Judge: 'Government misconduct' may result in dismissing charges against James Comey

A federal magistrate judge said that the criminal case against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, could be in trouble, according to The New York Times. The case is in jeopardy because of a series of apparent errors committed in front of the grand jury by Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced prosecutor picked by President Trump to oversee the matter.

The remarkable rebuke of Ms. Halligan came in a 24-page ruling in which the magistrate judge, William E. Fitzpatrick, ordered her to give Mr. Comey’s lawyers all of the grand jury materials she used to obtain the indictment and raised the question of whether “government misconduct” in the case might require dismissing the charges altogether.

In his ruling, Judge Fitzpatrick said that when Ms. Halligan appeared — by herself — in front of the grand jury in September to seek an indictment accusing Mr. Comey of lying to and obstructing Congress in 2020 testimony, she made at least two “fundamental and highly prejudicial” misstatements of the law. He also pointed out that the grand jury materials he ordered her to turn over to him for his review this month appeared to be incomplete and “likely do not reflect the full proceedings.”

“The court is finding that the government’s actions in this case — whether purposeful, reckless or negligent — raise genuine issues of misconduct, are inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation and deserve to be fully explored by the defense,” Judge Fitzpatrick wrote.

As part of his ruling, the judge ordered prosecutors to provide Mr. Comey’s lawyers by Monday evening with the same grand jury materials that he himself has already looked at — a measure he described as “an extraordinary remedy.” Typically, grand jury notes are kept secret before trial, even from defendants and their lawyers.

But the disclosure was needed, Judge Fitzpatrick said, to permit Mr. Comey’s legal team to delve into the question of whether Ms. Halligan and an F.B.I. agent who testified in front of the grand jury had conducted themselves properly when they secured the indictment.

Minutes before the first portion of the grand jury notes were to be handed over to Mr. Comey’s legal team, prosecutors filed an emergency request seeking to halt Judge Fitzpatrick’s order. Calling it “contrary to law,” the prosecutors said they wanted to quickly raise objections to the ruling in front of Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff, the district court judge who is overseeing the case.

The ruling by Judge Fitzpatrick was only the most recent setback in the Justice Department’s efforts to bring charges against Mr. Comey — a decision that was initially rejected by Ms. Halligan’s predecessor as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik S. Siebert. In an extraordinary move, Mr. Trump ousted Mr. Siebert in September to make way for Ms. Halligan after he suggested there was insufficient evidence to file an indictment against Mr. Comey.

Judge Fitzpatrick’s harsh words came just days after a different judge involved in the Comey case raised doubts about a separate question pertaining to Ms. Halligan: namely, whether Attorney General Pam Bondi had lawfully appointed her to her post as U.S. attorney in the first place. The judge overseeing that issue said she would make a decision on the matter by Thanksgiving.

The indictment against Mr. Comey charges him with lying to and obstructing Congress during an appearance he made in September 2020 in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the hearing, he was asked questions about whether he had authorized anyone at the F.B.I. to serve as an anonymous source in newspaper articles about sensitive investigations.

Ms. Halligan, who had never worked on a criminal case until she was thrust into the Comey prosecution, has faced extensive scrutiny from the moment Mr. Trump installed her atop the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia against the wishes of many career prosecutors there. Her critics have pointed out that her previous experience in the law was limited to working as an insurance lawyer and serving as a personal lawyer to Mr. Trump.

It is extremely unusual for judges to examine how prosecutors act in front of grand juries, let alone to openly criticize their conduct. But that is exactly what Judge Fitzpatrick did to Ms. Halligan.

He noted that during her grand jury presentation she appears to have misrepresented a basic tenet of the law by suggesting that Mr. Comey did not have the right, under the Fifth Amendment, to avoid testifying at his own trial.

She also appears to have made another astonishing error, Judge Fitzpatrick said. In his ruling, he pointed out that she told grand jurors that they did not have to rely solely “on the record before them” to return an indictment against Mr. Comey, but instead “could be assured the government had more evidence — perhaps better evidence — that would be presented at trial.”

The judge also said that Ms. Halligan appears to have botched her efforts to pare down the three-count indictment she had initially sought against Mr. Comey after grand jurors rejected one of the charges. Moreover, he noted that the grand jury transcripts he later received from her did not appear to contain her presentation of the second, two-charge indictment to the grand jury, leaving the record incomplete.

If, however, a second presentation was never made, then the court “is in uncharted legal territory,” he went on.

