CREATORS: Trump Administration Breathes Life Into Lost Cause of the Confederacy

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
September 2, 2025

The Trump administration is talking about making the nation's capital and places like California and Chicago safe again — reminiscent of the campaign's mantra that evolved into an acronym that represents a political movement MAGA, Make American Great Again.

At the same time, President Donald Trump's acolytes are using the criminal justice system to get even with his political opponents. The FBI raided the home of former national security adviser John Bolton.

According to a carefully calculated leak to The New York Post, Bolton — a major critic of Trump — had the search of his home personally authorized by FBI director Kash Patel. Greg Sargent recently wrote in The New Republic, "Patel had openly declared in 2023 that 'the conspirators,' that is enemies of Trump and MAGA, must be prosecuted, and also that more loyalists with the resolve to see this through would be recruited to carry this out."

The Department of Justice appears to be Trump's personal enforcers. Patel's hit list is common knowledge, and his open involvement in the investigation of Bolten is meant to send a message to Trump's critics. This sounds more like the Mob — who decades ago federal prosecutors successfully crushed — than the Department of Justice.

At the same time, the Trump administration is doubling down on its crime crackdown in major cities. Trump has long painted major U.S. cities as unsafe and lawless. This is nothing new. During 2017 inaugural address, Trump spoke of "American carnage" in urban areas, pointing to crime and poverty, particularly in places led by Democrats.

The focus has not changed. Even though, cities like Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago have been the focus of Trump's wrath, Southern cities like Memphis and Jackson, Mississippi have been ignored.

Not only is it a lie to say that cities like Chicago are "a mess" and dubious at best to suggest that the National Guard needs activated to clean up the mess — the rationale for deploying the National Guard is not about making cities safe it is about creating a "police state."

It has long been a staple of American governance that local and state law enforcement is to be conducted by civilians, not the military.

Ordinarily, a state's governor controls its National Guard. Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president can "federalize" the National Guard, placing them under federal control and funding for federal missions like overseas deployments or suppressing domestic insurrections.

Trump invoked this authority first in Los Angles in June during immigrations protests. He cited "incidents of violence and disorder" tied to ICE operations. According to Katie Couric Media, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials challenged the deployment, "arguing the order violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits U.S. troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. A federal judge agreed, but the ruling was ultimately put on hold by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."

The Posse Comitatus Act was meant to prevent the federal government from using the military as a domestic police force after Reconstruction.

This struggle is again evolving into a fight between red states and blue states — code for rural v. urban. While Los Angeles, Washington, DC and soon Chicago are under siege, there are plans to mobilize up to 1,700 National Guard troops from 19 Republican-controlled states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia and Texas.

This is a modern-day Reconstruction. Major urban areas being occupied by troops from predominately southern states. The Trump administration is breathing life into the lost cause of the Confederacy.

As Ty Seidule, professor emeritus at West Point, described in his book, "Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause," the south rebelled against the north because "(T)he Confederate States of America ... refused to accept the results of a democratic election in 1860."

Sound familiar?

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino 

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Law&Crime: Donald Trump's latest legal effort may escalate fight over Jeffrey Epstein files

Matthew T. Mangino
Law&Crime News
July 23, 2025

President Donald Trump has all sorts of problems with the criminal justice system.

He pardoned hundreds of men and woman who were convicted of storming the capitol on Jan. 6, and his Department of Justice has purged career prosecutors who effectively conducted the prosecutions.

The Trump DOJ, headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, has launched an investigation into the former director of the FBI James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan who looked into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump has fared much better with civil lawsuits — not those litigated, but those settled. His record with civil verdicts — those verdicts rendered by a jury — is not so good. New York Attorney General Letitia James got a verdict for the people of New York for $355 million against Trump for business fraud.  E. Jean Carroll was awarded $88.3 million as a result of two successful defamation jury verdicts against Trump.

On the other hand, Trump received a $15 million settlement – not in the form of a jury award, but money forked over by ABC Disney Entertainment. Paramount CBS did the same, handing Trump $16 million, and then announced the end of the popular "Late Show," hosted by Stephen Colbert, after Colbert called the payment a bribe to secure an upcoming merger.

No wonder, then, that Donald Trump has filed another lawsuit against a big-time media company. The president has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.

President Donald Trump, from left, speaks while signing an executive order as Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation, listen in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The lawsuit was filed in a Florida federal court seeking $10 billion in damages. According to The Guardian, the suit came only a day after the WSJ "reported on a 50th birthday greeting that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003 that included a sexually suggestive drawing and reference to secrets they shared."

The card reportedly concluded with "Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret."

Trump has denied the report and claimed the letter is a fake.

This lawsuit may be more about trying to extract Trump from the center of the Epstein scandal than to cash in another cowering media outlet.

A little more than a week ago, a two-page memo from the Department of Justice and the FBI said they found no evidence that Epstein blackmailed powerful people or kept a "client list," and they reiterated that he died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019.

According to NPR, Epstein's death and imprisonment have been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, including a "prominent belief amplified by numerous right-wing figures who now serve in the Trump administration that the sex trafficker's death is proof, in part, that the government is run by shadowy figures out to undermine Trump."

As the outrage on the right grows, Trump posted a lengthy message on his Truth Social website telling his supporters to "not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about," and spread baseless conspiracies that the so-called files were created by Democrats to go after him. That post didn't go over well with Democrats or Republicans.

While pressure from Democrats is the norm, dissent from within the Trump administration is not. The President's inner circle — Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino — have been at odds with each other over the handling of the Epstein files. Prominent GOP leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have suggested the files be released.

Then, on Friday, the president capitulated, ordering Bondi to seek the unsealing of grand jury testimony from the prosecution against Epstein."

Will the grand jury testimony calm the storm — or just fuel the growing tumult facing Trump and his administration?

(Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. He is a regular contributor to Law&Crime. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino)

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Crime rates fell considerably in the first six months of 2025

Crime almost certainly fell considerably in the United States in the first six months of 2025, reported Jeff-alytics. The decline in crime that began in 2023 and picked up steam in 2024 has accelerated even faster so far in 2025. Both violent and property crime likely fell with large drops in both murder and motor vehicle theft leading the way.

