November 20, 2003 by s.z.

The Horror, the Horror! Check out this eBay item: Time With Sean and Ann For Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter fans it doesn't get any better than this! To raise funds for our Defend Marriage and Family Campaign, United Families International is offering an incredible opportunity for three lucky people to spend time with Sean and Ann. Winners will receive the unprecedented opportunity to ride on a private jet with one of the most popular and influential radio personalities in the nation! Saturday morning, November 22nd, after Sean kicks off the Defend Marriage and Family Conference in Mesa Arizona, the three winners will depart with Sean in a private jet to Kansas City, where they will have the option of attending his Radio Rally. The three winners of the auction will receive the following exciting benefits: VIP seating at the Defend Marriage and Family Gala Dinner featuring Ann Coulter and the presentation of the Camie Awards on Friday evening, November 21st, in Mesa, Arizona! VIP treatment at an exclusive breakfast reception (limited to 40 people) with Sean and Ann on Saturday morning, November 22nd. They will have their pictures taken with Sean and Ann and will receive a signed copy of their best selling books! VIP seating on Saturday morning at the Defend Marriage and Family Conference in Mesa, Arizona to hear Sean give the Keynote Address. The minimum bid is just $995, but with less than 14 hours to go, there are no takers as yet.  I guess nobody wants to defend marriage with Sean and Ann. To help the cause, here a little background on Ann, explaining why she is the perfect choice to be a key-note speaker at a "Defend Marriage" conference:  First, from the Salon piece on "Ann, the Woman" by David Bowman: For years this 40-something woman has worked so hard to become the she-god of the Republican zeitgeist that she's forsaken any personal life. She has no marriage or long-time partner -- her social life consists of sporadic dating.  We should worry that she is dooming herself to spinsterhood, rather than assume Coulter practices free love or is still in the closet.  Such speculations would be cruel. And from The Telegraph News: Coulter is still searching for Mr Right-Wing. "I've been engaged many times. Four, I think. But I'm not like every other American. I thought I'd meet the right person before getting married and having children." Who were these dumped fiancés? "Oh, I don't even remember all of them. I really don't think about exes five minutes after they've gone." And as for Sean Hannity, we leave you with this Sean Hannity Moment, from Sean Hannity Biography: He loves to grill every weekend too. He would like to play more golf, but doesn't have the time. He believes in the second amendment and is a firearm owner. Don't rob his house because he says you will be shot. Doesn't he sound like he'd be a lot of fun to spend time with on a private jet? 5:28:04 AM

Rush Limbaugh Denies Money Laundering; Claims To Be Just Another Naif Led Astray by A Bank Rush used his radio show Wednesday to address his latest legal troubles: the report that he's being investigated for money laundering I'm INNOCENT I Tells Ya: RUSH: There is something I can respond to that happened on ABC News last night. Now, I know where this is coming from. I can't tell you that. But I can tell you that I understand exactly what's going on, and if you put your thinking caps on, you might, too. Oh, for fun!  Let's all put our thinking caps on and see where this might be coming from.  Let's start by reviewing the ABC story Authorities Eye Whether Rush Limbaugh Laundered Money Used to Pay for Drugs: Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh may have violated state money-laundering laws in the way he handled the money he used to buy the prescription drugs to which he was addicted, law enforcement officials in Florida and New York told ABCNEWS. [snip] Limbaugh's lawyers say he did not do that and that he is being falsely accused by those who want to force him off the air. So, the allegations are coming from law enforcement officials in Florida and New York.  And why are they doing it? Um, because they want to put pressure on Limbaugh to get him to take a deal for the drug trafficing?  No, that's just what they WANT you to think!  Actually, it's a case of the liberals, Hollywood lefists, and Hillary Clinton all conspiring with the elite meda to plant false accusations against Rush, so that his followers will lose faith in him, and he'll be forced off the air.  No drug-enduced paranoia here! Okay, now that we have that mystery solved, let's take our thinking caps off and listen to Rush some more.  The story on ABC News, World News Tonight last night was that there is a money laundering investigation of me that is underway. Let me say here at the top of the program, ladies and gentlemen, that I have never, I have not laundered any money.   Rush then explains that when he lived in New York, he banked at CitiBank-- but even though he was granted access to a SPECIAL part of the bank for SPECIAL customers, he still had to wait in line.  The regular part of the bank, for all the hundreds of REGULAR customers,  had, like, nine or ten tellers, but "the super-secret special whatever section of the bank" that was supposed to cater to the super-secret special handful of rich patrons, "had only had three tellers."   Now does that seem right?  