8 months after biden was installed, the FBI seized contents of 1,400 lock-boxes in LA. Without citing a crime

The Los Angeles Times is a Democrat-fellating paper.  In their view duh biden regime and all its henchmen in duh DOJ and FBI can do no wrong.  So as you would expect, the Times LOVED the FBI raid on Trump's Florida home.

Whatever the issue, the Times has always supported the Democrats and blasted any opposition--which is what makes the story below particularly delicious.  I've edited it extensively, but here's a link to the original if you want to see it for yourself.

It's the longest article I've ever seen in the LA Times--meaning that for the very first time, the editors at the Times MAY have awakened and realized that both the DOJ and FBI are totally lawless.  Out of control.

Nah, just kidding.  They still fellate the lawless Democrat administration.

Headline:  FBI misled judge who signed warrant for Beverly Hills seizure of $86 million in cash

By Michael Finnegan, Sept. 23, 2022

On Sept. 19, 2021--just eight months after biden was installed--the U.S. attorney's office (run by Merrick Garland's corrupt DOJ) got a judge to sign a search warrant giving the FBI permission to temporarily seize and inventory the contents of 1,400 safe-deposit boxes at a private storage vault in Beverly Hills.  The FBI then confiscated all the contents and essentially extorted scores of owners to forfeit the contents.

Wait...did the government claim ALL 1,400 boxes contained illegal drugs or stolen property?  

Nope.  But FBI agents drilled the locks on all 1,400 anyway, seizing everything.

Agents took photos and videos of pay stubs, password lists, credit cards, a prenuptial agreement, immigration and vaccination records, bank statements, heirlooms and a will, court records show.

Now, 18 months later, a lawsuit has forced the unsealing of court documents showing that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got the warrant for that grossly unconstitutional raid by misleading the judge who approved it.

They omitted from their warrant request a central part of the FBI’s plan: Permanent confiscation of everything inside every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or goods, a senior FBI agent recently testified.

The government’s justification for drilling all 1,400 boxes and seizing the contents of any box containing at least $5,000 in cash and goods was merely the claim that hundreds of unknown box holders were storing assets that might possibly have been tied to unknown crimes, court records show.

To help you understand this: Imagine you're worried that the government might seize everyone's bank accounts for some reason.  (Sound crazy?  Yeah, so did the "you must take the jab or be fired" ORDER.  And yet the regime did it anyway, remember?)  So you decide to keep, say, $10,000 in cash in your home.  There is NO difference between the FBI raid on the lock boxes and the FBI breaking down your door and seizing your cash because "Who needs $10,000 in CASH, people?  This person was clearly a criminal!!!"

It took scores of agents five days to fill their evidence bags with the bounty: More than $86 million in cash and a bonanza of gold, silver, rare coins, gem-studded jewelry and enough Rolex and Cartier watches to stock a boutique.

Over half the box renters weren't involved in a crime, and they sued.  And in a move that should trouble every American, the U.S. attorney’s office (did we mention it's an agency of the corrupt Merrick Garland's corrupt DOJ?) tried to block public disclosure of court papers that laid bare the government’s deception.  Fortunately for the honest holders, a judge properly rejected the DOJ's request to keep those court records sealed.

The drilling of all 1,400 boxes, and the seizure of their contents by the FBI if agents decreed that the contents were worth more than $5,000, have triggered a class-action lawsuit by box holders who say the raid violated their rights.

Wait...a Democrat-run DOJ violating the rights of California Democrats?  No one thought that was possible!  The biden DOJ would never violate the rights of Cali Democrats, eh?

The unsealed documents also show that federal agents defied restrictions that the judge set in the warrant, by searching through box holders’ belongings for evidence of crimes.

[If you still don't understand why this is an outrage, consider that there is only a hair's-breadth difference between this and the FBI breaking down your door to search your home for an unregistered gun, or cash above some arbitrary decreed amount, and with NO other reason to suspect you've committed a crime.  And as you might expect, the FBI usually does that to people the Democrats don't like.]

The government didn't know who owned the boxes, or what was in them, and had no evidence that a crime had been committed. That’s why the warrant application did not even attempt to argue there was probable cause to drill and rummage through the contents of all 1,400 boxes.  And yet the Constitution says you must have "probable cause" that a crime has been committed to get a search warrant.

