FBI agent pleads guilty to wiping hard-drive containing exculpatory evidence
katv.com
katv.com
You're treating the symptoms, the leaf nodes. The FBI is a criminal organization with a long history, that should be abolished outright.
/s
It would be logistically and all around easier to replace the corrupt FBI and it's culture than these two attempts by entire nations at replacing their corrupt police forces.
It is needed. Not because of anything that's happened the last couple years, but because the FBI has been run and staffed by criminals for decades.
This was true from it's earliest days when it was pulling dirty tricks on civil rights and anti war protestors.
Thinking this kind of things is cool when it's used against your political opponents is incredibly short sighted.
That's literally it. As long as the Feds were just cracking the heads of black protestors and snatching brown people up out of their beds, Trumpists were hard-core thin blue line. But the Feds dared disturb their oshi and now the same Trumpists have gone full #ACAB
It's basic fascist ideology - loyalty to the leader above all, and belief that the leader is above the system.
The FBI are investigators, not traditional police; they aren't generally the ones people are talking about when they say "thin blue line". It wasn't the FBI cracking heads and "snatching brown people out of their beds." The phrase is a reaction to perceptions of widespread civic disorder and violent crime; it really has nothing to do with the FBI at all.
Of course you do. Let's be outraged over them serving zero time before they are even sentenced.
All the "states misbehaving" issues that some people think they need the FBI for are traditionally handled by the US Marshall service.
* It’s not the 1920s, there aren’t large criminal organizations anymore
* The FBI in 2022 is a large criminal organization
"The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”"
https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list...
Happy now?
What smaller agency would take on a corrupt state Senator in Missouri?
In a solidly one-party state only the minority party gets prosecuted because the majority party will still win even if they look like corrupt buffoons. <insert Chicago joke here>
If the specific crimes are Federal as it was in this case, then the Federal law enforcement agency must get involved.
Otherwise your argument reduces to "there should be no Federal laws against wire fraud, honest services fraud, and money laundering"
Only when the state statute coincidentally matches the federal statute, for crimes like bank robbery that are defined at the state and federal level.
If the state doesn't have a law against the crime (i.e. South Carolina has no laws regarding hate crimes [1], but the federal government does [2]), then federal prosecutors are responsible for prosecuting those. One can't escape prosecution for a federal crime because there is no state law against it. Prosecuting federal crimes at a local level is exactly why the regional US attorneys offices exist.
In the case in from the article, the crimes committed by the state Senator (wire fraud, money laundering, etc) are federal by definition, so a local DA isn't going to prosecute them anyways.
1. https://apnews.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-columbia-south-caro...
We must assume that people are fallible, corruption is possible, and that we therefore need a means of redress when such corruption occurs.
Strong public accountability and transparency. Actual "rule of law" without social or political bias as the first tenant.
The FBI really does have a very sordid history. Perhaps they can be reformed though, not sure.
Check the facts: there has never once been a Democrat in charge of the FBI. Not once. Not even the ones appointed by Democratic presidents; they have also all been Republicans.
Almost a century, and zero Democrats have ever run the FBI.
Yet if you look at the popular vote, the public has voted for Democrats to run the federal government continuously since the 1980s with only one exception (2004).
I believe this has some relevance to our situation.
The right solution is transparency and accountability. Make sure power abuse gets punished, no matter how powerful the abuser.
These knee-jerk reactions sound good in passing, and sometimes pass into law. In reality, you created a get out of jail card for the powerful. Plenty of people in law enforcement would wipe a drive if their family and debts were taken care of, even in face of prison.
If this isn't a crime that sends you to jail, then I'm a little at a loss here.
Allegedly corrupt state Senator claims exculpatory evidence on a wiped drive. Weigh what could have been there, benefit of doubt to the defendant, without doing anything automatically.
> this isn't a crime that sends you to jail
The FBI agent is going to jail. Per the article.
This is beyond ridiculous:
(1) Someone in law enforcement that is in a position to meddle with the chain of evidence can already wipe incriminating evidence, which is already illegal. That would imply that the powerful already have a “get out of jail” card.
(2) There are a myriad of other places where corruption and bias can produce a “get out of jail” card, starting with who law enforcement chooses to investigate in the first place, and ending with who prosecutors decline to prosecute.
