Noah Feldman, Columnist

This Man’s Protest Is Free Speech. Courts Called It a Felony.

The federal judiciary mistakenly sees fraud instead of a man expressing his political beliefs.

January 3, 2019 at 4:00 PM UTC

Corrected

January 4, 2019 at 1:45 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

This is not a bank.
Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

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We go through life thinking the First Amendment is followed in the U.S. In practice, that isn’t always true. A case in point is that of Gunther Glaub, who was convicted and sentenced to five years’ probation for a quirky protest in which he sent the bill for his new Chevrolet Camaro to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — and scribbled on it, “Thank you for paying this debt.”

Astonishingly, prosecutors went after Glaub on the theory that sending the government this invoice and a few other bills, including one for his wife’s student loan and another from his credit union, violated the federal law against submitting false claims to the government. I wrote about the prosecution in 2016, urging the federal district court to throw out the case.