Tag: prosecutors

‘Donald Trump’s army’: Prosecutors close seditious conspiracy case against Proud Boys leaders

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U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves and Criminal Division Chief John Crabb, among other high-ranking DOJ officials, were on hand for the closing arguments, underscoring the significance of the case to the government.
A jury that has heard the case for nearly four months is expected to begin deliberating Tuesday, after each of the five defendants presents a closing argument as well.
Mulroe urged jurors to convict former Proud Boys Chair Enrique Tarrio and four associates — Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola — of seditious conspiracy, a plan to forcibly prevent the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden, as well as a host of other federal crimes.
Tarrio, prosecutors say, ignited the conspiracy on Dec. 19, 2020, hours after Trump had urged his supporters to descend on D.C. for a “wild” protest against the election results. Tarrio was concerned that the group — which had already mobilized to participate in two pro-Trump marches in Washington over the prior two months — had been undisciplined, leading to violent street clashes that left some of their members injured.
So he formed a new Proud Boys chapter that he dubbed the “Ministry of Self-Defense,” featuring only handpicked members whom leaders could trust to follow orders. Prosecutors say this group, which grew to several hundred members nationwide, became the “fighting force” that was the backbone of the Proud Boys’ presence on Jan. 6. That decision by Tarrio belies the defense’s claim, Mulroe argued, that the Proud Boys were merely a glorified men’s club, where members goaded each other and used overheated language but did little more than drink and talk.
“You want to call this a drinking club? You want to call this a men’s fraternal organization? Let’s call this what it is,” Mulroe said. “The Ministry of Self-Defense was a violent gang that came together to use force against its enemies.”
At the heart of the case is the group’s symbiotic relationship with Trump. Prosecutors showed how Trump’s debate-stage call in September 2020 for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” became a slogan for the group and fueled recruitment efforts in the months before Jan. 6. And when Trump called for a “wild” protest on Jan. 6, the Proud Boys saw it as a call to arms that they were prepared to answer.
“They clearly believed their club was so much better off with Donald Trump in the White House,” Mulroe said.

Much of the government’s closing argument reconstructed the Proud Boys’ descent on the Capitol on Jan. 6. Just two days earlier, Tarrio was arrested for burning a Black Lives Matter flag during the December pro-Trump rally in Washington — an arrest he saw coming due to a longstanding relationship with a D.C. police lieutenant. So on the day of the attack, Nordean assembled hundreds of Proud Boys at the Washington Monument early in the morning.
Rather than attend Trump’s long-planned speech nearby, Nordean marched the group to the Capitol, arriving just before 1 p.m., while Trump was still speaking. Mulroe emphasized that the Proud Boys’ arrival turned a relatively placid crowd into a rabid one. Soon, Biggs would huddle briefly with a member of the crowd, Ryan Samsel, who would just moments later charge at the police lines and provoke the first breach of Capitol grounds.
Members of the Proud Boys march followed the mob across the toppled barricades and arrived at a second police line, where Biggs and Nordean helped the mob disassemble a black metal fence, Mulroe said. As the mob amassed at the foot of the Capitol, police began to launch crowd control munitions. Amid the chaos that ensued, Pezzola helped wrest free a riot shield from a Capitol Police officer that he quickly carted away. After another Proud Boy, Daniel Scott, helped instigate a breach of the final police line between the mob and the Capitol, Pezzola rushed through the opening and reached the base of the building, where he used the shield to shatter a Senate-wing window.
“The Capitol Building would be breached in more places than you can count,” Mulroe said. “Pezzola was the first.”
The prosecutors’ close was the government’s first bid to stitch together months of complex and often disjointed testimony caused by numerous delays and disruptions to the trial. Mulroe contended that two of the defendants who testified — Rehl and Pezzola — lied on the stand as they defended their conduct. And he highlighted newly discovered evidence that Rehl appeared to discharge pepper spray at police as they fended off the mob.
Pezzola, Nordena, Biggs and Rehl all entered the Capitol while Tarrio — barred from D.C. due to his arrest two days earlier — monitored events from a hotel in Baltimore. Once inside, they milled around with the crowd until reinforcements helped police eject the mob from the Capitol.
“They went into that building like soldiers into a conquered city,” Mulroe said, noting that Pezzola took a selfie video while smoking a cigar and Biggs grabbed items from a Senate convenience store.
“This is a national disgrace,” Mulroe said. “To them, this was mission accomplished. They had done it. They had stopped the certification of the election.”
Defense attorneys have long contended that prosecutors have exaggerated the Proud Boys’ role on Jan. 6, turning their heated — but First Amendment-protected — rhetoric into the basis for grave criminal charges. There was no direct evidence that the Proud Boys leaders had hashed out a plan of action to attack the Capitol, they say.
When it was his turn, Nordean’s attorney Nick Smith said prosecutors spent the bulk of their case “manipulating” the jury to hate the defendants, in part to cover up holes in their case. He said they repeatedly referenced Trump and tried to link him to the Proud Boys to stoke the jury’s anger. They also repeatedly played videos and displayed images of violence caused by others at the Capitol, he said.
“Like the director of an action movie, the government wants you to feel this way,” Smith said. “It’s loud and high octane. … It’s guilty by association.”
Smith sought to inject doubt into the jury’s mind about the case the government laid out. Key prosecution witnesses had cut generous plea deals with the Justice Department. At times, Nordean, Biggs and others appeared to make comments or take actions that were contrary to any purported plan to go inside the Capitol and stop the transfer of power.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Smith repeatedly intoned, describing the defendants as “confused, unarmed men walking around the mall. … This case cannot make these men responsible for everything other people did on January 6.”
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#Donald #Trumps #army #Prosecutors #close #seditious #conspiracy #case #Proud #Boys #leaders
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 24, 2023
Prosecutors seek lengthiest Jan. 6 sentence yet for rioter who pinned officer in Capitol doorway

