“Like Patel, Bondi was confirmed after promising to be guided by the facts and the law rather than the president’s grudges. “The partisanship, the weaponization, will be gone,” she declared. “America will have one tier of justice for all….There will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.”
Blanche sang the same tune during his confirmation hearing. “Politics should never play a role in the Department of Justice,” he said. “We will work to restore the American people’s faith in our justice system.”
Whether or not Bondi and Blanche meant those words when they said them, the president plainly does not share the vision they described. “They’re all guilty as hell,” Trump said in the Truth Social rant addressed to Bondi, which mentioned Adam Schiff, the not-yet-indicted Democratic senator from California (whom Trump also mentioned on Wednesday), along with Comey and James—a list to which he has now added three more names. Guilty of what? The Justice Department’s job, as Trump sees it, is to figure that out.”
“In August, President Donald Trump took over the police force in Washington, D.C., and flooded the city with officers from various federal agencies. As part of this show of force, federal agents arrested hundreds of people, while prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia—led by interim U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro—seemingly intended to throw the book at them, whether or not the punishment actually fit the crime.
This week, one of the administration’s more high-profile cases crashed and burned at trial.
In July, according to a charging document, D.C. resident Sydney Reid filmed with her phone as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took two people into custody from the city jail. When one ICE officer told Reid to move back, she “continued to move closer to the officers and continued to record the arrest.” When she didn’t reply to further commands, an officer pushed her against the wall, and FBI Agent Eugenia Bates stepped in to assist as Reid “was flailing her arms and kicking and had to be pinned against a cement wall.” During the scuffle, the indictment claims Reid “forcefully pushed [Bates’] hand against the cement wall” and “caused lacerations,” and it includes a picture of her hand with two red marks.
Reid was arrested for “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officers, a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. But when prosecutors presented the case, a grand jury declined to indict—not once or even twice, but three separate times.
This is not unique to Reid: In August, the same month, prosecutors also failed to secure a grand jury indictment against Sean Dunn, the Department of Justice employee who threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer stationed in D.C. In fact, within three weeks of Trump’s D.C. takeover, grand juries declined to return indictments at least seven times.”
“In her dissent, Judge Susan P. Graber warned that the decision “erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights.” State Attorney General Dan Rayfield criticized the decision, saying that the ruling “sets a dangerous precedent that would allow a president to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification.””
“A few scenarios are possible. One is that the U.S. really is striking narcotraffickers, and that either their families don’t know their dead relatives are narcotraffickers or are obfuscating. Another possibility is that the U.S. is striking innocent fisherman and calling them narcotraffickers. There could, of course, be a mix of smugglers and fishermen.
But the U.S. government is almost definitely acting illegally here. These people are not combatants. We don’t know if they’re affiliated with groups designated terrorist organizations. Congress has not approved these strikes, and Trump doesn’t even appear to be seeking retroactive approval. When some senators did try to check Trump via the War Powers Act, it didn’t go all that well. And rest assured that Petro, Maduro, and all other who stand to profit are going to keep milking this for all it’s worth, using Trump’s inevitable screw-ups as a means of distracting from their own misbehavior.”
“A Washington, D.C., resident who was handcuffed and detained in September for mocking National Guard soldiers by playing “The Imperial March” from Star Wars on his cellphone is suing the soldiers and police officers for their stormtrooper-like behavior.
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Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in 1987, in a ruling striking down a Houston ordinance that made it unlawful to oppose or interrupt a police officer, that “the freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”
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According to his lawsuit, O’Hara was released after 15 to 20 minutes without charges.”
“Five years after the city’s fiery 2020 protests, Portland is mostly calm. That hasn’t stopped Trump from reviving old battles, fueled by false memories and made-for-TV outrage.
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there have been rocks and sticks thrown at ICE agents and the shining of lasers into officers’ eyes. According to recent reporting in The Oregonian, there have been 29 arrests during ICE protests this year, 18 of them in June. Still, most nights see a few dozen protesters at most. Comparing this to the 2,000-plus nightly protesters in 2020 is not just apples to oranges; it’s apples to an apple-flavored sugar crystal on an Apple Jack.
This clearly doesn’t matter to Trump, who has shown little to no interest in what’s actually happening, instead relying on historical memory of the city’s fiery days to animate the proposition that “war-ravaged” Portland must be made to heel.”
“Law enforcement launched 30 tear gas canisters into Amy Hadley’s home, smashed windows, ransacked furniture, destroyed security cameras, and more. The government gave her nothing.
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An Indiana woman whose home sustained severe damage during a police raid set in motion by a faulty investigation is not legally entitled to compensation, a federal court ruled this week, in yet another case that asked what innocent people are owed when the government destroys their property in pursuit of public safety.
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Such suits primarily hinge on one question: Does the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment—which promises that the government cannot take private property without providing “just compensation”—apply when the government is exercising its “police power”?
Several federal courts have answered in the negative.
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Cases with similarly situated plaintiffs have worked their way through the courts in recent years. Leo Lech’s $580,000 family home in Greenwood Village, Colorado, was condemned and demolished after police effectively destroyed it while pursuing a suspect who had broken in and barricaded himself inside. The city gave him $5,000. Los Angeles business owner Carlos Pena saw his printing shop and equipment ruined, and his livelihood crippled, in the same scenario: A fugitive, unrelated to Pena, broke in while trying to evade police. The government declined to pay him damages, which exceed $60,000; a ruling on the matter is forthcoming from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.”
Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, says that the Portland and Oregon: mayor, governor, chief of police, and the superintendent of the highway patrol are all lying about Antifa and what is or is not going on in Portland. The mayor, governor, and multiple police leaders from the area are lying, and the Trump outsiders have the accurate understanding and are telling us the truth?