Prilotsky told Freeman that he was in the car business. It was a lie. In fact,  Prilotsky was an agent of the Internal Revenue Service who had been assigned the  task of secretly investigating whether Freeman was committing any crimes in his  bitcoin business,

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Part 1 | Part 2 [to be published]This article is about the unjust conviction of an innocent man — Ian Freeman.
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If one googles the name “Ian Freeman” and “bitcoin,” the result will be hundreds  of articles describing Freeman as a “fraudster.” That’s because immediately after  Freeman’s sentencing in a criminal case in a U.S. District Court in New Hampshire  on October 2, 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Hampshire sent out a press  release in which Freeman was labeled a “fraudster.” 

There is one big problem, however, with that description: Freeman was never  convicted of fraud, and the U.S. Attorney’s office knew that when it sent out that  press release on the day of his sentencing.  

That’s not to say, however, that there wasn’t any evidence of fraud in Freeman’s  trial. There was, but it was fraud committed by the U.S. government official whose  testimony the U.S. Attorney used to secure a conviction of Freeman on a bogus  charge of “money laundering.” Although the jury found Freeman guilty of money  laundering based on the sworn testimony of that agent, the federal judge presiding  over the trial, Judge Joseph Laplante, as we see later in this article, threw out that  finding of guilt and acquitted Freeman of the money-laundering charge. 

Nonetheless, Freeman was convicted on other charges — conspiracy to engage in  money laundering, failing to register his bitcoin business with the federal  government, conspiring to fail to register his bitcoin business with the federal  government, and income-tax evasion, all of which, as we will see later in this  article, were as bogus as the money-laundering conviction that the judge rightly  threw out.  

In short, this article is about the unjust conviction of an innocent man — Ian  Freeman — who is now serving an eight-year jail sentence that was meted out to  him by the same judge who threw out that bogus money-laundering conviction.  

But this is also an article that goes far beyond a detailed analysis of a very complex  criminal prosecution in a federal district court, because it also places this criminal  case in a much larger context, one that goes a long way toward explaining the dark  statist morass into which our nation has plunged. That necessarily will mean a very  long, multipart article, one that will not only explain in detail the wrongful  conviction of the 43-year-old Ian Freeman but also review the historical, political,  legal, and economic context in which an innocent man has been wrongfully  convicted and sentenced to serve a very long time in a federal penitentiary. 

The Federal Fraudster

In September 2019, a man named Pavel Prilotsky began purchasing bitcoins from  Ian Freeman. We will examine later the nature of bitcoins and how and why  Freeman got into the business of selling them, but for now, we are simply going to  focus on the fraud in which Prilotsky engaged in an effort to entrap Freeman into  committing a crime.  

Prilotsky told Freeman that he was in the car business. It was a lie. In fact,  Prilotsky was an agent of the Internal Revenue Service who had been assigned the  task of secretly investigating whether Freeman was committing any crimes in his  bitcoin business, specifically income-tax violations, money-laundering offenses,  and violations of bank-secrecy regulations.  

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