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McCaughey’s restraint of D.C. Police Officer Daniel Hodges in a Capitol doorway is one of the most recognizable and horrifying images of the violence that day. McCaughey’s restraint of Hodges lasted more than two minutes while other rioters disarmed the officer, removed his gas mask and ignored his screams or help. Images of McCaughey face-to-face with Hodges became a symbol of the brutality of the Jan. 6 riot. It occurred in the Capitol’s lower west terrace tunnel, where many of the most violent confrontations that day took place.
“The defendant’s actions on January 6 show an absolute disregard for the rule of law coupled with a willingness to incite and engage in violence,” Paschall wrote. “The nature and circumstances of this defendant’s crimes weigh heavily towards a significant term of incarceration.”
U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden convicted McCaughey of nine charges — including three counts of assaulting police and obstruction of Congress’ Jan. 6 proceedings — at a bench trial in September 2022. He has characterized McCaughey’s actions as particularly horrific, even compared to other rioters who participated in some of the same violent attacks. But McFadden has also repeatedly rejected prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations, often disagreeing with their calculations and proposed enhancements. Prosecutors indicated in their sentencing memo that they anticipate him disagreeing with them once again.
Still, DOJ’s recommendation is the second-steepest it has made in any Jan. 6 case so far, trailing only the 17.5-year sentence it recommended for Thomas Webster, a former New York Police Department officer who brutally assaulted an officer on the front lines of the riot. Webster is currently serving a 10-year sentence, the longest of any handed down to a Jan. 6 defendant so far, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta. Mehta viewed Webster’s conduct as particularly egregious and also concluded that Webster lied on the stand when he testified about it.
The recommendation for McCaughey surpasses the 15-year sentence the Justice Department recommended for Guy Reffitt, the first Jan. 6 rioter convicted by a jury. Reffitt, a militia member, planned for violence with associates ahead of Jan. 6, carried a firearm and engaged with police in a lengthy standoff that enabled the mob to start amassing at the base of the Capitol. Ultimately, the judge in his case, U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich, sentenced Reffitt to just over seven years in prison.
Prosecutors say McCaughey, like Webster, was dishonest when he testified in his own trial last year. In addition to his lack of candor on the stand, prosecutors say McCaughey’s recommended sentence was influenced by the brutality of his attack against Hodges and a second officer, Henry Foulds — who McCaughey struck with a riot shield as the officer tried to close the doors to the tunnel.
McCaughey, for his part, is arguing for a sentence of a year in prison, contending that his crimes on Jan. 6 were an “aberration” in an otherwise law-abiding life.
“Although his conduct is indeed serious, it represents the only legal transgression this hard-working person has ever committed,” his attorney, Dennis Boyle wrote in a 25-page sentencing memo. “It is also significant to note that his actions were not motivated by any desire for personal financial gain or any other type of benefit. Rather, his actions, which he himself admits were reprehensible, were motivated by a misunderstanding as to the facts surrounding the 2020 election.”

