On January 15, the FBI raided the home of a run-of-the-mill whackjob named Daniel Baker. The broad strokes of this man’s life will be familiar to those who spend time on certain parts of the Internet: he is a tough-talking wannabe vigilante who’s said he’s “so fucking down to slay enemies again” and wants to stop them “WITH EVERY CALIBER AVAILABLE.” His stated enemies? Trumpist insurrectionists and Proud Boys mobs. The US Attorney who announced his arrest? A Trump appointee championed by Matt Gaetz.
The Washington Post has a good article about the raid that includes a number of viewpoints as well as a history of Baker’s life. He’s had his share of troubles. After an emotionally troubled childhood, he washed out of the Army and spent some time homeless. In 2017 traveled to Syria to fight against ISIS with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as a sniper. He posts stuff like the quotes above online.
The article doesn’t mention any concrete plans or weapons stockpiles or FBI entrapment stuff. The complaint (PDF) alleges that he has
violat[ed] Title 18, United States Code, Section875(c), which makes it a federal felony offense to “transmit in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing a threat to kidnap any person or a threat to injure the person of another.”
One of their pieces of evidence?
BAKER has traveled across the United States to participate in protests that have resulted in violence to include joining the CHOP/CHAZ movement in Seattle, Washington during the summer of 2020. CHAZ refers to the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” and CHOP refers to the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest,” which was a protest and self-declared autonomous zone in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. BAKER has used social media as a way to promote, circulate, encourage and educate followers on how to incapacitate officers while at a protest. For instance, BAKER has posted and informed his followers on how to debilitate law enforcement officers by filling up balloons with paint and to throw them at law enforcement.
[…] In addition to his online postings, BAKER has traveled around the country to protest against police brutality and the destruction of America, including travel to Seattle, Washington and Nashville, Tennessee
(There may be some OCR typos.) It’s pretty flimsy stuff. Paint balloons!
I wouldn’t let this guy cat-sit, but does this really justify an FBI raid? If not, how can we let our feelings on this case inform our feelings on prosecuting Trumpists on Parler for the same behavior (for the cases where things are truly equivalent)? One distinction people are drawing is that Baker’s threats of violence are in response to perceived threats from said Trumpists. But there’s always going to be a whackjob posting something violent; is the fact that you’re responding to a fellow whackjob exculpatory? Are we prepared for a world where this fairly common online behavior is enough to get stun grenades tossed into your home? While the online part is new, have we been living in that world since the sixties anyway? Here’s a Reason post that goes over some of these, if that’s up your alley.
If this is the standard going forward, a whole lot of people across the political spectrum are going to find themselves in trouble. Meanwhile, the work of stopping actual terrorism and violence will be made harder, as federal agents spend increasing amounts of time investigating, targeting, and prosecuting people for harmless posts.
I don’t know if I’d call this sort of thing ‘harmless’, exactly–cosplaying Weimar Germany is generally not great–but I’d say this behavior justifies, at most, an interview. I might feel differently if this sort of behavior was rare, but unfortunately it is not.
Update: Adam has provided a good history of the FBI’s sordid past targeting minorities, socialists, LGBT folks, etc. in the comments!
Baud
Based just on what’s in this post, it sounds like his best defense is that the intended victim was too abstract to violate the statute.
Urban Suburbanite
So they went on a full-on raid with this guy, but the douchebro fascists who head to Portland to blast people with bear mace from their lifted pickups are totally safe. And if they’re so concerned about the CHAZ/CHOP involvement, you think they might have might mentioned the fascists who were popping shots off at night around there.
No, of course they wouldn’t touch any of them.
Old School
I’m sure he’ll be brought up to “both sides” the domestic terrorism issue on a regular basis.
WaterGirl
@Urban Suburbanite: Your first comment has to be manually approved, but after that they go through. Welcome!
Baud
@Baud: Ok, having skimmed the complaint, I think this will be dismissed if he has a halfway competent lawyer.
