Except in this article, where they assert that the funds were correctly reported to the government with no explanation of what that claim even means. And they’re not saying that the defendant claimed to have reported; Reason themselves are making the claim.
Like most publications, they have editorial constraints, and usually choose to discuss the breaking news rather than rehash older facts. Reason has been covering this highly complex and lengthy case for nearly a decade, they have published dozens of articles about it, unfortunately for you they did not address your specific question in detail in this particular article. I think if you dig a bit deeper you'll find answers.
edit - 2 minutes of searching past Reason articles:
That Lacey was convicted of "international concealment money laundering" is bizarre, since the money transfer was not concealed: His lawyer informed the IRS about it, as required by law. And it was not made for nefarious purposes, according to Scottsdale lawyer John Becker's trial testimony. Lacey had needed some place to park his savings after U.S. banks, scared by a years-long propaganda crusade against Backpage, had decided doing business with the company or its associates was a reputational risk. So Becker and another lawyer advised Lacey to deposit the money—$17 million, on which taxes had been paid—with a foreign bank.
It's hard to see how Lacey conducted a financial transaction "to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity," even if you accept the government's premise that this money was derived from unlawful activity. And, to be clear, I don't accept that premise, since Backpage's business should have been protected by the First Amendment (not to mention Section 230 of federal communications law).
Party stances are always going to reflect the country they operate in.
On an absolute scale Republican’s support for expanding Medicare drug coverage was left leaning compared to at the time current law even though it’s to the right of many countries and Democrat’s stance on the issue.
yeah, the left/right dichotomy is gradually becoming outright meaningless - usually just sloppily slapped labels that fit an agenda. Important nuances go completely unnoticed in the left/right universe, like libertarians siding with communists, and neocons siding with democrats - or whoever thinks regime changing from above is a good idea. Anarchism, militarism, libertarianism, conservativism, fascism, welfarestateism, social democracy, etc, these are all useful terms. Left and right; not so much.
The Left-Right bias is more clear when you look at the general population vs specific interest groups.
Voters in low population states have outsized political power and therefore get handouts. Same deal with elderly voters because they vote more often and everyone expects to get old Meanwhile groups who vote less often like 18-24 year olds get fucked over.
There's a few distinct axes commonly labelled "left". The Democrats are quite left on some axes (e.g. concern about racism) and less so on others (e.g. siezing the means of production).
The Left no longer means pushing for worker unionization or trying to expand welfare programs, at least not in the rich countries. This traditional left has become fringe almost everywhere in the top 20 economies.
The Left is now a mostly academic movement dealing in obscure words.
>The Left no longer means pushing for worker unionization or trying to expand welfare programs, at least not in the rich countries. [...] The Left is now a mostly academic movement dealing in obscure words.
This is as factual as rain is dry.
>This traditional left has become fringe almost everywhere in the top 20 economies.
What is traditional left? Marxism-Leninism? Socialism is and has been a wide spectrum since before the Russian revolution. Right now we're seeing an uptick in extreme right tendencies in Europe but top 20 economy countries such as the UK, France, Brazil and Germany do have solid leftist parties.
The traditional left advocates for the rights of those who work for a living via collective action and organizing of working people, and attempts to break up concentrations of corporate power.
That’s hardly the only things traditional left advocated for, they also wanted things unions could help provide like safer working conditions, vacation days, etc.
Initially it was an offshoot of the abolitionist movement which took a hard look at property rights in a broader context but very much still wanted to abolish slavery and even serfdom. They also wanted social security style safety nets with pensions and compensation for injured workers and their families etc. Western democracies essentially adopted most of those standards to the point where they became invisible in modern politics.
FDR for example really gutted the socialist movement in the US with the “New Deal” to the point where it largely stopped being a talking point. More recently having gutted unions, with the gig economy sidestepping many worker protections, and 401k replacing pensions, etc has started to reawaken some of the west’s latent socialist tendencies.
The leftists I know are socialists, anarchists, and communists. They are very much doing the work both politically (I live in the Pacific Northwest, where socialists are on the ballot regularly) and locally (e.g. via Food Not Bombs or restoring land to natural states).
There definitely are academics, in organizations like the DSA. But there's practical folks too.
Virtually no one who calls themselves socialists in America are actually socialists. They’re social libertarians and neoliberals cosplaying as socialists.
You can’t have a workable left-wing movement that prioritizes social libertarianism because workers invariably will be more traditional than elites. You can’t tell factory workers they can’t say this or that and that they need to learn to like foreigners. You can think it, but you can't say it, and you certainly can't call them "racist, sexist, and homophobic." If your platform morally reforming workers and their manners becomes core to your platform, then it's not a workable left-wing platform. All you'll do is split the workers and push them away: https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/postcard-from-the-hispanic-....
What you'll end up with is a coalition where economic left-wingers are the rump of a neoliberal party. The neoliberals will never give the left-wingers anything, because they don't have to. Neoliberals have no reason to do anything other than pay lip service to leftists who can't actually unify and rally the mass of workers.
So what looks centrist or right leaning on a 2D scale is actually heavily biased in a different political direction.