Charles International Law

10/15/2026

Can someone returning to Cuba take their savings with them? Can relatives send financial support afterward—or carry cash when visiting? These questions involve overlapping sanctions, immigration, and border-reporting rules that can produce very different answers depending on the facts.

Our new **Charles International Law Research Library** guide explains authorized family remittances, the removal of the former $1,000 quarterly cap, and the distinction between personal spending money and savings carried during permanent relocation. It also addresses FinCEN Form 105, currency declarations, and why dividing cash among family members does not automatically avoid reporting requirements.

For families navigating a loved one’s return to Cuba, understanding these distinctions can prevent costly mistakes. Read **Economic Sanctions and Mass Deportations: How to Navigate Sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act in Remittances to Family in Cuba**:

https://www.charlesinternationallaw.com/how-to-navigate-sanctions-under-the-trading-with-the-enemy-act-in-remittances-to-family-in-cuba

Learn how OFAC sanctions affect remittances to Cuba, family visits, and returning with savings. Understand cash declarations and FinCEN Form 105.

10/02/2026

Lebanon County mail-in ballots are arriving now. I received mine today, and there is one particularly important detail voters should notice before sending theirs back: **the return envelope is not postage prepaid.**

Read the instructions carefully, complete your ballot, use the yellow security envelope as directed, seal the outer return envelope, and remember to sign and date it. Then make sure you put postage on the envelope before mailing it.

It would be an unfortunate way to lose a vote simply because a voter reasonably assumed the return envelope was prepaid. If you know someone in Lebanon County who is voting by mail, please share this with them.

Watch the short video here:

https://natecharles.substack.com/p/lebanon-county-mail-in-ballot-postage

10/01/2026

Reports are circulating that Western military veterans—including potentially former U.S. Navy SEALs—provided military training to Russian nationals who may later have fought in Ukraine.

The underlying allegations remain disputed, and I have no inside information about whether they are true. But the story highlights a serious legal issue that veterans entering the international defense and security industry need to understand: your military expertise can itself become a regulated export.

When I served as a Trial Attorney in the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of DOJ’s National Security Division, export-control cases were a significant part of my work. I particularly gravitated toward cases involving what the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) call “defense services.”

Under the Arms Export Control Act and ITAR, providing certain military training, technical assistance, or military advice to foreign persons can require authorization from the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. And when Russia is involved, the restrictions become substantially more severe.

These are not technical regulatory violations. Willful violations of the Arms Export Control Act can expose someone to serious federal criminal penalties, as well as debarment and other regulatory consequences.

In this episode of the Rule of Law Brief, I explain where the line is, why veterans and military contractors can cross it without realizing the legal significance of what they are doing, and why anyone considering overseas military or security work should understand the export-control implications before providing the service.

https://natecharles.substack.com/p/itar-veterans-military-defense-services

09/30/2026

Imagine having enough money to hire a lawyer—but no practical way to pay. You have cash, but the payment screen requires a credit card, debit card, or bank account you do not have.

For some newly arrived immigrants and people seeking refuge in the United States, this is an overlooked barrier to essential services. As more transactions move online, relying on cash can mean exclusion from systems others take for granted.

In this episode of the **Rule of Law Brief**, I discuss how banking barriers affect access to legal help, why “Know Your Customer” safeguards matter, and how legitimate crime-prevention measures can still create obstacles for legitimate customers. I also explain practical payment options we are helping clients navigate at Charles International Law.

Seeking refuge already involves enough obstacles. Access to legal help should not depend on whether the money in your pocket comes with a payment card.

Watch the episode and read more:
https://natecharles.substack.com/p/unbanked-america-immigrant-banking-barriers

09/26/2026

Prior restraint is one of those First Amendment concepts that sounds straightforward until you get into the actual law. And judging from some of the responses to a recent post of mine, it is a doctrine that even some practicing lawyers misunderstand.

The Constitution draws an important distinction between punishing unlawful speech after it occurs and having the government prohibit speech before it occurs. The latter is a prior restraint, and the Supreme Court has long treated prior restraints with particular constitutional suspicion.

In this edition of the Rule of Law Brief, I walk through what a prior restraint actually is, why prior restraints are not categorically unconstitutional, and what courts must consider when restricting future speech. I also discuss several of the Supreme Court's major cases in this area, including Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, Carroll v. President & Commissioners of Princess Anne, Tory v. Cochran, and Walker v. City of Birmingham.

There is also an important practical point: believing that a judicial order violates the First Amendment does not necessarily give you the right to disregard it. The proper remedy may be to challenge the order, appeal it, and, where appropriate, seek emergency appellate relief.

