(Just The News) The FBI and the Justice Department are violating civil liberties and using brutish tactics during politically motivated and highly publicized raids and arrests targeting critics of the Biden administration, according to legal experts.
These displays of force, which some observers have claimed are unnecessary and designed to humiliate those arrested and intimidate others, appear to have at least one thing in common: the person of interest supported former President Donald Trump.
“Law enforcement seems to be using arrest tactics on Trump supporters that are generally reserved for violent and/or fleeing suspects,” said Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. “They do not seem justified in many of these cases.”
The most recent case occurred late last month, when federal agents searched the Virginia home of former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, surprising the one-time Trump administration official in the morning.
Last week, CNN obtained and aired bodycam footage of the raid, which took place one day before a public hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that examined Clark’s role in supporting Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The video shows federal agents forcing Clark to step outside his home in just a dress shirt and underwear, not allowing him to put on his pants first despite multiple requests to do so.
The feds also reportedly seized electronic devices from Clark’s home. According to Clark, 12 agents and two local police officers were there and searched his home for three hours.
“Any sane person should be able to see that the government has been particularly overzealous in exercising its authority in these politically-charged cases,” said attorney John Irving, a former federal prosecutor. “A lack of good judgment damages the credibility of the Justice Department and people’s faith in our institutions.”
Irving is the lawyer for another recipient of alleged Justice Department overzealousness, former Trump White House trade official Peter Navarro.
Navarro was publicly arrested by FBI agents at Reagan National Airport just outside Washington, D.C. last month on misdemeanor charges that he acted in contempt of Congress by defying a subpoena from House Democrats’ Jan. 6 committee.
According to Navarro, the FBI put him in handcuffs, leg irons, strip-searched him, denied him a chance to call his lawyer, and deprived him of food and water. The Justice Department has said those claims are false.
“Why would you put a 72-year-old man with no criminal record in leg irons in a public arrest at an airport over a misdemeanor offense, especially when he literally lives across the street from the FBI headquarters building and had been in contact with an FBI agent two days earlier to be cooperative?” asked Irving. “This obviously is the kind of case where a defendant would be allowed to voluntarily surrender in court, rather than being the object of a public spectacle.”
Such operations haven’t just targeted former government officials — they’ve also targeted journalists and media organizations critical of the Biden administration.
