Readers will remember from this series of posts in April and May how the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maryland brought and then settled charges against Randy and Karen Sowers of Middletown, Md., over “structuring” of bank deposits, that is, the conscious holding of transactions under $10,000 to avoid triggering paperwork and federal scrutiny. Now Van Jones of the Baltimore City Paper, who has led the coverage of the story, has some unsettling new allegations:

Randy Sowers is not the only Maryland farmer recently targeted by federal money-laundering investigators for illegally depositing cash his business earns in increments of $10,000 or less, in order to avoid triggering bank-reporting requirements. But Sowers, whose South Mountain Creamery (SMC) dairy farm in Middletown, near Frederick, is a popular fixture at Baltimore-area farmers markets, is the only one to exercise his First Amendment rights and talk to the press about it. For that, Sowers’ lawyers say, the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO-MD) has made him pay—an assertion that U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein denies, despite an e-mail sent to Sowers’ attorney by the chief of Rosenstein’s asset forfeiture and money laundering section, Stefan Cassella, that appears to state exactly that.

David Watt and Paul Kamenar, attorneys for Sowers, say during negotiations over a deal to settle the charges, Watt asked Cassella why the government was insisting on particular concessionary language it had not obtained in the settlement of similar charges against a farmer named Taylor on the Eastern Shore. Cassella sent back a one-line email that read: “Mr. Taylor did not give an interview to the press.” In an e-mail to U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, Cassella has stated that the Sowers settlement was “not a punishment for exercising his First Amendment rights.”