(3) Anyone in law enforcement is well-aware of just how horrific a place prison actually is, especially for someone previously in law-enforcement. Nobody is scrambling to wipe their debts to “take care of their family” while going to prison themselves.
We’re referencing a case where a state senator was convicted despite a drive (of potentially exculpatory evidence) being wiped. Then the guy who wiped the drive was caught and charged. So no.
OP suggested the defendant be “automatically found not guilty.” Not fruit of the poisoned tree, where evidence can’t be used. Automatic exoneration.
> myriad of other places where corruption and bias can produce a “get out of jail” card, starting with who law enforcement chooses to investigate in the first place
Nothing automatic. Also, this is why we have overlapping jurisdiction.
> law enforcement is well-aware of just how horrific a place prison actually is
LEO doesn’t get sent to standard prison, largely for safety reasons.
In the US they do. Look at Derek Chauvin. He got assaulted on day one.
This senator was not powerful enough (or was actually honest enough) to not leverage the illegal “get out of jail” cards that already exist.
> OP suggested automatic not guilty for the defendant. Not fruit of the poisoned tree, where evidence can’t be used. Automatic exoneration.
What else are you going to do when potentially exculpatory evidence has been summarily wiped by the people responsible for maintaining the chain of evidence?
Force the accused to prove the wiped evidence was exculpatory?
This can always be claimed about anything, both ways.
> What else are you going to do when potentially exculpatory evidence has been summarily wiped by the people
Look at the other evidence in appeal. (The defendant is appealing [1].)
[1] https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/sep/05/sentence-in-woods...
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/18...
Surely you see the fundamental problem, here. This shifts the burden of proof onto the defendant. Demonstrating the previous existence and, in particular, the exculpatory nature of destroyed evidence is practically impossible.
If the state directly conspires to an unfair trial, the state’s case must be forfeit.
That we’re ignoring all of the evidence that contributed to the case (and conviction, which was made after the wiped drive was discovered) outside one laptop?
If exculpatory evidence is destroyed, adverse inference demands the court infer that that evidence be viewed in the worst light for the destroyer of the evidence, which in this case is the State. It really doesn't matter what was on that disk at this point. Now that the chain of evidence has been destroyed, we have to assume it truly was exculpatory.
Just as we'd assume a defendant destroying evidence would indicate it was so damning the jury should assume it was just the thing the State needed to prove their case.
Good of the goose, good of the gander. No self-referential inconsistency.
A. The evidence was available through other means
B. It was not strong enough to exculpate the defendant
[1]
I agree that taking a strong inference against actions of prosecution when evidence is destroyed and unrecoverable. However, in this case, that's not what happened. Evidence was destroyed, but it was also preserved in other locations (it was uploaded on dropbox).
Our court system, while weak in many areas, isn't terrible in this sort of circumstance. It doesn't take hard lines because things are tricky.
This sort of problem with evidence is made to come out of the regular court proceedings. It's why discovery happens before we start a trial.
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/18...
In this case they’re an elected official who siphoned six figures out of state funds.
My experience in USA with appeals is they only look at technical process, mis-application of case law, or "clear error". Constitutional issue can be raised, and will lose basically every time.
Any balance or weighing of evidence is in the lower court.
What fruit do you discard after somebody destroys the data that tells what tree was poisoned?
Just recently there was a judge - was it judges? - found guilty of sending kids to prison based on kickbacks received from the prison. And that, pardon the cliche, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Human behavior is both predictable and yet often bizarre.
But is it just the tip of the iceberg? Or are these things highly publicized when they happen because they are rare?
I'm not a cynical, simply realistic. We don't know about a fraction of the shit that goes down.
Creating a situation where bribing a law enforcement officer to claim to have destroyed evidence gets you out of a criminal charge automatically seems like a pretty problematic idea.
https://pds.wv.gov/attorney-and-staff-resources/research-cen...
How do you feel about the NSA?
This has nothing to do with slippery slopes.
I highly doubt folks will do this "incentive" if we were to throw out the charges given there is punishment for the tampering. And if so (slippery slope case happens!) we can reconsider. But otherwise it's all rampant slippery slope thinking and baseless paranoia. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Let's say someone kills a relative of mine, the FBI dorks something up ... they should go free by default even if otherwise can be proven guilty?
I don't think that makes sense / that's not justice.