The national decline in murder stands out due to extraordinary drops in many cities. New Orleans recorded fewer murders through June 2025 than any year since 1970 even in spite of the January 1st terrorist attack. New York City has only recorded fewer murders once through June since 1960 (136 in 2017). Philadelphia recorded the fewest murders since 1969, Los Angeles since 1966, Baltimore since 1965, Detroit since 1964, and San Francisco had the fewest ever recorded (monthly data available to 1960).

As a reminder, murder rose at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2020 and it stayed at that consistently higher level in 2021 and 2022. Murder began dropping in 2023 and ended up falling at the fastest rate ever recorded that year. Then murder likely fell even faster in 2024 though we won’t have official FBI data on that for a few months. Now, just five years after the largest one-year increase ever, the US is on track to have the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded for the third straight year in 2025.

The assessment of national crime trends can be made thanks to a variety of independent data sources which have historically closely aligned with FBI national estimates. These alternative sources are needed because the FBI has reported no data on national crime trends since reporting Q2 2024 data last year.

Relying on sampling is a workaround to the traditional slowness of FBI data, but there is always a risk in interpreting the results of 18,000 agencies from a sample of 400+ agencies. That said, the size of the crime declines articulated by independent sources and the historical accuracy of those sources suggests that large declines will hold up even if the unofficial sources are off by more than usual.

The most recent formal FBI data is 18 months old now while the CDC is just finishing up its provisional 2024 count. Fortunately, both the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) and Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI) tend to mimic the annual changes seen in the official sources. As such, these unofficial tallies can tell us what is happening without having to wait 9 or more months for the official word.

Both the GVA and RTCI point to massive declines in fatal shootings and murders occurring in 2025, the third straight year of large declines. The RTCI is now available through May 2025, and that reporting can be supplemented by sampling large cities with publicly available data to see that the trend continued through midyear.

The bottom line is that crime is falling in the United States led by the largest one-year percentage point decline in murder ever recorded. If that sentence sounds familiar it’s because it’s basically identical to what I wrote last year about our crime trends.

It is late enough in the year and the declines are large enough to feel confident that these trends will generally hold through the rest of the year. The exact degree of downward motion in the nation’s crime stats will still take some months to tease out, but a large decline is almost certainly inevitable at this point.

Real-Time Crime Index

The Real-Time Crime index was updated last week through May 2025. The new RTCI sample has data from 421 agencies representing more than 102 million people. This sample makes up around half of all the murders that occur in the US in a given year, so it’s a reliable bellwether of the nation’s murder trend. (As an aside, this is our biggest sample yet in terms of agencies and population covered).

The RTCI through May 2025 shows murder down 20 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2024, down 37 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2021 (at the height of the murder surge), and down 9 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2019 (pre-surge). Murder rolling over the last 12 months in this sample has fallen below 2019’s level

Violent crime is down roughly 11 percent in the RTCI while property crime is down 12 percent. There is undoubtedly some underreporting occurring as agencies still have 9 or so months to correct missing reports. But that issue does not impact the finding of large scale declines in every crime category even if the degree of the decline is likely slightly overstated by the collection methodology.

The decline is fairly uniform across cities/counties and population sizes. In 13 agencies covering 1 million people or more, murder is down 20.1 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent and property crime is down 12 percent. In 192 agencies covering under 100,000 people, murder is down 36 percent, violent crime is down 9 percent and property crime is down 14 percent.

Aside from murder, the motor vehicle theft decline stands out. Motor vehicle thefts surged in 2022 but have been plunging ever since. The decline in motor vehicle thefts started at the very end of 2023 and has been steady ever since. The surge in auto thefts that kicked off in 2020 has not been falling as long so it is still higher than pre-COVID levels, but we aren’t yet seeing signs of a slowdown.

Gun Violence Archive

The Gun Violence Archive data through June paints a similarly rosy picture of our nation’s gun violence trend (though even a large decline leaves gun violence far too prevalent). If a picture is worth 1,000 words then the next three graphs tell the story in 3,000 words.

The GVA isn't exact but it's another strong indicator that the historic drop in gun violence is continuing through June 2025.

Sampling Cities

The RTCI is updated through May which obviously isn’t quite midyear (though it's close!). I grabbed publicly available murder data from the 30 cities with the most murders in 2023 plus Jacksonville (which didn’t report in 2023 but would have been on this list if they had) to clearly see that the RTCI trend carried through midyear.

And…yep. That’s a huge decline through midyear in a decently large sample of cities. Violent and property crime are harder to sample because fewer agencies publish aggregated counts, but there’s no reason to suspect any change from the available May data once June is counted.

The Midyear Final Word

The final word on crime through midyear is that there is a sizable decline in every category of Uniform Crime Report Part I crime. The declines in crime shown by the RTCI data through May suggests crime may decline at or near record levels in every crime type we have measured since 1960. It’s also plausible that multiple crime types will feature the largest drop ever recorded moniker in 2025.

Not every crime is reported to police, there are still six months left in the year for these trends to moderate, and not every city or county is seeing historic declines (or declines at all). Yet the data so far this year paints the picture of declines that began in 2023 and 2024 continuing (and accelerating) through the first half of 2025.

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DOJ wants life in prison for man pardoned by President Trump

Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence a Jan. 6 rioter to a lifetime behind bars—despite President Donald Trump pardoning his crimes at the U.S. Capitol, reported The Daily Beast.

Edward Kelley, a 35-year-old East Tennessee native, was convicted in November of conspiring to murder FBI agents and other officials who investigated his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

                                            Edward Kelly 'Make America Great Again'

Kelley was separately convicted of throwing a Capitol cop to the ground, with the help of others, and smashing a window with a piece of wood. However, those charges were wiped away by the president’s sweeping pardon of so-called “Jan. 6ers” in January. 

Edward Kelley was wearing a helmet, gloves, and a paint respirator when he entered the U.S. Capitol. / Department of Justice

Kelley has contested that Trump’s pardon of his Capitol crimes should also apply to his conviction for plotting to kill FBI agents and local law enforcement in Tennessee.

The Department of Justice disagrees. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday, and first reported by Politico, they asked a judge to send Kelley to prison for the rest of his life.

“Kelley created a list of specific people he intended to assassinate, including agents, officers, and employees of the FBI, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Tennessee Highway Patrol, Maryville Police Department, Blount County Sheriff’s Office, and Clinton Police Department,” the memorandum read. “To effectuate his plan, Kelley sought the assistance of others to identify his victims’ pattern of life and to murder them at their offices, homes, and in public places.”

