civil asset forfeiture

How the IRS Used Civil Asset Forfeiture to Ruin the Lives of Two Connecticut Bakers

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At the beginning of this year, Attorney General Eric Holder attempted to close an exploitable loophole in asset forfeiture laws. State and local law enforcement agencies often sought federal “adoption” of seizures in order to route around statutes that dumped assets into general funds or otherwise limited them from directly profiting from these seizures. By partnering with federal agencies, local law enforcement often saw bigger payouts than with strictly local forfeitures.

The loophole closure still had its own loopholes (seizures for “public safety,” various criminal acts), but it did make a small attempt to straighten out some really perverted incentives. But deep down inside, it appears the DOJ isn’t really behind true forfeiture reform. In fact, it seems to be urging local law enforcement to fight these efforts by pointing out just how much money these agencies will “lose” if they can’t buddy up with Uncle Sam.

– From the post: How the Department of Justice is Actively Trying to Prevent Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform

It’s been a while since I’ve reported on the lawless and barbaric practice of civil asset forfeiture. However, just because it hasn’t been a focus doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Indeed, it appears the same federal agencies that couldn’t find a bank executive they didn’t want to coddle, take particular pleasure in harassing and abusing average Americans generally, and small businesspeople in particular.

The following case highlighted by the Huffington Post is an extremely sad and sobering expose. Below are some excerpts, but you can read the whole thing here: IRS Returns Bakery’s Money After 3 Years. Now It Wants To Put The Owners In Prison.

In May 2013, David Vocatura watched $68,000 disappear.

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How the DEA Uses “Parallel Construction” to Hide Unconstitutional Investigations

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Earlier this year, I highlighted the fact that unconstitutional surveillance was in many ways birthed by the pointless, misguided and utterly failed, “War on Drugs.” Here’s an excerpt from that post, titled, How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11:

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

In light of this, it should surprise no one that the DEA continues to use unconstitutional, “classified” methods when targeting suspects. Since the collection of this evidence would be questioned in a courtroom, the DEA suggests using a procedure known as “parallel construction” to avoid any controversy in the public record. This is how it works.

From Muckrock:

Drug Enforcement Administration training documents released to MuckRock user C.J. Ciaramella show how the agency constructs two chains of evidence to hide surveillance programs from defense teams, prosecutors, and a public wary of domestic intelligence practices.

In training materials, the department even encourages a willful ignorance by field agents to minimize the risk of making intelligence practices public.

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Federal Judge of 17 Years Repents – Compares Damage Done by “War on Drugs” to Destruction of World War II

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The “war on drugs” is one of the most irrational, idiotic and destructive public policy failures in American history, and that’s saying a lot. I’ve covered this topic many times at Liberty Blitzkrieg, but nothing spells it out like the repentant words of a former federal judge, who admittedly ruined countless lives for no reason.

From the Atlantic:

ASPEN, Colo.—Former Federal Judge Nancy Gertner was appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton in 1994. She presided over trials for 17 years. And Sunday, she stood before a crowd at The Aspen Ideas Festival to denounce most punishments that she imposed.

Among 500 sanctions that she handed down, “80 percent I believe were unfair and disproportionate,” she said. “I left the bench in 2011 to join the Harvard faculty to write about those stories––to write about how it came to pass that I was obliged to sentence people to terms that, frankly, made no sense under any philosophy.”

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This is How the Clowns at the DEA Screen for Drug Dealers on Amtrak

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It’s been a rough couple of years for the DEA. We’ve heard about the agents who got caught having orgies with prostitutes, paid for by both drug cartels and the U.S. taxpayer. We’ve heard about the agents who wrongly locked up a California student and forgot about him for days, forcing him to drink his own urine for survival. Most recently, we heard about the DEA agent who robbed a man of his life’s savings via civil asset forfeiture as he travelled from Michigan to Los Angeles on Amtrak to start a music company.

Unsurprisingly, what happened to the man on Amtrak appears to be a regular occurrence, as DEA agents and Amtrak officials basically assume all human behavior to be deemed “suspicious.”

We learn from the Atlantic that:

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The DEA Strikes Again – Agents Seize Man’s Life Savings Under Civil Asset Forfeiture Without Charges

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All the money – $16,000 in cash – that Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood is gone, seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque.

Rivers, 22, wasn’t detained and has not been charged with any crime since his money was taken last month.

That doesn’t matter. Under a federal law enforcement tool called civil asset forfeiture, he need never be arrested or convicted of a crime for the government to take away his cash, cars or property – and keep it.

Rivers was left penniless, his dream deferred.

From the Albuquerque Journal article: DEA to Traveler: Thanks, I’ll Take That Cash

In the “land of the free” you might be innocent until proven guilty, but your assets aren’t.