Besides, when you're jonsesing for blue babies, you don't have time  to stand in bank lines. So, somebody told Rush about U.S. Trust, which went out of its way to give its rich cleints whatever they needed, and Rush moved his money to their establishment. Back to ABCNEWS for the next part of the story: Authorities say they became aware two years ago, during an investigation of New York bank US Trust, that Limbaugh had taken between 30 and 40 cash withdrawals from his account in amounts just under $10,000.  Banks must file a report to the government if someone withdraws more than $10,000 at once.  Limbaugh's lawyers confirm that as part of US Trust's service, a bank employee personally delivered cash to Limbaugh at his New York studio in amounts of $9,900 or so. "That in itself is a suspicious activity: They are structuring their transaction to avoid reporting to the government, and the bank is required to file with the federal government something called a suspicious activity report," said Jack Blum, an expert on financial crimes. Limbaugh's lawyers say it was US Trust that suggested the arrangement.  In July 2001 the bank paid a $10 million fine because of the Limbaugh transactions and many others like it.  Limbaugh's name was not made public at the time but officials told ABCNEWS details were forwarded to state and federal investigators in Florida. "Now the problem will be: Did he then assist his drug supplier in hiding the proceeds from the government?" said Blum. Well, the problem will be: can we PROVE that he helped his supplier hide the funds from the goverment.  But here's Rush's side of it: US Trust explained that I would never have to stand in line again, if I needed cash, they'd bring it to me. . . .It happened, I don't know, two or three, four or five, whatever, it wasn't very many, it's being reported in the paper it was every time I got cash somebody from the bank snuck over under the cover of darkness to my building, and made the transaction. It was nothing at all like that. It was a convenience that they offered to all of their customers. It's not a traditional bank in that sense. So, the ABC report is all wrong because it implied that he got all of his suspicious cash withdrawals by messengers, and really that only happened 2, 3, 4, or 5 times.  The other 30-35 times he stood in line at the bank.  And it's not like having the money messengered to him was anything nefarious -- they did it for ALL of their customers.  So, now you can see how ABCNEWS lied about Rush, and how bogus the whole story is.  Move along.  Nothing more to see here.  Well, actually Rush has a lot more to say about this matter, and how it's all the bank's fault that he did anything wrong: And at this time when they were pitching their services to me, they told me that when I was going to withdraw cash, keep it under $10,000 so they wouldn't have to report anything to the government. There was a $10,000 reporting requirement and they said if you keep it under that, then nobody has to file any paperwork and so forth and so on, meaning them at the bank, and so that's what I did. Any time I got cash from the bank, I made sure it was less than $10,000. See? See?  The bank set him up!  Just because they were too lazy to fill out a report, they asked Rush to please only withdraw sums of $9990 or so at a time.  His only crime was being too accommodating and helpful to a financial institution! Anyway, Rush would only be guilty of the crime of "structuring" if he had tried to avoid the transaction reports so that his drug suppliers wouldn't face any questions about why they were getting large sums of cash from Rush Limbaugh.  But he didn't use the money for drugs.  No, he used the cash for, um, remodeling his house.  Yeah, that's the ticket! The cash in question here, most of it had to do with the two-and-a-half-year remodel we did for the home in Palm Beach.. . . So just one of the many areas, the money was for travel, it was for food, it was for gratuities, as I was out and about and playing a lot of golf tournaments as you know building the house. I think the total amount of money they're talking about here comes to about $300,000 over five or six years.  It's a lot of money, but given the amount of money I earn and so forth, it's pretty much in proportion with, you know, what anybody else earns in terms of the percentage of walking-around money and cash that they use for things. The rich are different than you or me -- they withdraw $10,000 in cash at a time for "walking around money."  Oh, and house remodeling.  Nothing suspicious about paying for your house renovations in cash.  No siree.  And while $300,000 (or maybe nearly $400,000) in cash might seem a lot to blow in a two-and-half year period (or maybe it was over 5 or 6 years -- Rush was on drugs at the time, so it's all a little blurry now), HE'S super-rich, so it's not a big deal to him.  Heck, he'd buy up to 4000 OxyContin pills at a time, just like you or I might buy a bottle a vitamins.  He is so far above us that we can't even wrap our minds around his godlike lifestyle. And all those drugs he bought?  Well, he used DIFFERENT money to buy them, so he's not guilty of a crime.  Now does it all make sense to you?  Back to the story of how Rush was led astray by the bank: The government and New York state was investigating U.S. Trust because the bank had apparently told many other of their clients that their cash withdrawals should be in amounts of less than $10,000. I was one of the last people they talked to, and they met I guess a couple people after me. I'm not really sure. But shortly after I met with them, U.S. Trust admitted to this and paid a $10 million fine, and that's it. I don't know how many other customers they had advised to do this, but there were enough that they incurred a $10 million fine, agreed to it, and that's what was going on here, folks. Um, that's not what was REALLY going on.  