The FBI has a track record of trampling on American citizens’ constitutional rights and cannot seem to stop. However, some victims of the abuse and violation have fought back. This time, with a lawsuit, their tenacity has left the FBI scrambling to save face.
In 2021, the bureau raided U.S. Private Vaults, a safety storage company based in Beverly Hills, California. They raided the vault on suspicion of money laundering, a charge to which the company later pleaded guilty. However, while conducting their raid, FBI agents exceeded their authority.
According to reports, their search warrant called for them to open safety deposit boxes. Also, it allowed them to “inspect the contents of the boxes to identify their owners so that they can claim their property.” However, the FBI had its plan.
Central to the bureau’s plan and not disclosed to the judge was the permanent confiscation of the box’s contents. Under a sweeping system, agents confiscated every box that contained at least $5,000 in cash or goods. Also, they refused to return anything worth more than $5,000, even when they charged the property owners with no crime.
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For instance, retired government worker Don Mellein, 79, lost 110 collectible gold coins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The FBI confiscated the coins during the raid with no intention of returning them until Mellein and others filed a lawsuit.
The alleged disclosure failure occurred in FBI documents and agent depositions in a class-action lawsuit by box holders. The box holders in the U.S. Private Vaults allege that the 2021 raid violated their rights. However, the FBI justified the seizure by arguing that they tied the goods to unknown crimes.
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In addition, court filings showed that agents defied a judge’s restrictions in the warrant. They violated the judge’s orders by searching box holders’ belongings for evidence of crimes. “The government did not know what was in those boxes,” Robert Frommer, a lawyer representing nearly 400 box holders in the class-action case, wrote in court papers.
“Who owned them, or what, if anything, those people had done.” Last month, a panel of judges with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing in Los Angeles. However, the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office denied that they misled the judge or ignored his conditions.
Rob Johnson, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Institute for Justice, condemned the FBI’s move. He criticized the bureau for violating the rights of citizens. Also, Johnson said the Fourth Amendment case in California might soon result in severe chastisement for the tyrannical FBI.
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In addition, the senior attorney took to X to express his opinion on the lawsuit. As part of a lengthy thread posted on December 5, 2023, Johnson wrote that the case is high-profile. He noted it “may be the most important Fourth Amendment case pending in the United States today.”
“The FBI has violated the Bill of Rights, and a group of libertarian attorneys have sought justice,” Johnson wrote. He also stated that the court proceeding was “fantastic,” and the judges called the government’s conduct “egregious” and “outrageous.”
“One of the judges compared the FBl’s search to the kinds that sparked the Revolutionary War,” Johnson wrote on X.
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