In one of the most uncivilized and preposterous loopholes in America, federal agents are allowed to steal citizens’ assets; cars, cash, even homes, based on suspicion alone. I’ve covered this barbaric and backward practice on many occasions, but here’s a quick refresher from the first post I wrote on the subject in 2013, Why You Should Never, Ever Drive Through Tenaha, Texas:

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American Justice – FBI Lab Overstated Forensic Hair Matches in 95% of Cases, Including 32 Death Sentences

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The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison.

“These findings are appalling and chilling in their indictment of our criminal justice system, not only for potentially innocent defendants who have been wrongly imprisoned and even executed, but for prosecutors who have relied on fabricated and false evidence despite their intentions to faithfully enforce the law,” Blumenthal said. 

– From the Washington Post article: FBI Overstated Forensic Hair Matches in Nearly All Trials efore 2000

The American justice system is broken. Completely and totally broken. This has been one of the key themes here at Liberty Blitzkrieg since inception, and I’ve come to realize that the death of the rule of law is the single most important issue facing our society at this time.

This site has focused on the increased use of selective prosecution in these United States. If you are poor, disenfranchised, or a dissident, the full force of the law will rain down on your skull like a thousand tons of bricks. We have seen this repeatedly in cases such as the South Carolina man who was fined $525 and fired from his job when he failed to pay for a $0.89 soda refill. We saw it in the case of Aaron Swartz, the child prodigy was driven to suicide by overly aggressive and ambitious feds. Finally, we saw it in the case of Barrett Brown, who was threatened with over a century in jail for essentially exposing the criminality of certain very rich and/or powerful individuals.

On the other side of the fence, we see that anyone associated with the power structure can do whatever they want with zero repercussions. We saw this in the case of General David Petraeus, who received a slap on the wrist for passing on highly classified information to his mistress and biographer Paula Broadwell. We saw it in how DEA agents were’t even fired from their jobs despite participating in sex parties filled with prostitutes that were paid for by drug cartels, and sometimes taxpayer funds. Most despicably, we have seen it in the explosive use of deferred prosecution agreements when it comes to all the bailed out Wall Street banks, thus ensuring that no senior bankers went to prison and that their bonuses would be forever protected.

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A Father Talks with His Son About Eric Garner

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Screen Shot 2014-12-11 at 12.46.46 PMI hate that I have to teach my children to be vigilant when it comes to the police. My overall message is that they should be respectful, but to never trust them.

Imagine a group of people surrounding someone who isn’t doing anything violent or disruptive. All this person wants is to be left alone and mind his own business. The gang surrounding him, instead of minding its own business, jumps on him, chokes him, and then proceeds to smother him against the concrete until he dies. If you haven’t already figured it out, this really did happen. To Eric Garner. On July 17th, 2014 he was choked to death while attempting to have a conversation with the police.

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Video of the Day – Understanding the 5th Amendment and Why a Law Professor Says “Don’t Talk to Police”

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Screen Shot 2014-11-26 at 11.50.42 AMIn my recent interview, “Serfdom is the New Normal” – Talkin’ Oligarch Blues with Perpetual Assets, I mentioned the dangers of talking to the police in light of the recent epidemic of shady civil asset forfeitures. What many people fail to realize, is that you aren’t obligated to have casual conversations with police when you have been pulled over. In fact, such conversations are often used solely to manufacture an excuse for further action against you. For example, take this excerpt from the recent Washington Post article, Highway Seizure in Iowa Fuels Debate about Asset-Forfeiture Laws:

Simmons said he was issuing a warning for the failure to signal. After handing over the paperwork, he said the stop was over. Then he asked the driver, Newmerzhycky, if he had “time for just a couple quick questions.”

Police who specialize in highway interdiction use casual conversations to avoid triggering legal questions about the length of stops. If the conversations are consensual, courts consider the added delay to be legal.

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Wall Street Journal Reports Obama’s Attorney General Nominee Has Been Involved in $904 Million in Asset Forfeitures

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Screen Shot 2014-11-11 at 3.55.26 PMEarlier today, I posted the most recent piece in a series highlighting the insidious and lawless practice of civil asset forfeiture being abused by police departments and prosecutors across America in the post: Quote of the Day – An Incredible Statement from the City Attorney of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I suggest reading that before checking out the rest of this post.

Considering the fact that civil asset forfeiture has rightly entered the national spotlight as of late, the stance of Obama’s nominee for Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, on the matter is extremely important. Particularly if the Wall Street Journal is correct and her office had been aggressive in utilizing this practice to seize funds under her oversight.

The WSJ reports that:

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