@Old School: The guy hates Biden too.
MattF
The good news is that we’re running out of bullets.
trollhattan
Well now, he sounds far more dangerous than that poor, misunderstood Rittenhouse kid who only wanted to protect bidnezes from bad commies.
Shalimar
He’s someone they would be justified to keep an eye on. Online support of violence combined with putting himself in situations to carry out threats is a dangerous combination. But it doesn’t sound like he is threatening specific people, so I’m not sure why the charges. If what he said and did is the standard, every single Proud Boy would be in prison.
patroclus
Daniel Baker was a noted Presbyterian pastor, who preached all over the ante-bellum South, moved to Texas in 1840, founded Austin College and Daniel Baker College was named after him (although it folded into Howard Payne University after Depression-related and other financial problems). After serving as the 2nd AC President, he died to universal acclaim in 1857. He was also a fine cat-sitter and was neither a thought criminal nor an incipient domestic terrorist.
The current Daniel Baker seems likely to beat the rap if he gets a good lawyer.
Urban Suburbanite
@WaterGirl:
Thanks. I’ve been lurking on this site for a long time.
Kristine
FBI just protecting their informants? /s
Major Major Major Major
@Shalimar: yeah I mean definitely put this guy on a list, but…
Gin & Tonic
@patroclus:
That may not be the way you meant it?
patroclus
@Gin & Tonic: :-) That’s how the AC student-written plaque reads…
Mary G
I find some of the complaints against the Capitol insurrectionists a bit disturbing because multiple felonies are charged for basically just being on federal property raising a verbal ruckus. I don’t condone what they did, but I think of the people from ADAPT who protested outside Congressional offices in their wheelchairs to stop the repeal of the ACA in 2017 or 2018. For nonviolent participants I just worry cheering on throwing the book at MAGAt idiots will come back to be used against us.
Parfigliano
If this is the standard that gets an FBI raid response then (hate to say it) “both sides” are in for a world of hurt.
Tenar Arha
I think we have to look at him as a “thought criminal.” Which means the maximum should have been an interview. (I gather Reason has pretty good tracking of no knock raids, & have documented they’ve long since become dangerously overused).
It’s not like it’s hard for the FBI to investigate someone’s background before they decide on an interview, starting with the reliable red flag for potential violence is previous violence. (Ex. the correlation between domestic violence perpetrators & mass shooters, or physical fights in general). It seems like lazy law enforcement when so much information is publicly available.
As for what’s the difference between this “leftist” guy being threatening online vs. various white supremacists? The difference is mostly a historical blind spot & present impunity. Law enforcement continues to ignore the well documented trend of mass casualty white supremacist violence, including until now, probably in part because they preferred to ignore their complicity in blindly neglecting the danger until it made them look like chumps & almost got multiple politicians killed. IOW FBI has a major culture problem about who should be investigated, & they really need to start automatically “doing the opposite” when they make decisions, like George Costanza.
Jay
Paint balloons,
what, no “concrete milkshakes”, “frozen waterbottles” or “soup cans”?
In the wake of the DHS/FBI report that Nazi’s/Incels/Soverigns were the biggest danger in the US and to the US Government, the DHS/FBI went hard against,……. wait for it,
Non violent WaterProtectors, anti ICE protestors, BLM, Community Activists and SJW’s.
No surprise that after 1/6 the DHS/FBI is going to go after SJW’s of all stripes being intemperate on Social Media.
oldster
What a strangely worded statute!
“…containing a threat to kidnap any person or a threat to injure the person of another.”
Notice: it specifies that it has to be a threat to injure “the person of another,” so that it does not cover the case of threatening to harm yourself.
But since that qualification is not included in the kidnap clause, this statute criminalizes kidnapping *any* person, including…yourself!
Man, I’d better not threaten to kidnap myself, or the FBI will be at my door in a heartbeat.
