United States v. Jeffrey Reed

75 F.4th 396
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit·Decided July 31, 2023·No. 22-4258·Published·Cited by 2 cases

Opinion

PUBLISHED

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 22-4258

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff – Appellee,

v.

JEFFREY M. REED, Defendant – Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, at Bluefield. David A. Faber, Senior District Judge. (1:20-cr-00066-1)

Argued: March 10, 2023 Decided: July 31, 2023

Before WILKINSON, HARRIS, and RUSHING, Circuit Judges.

Affirmed by published opinion. Judge Rushing wrote the opinion, in which Judge Wilkinson and Judge Harris joined.

ARGUED: David Robert Bungard, OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Charleston, West Virginia, for Appellant. Erik S. Goes, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Charleston, West Virginia, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Wesley P. Page, Federal Public Defender, Jonathan D. Byrne, OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Charleston, West Virginia, for Appellant. William S. Thompson, United States Attorney, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Charleston, West Virginia, for Appellee.

RUSHING, Circuit Judge:

A jury convicted Jeffrey M. Reed of two crimes arising out of an elaborate ploy to intimidate an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent into halting her efforts to collect his delinquent tax debt. On appeal, Reed challenges the validity of both convictions along with three enhancements the district court imposed at sentencing. We affirm.

I.

Reed owed the IRS a substantial amount in past-due taxes. After the IRS’s ordinary collection efforts failed, the agency transferred Reed’s case to its Abusive Tax Avoidance Transactions division, a specialized unit that handles difficult cases involving tax avoiders and repeat offenders. An IRS agent using the agency-approved pseudonym T.L. Blake was assigned to pursue Reed’s case. Initially, Blake sent Reed a collection letter and attempted to visit him at home, but to no avail. Blake also sent a notice of levy to Reed’s employer, the Holiday Lodge & Conference Center in Oak Hill, West Virginia, directing the hotel to garnish Reed’s wages. When the Holiday Lodge did not respond, Blake traveled to West Virginia and visited the hotel. There, she served a final notice of levy directing the hotel to begin garnishing Reed’s wages or risk facing a penalty.

The hotel’s owner, Sara Nelson, decided to comply with Blake’s directive and garnish Reed’s wages. When Nelson told Reed her intentions, Reed became upset and tried to convince Nelson to send a letter on his behalf, written by him, challenging the garnishment. In one of Reed’s draft letters, he included a thinly veiled threat to sue Nelson if she garnished his wages. Nelson declined to send a letter for Reed, garnished his wages,

and soon fired him because of his hostility toward her and threat to sue her. She garnished approximately $600 from one of Reed’s paychecks.

Around the same time, Reed mailed back to the IRS copies of documents Blake had served on the hotel and mailed to Reed. In an accompanying letter, Reed claimed the documents were instruments good for the value of his debt. Frivolous avoidance tactics like this were not new to Reed. Years prior, in 2013, the IRS sent Reed a letter warning him against such conduct. Blake referred the mailing to the IRS’s Frivolous Return Unit, which handles such correspondence.

In response to Blake’s attempts to collect his taxes, Reed filed a lien and various related documents against Blake and Nelson with the Mercer County, West Virginia clerk alleging the two owed him nearly $5 million arising from 165 constitutional violations they supposedly committed against him. Reed then recorded financing statements purporting to perfect security interests in the lien. The financing statements listed Nelson and Blake as lien debtors and asserted that Reed, as the creditor, had a security interest in their real and personal property because of the supposed debt. Reed recorded one financing statement against Blake in Maryland and one against Nelson in West Virginia, the latter of which he twice amended. Before he filed the lien and related documents, Reed sent “courtesy notices” of some of these documents to IRS officials on at least three occasions to apprise them of “the legal action” he was taking against Blake. J.A. 460. He also sent

letters to insurance commissioners in several States complaining that Blake and Nelson had not provided bonding information to cover the amount alleged in the lien. 1 When Blake learned of the financing statement Reed had filed against her, she referred it to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which investigated the filing. As part of the investigation, two officers interviewed Reed, who voluntarily spoke with them at his home. Reed admitted creating and filing the lien and financing statement against Blake, acknowledged receiving the 2013 letter warning him against frivolous tax-avoidance tactics, and initialed each document. Reed explained he developed the strategy to file a lien and financing statement by “talk[ing] to individuals and research[ing] it on the internet and that [he] had concluded that this was going to be the only way he could get the IRS to leave him alone.” J.A. 151. Although Reed disclaimed an intention to try to enforce the lien, he told the officers he could enforce it “at any time” and that the filings “would not go away without him signing off, or making them go away, that they would exist continuously”; he also acknowledged that the filings could impact Blake’s credit score and ability to obtain credit. J.A. 152.

Although Reed never attempted to enforce the lien, his filings negatively impacted both Blake and Nelson. When Blake tried to purchase a home, she had to list her pseudonym as an alias on her mortgage application. The lender then found Reed’s lien, requiring Blake to undertake significant efforts to clear up the matter to complete her

1

Reed also sent Blake and two other IRS officials a notice alleging Blake had violated a copyright Reed supposedly owns in his name and owed him $9 million in damages.

purchase. As for Nelson, she perceived the lien and financing statement to be a serious threat to her business and was afraid Reed would try to take the hotel from her. She later reemployed Reed as an independent contractor when she needed additional maintenance staff, reasoning that repairing their relationship might convince him to void the lien.

In May 2020, a grand jury charged Reed with filing or attempting to file a false lien or encumbrance against a federal employee in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1521. Reed moved to dismiss, arguing that because he filed the lien against the IRS agent’s pseudonym, T.L. Blake, he did not file it against an “individual” as required under Section 1521. The district court denied the motion, concluding the indictment was sufficient and Reed’s arguments on the merits were premature. The grand jury later returned a superseding indictment that maintained the Section 1521 charge (Count 1) and added a charge for attempting to interfere with the administration of internal revenue laws in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7212(a) (Count 2), and the case proceeded to trial.

When the Government concluded its case-in-chief, Reed moved for a judgment of acquittal. The district court reserved ruling on the motion, and the jury convicted Reed on both counts. At sentencing, the court denied Reed’s motion for acquittal and explained the decision in a written order. The court overruled Reed’s objections to various sentencing enhancements and sentenced Reed to 60 months’ imprisonment on Count 1 and 36 months’ imprisonment on Count 2, to run concurrently, followed by 3 years of supervised release. Reed appealed, and we have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291.

II.

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