Rasheed Al Jijakli, the owner of Orange Check Cashing in Orange, California, has been indicted for illegal exports of tactical flashlights, rifle scopes, cameras, radios, voltmeters and laser boresighters to Syria. According to the indictment, Jijakli allegedly took the items with him on flights to Turkey, crossed the border from Turkey to Syria and gave the items to rebel groups in Syria. He was arrested on August 1 and released on a $250,000 bond pending trial.

Of course, for the criminal indictment to succeed the U.S. Government must prove that Jijakli knew that supplying these items to persons in Syria was illegal. The indictment alleges that Jijakli told an un-indicted co-conspirator “about a technique he used to smuggle goods into Turkey without being detected by law enforcement.” It also alleges that he asked the same unindicted co-conspirator if he “needed an alias in the event law enforcement questioned [him] about the purchases.” The trial and any conviction may well turn on whether a jury decides the un-indicted co-conspirator is telling the truth about these statements by Jijakli.

But the prosecution’s efforts to prove that Jijakli understood the complexities of export law sufficiently to have criminal intent will be hindered by the prosecution’s own inability to understand the relevant export laws. Paragraph 6 of the indictment says this:

6. With certain limited exceptions not applicable here, U.S. sanctions against Syria prohibited, among other things, the export,
re-export, sale, or supply, directly or indirectly, of U.S.-origin goods from the United States or by a United States person wherever
located, to Syria without prior authorization from the Secretary of the Treasury.

Nope. The Syrian Sanctions Regulations administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) in the Treasury Department do not prohibit the export of goods to Syria. Section 542.207 which regulates exports to Syria only prohibits unlicensed exports of services from the United States or by a U.S. person. The export of goods to Syria is instead controlled by the Export Administration Regulations. Only a license from BIS is required for export of goods to Syria; no license from OFAC or the Secretary of Treasury, as the indictment would have it, is required.

If a prosecutor with a law degree can’t get U.S. export laws right, how can we expect a guy who owns a check cashing place in a strip mall to get it right?

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