In 2019 the FBI believed U.S. Private Vaults was a magnet for criminals hiding illicit proceeds in their boxes.  After two years of investigating, the head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office "believed" that was true, and began crafting a plan to seize everything..

The people who rented the safe-deposit boxes say the seizing of *their* boxes was illegal-- that the warrant the FBI secured from a judge explicitly barred the government from seizing the contents of their boxes.  But the FBI insists it has the right to keep millions in cash, gold, jewels from Beverly Hills raid.

The FBI and U.S. attorney’s office deny that they misled the judge or ignored his conditions, claiming they had no obligation to tell him their plan was to simply confiscate everything, on the assumption that every customer was hiding crime-tainted assets.

An FBI spokeslackey said the warrants were lawfully executed “based on allegations of widespread criminal wrongdoing. At no time was a magistrate misled as to the probable cause used to obtain the warrants.”

The business itself was charged with conspiracy to sell drugs and launder money.  The FBI said U.S. Private Vaults pled guilty to conspiracy to launder drug money, and that investigation is continuing.

The private vault storage company began attracting police attention way back in 2015.  Local detectives and federal agents say they spotted suspected drug dealers walking in and out.

Customers could rent boxes without identifying themselves. Testimony in the lawsuit claims the sheriff’s department suspected one customer was a criminal but was “having all kinds of problems getting into the box that they had a warrant for because of the nature of the business.”

By 2019, federal and local law enforcement had managed to search more than a dozen boxes and seized about $5 million from five drug dealers, a bookie and a debit card thief.

The FBI opened an investigation of the business itself. Through surveillance, informants and undercover work, they speculated that U.S. Private Vaults and a precious-metals store next door were helping drug dealers launder cash by converting it into gold and silver the dealers then stashed in their boxes.  Prosecutors eventually submitted an affidavit to the judge supporting a request for six search warrants.

Five of those warrants were for straightforward searches of the store and the homes of its owners and managers to gather evidence for prosecution of the company.

But the sixth was highly unusual: It sought to seize the store’s "business equipment."  The government wanted to take not just computers and video cameras but also the “nests of safety deposit boxes and keys.”

Logically, if the FBI was allowed to seize the racks of boxes ("nests" of boxes) it would also be seizing the contents, and any honest judge reviewing the warrant request would recognize that as a huge violation of the rights of what turned out to be about 700 customers who had locked away some of their most valuable belongings.

Attorneys in the class-action suit liken the raid to police barging into a building with 700 apartments and taking every tenant’s possessions when the only have evidence of wrongdoing by the building's owners.

Not surprisingly, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to say if the government had evidence of criminal activity by any specific box holders prior to the seizure--let alone by ALL 1,400 box renters.

The 4th Amendment protects people against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” If the government wants to search your property it must apply for a warrant, showing in a sworn statement that it has *specific* probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed, and describing what it claims are the things it has reason to believe will be found by the search.

The key word there is "specific:"  A warrant saying "We demand to seize anything we find"--as the FBI did when it raided Trump's home in Florida--would be unconstitutional.  Yet in both cases the FBI seized everything it found, in violation of the Constitution.

The affidavit the U.S. attorney's office presented to the judge to get the search warrant implied criminal wrongdoing by box holders by saying it would be “irrational” for anyone NOT trying to hide criminal proceeds to use this private vault when a bank would be safer.

“Only those who wish to hide their wealth from the DEA, IRS, or creditors would” rent a box anonymously at U.S. Private Vaults, said the affidavit.

One could as well argue that having locks on your door at your home means you're hiding something.

The affidavit in support of the warrant request was written by a female agent, Lynn Zellhart.  She wrote that FBI agents had seen cars pull up to the store with license plates from Nevada, Ohio and Illinois,  and that “Based on my training and experience in money laundering investigations, Chicago, Illinois is a hub of both drug trafficking and money laundering.  I believe these patrons were using their USPV box to store drug proceeds.”

So, out-of-state plates and "I believe" were the only factors she cited to support her claim of illegal activity.

Other customers were showing up in rental cars--and that too, she claimed, was a sign of drug dealers evading law enforcement.  One owner of the storage business told a government witness that the store’s best customers were “bookies, prostitutes and weed guys.”  That was in the affidavit.