Brachiator
Reason says pretty much the same thing when it comes to posts by racists, sexists and anti-Muslim bigots. Threat assessment is a serious part of law enforcement. They have often been stupid, targeted the wrong groups for insane political reasons.
I don’t know if there is a single magic formula to make this better. Monitoring by ACLU and others helps, maybe.
WaterGirl
@Urban Suburbanite: I almost wrote “welcome to commenting!”
Leto
This really isn’t a “both sides” deal. One side got an FBI raid over tough guy internet talk, while the other side gets to go on their Mexican vacay after participating in an insurrection attempt.
Winston
Damn! Paint balloons!
artem1s
@Shalimar:
Only speculation but it’s likely the FBI has their eye on a lot of people who are communicating around upcoming specific events. The Jan6 Brigade isn’t done yet. If this character and other’s like him will decide they are the equivalent of the vigilante MinuteMen and are called upon to defend ‘Murica they aren’t any better than McVeigh. Kidnapping sounds pretty specific to me, even if an individual target hasn’t been chosen. As in “let’s show up to the Michigan state house (or upcoming Trump rally) and grab whoever is around and put them on trial”.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud:
So not one of us. Got it. Maybe someone at LGM?
Roger Moore
@Shalimar:
If he served as a sniper in Syria, he also has the experience to make good on his threats. I would prefer that people like this not be arrested until they’ve done something concrete, like bringing their guns to a protest, but they certainly ought to be watched.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Meh – play stupid games, get stupid prizes.
I think our society has been made much worse by the way gently we treat lies in public and commercial discourse, as well as the extent we coddle racist/religious/gender lies and exhortations to violence.
Steve in the ATL
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
But it was mere puffery!
Benw
Every day I find another reason to be happy T**** is deplatformed.
Millard Filmore
@Tenar Arha:
His becoming a militia sniper in a faraway land must count toward that
— and Roger Moore got there first.
Major Major Major Major
@Millard Filmore: Yeah that was a huge red flag obviously, but a no-knock raid??
@Brachiator:
Right, and Reason’s consistent point is that when these are stupid, wrong, and insane, they’re stupid, wrong, and insane. They’re a consistently negatively-partisan platform against the Democrats, but sometimes they write correct things too.
LuciaMia
Live feed from Bourbon St. Sad to see everything closed up and almost deserted. But the photos of how various krewe members decorated the outside of their houses were incredible.
Eolirin
If this was pushed by a Trump appointee at the US Attorney level, and maybe moved by some FBI elements looking to create a both sides narrative around this kind of thing, then isn’t this mostly a political problem that gets resolved by removing enough of the right wing sympathetic elements from government?
Would this arrest have happened if there wasn’t a need to create cover for the white supremacist insurgents who attempted an insurrection?
Hob
@Mary G:
Either laws restricting behavior within government offices are on the books or they aren’t. If you’re saying that these charges are not justified by the law, that’s one thing. If you’re saying that enforcing the law is bad because then the law might get enforced against us, that seems to me to be 1. an argument for changing the law, not for declining to throw the book at these assholes to the extent of the law, and 2. exaggerating the importance of precedent in these things— that is, if the government wants to prosecute non-evil protesters then it will do so regardless of whether it has prosecuted evil ones in the past.
Protesters for good causes who carry out civil disobedience are doing so in awareness of the applicable laws, and are expressing willingness to be arrested. They don’t break in and fuck stuff up and then run away to avoid being held responsible.
Also, I think your statement that “multiple felonies are charged for basically just being on federal property raising a verbal ruckus” may be misleading. It’s not clear that most of these people have been charged with felonies at all, or that if they were, that it was due to “raising a verbal ruckus”. The most common charge in the list is “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds”, which if I understand correctly is defined in 18 U.S.C. §1752 and is only a felony if “the person … uses or carries a deadly or dangerous weapon or firearm” and/or “the offense results in significant bodily injury”; otherwise it’s a misdemeanor. That seems to me like a reasonable distinction. If you’re referring to something else maybe you could clarify.
