We've reached the indicting the opposition stage of fascism
There's no sane world in which Rep. McIver committed felonies during her altercation with ICE.
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On Tuesday, June 10, Alina Habba, the interim US attorney for New Jersey, indicted sitting Democratic Rep. LaMonica McIver. The Newark Democrat is charged with two felony counts and one misdemeanor for assaulting, resisting, and impeding a federal officer in the performance of his official duties.
Habba has zero prosecutorial background and came to the job after her spectacular performance as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, where she got him half a billion dollars in civil fraud penalties in New York, $83 million in damages in the E. Jean Carroll assault and defamation cases, and a million dollars in sanctions for filing a RICO trollsuit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, the Perkins Coie law farm, and half the Democrats in DC. (Spoiler alert: It’s never RICO.)
The indictment of Rep. McIver arises from an incident outside Delaney Hall, an ICE facility in Newark. In February, the GEO Group, the private prison company which runs the facility, was awarded a 15-year, $1 billion contract to run the 1,000-bed facility. It became an immediate flashpoint for protesters, as well as city officials, who said that they’d been blocked from inspecting for health and safety.
On May 9, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Reps. McIver, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Rob Menendez Jr. showed up to protest. But members of Congress have a statutory right to inspect Homeland Security detention centers, and they don’t have to call first. (See: Section 527 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2024.) So the facility staff had no choice but to let the representatives inside. Mayor Baraka enjoys no such right of access, however, and so, after initially allowing him inside the gate, he was ordered to leave on pain of arrest.
What happened next is not entirely clear. The McIver indictment claims that Baraka was “allowed to enter into the secured area when the guard became concerned for [his] safety amidst the crowd of protesters,” but was later “told he could not enter without authorization and ordered … to leave the secured area.”
As events were unfolding, the Department of Homeland Security put out a bizarre press release claiming that “a group of protestors, including two members of the US House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility. Representatives Robert Menendez Jr. and Bonnie Watson Coleman and multiple protestors are holed up in a guard shack, the first security check point.” Rep. Watson Coleman is 80 years old. She did not storm the gates, and nor did anyone else.
But all parties agree that Baraka voluntarily left the restricted area and was standing outside on the public sidewalk when ICE agents came to arrest him. During that arrest, the crowd, including Rep. McIver, surrounded the mayor in an attempt to stop ICE from taking him into custody. And it is that scuffle that led to charges against the congresswoman.
“We actually have body camera footage of these members of Congress assaulting these ICE enforcement officers, including body slamming a female ICE officer,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin hyped, declining to say which member of Congress was cosplaying as a WWE ‘rassler.
“NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW,” Habba tweeted, adding that “My office is undertaking a thorough investigation in coordination with our Federal Agency partners of what transpired on Friday at Delaney Hall.”
In the event, the Justice Department never indicted Baraka. It filed a criminal complaint, which it dropped two weeks later after Habba put out a press release saying she’d “agreed to dismiss Mayor Baraka's misdemeanor charge of trespass for the sake of moving forward.”
That is not how prosecutors make charging decisions, and Magistrate Judge André Espinosa was deeply unimpressed with what he called the “embarrassing retraction.”
“Your office must operate with a higher standard than that,” he chastised, reminding the prosecutors that their job is “not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas.”
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But Habba wasn’t hired for her legal chops — she was hired to advance political agendas. So even as she’s facing a civil suit for malicious prosecution and defamation by Baraka, she filed a criminal complaint against Rep. McIver, and then followed it up with an actual indictment.
The charges are thin, to say the least. Footage shows McIver, in the red jacket, attempting to shield the mayor with her body. She is jostled in the crowd and swipes at an agent who grabs her. No body slam was recorded.
It’s often said that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. The joke here is that the standard for an indictment is so low and the scales so tilted toward the prosecution at the grand jury stage, that an indictment is virtually guaranteed. The target is not entitled to be present or to introduce competing evidence. A grand jury need only find that there is probable cause to believe that the crime occurred, and need not be unanimous. And an indictment can be secured if a mere 12 jurors out of 16-23 assembled vote in favor of it.
Convincing a jury of 12 Garden State citizens, most likely the congresswoman’s own constituents, that she assaulted an ICE officer and made him fear for his safety beyond a reasonable doubt, is another matter. Rep. McIver will also have a powerful defense in the Speech or Debate Clause, which protects members of Congress from prosecution when they are carrying out official business.
And of course none of this can be separated from the intensifying chaos around us, as ICE thugs rampage in the streets, the Trump administration dispatches soldiers to arrest civilians, and Republicans target Democratic politicians.
Just yesterday, California US Sen. Alex Padilla was tackled to the ground after interrupting DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as she promised to “liberate the city” of Los Angeles from its elected leaders.
“Rank politics”
Former federal prosecutor Mitch Epner, a partner at New York litigation boutique Kudman Trachten Aloe Posner, called the McIver indictment “an embarrassment to the legacy of the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, where I proudly served as an AUSA from 2001 – 2004.”
He was equally scornful of Habba’s management of the Delaney Hall cases.
“Acting US Attorney Alina Habba is bringing shame to an office that she is not qualified to lead,” he went on. “This is rank politics, with the force of law behind it. I would not be surprised if this prosecution disappears in the same way that the prosecution of Mayor Ras Baraka did.”
If Habba does not slink off again, the case will be heard by Judge Jamel Semper, a veteran of the US attorney’s office Habba now leads, who was appointed to the bench by President Biden. Arraignment is set for next Monday.
McIver, who declined a plea agreement Habba tried to foist on her earlier, called the indictment “a brazen attempt at political intimidation.”
“This indictment is no more justified than the original charges, and is an effort by Trump’s administration to dodge accountability for the chaos ICE caused and scare me out of doing the work I was elected to do,” she said. “But it won’t work — I will not be intimidated. The facts are on our side, I will be entering a plea of not guilty, I’m grateful for the support of my community, and I look forward to my day in court.”
That’s it for today
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The time is long past for some constructive public action. I'll see you on the streets tomorrow for some good old-fashioned American peaceful protest!
It's a good thing that the Trump administration and it's henchmen as a group are so incompetent. It would be justice if that disgrace to professional women, Ms Habba was made to pay for the costs of the government's law enforcement bodies out of her own purse.