A former IRS agent who believes citizens are not required to pay federal income taxes will appear in U.S. District Court in Sacramento tomorrow to face charges for numerous alleged tax crimes. Joseph Banister, 41, a leading figure in the “tax honesty” movement [and former IRS special agent], was taken into custody Nov. 19 by IRS agents and released on $25,000 bond after pleading not guilty….The IRS spokesman said many courts are getting fed up with lawsuits brought by people who contend federal tax law is fraudulent and are slapping them with frivilous-lawsuit penalties. In response to another common argument, the Department of Justice website says, “courts have both implicitly and explicitly recognized that the 16th Amendment authorizes a non-apportioned direct income tax on United States citizens and that the federal tax laws as applied are valid.”
Of course, every time you actually read the transcripts of these cases, you see that the judge refuses to permit the tax code to be entered as evidence, runs roughshod over the jury and tells them to simply assume the facts are as the prosecution presents them, and in general behaves like someone desperately trying to hide something. Despite his accurate knowledge of tax law and IRS regulations, I suspect Banister will face a very difficult road ahead, as his hiring of a lawyer – an officer of the court – suggests that he doesn’t understand that it is not only the tax law that is fraudulent.
This is nothing but a show trial. Watch for the usual railroading, violations of rules of court procedure, unfounded assertions from the bench, and, if a guilty verdict is pushed through, a shockingly long sentence.