Part of his alleged plan was to attack his local FBI office in Knoxville by using “improvised explosive devices attached to vehicles and drones.”

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The case for checks and balances, separation of powers, and constrained presidential authority

If ever one needed evidence of the necessity for limits on executive power, President Donald Trump has now provided it, writes David Cole in The New York Review of Books. The first three weeks of his second term are Exhibit A in the case for checks and balances, separation of powers, and constrained presidential authority. He has sought to effectively shutter an agency established by Congress, USAID. He tried to freeze all federal funding, in contravention both of statutes requiring that the funds be spent and of countless contractual obligations. In a brazen effort to remake the federal government in his image, he offered without any authorization to buy out federal employees if they voluntarily resigned. He has attempted to end birthright citizenship, a right expressly guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. He ordered the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia to fire dozens of lawyers who prosecuted the January 6 insurrectionists, and threatened to fire the FBI agents involved, even though they were only doing their jobs. His Attorney General has directed the Justice Department to criminally investigate businesses for DEI programs—even though Congress has not made offering such programs a crime under any circumstances. And he dismissed seventeen inspectors general, the watchdogs for abuse and fraud within the executive branch, without providing the notice and reasons required by statute. The list goes on.  

The targets of these and other measures have not been shy about pushing back, filing legal challenges in the courts. (The online publication Just Security keeps an excellent tracker of this litigation.) Thus far, to put it mildly, the president is not faring well. Courts have blocked him from halting federal funding, closing USAID, removing birthright citizenship, giving Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive information on millions of people held by the Treasury Department, and imposing a February 6 deadline for federal employees to take his illegal buyout. Two courts have blocked his cruel and unfounded directive to transfer transgender women to men’s prisons, even where prison authorities have determined that they should be housed in women’s prisons for their safety. (To be clear, much damage remains, as many of the executive orders are in place and probably not illegal—just heartless, counterproductive, and stupid.) The judges who have blocked his actions were appointed by Republicans and Democrats, even in one case by Trump himself. The courts, in other words, are for the most part doing their job—checking unprecedented abuses of presidential power. 

The ultimate fate of many if not most of these initiatives will likely be determined by the Supreme Court. That is worrying, because for many years this Supreme Court—deeply distrustful of the “administrative state” and of congressional efforts to rein in presidential authority—has undertaken a campaign to grant the president centralized, consolidated power. In the name of the “unitary executive,” a theory that the president must have unilateral control over the executive branch, the Court has repeatedly struck down limits on the president’s power to remove federal officials. Last term it went still further, granting President Trump himself unprecedented immunity even for criminal conduct, reasoning that subjecting a president to the criminal accountability everyone else faces—even after he has left office—could impermissibly interfere with his unilateral powers, such as the pardon authority, and more generally unduly hinder his freedom and willingness to carry out his duties.

It is hard to say how much that decision informs the president’s current overreach. But in any case this time around Trump is more than unhindered; he is unhinged. Many have wondered whether Trump will go so far as to simply defy the Supreme Court if it rules against him. Over the weekend, Vice President J.D. Vance poured gasoline on that speculation by tweeting that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” A lot of work is being done in that sentence by the word “legitimate,” but in our system it is the Court, not the executive, that determines whether the executive’s actions are legitimate, as in legal. If Trump did choose to disobey the Court’s justices on the grounds that they “aren’t allowed” to regulate his executive actions, it would cross a line that no president has ever crossed and likely ignite an entirely justified political firestorm.  

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Trump administration conducts "mass purge" of FBI

Reminiscent of Joseph Stalin and the Russian Soviet era, the Trump administration intensified its efforts to identify and target for retaliation FBI personnel connected to the now-closed investigations into Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and his absconding with dozens of classified documents he was not entitled to retain per the Presidential Records Act, reported the Cato Institute.

In the wake of the administration’s Friday mass purge of senior FBI leaders in Washington and elsewhere across the country, ABC News reported on February 2 that a 12-question survey was sent to FBI personnel “asking about their work related to investigating the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.” The FBI Agents Association (FBIAA) apparently provided the tip to ABC and told the network that,

Employees carrying out their duties to investigate allegations of criminal activity with integrity and within the rule of law should never be treated as those who have engaged in actual misconduct.

This morning, the Washington Times reported that Acting FBI Director and former FBI Newark Field Office head Brian Driscoll had apparently refused an order by Acting Attorney General Emile Bove “to compile a list of all current and former FBI employees assigned ‘at any time’ to the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol for review ‘to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.’ 

The FBI told The Washington Times that Mr. Driscoll is still the acting director, but there is speculation among current and former FBI agents over whether he will remain in that position after refusing Mr. Bove’s order.

Sources said that Mr. Driscoll’s team drove him to Newark, New Jersey, where he previously headed the field office.

It’s that last sentence that really caught my attention. 

Maybe Driscoll needed to visit the Newark office in connection with one or more ongoing investigations. But the fact that the Times’ sources made a point of noting that Driscoll’s “team” drove him to Newark means that he’s got subordinates with guns at his side for a very different reason.

The Times also reported that “a protest by employees and former employees Monday at the Washington Field Office and headquarters is in the planning stages.”

I cannot recall a time in FBI history when current or former employees have planned to gather in numbers to protest on federal property a sitting chief executive’s personnel actions. At the same time, no prior president has attempted a Stalinist-like purge of career federal law enforcement officers at any point in US history.

It’s also worth noting that the abrupt removal of hundreds or even thousands of FBI personnel will inevitably jeopardize ongoing counterintelligence, counterterrorism, cyber, and child sexual trafficking investigations, among many others, something former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R‑NJ) also noted over the weekend.

On January 23, 2025, the FBIAA issued a statement condemning Trump’s mass pardons and sentence commutations of those convicted or pled out for their role in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A request to FBIAA for comment on these latest administration personnel actions targeting FBI employees was not answered prior to the publication of this piece.

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Just Security: The Real Reason Trump’s Purge of Career DOJ Officials Should Alarm You

Since taking office last week, the Trump administration has fired, demoted, and reassigned career investigators and prosecutors across the Department of Justice, moving rapidly to politicize an institution over which the president has reportedly said he has an “absolute right” to total control, reported Just Security. Much has been said in recent days about the impact of these unprecedented personnel moves on the Department’s independence and continued ability to address urgent national security and public safety threats, not to mention the morale of its workforce. But the ouster of career Department officials creates another, more insidious potential threat: that Trump and his allies will use the Department to hold onto power in future election cycles, as they tried and failed to do in 2020.