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#Prosecutors #seek #lengthiest #Jan #sentence #rioter #pinned #officer #Capitol #doorway
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 8, 2023
Swiss prosecutors open probe into UBS takeover of Credit Suisse

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Swiss prosecutors have opened an investigation into possible illegal activity in connection with government support for UBS’s rushed takeover of Credit Suisse.
The two banks agreed to merge in March as part of an emergency deal targeted at avoiding a national financial crisis that could have had a knock-on effect globally.
“The Federal Prosecutor’s office wants to proactively fulfill its mission and responsibility to contribute to a clean Swiss financial center and has set up monitoring in order to take immediate action in any situation that falls within its field of activity,” the authority said in a statement.
Last month, Zurich-based UBS was forced by Swiss authorities to take over its longtime domestic rival Credit Suisse in a deal that creates a new bank.
The prosecutor’s statement said that the intention of the probe was to “analyze and identify any criminal offenses” associated with the deal, adding that various bodies had been contacted to provide clarifications and information.
The deal has been unpopular locally and on Sunday, Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger reported that the new entity could slash jobs by up to 30 percent.
“If we had done nothing, [Credit Suisse] shares would have been worthless on Monday and the shareholders would have gone home empty-handed,” Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter said last weekend in justifying the deal.

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#Swiss #prosecutors #open #probe #UBS #takeover #Credit #Suisse
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

April 1, 2023
Prosecutors: Bankman-Fried bribed Chinese officials in 2021

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With the new charge alleging conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Bankman-Fried now faces 13 criminal counts that include securities fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitter. His criminal trial is scheduled to begin in October.
Bankman-Fried’s spokesperson declined comment. His legal team did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Prior to FTX’s bankruptcy in November and his eventual arrest in the Bahamas, Bankman-Fried controlled one of the most powerful networks of crypto exchanges and trading firms in the world. He’d also cultivated an image as an honest broker among Washington policymakers and media members, dispensing hundreds of millions of dollars in political contributions, philanthropic donations and grants.
FTX’s bankruptcy and Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial derailed ongoing efforts in Congress and within federal agencies to develop a rulebook for the nascent cryptoasset industry, which has since faced a broad crackdown on practices that industry skeptics say have harmed consumers and investors.
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#Prosecutors #BankmanFried #bribed #Chinese #officials
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 28, 2023
Stormy Daniels speaks to New York prosecutors as possible Trump indictment looms

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A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment.
Daniels’ meeting with prosecutors comes after a flurry of activity signaling an indictment of the former president is likely imminent.
Earlier this week, the grand jury examining evidence in the inquiry heard from Trump’s one-time attorney Michael Cohen, he confirmed to POLITICO. Cohen facilitated the payment to Daniels and has said in court that he paid hush money to Trump’s accuser “in coordination with and at the direction of” the former president. Trump has denied the Daniels affair.
And an attorney for Trump, Joe Tacopina, said prosecutors had offered the former president an opportunity to go before the grand jury, but that Trump had no plans to do so. Prosecutors typically offer a potential defendant the chance to speak to the grand jury near the conclusion of their inquiry.
Prosecutors are weighing a felony charge against Trump related to how his real estate company, the Trump Organization, reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 payment. Federal prosecutors, who charged Cohen in a separate case in 2018, said the firm falsely recorded the reimbursement payments as legal expenses. Cohen pleaded guilty in that case.
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#Stormy #Daniels #speaks #York #prosecutors #Trump #indictment #looms
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 16, 2023
Prosecutors say newly aired Chansley footage paints misleading portrait of his Jan. 6 conduct

