"Nice try." says Kaplan you've been denied.... image from www.legalnewsline.com
“Nice try.” In essence, that’s what federal judge Lewis Kaplan wrote yesterday in denying a motion by Black Friday defendants Chad Elie and John Campos to summarily dismiss all charges against them, as a result of last month’s opinion served up by the Department of Justice that online poker of and by itself is not illegal according to the 1961 Wire Act.
The problem, as Kaplan noted, is that Campos and Elie faced charges stretching well beyond the narrow question of online poker’s legality. Since summary dismissals are rarely granted in criminal matters anyway, it was no more than a wild hope that the motions brought by Campos’s and Elie’s attorneys would be successful. And of course, they weren’t.
According to a “mediocre Forbes piece on the motions’ denial, Kaplan also wrote in an eight-page memo that “Defendants’ argument that poker is not gambling fails, at least at this stage.” That, like the banking-fraud violations, is an argument better suited for the trial itself, not the pre-trial phase.
One must remember that neither Campos nor Elie was an actual employee of any of the sites affected by the Black Friday clampdowns, those being PokerStars, Full Tilt and Absolute Poker (which also included ub.com). Campos was the officer at the Utah bank which essentially offered itself as a flag of convenience for the processing of gambling transactions, while Elie was the go-between who sought to keep open various channels suitable for the processing of online transactions. Those matters delve into bank fraud and conspiracy and drift away from the “poker” area of the matter, which is why there was virtually no chance that the charges would be dismissed at this stage. It was still worth generating a headline or two in the meantime.
The cases against Elie and Campos, therefore, continue apace. Nothing to see here, at least at this moment in time. The federales likely still hope they can talk the pair into accepting a plea deal — if for no reason other than to keep their batting record perfect in the Black Friday matchup.
In the meantime, we’ll have to settle for such ycccch as the following, as written in the Forbes piece: “Judge Kaplan did poke holes in some of the arguments made by big shot lawyers like former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement on behalf of Campos and Elie at the December pre-trial hearing.” That’s quite the predisposed statement for a piece supposedly more straight news reporting than editorial. And it’s poor grammar, too. Just sayin’.
