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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   2960 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Can you point to any other diplomatic personnel or senior political staffers of first world countries who have been arrested in the U.S. for sex-related crimes? Don't we sort of take it for granted that people in power are fucking deviant horndogs - isn't it a totally normal headline that prostitutes/escorts "descend" upon Davos and similar major-power conference locations?

The correct comparison here would be a non-diplomatic foreign government official from a friendly country. A good comparison here is actually the Harry Dunn case in the UK. An American government official without diplomatic immunity killed a motorcyclist while driving on the wrong side of the road. She was released with the expectation that she would show up to court. It turned into a big diplomatic mess because the US government smuggled her out of the country on a military plane and tried to retroactively claim diplomatic immunity under a highly questionable legal interpretation.

The expectation especially among friendly countries is that foreign government officials who are charged with a crime will respect the laws of their host country and show up for court. This is especially true among first-world democracies with trustworthy legal systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn

I would think you should be the one pointing to other foreigners who were here not on a diplomatic visa who were arrested and charged with trying to have sex with a minor and then were just inexplicably allowed to leave the country with pending felony charges.

Roman Polanski; Chinese billionaire Richard Liu; the Saudis have a habit of having their government bail out their nationals after their arrests, including for rape and child porn...

Neither Polanski or Liu are examples of that. Liu was released due to lack of evidence. Polanski got a sweetheart deal like the Epstein case. The Saudi cases are far closer to this example, but still seem to be different:

That student, Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, was freed from a Portland jail after the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles gave him $100,000 to cover his $1 million bail. He surrendered his passport and driver’s license to Homeland Security officials. But on a Saturday afternoon in June 2017, two weeks before Noorah was to go on trial for manslaughter, a large, black SUV picked him up at the home where he was staying and spirited him away. His ankle monitoring bracelet was later found by the roadside; a week later, he was back in Saudi Arabia — a fact that the authorities in Oregon did not learn until more than a year later.

Federal officials would not discuss their evidence in the case, but they said they believe it shows that the Saudi government helped Noorah flee the country. Investigators suspect that Saudi operatives provided the student with a replacement passport and may also have arranged for him to escape on a private jet, officials of the U.S. Marshals Service said.

... It is generally not possible to leave the United States by plane without a passport. National security officials said it was implausible that young Saudis on the run could obtain replacement passports or travel into Mexico by land without help. They suspect that Saudi operatives accompany or guide the fugitives.

The Saudi Embassy, unlike many others, routinely posts bail and hires criminal defense lawyers for its citizens when they are accused of crimes in the United States. But Nazer, the embassy spokesman, said it does not “issue travel documents to citizens engaged in legal proceedings.”

Danik, one of the former FBI officials who served in Riyadh, recalled dealing with cases of Saudis who fled despite the fact that U.S. courts had seized their passports. “I remember in some cases local police and U.S.-based FBI agents were angry,” he said. They would call the legal attache’s office in Riyadh afterward asking: ‘How did he get out of the U.S.?’ I told them if they’d have notified us beforehand, I could've possibly filed an affidavit opposing bail because Saudis arrested in the U.S. were often a flight risk.

So his passport was revoked and he was given an ankle bracelet. The escape involved a replaced passport and more coordination. This is not an escape where the US government is arguably looking the other way, this is the US Government letting him keep his passport and leave the country. And still the Saudi cases invite scrutiny with many demanding accountability. It's a different story here to say the least.

Steve Bannon's passport was seized when he was charged with Contempt of Congress... This is not SOP and is not even the case with these Saudi fugitives.

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