agingrebel.com
A few sentences in a 2,000 word speech
yesterday by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to the
summer meeting of the National District Attorney’s Association in
Minneapolis set off alarm bells among civil libertarians.
Sessions promised America’s prosecutors
that he intends to place “greater emphasis on dismantling gangs” – which
may mean you or someone you know.
And, near the end of his remarks he also
said, “we hope to issue this week a new directive on asset forfeiture –
especially for drug traffickers. With care and professionalism, we plan
to develop policies to increase forfeitures. No criminal should be
allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime. Adoptive forfeitures are
appropriate as is sharing with our partners..”
Words Words Words
The angle national news outlets followed
in this morning’s accounts was to contrast Sessions’ rhetoric with the
rhetoric of the Obama Administration, But it is a misleading angle and
the comparisons have been both fatuous and naïve.
“In 2015,” The Washington Post
noted this morning, Obama Attorney General “Eric Holder’s Justice
Department issued a memo sharply curtailing a particular type of
forfeiture practice that allowed local police to share part of their
forfeiture proceeds with federal authorities… criminal justice reform
groups on the left and the right cheered the move as a signal that the
Obama administration was serious about curtailing forfeiture abuses.”
But, of course, that was not what
actually happened. What Holder accomplished was a public relations stunt
that concealed the extent of an ever expanding police tyranny. In
January 2015, when Holder announced his “reform,” the Post
reported that Holder had “barred local and state police from using
federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or
criminal charges.”
Really, Holder’s forfeiture “reform” was just a smoke grenade. Two weeks later, the Wall Street Journal reported that what Holder was actually up to:
“The Justice Department has been
building a national database to track in real time the movement of
vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering
program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about
motorists, according to current and former officials and government
documents,” the business paper reported.
“The primary goal of the License Plate
Tracking Program, run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, is to
seize cars, cash and other assets to combat drug trafficking, according
to one government document. But the database’s use has expanded to hunt
for vehicles associated with numerous other potential crimes, from
kidnappings to killings to rape suspects, say people familiar with the
matter.”
Asset Forfeiture Primary Goal
The same day the Journal
published its report, the American Civil Liberties Union argued in its
own report that “With its jurisdiction and its finances, the federal
government is uniquely positioned to create a centralized repository of
all drivers’ movements across the country – and the DEA seems to be
moving toward doing just that. If license plate readers continue to
proliferate without restriction and the DEA holds license plate reader
data for extended periods of time, the agency will soon possess a
detailed and invasive depiction of our lives (particularly if combined
with other data about individuals collected by the government, such as
the DEA’s recently revealed bulk phone records program, or cell phone
information gleaned from U.S. Marshals Service’s cell site
simulator-equipped aircraft.) Data-mining the information, an unproven
law enforcement technique that the DEA has begun to use here, only
exacerbates these concerns, potentially tagging people as criminals
without due process.”
The ACLU also reported that a DEA
document uncovered as a result of a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit
described “asset forfeiture” as a “primary” goal of the program. The
documents also showed that the federal government had deployed hundreds
of license plate readers and had been sharing the information through
the network of federal fusion centers with local and state police
agencies since at least 2009.
Consequently, the important question is what Sessions’ words to prosecutors yesterday actually mean. Reason Magazine,
which is probably at the opposite end of the political spectrum from
the Post, reported that they represent “a disheartening setback in the
fight to protect Americans’ private property rights.”
The increasingly opaque Trump
Administration hasn’t offered any elaboration on Sessions’ remarks. But
it is a matter of public record that Trump intends to “crack down” on
legal marijuana which Sessions routinely describes as “a gateway drug.”
And, the most recent case against members of the Vagos Motorcycle Club
is, unusually, headed by an Assistant Attorney General rather than a
United States Attorney. Since organizations like the Hells Angels,
Vagos, Mongols and Bandidos Motorcycle Clubs are regularly described in
federal filings as “transnational drug gangs,” the “policies” Sessions
promises “to increase forfeitures” might be aimed at the bikers Trump
brags he loves.