So now you potentially go to trial with that evidence.
"This isn't fair to me."
"I propose a solution that isn't fair to everyone else ..."
Had Jones's case been a criminal trial, the lawyer's screwup would have given Jones a powerful Fifth Amendment protection argument for excluding the relevant cell phone data from the trial. And anything that is found in that record is unlikely to be applicable to any criminal proceedings against Jones in the future (with the exception of perjury; I'm actually unclear on how a charge of perjury works in this circumstance when the Court is holding evidence provided by the defendant that the defendant perjured themselves).
If he actually has to serve that kind of sentence, that really doesn't sound too lenient.
Those are the exact same maximum penalties for a single count of wire fraud. It's more lenient than the penalty for growing 50-99 marijuana plants (same jail time, fines go up to $1M) or selling 50-99kg of marijuana (same penalty as the cultivation). On the high end of the scale, sale or cultivation of marijuana includes life in prison.
Relative to other less serious crimes (in my opinion), this does seem fairly lenient. There aren't even mandatory minimums on it, unlike drug charges.
I agree, and I hope the agent is sentenced harshly. However, given that this was a plea deal, I would expect him to get only a few years in jail. Although usually this is at the discretion of the judge.
But yes I think any LEOs should consider it not just a moral, ethical and legal violation of trust to do things like this, but to actively fear the consequences if they give in to the urge to cheat. In other words, a rational selfish person would NOT cheat because the EV is far too low.
This is exactly why adverse inference is a thing, and needs to be enforced to the hilt to exonerate, because otherwise, it doesn't disincent the State from doing the same thing in the future where they trade one of their own to really make a case stick.
The Court must symmetrically apply it's measures in disincenting pathologic behavior.
You're not getting it. We could discuss this in a nuanced manner if the evidence existed, and could be weighed by the Court.
We no longer can, because the State, the very entity we bequeathe with the sole authority to conditionally suspend civil liberties in the condition of a proven beyond a reasonable doubt case, and the abscense of exculpatory evidence, destroyed it.
The Court must assume that that information was so damaging to the State's case, that even with all of the disincentives the legal system has to offer, a State agent committed the heinous crime of denying to the defense evidence lawfully subpoena'd.
If the Court does not exonerate, it's recognizing, and cutting law enforcement a check to undermine the rights of a defendant, and more importantly, their counsel, to lawfully surface potentially material exculpatory evidence by whoopsy-ing the material in question, and trading one of their own to make it stick.
This undermines everything the legal system has been predicated upon. This attacks the very integrity and independence of the American judiciary. No one is above the law. Especially the Government.
You may not like the defendant; I don't, but I like a rigged system even less. These are the cases that really test the mettle and integrity of the legal system, and the claim we live in a society subject to the rule of law.
It could be you in the same position. Don't even try that "Pah, never happen", because you don't know. That's why due process matters. This person was entitled to the same procedure as everyone else, and the State has willfully deprived him of it.
Also, at that point I had not read the ruling you referred to, which oddly clearly states the erased data was just a copy loaded to Dropbox; meaning the data exist in at least three places, one one of which is the one in question, that is the disk on the laptop that was erased by the agent. No explanation is provided of what happened to the other copies.
See “parties learned that a paralegal in Mr. Wilkinson's office named Karri Layton had uploaded the Neal recordings to a Dropbox account” here:
"Due process is a requirement that legal matters be resolved according to established rules and principles, and that individuals be treated fairly."
The "established rules and principles" clearly and obviously were not followed, here. Therefore, by definition, and there can be no debate on this, there was no "due process", here.
It's really quite clear here whether there was due process. Which is why a judge already ruled. Probably took about five seconds to figure this case out.
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/10/16/archives/us-forgoes-trial...
I don't think this is even a hard case, legally. The government had relevant evidence & destroyed it deliberately. Not guilty.
The punishment for tampering with evidence should be strict no matter what the case was about. Whether the crime they are framing somebody for is murder or petty shoplifting, the main problem is the abuse of the public trust.
You do not seem to grasp the implications of exculpatory evidence being destroyed. A retrial would be a vindication of the corrupt prosecution - er, I mean, the corrupt law enforcement who was totally not an agent of the prosecution.
https://definitions.uslegal.com/a/adverse-inference/
Given the evidence was exculpatory in nature, the court must assume the worst of it's impact on the State's case.
