“Navarro was indicted in June 2022 after the House held him in contempt of Congress. He was convicted by a jury a year later.
The Justice Department separately sued Navarro to recover emails he sent on private accounts but related to government business. The Justice Department similarly abandoned that effort after Trump took office earlier this year.”
Although crime in DC has been down, it has still been very bad. The streets are quieter since the Feds came to town, but this isn’t a long term solution. Some residents are living in fear of the Feds, especially Hispanics, including ones here legally because the Feds will arrest people they falsely suspect are illegal.
“As is often the case with drug raids, the initial, self-serving police account proved to be inaccurate in several crucial ways. Although Thonetheva supposedly was armed and dangerous, he proved to be neither: He was unarmed when he was arrested later that night at his girlfriend’s apartment without incident (and without the deployment of a “distraction device”). Although Terrell claimed police had no reason to believe they were endangering children, even cursory surveillance could easily have discovered that fact: There were children’s toys, including a plastic wading pool, in the yard, where Bounkham frequently played with his kids. In the driveway was a minivan containing four child seats that was decorated with decals depicting a mother, a father, three little girls, and a baby boy.
Four months after the raid, a local grand jury faulted the task force that executed it for a “hurried” and “sloppy” investigation that was “not in accordance with the best practices and procedures.” Ten months after that, a federal grand jury charged Nikki Autry, the deputy who obtained the no-knock warrant for the raid, with lying in her affidavit. “Without her false statements, there was no probable cause to search the premises for drugs or to make the arrest,” said John Horn, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. “And in this case, the consequences of the unlawful search were tragic.”
The negligence and misconduct discovered after the paramilitary operation that burned and mutilated Bou Bou Phonesavanh are common features of “botched” drug raids that injure or kill people, including nationally notorious incidents such as the 2019 deaths of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas in Houston and the 2020 death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. But beyond the specific failures detailed in the wake of such outrages is the question of what these operations are supposed to accomplish even when they go as planned. In the vain hope of preventing substance abuse, drug prohibition authorizes police conduct that otherwise would be readily recognized as criminal, including violent home invasions that endanger innocent bystanders as well as suspects and police officers.
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what are police trying to achieve when they mount an operation like this one? As the grand jury implicitly conceded, busting one dealer has no measurable impact on the availability of drugs: If police nab someone like Thonetheva, someone else will surely take his place. But from 1995 through 2023, police in the United States arrested people for producing or selling illegal drugs millions of times. Did that massive undertaking make a dent in the drug supply big enough to reduce consumption?
Survey data suggest it did not. The federal government estimated that 25 percent of Americans 12 or older used illegal drugs in 2023, up from 11 percent in 1995. Meanwhile, the age-adjusted overdose death rate rose more than tenfold.
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SWAT teams, originally intended for special situations involving hostages, active shooters, or riots, today are routinely used to execute drug searches.
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Even when drug raids do not technically involve SWAT teams, they frequently feature “dynamic entry” in the middle of the night. Although that approach is supposed to reduce the potential for violence through surprise and a show of overwhelming force, it often has the opposite effect. As the Habersham County grand jury noted, these operations are inherently dangerous, especially since armed men breaking into a home after the residents have gone to bed can easily be mistaken for criminals, with potentially deadly consequences.
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How often does this sort of thing happen? There is no way to know. Prosecutors, judges, and jurors tend to discount the protestations of drug defendants, especially if they have prior convictions, and automatically accept the testimony of cops
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The underlying problem, of course, is the decision to treat that exchange of drugs for money as a crime in the first place. By authorizing the use of force in response to peaceful transactions among consenting adults, prohibition sets the stage for the senseless violence that periodically shocks Americans who are otherwise inclined to support the war on drugs. But like the grand jurors in Habersham County, they typically do not question the basic morality of an enterprise that predictably leads to such outrages.”
“”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.””
“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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.
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.””