Tenar Arha
@Millard Filmore:
@Roger Moore: Ugh, & I managed to have left it out, but sniper in Syria is definitely a valid flag for an interview.
ETA word choice
Leto
@LuciaMia: we lived over in Biloxi for 5 years and the parades there were always nice. It really sucks that we won’t have MG this year, but I’m really digging the yard displays and I hope that next year we’ll be able to celebrate properly (that means king cake) :)
Cermet
@Mary G: Crossing police barricades and pushing past police is VERY different thing; so making the charges they did use (which appear minor) a major crime is 100% appropriate.
danielx
@Benw:
I’m glad you find another reason every day, but I only need one reason to be happy about it – I don’t have to listen to or read anything posted by him.
Hob
Btw if anyone is curious about the specific charges being filed about Jan. 6, this page has links to the full indictments in each case and it’s a pretty simple matter to search for the laws that they mention. For instance, two others of the most frequent charges are “Violent Entry and Disorderly Conduct in : a Capitol Building”, 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(D), and “Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in : a Capitol Building”, 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(G). Like the statute I mentioned before, these are (if I’m reading correctly) misdemeanor charges except in cases that involve deadly weapons. Other common charges are vandalism/theft of government property, which have triggers for felony-level penalties based on the amount of stuff vandalized or stolen, a threshold that the kind of nonviolent protests Mary expressed concern about would be very unlikely to meet. Here is a useful article that summarizes other related laws.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Major Major Major Major @ Top:
And I might feel differently if it weren’t so obviously a bad faith attempt by a Trump appointed lawyer (championed by Matt Gaetz!) to drum up a case against someone from the left engaging in vaguely riot-wing extremist type rhetoric, so the lawyer could shout “Both-Sides!” and own the libs.
But since that’s exactly what this is, there’s nothing to be gained by engaging with it as if the Trumpist lawyer is making a valid point. The DoJ should re-assign the case for re-assessment by someone credible, and scuttle the Trumpie off to some federal office in Nome, Alaska or Meat-Packing Central, South Dakota.
Major Major Major Major
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
Bad actors often accidentally raise good points!
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Major Major Major Major:
They really don’t.
Maybe it happens rarely, but I’m skeptical, and it certainly doesn’t happen often.
That said, that’s why I recommended re-assigning the case to someone credible for re-assessment – instead of just firing the Trumpy jackass and throwing the case paperwork in the garbage.
gvg
I thought I read this guy had a bunch of guns and such too.
I personally think a lot more people ought to be arrested pretty often for non Trump related things. I have thought so for years. It comes out of awareness of domestic violence and how common stalking and just threatening people is. It needs to be stopped. People need to stop shrugging. The police need to stop it. Its all wrong. This is what anti bulling means. It is not OK. You don’t get to mouth off this way anywhere.
This is also why politicians are so weak. We don’t have their back.
I regret that this one guy who I guess thinks he is a lefty will be used against us by noodle brained authoritarians, but he sure doesn’t meet my standards of liberal. He seems exactly like most Trump supporters except for not actually being a Trump supporter.
Steve in the ATL
@Major Major Major Major:
Are you referring to exposition by William Shatner during episodes of “TJ Hooker”?
JustRuss
Normally I’d be against letting Comey anywhere near the FBI, but I’d grant an exception for this case.
MisterForkbeard
@Shalimar: I was going to say: I read various right-wing watch groups (/r/ParlerWatch being particularly noteworthy) and this is really normal for the hard core right wing.
They literally do this all the time. There are specific threats and actions about going after named Democratic politicians, either with guns or just threats and bragging of future assaults, lynching, etc. It is in fact a necessary part of QAnon – you’re hoping for a violent overthrow of the government and the extra-judicial murder of Democratic officials. “Firing Squad after Trump shows the ‘evidence’ on TV” being one of the more common wishes.
