BULLETIN: Andrew Isaac Chance, the Maryland man described by the Justice Department as a “tax defier” and recidivist fraudster who filed a bogus lien for $1.313 billion against a federal prosecutor, has been sentenced to 65 months in federal prison.
Chance, a retired station manager of the Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, explained that he filed liens against the federal prosecutor and a Maryland state prosecutor because they had “done him wrong,” prosecutors said.
The bogus lien against the federal prosecutor was in the form of a UCC Financing Statement filed in Maryland. The Uniform Commercial Code has been in the news in recent days in the context of purported “sovereign citizens.”
Michael Lee Crane, an Arizona man now charged in three murders in late January, told a judge at his arraignment on the first two murder charges that “I would like to reserve my right to Uniform Commercial Code 1-207, and the Uniform Commercial Code 1-103.”
Chance filed the false lien against the federal prosecutor who’d handled an earlier tax-fraud case against him “shortly after” Chance was released from prison. Chance, prosecutors said, was on federal probation when he filed the lien.
After filing the bogus lien, Chance returned to the same behavior that landed him in prison initially, filing three false claims for tax refunds, prosecutors said.
“This sentence shows that filing false tax returns and retaliating against federal prosecutors and other government officials, who are simply doing their jobs, will not be tolerated,” said John A. DiCicco, principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Tax Division.
In the false-liens case, Chance was charged under the same law federal prosecutors in Washington state used to charge AdSurfDaily figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming: Retaliating against a Federal judge or Federal law enforcement officer by false claim or slander of title.
Leaming allegedly was involved in the filing of several retaliatory liens against federal officials. He also faces charges of harboring fugitives, being a felon in possession of firearms and uttering a bogus “Bonded Promissory Note.”
