Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Trump’s clash with the courts is delaying trials in New Jersey and could drag on for months
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/26/trumps-courts-new-jersey-habba-00527352
“”A lot of the problems with criminal justice in Washington lie in the federal courts where the city’s major prosecutions happen,” writes Josh Barro on Substack, imploring his fellow Democrats to be less dismissive about crime and to offer workable alternatives to Trump’s show-of-force plan. “There are too many judicial vacancies, and the U.S. Attorney’s office has been declining too many prosecutions, meaning too many criminals go free and too many miscreants believe they will get away with crime. Fixing those prosecutorial problems is a federal responsibility—Democrats should say that if Trump wants to be tough on crime, he can start by making sure prosecutors are bringing enough cases and there are enough judges to hear them.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/is-trumps-d-c-policing-doing-anything/
“Sean Dunn—who, at the time, was an employee for the Justice Department—threw a Subway sandwich at a cop and was subsequently charged with felony assault of a federal law enforcement officer.
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the federal government sent “20 police officers to [Dunn’s] home” to rearrest him on a federal warrant
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The government’s disproportionate response to this offense epitomizes why Trump’s plan appears to be, at least for now, more political theater than a real solutions-oriented approach.
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one murder is still one too many, and some neighborhoods—primarily Wards 7 and 8 across the Anacostia River—disproportionately struggle to get crime under control. Police clearance rates, meanwhile, are abysmal: Law enforcement in 2024 made an arrest in just 60 percent of homicide cases and 31 percent of non-fatal shootings. In other words, if you kill or shoot someone, there’s a really good chance you’ll get away with it. (That problem, however, is a national one.)
Put differently, there’s work to be done. Crime is a serious problem. And serious problems demand serious solutions: where resources are targeted and used effectively to deter—and solve—crimes that violently infringe on the rights of others. It is not serious, then, to use resources to patrol Georgetown, one of the safest neighborhoods in D.C., or the National Mall, where crime is a rarity, while the highest-crime neighborhoods have reportedly not yet seen an increased law enforcement presence. Or to send nearly two dozen government agents to rearrest someone accused of throwing a sandwich, instead of just letting him turn himself in for his appearance in federal court.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/15/the-government-sent-20-police-officers-with-riot-gear-to-rearrest-d-c-sandwich-thrower-says-attorney/
Trump and Republicans for years lied and exaggerated about Democrats using the justice system against them. Now, in full honesty, Trump repeatedly uses the justice system against people who criticize him. U.S. democracy is on shaky grounds.
“President Donald Trump threatened to open an investigation targeting Chris Christie over the former New Jersey governor’s decade-old “Bridgegate” scandal after Christie criticized Trump on television earlier in the day.
The threat came just days after the FBI searched the home and office of another Trump critic, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, as part of an open criminal investigation. Trump lashed out at the former friend-turned-foe Christie in an evening Aug. 24 post on Truth Social, remarking that he just watched “Sloppy Chris Christie” on ABC’s This Week.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/president-trump-threatens-chris-christie-024621347.html
“The initial images of bored Drug Enforcement Administration agents strolling past perplexed joggers on the National Mall were more clownish than carceral. Local street resistance to the occupation was limited to a drunk guy throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
But inevitably, as this operation has dragged on, things have taken a darker turn. The sandwich-thrower was overcharged and rearrested in a needless, publicized show of force.
Masked federal agents have set up an unconstitutional checkpoint, violently arrested at least one delivery driver, and filmed themselves tearing down a banner protesting their presence in the city. Each day, more and more National Guard members pour into the capital.
The conversation about Trump’s declared crime emergency has understandably, albeit unhelpfully, provoked a lot of discourse about how safe D.C. is, whether a federalized local police department will make it safer, whether federal agents are being deployed in the right places and going after the right crimes, and on and on.
This incessant crime conversation has distracted from just how un-American Trump’s show of force in the nation’s capital is.
Uniformed troops and masked federal agents doing routine law enforcement at the command of the president is just not how we do things in the United States.
The entire point of the U.S. Constitution is to prevent the federal government from becoming a despotism, and one of the primary ways it does this is by limiting how many men with guns it has at its disposal.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/20/trumps-d-c-goon-squads-are-un-american/
FBI raided John Bolton’s home in search of classified documents. Trump does not like Bolton because Bolton told the truth about Trump’s problems. This is potentially a huge abuse of power to harass someone who criticized the president. But maybe it’s legit, we’ll have to keep an eye on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC-ZyC-lc3Y
It looks like yet another political use of the criminal justice system by the Trump administration, and yet another dent in U.S. democracy.
“The federal officer who arrested the mayor of New Jersey’s largest city outside an immigration detention center in May suggested that he was making the arrest at the direction of the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche, according to law enforcement body camera footage described in a new court filing.
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Witness accounts and other video footage taken that day showed the mayor had been allowed inside a gated area by a guard, stood there peacefully for the better part of an hour and left the gated area when federal agents threatened him with arrest. That day, Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) told POLITICO that he’d witnessed an agent inside the gated area talking on the phone with someone who told the agent to arrest Baraka, who by the time of the call was outside the gate. McIver gave a similar account in a press conference at the time.
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Less than two weeks later, federal prosecutors dropped a trespassing charge against Baraka. But a federal judge chided the effort to charge him in the first place. Magistrate Judge André M. Espinosa called it an “embarrassing retraction” that “suggests a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power.””
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/18/newark-mayor-arrest-bodycam-footage-todd-blanche-00513734
Trump and his supporters had spread falsehoods and exaggerated that Democrats were using the justice system against Trump, then Trump gets into power and straightforwardly uses the justice system to prosecute Democrats. This hypocrisy is one of the many reasons Trump is damaging U.S. democracy and basic justice in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlh7j8GeWB8
“An investigation by ProPublica has revealed nearly 50 instances of officers shattering windows while conducting immigration-related arrests in the last six months. Although not comprehensive and hard to verify without government statistics, only eight occurrences were found in the decade preceding Trump’s return to office. The uptick in window destruction coincides with growing uneasiness around how federal agents conduct themselves—and how aggressive behavior may even be rewarded within the Trump administration.
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American citizens have also been implicated during these forceful arrests. In a since-deleted Facebook Live video, agents pulled over Jennifer Gribben, a U.S. citizen, and her boyfriend Martin Rivera (ProPublica did not note his citizenship status), and told them they were looking for a fugitive named Garcia. Officers then smashed the car’s window to arrest them. Gribben said in a Facebook post that she was hit in the head by officers and that Rivera suffered a broken arm. She was later charged with resisting arrest and third-degree assault, to which she pleaded not guilty.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/01/shattering-norms-federal-immigration-agents-arent-afraid-to-smash-your-car-window/
“A police officer who had a woman jailed for over two years on false charges in connection with a bogus sex-trafficking ring cannot be sued, a court confirmed.., because she was acting under color of federal law—a puzzling reminder of the inverse relationship between power and accountability in government.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/01/a-cop-lied-fabricated-a-sex-trafficking-case-and-jailed-a-teen-on-false-charges-and-still-cant-be-sued/