Another issue is that due process has been broken in a way that can never be restored. I'm a little leery of continuing prosecution under those conditions, given that due process is the underpinning of a just legal system.
I see.
I have long said that attempting to frame someone should bring the same punishment the person would have faced if convicted. However, it shouldn't be automatic exoneration for the person who would have benefited. In this case it seems the attempt to destroy the data failed, the data was obtained and deemed insufficient to exonerate him. Handle it as we do in civil trials--missing evidence is presumed favorable to the other side. Now, usually that would result in an exoneration but it shouldn't be automatic--especially in cases like this where the attempt failed.
There was never democracy. People have an illusion of democracy. I think it was Noam Chomsky who said that in a democracy consent is manufactured.
It's like when you get an invoice for something you did not buy, and you pay even 1 dollar of it for whatever reason. You're now on the hook for all of it.
In the case in question, the defendant (a state Senator) requested the laptop that contained the hard drive for examination, because it would contain evidence that they believed would demonstrate their innocence. The FBI agent was ordered to produce the laptop and did so -- but only after first purchasing and using a forensic disk-wiping service.
According to the article, the defendant is a former state senator, not a current or former US Senator. Otherwise good quote and summary!
https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-woods-260
Does anyone understand why one FBI is helping a senator?
The FBI started investigating a kickback scheme from a State Senator (Jon Woods) who was steering contracts to a small school in exchange for cash and payments to a nonprofit he ran from school administrators. They quickly 'flipped' one of the admins at the school (Micah Neal) who agreed to provide evidence to the FBI in exchange for a guilty plea and reduction in his own sentence.
Neal offered to start recording conversations with Woods, but the FBI told him they didn't want him to / need him to (presumably because they had enough written evidence and financial detail to make the case). Neal recorded 119 conversations anyway and gave them to the FBI.
When the DOJ indicted Woods, his attorneys would be given all investigative material and the FBI agent in question sent him 39 audio files. Woods' attorney realized there were missing files, so he had the court force the FBI to turn over the rest of them, and that's when the FBI agent went out and erased the laptop.
Reading between the lines - the FBI agent probably sent the most 'damning' recordings, left out anything that would impugn their witness, and then panicked when he realized he was caught. The DOJ didn't use the recordings at trial and hadn't asked for them, so I suspect there was no greater motive in the deletion than trying to preserve the conviction/investigative effort.
Corrupt Senator wasting taxpayer money goes to jail, bad FBI agent goes to jail, all seems fine in the end.
Sending a TRIM request would do the job (or, generally speaking, just deleting the files). There is no reachable slack on SSD drives.
The most secure way to erase an SSD is write just insane amounts to it, and then put it through a ballistics test with a 1911 and then throw the remaining parts into Mt Doom.
Grab some popcorn, or tune it out. YMMV.
An often-abusive organization can be tasked with investigating deeply corrupt people, and we don't need to pick a side and declare them the good guys out of tribal loyalty.
We do if we want to have some veneer of ideological consistency to our calls to send the feds after groups X, Y and Z (values of X, Y and Z vary over time) that aren't very bad in the grand scheme of things but whom we want to be marginalized anyway. Reconciling the evil that goes on under the guise of federal law enforcement with throwing ever increasing resources at them to chase this year's boogeyman is beyond the reach of all but the most skilled mental gymnasts so people just call them the good guys because that's easier and doesn't run the risk of you having to defend a nuanced position.
Edit: I do not think the FBI (or most of federal law enforcement for that matter) should exist in their current capacity, but the above is how it appears many people's opinion of the FBI has been formed and that should make a lot of people here uncomfortable.
I do like the way the FBI is used to infiltrate extreme right wing groups of the present day. But that doesn't make me think that the FBI are the good guys.
The point is that the role of the FBI has to be considered on a case by case basis. They are neither the good/bad guys because they infiltrated the Weather Underground or SDS in the 60s, and they are not the good/bad guys because they are infiltrating right wing groups today. Likewise, just because Hoover used them for his own personal vendettas - incontrovertibly - doesn't make them a priori the good or the bad guys. The same is true in reverse: none of the groups are a priori the good or bad guys because they've been investigated or infiltrated by the FBI.
