Early this morning, Elon Musk shared a video on X of legendary investor Marc Andreesen’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Show. Andreesen alleged that the Biden administration had secretly “debanked”—closed the bank accounts of—“tech founders, crypto founders, and then just generally political opponents.” He opined: “We can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing, and then they literally get sanctioned.”
If this is news to you, I have a hell of a story to tell you. It isn’t just tech founders backed by billionaires running into trouble with the small matter of holding onto their money. Let me introduce you to the practice of “civil forfeiture,” which allows law enforcement to seize your assets without a criminal conviction—or even a criminal charge. Yes, Marc, Joe, and Elon: The government can take away all of your things based on the mere suspicion that your assets are tied to criminal activity. It’s called “civil forfeiture”—and if the government takes your money, you must prove it innocent.
In fact, over the past two decades, state and federal governments have seized over $68.8 billion from Americans. Why haven’t you heard of it? Both anecdotes and statistics tell the story that civil forfeiture is deployed disproportionately against people of color, low-income Americans, and immigrants. The proceeds, in turn, fund law enforcement agencies, providing further incentives to seize more and more.
I can tell you this story because I’ve lived it. During the first pandemic summer, I woke one morning to pounding on the glass of my home. I walked to the door with the youngest of my four daughters riding on my hip in a diaper. The unwelcome visitors were wearing their FBI raid jackets. “Open the door,” they shouted. “Warrant.” But the four agents with guns going through my house weren’t my main concern. Two weeks prior, federal prosecutors obtained a different kind of warrant, leaving us penniless and powerless to defend ourselves from an oncoming legal nightmare.
In 2020, Amazon Web Services accused my husband of a federal crime we’d never heard of, depriving the company of his “honest services” during and after his seven years of employment with the tech titan. Based on Amazon’s allegations, the government then authorized civil forfeiture and seized our family and business bank accounts—including my earnings as the CEO of my start-up, The Riveter, and savings from my decade as an attorney.
Fast-forward four years. My husband was never charged with any crime. A federal judge in a related civil case ruled that my husband had complied with the “explicit terms” of Amazon’s employment contract. The DOJ closed its investigation, and the government returned 85% of the money they took from us—so long as we promised not to sue them. Somehow, this series of events is legal in America.
But the seizure has forever changed our lives. We sold our home and car and emptied my husband’s retirement account—to pay our lawyers. Our family of six spent over a year moving between my sister’s basement, my father-in-law’s condo, and my parents’ townhouse. At the same time, our girls have attended six different schools and daycare providers in four separate states. When we tried to rent a house for our family, the owner learned of the forfeiture online and required us to pay a year of rent upfront. The case’s publicity has devastated my husband’s career and mine.
Civil forfeiture was an obscure backwater for most of the country’s history. At the time of the Founding, civil forfeiture was limited to confiscating ships and cargo that ran afoul of customs duties. But now civil forfeiture has become wildly popular across law enforcement precisely because—like the practice of debanking—it doesn’t require the government to prove anything.
Seizing assets also gives prosecutors tremendous leverage. Today, federal prosecutors obtain 97% of criminal convictions from guilty pleas instead of trials. Civil forfeiture is a powerful tool because if defendants cannot afford an attorney to fight back in court (let alone feed and house their family), they are far more likely to fold and accept whatever plea bargain a prosecutor offers, regardless of their innocence. Numerous legal scholars have documented the high plea rates of innocent defendants. This certainly played out in the DOJ’s investigation of my husband, where prosecutors ultimately vacated multiple guilty pleas from my husband’s alleged co-conspirators as “not in the interests of justice.” Without threats of forfeiture, would the innocent men have pleaded guilty in the first place?
Today, there is bipartisan support for civil forfeiture reform. Due process is the only right guaranteed twice by the Constitution. If I cannot be imprisoned unless found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of my peers, why can my money? Where is the due process when a government official presents secret allegations that my money is a crime made by a private company to a judge without allowing me even to see the allegations?
My family’s story adds another twist to the devastating use of civil forfeiture in America: Here, former FBI and Dept. of Justice employees who now work for Amazon leveraged cozy relationships with their former federal offices to lobby the government to pursue criminal charges and a civil forfeiture case. Indeed, the DOJ office’s top prosecutor assured Amazon’s counsel—after Amazon asked for a criminal investigation—that she had explicitly “selected” two of her “very best prosecutors” for his “client’s important matter.”
We need reform to protect not just tech founders and political opponents—but folks like me who have been victimized by the unjust practice of civil forfeiture. I don’t know what will happen to my family. While the DOJ investigation is closed, prosecutors are now fighting to keep critical documents related to its seizure forever under seal, and they’ve failed to return hundreds of thousands of dollars they took all those years ago. But I know that if our Constitution still means anything today, we must end civil forfeiture.
