In his recent appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” legendary investor Marc Andreessen alleged that the Biden administration had secretly “debanked” — that is, closed the bank accounts of — tech founders, crypto founders, and “just generally political opponents.”
“We can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing and then they literally get sanctioned,” Andreessen said.
If this is news to you, I have a quite story to tell you. It isn’t just tech founders backed by billionaires running into trouble with the small matter of holding on to their money. Let me introduce you to the practice of “civil forfeiture,” which allows law enforcement to seize your assets without a criminal conviction — or even a criminal charge. Yes, the government can take away all of your things based on the mere suspicion that your assets are tied to criminal activity. And if the government takes your money, the burden is on you to prove it is innocent.
Due process ensures I cannot be imprisoned without a jury of my peers finding me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Why, then, can my money be taken without the same protections?
In fact, over the past two decades, state and federal governments together have seized over $68.8 billion from Americans. Why haven’t you heard of it? Both anecdotes and statistics tell the story that civil forfeiture is deployed disproportionately against people of color, low-income Americans, and immigrants. The proceeds, in turn, fund law enforcement agencies, providing further incentive to seize more and more.
I can tell you this story because I’ve lived it. Back during the first pandemic summer, I woke one morning to pounding on the glass of my home. I walked to the door with the youngest of my four daughters riding on my hip in a diaper. The unwelcome visitors were wearing their FBI raid jackets. “Open the door!” they shouted. “Warrant!” But the four agents with guns going through my house weren’t my main concern. Two weeks prior, federal prosecutors obtained a different kind of warrant that left us penniless and powerless to defend ourselves from an oncoming legal nightmare.
In 2020, Amazon Web Services accused my husband of a federal crime we’d never heard of: depriving the company of his “honest services” during and after his seven years of employment with the tech titan. Based on Amazon’s allegations, the government then authorized civil forfeiture and seized our family and business bank accounts — including my earnings as the CEO of my startup, the Riveter, and savings from my decade as an attorney.
Fast-forward four years. My husband was never charged with any crime, a federal judge in a related civil case ruled that my husband had complied with the “explicit terms” of Amazon’s employment contract, the Justice Department closed its investigation, and the government returned 85% of the money it took from us — so long as we promised not to sue.
Somehow, this series of events is legal in America.
But the seizure has forever changed our lives. We sold our home, sold our car, and emptied my husband’s retirement account — just to pay our lawyers. Our family of six spent over a year moving between my sister’s basement, my father-in-law’s condo, and my parents’ townhouse, while our girls have attended six different schools and day-care providers in four separate states. When we tried to rent a house for our family, the owner learned of the forfeiture online and required us to pay a year of rent up front. The case’s publicity has obviously devastated my husband’s career but also mine.
For most of American history, civil forfeiture remained a little-known practice. At the time of the nation’s founding, authorities used it primarily to confiscate ships and cargo that violated customs duties. Today, civil forfeiture has gained widespread popularity among law enforcement because, like debanking, it allows the government to seize assets without proving wrongdoing.
Prosecutors gain tremendous leverage by seizing assets. Today, federal prosecutors secure 97% of criminal convictions through guilty pleas rather than trials. Civil forfeiture amplifies this power by leaving defendants unable to afford an attorney to fight back in court — or even provide for their families. Facing such pressure, many defendants fold and accept plea deals, regardless of their innocence. Numerous legal scholars have documented the high rate of guilty pleas among innocent defendants. This dynamic played out in the Justice Department’s investigation of my husband, where prosecutors ultimately vacated multiple guilty pleas from his alleged co-conspirators, saying they were “not in the interest of justice.” Without the threat of forfeiture, would these innocent men have pleaded guilty in the first place?
Bipartisan support for civil forfeiture reform continues to grow. Due process, the only right guaranteed twice by the Constitution, ensures that I cannot be imprisoned without a jury of my peers finding me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Why, then, can my money be taken without the same protections? How does due process exist when a government official submits secret allegations made by a private company to a judge without giving me the chance to review or contest those claims?
My family’s story adds another twist to the devastating use of civil forfeiture in America: Here, former FBI and Justice Department employees who now work for Amazon leveraged cozy relationships with their former federal offices to lobby the government to pursue criminal charges and a civil forfeiture case. Indeed, the government’s top prosecutor assured Amazon’s counsel — after Amazon asked for a criminal investigation — that she had specifically “selected” two of her “very best prosecutors” for his “client’s important matter.”
We need reform to protect not just tech founders and political opponents, but folks like me who have been victimized by the unjust practice of civil forfeiture. I don’t know what will happen to my family. While the government’s investigation is closed, prosecutors are now fighting to keep key documents related to its seizure forever under seal, and they’ve failed to return hundreds of thousands of dollars they took all those years ago. But I do know that if our Constitution still means anything today, we must end civil forfeiture.
The post Civil forfeiture turns lives upside down, ruins families — just like mine appeared first on TheBlaze.