The bank didn't admit to persuading customers to withdraw sums of less than $10,000 at a time, to keep the bank from having to fill out those bothersome forms; no, they admitted to failing to comply with regulations involving currency transactions, IN THAT THEY DIDN'T REPORT THE SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR OF THEIR CUSTOMERS.  Here's part of an L.A. Times story from 2001 (U.S. Trust Fined): U.S. Trust Corp., the blue-blood investment firm owned by Charles Schwab Corp., agreed to pay a $10-million penalty to regulators for allegedly violating rules designed to prevent money laundering and other fraud. [snip] New York-based U.S. Trust has offices in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, Costa Mesa and Palo Alto. Banks and other financial institutions that cater to the wealthy face a difficult balance between trying to comply with money- laundering regulations and serving legitimate customers who don't want transactions delayed by bank compliance procedures, said Bruce Zagaris, a New York attorney who specializes in international law and banking regulation.  "You don't want to be so vigilant that you lose clients, but vigilant enough so that you don't have law enforcement and regulators investigating you, especially if you're going to get fined $10 million and have [reporters] writing stories about you," Zagaris said.   US Trust allegedly failed to comply with anti-money laundering laws requiring reports on cash transfers of more than $10,000 and failed to file suspicious activity reports. And here's a snippet from a piece at the site Money Launderers 'R Us: It appears that 60 wealthy clients structured withdrawals from their own accounts aggregating more than $10,000, drawing checks in amounts less than $10,000 on consecutive days, thus avoiding reporting. This could constitute the federal crime of "structuring" and the money police insist, should have triggered reports of suspicious activity by the bank. So, U.S. Trust, a bank for rich people, took customer service to another level by messengering money to its wealthy clientele and looking the other way when they withdrew suspicious amounts of money that they needed RIGHT THEN, like for insider trading or DRUGS or something.  But Rush is just a babe in the woods who never thought that it might be wrong to try to avoid reporting requirements.  Here he is, discussing the story with a caller, who said that his bank told him the very same thing about how he should just withdraw slightly less than $10,000 at a time: RUSH: Let me ask a question here. If I understand this now, and understand I'm a novice at these kinds of things, but I guess if your bank told you that if you withdraw less than $10,000 they don't have to report it anywhere, there must be a law that says if you withdraw 10,000 or more they do have to report it. CALLER: That's my understanding. RUSH: So they were advising you of a law and they were telling you how to do something legally. Correct? CALLER: Precisely. RUSH: Right.  You know, something about the above conversation calls to mind this one: BOB:  Well, you see Birch, I'm presently incarcerated, convicted of a crime I didn't even commit!  Huh!  "Attempted murder?"  Now honestly, what is that? Do they give out a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry? Do they? BIRCH: My-my-my friends, isn't this just typical? Another intelligent conservative here, railroaded by our liberal justice system. Just like...Colonel Oliver North, Officer Stacey Koon, and cartoon "smokesperson" Joe Camel. But back to poor Rush.  The smartest guy in the world, but he knows nothing about finance and banking, and so is an easy mark for the first posh financial institution that caters to his desires.  What a tragic tale. We'll let him summarize things: Now I know, and that's the story.  And I know where this is all coming from, and I know why it's being done, and I know why it's being reported the way it is, it's being reported to create a picture that is false.  This is not a leak, by the way, this is the purposeful release of false information. I'm having to restrain myself here at the same time because I would love to explain all of this, and that day will come sooner rather than later. Yes, it was deplorable the way that that law enforcement officials purposefully released the false information that Rush was being investigated for money laundering in connection with his drug purchases -- well, except that he IS being investigated for money laundering.  Okay, then it's terrible the way that ABC LIED and said that Rush had made 30-40 cash withdrawals of cash at just below the $10,000 level -- except he DID do that.  Well, I guess the really infuriating injustice being committed here is that the authorities are talking about possibly taking legal action against a rich, powerful conservative.  That's just not the way we do things in America, people.  Anyway, like Rush keeps saying, he would love to explain all of this -- the real story of the drug buys, his dealings with his former housekeeper, and which of his archenemies is behind this latest attack -- but he just can't right now, because his lawyer won't let him.  But he does have a great explanation for everything, believe you him!  You can trust Rush, because if YOU were a drug addict accused of money laundering, he'd be there for you.  He would.  Yup.  Yes, indeedy. 2:32:24 AM