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LAWSPLAINING: Margot Cleveland Suggests That the FBI Has Systematically Violated Defendants’ Rights

    The other day Senator Chuck Grassley released a file called ‘Nellie Ohr FBI Analysis,’ related to Fusion GPS, which in part accused of Ohr of misleading the public. For instance, this is one analysis of the document:





    Indeed, Davis linked to that document, here:

    But Professor Margot Cleveland noted a deeper problem revealed by the document and it’s a doozy. We’ll let her explain:

    Now, to do a little bit of ‘lawsplaining’ to translate from legalese to English … Brady refers to Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), which held that under the Due Process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, a criminal defendant has a right to any exculpatory evidence in the government’s possession. ‘Exculpatory evidence’ refers to any evidence that tends to show that a person is innocent of any crime the person is accused of committing or mitigating the severity of it.

    To give a practical example, remember the Duke Lacrosse non-rape case? In that case, several members of the Duke Lacrosse team were accused of gang raping a woman at a particular time. Later on, it turned out that one of accused was on camera at an ATM at the time he was allegedly committing the crime, and when that came to light, the charges completely fell apart—all of the accused were exonerated. But without Brady (or a similar state rule), the government could have attempted to cover up that footage and might have even potentially convicted these innocent men of the crime.

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    Here are those two images, blown up.

    Got that? So they can use the Sentinel system to search for documents, and if it is merely labeled ‘Restricted Access’ then the hit will come back as indicating that there is a relevant hit, but the person cannot access the document. 

    But if it is ‘Prohibited Access,’ the document won’t register a hit in word searches. You don’t even know what you are not seeing.

    So for instance, imagine if you are a defendant in the Governor Whitmer ‘fednapping’ case. So you reasonably request any documents related to Whitmer. An FBI agent would be required to search through Sentinel and review every document mentioning Whitmer to see if there is any exculpatory evidence in each. If the search says that there are restricted access documents, then that agent is at least on notice that there are documents with information about Whitmer in it that he or she doesn’t have access. Then that agent can either work with supervisors to get access to those documents, or have someone with the appropriate clearance look at those documents and see if any of them are responsive. But if one doesn’t even get a hit on the search engine, then how can you take that next step?





    Mind you, we are not sure that any of the defendants in that case were denied access to exculpatory evidence that way. We are simply inventing a hypothetical for illustrative purposes.

    Since some of the text is cut off, here’s the entire post:

    This paragraph confirms the point: The Washington Field Office agent can tell there are 70 documents in the Restricted Access system that include the search term ‘Berkowitz,’ but cannot know how many more are in ‘Prohibited Access’ because the Sentinel system will not show any ‘hits’ if the documents are in Prohibited Access.





    Jay Town, which is not a town, but a man who says he is …

    VP & General Counsel, @Gray_Analytics. Former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama (2017-2020). Career prosecutor. Marine. Proud dad & husband





    … said this in response to Cleveland’s thread:

    You can’t see this right now, but we are making our shocked face.

    But in all seriousness, this is not only a serious scandal, it could end up upending a large number of criminal case. Some innocent people will go free and some guilty people will ask for a new trial, just to hope to get a different outcome. How many will belong in either category is anyone’s guess.

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    Editor’s Note: The Deep State is working overtime to subvert President Trump’s agenda and the will of the people. 

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