Hobby Lobby 'probably should have known something was fishy' about its Iraqi artifacts
Hobby Lobby will probably never face criminal charges for the thousands of smuggled Iraqi artifacts it purchased, says a journalist who helped break the story — but that doesn't necessarily mean the company didn't know what it was doing.
The U.S. craft chain has agreed to pay $3 million to the federal government and forfeit thousands of ancient religious artifacts smuggled from the Middle East that the government alleges were intentionally mislabeled for import, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
"They probably should have known that something was fishy with this purchase insofar as it didn't have the appropriate paperwork or export licenses from Iraq allowing it to leave the country," Joel Baden, one of the reporters who first broke the news the company was under investigation, told As It Happens guest host Laura Lynch.
"They sort of have what I would call barely plausible deniability, but, on the legal front, it's probably unprosecutable."
Baden and his colleague Candida Moss have co-written book about the Oklahoma City-based craft store chain's devout Christian owners called Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby.
Importing Iraqi cultural property into the United States has been restricted since 1990 and banned outright since 2004. Under Iraqi law, all antiquities found in Iraq are considered property of the state and private people cannot generally possess them without authorization of the Iraqi government.
But Hobby Lobby, says Baden, is not being changed with anything.
"Hobby Lobby is simply admitting that these items were illegally brought into the country and are giving them up to the U.S. government as, effectively, contraband," Baden said.
The Christian-run company executed an agreement to purchase over 5,500 artifacts in December 2010 for $1.6 million US.
The items — mostly tablets and bricks written in cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing — are some 3,000 years old and they "speak to the world of the ancient Near East from which the Bible emerged," Baden said.
Hobby Lobby President Steve Green is the owner of one of the largest collections of religious artifacts in the world and is building a Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., due to open in the fall.
But prosecutors said acquisition "was fraught with red flags" and that packages bore shipping labels that described their contents as "ceramic tiles."
A dealer based in the United Arab Emirates shipped packages containing the artifacts to three different corporate addresses in Oklahoma City. Five shipments that were intercepted by U.S. customs officials bore shipping labels that falsely declared that the artifacts' country of origin was Turkey.
In September 2011, a package containing about 1,000 clay bullae, an ancient form of inscribed identification, was received by Hobby Lobby from an Israeli dealer and accompanied by a false declaration stating that its country of origin was Israel.
Hobby Lobby consented to the fine and forfeiture of thousands of artifacts that prosecutors say were shipped without proper documentation, according to a civil complaint filed in New York on Wednesday.
Green said in a statement that the company co-operated with the government and "should have exercised more oversight and carefully questioned how the acquisitions were handled.
"Our passion for the Bible continues, and we will do all that we can to support the efforts to conserve items that will help illuminate and enhance our understanding of this Great Book," Green said.
Controversial company
Baden doesn't think the incident will have much of an effect on the company's reputation.
The Hobby Lobby brand has been a controversial one since the company challenged former U.S. president Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, saying it didn't want to provide certain forms of birth control for its employees, citing religious objections.
In June 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Hobby Lobby's favour, saying the company's rights had been violated under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
"Mostly the people who were already displeased with Hobby Lobby for the Supreme Court case and its related media, you know, see this as yet another sign that these [people] are not trustworthy and not as moral as they say they are," Baden said.
"But on the other hand, those who are already on board tend to see the Green family as being persecuted, as sort of martyrs to a cause, and so my sense is their reputation will probably continue just the way it has always been, in part because they were so divisive as public figures to begin with."
With files from Associated Press