Book Reviews

So Help Me God

By Mike Pence

Simon & Schuster, 2022

542 pages, $35.00

Reviewed by Louis Fisher

Former Vice President Pence has released a book that covers a political career that led to his role on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, presiding over the count of electoral votes in the presidential race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. His book describes many of his previous political experiences, including serving for 12 years in the House of Representatives and as governor of Indiana. The prelude of the book explains that he “had always been loyal” to President Trump, but his “first loyalty was to the Constitution of the United States.” The oath Pence would take ended with these words: “so help me God,” the book’s title. All but one of the 52 chapters begin with a quotation from the Bible.

At times in the book, political issues are placed not with elected officials and the general public but in another realm. As

Pence mentions on page 145, he and other colleagues decided to place “the outcome in God’s hands.” As explained on page 150 re- garding a political issue, he and others were “determined to put it all in God’s hands.” As to the presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016, Pence offered this judgment on page 174: “There was nothing left to do but put it into the Lord’s hands.”

Chapter 23 explains the Republican difficulty to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Although that was a major goal, it proved to be impossible because of a “huge stumbling block” among House Republicans divided between “the Freedom Caucus and more mainstream Republicans.” As a result, Trump “vowed to veto every single bill Congress sent to him until Republicans found a solution to health care” (page 218). Although Democrats were opposed to replacing the ACA, “gaining consensus among the Republicans on how and what to replace it with was elusive” (page 241). As time went on, “the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare was dead” (page 243). The Republican party had majorities in each house of Congress and held the White House but could not deliver on its promise to repeal and replace the ACA. As Pence explains, Republican donors “were outraged and had stopped sending checks” (page 260).

Chapter 43 focuses on the phone call between President Trump and President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. Congress had appropriated $250 million to Ukraine to help it fight off Russian aggression on the eastern border. However, the money was withheld by the administration. As Pence notes on page 360, a whistleblower in the executive branch filed a complaint that Trump had pressured Zelenskyy to interfere on Trump’s behalf in the upcoming election. Pence does not explain that the pressure included asking Zelenskyy to find damaging information about Joe Biden, the most likely Democrat to run against Trump in 2020. Pence explains that details had emerged that Trump “had pressured Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter,” who had been given a position with the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. On page 362, Pence says that Trump publicly described his conversation with Zelenskyy as a “perfect call.” In Pence’s judgment, it was “a less-than-perfect call, but it was not an impeachable offense.” To Pence, “there was nothing illegal about what the president had said during his call with Zelenskyy.” In fact, the administration had impounded appropriated funds in order to pressure Zelenskyy to find damaging information about Joe Biden. In the judgment of Pence, House Democrats “proceeded with impeachment—over a phone call.” To Pence, the impeachment effort “was absurd” (page 363). The issue was never about Trump phoning someone; it was about a president threatening to withhold appropriated funds to Ukraine unless it agreed to find damaging information about the most likely Democrat to run for president in 2020.

Chapter 50 focuses on Pence’s duty to carry out the Electoral Count Act. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that the vice president, as President of the Senate, “shall, in the Presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted.” As Pence notes, the vice president as President of the Senate “is afforded no authority to reject or return votes to the states, and no vice president in history has ever asserted that authority” (page 442). He said he always knew he “did not possess the authority to overturn the election” (page 442). However, he shared “the concern of millions of Americans about allegations of fraud and irregularities in the November election and thought that a full airing of all the evidence to the country was in order” (page 445).

Trump strongly opposed the position that Pence took regarding electoral votes. Pence told Trump many times that the vice president possessed no power “under the Constitution to decide which votes to accept or reject,” but Trump “just kept coming” (page 446). A few days later, Pence did agree that members of Congress had the right under the Electoral Count Act to raise objections and offer evidence. As a result, many newspapers offered this headline: “Pence Welcomes Congressional Republicans’ bid to Challenge Electoral Votes.” To Trump, that meant Pence had “the absolute right to reject electoral votes,” but that was not the position of Pence (page 448). He told Trump repeatedly that the vice president, as President of the Senate, “is afforded no authority to reject or return votes to the states and no vice president in history has ever asserted that authority.” Nevertheless, Trump promptly tweeted to millions of his followers: “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors” (page 453).

On the morning of January 6, 2021, Pence received a phone call from Trump. Pence reiterated his position that he lacked any authority to reject electoral votes. When Trump told Pence he was not supporting and defending the country, Pence responded: “We both took an oath to support and defend the Constitution” (page 460). Pence was aware that a large crowd had gathered at the Ellipse south of the White House. Although Pence would ordinarily rely on television “to monitor a Trump rally, that day I made a conscious decision not to watch.” Later he decided that maybe he should have watched (page 460). Trump would tell the crowd that Pence “is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.” All that Pence had to do, he told the crowd, was to send certain electoral votes back to the states “to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people” (page 460).