That would suggest, he wrote, “that the indictment returned in open court was not the same charging document presented to and deliberated upon by the grand jury.”

“Either way,” the judge concluded, “this unusual series of events, still not fully explained by the prosecutor’s declaration, calls into question the presumption of regularity generally associated with grand jury proceedings, and provides another genuine issue the defense may raise to challenge the manner in which the government obtained the indictment.”

Judge Fitzpatrick mentioned one more potential problem with the government’s grand jury presentation. He questioned whether the F.B.I. agent who was the sole witness to have testified may have inadvertently disclosed information that should not have been revealed because of the attorney-client privilege.

Ultimately, the decision about whether to dismiss the case based on these purported grand jury errors will lie with Judge Nachmanoff, the district court judge. Judge Nachmanoff has already scheduled a hearing for early December to consider separate but related claims by Mr. Comey’s lawyers that Ms. Halligan had abused the grand jury process.

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Alito and colleagues challenge compassionate release

 Madiba K. Dennie writing for Balls & Strikes:

 Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in three cases about the conditions under which federal judges can reduce a prison sentence. As a general rule, judges may not modify a term of imprisonment once it’s been imposed. But four decades ago, Congress enacted a statutory exception for compassionate release, empowering judges to shorten a prison term if “extraordinary and compelling reasons” warrant relief.

Congress did not, however, give much guidance as to what a compelling reason actually is, beyond specifying that rehabilitation alone is insufficient, and that any sentence reduction must be “consistent with applicable policy statements issued by the Sentencing Commission.” Identifying qualifying circumstances is thus up to individual judges evaluating requests for release—and, of course, a matter of some debate

In the first case the Court heard, Fernandez v. United States, a district court judge reduced a sentence because he doubted the reliability of the evidence, and had concerns about a significant sentencing disparity between Fernandez and one of his co-defendants. A federal appeals court then held that the district court judge had abused his discretion because he should not have considered Fernandez’s potential innocence—something neither Congress nor the Sentencing Commission ever said.

In the other two cases, Rutherford v. United States and Carter v. United States, judges said they could not consider the fact that the defendants asking for a sentence reduction would have received significantly shorter prison terms had they been convicted after Congress enacted the First Step Act of 2018, a bipartisan criminal justice reform law. But this, too, is not so simple: The Sentencing Commission has explicitly said judges can consider factors like this under certain circumstances.

The uninspiring success rate of the defendants in these three cases—zero for three—doesn’t support an inference that judges are especially inclined to find “extraordinary and compelling reasons” to reduce a prison sentence. Yet Justice Samuel Alito spent Wednesday morning defending the sanctity of mandatory minimum sentences, deeply disturbed by the notion that judges could be letting people out of prison for little reason other than their personal belief that prison is bad. 

“There are a lot of district judges and other federal judges who don’t like mandatory minimums,” Alito said to Fernandez’s counsel. “Could a district judge say, ‘You know what, that mandatory minimum is too much under the circumstances of this case, so I’m going to grant a sentence reduction?’” he asked. 

Alito pressed Rutherford’s counsel, David Frederick, on this same issue. “Is it a permissible factor for a judge to include in the determination a disapproval of the mandatory minimum?” Alito asked. Frederick politely responded with the answer the statute already provides: that a judge would be abusing their discretion if they just didn’t like mandatory minimums, but would be within their discretion if they thought departing from a mandatory minimum was justified by the circumstances of the particular case. Alito was unsatisfied. “I don’t quite see the difference between those two things,” he said.

To illustrate the difference, Frederick offered a hypothetical, imagining a 75-year-old with a life-threatening disease in a prison without adequate medical facilities. “It is not an abuse of discretion for the court to say that, in this particular circumstance, that mandatory minimum is too harsh,” said Frederick. At this, Chief Justice John Roberts interrupted. “Well, you really shouldn’t call it a mandatory minimum then,” said Roberts. “You probably should call it something like the presumptive minimum depending upon subsequent developments.”

Alito later moved to Carter’s counsel, David O’Neill, who also affirmed that district courts could not reduce sentences solely because they disagree with mandatory minimums as a matter of principle. When Alito asked if any provision of the statute “specifically” states that, Carter, too, explained that any categorical approach would be at odds with a statute that’s “all about the individual circumstances.”