BTW, the vast majority of the organizations the FBI infiltrated between 1963 and 1976 were non-violent and dedicated to peace.
Some of us think that people we vehemently disagree with deserve to have their rights upheld and be subject to due process.
The real tragedy is that people like you who don't believe in equality under law poison the well for the rest of us. In a world where you people are happy to enable slimy things to get your way everyone else must behave similarly or be at a disadvantage.
If your chosen anonymous identity were tied to persistent effort, one could validate, but in the absence of that, you could just use arbitrarily many "throwaway" accounts that all claim ideological consistency on as many issues as desired. Any claims to ideological consistency are therefore of zero value.
It's like me claiming that I have given away $10 billion today to charity.
Let's think of an example: "Why do you think people cannot see through your attempt at manipulation?"
That’s also an oversimplification of what’s known about the Whitney plot, too. The state and second federal trial are still pending:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
In regards to Whitmer, without the feds inciting the idiots in the group, none of this happens. A federal jury already failed to convict several members, so the "justice" system is going to keep retrying until they succeed. This is all a sham.
You won't find any evidence of a superior force opening the gates. One commonly shown video of an officer waving protestors past was actually him signalling for other officers to pull out of the crowd and the officers were clearly outnumbered in that situation.
I really have a hard time with comments like these. It's hard to believe it's just ignorance nearly two years later.
January 6th was a bunch of people with unbreakable faith (some still even after) to a grifter of a magnitude not seen in this country for as long as I'm aware of. He told them to go to the capitol, and that he would go with them. I watched as a horde of people were practically escorted around, having barriers and gates opened up for them, and police allowing protestors to take selfies with them.
After that, the man who told his followers to go to the capitol couldn't even muster any support or pardons for them.
If you are going to say that there was no federal collusion here, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
That seems like a fair assessment.
My point was to reinforce GP's stating that you don't need to pick sides. You need to examine particular situations on a case-by-case basis, rather than coming to some sort of simplistic catch-all description such as "the FBI are the bad guys" or "everyone the FBI investigates are the bad guys".
This is hardly an isolated incident either, so I don't see anything untoward about discussing a pattern of corrupt behavior coming out of the FBI that dates back decades, and calling them out on this malfeasance.
Also, you can try to backpedal all you want. In the original comment of yours that I questioned, you indeed implied that you didn't care about FBI corruption as long as the target is someone you don't like. Your words were pretty clear, so I have a hard time believing that you didn't mean exactly what you said.
I would argue the opposite.
Ideology generally doesn't mean you should pick a side and stick with it all the time.
For example I can disagree with the FBI one day based on my ideology, and agree the next based on my ideology. The FBI is an institution made up of people who make various choices, not an ideology.
I get that this could go down a rabbit hole of definitions and so on but that's my approach generally, to a lot of things.
This isn't evidence that makes the defendant guiltier...but could be a factual finding that blows open the case meaning ya got the wrong guy, or the guy is still guilty, but not the end of the story.
If it were evaluated and available to the Court, a more nuanced discussion could be had of the ramifications on the case. The State destroyed it, however, introducing adverse inference.
This usually comes coupled, when a defendant does it, of causing the Prosecution to become entitled to having the Judge instruct the Jury to see the destroyed evidence in the worst light possible. Seeing as it was the State doing it, that would imply the Court must take that evidence as nothing less than completely undermining the State's original case.
If you aren't willing to throw a guilty man on the streets to make damn sure your LE edifice doesn't put the innocent in harm's way, wtf are you doing as a Court System? It sure isn't justice.
> Something like this should result in the defendant being automatically found not guilty, and the agent sent to jail for the maximum sentence the defendant was facing. This is a complete and unacceptable breach of the public trust, and of civil liberties.
Now, it is a nexus of power that is prone to abuse. (Be sure to check out the lingerie display in the Hoover Building if you visit.) And I do think it needs some reforms - oversight, control and sunlight are sorely lacking. Just like the rest of US LE, they need to be far better-controlled.
https://ij.org/issues/project-on-immunity-and-accountability...
The FBI has always selectively targeted politicians going back to J Edgar Hoover, and the entire organization has political corruption in its founding and DNA.
