this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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[–] dhork@lemmy.world 68 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I had been reading elsewhere that the Justice Department had already gone to two Federal judges to press charges against him, only to be denied. I am interested to see whether they bothered a third time, or simply took him into custody without the paperwork, because they could.

Who's gonna stop them?

[–] mkwt@lemmy.world 38 points 1 month ago

They did some wildly unprecedented legal maneuvers to try to get these warrants.

  1. Went to magistrate duty judge, who approved 3/8 warrants.
  2. Went to that judge's manager, Chief Judge Schlitz. He didn't outright deny the warrants, he just wanted to take a few days to think about it.
  3. That wasn't good enough. They went to the judge-manager's manager, the 8th circuit court of appeals. In a sealed emergency petition for writ of mandamus.
  4. Judge Schlitz was required to defend himself in this mandamus action with two hours of notice and he wasn't even allowed to read the papers.

Since the mandamus action failed, it seems likely that the government has gotten a grand jury indictment. Which process bypasses judges nearly entirely.

Note that it's pretty normal to get indictments first in the federal courts (before the current times), because if the feds arrest someone on a complaint, they have a 30 day deadline to get that indictment. If they don't arrest first, there's no deadline and they can retry as many times as they want.

So normally the feds only use complaints when they need to get someone off the street urgently. These feds use complaints because they only care about splashing the perp walk on social media. They don't care what happens to the case after that.

[–] AniZaeger@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago (3 children)

They may have gotten an indictment through a grand jury.

[–] Kirp123@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

You think? Their track record with Grand Juries is not the best. They tried to indict the sandwich guy 2 times through a grand jury and failed, had to downgrade the charges to misdemeanors since don't require a grand jury and then the jury in the misdemeanor trial acquitted the guy.

My guess is they used an administrative warrant, those have no real oversight and they've been using them a lot.

An administrative warrant is a warrant obtained from a judge by an administrative body to search for violations of administrative rules and regulations. While similar to a criminal warrant, an administrative warrant requires a lower standard of probable cause to be granted. Administrative warrants are governed by 49 USC §32707.

[–] uberdroog@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] AniZaeger@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wouldn't be the first time for this administration.

[–] felbane@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Or the second, or the ninth, or the 73rd, or the 512th, or the 2861st...

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's what reporting seems to indicate. I'm fairly shocked they managed to get a jury to go along with this. The charges look extremely flimsy on multiple levels.

[–] AniZaeger@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's a grand jury. A prosecutor could get one of them to indicate a ham sandwich.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago

This ain't even a ham sandwich though...

[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

Except when they literally couldn't.