Watch the full Rule of Law Brief here:
https://natecharles.substack.com/p/prior-restraint-first-amendment

09/23/2026

When I worked as a military war planner, every plan had to account for what other agencies would do to support it. The State Department’s role often involved explaining U.S. policy abroad, but we also had to account for the limits imposed by the Smith–Mundt Act on influencing Americans at home.

Congress amended that law in 2013 as the internet blurred the boundary between foreign and domestic audiences. It did not abandon the restriction on using the covered programs’ funds to influence U.S. public opinion. The law does not apply to the White House’s new “Trump TV” channel, but the contrast raises a question worth asking: what limits should we expect when the government uses its own media to promote the president to Americans?

I discuss that history and my experience in the latest *Rule of Law Brief*. Watch here: https://natecharles.substack.com/p/trump-tv-and-the-smith-mundt-act

09/20/2026

I once supported the death penalty. I believed its deterrent value, although difficult to quantify, barely outweighed the undeniable inhumanity of deliberately taking a life.

My position has changed. That change did not arise from naïveté about violence or an overabundance of sympathy for violent offenders. I served three combat tours in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL officer and later served as a criminal prosecutor. I understand why particularly horrific crimes produce an entirely human demand for the most severe punishment available.

What changed was my confidence in the institutions empowered to impose it. After years of practicing law, I have seen too much human frailty—bias, ego, unreliable memory, mistaken eyewitness identifications, questionable forensic science, institutional defensiveness, and the reluctance to acknowledge error—to believe that any judicial system operated by human beings can exercise an irreversible power without eventually making an irreversible mistake.

Nidal Hasan’s possible ex*****on—the first by the U.S. military since 1961—offers an especially difficult test because his factual guilt is not seriously disputed. But laws cannot be designed only for the easiest case. Preserving the machinery of ex*****on for an obviously guilty defendant necessarily preserves it for the next defendant, whose case may depend on a mistaken witness, an unreliable expert, an overconfident prosecutor, or a biased judge.

Our judicial system is too human to impose a punishment it can never correct. As long as justice is administered by fallible people, the possibility of correcting their mistakes must remain.

Read the full essay:

https://natecharles.substack.com/p/why-i-no-longer-support-the-death-penalty

I once supported the death penalty. A decade of witnessing the fallibility of justice changed my mind.

09/19/2026

More than twenty-five years after September 11th, the principal defendants accused of planning and facilitating the attacks still have not received a completed trial. That failure did not occur because the American legal system was too protective of terrorists; it occurred because the United States tortured people in its custody, contaminated its own prosecutions, and constructed an improvised military-commission system incapable of delivering timely justice.

I write about this from an unusual perspective. I served as a Navy SEAL officer involved in JSOC operations after 9/11, later worked at the Department of Justice while many of these issues were being debated, and happened to be attending the Defense Intelligence Agency’s interrogation course when the so-called “torture memos” were released to the public.

In my new Substack essay, I explain why the plea agreements negotiated with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two co-defendants probably represented the healthiest outcome still available—and why Secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision to revoke them was shortsighted. The likely alternative is that these men will die at Guantánamo without receiving fair trials and without ever facing completed legal proceedings capable of imposing the punishment their alleged crimes warranted.

The damage also extends beyond Guantánamo. Once a nation teaches itself that constitutional restraints become optional whenever the government invokes an emergency, that precedent remains available for every future administration to adapt to new targets and purposes. As my professor Andy Popper used to remind us, “Hard cases make bad law.”

Read “Guantánamo and the Cost of Abandoning the Rule of Law” here:

https://natecharles.substack.com/p/guantanamo-and-the-cost-of-abandoning

The United States compromised its principles, contaminated its prosecutions, and may have taught future presidents that constitutional restraints become optional whenever they invoke an emergency.

09/18/2026

“Don’t take no for an answer.”

It’s one of the oldest pieces of advice in sales. And sometimes it’s good advice.

But there’s an important legal limit—particularly when you’re standing on someone else’s property.

Today’s Rule of Law Brief comes from a real-world encounter with a door-to-door roofing solicitor at my wife’s house outside Nashville. As a small-business owner myself, I understand the hustle. When I was first building my law practice, I took work wherever I could find it—including doing handyman jobs through TaskRabbit when legal work was scarce.

There’s nothing wrong with being persistent. There is something wrong with failing to recognize when persistence needs to end.

If you knock on someone’s door and they tell you they’re not interested and want you to leave, the sales pitch is over. Depending on the circumstances and applicable law, remaining after permission has been withdrawn can potentially turn an ordinary sales call into a trespass issue.

Hustle. Make the pitch. Ask for the business.

But learn when to take “no” for an answer.

Watch the full Rule of Law Brief:

https://natecharles.substack.com/p/when-dont-take-no-for-an-answer-becomes-trespassing