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.
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 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.