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“Prior to that time, Chansley had, amongst other acts, breached a police line at 2:09 p.m. with the mob, entered the Capitol less than one minute behind Pezzola during the initial breach of the building, and faced off with members of the U.S. Capitol Police for more than thirty minutes in front of the Senate Chamber doors while elected officials, including the Vice President of the United States, were fleeing from the chamber,” they continued.
The footage aired by Carlson earlier this month showed Chansley walking through Capitol hallways accompanied by police officers, who at some moments appeared to be facilitating his movements — even opening a Senate-wing door for him at one point — and certainly weren’t trying to subdue him. But the clips didn’t indicate what time of day the footage came from or any of the context about the interactions.
Nevertheless, the episode — billed by Carlson as a refutation of the prevailing perception of the events of Jan. 6 — ignited a firestorm among allies of former President Donald Trump, who have long sought to downplay the Jan. 6 riot and the threat it posed to the transfer of power. Separately, Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, came out in favor of freeing Chansley over the weekend. Chansley’s current attorney, William Shipley, has indicated he intends to take a “creative” action to aid his client’s legal fight.
But Carlson omitted footage of Chansley’s entry into the Capitol, which came amid the earliest wave of rioters overrunning police, as well as footage from a lengthy standoff with police outside the Senate, and Chansley’s own trip inside the Senate chamber, where he stood on the Senate dais, recited a prayer and wrote an ominous message to then-Vice President Mike Pence: “It’s only a matter of time. Justice is coming.”
“In sum, Chansley was not some passive, chaperoned observer of events for the roughly hour that he was unlawfully inside the Capitol,” prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors emphasized that U.S. Capitol Police officers had been overwhelmed at that point in the riot, resorting to triage to minimize the damage of the riot.
“For a period that afternoon, those defending the Capitol were in triage mode — trying to deal with the most violent element of those unlawfully present, holding those portions of the Capitol that had not yet been seized by rioters, and protecting those Members and staffers who were still trapped in the Capitol,” prosecutors wrote.
Chansley’s defenders have noted that he garnered outsize attention for his role in the riot, in part by his outlandish attire — he strode shirtless through the Capitol, wearing a horned helmet and full face paint, while carrying a flagpole with a sharp finial that led the judge in his case to conclude he was carrying a dangerous weapon.

Chansley is not accused of violence and has contended that he had positive interactions with officers inside the Capitol and encouraged other rioters not to loot the building. He became one of the earliest rioters to plead guilty to obstruction after about eight months in pretrial detention — which was ordered by a magistrate judge in Arizona and upheld by D.C.-based U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth. Lamberth sentenced him to 41 months in prison in November 2021.
Chansley is currently incarcerated and slated for release in July.
Chansley’s allies say the footage aired by Carlson might have changed the case against him. In Sunday’s filing, however, the Justice Department contended that it had shipped all but 10 seconds of the footage to Chansley’s attorney by Sept. 24, 2021 — about three weeks after Chansley pleaded guilty but more than a month before his sentencing.
Pezzola’s defense seized on the flap over the Carlson footage to urge the dismissal of the entire case against the Proud Boys, contending that it proved there had been prosecutorial misconduct and that the crowd inside the Capitol was nonviolent.
“Once tethered to facts and reality, defendant Pezzola’s arguments quickly unravel,” the Justice Department wrote.
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#Prosecutors #newly #aired #Chansley #footage #paints #misleading #portrait #Jan #conduct
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 13, 2023
Proud Boys prosecutors push back on claims of misconduct after discovery of internal FBI messages

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However, the defense lawyers said the filtered messages included significant and suspicious exchanges that appeared to relate to the seditious conspiracy case against their clients.
In one exchange, Miller and another agent discussed learning of defendant Zachary Rehl’s plan to take the case to trial, in part because they had reviewed messages between him and his attorney at the time, Jonathon Moseley. The defense lawyers said it appeared, on its face, to be a breach of attorney-client privilege.
The lawyers also cited several other exchanges they viewed as fishy: a message from one agent asking that his name be edited out of a report concerning a meeting with a confidential human source; an FBI agent’s opinion about the strength of the Proud Boys conspiracy case; and a message from an agent discussing an order to destroy 338 pieces of evidence in an unidentified case.
Defense attorneys said they should be permitted to grill Miller about each of these topics when the trial resumes this week. The hidden messages sparked an uproar on Thursday, when Nicholas Smith, attorney for defendant Ethan Nordean, began questioning Miller about them. Prosecutors objected and later indicated they believed there had been a “spill” of classified information in the messages — a claim the defense lawyers worried was a pretense to shut down their review. U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly called the trial off for the day Friday to give the Justice Department and the defense a chance to clarify the issues.
In an 18-page filing Sunday, prosecutors went through each topic cited by the defense lawyers and suggested their claims lacked merit — and were not part of any attempt to withhold relevant evidence in the case.
The request for an edit to the report concerning the confidential human source, for example, was a “clerical” matter in which an agent who had been promoted to a supervisory role requested to be removed from the report because he was no longer handling the source — a request that was ultimately rescinded, prosecutors said. The comment from an agent about destroying evidence pertained to an unrelated “20-year-old multi codefendant trial” that had concluded long ago, the Justice Department attorneys said.
“As the Court knows, disposal of evidence is a routine part of the lifecycle of every criminal case,” the prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors also dismissed the notion that Miller and other agents had accessed privileged attorney-client information.

