Judge unseals U.S. attorney files

Federal Judge Kent Dawson has made public all documents that the U.S. attorney's office had secretly filed in a civil case launched by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada to protect four anonymous readers of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Some readers had posted threatening comments online in May about a trial in which business owner Robert Kahre last week was found guilty of tax evasion and other tax-related felonies.

Dawson signed the order to unseal on Monday, one business day after Kahre's Friday conviction on 57 counts. No wording appears to have been removed from the newly revealed filings, as is sometimes done to keep details confidential.

The ACLU is calling the unsealing a victory.

"There was simply no basis for the government's view that this case should be kept out of the public eye," ACLU lawyer Margaret McLetchie, said Tuesday. "Since the case involves prosecutorial abuse of the grand-jury process, and apparent retaliation against the public's exercise of First Amendment rights, it is especially important that this matter be litigated in the light of day."

Dawson has not addressed a now-unsealed June 26 government motion to dismiss the ACLU's request to intervene in the subpoena matter, on the grounds that it is now moot because the Review-Journal complied with one Kahre-related subpoena in late June.

The unsealing is a skirmish in the ACLU's longer-term battle. Under the banner of free speech, it wants to squelch the government's use of identifying information it forced from the newspaper, via subpoena, about two particular online commenters.

McLetchie admitted Tuesday that the ACLU has no idea whether federal investigators already have used the data, perhaps to do surveillance on the targeted commenters during the Kahre trial or immediately after the verdicts were announced on Friday.

The trial judge, David Ezra, did not grant pre-sentencing release for Kahre and Alex Loglia, another defendant, until Kahre agreed that he would not encourage violence by his supporters or what the judge termed a "fringe element."

The ACLU also wants a court to declare both subpoenas sent to the newspaper unconstitutional and to give guidance to the U.S. attorney's office for future subpoenas.

In now-unsealed documents, the government said it was bound by grand jury subpoena secrecy to not share why it needed to identify any commenters.

McLetchie said the ACLU -- like the commenters who were targeted -- only learned of the subpoenas because the newspaper chose to reveal their existence.

The Review-Journal had opposed a first, sweeping subpoena in early June for data on all people who had posted comments below an online article about the Kahre trial. But it complied in late June with a narrower replacement subpoena asking for data on only two particular commenters.

One suggested hanging the jurors if they convicted Kahre, who owns several local businesses in construction trades such as drywall, painting, plumbing, electrical, heating and cooling.

The other commenter offered to wager that a federal prosecutor from Washington, D.C., who was involved in the Kahre trial, would die within the year.

Kahre's three co-defendants were each convicted of, and acquitted of, counts related to his payroll system, which passed out cash in the form of gold and silver coins.

Workers were allowed to immediately trade the coins for paper cash equal to the coins' fair-market value but were told they could go by the coins' face value for tax purposes. Kahre withheld no income tax for workers because he considered them to be independent contractors responsible for their own taxes.

Sentencing for the four found guilty is set for Nov. 17. Three of them were tried on similar charges in 2007, but because jurors could not agree, they were neither acquitted nor convicted, which led to a new indictment and the recently concluded trial.

Contact reporter Joan Whitely at jwhitely@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0268.