A defiant Don Lemon vowed to fight the charges brought against him by federal prosecutors Friday, after he and another independent journalist were arrested in connection with a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
I had been reading elsewhere that the Justice Department had already gone to two Federal judges to press charges against him, only to be denied. I am interested to see whether they bothered a third time, or simply took him into custody without the paperwork, because they could.
That’s what reporting seems to indicate. I’m fairly shocked they managed to get a jury to go along with this. The charges look extremely flimsy on multiple levels.
They did some wildly unprecedented legal maneuvers to try to get these warrants.
Went to magistrate duty judge, who approved 3/8 warrants.
Went to that judge’s manager, Chief Judge Schlitz. He didn’t outright deny the warrants, he just wanted to take a few days to think about it.
That wasn’t good enough. They went to the judge-manager’s manager, the 8th circuit court of appeals. In a sealed emergency petition for writ of mandamus.
Judge Schlitz was required to defend himself in this mandamus action with two hours of notice and he wasn’t even allowed to read the papers.
Since the mandamus action failed, it seems likely that the government has gotten a grand jury indictment. Which process bypasses judges nearly entirely.
Note that it’s pretty normal to get indictments first in the federal courts (before the current times), because if the feds arrest someone on a complaint, they have a 30 day deadline to get that indictment. If they don’t arrest first, there’s no deadline and they can retry as many times as they want.
So normally the feds only use complaints when they need to get someone off the street urgently. These feds use complaints because they only care about splashing the perp walk on social media. They don’t care what happens to the case after that.
I had been reading elsewhere that the Justice Department had already gone to two Federal judges to press charges against him, only to be denied. I am interested to see whether they bothered a third time, or simply took him into custody without the paperwork, because they could.
Who’s gonna stop them?
They may have gotten an indictment through a grand jury.
That’s what reporting seems to indicate. I’m fairly shocked they managed to get a jury to go along with this. The charges look extremely flimsy on multiple levels.
It’s a grand jury. A prosecutor could get one of them to indicate a ham sandwich.
Except when they literally couldn’t.
They did some wildly unprecedented legal maneuvers to try to get these warrants.
Since the mandamus action failed, it seems likely that the government has gotten a grand jury indictment. Which process bypasses judges nearly entirely.
Note that it’s pretty normal to get indictments first in the federal courts (before the current times), because if the feds arrest someone on a complaint, they have a 30 day deadline to get that indictment. If they don’t arrest first, there’s no deadline and they can retry as many times as they want.
So normally the feds only use complaints when they need to get someone off the street urgently. These feds use complaints because they only care about splashing the perp walk on social media. They don’t care what happens to the case after that.