Hob
@MisterForkbeard: This makes it extra hilarious that Trump tried to make “down with section 230 of the CDA!” into a rallying cry against liberal repression in Big Tech. If it weren’t for section 230, Parler would be legally liable for all of that shit—or it would be, except that, for the same reason, it wouldn’t have existed in the first place.
Urban Suburbanite
This guy was definitely not a sniper. He was with one of the Kurdish militias, but he’s definitely puffing up what he did. (And those militias aren’t the same as the ones here – they actually fight) In general, this guy sounds a lot like Michael Reinoehl – he wants to step up, is kind of unstable, and has the potential to be a real liability. I don’t doubt his intentions or wanting to help others, but this is not a guy you want alongside you with a rifle.
The case is weak as hell – he travelled to Seattle? So fucking what? Fascists head down to Portland to attack people and the local cops hold their hands the entire time. He talked tough online – wow. The only way I can see a judge going along with this bullshit is if it’s one of Leonard Leo’s creatures.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
What exactly are “gender lies”?
burnspbesq
@Shalimar:
I’m not sure I see the problem …
More seriously, the Bureau of Prisons isn’t equipped to give this guy the mental health services that he manifestly needs.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Steve in the ATL:
Shatner wasn’t that bad in TJ Hooker imo. Same with Star Trek.
burnspbesq
@Steve in the ATL:
Ha! Try Lawfare, or maybe Just Security.
NotMax
On its face, disproportionate response.
Talk about yer oxymorons.
Say what now? The sky is blue in the world I inhabit. What color is it in that one?
Conflating aberrance with peculiarity normalizes the negative and diminishes the positive.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax:
Gray, currently. I don’t know about you, but I see violent rhetoric all the time. We even used to have some commenters here who were very prolific about it, and were allowed to be for a long time.
The point is exactly the one you agree with: this is an overreaction. I think the fact that it’s an overreaction to commonplace behavior makes it even more of an overreaction.
MisterForkbeard
@Hob: As I understand it, the goal here is to remove section 230 which will then cause Tech companies to do one of two things:
1) Be legally liable for all comments on their site if they do ANY moderations
2) Cut off all moderation, spam/blocking protections, etc.
The goal for the Section 230 crowd is to force #2: Stop any and all fact checking, moderation, spam blocking, etc.
MisterForkbeard
@Major Major Major Major: Yep. It’s somewhat common (less so here) but VERY common in certain corners of the internet.
Browse Reddit, for example. You’ll see it very quickly, and Reddit is considerably more circumspect about this than the rightwing media sites or Fox News comment sections.
Carlo
To my mind the trouble is that the “harmless” assessment can only be definitively made in the negative, after some horrible act. There are thousands of whackjobs with weapons who make online threats for every one who acts on a threat. Every one who breaks through is an avalanche of criticism for law enforcement’s failure to stop this one (in retrospect) dangerous loonie, as if his warning signs weren’t hidden in a sea of deranged online noise just like his own.
Law enforcement needs some discretion in threat assessment, if the online threat law is to have any force at all. The fact that they’re acting at the instigation of a Trumphole US attorney doesn’t mean he’s not a valid bust, stopped clocks being correct twice a day. Certainly if I were planning to attend a left-wing demonstration I’d be relieved to have this kind of dipshit behind bars, instead of acting out his stupid distracting issues next to me.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
When he was yet an uncured ham.
;)
Dan B
@MisterForkbeard: I hadn’t seen details of threats posted on Parler. This is disturbing and all the more reason to get Merrick Garland at DOJ ASAP! Lindsey Graham and McConnell are fighting this because they know that Garland will not limit investigations to small fry crazies. He will make life very complicated for major grifters and corrupted pol’s like Graham, McConnell and their funders.
Rebekah Mercer seems to be a high caliber piece of work supporting Parler, among other things, and she must have wealthy friends who prefer being behind the curtain.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
There’s a distinction between frequent and commonplace which IMHO you’re papering over. But you also tread different digital paths than I.