“She did no such thing,” they argued, “both because any privilege was waived and, in any event, even assuming … that the email to which the other agent was referring contained privileged information, no privileged information was passed Special Agent Miller.”
The exchange between Rehl and his attorney that the agents discussed was sent between Rehl and Moseley, his former attorney, who has since been disbarred, through a jailhouse email system. That system explicitly notifies users that it is monitored and that emails between an attorney and client will “not be treated as privileged.” Prisoners are supposed to use special legal mail procedures, legal phone calls or in-person meetings to communicate confidentially with their lawyers.
“Rehl waived any privilege by knowingly using FDC-Philadelphia’s monitored email system to communicate with his attorney,” prosecutors contended.
Prosecutors also rejected efforts by defense lawyers to introduce a message from an FBI agent suggesting he harbored doubts about the strength of the conspiracy evidence in the Proud Boys case. Typically, such agent opinions are excluded, and in any case, they say Miller contradicted the doubting agent’s comment, saying: “No we can. We DEF can now.”
Kelly will decide on Monday whether to permit the attorneys for Nordean, Rehl and their three co-defendants — Enrique Tarrio, Dominic Pezzola and Joseph Biggs — to ask Miller about these topics. Prosecutors contended on Sunday that their unsuccessfully implemented decision to withhold the messages — even ones that related to the Proud Boys case — was proper. Precedents and laws, they said, required the government to turn over only materials connected to what Miller testified about on the stand, not every statement she made about the Proud Boys case in general.
Miller testified last week, after the furor erupted, that FBI headquarters compiled her messages for her, culling them from a secret-level classified system. She filtered out any messages sent from other agents and then manually removed messages she viewed as not subject to disclosure, including many about other cases. But when prosecutors packaged up the remaining messages, they appear to not have realized the filtered messages from other agents were left in the spreadsheet as “hidden.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jocelyn Ballantine, the supervising prosecutor on the case, told the court on Friday that the Justice Department was concerned that the hidden messages contained potential classified information, since they were drawn from the secret-level system and not fully vetted. Ballantine, in particular, was concerned that the message pertaining to destroying evidence was sent by an agent involved in “covert” activity and could reference classified information.
It’s unclear whether defense lawyers will be satisfied by the government’s responses. They’ve previously raised alarms that prosecutors would use the pretense of “classified” information to claw back damaging evidence. Prosecutors indicated on Sunday that they had removed just 80 rows of “classified or sensitive” messages from a production of nearly 12,000 rows. In addition, they suggested they had provided additional messages to help contextualize the ones cited by the defense.
Smith, one of the defense lawyers, indicated in a Sunday filing that the government had also deleted about 6,000 rows of messages it said were blank, leaving just over 5,000 for the defense to review. And he said he had inquired with prosecutors to clarify how many of the 80 substantive rows of removed messages were classified and how many were dubbed “sensitive” but not classified.
Smith said he should be allowed to cross-examine Miller on her handling of the messages in part because of her answers to a brief set of questions about them on Thursday, when she indicated that she hadn’t removed or filtered out relevant materials.
“Whether the agent gave truthful testimony about her legal obligations related to her work on this case is patently a matter of credibility,” Smith wrote.
Though cross-examination typically relates only to the substance of a witness’s direct testimony, Smith pointed out that he was also permitted to raise questions about a witness’ credibility, which he said made the handling of those messages fair game for questioning.
Prosecutors said that if the defense lawyers were allowed to question her at all about the unsuccessfully withheld messages — a step the government largely opposes — it should come during the defense’s case, set to begin within the next two weeks, not on cross-examination during the government’s case.
“The topics in question are miles outside the scope of Agent Miller’s direct testimony,” the prosecutors argued.
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#Proud #Boys #prosecutors #push #claims #misconduct #discovery #internal #FBI #messages
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 13, 2023
Garland promises free rein for prosecutors probing Hunter Biden