As a former Senate investigator, I led the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies, including then-Acting Civil Division Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, to conscript the Department into helping overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Our investigation laid the groundwork for the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack’s (“January 6 Select Committee”) examination of the same misconduct, and was the first congressional inquiry to expose Trump’s repeated calls to Department leaders about the investigations he wanted them to conduct.

We also exposed Clark’s scheme to supplant then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and insert the Department in the appointment of swing state electors, along with other efforts by Trump and his allies to use the Department to overturn the election. By now, the ending of this chapter in the January 6 story is familiar: after Department leaders threatened mass resignations in a dramatic Oval Office meeting, Trump backed down from installing Clark as Acting Attorney General. As then-committee chair Dick Durbin said when we released our investigative findings, it was only because of “a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice [that] Donald Trump was unable to bend the Department to his will.”

The Importance of Norms in Protecting the Department’s Work from Politics

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation underscored a basic feature of the nation’s chief law enforcement agency: much of its work is guided by internal norms, not laws passed by Congress. These norms were put in place after Watergate to protect the Department’s independence from politics and ensure its decisions to investigate and prosecute are based only on the facts and the law. Oversight by Congress and independent Inspectors General can expose when the Department strays from its norms, but their implementation ultimately comes down to the principles of 115,000 individual Department employees.

One norm that is central to the Department’s independence is its longstanding policy restricting communications between Department officials and the White House about individual investigations, criminal prosecutions, and civil enforcement actions. This policy and a companion typically issued by the White House has been reaffirmed by Attorneys General and White House Counsels of both parties, and it’s designed to ensure that federal investigations and prosecutions are driven by facts, not politics. In 2020, these restrictions were flouted by high-ranking officials including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who repeatedly asked Department leaders to open criminal investigations of false election fraud claims.

The Department’s norms don’t just insulate law enforcement decisions from politics—they also insulate politics from inappropriate law enforcement. Federal prosecutors have a well-established, legitimate role in enforcing criminal laws passed by Congress, including laws that punish the corruption of government processes (think bribery and fraud) and electoral processes (think campaign finance violations and ballot fraud). Because of the sensitivity of these types of enforcement actions, Department policy typically requires agents and prosecutors to consult with the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section before initiating them. These consultation requirements help ensure the Department applies the same standards to similar cases, so a Republican politician is treated no differently than a Democratic politician who engaged in the same misconduct. More broadly, they help ensure the Department makes decisions to investigate and prosecute based on the facts and the law, not politics or other improper considerations.

Norms also play a critical role in ensuring the Department stays in its lane during elections. The Public Integrity Section’s Election Crimes Branch has explained in longstanding internal guidance that the Department’s role in election crime cases is limited, and that “the Department does not have a role in determining which candidate won a particular election, or whether another election should be held because of the impact of the alleged fraud on the election.” This guidance also recognizes that “the fact of a federal criminal investigation may itself become an issue in [an] election”—a reality that undoubtedly motivated Trump’s demand that Department leaders “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me.” For these reasons, internal policy makes clear that “the Department should not engage in overt criminal investigative measures in matters involving alleged ballot fraud until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded.”

Department officials deviated from this longstanding norm in 2020 at the encouragement of then-Attorney General William Barr. Days after the 2020 election, when claims of a stolen election were in full swing, Barr issued a memo that loosened the Department’s longstanding restrictions on taking overt investigative steps in election fraud matters until the election is certified. The memo reportedly prompted objections by current and former Department prosecutors and led the longtime career head of the Public Integrity Section’s Election Crimes Branch to resign his position. Over the objection of career officials in the Public Integrity Section, Barr simultaneously directed federal prosecutors to investigate certain election fraud claims, including debunked allegations that Georgia election workers had secretly tabulated suitcases full of fake ballots. At the time Georgia’s elections had not yet concluded, with runoff elections scheduled a month later on January 5, 2021.

The extent of the Department’s deviation from longstanding norms during this period has never been fully examined, in part because the Department refused to divulge details of its work in response to bipartisan questioning by Senate staff, and in part because of the January 6 Select Committee’s understandable focus on Barr’s ultimate conclusion that there was no election fraud sufficient to alter the outcome of the election. Barr’s memo was withdrawn in early 2021, but the fact he issued it in the first place, and the way it enabled investigations beyond what the Department historically permitted, underscores how precarious even longstanding norms can be depending on who leads the Department.

The Purge of Career Officials

The ongoing purge of career officials should worry anyone who cares about keeping politics out of the Department and the Department out of the business of deciding elections. Since last Monday, the administration has fired, demoted, and reassigned career investigators and prosecutors across numerous Department offices and law enforcement components. Those impacted include senior leaders in the Department’s Criminal and National Security Divisions, at least a dozen career prosecutors previously assigned to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations, and senior career leaders of the Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, among others.

The mass firing of Special Counsel Smith’s team has gotten significant attention, and deservedly so, for the message it sends to any Department employee thinking of investigating or prosecuting misconduct involving the president. But Americans should be just as alarmed by the reassignment and demotion of Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer, whose obscure-outside-the-Beltway title and low profile belie his critical role in upholding the Department’s norms. Until this week, he served as the Department’s senior-most career official. For decades and across administrations of both parties, Mr. Weinsheimer and his predecessors in that role advised Department leaders on ethics and recusal requirements and the longstanding requirements that keep politics and other improper considerations out of the Department’s work.

Equally concerning is the reassignment and subsequent resignation of Corey Amundson, the longtime career head of the Department’s Public Integrity Section. That office’s apolitical career prosecutors play an indispensable role in ensuring politically sensitive cases are handled appropriately, and that the Department doesn’t overstep its role in election-related matters. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation revealed that in at least one instance, Mr. Amundson pushed to restrain the Department from inserting itself in a 2020 election-related investigation, warning that doing so “risks great damage to the Department’s reputation, including the possible appearance of being motivated by partisan concerns.”

The ousters of Mr. Weinsheimer and Mr. Amundson aren’t surprising, but they should alarm anyone who cares about the Department’s adherence to norms that uphold the rule of law. Of course, the Department’s norms aren’t just the province of high-ranking career officials—every investigator and lawyer must follow them, and the Department is filled with principled career and non-career employees at all levels who do. But the ongoing purge of the very officials responsible for policing those norms signals to the Department’s entire workforce that their jobs are at risk if they, too, prioritize rules that keep politics out of law enforcement.

