Conspiracy to impede
The arrest of a US army veteran who protested against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has raised alarms among legal experts and fellow veterans familiar with his service in Afghanistan.
Bajun Mavalwalla II – a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations mission in Afghanistan – was charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers” after joining a demonstration against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Spokane, Washington.
We are allowed to demonstrate. Presidents are not allowed to punish us for demonstrating. We are not the criminals here.
Legal experts say the case marks an escalation in the administration’s attacks on first amendment rights. Afghanistan war veterans who know him say the case against Mavalwalla appears unjust.
“Here’s a guy who held a top secret clearance and was privy to some of the most sensitive information we have, who served in a combat zone,” said Kenneth Koop, a retired colonel who trained the Afghan military and police during Mavalwalla’s deployment. “To see him treated like this really sticks in my craw.”
The 11 June protest against Ice that led to Mavalwalla’s arrest was confrontational, leaving a government van’s windshield smashed and tires slashed, but Mavalwalla was not among the more than two dozen people arrested at the scene. More than a month passed before the FBI arrived at his door on 15 July.
It took them all that time to find a pretext.
While the indictment alleges other protesters struck federal officers and let the air out of the tires of an Ice transport, Mavalwalla was not charged with obstruction or assault. Instead, he was charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers”.
According to the indictment, Mavalwalla and his co-defendants “physically blocked the drive-way of the federal facility and/or physically pushed against officers despite orders to disburse and efforts to remove them from the property”.
He helped block a driveway. Wow, what a hardened criminal.
The indictment was handed down two days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US attorney for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker called his exit “a very difficult decision”.
“I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in,” he wrote.
The current acting US attorney, nominated for the permanent post by Donald Trump, is Pete Serrano, a former litigator for the Silent Majority Foundation, a conservative advocacy group. In February, Serrano filed an amicus brief in support of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, a position at odds with the 14th amendment. He has no prosecutorial experience and has described the 6 January 2021, US Capitol rioters as “political prisoners”.
We’re all at the mercy of these shits.
Pretty much irrelevant in the great scheme of things, but nice to know that whoever wrote the indictment doesn’t know the difference between “disburse” and “disperse”.
Yes that’s always encouraging.
@dnm
No, failure to disburse money to Trump is also a crime.
https://www.grammarly.com/commonly-confused-words/disburse-vs-disperse#:~:text=While%20disburse%20and%20disperse%20may,or%20a%20crowd%20of%20people.
It’s been changed on the Guardian’s page to ‘disperse’, damnit! I wanted to quote C S Lewis on the state of education. It’s so much easier to concentrate on trivia when the big stuff is so awful…
Perhaps the officers wanted the demonstrators to turn out their pockets? That would add a little more on top of the bounties & bonuses they apparently get for arrests and for the enthusiasm they demonstrate in throwing people violently to the ground, twisting their arms, punching them, etc. Gangs of vigilantes. It’s getting quite like the Wild West or the Deep South — how long before the lynchings start? MAGA would certainly enjoy those. I wonder if Kyle Rittenhouse and his dog are joining up in ICE now that the age limitations have been simultaneously lowered and heightened and the hours of training have been halved — the poor lad probably needs a few dollars.
The other two confusions that particularly annoy me are those between “flout” & “flaunt” and “principle” & principal”. Why do these small things so irritate one, when other things, big or small, don’t?
After the criminal flaunted the court order, the principle judge flouted the court order before the criminal’s face, and told him, “You have no principals!”
@ Alison
The mistake was in quoted text, so I imagined that the reporter would have simply copied it from the indictment into the article, but I guess it is just as plausible that the poor speller is a (Grauniad) journalist not a government lawyer.