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When Garland was nominated as attorney general, he agreed to leave Weiss — an appointee of former President Donald Trump — in place to complete the Hunter Biden investigation.
While offering those assurances about independence, Garland did not share any substantive update on the investigation into the president’s son. The probe is reportedly focused on Hunter Biden’s failure for years to pay a federal income tax bill that eventually amounted to about $1 million and a false statement Hunter Biden allegedly made about his drug use when purchasing a gun in 2018. Hunter Biden has said he is confident the investigation will clear him of wrongdoing.
While the Hunter Biden questions were the most politically explosive issues aired in the early hours of Wednesday’s hearing, questioning from senators was a potpourri, spanning concerns ranging from violent crime to drugs to guns to the impact of social media platforms on American society.
Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) challenged Garland about federal law enforcement’s handling of protests that broke out at the homes of several Supreme Court justices after POLITICO reported last May on a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the federal constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. The protests intensified after the court formally issued its ruling the next month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, with the opinion in much the same form as the earlier draft.
Lee, a former law clerk to the author of Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote Dobbs, pressed Garland on why no one has been arrested under a federal statute that prohibits trying to influence the administration of justice by picketing or parading near the homes of federal judges.
“It’s very clear they’re tying to influence in one way or another that those serving on the United States Supreme Court,” Lee said of the protesters. “Yet, not one person to my knowledge has been prosecuted for such things.”
Cruz, who served as a law clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, later thundered at Garland over the department’s failure to act against what the senator called “rioters” at the justices’ homes.
“You’re perfectly content with justices being afraid for their children’s lives,” the Texas Republican shouted.

Garland stressed that he responded rapidly to the leak and the protests by assigning more than 70 deputy U.S. Marshals to guard the justices and their families around the clock. “As soon as the Dobbs draft leaked, I ordered the marshals to do something that the marshals had never done in United States history before, which was to protect the justices and their families, 24-7.”
The attorney general eventually conceded that no protester has been charged under the federal law, but he said the “priority” of the marshals is keeping the justices and their families safe, not policing the demonstrators. Garland insisted, however, that no directive has been given to the marshals to ignore that law.
“They have full authority to arrest people under any federal statute, including that statute,” Garland said.
Some experts have said the federal law could be open to a First Amendment challenge, although the attorney general noted that the Supreme Court marshal wrote to local law enforcement in Maryland and Virginia last year urging them to enforce similar local ordinances.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also challenged Garland on abortion-related issues, grilling him over alleged “anti-Catholic bias” at the Justice Department. Hawley pointed to an intelligence memo prepared by the FBI’s Richmond, Va., field office and dated in January that warned of the potential for violence from “radical-traditionalist Catholics,” particularly among those who favor the Latin mass.
“It’s appalling. It’s appalling. I’m in complete agreement with you,” Garland replied. “I understand that the FBI has withdrawn it and is now looking into how this would ever have happened….It does not reflect the methods the FBI is supposed to be using.”
“Are you cultivating sources and spies in Latin-mass parishes and other Catholic parishes around the country?…How many informants do you have in Catholic churches across America?” Hawley asked.
“I don’t think we have any informants,” Garland said, pointing to longstanding Justice Department policies.
Democrats also used the hearing to cajole Garland for support for their key issues, with Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) railing against social media companies for enabling drug trafficking and dangerous behavior by teenagers.
“This is out of hand,” Durbin told the attorney general. The chair also bemoaned the influence of the 1996 law known as Section 230, which gives online platforms broad immunity from being sued over content third parties post online and from being sued over the adequacy of their efforts to police that content.
“I think Section 230 has become a suicide pact. We are basically saying you are absolved from liability, make money and deaths result from it,” Durbin said.
Garland called the situation Durbin described “horrible,” but was careful to limit his specific criticism to the role social media plays in drug dealing.
“We do have to do something to force them to provide information to search their own platforms for drugs,” the attorney general said.
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#Garland #promises #free #rein #prosecutors #probing #Hunter #Biden
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 1, 2023
Republicans clash with prosecutors over enforcement of abortion bans

