and laughable abusive subpoena.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation, publisher of Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax by Sheldon Richman. Send him email.