NOTHING on Snopes.com.......... What to do (and what not to do) if you are ever questioned by government agents. "Boy, I feel safer now that (Martha Stewart is) behind bars. O. J. & Kobe are walking around; Osama Bin Laden and some of those Enron thieves too, but they take the one woman in America willing to cook and clean and work in the yard and haul her ass to jail." -- Tim Allen The following advice applies mainly to our USA readers. But it can be applied to situations in other countries - especially the UK and Australia. This is a very important article. You never know when a nasty situation could entrap you! Basic rule: Never, under any circumstances, answer questions put to you by any government agent - unless you have a competent lawyer at your side. And it would be better if you could be sure it was a very good criminal lawyer. The exception is at border crossings where you have to answer all questions truthfully (or at least with plausible responses) if you expect them to let you in. In the USA there is a section in the federal code, referred to as '1001' by legal eagles. This law makes it a crime to lie to a federal agent. The agent doesn't have to put you under oath or even have to tape the conversation.All he or she has to do is produce handwritten notes that indicate that you made false statements. If you tell him or her a lie, you are guilty. If he says you lied, you are guilty if a judge or jury finds the "G-Man's" version of your conversation more believable than yours. Maybe you misspeak or the agent mishears. Or maybe there is an ambiguity that the agent chooses to interpret in an unfortunate (for you) direction. You are on the hook and can spend some time in the clink - for basically nothing! 'Lying to a federal agent' does not have to mean telling lies in an important criminal cases or when you are under arrest. IRS officers are federal agents too. There's always the possibility that you might be tempted to shade the truth a bit when an IRS agent is quizzing you about that tax deduction you took for a trip to Vegas. Our advice to you is: Keep Your Mouth Shut! Lets repeat that in other words. To be on the safe side, when confronted by a federal agent, don't say anything at all. Well, not exactly. You need to ask them to sign a letter so that they can't later lie about what happened. Keep reading. It's a shame things have come to this. It used to be that people felt it their duty as citizens to cooperate with authorities. That was before the 'War on Terror' and Law 1001. We now live in an era of government terror where civil rights are almost non-existent. You have to know enough to protect yourself at all times. WHAT HAPPENED TO MARTHA STEWART Take, for example, the highly publicized case of lifestyle guru Martha Stewart. Stewart was sentenced to jail in 2004. Her case reflects what has happened to thousands of other less high-profile cases - normal, respectable, honest businesspeople. Maybe friends of yours were already caught in the net. So what did Stewart do wrong? She was caught out by rule 1001. She was convicted of lying about the reason she sold her shares in a biotechnology company. She said she sold the shares because they had fallen to the price where she had told her broker to sell. She claimed that she recalled having placed a 'stop loss' order with her broker. The government argued (and the jury accepted) that she sold only because her broker passed on some inside information that the stock was going to plunge in the next couple of days. She lied, said the Federal Agent. True, her stock trade, one of many she had made, had a smell of illegal 'insider trading' about it. But, the prosecutors did not charge her with insider trading! They only charged her with lying about it, under '1001'. Stewart was convicted of lying about a crime. But the government did not have to prove that any actual crime ever happened. Merely stating her recollection of a single small (for her) transaction was enough to get her a jail sentence. Stewart saved all of $45,000 on the stock transaction when the stock went down. Later the same stock went way above her selling price! But her prosecution has caused her business to go to blazes and stockholdings in her own company decrease by hundreds of millions. Why? Because of the accusations and the criminal trial. What happened to Martha, who was certainly no villainous insider trader, does not seem fair to us. Whether insider trading is really a crime is another question. Our personal experience is that when given so called insider tips, the stock involved usually went the opposite direction the tipster indicated it would go! Martha's 'crime' was a step removed. Her spontaneous response to one of an agent's many questions, her best memory, was deemed to be a criminal offense in and of itself. Her co-operation and willingness to talk was transmuted into a crime. Is that justice? But then, what is fair about 'justice' these days? It has been said that Justice to the Department of Justice, is as military bands are to music. The Martha Stewart case and many others are purely for show - a politically motivated crackdown on successful people. The prosecution had its roots in the jealousy and ambition of a government bureau-rat. This is exactly as predicted by Ayn Rand and the anonymous author of A Lodging of Wayfaring Men: The government has so many potential crimes on the books that a criminal case can be made against any individual who is investigated. The fear of prosecution is what gives government its power. AVOID ARROGANCE What other mistakes did Stewart make that we could learn from? She irritated prosecutors with her arrogant attitude. "I'm innocent and you don't have anything on me!" It's a natural reaction, a common error that people (especially successful people) often make when confronting for the first time a low-level, bureaucrat who asks accusatory questions. But it's always a bad idea to make Big Brother's Minions mad by truthfully claiming you are not a criminal. What should you do? How should you handle a situation where you are questioned and don't know exactly what the government guy is after? Here it comes a third time: You shut up. Then the odds are that there will be no evidence to make a case against you. If you do get indicted, try first to negotiate. Remember, the Feds won't bring a case unless they are pretty sure they will win. Instead of warning Stewart against protesting her innocence too loudly and fighting the case in the media, her high-priced attorney, Robert Morvillo, only exacerbated her problems. His chief argument was that Stewart and her broker were "too smart to pull a dumb stunt like intentionally lying." But as one juror said later, "How could we tell anything about how smart either of them was if they never took the stand?" Martha was sent to jail. For nothing. How could it have been avoided? THE LETTER YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CARRY IN YOUR POCKET Besides keeping your mouth shut, it's a good idea to have evidence that you have indeed kept your mouth shut. We suggest typing out the following letter and carrying two copies of it with you on your person at all times: You hand it to any Law Enforcement Agent who says, "Can I come in and ask you a few questions?" This is the letter: Dear Sir: Due to rule 1001, I don't feel I can answer any oral questions at all unless I clear all your questions with a lawyer first. Please submit all your questions in writing, and I will get back to you. Please give me your calling card, let me photocopy your official identification credentials and sign this letter below. I will give you a copy as a receipt and as evidence that I gave you no information whatsoever in this or any other interview. Signature of government agent:___________________ Date & Time: _________________________________ Name and official position:_______________________ Office Address_________________________________ ID number:____________________________________ Telephone / Fax number:_________________________ E-Mail address:_________________________________ If the agent won't sign, you should fill in the above blanks. Where the agent should have signed, print on the letter the agent's name, followed by "refused to sign." Plus your name. Then contact your lawyer right away.
whether federal agent or not...always demand a lawyer if you're put under arrest or held for questioning.
You do not have to consent to any search unless you are put under arrest, at which point a strip search becomes part of the process.
