Listen: Is having a bird die on your property a criminal act? Here's what the government thinks

Howard Root, author of “Cardiac Arrest: Five Heart-Stopping Years as a CEO On the Feds' Hit-List,” joins Jacki Daily in this podcast to share his story, a true tale of the regulatory state gone wrong.

“Government versus man ... it’s been going on since the beginning of time,” said Jacki, by way of introducing the topic of government overreach and abuse. “I'm talk[ing] about over-criminalization, the between 3 and 4 hundred thousand crimes in The Code of Federal Regulations that you have never heard of, put there by some bureaucrat that you didn’t elect and whose name you’ll never know, that can throw you potentially into a cage. That’s how serious this is.”

Jacki briefly touched on the case of Harold Hamm, founder Continental Resources an oil company operating in the Bakken shale oil field of North Dakota, who faced criminal charges and up to six months in jail when a single bird was found dead in one of the company’s reserve pits. “You know a million birds and bats are killed by windmills but no one cares about that,” noted Jacki. “Well, the DOJ came after [Hamm] and threatened him with six months in the clink because a bird -- not an endangered bird -- a bird probably had a heart attack and fell into his oil pit. These stories happen all the time, you just don’t hear about them but you should.”

Howard Root, the CEO of a company called Vascular Solutions, found himself similarly on the wrong end of a zealous prosecutor. “He was on the receiving end of a limitless Federal government that will never run out of funds to prosecute him. He has to pay for his defense lawyers but you and I, the taxpayers, pay for the Federal prosecutor and all of their resources to go up against him,” explained Jacki.

“You had to hire 121 lawyers at a cost of $25 million … and you said there was never an allegation that you actually hurt anyone, right?” she asked Root.

“Correct. This product made up 0.1 percent of our sales, never harmed a single patient, and had been approved by the FDA eight separate times. They are alleging that my sales people said the wrong word,” said Root, adding, “The reason we had to hire so many lawyers … is the government has unlimited resources, so if they have you in their sights they will try to get the evidence. By getting the evidence, they will take your employees, your customers, your former employees, they drag them down in front of a grand jury, and they start asking them questions. And if they don’t get the answers that the prosecutors want, they start threatening those people. They threaten that their careers will be destroyed, they’ll be charged for perjury, all kinds of things that the government can do.”

Listen to the podcast above to get the full story.

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