In 2020, Trump tried and failed to use the Department to hold onto power. Although some Department officials strayed from certain norms, enough principled individuals took a stand when it mattered. He is now ousting the apolitical career officials responsible for ensuring the Department upholds its norms and traditions of independence. In doing so, he is laying the groundwork not only to use the Department for his own personal, political goals throughout his administration, but also to succeed in doing in the next election what he failed to do in 2020.

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Fierce opponent of FBI may soon be agency's director

Kash Patel has called for radical changes at the FBI and was a fierce and vocal critic of the bureau’s work as it investigated ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, reported WHYY Philadelphia.

Now the steadfast Trump ally has been tapped to lead the federal law enforcement agency he’s pushed to overhaul.

A look at Patel, Trump’s pick to replace Christopher Wray atop the FBI.

Patel has for years been a loyal ally to Trump, finding common cause over their shared skepticism of government surveillance and the “deep state” — a pejorative catchall used by Trump to refer to government bureaucracy.

He was part of a small group of supporters during Trump’s recent criminal trial in New York who accompanied him to the courthouse, where he told reporters that Trump was the victim of an “unconstitutional circus.”

That close bond would depart from the modern-day precedent of FBI directors looking to keep presidents at arm’s length.

Former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017, memorably recoiled when Trump asked him during a private dinner to pledge his loyalty to him. And Wray, who had no personal connection to Trump when he was picked to replace Comey, broke with Trump on different hot-button issues and served as FBI director during investigations into Trump that ultimately led to his indictment.

Patel has signaled through interviews and public statements a determination to upend the FBI and radically reshape its mission.

He’s called for dramatically reducing its footprint and limiting its authority, as well as going after government officials who disclose information to reporters.

In an interview earlier this year on the “Shawn Ryan Show,” Patel vowed to sever the FBI’s intelligence-gathering activities from the rest of its mission and said he would “shut down” the bureau’s headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state.’”

“And I’d take the seven thousand employees that work in that building and send them across America to go chase down criminals,” he added.

In a separate interview with conservative strategist Steve Bannon, Patel said he and others “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.”

”We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden, the Democratic challenger, defeated Trump. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

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Can special counsel Jack Smith actually be prosecuted?

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Georgia) asked Jack Smith’s office to preserve all records of the historic classified document and election interference probes, a routine first step in congressional inquiries, law enforcement investigations and litigation, reported, reported the Washington Post.

Smith’s team included veteran national security prosecutors who had spent years at the Justice Department. They secured grand jury indictments charging Doanld Trump with hoarding classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them, and illegally trying to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory.

Since this week’s election, Smith has signaled that he plans to wind down the cases against Trump and focus on completing a final report to Attorney General Merrick Garland, rather than pushing ahead with the prosecutions until the inauguration and forcing a confrontation with the incoming administration.

Smith is assessing how he wants to proceed with the case now that Trump is expected to be sworn in as president on Jan. 20, the special counsel and his team told a federal judge in a filing Friday. Justice Department policy would not allow for the prosecution of a sitting president. U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan responded by granting Smith’s request to suspend all remaining deadlines in the case Friday.

Jordan and Loudermilk’s letter to Smith suggested that Smith’s office might respond to the election by purging records, warning, “The Office of Special Counsel is not immune from transparency or above accountability for its actions.” The lawmakers, both staunch Trump supporters, repeated an earlier request for Smith to turn over records about his communications with Garland, his hiring decisions and the court-approved search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022.

In its filing to Chutkan on Friday, Smith’s team said it needed to assess how to proceed with the case, which accused Trump of trying to interfere with the 2020 election results, now that he is returning to the White House.

Chutkan quickly granted that request and ordered prosecutors to file a report by Dec. 2 explaining how they want to proceed.

The case is still far from a potential trial, and Chutkan is determining what allegations in the superseding indictment may still be prosecuted after the Supreme Court ruled this summer that presidents enjoy broad immunity.

Smith’s options include preparing a final report for public disclosure or dismissing both cases so that they can be revived after Trump’s second term ends, said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former federal prosecutor.

If he terminates the criminal cases soon enough, Smith could deliver a final report detailing the findings of his two probes to Garland before Trump becomes the next president. A final report would allow Smith to “share with the public his evidence of Trump’s crimes,” McQuade said. “Members of Congress should be careful what they ask for.”

Smith could then resign as special counsel before Trump has a chance to make good on his promises to fire him.

Garland has previously said that he would make special counsel reports public if they reached his desk, though he has not indicated specifically what he would do if Smith gave him such a report now.

Were Smith to press forward into a Trump administration, the president or his attorney general could fire him and order the Justice Department to drop the prosecution.

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White supremacist plotted to destroy Tennessee electricity substation

A white supremacist is accused of trying to destroy an electricity substation in Tennessee in an attempt to bring down the regional power network and disrupt American society, authorities told NBC News.

Skyler Philippi, 24, of Columbia, Tennessee, was arrested after an FBI investigation found that he planned to attach a bomb to a drone and fly it into the energy facility in Nashville as part of his extremist agenda, authorities said.

Philippi is charged with the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and the attempted destruction of an energy facility. He appeared in court last week and is due to appear again on Nov. 13. He remains in custody and faces possible life in prison.

In messages to FBI sources, Philippi espoused accelerationist views, a theory popular among far-right extremists that is predicated on large shocks causing chaos and forcing society to change its racial make-up, resulting in a white-only state, authorities said.

The theory was popularized by manifestos left by perpetrators in a number of high-profile neo-Nazi and white supremacist terrorist incidents, including the killing of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

The suspect allegedly told a confidential FBI source in June that he wanted to carry out a mass shooting at a YMCA facility in Columbia, south of Nashville, but later in the year decided that this wouldn’t be enough to achieve.

"If you want to do the most damage as an accelerationist, attack high economic, high tax, political zones in every major metropolis," Philippi wrote, according to court documents released Monday.

In September, Philippi showed an undercover agent portions of his manifesto, which said that "radical armed struggle is the only end to protecting and preserving our folk."

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Creators: Homicides Are Down but More Murderers Are Walking the Streets

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
October 29, 2024

In September, The New York Times declared that "the number of murders reported in the United States dropped in 2023 at the fastest rate on record."