And the revenge fantasies which from time to time have littered this room are no less abhorrent regardless of their number.
catclub
Why? He has all the bad FBI instincts. Authoritarian, FBI is always right and good, etc.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: It really, really is common on many parts of the Internet, as forkbeard attests to above. Even just like some of my lefty friends’ facebook comment threads. I don’t have to go very far.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Every sewer has an exit.
cain
I believe the DOJ has already asked for all U.S. attorneys appointed by Trump to resign.
Geminid
@Urban Suburbanite: Michael Rienoehl was similar to Baker in some of his thinking, but can be distinguished by his actions. When he apparently killed the right winger in Portland, Reinoehl was already liable for failure to appear in a case involving high speed (100+mph) racing, possession of drugs and an illegal concealed handgun, and endangerment of a minor passenger (his daughter). He’d been racing his son on I-84. Reinoehl had also been arrested on charges of possession of an illegal handgun and assaulting a police officer at a Portland demonstration, but the charges had been dropped along with those against hundreds of other protestors. Reinoehl’s writings, and his Vice interview the day he was killed by law enforcement, indicate he had moved on from wanting to protect against violent fascists and was now into accelerationism, hoping to trigger a civil war.
Adam L Silverman
The FBI began as the Bureau of Investigation. Its first major case, led by a young agent named Hoover, was the attempt to find the 1919 bomber. This is better known as the Palmer Raids. In 2002 I wrote the counter-terrorist history of this as part of analysis with a friend on how the US Federal government has dealt with what we now call terrorism over time. This included a statistical analysis as to whether the Pike and Church reforms to how we gather intelligence and air gap it from law enforcement had any actual effect on dealing with terrorism (it didn’t). It also included elite level semi-structured interviews with a variety of senior leaders. This included a former director on the National Security Staff, a senior leader at DHS, and former AG Ed Meese. No one would publish. Not the academic journals who all recommended we send it to a different journal with their recommendation that it belonged there. Not my editorial contacts at mainstream outlets like The American Prospect or The Atlantic, despite Harold Meyerson indicating he wanted to publish it at the Prospect. And not the academic presses as a book – both not for profit and for profit. I even had an acquisition editor who had scheduled a meeting with us to sign a contract for the book we were going to expand that into get stomped on by her boss. Her boss who owned the press showed up at the meeting instead and in no uncertain terms told us we were to never have contact with anyone at her press ever again. By 2005 we’d abandoned the project.
The reason I recount this unpleasant professional history is that the FBI was born out of the 1919 Bombings/Palmer Raids investigations. And those investigations involved Hoover, in the early 1920s, collecting over 200,000 detailed case files of Americans who were communists, socialists, and subversives of various stripes, but all on the left side of the political spectrum. Think about that. Early 1920s, what we would today think about as rudimentary technology for investigation, surveillance, data collection, and data analysis. And all of it focused on those on the left of American politics. As well as immigrants and visibly ethnic and religious minorities. Despite all of Hoover’s work, it turns out the case was broken open by a small “s” socialist who had immigrated to the US from eastern Europe and was working at the Post Office where the parcel bombs were mailed from. He’d shelved a couple for insufficient postage figuring someone would eventually show up to pay the remainder of the postage when he or she was notified that the packages were never delivered. Not only did he prevent several of the bombs from being delivered and going off on the receiving end, but he was able to produce the evidence that ultimately led to the bomber.
Why is this important? The FBI’s roots are in targeting and investigation and harassing immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, and anyone who can be labelled as a communist or a socialist, which, as far as Hoover was concerned, was anyone with different politics than his own. Basically, while they’re currently focused on domestic extremism and we know that well over 75 or 80 percent of domestic extremism in the US is on the extreme political and/or religious right and is undertaken by white men who are usually Christian, the FBI’s DNA, its original programming, is screaming at it to do what it does best in this situation: roust people on the far left.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk!