Of all the box holders, Zellhart mentioned only nine, identifying some by their initials or not at all. She said they were “linked” or “associated” with law enforcement investigations, but failed to provide a single claim of specific criminal misconduct.

As part of the box-holders' lawsuit the judge required Zellhart to be deposed, and in that deposition she was asked, “Was it your opinion that most of the people who rented safe-deposit boxes were criminals in some way?”

She replied, “I was expecting a lot of criminals.  I don’t know about most.”

The attorney reminded her of the language in her affidavit.

“I don’t sort of know how to answer your question as to whether it was all of them or was most of them,” she responded. “I don’t — I don’t have a percentage.”

On the affidavit’s 84th page, the government assured the judge who granted the search warrant that the FBI would respect customers’ rights.  Zellhart testified that that particular section was written by Andrew Brown, an assistant U.S. attorney, and the driving force of the investigation.

What Brown wrote contradicts the FBI’s plan to seize the contents of all the boxes.  He underlined the government’s lack of evidence to justify any criminal search of the customers’ property.

“The warrants authorize the seizure of the nests of the boxes themselves, not their contents,” his section of the affidavit said. “By seizing the nests of safety deposit boxes themselves, the government will necessarily end up with custody of what is inside those boxes initially.”

The affidavit told the judge that agents would “follow their written inventory policies” and “attempt to notify the lawful owners of the property stored in the boxes how to claim their property.”

"Attempt."  Hmmm....

Under FBI policy, the affidavit read, inspection of each box would “extend no further than necessary to determine ownership.” But in fact the FBI's inspection of the boxes went substantially further — just as the government planned, according to FBI records filed in court.

By the time the judge received the warrant request, the FBI had been preparing an enormous forfeiture operation for at least six months, according to Jessie Murray, the chief of the FBI’s asset forfeiture unit in Los Angeles.

In the summer of 2020, she testified, Matthew Moon, then one of the highest-ranking FBI agents in Los Angeles, asked her if her team “was capable of handling a possible large-scale seizure” of safe-deposit boxes at U.S. Private Vaults.

Murray told him yes. She recalled joining a conference call in late 2020 and another in early 2021 to plan forfeitures of the box contents with the U.S. attorney’s office, other federal and local agencies, and “maybe even our legal forfeiture unit at [FBI] headquarters in D.C.”

In the most damning admission, the woman who drafted most of the affidavit, and a colleague, confirmed in a memo to fellow agents that the FBI planned to seize the contents of all the boxes.  That memo contained detailed instructions for carrying out the raid.

The memo was approved by Moon and two other senior FBI managers.

Murray testified that once she reviewed the final draft of the affidavit, it was clear to her that the FBI planned to seize and confiscate the contents of every box that met the $5,000 minimum set by the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Policy Manual.

Murray offered no explanation for why the FBI believed it had legal grounds to take away the assets of hundreds of unknown box holders based merely on *possible* ties to unknown crimes.

To confiscate an asset under U.S. forfeiture laws, the government must first have evidence that it was derived from criminal conduct or used to facilitate it.  [Yet dozens of innocent Americans have had thousands of dollars of cash seized by the government and never returned, with no evidence of a crime ever being presented.]

In a court filing in the class-action case, Brown and other prosecutors claimed the FBI had no obligation at all to tell the judge from whom the FBI sought the warrant that the FBI planned to seize all the contents of all boxes containing the threshold amount of cash "or valuables."

The government's reasoning was ludicrous:  FBI agents, it claimed only “owe a duty of candor to courts about known facts that have already occurred.”  Translation: We are totally free to lie about what we *plan* to do.

The judge who issued the warrant explicitly limited the scope of the raid, saying the warrant did not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes.

The judge gave the FBI permission to inventory the contents of each box to protect against theft accusations. He ordered agents to identify the owners and notify them that they could claim their property.

But by then, Zellhart and her colleague had already told agents in their memo to take notes on anything that suggests any of the cash “may be criminal proceeds,” such as whether it was bundled in rubber bands or smelled like marijuana.

The FBI also had dogs sniff all the cash for any odor of marijuana or other drugs—notoriously unreliable evidence in a state where marijuana is legal — to convince judges to approve confiscation of box holders’ money.