The FBI reported that there were about 2,500 fewer homicides in 2023 than in 2022, a decline of 11.6%. According to Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst who publishes on Substack, the data suggests "the largest year-to-year decline since national record-keeping began in 1960."

However, the picture is not all rosy. In the criminal justice system, "clearance rate" is a term used to measure the rate at which law enforcement agencies solve crimes. In the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, law enforcement agencies can clear, or "close," offenses in one of two ways: by arrest or by exceptional means.

Clearance by exceptional means could include the death of a suspect or the reluctance of the victim or witnesses to cooperate in an investigation.

Declining clearance rates are a problem. A murder in America has a 50% chance of being solved.

Clearance rates have declined precipitously over the last 60 years. In 1965, clearance rates for murder hovered above 90%. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2022, the last year of available data, the clearance rate nationwide was 52.3%.

Although homicides have declined, solving murders has become more difficult. Even with modern investigative techniques, more homicides than ever remain unsolved.

The scope of the problem is enormous. For instance, in 2022, according to the FBI, there were 24,849 homicides. Based on the clearance rate for homicides in 2022, there are approximately 11,853 unsolved murders. That means there are probably more than 10,000 murderers walking the streets from 2022.

If you take the total number of murders over the last 10 years and divide that number by the average clearance rate, the result is more than 80,000 unsolved murders.

More than half of America's major police departments are struggling to solve homicides at the same level of success they enjoyed just a decade ago, according to a 2010 study of federal crime records by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project.

The study focused on the nation's 160 police departments that investigate at least 10 homicides a year and annually report crime data to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. Fifty-four percent of those departments reported less success in solving murders committed during the 10 years prior to the report than in the previous 10 years.

The problem is about more than police work. The MAP study found most departments with declining murder clearance rates also experienced an increase in homicides. These departments often are located in areas with declining tax bases or facing other kinds of fiscal challenges.

Some crime analysts have also cast doubt on FBI data. According to Newsweek, the concerns stem from the suggestion that the data "only covers 77 percent of the U.S. population and should be considered preliminary, given that state and local law enforcement agencies have months to report their data and correct any errors."

In addition, participating in the FBI's Uniform Crime Report is voluntary. If a police department refuses to provide data, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to replicate the data.

This summer, the FBI said the first three months of 2024 saw a "historic" drop in rates of violent crime and murder across the country. That is good news, but is it accurate?

Asher wrote, "Crime almost certainly declined nationally in the first three months of 2024 compared to the first three months of 2023, but the FBI's data is almost certainly overstating that decline."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on X @MatthewTMangino).

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Creators: Report: White House Controlled 'Investigation' During Kavanaugh Confirmation

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
October 14, 2024 

The old adage that the cover-up is often worse than the crime is no more evident, as we have recently learned, than with the confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

In 2018, Kavanaugh was nominated by President Donald Trump to fill the seat left vacant by the sudden retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. A Republican appointee, Kennedy consistently voted for such left-leaning causes as narrowing the death penalty, same-sex marriage and abortion. Kennedy's departure opened the door to appoint a conservative to the court with an eye toward eliminating women's reproductive rights.

However, after two women, Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez, came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct, it appeared Kavanaugh's appointment might be derailed.

In what appeared to be a magnanimous move, Trump called for a supplemental background investigation by the FBI. The investigation was to be done by the book. Unfortunately, there was no book on supplemental background investigations. The White House set the parameters for the "investigation."

Trump promised that the FBI would have "free rein" to investigate claims by Ford and Ramirez. He went on to say the FBI was "talking to everybody" and he wanted the FBI "to interview whoever they deemed appropriate, at their discretion."

As shocking as it might seem to some, Trump was not telling the truth when he described the 2018 "investigation" of Kavanaugh. The Kavanaugh "investigation" was really not an investigation at all.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a Senate Judiciary Committee member, released a recent report into the time leading up to Kavanaugh's confirmation. He found that messages to the FBI tip line regarding Kavanaugh were forwarded directly to the White House and never investigated. The FBI was instructed by the White House to talk to 10 potential witnesses and was not given the leeway to pursue corroborating evidence.

"On instructions from the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came in through the FBI's tip line," according to the Whitehouse report. "Instead, all tips related to Kavanaugh were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information."

According to the Guardian, the FBI received more than 4,500 calls and electronic messages. Even when senators contacted the FBI directly with the names of people who claimed to have relevant information about Kavanaugh, the FBI did not contact them.

The FBI wrapped up their "investigation" within a week. They never even interviewed Ford or Kavanaugh.

Several senators went on to vote to confirm Kavanaugh based on the FBI investigation not finding any corroborating evidence to support Ford's and Ramirez's stories. The FBI didn't try to corroborate their stories, and if there was corroboration in any of the thousands of tips received by the FBI, no one saw it except maybe the White House.

This isn't a failure on the part of the FBI. The Trump White House, the report found, "exercised total control over the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on tips. The White House refused to authorize basic investigatory steps that might have uncovered information corroborating the allegations."

If Trump had no qualms about lying to U.S. senators about something as fundamentally important as the confirmation for a lifetime term on the United States Supreme Court, what is the likelihood he'll be honest with the rest of us?

Here the cover-up made it possible to turn back the clock on women and their reproductive rights. Kavanaugh joined the high court, and in less than four years, the court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on X @MatthewTMangino.

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Homicide down 11.6% nationally the largest single year decline since record-keeping began

Gallup poll last year found that 77 percent of Americans believed crime was rising, even though it was actually falling

The number of murders reported in the United States dropped in 2023 at the fastest rate on record, continuing a decline from the surge in homicides during the pandemic, according to The New York Times.

The F.B.I.’s report, which is the agency’s final compilation of crime data for 2023, showed that there were about 2,500 fewer homicides in 2023 that year than in 2022, a decline of 11.6 percent. That was the largest year-to-year decline since national record-keeping began in 1960, according to Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst based in New Orleans.

Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.

The latest data is consistent with earlier preliminary reports from the F.B.I., and with research from other organizations and criminologists, all showing continuing declines in most crime, including murder.

Even so, crime remains a point of contention in the presidential race, with the Republican nominee, former President Donald J. Trump, describing American cities as crime-ridden dystopias. Polling shows that Americans remain concerned about crime, and that there is a consistent gap between crime data and the public perception of the problem. For instance, a Gallup poll last year found that 77 percent of Americans believed crime was rising, even though it was actually falling.