The FBI was founded to go after politicians. Add in prosecutorial discretion and such an organisation will always be charged with selective enforcement. One of their first cases was prosecuting a murderer of wealthy Indians in Oklahoma the locals ignored [1]. Yes, it has a troubled history. But I haven’t seen a great argument for what could replace it as our nation’s anti-corruption and major crimes force.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/books/review/killers-of-t...
A DOJ lawyer admitted to altering contents of an email to make it say the opposite of what it originally said. https://www.google.com/search?q=doj+lawyer+admits+to+alterin...
Recently 2 of the 4 defendants were acquitted and 2 were declared a mistrial because the FBI was shown to have played a key part in the actual planning. https://www.google.com/search?q=michigan+governor+kidnapping...
Illegal spying on American citizens https://www.google.com/search?q=fbi+illegally+spied+on+ameri...
How has someone been convicted of trafficking children, yet the FBI and DOJ have not released any of the names or charged any of their clients? Everything else seem to leak out right away.
There are plenty more examples. Take a look at some of the OIG reports that have come out in the last 10 years if you want a real in depth look.
There is something wrong with our FBI and DOJ and it needs to be rooted out. I agree with you regarding the replacement but at the same time we cannot pretend its actual doing anti-corruption or major crimes work fairly. Both organizations selectively chooses who to go after based on the employees personal feelings. That is not okay. That is not justice.
Yes, right now it's trendy to be pro-FBI since they are going after Trump, and Trump bad. However, the FBI routinely violates civil rights and like any police organization attracts bad actors and will abuse it's power to the extent it is not prevented from doing so.
The FBI agent is pleading guilty. These wheels have long been turning.
The only part relevant to the present situation is the editorial discretion and social amplification putting an…ABC 7 KATV? Yes, that article on the HN front page. It’s topical, it gets clicks, it gets upvotes.
It’s gaining attention because of the zeitgeist.
> treat the emails no different than anything else
It seems that did not happen[0] (emphasis mine):
> On October 26, 2016, two weeks before the presidential election, Comey learned that FBI agents investigating an unrelated case involving former congressman Anthony Weiner had discovered emails on Weiner's computer between his wife, Huma Abedin, and Hillary Clinton. Claiming he believed it would take months to review Weiner's emails, Comey decided he had to inform Congress that the investigation was being reopened due to new information. Justice Department lawyers warned him that giving out public information about an investigation was inconsistent with department policy, but he considered the policy to be "guidance" rather than an ironclad rule. He decided that to not reveal the new information would be misleading to Congress and the public. On October 28, Comey sent a letter to members of Congress advising them that the FBI was reviewing more emails.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey#Release_of_informa...
Citations please.
Weird that you would say this like a fact, it really isn't the case. It is a smaller proportion of the population that is trying to cast doubt and trying to normalize this suspicion.
The FBI forensic lab for its whole existence went out of their way to falsify testimony on samples they were sent, implicating or exonerating according to what whoever sent them wanted.
Their "most-wanted list" was always a political PR instrument: they put on it whoever they were about to arrest, just so they would seem successful, effective, and deserving of increased funding.
Now whoever runs it inherits all their institutional power.
The real story will be how that "could" will be translated into an "is" beyond a slap on the wrist not to discourage future minions.
There is hardly anything worse. An individual is fairly limited in how much harm they can do (unless they control a biggish corporation). A public official abusing the power of the Federal Government can blight the lives of millions.
That said, people in control of corporations casn do enormous harm, and the go-to treatment of this malfeasance in the US is to fine holders of the stock at the time a conviction loses its final appeal, with no prosecution of company officers at all unless they defrauded stockholders. That is seriously messed up.
All the executives of pint companies that poisoned millions for decades retired untouched.
- John Corry
> The laptop became an issue when it was used to copy audio recordings the government says it never sought.
> Neal, a former state representative of Springdale, carried an audio recorder disguised as a pen during most of 2016. He was cooperating with the government and told investigators he was willing to wear a hidden recording device. Investigators declined, but Neal went ahead and recorded any conversation he thought might interest investigators. He said he hoped he could be of more value to the government and reduce his sentence. He pleaded guilty on Jan. 4, 2017.
> Cessario used his FBI laptop to make copies of the audio files after they were placed in a Dropbox file-sharing folder. He testified in a February court hearing he copied every file that was there and copied them to computer disc in November 2016. Copies of those recordings were turned over to the defense in April 2017.
