Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Tuesday blasted Attorney General Jeff Sessions for announcing that the Justice Department would be increasing asset forfeiture around the country.

In a statement released by his press office, Issa called Sessions's decision "troubling."

“This is a troubling decision for the due process protections afforded to us under the Fourth Amendment as well as the growing consensus we’ve seen nationwide on this issue,” Issa said in the statement.

“Ramping up adoptive forfeitures would circumvent much of the progress state legislatures have made to curb forfeiture abuse."

Asset forfeiture is the process by which police departments and law enforcement agencies seize money and property suspected to be used in a crime. Issa warned that the Justice Department's decision to increase this practice would threaten Americans' due process rights.
"Criminals shouldn’t be able to keep the proceeds of their crime," Issa added, "but innocent Americans shouldn’t lose their right to due process, or their private property rights, in order to make that happen."

On Monday, Sessions said that the Justice Department would increase the practice as part of President Trump's focus on law and order.

"We hope to issue this week a new directive on asset forfeiture — especially for drug traffickers," Sessions said Monday.

"With care and professionalism, we plan to develop policies to increase forfeitures. No criminal should be allowed to keep the proceeds of their crime. Adoptive forfeitures are appropriate as is sharing with our partners."

Link

Yeah, I read this. While fine in theory, application leaves something to be desired. DOJ can't even control their own people adequately, much less the thousands of law enforcement agencies this impacts. Bad idea and I am a Jeff Sessions fan. Bad move Jeff.

RMD

quote:

Originally posted by rduckwor:
Yeah, I read this. While fine in theory, application leaves something to be desired. DOJ can't even control their own people adequately, much less the thousands of law enforcement agencies this impacts. Bad idea and I am a Jeff Sessions fan. Bad move Jeff.

RMD

Me, too.

Having seen how this works in real life, as opposed to the cheery atmosphere of the presser, I am filled with worries.

I believe appointing Session as Attorney General was mistake. He's favoring a long list of bullshit actions over doing what needs doing at DOJ.

I have also been a big Sessions supporter, and am stunned by this decision.

Whatever happened to due process of law?

Well, I am in no way on-board with this. I mean seriously, WTH?

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:
I believe appointing Session as Attorney General was mistake. He's favoring a long list of bullshit actions over doing what needs doing at DOJ.

Agree, until he indicts former criminals from Obama's admin, he's just another wind bag...

quote:

Originally posted by downtownv:
Agree, until he indicts former criminals from Obama's admin, he's just another wind bag...

While that would be great, I never thought for a second it would ever happen no matter who the AG is.

However, I had no idea that Sessions was in favor of state sanctioned theft. It's been a huge problem in Tennessee, there is no way anyone will ever convince me that it is not a direct violation of the constitution. (Yes, I am aware of the court rulings on it and vehemently disagree with them)

quote:

Originally posted by AUTiger89:
I have also been a big Sessions supporter, and am stunned by this decision.

Whatever happened to due process of law?

There is due process of law, but it is not always in the hands of people who are properly motivated, or who know what they are doing.

In one case I was involved in, the DEA did a middle of the night raid to seize a home in the San Diego area, rousted the occupants with automatic weapons, the whole op team.

Unfortunately for them, the mother of the drug lord they were after had sold the property some weeks before and the occupants were the new owners. The man was a near senior citizen who suffered a heart attack during the raid and aftermath. I recall that he survived, but never really recovered. The documents evidencing the transfer had recorded at the time of the transfer some weeks earlier, all in the public records. There is really no explanation for what happened there other than incompetence.

The government was 0 for 3 in terms of being correct and proper in cases I knew about.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by AUTiger89:
I have also been a big Sessions supporter, and am stunned by this decision.

Whatever happened to due process of law?

There is due process of law, but it is not always in the hands of people who are properly motivated, or who know what they are doing.

In one case I was involved in, the DEA did a middle of the night raid to seize a home in the San Diego area, rousted the occupants with automatic weapons, the whole op team.

Unfortunately for them, the mother of the drug lord they were after had sold the property some weeks before and the occupants were the new owners. The man was a near senior citizen who suffered a heart attack during the raid and aftermath. I recall that he survived, but never really recovered. The documents evidencing the transfer had recorded at the time of the transfer some weeks earlier, all in the public records. There is really no explanation for what happened there other than incompetence.

The government was 0 for 3 in terms of being correct and proper in cases I knew about.

Even worse in Tennessee. I've posted previously about the magnitude of the issue. There is a whole Task Force that is funded solely on assets they seize. There are dashcam videos of agencies almost coming to blows on the side of the highway, fighting over who gets to seize the cash and vehicle of a suspected drug dealer. It's out of control and against all the principles of the constitution.

My Congressman, Thomas Massie (R) of KY-4, made a comment upon that today when he linked a ruling written by Justice Clarence Thomas.

"Do you think the government should be able to seize and keep your assets without finding you guilty of a crime? I commend Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for issuing an encouraging statement that calls into question the constitutionality of civil asset forfeiture. I'm not surprised this didn't get coverage in the media.

"Go to page 16 of this Supreme Court document to read his actual statement:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/…...…/030617zor_6j37.pdf

"By the way, Justice Thomas also ruled for the homeowner in Kelo v. New London, CT. Whereas Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kennedy ruled that the government can forcibly take your home and give it to a private company for the purposes of economic development."


In the "City of God," St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, "How dare you molest the seas?" To which the pirate replied, "How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was "elegant and excellent."

Jeff Sessions is a grotesquely out-of-touch draconian-nutbag in a few important ways - which is disappointing, as he seems like a good and honorable man otherwise.

Reign the man in, or send him packing. At present he is he wrong person for the job.

This is bad news. We already have enough assaults on the Bill of Rights without the civil asset forfeiture goons running amok.