If Alito really wants to be angry about the criminal legal system, there are countless real problems he can choose from. His choice to fixate on hypothetical judges with vendettas against mandatory minimums instead is an illustrative example of the conservative conception of criminal law. In Alito’s view, the criminal legal system already does what it is supposed to do: inflict maximum punishment. Any attempts to reform that system are inherently illegitimate.

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South Carolina executes man by firing squad

 The 43rd Execution of 2025

A South Carolina firing squad has executed a man on November 14, 2025, the third person to die by that method in the state this year, reported The Associated Press.

Three prison employees, all with live ammunition, volunteered to carry out the execution of Stephen Bryant, 44, who was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. Bryant killed three people in five days in a rural area of the state in 2004.

Bryant chose to die by firing squad instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. He made no final statement and briefly glanced toward the 10 witnesses before the hood was placed on his head.

The shots rang out about 55 seconds later. Bryant made no noise. The red bullseye target that marks the location of his heart flew forward off his chest. He had a few shallow breaths and then a final spasm a little over a minute later. A doctor checked him with a stethoscope for a minute before he pronounced Bryant dead.

A media witness said after the execution that a pool of wetness emerged on Bryant’s chest where he was shot. Three family members of victims who served as witnesses held hands during the execution.

Bryant is the seventh person put to death by South Carolina in 14 months after the state had a 13-year pause in executions when it couldn’t obtain lethal injection drugs.

Republican Gov. Henry McMaster denied clemency for Bryant, according to his office. No South Carolina governor has offered clemency since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1976.

Final meal and memory

For his final meal, Bryant had spicy mixed seafood stir-fry, fried fish over rice, egg rolls, stuffed shrimp, two candy bars and German chocolate cake.

Bo King, a lawyer who works on death penalty cases in South Carolina, said Bryant had a genetic disorder, was a victim of sexual and physical abuse by relatives, and his mother’s binge drinking “permanently damaged his body and brain.”

“Mr. Bryant’s impairments left him unable to endure the tormenting memories of his childhood,” King wrote in a statement.

King said Bryant “showed grace and courage in forgiving his family and great love for those in and outside of his prison.”

“We will remember his unlikely friendships, his fierce protectiveness, and his love for nature, the water, and the world,” King wrote.

Firing squad vs. lethal injection drugs

The firing squad has a long and violent history around the world. Death by a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

But in recent years, it’s been revived in the U.S. Some lawmakers say it’s the quickest and most humane way to execute a person.

That’s since a number of botched executions by other methods, including lethal injection drugs. South Carolina and other states have struggled to maintain adequate supplies of lethal injection drugs.

In part because of this, South Carolina paused executions for 13 years. The state then restarted in September 2024, after which four men have been executed by lethal injection and three by firing squad. The state is among several where the electric chair is still legal.

King, the lawyer speaking on Bryant’s behalf, said each of the seven executions have been “brutal and shameful.”

“None has made South Carolina safer or more just,” King said.

The three other recent firing squad executions in the U.S. have been in Utah with none in that state since 2010. The method is also still legal in Idaho and a backup method if others aren’t available in Oklahoma and Mississippi.

The 2004 killings in rural South Carolina

Bryant admitted to killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in October 2004 after stopping by his secluded home in rural Sumter County and saying he had car trouble.

Tietjen was shot several times. Bryant then answered Tietjen’s phone after it rang several times telling both his wife and daughter that he was the prowler and had killed them, prosecutors said.

Bryant also killed two men — one before and one after Tietjen. He gave the men rides and when they got out to urinate on the side of the road, he shot them in the back, authorities said.

During the search, officers stopped nearly everyone driving on dirt roads in the area just east of Columbia, and told people to be leery of anyone they did not know asking for help.

Bryant is the 43rd man killed by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S. At least 14 others are scheduled to be put to death during the remainder of 2025 and next year.

Bryant is also the 50th person executed in South Carolina since the state restarted the death penalty 40 years ago.

What happens during a firing squad execution

The curtain opens in the death chamber of the prison with fewer than a dozen witnesses sitting behind bulletproof glass.

The person is strapped into a chair. A white square with a red bull’s-eye target is placed over his heart by a doctor. Their lawyer can read a final statement. A prison employee then places a hood over the person’s head, walks across the small room and pulls open a black shade where the firing squad waits.

Without an audible or visual warning to witnesses, the shooters then fire high-powered rifles from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

A doctor will then come out within a minute or two, examine him and declare him dead.

