>"So how did this go down, in your mind? The President of Hobby Lobby got his eyes on some shiny objects, then was told to make the check out to Al-Qaeda, and decided that it was worth funding terrorism to get the items he'd been lusting after?"
Almost. From the BBC article and mentioned elsewhere:
"But prosecutors said the company was warned by an expert that such items from Iraq were likely to have been looted from archaeological sites and needed to be carefully verified."
and
"Prosecutors said the purchase "was fraught with red flags", and the company never met the dealer, working with a middleman instead, and making the payments to seven private bank accounts."[1]
Any legal counsel or consultants that Hobby Lobby would have used in attempting such a transaction would have apprised them of these red flags. The provenance of the items and the legitimacy of the sale would also have been surfaced with even a modicum of proper due diligence.
David Green Hobby Lobby's CEO and the person who oversaw this is worth over 5 billion dollars. It's unlikely they he didn't have the resources to properly vet such a significant transaction.[2]
Its worth noting this glaring excerpt from the recent Atlantic article:
"Law-enforcement officials report that in 2010, Hobby Lobby’s president, Steve Green, visited the United Arab Emirates with an antiquities consultant to inspect more than 5,548 artifacts. The objects—which were precious and collectively worth millions of dollars—“were displayed informally,” the complaint stated, “spread on the floor, arranged in layers on a coffee table, and packed loosely in cardboard boxes, in many instances with little or no protective material between them.” They included cuneiform tablets, which display writing used in ancient Mesopotamia, and clay bullae, or balls of clay printed with ancient seals."[3]
>"Also, would you arrest someone who purchased an item at a yard sale that had been stolen at one point? "
That's a total straw man. To compare buying an item at a neighbors yards sale to buying a large quantity of antiquities from a war torn country for millions of dollar from people you never met is a joke.
The "aww shucks we didn't know" bit of false naivete is insulting. The issue of looted antiquities from the region is not exactly an esoteric subject. A google search using the terms "stolen antiquities war Iraq" shows 3.4 million results.
What's more likely is that Steve Green's legal council explained the downside risk to him was that if caught he would be slapped with a fine in the low millions. A slap on the wrist for someone of his outsized wealth.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40516932
]2 https://www.forbes.com/profile/david-green/
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/hobby-l...