Sheldon Adelson Closer To Winning Online Gambling Battle
The Justice Department offered a legal opinion that could further restrict online gambling — a move casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has been seeking, The Washington Post reported.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel suggested that it could reverse an Obama-era rule that the Wire Act applied only to sports gambling. The opinion will probably be brought up in court.
Most online gambling is already illegal, to the satisfaction of Adelson, a GOP megadonor who controls Las Vegas Sands Corporation, one of the world’s largest casino empires. But adding the Wire Act to these other laws, like the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, means the Justice Department can bring cases more against online gambling sites.
Former senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in a statement Monday that the original version of the Wire Act was “as problematic legally as it was morally.” He spoke on behalf of the Adelson-backed Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling.
According to federal lobbying records, Las Vegas Sands has paid Lincoln’s lobbying firm $210,000 since 2017.
“The change here will have some impact, but it doesn’t mean that large swaths of gambling that were once legal are now illegal and vice versa,” a Justice Department official with knowledge of the matter told the Post.
The official said the opinion was no discussed with Adelson or “any outside parties.”
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO