RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
Married to a tomboy, so I have that going for me, which is nice.
User ID: 3756
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
16hr ago
This may be the first time I've actually laughed out loud at the contents of a legal opinion.
Scalia's dissents are full of stuff like this. There's a reason he's super popular with law students--he's a delight to read, especially when compared to the dreck other judges produce. The biggest problem with Scalia's writing is that it inspires too many judges to try to write like him when they have 1/100th of his talent.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
16hr ago
The most likely reason the FBI failed to arrest the January 5 pipe bomber in the past 5 years: incompetence.
Prior Motte discussion here. News article here that claims the suspect, Brian Cole, has allegedly admitted his involvement.
I was thinking about this case and thinking about past cases I’ve handled as a criminal defense attorney where I’ve seen law enforcement screw up an investigation. Three related things I’ve seen before that could be behind the FBI’s failure in this case: overlooking evidence, imposing an unnecessary requirement, and target fixation.
1)Overlooking evidence. The FBI could have had a tip incriminating Cole, but they overlooked or ignored it. Even cases with a small amount of local media attention can generate a ridiculous number of “tips.” I can’t imagine how many were generated by this case. People were falling over each other to identify people involved in the Jan. 6 event, so the FBI was probably inundated on this case, too. Here was another chance for people to pursue every grudge against every Trump supporter they knew.
A tip regarding Cole could’ve been missed for any of the usual reasons: it got sorted into the “tip from crazy person” pile instead of the “has potential” pile, an agent wrongly believing someone else had checked it, incorrect logging of some kind, the agent reviewing it misunderstood it somehow, etc. Perhaps the agent even ran Cole’s name through a DMV database, saw that he’s black, and assumed he couldn’t have done it because it had to be Trump supporter and no Trump supporters are black. Law enforcement makes all kind of (dis)qualifying assumptions during a complex investigation, so an agent filtering out a suspect for a reason like this wouldn’t be shocking.
2)Imposing an incorrect (dis)qualifying assumption. The FBI affidavit for the arrest warrant mentioned the evidence that incriminates Cole: cell site location data, purchase data at MicroCenter, and a hit from a license plate reader.
But it’s a safe bet that’s not all the evidence the FBI would’ve had in the case overall. They would also have all the purchase records they could get for the distinctive shoes, purchase records from other hardware stores (Lowe’s, Home Depot, Ace, Walmart, whoever else carries the components used), and cell site location data for the Jan. 6 riot. Some of this evidence might incriminate other people instead of Cole.
The Jan. 6 cell site location data is important because if someone on the investigative team decided that the suspect must have also been at the Jan. 6 event, then the investigation stopped pursuing anyone that wasn’t there.
This kind of (dis)qualifying assumption happens all the time, and it’s a prime source of mistakes. Someone in the investigation will decide, “the suspect must be X” or “the suspect can’t be Y” with insufficient support for why those must be true.
With sufficient support, this kind of filter is valid and a necessary thing to narrow down an investigation. “The suspect must be black because three witnesses said it was a black guy and the video shows a black guy” is a good reason to discount any non-blacks. “The suspect must be left-handed because the video shows him holding the weapon in his left hand” could be valid, or it could be wrong because the video only showed him holding the knife in his left hand, not actually using it.
“The suspect must be a Trump supporter and was likely at Jan. 6.” That first part could mistakenly discount anyone who the agent thought unlikely to be a Trump supporter as I noted above. The second part means the FBI could drive themselves crazy trying to investigate every person present on Jan 6 and trying to make the pieces fit for that person being the pipe bomber, but never have success if the true suspect wasn’t at Jan. 6.
These assumptions lead to rabbit holes, too. “Maybe he had his phone with him on Jan. 6 but not on the 5th.” “Maybe he had his phone with him on Jan. 5 but not Jan. 6.” Then comparing purchase data and license plate hits for everyone at Jan. 6. More and more searching and data matching with no results in this case.
It often takes a completely fresh set of eyes to go back and look at the overall investigation and spot these logical leaps. Once a new team was brought on board, someone could’ve said “uh… what if the guy who planted these wasn’t at Jan. 6?” Only then did the FBI try and sort through all their other data, ignoring everything about Jan 6, and have Cole’s name pop up.
3)Target fixation on the wrong suspect. It’s possible that the FBI thought it was someone else, but there was some piece of evidence that they couldn’t get to fit. A match between a license plate hit and someone at Jan. 6, but no other matching info. Someone who had bought the same shoes and a cell site hit, but nothing else matching. The possibilities are nigh-infinite.
The FBI has shown themselves willing to go to great lengths to try to make pieces fit once they decide the suspect is guilty. See Brandon Mayfield of Oregon and the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Or think about Steven Hatfill and the 2001 anthrax attacks. Or Richard Jewell.
Here, if they decided it was someone else, they could’ve gone down any number of paths trying to make the case, but always failing to get enough to get a U.S. attorney to sign off on the case.
I have seen these three mistakes go together multiple times. Every defense attorney has had the situation where they’ve read through a police report and spotted an obvious alternate suspect with means/motive/opportunity who the police downplay for a very flimsy reason, and the real reason is that law enforcement decided one person is guilty and they’re going to build the case against that person. It must be remembered that the incentive isn’t to “solve” a crime, it’s to make an arrest and get a conviction.
(This is really obvious in some self-defense cases. Officers will downplay every bit of evidence that indicates it was self-defense by the accused and that the “victim” is actually the aggressor, and rabidly defend and support every bit of evidence that shows the “victim” in the best light possible.)
I'm not going to claim any government official is especially trustworthy or PR announcements about arrests are accurate, but past incompetence + new people working on the case fits what Bondi claims led to the arrest:
“Let me be clear: There was no new tip. There was no new witness. Just good, diligent police work and prosecutorial work,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said at a news conference.
