Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Trump signed pardons for 23 anti-abortion protesters who were convicted of illegally blockading a reproductive health clinic in Washington, D.C.”
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/24/trump-pardons-anti-abortion-activists
“Almost four years ago to the day, the FBI entered U.S. Private Vaults (USPV), a storage business in Beverly Hills, and raided the safe-deposit boxes there, pocketing tens of millions of dollars in cash, valuables, and personal items. Among those owners was Linda Martin, from whom agents took $40,200—her life savings—despite that she had not been charged with a crime.
Those charges would never come. Although USPV itself was ultimately indicted in federal court, the government had no case against unknowing customers like Martin, in a scheme that attorneys have compared to seizing property from individual apartment units because the tenants’ landlord was suspected of criminal wrongdoing. At USPV, the agency confiscated over $100 million in valuables from a slew of such people via civil forfeiture, the legal process that allows the government to take people’s property without having to prove its owners committed any crime.”
https://reason.com/2025/03/20/the-fbi-seized-this-womans-life-savings-without-telling-her-why/
“Corral’s reckless chase was in pursuit of someone suspected of soliciting prostitution. The whole business was kicked off by the suspect offering to pay an undercover female cop posing as an adult sex worker.
Police put in danger the lives of countless people in order to arrest someone for trying to have consensual but non-state-sanctioned sex.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/08/texas-cop-chases-prostitution-suspect-causes-car-accident-gets-immunity/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/jack-smith-special-counsel-report-takeaways-00198252
FBI agents being fired for taking part in legitimate and important investigations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QdzJXwOSmQ
“the Department of Justice moved to fire several senior FBI executives — including the head of the Washington field office. Additionally, DOJ is demanding a list of FBI personnel who investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.”
…
“I asked two scholars of FBI history if there was any precedent for this. Both said no. Agents can be fired for corruption or incompetence after a review, but a mass firing for participating in an investigation is unheard of, they said.”
…
“The firing of top officials could make the FBI less effective in critical areas such as counterterrorism. And mass firings of FBI staff involved in the January 6 investigation would serve as a warning to bureau employees about what happens if they investigate Trump’s political allies, corroding the independence the agency depends on to enforce federal law.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/398025/the-logoff-donald-trumps-fbi-purge-law-doj
“Less than 1% of immigrants deported last fiscal year were kicked out of the U.S. for crimes other than immigration violations.”
…
“To deport millions of “criminals,” Trump would have to consider all undocumented immigrants as criminals. But being in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal one.”
…
“Those millions would have to include agricultural, construction and service workers, students and others who are unauthorized to be in the U.S. but have no criminal backgrounds, according to legal specialists and an Axios review of federal immigration data.”
…
“”There are not millions of people with criminal records to deport,” Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago, tells Axios.”
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/27/undocumented-immigrants-crime-deportations-trump
Kash Patel isn’t qualified to be Director of the FBI, but he is a Trump loyalist. Trump already fired one Director for the purpose of protecting himself and his allies from a legitimate investigation. Will Patel be focused on good police work, or abusing the powers of the FBI to serve Trump?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBpWjz9Y8M
““No. 1, he had the legal authority to do it,” Graham pointed out. “But I fear that you will get more violence. Pardoning the people who went into the Capitol and beat up a police officer, violently, I think, was a mistake because it seems to suggest that’s an OK thing to do.” Graham made similar comments to CNN’s Dana Bash, saying the pardons “sent the wrong signal.”
Members of Trump’s loyal base flipped out over Graham’s mild chiding of the returned POTUS. They slammed the senator as a “snake” and a “RINO,” or Republican In Name Only.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-mistake_n_6797340de4b01edab1f9223a
“Trump’s executive order not only will revive capital punishment at the federal level, but attempt to expand the death penalty by directly supplying drugs to states and overturning Supreme Court precedents limiting the death penalty to crimes involving murder.
The executive order instructs the attorney general to “take all necessary and lawful action to ensure that each state that allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injection.”
The death penalty has been in long-term decline nationally due to unrelenting legal challenges, governor-imposed moratoriums, and difficulties acquiring the drugs used in lethal injections.
Where the death penalty remains active, states have turned to extreme secrecy and novel methods to keep it going. They’ve passed new laws hiding their supply chains and methods, barred witnesses from execution chambers, imported drugs from shady overseas pharmacies, and paid cash to avoid paper trails. Despite all this, states haven’t been able to hide numerous botched executions that resulted.
In 2023 Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs paused executions in the state and hired a former federal magistrate judge to investigate its death penalty practices. However, Hobbs fired the investigator before he could release his report after he concluded that the sloppy injection protocols were not a viable method of execution. Arizona’s supply of lethal injection drugs is currently sitting in unmarked jars and are possibly expired.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/21/trumps-death-penalty-executive-order-aims-to-expand-execution/