Journalist Don Lemon was taken into custody on Thursday night in connection to a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to his attorney.
I had been reading elsewhere that the Justice Department had already gone to two Federal judges to press charges against him, only to be denied. I am interested to see whether they bothered a third time, or simply took him into custody without the paperwork, because they could.
They did some wildly unprecedented legal maneuvers to try to get these warrants.
Went to magistrate duty judge, who approved 3/8 warrants.
Went to that judge’s manager, Chief Judge Schlitz. He didn’t outright deny the warrants, he just wanted to take a few days to think about it.
That wasn’t good enough. They went to the judge-manager’s manager, the 8th circuit court of appeals. In a sealed emergency petition for writ of mandamus.
Judge Schlitz was required to defend himself in this mandamus action with two hours of notice and he wasn’t even allowed to read the papers.
Since the mandamus action failed, it seems likely that the government has gotten a grand jury indictment. Which process bypasses judges nearly entirely.
Note that it’s pretty normal to get indictments first in the federal courts (before the current times), because if the feds arrest someone on a complaint, they have a 30 day deadline to get that indictment. If they don’t arrest first, there’s no deadline and they can retry as many times as they want.
So normally the feds only use complaints when they need to get someone off the street urgently. These feds use complaints because they only care about splashing the perp walk on social media. They don’t care what happens to the case after that.
They’ve had more than those two failures in the judicial system, they’ve been hammered by their own judges over and over again recently, just stuff that never gets publicity.
They probably know that they’re going to face massive legal repercussions for this action, and will never get it to any kind of trial, but they’re just trying to send a message.
They’re bad at it though, they don’t know how to fascism properly, so they’re going to have to release Lemon and then claim to have some kind of power after being shot down by more legal institutions.
When other dictatorships do these actions, they usually have the legal system locked-down already. Don’t let the corruption of the Supreme Court make you think that the entire country’s judicial branch is cooked, the USA is HUGE and has a LOT of power in states.
You think? Their track record with Grand Juries is not the best. They tried to indict the sandwich guy 2 times through a grand jury and failed, had to downgrade the charges to misdemeanors since don’t require a grand jury and then the jury in the misdemeanor trial acquitted the guy.
My guess is they used an administrative warrant, those have no real oversight and they’ve been using them a lot.
An administrative warrant is a warrant obtained from a judge by an administrative body to search for violations of administrative rules and regulations. While similar to a criminal warrant, an administrative warrant requires a lower standard of probable cause to be granted. Administrative warrants are governed by 49 USC §32707.
That’s what reporting seems to indicate. I’m fairly shocked they managed to get a jury to go along with this. The charges look extremely flimsy on multiple levels.
I had been reading elsewhere that the Justice Department had already gone to two Federal judges to press charges against him, only to be denied. I am interested to see whether they bothered a third time, or simply took him into custody without the paperwork, because they could.
Who’s gonna stop them?
They did some wildly unprecedented legal maneuvers to try to get these warrants.
Since the mandamus action failed, it seems likely that the government has gotten a grand jury indictment. Which process bypasses judges nearly entirely.
Note that it’s pretty normal to get indictments first in the federal courts (before the current times), because if the feds arrest someone on a complaint, they have a 30 day deadline to get that indictment. If they don’t arrest first, there’s no deadline and they can retry as many times as they want.
So normally the feds only use complaints when they need to get someone off the street urgently. These feds use complaints because they only care about splashing the perp walk on social media. They don’t care what happens to the case after that.
They’ve had more than those two failures in the judicial system, they’ve been hammered by their own judges over and over again recently, just stuff that never gets publicity.
They probably know that they’re going to face massive legal repercussions for this action, and will never get it to any kind of trial, but they’re just trying to send a message.
They’re bad at it though, they don’t know how to fascism properly, so they’re going to have to release Lemon and then claim to have some kind of power after being shot down by more legal institutions.
When other dictatorships do these actions, they usually have the legal system locked-down already. Don’t let the corruption of the Supreme Court make you think that the entire country’s judicial branch is cooked, the USA is HUGE and has a LOT of power in states.
They may have gotten an indictment through a grand jury.
You think? Their track record with Grand Juries is not the best. They tried to indict the sandwich guy 2 times through a grand jury and failed, had to downgrade the charges to misdemeanors since don’t require a grand jury and then the jury in the misdemeanor trial acquitted the guy.
My guess is they used an administrative warrant, those have no real oversight and they’ve been using them a lot.
Or we just ignore laws…
Wouldn’t be the first time for this administration.
Or the second, or the ninth, or the 73rd, or the 512th, or the 2861st…
That’s what reporting seems to indicate. I’m fairly shocked they managed to get a jury to go along with this. The charges look extremely flimsy on multiple levels.
It’s a grand jury. A prosecutor could get one of them to indicate a ham sandwich.
This ain’t even a ham sandwich though…