In the raid’s aftermath, the criminal case against U.S. Private Vaults sputtered to an end with nobody sent to prison.

The company went out of business. It was sentenced to pay a $1.1-million fine for laundering drug money, but prosecutors conceded it lacked the means to pay it.

Under a plea deal, the U.S. attorney’s office agreed not to prosecute the company’s owners, despite a Justice Department policy under Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland to hold individuals accountable for corporate wrongdoing — and despite Zellhart telling the judge it was “owned and managed by criminals.”

The FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices both refused repeated requests by the Times for a full accounting of what was seized. They have refused to say how much the government seized, how much it's kept and how much it has returned.

Records from dozens of lawsuits stemming from the raid make clear, though, that it produced a windfall of tens of millions of dollars for the Justice Department. Local police departments that assisted in the raid have sought shares of the money, according to Murray.

Some of the government’s gains came from customers who abandoned their boxes. “There’s a good number of people who just said, ‘I don’t want it,’ ” Zellhart testified. “I think there was 20 or 30 of those.”

When the FBI vacated U.S. Private Vaults, it posted a notice in the store window inviting customers to claim their property. The FBI went on to investigate anyone who stepped forward, checking their bank records, state tax returns, DMV files and criminal histories, agents testified.

Zellhart testified that the FBI was just making sure it was returning things to rightful owners.

Many box holders have agreed to give up a portion of their cash and property after deciding it was not worth spending tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees — or more — to recover the rest.

Some of those, and many others, have faced baseless FBI accusations of criminal wrongdoing. In May 2021, the FBI claimed the contents of 369 boxes — including the $86 million in cash — were linked to crime and filed papers for confiscation through forfeiture.

In some of those cases, prosecutors cited no evidence that the money was tied to any specific crime, merely claiming that a dog smelled drug residue on the cash, or that it was bagged or wrapped in a way that aroused suspicion of drug trafficking.

In a few other cases, prosecutors and the FBI accused box holders by name of committing multiple felonies but offered no evidence to back up those accusations, and ultimately gave back everything.

One of those customers was a glassware maker who kept more than $340,000 in cash and gold in his box.

In a court declaration, he said he rented the box in 2020 because it was a “disturbing and scary” time of social upheaval, and he distrusted banks.

“Protests and riots were the normal news, banks had been boarding up their windows, and emergency alerts were prompting people to stay indoors after curfew,” he wrote.

Prosecutors falsely accused the man of fraud, racketeering, conspiracy, drug trafficking and money laundering. FBI agent Madison MacDonald — who co-authored the raid plan — filed a sworn statement saying the allegations were true.

The complaint included no evidence the glassware maker had committed any of those crimes, but alleged he had “an extensive history of narcotic trafficking arrests and convictions.”

The man’s lawyer blasted prosecutors for exaggerating expunged misdemeanors, saying they intentionally omitted that the man had been arrested 16 years ago and was never convicted of a felony.

Spokespersons for both the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the case.

Prosecutors demanded that the glassmaker provide a sworn statement on when, why and from whom he received every dollar of the $340,000; the names of everyone who’d given him gifts since 2017; five years of tax returns for him and his wife, a doctor; and all of their bank and investment account numbers.

“Before proceeding too far down the road on this case, do you have a settlement offer to resolve this matter?” Assistant U.S. Atty. Victor Rodgers asked the man's attorney in an email just six days later after making the clearly unreasonable demands. “The government is prepared to be reasonable in connection with a resolution, and I think that an early settlement of this case would probably be beneficial to both parties.”

The man refused the government's offer that he pay to settle.  Instead his attorney asked U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi to “put a stop to the government’s abuse and overreach” by dismissing the complaint.

On March 9, nearly a year after the FBI seized the man’s cash and gold, Scarsi ordered the government to give it back.
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Now, I think it's likely that the vault was run by crooks for the benefit of other crooks.  But the egregious lies by the FBLie and DOJ again show--as if more showing is needed--that those agencies have abandoned all pretense of acting lawfully--much like the entire Democrat regime. 

The Times was ecstatic about the FBI's unconstitutional raid on Trump's home. But when the lawless FBI seized valuables from innocent friends of theirs, not so much.  It's the definition of "double standard"--which is one of the defining characteristics of Democrats today.