Attention to the Unseen

By Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield This story was originally published by ProPublica When the FBI executed a warrant on Wednesday to seize records from the 2020 presidential vote in Fulton County, Georgia, it marked both an extraordinary event in the history of American elections and a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s breaking of democratic norms, several legal experts said. Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him and blamed Georgia, in…

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The New York Times reports: The chief federal judge in Minnesota excoriated Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Wednesday, saying it had violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from its aggressive crackdown in the state and had disobeyed more judicial directives in January alone than “some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” The extraordinary broadside by the judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, came in a ruling in which he temporarily rescinded an order he had issued on Tuesday, summoning Todd…

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J.D. Vance (who obtained his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in May 2013 and was admitted to the bar in Kentucky later that year) lied after Renee Good’s murder when he made this baseless declaration: “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy’s protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.”   Should we not assume that the federal agents who murdered Alex Pretti believed that they…

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Barry Friedman and Stephen I. Vladeck write: In the wake of another fatal shooting by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, many people are wondering what can be done. The answer has been right in front of us all along. Despite the incredulity with which some legal observers meet the idea, state and local prosecutors can prosecute federal officials for violating state criminal laws. Prosecutors should be gathering and securing evidence and seriously considering filing charges — sooner rather than later….

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  A frame-by-frame assessment of actions by Alex Pretti and the two officers who fired 10 times shows how lethal force came to be used against a target who didn’t pose a threat.

  Ken Klippenstein writes: “The brand new agents are idiots,” an experienced ICE agent assigned to homeland security investigations told me. This same sentiment was echoed by virtually everyone I talked to, with several conveying the view that [Alex] Pretti’s death was the fault of some skittish young recruit who panicked when he heard the word “gun” (if that’s what happened). Even one of the new ICE recruits agreed with the experienced agent’s low assessment of the Trump freshman class….

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