One of the most troubling things about the Biden regime has been the unequal application of the law we have seen. What has always made the U.S. special in the history of the world was not only its freedom but its rule of law. That’s why people came to us from troubled places all over the world, fleeing banana republics. Yet the Biden team seems to be intent on turning us into the banana republics that people have fled from.
We’ve seen the stark difference in the way that the Jan. 6 defendants have been treated versus the BLM or other leftist rioters. We’ve seen all kinds of tactics brought to bear when it comes to anything related to Jan. 6, whereas in a similar riot against the inauguration of President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2017; most of those arrested had their charges dismissed.
One of the tactics raising concerns is the “geofence warrant” that I’ve previously written about.
There’s more from defense attorney Tara Fish, who takes it apart in her motion to suppress on behalf of defendant David Rhine. Fish argues first that the search was massively overbroad, first going through “millions of private accounts” to determine if any fit within the data of being in or near the Capitol. “The warrant was therefore unconstitutionally overbroad, a modern-day general warrant.” That’s a big problem because warrants have to be narrow and specific.
Federal public defender convincingly argues that the FBI used an unprecedented "modern-day general warrant" to seize personal data of anyone who "could have been" in the approximate vicinity of the Capitol on Jan 6. "Defending democracy" by obliterating bedrock civil liberties pic.twitter.com/wjuyG4lrsO
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 29, 2022
The warrant application didn’t set forth evidence that everyone present “at or near the Capitol Building was guilty of a crime.” Because it didn’t specify based on the person or the evidence of a crime, it guaranteed that it would sweep up people whose “crime” may only have been standing in the vicinity.
The warrant was "fatally over-broad and devoid of particularity, and therefore impermissible under the Fourth Amendment." There was never any particularized probable cause cited by FBI — making it certain that searches were conducted on people who committed no crime whatsoever pic.twitter.com/5MWnL3VKeY
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 29, 2022
They “equated presence at the Capitol with criminal activity.”
Rather than establishing any basis for probable cause that subjects of the search had committed a crime, the government relied on hypothesis and conjecture that merely "equated presence at the Capitol with criminal activity" — bizarrely invoking "the pandemic" in its reasoning pic.twitter.com/0nwnkiyUx2
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 29, 2022
In other words, to obtain its general warrant and seize the personal data of thousands of people without establishing any particularized probable cause that they had engaged in criminal activity, the government simply "equated presence to criminality" pic.twitter.com/1MfcspVlDE
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 29, 2022
That should concern everyone, on all sides of the political aisle. Journalist Michael Tracey snarked that because the “Jan 6 investigation is the most important in the history of human civilization or something, and Democracy™ as we know it hangs in the balance,” the powers that be think these precedent-setting violations of the Constitution should just be ignored. He also noted the evil people being pursued through these intense tactics include suspects like this couple, whose alleged crime appears to have been they went into the building and took a selfie.
The suspect's criminal conduct is alleged to be that he walked into the Capitol at 2:50pm, took a selfie with his wife (who was also arrested), and then walked out at 3:00pm. These were the fruits of an extensive investigation by an agent in the FBI's "Joint Terrorism Task Force" pic.twitter.com/zGKhMGygu7
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) November 29, 2022
Now, if they had been leftists just trespassing during a BLM riot, they probably wouldn’t even have been charged–much less hunted down with such tactics.
But it’s very easy to see how such a warrant can be abused to serve a government that wants to cut off protesters or dissent.