“Perceptions of safety are not driven by numbers in spreadsheets,” said Adam Gelb, the chief executive of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonprofit policy research group that produces its own reports on crime in America. “They are about what people see and hear and feel on the streets, on TV and in their social media feeds. They are not sitting around studying the F.B.I.’s website.”

Some states, most notably California, are weighing tougher criminal justice measures in the face of public concern over crime. In November, voters in the state will decide whether to roll back one of the state’s landmark criminal justice measures, known as Proposition 47. The measure, approved in 2014, lowered penalties for theft and drug crimes and was responsible for a sharp reduction in the state’s prison population.

As residents of all political stripes express frustration with shoplifting and the role of fentanyl and other drugs in perpetuating disorder, polls are showing overwhelming support in California for rolling back Proposition 47.

At the same time, two progressive district attorneys in California who pursued policies to reduce imprisonment are in tough fights to keep their jobs. Both were elected in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis and the social justice protests it provoked. One, Pamela Price in Oakland, faces a recall election driven by concerns about crime. The other, George Gascon in Los Angeles, is in an uphill battle against a more conservative challenger, polling shows.

 

Though the overall trend in crime is downward, there were still 19,252 murders last year in the United States, according to the F.B.I. And the progress was not uniform, with some cities, like Washington D.C., Greensboro, N.C., and Memphis, Tenn, showing big increases in homicides last year, Mr. Asher noted in an analysis he published on Monday.

“The caveat is that these are national numbers,” said Alex Piquero, a professor of criminology at the University of Miami and the former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics said of the F.B.I. report.

Pointing to a mass shooting in Alabama over the weekend that killed four people, Mr. Piquero said: “When you hear what happens in Birmingham, or you hear what happens in some cities in the United States that still are experiencing firearm violence the way it is, the national numbers won’t mean a lot for those people or those communities. So we have to always remember that we are moving in the right direction, but now is not the time to stop doing what all the people who are invested in crime prevention are doing.”

Criminologists attribute the drop in violent crime to a number of factors, all related to the country emerging from the pandemic: more social services coming back; investments in violence-prevention initiatives; social bonds being re-established; more proactive policing.

“All of those things that were turned off, from a crime prevention point of view, have now been turned on,” Mr. Piquero said.

In a statement, President Biden cited the reduction in crime and pointed to investments in community anti-violence groups that were part of Covid stimulus legislation, saying, “Americans are safer now than when we took office.” He also urged more funding for police departments.

While the F.B.I.’s new report covers crime in 2023, more recent research shows the trend of falling homicides continuing into 2024. A report released in July by the Council on Criminal Justice found that many major U.S. cities had seen sharp drops in homicides this year, and that rates of homicide had returned to prepandemic levels.

And in a database kept by Mr. Asher that tracks murders in nearly 300 American cities, homicides in those cities have declined by nearly 18 percent so far this year — equating to more than 1,200 fewer murders then last year.

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Three mass killings of four or more in Alabama this year

A late night shooting in Birmingham’s Five Points South neighborhood left four dead and 17 injured is one of three quadruple homicides in the city thus far in 2024, according to AL.com.

On July 13, a drive-by shooting at an adult birthday party left four people dead and nine others injured. The victims were Angela Weatherspoon, 56, of Center Point, Markeisha Gettings, 42, of Birmingham, Stevie McGhee, 39, of Birmingham, and Lerandus Anderson, 24, of Center Point.

On Feb. 16, four men were killed in a drive-by shooting in the Smithfield neighborhood. Talton “TJ” Tait, 36, Cortez Ray, 32, Terrell Edwards, 38, and Kevin McGhee, 38, were killed in that shooting.

It also the most recent mass homicide in the state.

The FBI defines mass killings as incidents in which four or more people die within a 24-hour period, not including the killer, according to The Associated Press.

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Crime rates are falling, data collection not improving

 Washington Post Editorial:

There’s encouraging news about crime rates in the United States. After a spike in both violent crime and property offenses after the pandemic-and-protest year of 2020, statistics show that crime is reverting to 2019 levels. That’s according to a newly released midyear report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, based on monthly offense rates for 12 violent, property and drug crimes in 39 cities that have consistently reported such data over the past six years.

Rates for 11 of the 12 offenses CCJ covered in its report were lower in the first half of 2024 than in the first half of 2023. One crime of any kind is too many, of course, and even five years ago the United States was unacceptably violence-prone. Still, those who are genuinely interested in eliminating crime, as opposed to exploiting the issue for political purposes, will take heart in the new trends and study them for hints about which anti-crime policies do and do not work.

Alas, many in politics are interested in exploiting the issue. Former president Donald Trump told a rally in March that “crime is rampant and out of control like never before,” and doubled down on that alarmist message by telling the Republican National Convention that “our crime rate is going up.” Political rhetoric interacts with the public’s long-standing tendency to believe the worst about crime, which is why Mr. Trump is not the only politician to play this game. Twenty-three out of 27 Gallup polls conducted since 1993 showed that at least three-fifths of American adults believed crime had risen over the previous year, though annual rates actually fell during most of that period.

It would be equally wrong to dismiss public concerns, however; they have a basis in reality. Even with the recent improvements, it is undeniable that crime, including the worst crime — homicide — spiked nationally in recent years. The trauma and insecurity that this caused lingers. In seven U.S. cities that provide data on carjacking, that offense remains 68 percent more frequent than it was in the first half of 2019, according to CCJ’s report. Shoplifting and car theft also remain at elevated levels.

Given the emotions that inevitably swirl around this subject, public opinion will probably never precisely reflect statistical reality. But at least the government could publish a sufficiently precise and up-to-date picture of statistical reality. Unfortunately, it does not, as another recent CCJ report explained. The lead federal source for national data, the FBI, issues annual reports each October based on numbers gathered up to 18 months previously and reported — voluntarily and with varying degrees of accuracy — to the bureau by some 18,000 police agencies. Crime rates are based on two different sources: The National Incident-Based Reporting System, which collects details on crimes reported to law enforcement, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which gathers data directly from individuals about their experiences with crime, whether these incidents were reported to police or not.

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FBI: Violent crime takes dramatic fall

On Monday, June 10, 2024, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program released the Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (Q1), January-March, 2024 and the National Use-of-Force Data Collection Update, March 2024, on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer (CDE) at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov.

