from the might-makes-far-right dept

Oh hooray. One other a part of our new regular beneath Trump 2.0. Right here’s the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel with the gory details:

Milwaukee County Circuit Choose Hannah Dugan was charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of making an attempt to assist an undocumented immigrant keep away from arrest after he appeared in her courtroom.

In keeping with a 13-page complaint, Dugan, 65, is accused of obstructing a U.S. company and concealing a person to forestall an arrest. The 2 costs carry a most penalty of six years in jail and a $350,000 wonderful, however sentences in instances involving nonviolent offenses sometimes are a lot shorter.

Arresting a choose is an especially uncommon incidence. If it does occur, it often follows months of investigation and large quantities of proof of prison exercise. On this case, it took lower than per week and largely hinges on the statements of a single court docket deputy and the allegations of federal officers who had been free to imagine the worst concerning the few issues they did handle to witness first-hand. On prime of that, the arrest was made on the courthouse, as if the choose posed some kind of a flight threat if she wasn’t apprehended in public at her place of presidency employment.

All very shitty. And all too acquainted. There’s some precedent for this. Guess when that happened.

A Massachusetts choose who allegedly gave a “affordable impression” that she was permitting an immigrant to evade federal custody was “lower than absolutely candid” when requested concerning the incident, in line with an ethics grievance filed Monday.

The choose, Choose Shelley M. Richmond Joseph of Massachusetts, is accused of willful misconduct within the ethics complaint.

[…]

Joseph had as soon as confronted federal costs of conspiracy to hinder justice over the April 2018 incident within the Newton, Massachusetts, courthouse.

Prosecutors had alleged that Joseph allowed Medina-Perez to go downstairs to the lockup, supposedly to retrieve property. The immigrant was then allowed to go away by a again door by a court docket officer. The fees were dropped in September 2022 after Joseph agreed to report herself to the Massachusetts Fee on Judicial Conduct.

[Strokes chin thoughtfully] What may very well be the small print that join these two anomalies? What certainly. Allegedly serving to an immigrant keep away from interloping federal officers trying to make their jobs simpler by poaching folks exterior courtrooms following court docket appearances? Verify. President Trump in workplace? Verify.

As famous within the above report, the felony obstruction costs had been dropped and changed with an ethics grievance. We’ll have to attend and see how this one goes, however to this point, Trump Administration officers are treating it like a regulation and order win. The top of the FBI, Kash Patel, tweeted, de-tweeted, and tweeted again about how proud he was his company was proper there to carry an obstructionist choose to heel. Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi confirmed this report on xTwitter, pretending this was simply good authorities enterprise, fairly than the KGB-esque removing of, let’s consider, a competing viewpoint within the market of mass deportation concepts.

There’s a 13-page charging document [PDF] written by FBI Particular Agent Lindsay Schloemer that portrays this as some kind of prison conspiracy, fairly than only a sympathetic choose being unwilling to let federal brokers use her court docket as some kind of non permanent holding cell for immigration arrests. It’s all written in accordance with the FBI Charging Doc Fashion Information — one thing able to portraying somebody pointing somebody to an alternate exit because the equal to being the motive force in a financial institution theft getaway automotive.

However earlier than we dip into {that a} bit, I need to spotlight considered one of most hilarious “coaching and expertise” assertions I’ve ever seen in a warrant affidavit:

I’m a Particular Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) and have been so employed since 2014. I’m presently assigned to the Milwaukee Subject Workplace. As such, I’m an investigative or regulation enforcement agent of the USA approved beneath Title 18, United States Code, Part 3052, that’s, an officer of the USA who’s empowered by regulation to conduct investigations, to make arrests, and to gather proof for numerous violations of federal regulation. I’m additionally a Licensed Public Accountant (“CPA”) and labored as a CPA for seven years earlier than my employment with the FBI.

Good. Ineffective on this particular state of affairs, however one ought to at all times have a fall-back profession. Apparently, arresting judges is the agent’s fall-back profession, as a result of Schloemer goes on to level out their white collar crime bona fides earlier than getting round to justifying the arrest of a county choose simply because federal brokers (together with a DEA agent as a result of that’s what we’re doing nowadays) had been compelled to run an additional 50-100 ft to apprehend Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, whose essential evasive effort was (and that is all within the charging doc!) utilizing an elevator that was additional away than the one federal brokers assumed made extra sense to make use of. I’m not kidding.

After leaving the Chief Choose’s vestibule and returning to the general public hallway, DEA Agent A reported that Flores-Ruiz and his legal professional had been within the public hallway. DEA Agent B additionally noticed Flores-Ruiz and his legal professional within the hallway close to Courtroom 615 and famous that Flores. Ruiz was trying across the hallway. From completely different vantage factors, each brokers noticed Flores- Ruiz and his counsel stroll briskly in direction of the elevator financial institution on the south finish of the sixth flooring. | am acquainted with the structure of the sixth flooring of the courthouse and know that the south elevators aren’t the closest elevators to Courtroom 615, and subsequently it seems that Flores-Ruiz and his counsel elected to not use the closest elevator financial institution to Courtroom 615.

No matter. It actually doesn’t matter. The allegations declare the choose diverted officers, ushered Flores-Ruiz out by the jury exit, and in any other case tried to impede this arrest. The chief choose additionally appeared somewhat involved concerning the swarm of federal officers making an attempt to poach exiting court docket attendees and expressed a need to formalize the place within the courthouse it was applicable to make these arrests. In the long run, the brokers had been momentarily inconvenienced.

Even when all of claims are factual, the FBI had a number of choices to make use of, together with the one which left it as much as the DOJ to file an ethics grievance, fairly than expedite a felony grievance in opposition to a choose — an motion that’s simply as inexcusable because it was again in 2018. However this administration is useless set on proving to everybody it’ll go after anybody and something that even momentarily halts the progress of its fascist designs. And in doing so, it’s including yet one more black eye to US historical past, one it may solely hope it stays in energy lengthy sufficient to retcon.

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