Minton debunks Adelson lobbyist claims on Wire Act

Earlier this week the Washington Examiner published an op-ed written by Sheldon Adelson lobbyist Jon Bruning which attacked the key Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel opinion in 2011 that the 1961 Wire Act applies only to sports betting, claiming that the move was a reinterpretation of the Act and demanding that the Trump Administration “restore” the Act to its original intent.

The tone of the article irritated many online gambling protagonists who have over the years prior to the Office of Legal Counsel’s clarifying opinion seen enforcement placing interpretations of the act wildly different from the original and the intentions of Congress.

This week Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington DC responded to Bruning’s perspective, taking the lobbyist to task.

Backing up her assertions with a wealth of evidence, Minton points out that when Congress enacted the Wire Act, there was no doubt about its intent.

Then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authored the bill and testified multiple times that it was meant as a tool for the federal government to assist the states in the enforcement of their laws. The point was to target the mafia’s sports gambling operations that, via the use of the telephone, operated across state lines and thus out of the reach of state law enforcement.

It was not, as Bruning and others now want to believe, meant to create a new and broad prohibition on all Internet gambling, Minton contends.

“Congress clearly understood the limited nature of the Wire Act when it enacted the bill,” Minton writes. “In Senate hearings, for example, Chairman Estes Kefauver asked Deputy Attorney General Herbert J. Miller if the Wire Act applied to lotteries conducted over the phone, to which Miller responded that it would not since the Wire Act was “limited to sporting evets or contests.”

Minton goes on to examine the background to the 2011 Office of Legal Counsel opinion following a request from two US states for clarity on the position of online lotteries. The Office of Legal Counsel – the DoJ’s top professional body – undertook an exhaustive two-year study and review of the entire Wire Act and its origins before reaching its conclusion that the Act applies only to sports betting.

Read the full op-ed here: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-wire-act-was-already-restored/article/2621836.