A few days ago the LA Times published security camera video of a sheriff's deputy who knelt on the head of a handcuffed inmate for about three minutes. The circumstances are a little murky, but luckily the sheriff is ON IT:
Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said he is launching a criminal investigation to find out who leaked security video of an incident in which a deputy knelt on the head of a handcuffed inmate for more than three minutes....In an interview with Fox 11 News, Villanueva said the disclosure of the video to The Times amounted to a theft of investigative material. He did not respond to questions from The Times.
It's good to see that Villanueva, as usual, has his priorities straight.
Even beyond the normal policing problems we've got, LA County Sheriff's department just seems to be horrible. They really need to overhaul the whole department.
From what I can tell the US Secret Service is pretty horrible too:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/secret-service-arian-taherzadeh-haider-ali-accused-impersonating-federal-agents/
I wouldn’t even know this was happening were it not for TPM. It is not a headline on any of the mainstream news sites I regularly visit like CNN ant the New York Times. The Washington Post has it buried in DC local news. It seems like a really big deal to me that the Secret Service has been compromised for two years.
Your link is to CBS.
I know. After I saw the story at TPM I looked through several news sites including CNN, the New York and the Los Angeles Times Sites, the Washington Post site, and a few others. I found nothing looking at their main pages. So I put one of the suspect’s names in to google and found a number of stories of various quality. I linked the one that gave the most details. But I would be completely unaware that it had happened were it not for TPM. It seems like a really big deal to me and I’m very surprised it is not being given the prominence I would think such a story should get. At least one of the Secret Service agents was assigned to the President’s wife.
Knew I should have skimmed the thread for this!
Sheer accident this plot was discovered.
With all that investigative firepower living with and interacting with the suspects daily it’s scary that it took a postal inspector investigating an unrelated assault on a mail carrier that exposed the scheme. Kind of scary, I think.
I have also been following this at TPM and absolutely nothing about it makes the slightest bit of sense. This operation appears to have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, used sophisticated surveillance technology (possibly including stealing sight and sound from LE people’s apartments), and seems to have been done with the objective of comprising seemingly random federal agents and secret service agents. It seems like the kind of operation that could only been done by a national intelligence service.
But while some aspects seemed sophisticated and required a lot of trained manpower, it’s difficult for me to see the point of the operation, unless it involved an eventual plot to kidnap or kill the president or his wife. Which seems a bit far fetched
Or to force the compromised agents to plant listening devices using their unrestricted access.
But, at the same time, the operation seems amateurish and low budget. The two guys seem almost comically inept and apparently had a very strange cover which, I suspect, raised red flags even in a routine investigation by a postal inspector. If I’m reading between the lines correctly, they had no credentials and no previous connections with law enforcement.
As I read it they had fake credentials. Apparently the building had many employees of various federal law enforcement agencies and maybe the entire place was bugged and this was pretty much known by the people living there. I just don’t understand how this went unnoticed for more than a year and would be going on right now except for an alert Postal Inspector.
There’s obviously a lot more to the story. Why go to all this trouble with fake credentials? And do DHS agents do weird James Bond super spy stuff with immense budgets or are they more like EPA enforcement agents?
And p, just as weird, I’m trying to game out how an assault on a postal worker leads a postal inspector to verify the assignments of a couple of faux DHS agents and the fact that they’ve been paying for apartments and handing out cash like it was Halloween candy. I can’t find an obvious path for the postal inspector’s investigation.
And they're Middle Eastern which they don't try to obscure, one of them with an Iranian name, which actually suggests to me it's the Saudis.
My thought was that it is a Turkish operation. No evidence at all except for the Middle Eastern names and that the Turks seem to be good at bugging stuff as evidenced by their having those tapes of the Khashoggi murder.
I was thinking the character of, seemingly, cheerfulness in their manner, blithe unconcern, the money it took and heading right for the top suggested Saudis, but now I'm reading it was Pakistan.
The awful thing is this was so hamfisted, in an apartment building stuffed full of people any of whom may have all of a sudden had a really sensitive job where they get investigated heavily before being cleared for it, would inevitably have been discovered; so, what of better intelligence services? It was apparently easy for these guys to compromise Secret Service agents, how compromised is the Secret Service, really? We know they're full of MAGA heads, which is bad enough, and which I think is easily grounds for dismissal by itself.
That’s the first thing that came into my mind, too. A revealing mix of limitless money and total incompetence.. Apparently the Saudis are brutal and cruel but also extremely incompetent. Definitely the front runner
And also all their DHS paraphernalia and casual chit chat seems to suggest they had somebody on the inside who was able to cover up for them until the postal inspector happened by.
Though now that I think of it the postal inspector could have been a set up to get them arrested which they couldn't bring about in some other fashion for some reason.
But that’s weird, too. If you already own a legit DHS agent, why not use him or her instead of two obviously middle eastern guys with phony credentials? Or, if you don’t want to use this guy up, why not use him to find DHS agents that you can buy?
And these people apparently had assembled an immense arsenal to presumably kill somebody protected by the secret service but it’s not clear that they’d recruited the agents with access to the Biden family so isn’t this putting the cart before the horse?
Nothing about this makes any sense.
Just read that after spending some time in jail one of them outright admitted to working for Pakistan. Some secret agent! Now it sounds like a set up to implicate Pakistan.
The story was broken by the DC NBC owned station, which has a myriad of contacts in local law enforcement, they've been breaking a bunch of the January 6th news in the past year. I think it took a minute for folks to nail down the story beyond a "hmmmm, that's interesting" to a national story. It's now on ABC News days after NBC broke the story.
Not sure how this is theft. The sheriff still has the video. What was publicized was a copy. Unauthorized release, yes, but not theft.
I think use of the word “theft” is ok here. People who download pirated copies of songs, movies, etc also are described as “stealing,” even though the artists/studios still have their original data files.
Pirating content is also not theft, it's copyright infringement. The content industries refer to it as theft because it suits them, but it's not.
I'm really looking forward to voting against this schmuck.
You could do a whole series about what a dumpster fire our sheriff is. Just the other day the LA Times revealed that he's making unsubstantiated claims that one of his adversaries is a holocaust denier, and then engaging in grade-school level verbal shenanigans when asked to support the accusation.
"In an interview with Fox 11 News, Villanueva said the disclosure of the video to The Times amounted to a theft of investigative material."
It could very well be. But, man, how about the elephant in the room leaning with its foot on the head of a handcuffed inmate?
I suspect this scandal is the only thing that prevented Villanueva from a giant PR operation in which he himself would arrest Will Smith for assault.
No, that's not who Villanueva is. You'd have to twist his arm clean off before he'd sic his department on a wealthy and powerful citizen who hasn't crossed him.
See, for instance, Villanueva's obsequious behavior toward Tiger Woods when the latter wrecked his vehicle under circumstances that would have landed an ordinary person in significant legal trouble
If you have ever driven that part of that road you can easily see the problem, easy to get fast with a couple of sharper than normal curves. It is a problem that most residents know about.
Right. I'm not looking to relitigate the details of that incident. My point here is that Villanueva behaved as Mr. Woods personal fixer in the aftermath.
The tone and content of his public remarks indicated very clearly that he viewed Woods as his client.
This bears on the Smith case in that it shows how Villanueva behaves when a wealthy, powerful, popular black celebrity engages in conduct which gives the LA county sheriff the option of hassling the man.