Hat tip to Hot Air
Turn-about is fair play. If DOJ wants to cover up Fast and Furious and sue Arizona and Sheriff Joe Arpaio for enforcing immigration crimes the Feds won't enforce, then maybe it's time for state officials to make the Feds do the perp walk.
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/01/22/video-arizona-to-open-investigation-of-operation-fast-furious/
This sets up an interesting constitutional issue, I suppose. It reminds me of an incident that happened a many years ago in Florida when DEA was involved in a shoot out and one of the bad guys wound up dead. If I am not mistaken, I think it involved the taking of a DEA undercover agent at gunpoint in an attempted rip off. As the story goes, while later testifying, one of the shooting agents was asked why he fired a certain number of bullets at the bad guy. His answer was that he ran out of bullets. Janet Reno, who was then state attorney for Dade County, tried to indict the agent, but DOJ stepped in and said no way.
In this case, however, I think it would be cool. Give the ATF street agents immunity for their testimony, indict Holder et al, and have Sheriff Joe drag the attorney general back to Arizona in handcuffs. Wouldn't you love to see Eric Holder sleeping in a tent in the desert wearing pink underwear?
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3 comments:
Yeah, Gary doesn't care about constitutional principles, or jurisdiction, or consistent, neutral application of the law... when he was a fed, he favored the feds, now he's not, he thinks it would be cool for a state to prosecute some feds over something Gary doesn't approve of.
What was it Thomas More said about knocking down every law in pursuit of the devil, and then looking for something to hide behind when the devil turns on his pursuer?
Siarlys--you appear to be suggesting that it is somehow unconstitutional, or that there is no jurisdiction, for Arizona to investigate and prosecute potential felonies committed there, no matter who the alleged crooks are (except for the possibility of diplomatic immunity, which does not seem to apply here). Nothing could be further from the truth.
And the question is not whether Gary approves of Fast and Furious, the question is whether State law was broken. If Gary had done in his career what appears to have gone on here, he would most likely have been prosecuted himself, and probably should have been.
There is of course the possibility that an individual who is a federal agent violated state law. E.g., if they worked for ATF by day and couriered drugs for a local syndicate by night, their federal employment would not shield them from prosecution.
The options for a state to prosecute on the ground that what a federal law enforcement agent did, within the scope of their employment AS a federal officer, somehow "violated state law" are much, much narrower. Otherwise, federal marshalls who went to Mississippi to escort James Meredith to class at Ole' Miss could have been summarily arrested by state troopers for criminal conspiracy to enroll a n***** in a White University.
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