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In Georgia, legislators want to create a prosecutorial oversight commission that could discipline or remove local prosecutors who demonstrate a “willful and persistent failure to perform his or her duties.”
A bill introduced in the South Carolina House would give the state attorney general the power to prosecute abortion cases — something currently under the purview of local district attorneys.
And in Indiana, proposed legislation would allow a legislatively appointed special prosecutor to enforce laws when a local prosecutor declines to do so.
The mounting tension between Republican lawmakers and local prosecutors over abortion is one part of a broader fight over diverging approaches to criminal justice — seen in recent battles over drug laws, property crimes and other offenses. As more prosecutors, particularly in progressive metropolises in red states, win elections by breaking with the decadeslong tough-on-crime mindset and running as a check on GOP lawmakers, conservative state officials say they now need to rein in their excesses.
“Whatever issue we’re talking about — whether it’s marijuana, abortion, enforcing homicide statutes, enforcing whatever the law is — the law is on the books, and the law is supposed to be applied equally across the board among our citizens,” said Republican Indiana Sen. Aaron Freeman, who is sponsoring the special prosecutor bill. “If we’re just going to basically ignore the Constitution and our republic and just do whatever the hell we want, well, that’s a society that scares the hell out of me.”
GOP officials are also exploring nonlegislative tactics. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democrat, over his public pledge not to bring charges under the state’s 15-week abortion ban. Warren sued in federal court to be reinstated, and while the judge agreed that DeSantis’ action violated the state’s constitution, he ruled that only a state court could reverse the governor’s decision.

“It’s a political war being waged against people for speaking their minds,” ousted Hillsborough County prosecutor Andrew Warren says.
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Luis Santana/AP Photo
The moves have left local prosecutors chafing at what they see as encroachment on their executive branch powers, tactics that Warren called “ridiculous” and “undemocratic.”
“It’s a political war being waged against people for speaking their minds,” he said.

Nonpartisan legal groups view this trend as a threat to prosecutors’ ability to use their best judgment on which cases are worth pursuing and how to allocate their offices’ finite resources to best serve the community that elected them.
“The individual exercise of discretion is the foundation of our legal system. This is a huge overreach by the legislatures,” warned David LaBahn, president and CEO of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. “When we’re looking at a series of cases — and this is not hypothetical, it’s very real, because we’re dealing with backlogs in so many places right now — should they investigate a phone call from someone saying they think someone had an abortion, versus a documented homicide or case of child abuse? If you have limited resources — should you pour everything into the first one? Of course not! That’s why you have discretion.”
LaBahn noted the wave of bills also threatens the “jury standard” — the metric local prosecutors use to decide which cases they could reasonably expect to win at trial with a jury selected from their local community.
“And the standard is not ‘a jury in the most conservative county in Texas,’” he stressed. “It’s a jury in the place that elected you.”
Some district attorneys caught in this fight argue there aren’t any crimes for them to prosecute even if they wanted to do so, citing preliminary data showing that almost no doctor-administered abortions have taken place in their states since the bans took effect.
Others, however, say they wouldn’t take up a case even if there were violations of their state’s anti-abortion laws. More than 80 district attorneys from 29 states signed a pledge a month after Roe was overturned to “refrain from using limited criminal legal system resources to criminalize personal medical decisions.”
Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who runs Fair and Just Prosecution, the group that wrote the pledge, said prosecutors have the right to make that call.
“They want to focus on serious and violent crimes and not spend time investigating and prosecuting people who are making a health care decision,” she said. “They don’t want to turn miscarriages into crime scenes.”
Yet GOP lawmakers and their anti-abortion allies, many of whom believe terminating a pregnancy is murder, said prosecutors are violating their oaths of office — and the separation of powers — by saying they either won’t prosecute or will deprioritize prosecuting entire categories of crimes, instead of evaluating each case on its merits.
Under the bill introduced by Texas Sen. Mayes Middleton, prosecutors could face removal if they “categorically or systematically” refuse to bring charges for certain offenses, including abortion and some property- and election-related crimes. Attorneys could also be penalized for “categorically or systematically” not seeking the death penalty for capital offenses.
“It’s up to our district attorneys to enforce all of our laws, whether they like them or not,” Middleton said. “If they have a policy of not prosecuting crimes of violence, including our laws against abortion, then it subjects them to removal from office … This bill classifies abortion as a crime of violence, taking a life.”
GOP lawmakers have said that DAs who are unhappy with their state’s laws should run for the Legislature instead of using their office as a check on lawmakers.
“I think we all probably need to sit down and watch ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’” said Freeman, the Indiana senator.
Anti-abortion groups have coalesced behind the bills that go after prosecutors, arguing that state bans are meaningless unless they’re backed by the threat of enforcement.
“You have to have a penalty to serve as a deterrent,” said Rebecca Parma, senior legislative associate for Texas Right to Life. “We see how the abortion industry is pivoting since Dobbs and we need to respond as a state to make sure abortion stays fully prohibited. We’re seeing groups illegally shipping abortion pills into our state — trafficking pills across the border. And we have the phenomenon of abortion ships right off our coast. We need to hold people accountable for illegally aiding and abetting.”
Parma added that anti-abortion groups believe it’s not enough to target pr