The Quarterly Uniform Crime Report (Q1), January-March, 2024, provides a preliminary look at crime trends for January through March 2024 compared to January through March 2023. A comparison of data from agencies that voluntarily submitted at least two or more common months of data for January through March 2023 and 2024 indicates reported violent crime decreased by 15.2 percent. Murder decreased by 26.4 percent, rape decreased by 25.7 percent, robbery decreased by 17.8 percent, and aggravated assault decreased by 12.5 percent. Reported property crime also decreased by 15.1 percent.

National Use-of-Force Data Collection data was historically released on a quarterly basis, with each release building cumulatively throughout a calendar year. This cadence required the participation percentage to reset at zero every year. Beginning in January 2024, the participation percentage for the National Use-of-Force Data Collection will be determined using a rolling 12-month span. This change provides continuity in the participation percentage.

Information released from the National Use-of-Force Data Collection in June 2024 reflects data from 72 percent of the law enforcement population participating in the collection. The following is a breakdown of the types of use-of-force events reported from April 1, 2023, through March 31, 2024:

Death – 31.7 percent

Serious Bodily Injury – 55.3 percent

Discharge – 13.6 percent 

The number of incidents will be publicly released when 80 percent participation levels are met.

Firearm attacks on police at 10-year high

The rate of assaults on American law enforcement reached a 10-year high in 2023, with more than 79,000 officer attacks reported, according to a new FBI report released according to The Associated Press. the U.S. to determine trends in violence against law enforcement. It shows that the number of officers assaulted and injured by guns is also climbing.

Agencies reported 466 assaults with firearms in 2023, which is the highest level in a decade, FBI officials said. That’s up from less than 200 officers assaulted and injured by guns in 2014.

There were 60 officers killed as the result of criminal acts in 2023, compared to 61 the year prior and 73 in 2021.

While those numbers declined over the last three years, there were more officer killings as the result of criminal acts in that time than any other three-year period in the last two decades, FBI officials said.

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Special counsel editorializes in classified document report

Another special counsel has filed another report, setting off another round of accusations of partisanship, reported Lawfare. In this case, Special Counsel Robert Hur (whom I like and admire) determined that President Joe Biden should not be prosecuted for mishandling classified information. That is clearly the correct prosecutorial judgment.

Separately, Hur has been criticized for observations he included in his report disparaging President Biden’s memory and mental acuity—observations that Biden’s political opponents will weaponize. For reasons I explored previously, the special counsel regulations are flawed, and recent attorneys general have overly relied on the special counsel mechanism to the detriment of the institutional standing of the Department of Justice. Nonetheless, Hur had no choice here in one respect; a report was mandated. 

But what motivated Hur to include in his report observations about the president’s mental acuity?

Two points are worth noting. First, when a special counsel submits a report it is, by regulation, confidential. Second, a special counsel must explain his or her prosecutive decisions to the attorney general in the report. Once submitted, the decision to release the report to the public belongs wholly to the attorney general. The regulations are clear: “The Attorney General may determine that public release of these reports would be in the public interest.”   

Prosecutors operating in normal, non-special counsel circumstances routinely decline some of the cases they open. When they do—and I was a federal prosecutor for many years—they do not write reports about their investigations, comment publicly on the strength of the evidence, or comment on the relative strengths and weaknesses of their witnesses or of the defendant. 

But they certainly make those sorts of assessments and observations, internally and privately, during their investigations. Some of those assessments are sensitive (witness x is not credible, or witness y is an inveterate liar) and should not be shared publicly. But those sorts of assessments help prosecutors decide which cases are meritorious and should be charged, and which are not, and should be declined.

During his investigation, Hur and his team collected more than 7 million documents and spoke with 147 witnesses. They were trying to determine lots of things, including, most notably, whether any federal criminal statutes were violated and whether, if they charged those violations, they could establish their case to a unanimous jury with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But Hur is required under the special counsel regulations to explain his declination in writing.  

If Hur was going to tell the attorney general that he declined to prosecute President Biden, then I believe he was also obligated to explain his rationale. The very nature of the decision to decline to prosecute includes Hur’s assessment of the putative defendant (Biden) and how Biden would fare at a criminal trial, including in front of a jury, if he chose to take the stand. Would Biden come across as forgetful? As sympathetic? As willful? As dissembling? As honest? These are crucial determinations prosecutors make all the time about witnesses and defendants. Indeed, I cannot imagine writing a report to the attorney general and not including these assessments.

I think it is unfair to Hur to leap to a conclusion that he intended to act as a partisan. It is an easy accusation to make and a difficult one to prove, and it would be at odds with the Rob Hur that I know. But I do think some criticism of the language Hur used is fair. Though he is obligated to write the report and include his assessments, and though the decision to release the report belongs to the attorney general, Hur must have known that his report would inevitably be released. The attorney general has long said that he is inclined to release such reports, to the extent the law permits. 

But a special counsel must write a report in a way—if possible—that gives no advantage or disadvantage to any one person, apart from the consequences that flow naturally from the factual findings of the report. It is one thing to explain in a neutral way why evidence exists—or does not exist—in a case (such as Biden could not recall) and another to use language that is arguably disparaging (such as that Biden is “an elderly man with a poor memory”). It is one thing to suggest that a defendant could come across to a jury as sympathetic and another to suggest that a defendant is utterly incapable of forming criminal intent. Political opponents will turn the latter characterizations into political capital. A special counsel report should avoid providing that sort of ammunition to either side (and I believe Hur could have threaded that needle here) while still adequately explaining a declination decision to the attorney general. 

There is much not to like about the special counsel regulations and this attorney general’s over-reliance on them. Turning to a special counsel is not the panacea the attorney general imagines it to be, and it does not insulate the process from accusations of partisanship. This latest special counsel report only further highlights that fact and those problems.  

By contrast, in June 2023, the investigation into the mishandling of classified information by former Vice President Mike Pence was closed without fanfare. The case was handled within normal channels, and no special counsel was appointed. A letter received by Pence’s attorneys from the Department of Justice simply noted that “[t]he Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department’s National Security Division have conducted an investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information” and that “[b]ased on the results of that investigation, no criminal charges will be sought.” Simple, proper, and uninteresting, as it should be.

If you do not want to pour the fruits of sensitive investigations (with their attendant impressions and assessments) into the public domain, then handle these investigations through normal channels at the Department of Justice, and do what prosecutors always do when they decide not to charge a case: nothing.

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