After Pence and members of Congress learned that protestors had broken into the Capitol and were committing violence, his Secret Service detail told Pence that he and members of Congress needed to leave the Capitol. Pence refused, pointing his finger at a Secret Service agent while saying: “You’re not hearing me, I’m not leaving! I’m not giving those people the sight of a sixteen-car motorcade speeding away from the Capitol” (page 464). As a compromise, Pence with his family and others agreed to be moved temporarily to the Capitol’s loading dock and garage, a few floors below. In that location, Pence learned that Trump had sent out a tweet at 2:24 p.m. saying: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” (pages 465-66).

By 7:00 p.m., Pence and Senators were allowed to assemble and begin the counting of electoral ballots. At around 3:40 a.m., Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota read the results of the 2020 election: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris received 306 Electoral College votes to Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s 232 (page 471). Trump was impeached a second time for his actions on January 6, 2021 but not convicted in the Senate.  asks whether the industry needs its own set of regulations. Business academics in the Financial Times are opposed, lest any new laws endow the embattled “things” with unwarranted legitimacy. Instead, they declare, society would be better served doing “nothing and just let crypto burn.” The European Central Bank appears to agree, believing that Bitcoin is now on “the road to irrelevance.”

Louis Fisher is visiting scholar at the William and Mary Law School. From 1970 to 2010, he served at the Library of Congress as senior specialist in separation of powers at Congressional Research Service and specialist in constitutional law at the Law Library of Congress. He is author of 32 books and over 600 articles. For more information, see http://www. loufisher.org.

Tracers will prepare and inform anyone interested in these issues. Even more than that, it will entertain. Greenberg documents Bitcoin’s fascinating arc from its libertarian roots into the depths of its darkest, most criminally fraught abuses.

The book is structured around criminal investigations of “dark web” marketplaces. These online bazaars operated in the encrypted corners of the internet. Bitcoin was their exclusive payment method for the illicit goods and services on sale.

Each investigation unfurls like an international spy novel, set within a season of CSI, and infused with occasional buddy cop levity. The protagonists are criminal investigators and prosecutors at three-letter U.S. law enforcement agencies.

IRS-Criminal Investigation special agents play the leading role. These accountants— armed with guns, badges, and the ability to swear out warrants—are the backbone and compass of each investigation. Digitizing the mantra “follow the money,” they trace cryptocurrency transactions and online clues to identify the modern, and now infamous, Bitcoin-laundering kingpins: Silk Road, Dread Pirate Roberts, and AlphaBay.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

By Andy Greenberg Doubleday, 2022

326 pages, $32.50

Reviewed by Daniel Silva

Andy Greenberg’s book Tracers in the Dark arrives at a pivotal moment in the cryptocurrency lifecycle. Amid mounting bankruptcies and regulatory scrutiny, the turmoil has reanimated several questions at the heart of the cryptocurrency experiment. Chief among them: What exactly is cryptocurrency—money, securities, commodities, simple computer code? And are they doomed to function merely as speculative investments or payments for unlawful transactions?

To that end, a more recent policy debate

Greenberg shows how federal investigations start, expand, succeed, and sometimes fail. Law enforcement, despite the seriousness of the crimes, work with an endearing sense of mission. The book shines when humanizing the prosecution teams. Some anecdotes are destined for legendary status, none more likely than “octopus guy” (further description would spoil the story or fail to do it justice).

As the public servants unravel novel, sophisticated, diffuse, and digital crimes across the globe, we see that relationships and aligned strategies matter as much as every piece of evidence. Trust circumvents bureaucracy. Camaraderie minimizes setbacks.

But this is no typical cops-and-robbers tale. The investigations are as complex as they come. The subject matter demands some understanding of Bitcoin and its basic functions. Some techno-jargon is thus unavoidable. Thankfully, none of it bogs the story down. Greenberg surpasses the high bar he sets for himself by avoiding the trapdoor of delivering a lecture on “how to balance a digital currency checkbook”.

The crypto terms and techniques instead develop naturally, presented within investigations. Greenberg balances out the technical definitions and transactional analysis with many tense moments when an agent is not in front of a computer.

Greenberg generates further suspense with extended descriptions of “takedowns”—the coordinated arrests and seizures of assets. Digital or analogue, these are crimes that require old fashioned detective work. Law enforcement patiently and thoroughly builds evidence, like when an agent finds an incriminating image that is reflected on the criminal’s eyeglasses in a selfie.

The agents gain investigative skills over time and across investigations. Crucially, they also learn to exploit the continuing advances in Bitcoin-tracing technology. It turns out that Bitcoin users are not invisible. They are merely anonymized behind semi-encoded transactions. Greenberg spares readers an extended explanation of how Bitcoin’s public ledger, known as the “blockchain”, works. The important takeaway is that this partial anonymity gave criminals a significant, but imperfect, advantage against law enforcement.

In short order, law enforcement deploys its own digital investigative tools to fight (cryptographic) fire with (technological) fire. With the pace of a whodunnit/treasure hunt, the agents find more inventive ways to read the blockchain and connect Bitcoin transactions with real people and assets.

These investigative tools did not evolve in isolation. As Bitcoin’s usage and popularity matured, so too did academic research, Bitcoin-tracing companies, and cultural movements. Tracers contextualizes these developments by showing how they aided law enforcement, intentionally or otherwise.

For instance, “cyberpunks” are the opposite of law enforcement. Promoting a radical libertarianism, cyberpunks saw cryptocurrency as a means to fulfil their “grand mission of using unbreakable encryption software to take power away from governments and corporations and give it to individuals.” Think Neo from The Matrix before he takes the red pill. These principled dark web philosophers are unrecognizable next to the more contemporary and brash “crypto bros,” renowned for mocking crypto-skeptics with memes like “#HFSP” (“have fun staying poor”).

This cheekiness has consequences. Cyberpunk idealism gives way to marketplaces that sell all types of contraband, facilitate ransomware, and, most disturbingly, encourage the production of child sexual abuse material. This descent stems from the misconception that Bitcoin was the perfect, digital get-away car for money launderers. Or, as Greenberg puts it, Bitcoin was a “siren song: the false promise of untraceable money.”

An academic identified this flaw as far back as in 2013, predicting that those “with subpoena power would be well placed to identify who is paying money to whom.” Had the criminals done their homework, they would have learned that Bitcoin was a poor fit for “high-volume illicit use such as money laundering.”

As predicted, law enforcement wields its subpoena power to devastating effect. Less predictable, however, is the symbiotic growth of “crypto analysis” companies. The book’s ambiguous sub-title—Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency—quickly takes on new meaning. Greenberg details the rise of these companies, some led by cyberpunk sympathizers, in parallel with law enforcement’s pursuit of digital money launderers. The bargain was simple: For a fee, the companies licensed or used their technology to trace Bitcoin, allowing law enforcement to seize billions of it.

Inspired with a sense of justice, readers transform into fledgling forensic accountants. We share small thrills with the agents and crypto-hunting companies as they gather evidence. The more we learn, the more we want to catch the perpetrators. At some point, the “cryptoverse” sheds its complexity. Bitcoin begins to resemble the traditional financial system. Instead of “bank accounts,” cryptocurrency is deposited into “digital wallets.” Banks aren’t the main financial intermediaries, “exchanges” are.

Less concerned with debating cryptocurrency’s utility, Tracers explains and explores Bitcoin’s most notorious abuses. Still, readers are left wondering what the starring special agents and prosecutors think about crypto’s future, or whether their partnership with the crypto-hunting companies carried any hidden risks. This layer of insight becomes all the more intriguing upon learning that many of the government officials profiled in Tracers now work for private companies in the cryptocurrency industry.

Possibly to avoid these conflicts, Greenberg concludes with the thoughts of an outspoken civil liberties activist, who argues that the success of the crypto-hunting companies (and ironically maybe even Tracers itself) represents an “epitaph for the era.” Bitcoin will cease to function as a money laundering device, the activist predicts, and the crypto-hunting companies will soon find themselves on their own road to irrelevance.

This seems premature. It also ignores finance and money laundering trends. Transactions are increasingly digital, whether on a blockchain, in a metaverse, or across the global financial system and the proliferating financial technology subindustry (e.g., “fintechs”).

Meanwhile, technology ceaselessly advances. Cryptocurrencies and related “web3” products remain in their infancy. Nations continue to experiment with minting their own digital currency. Fully untraceable cryptocurrencies, without a public blockchain, already exist. For a moment, consider the future perils of all this technology when paired with artificial intelligence, quantum computing, or even basic money laundering techniques like shell companies in offshore tax havens.

All this suggests that IRS-CI, academics, underground digital communities, and private industry will be hard at work in the future. Greenberg chronicles what financial detective work will look like in the 21st century. By looking back, Tracers has anticipated a sustained, global demand for sophisticated asset-tracing skills.

As proof, look no further than comments from John Ray III, the recently-installed CEO of FTX. The cryptocurrency exchange imploded in November 2022, culminating in bankruptcy and criminal charges against several FTX officers, charges that former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried denies. Yet in describing the company’s chaotic operations, Ray testified before Congress that, “We’re dealing with literally a paperless bankruptcy in terms of how they created this company … it makes it very difficult to trace and track assets.” 

Daniel Silva is product counsel for Stripe—a fintech and software company—advising on risk, credit, regulatory, and litigation issues. Before joining Stripe, he was an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, where he directed investigations, prosecutions, and forfeiture litigation of complex financial frauds, money laundering, tax crimes, and Bank Secrecy Act violations. In addition to his Juris Doctor, Daniel holds a Master of Laws in taxation and an MBA.