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Legal Travesty in the Kahre Case
by Jacob G. Hornberger

Federal Judge David Ezra has sentenced Las Vegas businessman Robert Kahre to serve 15 years in the federal penitentiary. What a travesty of justice. The man no more belongs in jail than, say, Plaxico Burress, the NFL player who was sentenced to serve two years in a New York jail for possessing a handgun for self-defense. It’s just part of the trend in America to send good people to jail for violating ridiculous regulations.

What was Kahre’s crime? He took advantage of a loophole in U.S. tax law and then openly and publicly exposed it.

U.S. officials play this game in which they claim to the world that U.S. gold coins constitute legal tender at face value when in fact they don’t really mean it. Kahre exposed the fraudulent nature of their game by paying his workers with U.S. gold coins rather than paper money. Since the total value of the compensation was significantly lower using the face value of the coins, the employees did not reach the legal threshold for paying income taxes on their income, and Kahre wasn’t doing any withholding on their wages.

Kahre did all this openly and publicly. He had found a tax loophole, and he tested it. The most the feds should have done was file a civil proceeding against him. He didn’t deserve a criminal prosecution and certainly doesn’t deserve any higher sentence than probation, the sentence the judge gave Kahre’s wife Danille, who also participated in the scheme.

In fact, since probation is the appropriate sentence for the wife, why not for the husband? The judge says that it’s because Kahre exerted a strong influence on the 38-year-old woman. What nonsense. She’s 38 years old, Judge Ezra, not a 14-year-old. Why not match his sentence to hers?

The feds had to make an example out of Bob Kahre. He had committed a super no-no. He had exposed the government’s gold-coin, legal-tender claim for the fraud it is.

That was Kahre’s real crime, or at least one of them. The other one was exposing what the Federal Reserve has done to people’s money. That’s the other super no-no that’s taking place here.

Back before the Federal Reserve was established, a $20 bill could be exchanged for a $20 one-ounce gold coin. How much paper money do you need to buy that gold coin today? You need more than $1,100 to buy it. The reason is that the Federal Reserve, decade after decade, has been flooding the market with paper money, enabling federal officials to engage in their grandiose welfare and warfare programs without having to raise income taxes even more than they have.

That’s the scam that Kahre was exposing with his gold-coin, legal-tender scheme. He was showing Americans in a very real way what the Federal Reserve has done and is doing to our money.

Within this legal travesty, there were a couple of amusing moments at the sentencing hearings, as reported in the Las Vegas Review Journal. One was when Judge Ezra counseled Kahre’s wife on how to raise her children: “If, as a result of that trauma, that turns (the children) against their own country and leads along a path of hate and retribution, they will have lost their promise to grow into healthy, productive adults.”

According to the judge, the federal government is the same as the country, and children should grow up into good, little citizens, who love their government. Never mind that the Bill of Rights expressly protects the country from the government and that the reason the Founding Fathers stood up against their own government was because they loved their country. Note to Judge Ezra: It’s possible for people to love their country and hate and oppose the wrongdoing of their government. It’s what genuine patriotism is all about.

The other amusing occurrence was at Kahre’s sentencing hearing. Ezra revealed that Las Vegas psychiatrist Karen Cruey had diagnosed Kahre in 2008 with “a persecutory and grandiose delusional disorder … that perceives harassment where there is none.”

Yeah, for the next 15 years Kahre can sit in his jail cell and think to himself that the two federal trials he underwent, his sentencing, his conviction, and his incarceration are all imaginary and perceived.

As her husband Robert received his 15-year sentence, his wife Danille “moaned and sobbed audibly in court.” It’s what America should be doing as well. The sooner we get the IRS and Federal Reserve abolished, as our American ancestors did, the better off the country will be.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.