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Structural Failure (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

3 min read

It’s been more than a year since I pulled out the Moritz Scale of Political Bad Behavior, which has come in handy since I first introduced it in 2009 but does have its limitations. For example, this week I’m going to put both former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and state Auditor Andrea Lea on the scale, and their scores are going to look much closer together than the nature of their bad behavior would justify.

The Moritz Scale, which I fully expected to have its own Wikipedia entry by now, is a numeric scale to gauge the magnitude of missteps by political figures in an all-news-all-the-time environment that demands constant outrage.

Dennis Hastert, who was sentenced last week to 15 months in prison, gets a 5, because that’s what all politicians guilty of crimes get. But Hastert’s crimes were far worse than the one he pleaded guilty to, which was what federal prosecutors call structuring. In this case, Hastert structured bank transactions to disguise the hush money he was paying to one of the victims he sexually molested when they were teenage boys.

Since the molestations date back to Hastert’s time as a high school wrestling coach, before his political career took off, the statute of limitations has run out on the underlying crime. That’s an important point when prosecuting structuring: There needs to be an underlying crime.

Typically the underlying crime is not serial child molestation. It’s usually money laundering, especially drug money. But until The New York Times took an in-depth look in the fall of 2014, federal prosecutors (with the encouragement of the IRS) had grown too comfortable with using the structuring statute to seize assets from folks who were never accused of any underlying crime.

After that article appeared, the IRS announced that it would target money from “legal sources” in structuring cases only in exceptional circumstances.

That appropriate policy change came too late for Patrice Duncan, who had pleaded guilty a few months earlier to aiding and abetting structuring at the outdoor gear business she and her husband operate in Conway.

That case made me crazy: Patrice ended up as a convicted felon because she followed a bank teller’s suggestion for cutting down on the paperwork involved when making cash deposits. The Hastert case shows, however, that the structuring law can be useful. He could not be successfully prosecuted for the underlying crime, but he is being punished and his reputation is in tatters, as it should be.

***

Auditor Andrea Lea gets a 4 on the Moritz Scale. Her bad political behavior embodies “hypocrisy and/or tacky behavior compounded by recklessness and/or sheer stupidity.”

Lea actually campaigned on her dedication to “transparency” in government only to institute a policy of having staff members email her personal account from their personal email accounts. While she never admitted that this tactic was designed to thwart the state Freedom of Information Act, it certainly had that effect. Had Arkansas Business not learned of her insistence on using private emails, Lea’s office never would have turned over communication about the no-bid contract she gave to overpriced, inexperienced lawyers recommended by her campaign contributor John Goodson.

Compounding that hypocrisy, Lea lied about the extent of that policy until texts leaked to Arkansas Business and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette proved that she regularly reminded staffers that she didn’t want them using state email addresses when communicating with her.

Circumventing the FOI actually can be a crime in Arkansas, but I’m not ready to go that far in condemning Lea’s very bad behavior. At this point, just having been caught doing the bidding of John Goodson, that serial abuser of the court system, is damning enough.


Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.
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