Lawyers for the last man executed by a firing squad said the shooters nearly missed the heart of Mikal Mahdi. They suggested by barely hitting the bottom of the heart that Mahdi was in agonizing pain for three or four times longer than experts say he would have been if his heart had been hit directly.

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Florida carries out its 16th execution of 2025

 The 42nd Execution of 2025

A man convicted of the 1979 killing a 6-year-old girl who was abducted from her bedroom was put to death in a record 16th execution in Florida this year, reported The Associated Press.

Bryan Frederick Jennings, 66, was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. on November 13, 2025 following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. Jennings drew the death penalty for the murder of Rebecca Kunash, who was raped and drowned in a canal.

When asked if he had a final statement, Jennings said “No” loudly. As the drugs were then administered, his chest heaved and his arms twitched for a few minutes. Then he laid still with his mouth open.

No members of the victim’s family spoke to the media after the execution, and Department of Corrections spokesman Jordan Kirkland said the procedure went as planned.

“The execution took place without incident,” he said. “There were no complications.”

The execution of the ex-Marine was one of three scheduled this week in the U.S., though Oklahoma’s governor spared the life of a man just before a planned lethal injection Thursday. On Friday, Stephen Bryant is set to be executed by firing squad in South Carolina for three killings more than two decades ago.

Court records show Jennings was a 20-year-old on leave from the Marine Corps on May 11, 1979, when he removed the screen from the girl’s bedroom window while her parents were in another room.

Jennings abducted the girl, took her in his car to a canal and raped her, trial testimony showed. He then “swung her by her legs to the ground with such force that she fractured her skull,” according to court records. The girl was then drowned in the canal, where her body was found later that day.

Arrested hours later on a traffic warrant, Jennings matched the description of a man seen near the Kunash home when the girl disappeared. Shoe prints found at the home matched those Jennings was wearing, his fingerprints were found on the girl’s windowsill, and his clothes and hair were wet, court records stated.

Jennings was convicted and sentenced to death twice for the 1979 murder in Brevard County, both of which were reversed on appeal. The final trial in 1986 resulted in a third death sentence. He also drew life sentences for kidnapping, sexual assault and burglary convictions.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Republican who signed the death warrant, has ordered more executions in a single year than any Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976. The previous state record was set in 2014 with eight executions.

Additional Florida executions are scheduled on Nov. 20 for Richard Barry Randolph and on Dec. 9 for Mark Allen Geralds, which if carried out would bring the year’s total to 18 so far this year.

DeSantis has explained the unprecedented number of executions by saying his goal is to bring justice to victims’ families who have waited decades for the death sentences to be carried out.

“Some of these crimes were committed in the ’80s,” the governor said at a recent news conference. “Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly. If I honestly thought someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger.”

Florida executions are all conducted via lethal injection using a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.

Jennings had filed numerous state and federal court appeals, most recently contending he went months without a lawyer prior to DeSantis signing his death warrant, calling that a violation of his right to counsel.

With Jennings’ death, a total of 42 people have undergone court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and at least 16 others — including Bryant — were scheduled to be put to death in the rest of 2025 and throughout 2026, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.

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Autocracy Watch Day 12: An authoritarian manipulates the law to stay in power.

The New York Times, NO. 12

An authoritarian manipulates the law to stay in power. Trump has started to.

Authoritarians change election rules to help their party, and they rewrite laws — or violate their spirit — to ignore term limits.

Mr. Trump’s biggest attempt to follow this playbook failed, when he was unable to undo his election defeat to Joe Biden in 2020. But that effort showed Mr. Trump’s willingness to break the law to remain in power.

In his second term, he has shown worrisome signs of using his power to entrench the Republican Party’s hold on the government. He has pressed Republicans to take gerrymandering to a new extreme. He issued an executive order in March that seeks to interfere with how states run their elections. These moves increase the chances that Republicans will keep control of Congress even if most voters want to oust them.

Mr. Trump has not taken concrete steps to remain in power for a third term, which the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution was written to forbid. He has alternated between floating the idea and suggesting he understands that he must leave the presidency for good on Jan. 20, 2029.

The Bottom Line
Even if he backs away from any scheme to serve more than two presidential terms, Mr. Trump’s attempts to tilt the electoral field in favor of Republicans is anti-democratic and could pervert American elections for years.

