It took a couple of hours to remove Idaho legislator from the House. What took so long?
Idaho avoided an embarrassment this week when the House voted unanimously to remove John Green from the Legislature after he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the United States.
For a minute there, though, it seemed touch-and-go.
Green, a Republican representative from Post Falls, told The Associated Press shortly after being convicted by a federal jury in Texas that he was planning to be back in the Idaho Statehouse on Monday, as if to say, “Hey, let’s not make a federal case out of this.”
“I’m going to finish my term, and we’ll see what happens,” Green said in a phone interview with the AP shortly after he was convicted, adding that “a lot of innocent people get convicted.”
Republican House Majority Leader Mike Moyle on Wednesday told the AP that he wanted to talk to Green and learn more details before discussing removing a convicted felon from office.
“I think it’s just too premature to even discuss that,” Moyle said.
Even after the vote Thursday to remove Green, House Speaker Scott Bedke said, “In our caucus, there were many opinions expressed, there was empathy and sympathy expressed to the situation,” according to KTVB.
Fortunately, the vote was unanimous, a good look for the House (although a couple of legislators were absent, including Reps. Tammy Nichols and Brent Crane, both of Canyon County, according to Boise State Public Radio).
It’s bizarre that this would even be a question that Green could have come back to the Statehouse and carried on the people’s business as if nothing happened.
It finally took a written letter from the Idaho Attorney General’s Office to clarify that based on the Idaho Constitution, “he appears to have lost his qualifications for office.”
After Green was found guilty, the judge released him with no bond while he awaited sentencing. Green faces a five-year maximum sentence.
Federal jurors took about three hours to find Green guilty of conspiracy to defraud the United States. The same jury found his client, Texas inventor Thomas Selgas, guilty of tax evasion and conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
In an elaborate ruse to defraud the government and evade taxes over several years, Selgas converted all of his money into gold coins, his business partnership paid him with the coins, and he used the gold pieces to buy a ranch in East Texas, according to the Dallas Morning News. Rather than use a bank, Selgas kept his money in Green’s lawyer trust account, and Green used that money to pay Selgas’ expenses via his credit card bills.
Mara Strier, a trial attorney with the Justice Department’s tax division, said the case was a “classic tale of greed,” according to the Dallas Morning News. Or perhaps it was a case of being a “tax defier,” holding the belief that government taxes amount to theft, so doing anything you can do to avoid paying taxes is somehow justifiable.
Or maybe, as the defendants’ lawyers tried to argue in court, they were not paying taxes as they tried to better understand the tax code — for the past 10 years. Or, as another argument went, tax notices were sent to the wrong address.
Whatever the motivation, whatever the illogical attempt at explanation, the jury wasn’t buying it.
Fortunately, House members weren’t buying any of it, either.