> According to court testimony, not all the files were in the Dropbox folder the day Cessario downloaded the files and then made his copies. For whatever reason, only 39 of at least 119 audio files made it to the defense. Recorded conversations specifically mentioned in texts from Neal's attorney to Cessario in 2016 were not there.
> Cessario was ordered Dec. 4 in an email from Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Jennen to turn over the laptop for examination to try and find out what happened. That same day Cessario had the hard drive professionally erased at a computer shop in Bentonville, then erased it again himself before turning it in on Dec. 7, he testified in a pretrial hearing Jan. 25.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca8/18...
In otherwords, the evidence wasn't strong enough to overturn the conviction and was available through other means.
What extreme duckery is this? How does it take 45 seconds on a computer that's capable of 8 billion instructions per second per core with 16 gigs of memory to "process preferences" about cookies?
https://www.klos.com/~john/katv.com.png
Holy cow! The list of errors on that page is huge. Oh, well. When they duck up that badly, it provides the impetus to see where this shitshow is coming from so I can block even more of these horrible domains.
Due. Process. Them you can abscond with liberties. No due process, no absconding with liberties. Destroying evidence, especially exculpatory evidence is the System placing itself above it's mandate from the People as laid out in the Constitution.
If you want to imprison someone, you prove your case, maintain all evidence, and investigate every instance of exculpatory evidence you can.
It is not the job of Law Enforcement to secure a conviction. It is their job to see Justice done to the best of their ability. If they violate that mandate by destroying exculpatory evidence, they vacate their authority to imprison.
The scales of Justice demand this bias. Otherwise you've equipped the State with carte blanche to lock up and keep locked up anyone they like.
Due Process. It means something. You may not sympathize with the person, but it is critically important that we hold the edifices of power to maximal account.
The engineer from the car company fudging its pollution data, Jefferey Epstein, Child trafficking rings of the high and mighty, stock market frauds, and the list goes on.
This is true across the world to a degree.
All this technology, laws, systems, institutions, people, moral education, increased awareness and everything modern has not moved the society a lot in any positive direction. Just wobbling around a point, swinging temporarily around the corrupt core.
In fairness, there also hasn't been much development of proactively moral technology, moreso reactively moral i.e. detective and responsive.
To wit:
> According to court testimony, not all the files were in the Dropbox folder the day Cessario downloaded the files and then made his copies. For whatever reason, only 39 of at least 119 audio files made it to the defense. Recorded conversations specifically mentioned in texts from Neal's attorney to Cessario in 2016 were not there.
> Cessario was ordered Dec. 4 in an email from Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Jennen to turn over the laptop for examination to try and find out what happened. That same day Cessario had the hard drive professionally erased at a computer shop in Bentonville, then erased it again himself before turning it in on Dec. 7, he testified in a pretrial hearing Jan. 25.
Audit trails and forensic tech all over the place surfaced it, which theory holds should be a dissuasive factor on future corruption. Time will tell though; moral and immoral tech and moral/immoral implementations of tech are in a runaway arms race.
Their comment relates to a corrupt and entitled elite, which has come to exist in most societies down through history. The trick is to peacefully cycle the elite out of power before they become corrupt, because it seems that most humans will become corrupt, given the opportunity.
Corrupt FBI agent gets caught. How does even this cue choirs of nihilism?
Here’s a better article on the topic https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/fbi-agent-pleads-gu...
Tying 2015 activity by the Missouri field office of the FBI to some sort of FBI vendetta against people who supported Trump is the dumbest thing I've read in awhile, which is generally why nobody should read the Gateway Pundit.
There is actually a great deal wrong with them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gateway_Pundit#False_stori...
The stuff in there is bad enough it makes The Gateway Pundit look like fake news regardless of the bias of the person(s) who wrote it (assuming it is true).
It is a better article, if you can ignore the hyperbolic spin, in that it links to more information -- the fact this was known at the original trial, and the appeals court being quoted, "the evidence the agent destroyed lacked exculpatory value and the information was available by other means".
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-hillary-clinton-aide-des...
EDIT:
Apparently a lot of people think the FBI is completely above board when dealing with more important pigs.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/19/think-the-fbi-deserves-...
Edit: zdragnar is correct that the phones should probably have fallen under Federal Records Act handling.