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The FBI Robs a Bank
Well, not technically a bank, but the utter lack of principle is the same. US Private Vaults was a private safety deposit box business in Beverly Hills, CA. An FBI agent “suspected” that its owners were involved in laundering drug money (an allegation that was never proven in court, by the way). On that basis, the FBI moved in and seized every lockbox on the site – most of which belonged to people who were not dealing drugs or laundering drug money.
Agents took photos and videos of pay stubs, password lists, credit cards, a prenuptial agreement, immigration and vaccination records, bank statements, heirlooms and a will, court records show. In one box, agents found cremated human remains.
Eighteen months later, newly unsealed court documents show that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got their warrant for that raid by misleading the judge who approved it.
They got the warrant, but they never told the judge they planned to confiscate everything under our gangster Government’s corrupt asset forfeiture laws. And as is usual with the thoroughly corrupt FBI, they are refusing to release to the public the papers they filed with the court before they raided the operation; which seems to be standard procedure for Merrick Garland’s DOJ.
The U.S. attorney’s office has tried to block public disclosure of court papers that laid bare the government’s deception, but a judge rejected its request to keep them under seal.
The FBI’s take amounted to some $86 million dollars. When some of the depositors asked for their possessions back, the FBI threatened to charge them with crimes. Most people gave up rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars and fighting in court for years to get their stuff back. David French calls spending tens of thousands of dollars in court to have your rights returned a “blessing of liberty.” I call it Gangster Government.
Published in General
Couldn’t happen to a better agency. Timing is exquisite. The litany of reasons to dissolve the National Police is growing.
The case will be easy to make.
But who will make it? And what can be done?
When the highest law enforcement in the nation is corrupt, there is no one to turn to for justice.
In 1968, my father was reading the newspaper and pulled it down to say to me and my mother that Eugene McCarthy was the cleanest man in American politics. McCarthy seemed somewhat left of Dad’s politics so it seemed an odd remark. My mother (or it may have been me) asked, “How do you know that?”
Answer: “Because a few weeks ago he called for the removal of J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI as his first act if elected and absolutely nothing bad about his personal or financial life has appeared in the newspapers.”
Dad had been an attorney in the DOJ and a savvy political observer and knew that Hoover’s appetite for destroying enemies was legendary.
Seeing which members of Congress go after these FBI abuses will be a real litmus test.
No