Well...This just came out:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/201...russia.html?referer=

Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency, calling the decision “very unfair to the president.”

In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.

Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned investigators against delving into matters too far afield from Russia. Mr. Trump never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, nor would he outline circumstances under which he might do so. But he left open the possibility as he expressed deep grievance over an investigation that has taken a political toll in the six months since he took office.

Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”

While the interview touched on an array of issues, including health care, foreign affairs and politics, the investigation dominated the conversation. He said that as far as he knew, he was not under investigation himself, despite reports that Mr. Mueller is looking at whether the president obstructed justice by firing Mr. Comey.

“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” he said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Describing a newly disclosed informal conversation he had with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a dinner of world leaders in Germany earlier this month, Mr. Trump said they talked for about 15 minutes, mostly about “pleasantries.” But Mr. Trump did say that they talked “about adoptions.” Mr. Putin banned American adoptions of Russian children in 2012 after the United States enacted sanctions on Russians accused of human rights abuses, an issue that remains a sore point in relations with Moscow.

Mr. Trump acknowledged that it was “interesting” that adoptions came up since his son, Donald Trump Jr., said that was the topic of a meeting he had with several Russians with ties to the Kremlin during last year’s campaign. Even though emails show that the session had been set up to pass along incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, the president said he did not need such material from Russia about Mrs. Clinton last year because he already had more than enough.

The interview came as the White House was trying to move beyond the Russia story and regain momentum following the collapse of health care legislation in the Senate. Relaxed and engaged, the president sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, with only one aide, Hope Hicks, sitting in on the interview. The session was sandwiched between a White House lunch with Republican senators and an event promoting “Made in America” week.

Over the course of 50 minutes, the often-fiery Mr. Trump demonstrated his more amiable side, joking about holding hands with the president of France and musing about having a military parade down a main avenue in Washington. He took satisfaction that unemployment has fallen and stock markets have risen to record highs on his watch.

At one point, his daughter, Ivanka, arrived at the doorway with her daughter Arabella, who ran to her grandfather and gave him a kiss. He greeted the six-year-old girl as “baby,” then urged her to show the reporters her ability to speak Chinese. She obliged.

But Mr. Trump left little doubt during the interview that the Russia investigation remained a sore point. His pique at Mr. Sessions, in particular, seemed fresh even months after the attorney general’s recusal. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy and was rewarded with a key Cabinet slot, but has been more distant from the president lately.

“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he added. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”

Mr. Trump also faulted Mr. Sessions for his testimony during Senate confirmation hearings when Mr. Sessions said he had not met with any Russians even though he had met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”


A spokesman for Mr. Sessions declined to comment on Wednesday.

The president added a new allegation against Mr. Comey, whose dismissal has become a central issue for critics who said it amounts to an attempt to obstruct the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election and any possible collusion with Mr. Trump’s team.

Mr. Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Mr. Comey afterward pulled Mr. Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president, including supposed sexual escapades in Moscow. The F.B.I. has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.

In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believes Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,’’ Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”

The president dismissed the assertions in the dossier: “When he brought it to me, I said this is really, made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about man, this is such a phony deal.”

Mr. Comey declined to comment on Wednesday.

But Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials decided it was best for him to raise the subject with Mr. Trump alone because he was going to remain as F.B.I. director. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that he disclosed the details of the dossier to Mr. Trump because he thought that the media would soon be publishing details from it and that Mr. Trump had a right to know what information was out there about him.

Mr. Trump rebutted Mr. Comey’s claim that in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, the president asked him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that Mr. Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Mr. Comey.

“I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”

Mr. Trump was also critical of Mr. Mueller, a longtime former F.B.I. director, reprising some of his past complaints that lawyers in his office contributed money to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. He noted that he actually interviewed Mr. Mueller to replace Mr. Comey just before his appointment as special counsel.

“He was up here and he wanted the job,” Mr. Trump said. After he was named special counsel, “I said, ‘What the hell is this all about?’ Talk about conflicts. But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.”

The president also expressed discontent with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a former federal prosecutor from Baltimore. When Mr. Sessions recused himself, the president said he was irritated to learn where his deputy was from. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any,” he said of the predominately Democratic city.

He complained that Mr. Rosenstein had in effect been on both sides when it came to Mr. Comey. The deputy attorney general recommended Mr. Comey be fired but then appointed Mr. Mueller, who may be investigating whether the dismissal was an obstruction of justice. “Well, that’s a conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said. “Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are?”

As for Andrew G. McCabe, the acting F.B.I. director, the president suggested that he too had a conflict. Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received nearly $500,000 in 2015 during a losing campaign for the Virginia state Senate from a political action committee affiliated with Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

In his first description of his dinnertime conversation with Mr. Putin at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Trump downplayed its significance. He said his wife, Melania, was seated next to Mr. Putin at the other end of a table filled with world leaders.

“The meal was going toward dessert,’’ he said. “I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.”

He noted the adoption issue came up in the June 2016 meeting between his son and Russian visitors. “I actually talked about Russian adoption with him,’’ he said, meaning Mr. Putin. “Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting.”

But the president repeated that he did not know about his son’s meeting at the time and added that he did not need the Russians to provide damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.

“There wasn’t much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying,” he said. “Unless somebody said that she shot somebody in the back, there wasn’t much I could add to my repertoire.”

Sessions was a horrible choice, and this is just one more example of why. This sort of theft from people not convicted of anything is despicable.

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:
I believe appointing Session as Attorney General was mistake.

I made that determination while watching his pathetic performance at the Senate hearing. He looked like a weak and incompetent old man who was in way over his head.

His days as AG are numbered.

very troubling for the average citizen

probably a welcome sign for the state troopers scamming people along I40