It came up in the prior Motte discussion, but upon more review, I don’t believe Cole was previously on the FBI shortlist and that someone feared the evidence was insufficient to get a conviction. Based on what the FBI says it had, they had more than enough evidence to get a search warrant for Cole’s residence, and they had more than enough to send agents to talk to him to see if he’d say something incriminating. It takes very little for law enforcement to go and talk to someone and see what info they can get, so it leads me to think they hadn’t considered Cole at all.
Could it have been new matching software that allowed the FBI to re-sift all the data, or a tip from a nefarious source that can't be made public (something involving Palantir, NSA data centers, etc.), or politically-motivated sandbagging by the prior FBI team? Yes. I don’t have access to any files and can’t rule any of those out. But with what I do know of law enforcement screwing up cases, incompetence seems to fit.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
16hr ago
With the horn players, I shared that I’d given up the horn because it involved entirely too much spit.
Given Willie Brown, too much spit being involved didn't get her to give up playing all horns. Hey-o!
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
I later learned that he told reporters he was there because “I just wanted to check out my future plane.”
She (and/or the ghostwriter) is so good at making her enemies sound awesome.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2d ago
As a more than WOULDable chick (obligatory: I’d at least give her a D)
I feel like you missed a Fulnecky/full throat joke.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2d ago
That's my assumption. He probably could've smeared feces on the application and gotten in.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
To (reluctantly) be fair, the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort.
He also happens to be the son of Shakil Ahmed, a rather big deal formerly of Morgan Stanley.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
It was like someone wrote it while on acid, then fed it into GPT1 with instructions to "just fuck my shit up".
You might have been reading the 21st century version of Naked Lunch.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
"Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrisation of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold"
A true Lovecraftian tome.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
Are you serious? I... didn't think it was possible for lawyers to hate money like this.
I am serious, and these are salaried government attorneys, so they aren't hating money. They're getting the same salaries as others to do less work.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
Uhh — something you guys want to tell me?
I'm a dog, not a teenager.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
If he put his phone number into the system when he made his cash purchase, then the purchase would still be recorded under his account.
Getting caught for an attempted terrorist act because he wanted his 1% store rewards points. Oops.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
DON'T TAKE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS, and you can get by with much less effort.
(I took differential equations. It left scars)
I thought DE was challenging but it was far from the worst class I took. By the time I was done, I could do integration by parts in my head for not-too-complex setups (very helpful in later eng classes). No danger of me doing that now. Depressing how much those skills have atrophied.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
Personally, my grocery bill has doubled in the last ten years. My house has more than doubled in value - I'm fairly well off, and I couldn't afford to live in my neighborhood now. A new model of the same car I'm driving (5 years old) would cost $20,000 more. My employment situation feels more precarious than ever, and the horror stories I hear from acquaintances who have been laid off recently make me wonder if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed. Even the clothes I buy are lower quality and fall apart in ways that they didn't less than a decade ago. Every retail center in my region has so many closed up shops that it looks like a mouth with missing teeth.
It's this part. When I can see how my purchasing power has fallen in the past decade, or how it's gone off a cliff compared to what my parents had in 2000, I don't see much merit in arguments that life is great because Big Line Go Up and phones/weed/gambling/porn.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
Not only is it expensive
No kidding. Even buying bulk and when they're on sale, e-gels from Crank Sports are now over $2 each.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4d ago
I try as best I can to get all my eating into a 6-8 hour window at least 5 days out of a week.
How do you maintain your weight while doing this? I'm not able to do lunches currently, so I'm having to get everything in at breakfast and dinner, and my weight is dropping. There's only so much I can practically eat, even with drinking lots of whole milk, since I don't like a heavy evening meal.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5d ago
"these beautiful, magical words are supposed to make my enemies stop in their tracks."
This is it, and why some bodycam videos have suspects running full-speed from officers while shouting, "I can't breathe."
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5d ago
It could be this is someone the last administration didn’t want to arrest on the chance they lost the case.
Yeah, I wonder. Credit card purchases, cell phone location, and a license plate reader hit all seems like evidence they should've had for years.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5d ago
December 28, 2019, including cash purchases made during the December transaction.
Isn't that a cash transaction that was over a year old that they tracked, not just months?
Also, is the "including" saying he made both credit and cash purchases at that same December transaction?
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5d ago
Who brings their cell phone with them to commit crimes?
From experience as a defense attorney, just about everyone. Obviously, selection bias since there might be hordes of people leaving their cell phones at home, committing crimes, and not getting arrested, and I would never see them.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5d ago
No movement for years, then outsider media identifies a suspect independently, and within a month a different patsy is suddenly identified and arrested.
This timing makes me skeptical as well.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5d ago
Sometimes I sincerely wonder if our education system was deliberately sabotaged. If some ancient soviet program to promote teaching precisely the wrong way took on a life of it's own in academia.
Conquest's 3rd law: The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
There is also the Iowahawk restatement.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5d ago
In fact, you're even entitled to take the carcass if you didn't hit it with your car - the driver who hit it has dibs, but after that whoever comes across it can take it if they want.
That's how my state works as well. And the cop who shows up when you report striking the deer issues the salvage tag.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5d ago
Roadkill doesn't necessarily mean it's been sitting out in the sun for days.
Yes, I'm aware. I've eaten harvested roadkill. It's more the "vegetarian with exception for roadkill" that's an eyebrow-raiser.
A law professor helpfully compiled all the times that Scalia was a big meany and rude to people in his dissents. (She looks exactly as you might expect). She only includes excerpts of those dissents, but if any catch your eye, it'd be worth tracking down the full thing to read.
Although specifically witty ones might be harder to pin down versus sarcastic ones. His dissents in culture war cases tend to be the latter.
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