Started down the anti-democratic path

The clearest sign that a democracy has died is that a leader and his party make it impossible for their opponents to win an election and hold power. Once that stage is reached, however, the change is extremely difficult to reverse. And aspiring authoritarians use other excesses, like a cowed legislature and judiciary, to lock in their power.

The United States is not an autocracy today. It still has a mostly free press and independent judiciary, and millions of Americans recently attended the “No Kings” protests. But it has started down an anti-democratic path, and many Americans — including people in positions of power — remain far too complacent about the threat.

The 12 benchmarks in this editorial offer a way to understand and measure how much further Mr. Trump goes in the months and years ahead. We plan to update this index in 2026.

One of the striking features of the present administration is the regularity with which its leaders, from President Donald Trump on down, confidently describe the state of the law in ways entirely contrary to what had been seen as settled, on topics that range from flag burning to Congress’s TikTok ban to whether civil servants can be removed on a partisan basis. Sometimes, these proclamations may herald an effort to persuade courts to change prevailing doctrine, but at least as often they look more like an attempt to alter reality by establishing new legal facts on the ground. 

On October 24, influential White House adviser Stephen Miller appeared on Fox News when the issue of whether authorities in Illinois could prosecute misbehaving federal immigration agents under state law arose. Miller responded, “To all ICE officers: you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop or obstruct you is committing a felony.”

Whatever that is, it is not an accurate description of the state of the law. As Professor Steve Vladeck explains in this brief write-up, the actual rules are more complicated. There is indeed a zone of so-called Supremacy Clause immunity that will apply when “(1) the federal officer was performing an act that he was authorized to do by federal law; and (2) in performing the authorized act, the federal officer did no more than what was necessary and proper.” When either condition is not satisfied—when the agent is taking an unauthorized action or is acting under authorization but in a manner that exceeds what is necessary and proper—the immunity based on federal supremacy ends. 

As Vladeck notes, the prevailing rule in this category of immunity was formulated by Judge Michael McConnell, a conservative hero, and it does indeed allow state prosecutors to use state law to pursue instances of misbehavior by ICE agents.

Here’s another instance: in a piece at The Dispatch earlier this month, I tell how high administration officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, have repeatedly spoken as if citizens have no right to photograph or video record ICE raids or identify the officers by name. McLaughlin said, “Videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxing our agents,” and added, “We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.” Noem went even further, describing “violence” against DHS agents as “anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them. It is videotaping them where they’re at.” 

In point of fact, however, the courts aren’t on board with that sort of nonsense. While the Supreme Court itself hasn’t yet faced the issue squarely, the seven federal circuits that have done so—the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 10th, and 11th—all agree that the First Amendment protects the right to record police performing their duties in public.* Those circuits cover such populous states as California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

Here at Cato we’ve had the honor of participating as amicus in at least three (that I know of) of these circuit precedents: Fields v. City of Philadelphia at the Third Circuit in 2017, Adkins v. Department of Homeland Security at the Ninth Circuit in 2018, and Irizarry v. Yehia at the Tenth Circuit in 2022. Adkins, the Ninth Circuit case, was especially interesting because it involved two citizens arrested by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for taking pictures at a border crossing that they believed documented unlawful searches and other problems; the agency, which had seized the men’s cameras and deleted their pictures, asserted that the sidewalks they were standing on were property it officially controlled, but it lost anyway. (Thanks to colleague Dan Greenberg for helping compile the cases.)

To some important extent, one of the audiences Noem and her department are seeking to reach was the same one Miller was explicit in addressing: ICE agents themselves. If the agents come to believe that they have blanket immunity whatever they do, or that citizens have no right to record them, they are more likely to take aggressive informal action, such as grabbing phones or taking news reporters into custody on charges of obstruction (perhaps later quietly dropped). These informal methods of repression, I observe, can very much set the tone for enforcement, no matter whether the agency does or does not expect courts to say later. 

If the agents are hearing a persistent message from their higher ups of “you’re immune no matter what you do,” it’s up to the rest of us to disabuse them of that error.

One of the striking features of the present administration is the regularity with which its leaders, from President Donald Trump on down, confidently describe the state of the law in ways entirely contrary to what had been seen as settled, on topics that range from flag burning to Congress’s TikTok ban to whether civil servants can be removed on a partisan basis. Sometimes, these proclamations may herald an effort to persuade courts to change prevailing doctrine, but at least as often they look more like an attempt to alter reality by establishing new legal facts on the ground. 

