The Patriot Post® · Individual Liberty 1, FBI 0

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.