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: The Popehat beacons are lit. The affluent suburbs of Los Angeles calls for aid!//
Adam L Silverman
@oldster: It’s the Sheriff Bart clause. The statute was revised to include it after Blazing Saddles premiered.
The Moar You Know
I have zero problem with how he’s being treated but as everyone else on this thread has noted, that standard is being applied quite differently to those on the right side of the spectrum.
Which was, by the way, SOP in Weimar Germany as I’m sure some other commenters have noticed as well.
Carlo
@Adam L Silverman: I could imagine Lawfare publishing an updated version.
Adam L Silverman
@MisterForkbeard: Just read the comments at TTAG, it’s like the sewer that runs under Chernobyl:
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: I ban as quickly as someone notifies me of the problem.
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman: ha!
@Adam L Silverman: NEVER READ THE COMMENTS! (Except, possibly, here)
Geminid
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you for the TED Talk. How do you think the FBI will do regarding the January 6 insurrection?
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Trivia:
The Bureau of Investigation was established in 1908 by the grand-nephew of Napoleon, U.S. Attorney General Charles (“Charlie the Crook Chaser”) Joseph Bonaparte.
Adam L Silverman
@The Moar You Know: This is the key:
It isn’t that everyone should be treated as badly and harshly as him. It’s that everyone should be treated as well as the woman who was allowed to go to the business retreat in Mexico.
Adam L Silverman
@Carlo: We let the project die a long time ago. My friend is now a senior researcher at CRS. It’s not getting revived.
Also, I know Chesney and, frankly, it’s not the kind of thing he and his co-publishers/co-editors would publish.
Geminid
@cain: Fifty-some U.S. District Attorneys have been told to resign by February 28. Some have already.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: Rohan will ride to Lake Forests’ aid! Forth Eorlingas!!!!!
Adam L Silverman
@Geminid: Good. This is bread and butter to them. They’re good when there’s lots of evidence. And when they don’t have to step all over the locals who are doing the actual leg work. In this case it is all straight up Federal.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: When you can’t claim the imperial throne of Mexico, you go into law enforcement.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: ding ding ding
Although maybe not quite *that* well…
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The shit they use to repress women, primarily.
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: What is not widely known, because it’s not discussed – hell it isn’t even taught in criminology and criminal justice courses on policing or, at least, now when I was an academic criminologist because it isn’t in the text books used for those courses – is that American law enforcement is not adapted from the English model created by Robert Peel. The earliest police forces in the US were the plantation police and slave patrolmen in the US south. The first police union was established in South Carolina on the behalf of the officers, deputies, and patrolmen in those early departments. The origin of law enforcement and law enforcement unions in the US are, like so much else in the US, rooted in establishing and protecting slavery.
We don’t need just systemic reform. We need to develop an alternative system and transition to it. From law enforcement to criminal prosecution to incarceration. We need a serious rethink of what each of these components in the system is for and is supposed to do, how they work both as specific parts of the system and in regard to each other within the system, and what, exactly we want the system to achieve.
Urban Suburbanite
@Geminid:
I had forgotten about those charges with Reinoehl. I know some activists had a history of run-ins with him and mentioned his history of confrontational and unstable behavior.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: I did indeed not know that!
Geminid
@Urban Suburbanite: I really wish Michael Reinoehl had turned himself in, or had been captured, so he could have been tried for the killing of Donaldson. The trajectory of his life makes me think that he would not have let himself be taken alive, though. In any event, local LEOs acting as part of a U.S. Marshall’s task force apparently gave Reinoehl little if any chance to surrender.
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman: Your brief history of the FBI makes no mention of its legendary X-Files unit. I am deeply disappoint.
Freemark
@Amir Khalid: He couldn’t include everything in one comment. But I’m sure it is why the report was quashed.
Adam, if it is why it was quashed don’t comment, deny the comment, or confirm the comment. If you do any of those we will take it as confirmation.