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In addition to the Bundy trial, I like pointed to the Ted Stevens fiasco, since it was even higher profile than anything else, very likely turned the Senate's 60th seat that year, and have even more clearly unlawful behavior from the FBI's agents that was even more clearly interested in convicting someone high-profile for something than actually getting the guilty.
And also because no one cares. Even among the right-wing, this isn't a cause celebre, or even terribly well-known; I assume the left has their equivalents, and I know some of them, and I know they're often forgotten.
The other damning problem is that the innocent have everything to fear. "Ignore damning evidence because it was illegally seized" isn't just a hard ask for judges faced with the obviously guilty; it does nothing if the unlawfully-collected gains wouldn't be presented as evidence to start with, whether that's the police 'lawfully' essential property and taking months or years to return it, publicizing humiliating personal information and saying oops, or simply stealing things and never being responsible for it.
It's nice to hear that -- if everything works properly, which it doesn't always -- you might not get wrongly convicted by prosecutors who knew or had reason to believe you were innocent, but it doesn't actually undo the tremendous amount of harm that this sort of exploitative efforts can do even and especially to the innocent, in a system where there is not even a mechanism to try to get made whole.
I'm not sure.
I mean, one easy and Occam-compatible explanation's that 90+% of investigatory paperwork never goes anywhere, 90%+ of pretrial paperwork any further than a grand jury, and it's just meant most cases -- whether 'good' or not -- even very egregious abuses aren't going to get caught or even inspected. And that includes most J6 cases. Chansley plead guilty, as a specific example. They don't care because most of the time it doesn't matter, and even when they do make a mistake 'the bad guys must be guilty of something'.
But another possibility is that regardless of how much public scrutiny their might by in terms of population numbers, there's not going to be any meaningful outrage in ways that matter, and more importantly the scrutiny that they do get they want. Even today, anyone defending Ted Stevens sounds, to mainstream readers, as a defense of hilarious bridge-to-nowhere corruption. Chansley is still absolutely guilty of leaving threats, in addition to just generally being a putz. Making a ton of Carlson viewers pissed isn't a downside, in the way that even getting a lot of well-lawyered ACLU fans would, especially if it simulatneously gets a lot of approval from a normally police-skeptical field. I don't mean to claim that this is an intentional plan, but I don't think you can reasonably look at the modern FBI and think anyone, even those at middle managements levels, are unaware of the political calculus.
That's optimistic, in a sense, compared to the 'FBI can't match up with Inspector Clouseau'-level failures, where there's a teeming morass of unobserved and unwhistleblown goatfucking behind every moderately difficult federal investigation. But it's a little more pessimistic, in that it would indicate a federal investigatory force that's quite happy to see politics as part of their day job.
I'm not a fan of either doctrine, but ultimately I'm not sure how much they'd help, here. We're positing an environment where, despite basically zero personal or career punishment for even egregious cases, only the highest-profile and the most-lucky defendants catch wind of anything, and even of those most sound like conspiracy theorists. And even where no one presently in office would face serious social or political fallout, we still see serious resistance in even clear-cut cases.
In a world where both the state and the individual investigator or prosecutor could be liable for large amounts, does this result in more enforcement? Or does it result in a far heavier thick blue line, where every release to defense attornies goes through four layers of 'did you redact that important thing /right/' (and also conveniently distributing responsibility should it leak and a civil case show up!), and whistleblowers end up with mysteriously large problems (hopefully not with their brakes) or the feds blocking them?
This is a fair point, speaking generally. I'd like to think that every new scandal of outright venality moves the impression slightly at the margins. And the scrutiny I'm referring to applies to the defense attorney's role as well. The federal public defender bar (private and public) have a well-earned reputation of being the gold standard in the field, and that's only maximized when each one knows that every filing of theirs is going to be picked apart by an interested public (as happened in the post above!). To your point however, despite a cavalcade of outrageous conduct, there hasn't been much broad appetite to meaningfully change how the FBI operates. Just like prosecutorial misconduct, any spike in interested remains niche and therefore easy to ignore.
I didn't think about this point and I have to concede that's a strong possibility. It's basically a battle of equilibria to see whether greater openness forces greater transparency or higher efforts to maintain secrecy.
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