Part of our core mission? Exposing the Left's blatant hypocrisy. Help us continue the fight and support the 2024 Year-End Campaign now.

February 21, 2024

Individual Liberty 1, FBI 0

A recent decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled strongly in favor of property rights and against unlawful government confiscation.

If you don’t have private property rights, you aren’t a free people.

This is a fundamental precept of Liberty and of Western civilization, but it sometimes gets lost amid the more topical and visceral struggle to keep the state from encroaching on our First and Second Amendment rights. And yet we seem to remember it being written down somewhere that the right of the American people “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

Perhaps, having recently been taken to the woodshed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the FBI’s corrupt and irresolute leadership — looking at you, Chris Wray — will get this lesson through its thick collective skull.

At issue is a 2021 raid by the bureau on a Beverly Hills business, U.S. Private Vaults, that it suspected of money laundering. Seems the same folks who zealously conducted hundreds of heavily armed pre-dawn raids on an array of January 6 protesters — some of them rioters but the overwhelming majority of them tourists — also swooped in and seized the contents of some 1,400 safe deposit boxes belonging to private citizens. In doing so, the bureau seized more than $86 million in cash and valuables from people who had not even been accused of wrongdoing. Their boxes were then opened and their contents catalogued without individual criminal warrants for each.

Talk about casting a wide net.

As it turns out, the FBI had no right to do so — at least not according to our Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. Never mind that the FBI was right to suspect the company in question, U.S. Private Vaults, which ultimately shut down and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder drug money. As Fox News reports, “Unsealed court documents showed neither the FBI nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office told the judge in their warrant request that agents planned to confiscate the contents of every box containing at least $5,000 in cash or belongings.”

And that’s where the FBI lost its way — and it’s where the second half of the Fourth Amendment comes into play: “And no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

As Fox News continues: “The warrant only authorized authorities to seize business computers, money counters and surveillance equipment. The judge also allowed them to seize safety deposit boxes and keys, but specifically wrote that agents should only ‘inspect the contents of the boxes in an effort to identify their owners … so that they can claim their property,’ and that the warrant ‘does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes.’”

One of the many victims of the FBI’s raid, Jeni Pearsons, became a plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit. She and her husband had $20,000 in silver and $2,000 in cash seized from their safe deposit box during the raid. Apparently, the FBI had lost the $2,000 when she went to reclaim it.

“Hearing these judges just knock them down a peg and talk through the situation, this extraordinary overreach and an actual breaking of civil rights … it was just really, really gratifying,” Pearsons said.

“This was a resounding victory, not just for our clients, but for the hundreds of people who’ve been stuck in a nightmare for years because of what the FBI did,” said senior attorney Rob Frommer of the Institute for Justice, which represented several plaintiffs in the case.

Ninth Circuit Judge Milan Smith Jr., writing for a three-judge panel, compared the bureau’s overreach to the “limitless searches of an individual’s personal belongings” like those seen in colonial America. “It was those very abuses of power, after all, that led to adoption of the Fourth Amendment in the first place,” he wrote.

And bully for Smith and his Ninth Circuit colleagues. Time was when that particular plank in the federal bench, headquartered in San Francisco, was derisively known as the Ninth Circus, so reliably and awfully anti-constitutional were its rulings. Times have changed, though, and the court of last local appeal for the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington was opportunistically remade under Donald Trump, who during his single term in office placed 10 judges on the Ninth Circuit bench, four of whom replaced judges appointed by Democrats. This pro-Liberty ruling was clearly the fruit of those appointments.

Elections, as it turns out, have consequences.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.