On October 24, influential White House adviser Stephen Miller appeared on Fox News when the issue of whether authorities in Illinois could prosecute misbehaving federal immigration agents under state law arose. Miller responded, “To all ICE officers: you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop or obstruct you is committing a felony.”

Whatever that is, it is not an accurate description of the state of the law. As Professor Steve Vladeck explains in this brief write-up, the actual rules are more complicated. There is indeed a zone of so-called Supremacy Clause immunity that will apply when “(1) the federal officer was performing an act that he was authorized to do by federal law; and (2) in performing the authorized act, the federal officer did no more than what was necessary and proper.” When either condition is not satisfied—when the agent is taking an unauthorized action or is acting under authorization but in a manner that exceeds what is necessary and proper—the immunity based on federal supremacy ends. 

As Vladeck notes, the prevailing rule in this category of immunity was formulated by Judge Michael McConnell, a conservative hero, and it does indeed allow state prosecutors to use state law to pursue instances of misbehavior by ICE agents.

Here’s another instance: in a piece at The Dispatch earlier this month, I tell how high administration officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, have repeatedly spoken as if citizens have no right to photograph or video record ICE raids or identify the officers by name. McLaughlin said, “Videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxing our agents,” and added, “We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.” Noem went even further, describing “violence” against DHS agents as “anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them. It is videotaping them where they’re at.” 

In point of fact, however, the courts aren’t on board with that sort of nonsense. While the Supreme Court itself hasn’t yet faced the issue squarely, the seven federal circuits that have done so—the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 10th, and 11th—all agree that the First Amendment protects the right to record police performing their duties in public.* Those circuits cover such populous states as California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

Here at Cato we’ve had the honor of participating as amicus in at least three (that I know of) of these circuit precedents: Fields v. City of Philadelphia at the Third Circuit in 2017, Adkins v. Department of Homeland Security at the Ninth Circuit in 2018, and Irizarry v. Yehia at the Tenth Circuit in 2022. Adkins, the Ninth Circuit case, was especially interesting because it involved two citizens arrested by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for taking pictures at a border crossing that they believed documented unlawful searches and other problems; the agency, which had seized the men’s cameras and deleted their pictures, asserted that the sidewalks they were standing on were property it officially controlled, but it lost anyway. (Thanks to colleague Dan Greenberg for helping compile the cases.)

To some important extent, one of the audiences Noem and her department are seeking to reach was the same one Miller was explicit in addressing: ICE agents themselves. If the agents come to believe that they have blanket immunity whatever they do, or that citizens have no right to record them, they are more likely to take aggressive informal action, such as grabbing phones or taking news reporters into custody on charges of obstruction (perhaps later quietly dropped). These informal methods of repression, I observe, can very much set the tone for enforcement, no matter whether the agency does or does not expect courts to say later. 

If the agents are hearing a persistent message from their higher ups of “you’re immune no matter what you do,” it’s up to the rest of us to disabuse them of that error.

To read more CLICK HERE

Autocracy Watch Day 11-- An authoritarian uses power for personal profit

 The New York Times, NO. 11

An authoritarian uses power for personal profit. Trump has.

Authoritarians often turn the government into a machine for enriching themselves, their families and their allies. Mr. Trump glories in his administration’s culture of corruption.

He openly uses the presidency as an opportunity to pad his bottom line, in ways that range from the comically petty (like charging the Secret Service up to $1,200 per night for rooms at his hotels) to the shamelessly greedy (like the $40 million that Amazon paid for the rights to a Melania Trump documentary or his recent demand that the government pay him $230 million because he was investigated for breaking the law). He solicits favors from foreign governments, including an airplane from Qatar. His children also profit from their father’s position, through real-estate deals, crypto, a private club in Washington and more. And he rewards those who enrich them, recently pardoning the head of a cryptocurrency firm who worked with the Trump family.

In the first six months of this year, the Trump Organization’s income soared to $864 million, up from just $51 million a year earlier, according to a recent Reuters analysis. It’s worth noting that recent Supreme Court decisions have made corruption harder to police.

The Bottom Line
Mr. Trump’s culture of corruption may resemble the behavior of foreign autocrats more closely than any other category on this list. He is using what rightly belongs to American citizens — the power and resources of our democratic government — to enrich himself, and he is not trying to hide it.

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Mangino discusses plea withdraw on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with Corey McCrae from WFMJ-TV21 about a plea withdraw after sentencing in Mahoning County drowning case.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE