Business Insider isn't a great source, but I don't like primary sources: They will be very biased in their own interest. A good secondary source can provide context, information from sources that disagree or have other perspectives or concerns, etc. That's one reason Wikipedia requires secondary sources.
This is like... the weirdest post to bring that up on. DoJ announcements are some of the driest, most precisely worded press releases from any organisation on the planet. You could not hope for a better primary source.
When you read "co-conspirators", did you think oh, DoJ is biased, they're using heavily charged terms to make us feel a certain way? They aren't! He was charged with a conspiracy offence. That's what the people he conspired with are called.
Criminal accusations by the government are assumed to be biased; the legal system is built around that: Innocent until proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty, an entirely independent branch of government decides whether its proven, and then that branch relies on 12 civilians.
The US Department of Justice has a long history of bias, especially against non-conformists (maybe not the perfect word to characterize it, but hopefully that conveys it).
Sure. But this is not a "criminal accusation". This is an announcement of the result of the judicial process. A jury convicted this guy, and now a judge sentenced him to 5 years. There are no further accusations being lobbed at him. It is perfectly acceptable to take DoJ's word for what the verdict and sentence were.
It is also perfectly acceptable to take their word for what he has been convicted OF. Convictions are how we write history. We have now answered the following question: did this guy conspire to violate sanctions? The answer was yes. All of the things they detailed in https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizen-who-conspired-assi... are things they tested in court and proved. (Very rarely, that process gets it wrong. But it is okay for the average Joe to accept convictions as the truth. It's the best we have. If someone's conviction is overturned, the truth changes. If you no longer have a judiciary of sufficient independence to ensure this, lawyers will stop recommending you believe verdicts, and they'll be screaming about it.)
Beyond that, you did not get ANY more commentary from the DoJ. They did not go on a rant about how Bitcoin's ideological foundations are in defying US hegemonic control over its currency, ultra libertarianism, how this was bound to happen, etc.. You did not get a political statement about how it should be brought within the banking regulations to ensure more transparency by Coinbase-like entities that might be used to evade sanctions further. All of which you may have been given in bucketloads by any secondary source.
Yes, DoJ has a long history of trying to send people to jail, even people who don't deserve it. The feds are very powerful and very smart, and if they indict you for something, the chances of a conviction are very high, because if they're not convinced to a high degree, they do not prosecute. I think there's a place for your rule: you should be careful of believing 100% anything that involves a DoJ accusation but no indictment. I would completely understand Wikipedia's position that they don't use a pure accusation by the government of a crime as evidence of guilt to back up an entry saying "they did X" on Wikipedia. But the rest of it is both newsworthy and consequential, and as I said before perfectly good as a primary source evidencing the facts and outcomes of the judicial process.
If you don't know how they can mislead you, it only means you are more vulnerable. We don't know what we don't know. Whole worlds of issues and problems can be easily omitted, for example. Trusting any source as described is a fundamental mistake.
But this is really unnerving:
> Very rarely, that process gets it wrong
Why do you say that? That is not my understanding of the process. Look at all the exonerations from death row, cases that receive the most attention and process. Look at all the abuses of minorities and political outcasts.
> you should be careful of believing 100% anything that involves a DoJ accusation but no indictment
Do you mean, 'indictment but no conviction'? Indictments are easy - the old saying is that a decent prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.
> Convictions are how we write history. We have now answered the following question: did this guy conspire to violate sanctions? The answer was yes.
That's not how knowledge works; we don't get relief from certainty. What we know is that they were convicted. Many accept, whether true or not, that that process is better than any available alternative; I don't know many people who have as much confidence in its accuracy as you do.
In comparison, there were about 1500 from state courts. This makes sense when you realise murder is almost always prosecuted as one of 50 different state crimes. You have missed that I'm specifically talking about the US DoJ. State equivalents are entirely different organisations that I am not commenting on.
> DoJ accusation but no indictment > Do you mean, 'indictment but no conviction'?
No. Your little aphorism is true of many district attorneys but not of the US DoJ. I am referring to, e.g. statements by the FBI, which is a branch of the DoJ. The FBI in particular has a much more questionable history than the DoJ's criminal division, which handles prosecutions.
Finally, on this theme of distinguishing federal prosecutors from everyone else, no, I don't have as much confidence in all criminal convictions everywhere as you might have been thinking. But I have quite a lot in US DoJ's ones. I studied law, but not US law. I do know how they can mislead you. Feel free to take my word for it as far as that goes.
Better title: "United States Citizen Pleads Guilty To Conspiring To Assist North Korea In Evading Sanctions"