In Wisconsin, several local prosecutors are defending the state’s 1849 near-total abortion ban against a lawsuit filed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, arguing the state is infringing on their prosecutorial discretion.
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AP
osecutors, and that they’re working now with lawmakers in Texas to revive the system in place before the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, that allowed individuals to sue anyone they suspect of helping someone obtain an abortion, with a $10,000 reward if the suit succeeds.
“We can’t depend solely on the state and elected officials,” she said. “Removing a bad DA who will only be replaced by another bad DA is not going to solve the problem. We need another tool in our belts.”
The fights over prosecutorial discretion are not new — there were clashes in California a century ago over gambling — and not confined to abortion. In the past few years, bills have been introduced in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia to circumvent or penalize prosecutors who decline to bring charges on a range of offenses, from murder to marijuana possession.
And while most of the concerns about attacks on prosecutorial discretion have surfaced from the left, the issue can cut both ways. In Wisconsin, several local prosecutors are defending the state’s 1849 near-total abortion ban against a lawsuit filed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, arguing the state is infringing on their powers of prosecutorial discretion by pushing the courts to rule the law unenforceable. Several conservative state leaders have also, in recent years, said they would not enforce federal laws and regulations they disagree with — such as vaccine mandates.
Yet legal experts say the mounting calls on the right to force more abortion-related prosecutions is where “the rubber meets the road.”
“State legislators watch each other,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director of the Public Rights Project that supports progressive DAs. “And because there’s been so much noise around these bills in Texas, we expect to see these threats emerging in a lot of significant states.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 12, 2023
Elizabeth Holmes tried to ‘flee’ US with one-way Mexico ticket, prosecutors say

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The disgraced founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, made an “attempt to flee the country” by purchasing a one-way ticket to Mexico after she was found guilty on four counts of fraud last January, according to prosecutors.
In the new filing on Thursday, prosecutors said that “contrary to defendant’s assertion that she has a ‘flawless record with US Pretrial Services’ and claim that no evidence suggests she will flee while she pursues her appeal … the incentive to flee has never been higher and defendant has the means to act on that incentive.”
“As an initial matter, defendant’s record with Pretrial Services and the court does not account for her attempt to flee the country shortly after she was convicted. The government became aware on 23 January 2022, that Defendant Holmes booked an international flight to Mexico departing on 26 January 2022 without a scheduled return trip,” it said.
Once the government became aware of Holmes’ planned trip, prosecutors emailed Holmes’ attorneys. In an email sent from Holmes’ legal team to the government, which ABC News reviewed, Holmes’ attorneys said: “The hope was that the verdict would be different and Ms Holmes would be able to make this trip to attend the wedding of close friends in Mexico.”
“Given the verdict, she does not plan to take the trip – and therefore did not provide notice, seek permission, or request access to her passport (which the government has) for the trip.
“But she also had not yet cancelled the trip, amidst everything that has been going on. We will have her do so promptly and will provide you confirmation.”
Prosecutors in the filing said that “it is difficult to know with certainty what defendant would have done had the government not intervened”.
They also revealed that Holmes’ partner William Evans departed on the scheduled date with a one-way ticket. Evans did not return until about six weeks later “from a different continent”. Evans’ activities during the trip were not disclosed by prosecutors.

In November, Holmes was sentenced to over 11 years in prison over her role in Theranos, the blood testing firm she founded which was once valued at over $9bn and was later discovered to be mostly fraudulent. Holmes was convicted on four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
In a statement prior to the sentencing, federal judge Edward Davila condemned Holmes and Theranos, calling the whole debacle a “fraud case where an exciting venture went forward with great expectations and hope, only to be dashed by misrepresentation, hubris and plain lies”.
During Holmes’ sentencing, she was ordered to self-surrender to prison on April 27.
The new filing comes as part of prosecutors’ argument that Holmes, who is currently pregnant with her second child, should start serving her prison sentence instead of living on a California estate with an alleged monthly upkeep of over $13,000, prosecutors claim.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 21, 2023