That was Hector Flores in the New York Times today, speaking for his client -- a former federal ICE agent, Richard P. Cramer. From the Times:
According to the complaint, on a number of occasions Mr. Cramer used his position to search federal databases and a California state database to see if certain unidentified drug trafficking organization members were informants for American law enforcement.
The complaint says he passed that information along to his cartel handlers, charging $2,000 for one D.E.A. document, as well as information on how federal agents conduct drug investigations and recruit informants.
Mr. Cramer, the complaint said, at one point invested $40,000 in a 2007 plot to smuggle 660 pounds of cocaine to Spain from Panama, passing through United States seaports.
The load was seized, and that turn of events set off a dispute involving Mr. Cramer, a drug lord and lower-level traffickers that included a hunt for informants, according to the complaint.
The drug agency last August arrested an unidentified participant in the plot who, along with other confidential sources, provided information that culminated in Mr. Cramer’s arrest.
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David, tell everybody about the issues in the cross case. Give us details about the purpose of the cross on non-federal land.
ReplyDeleteIsn't Scalia David's hero? Here you go:
ReplyDeleteAs the Supreme Court weighed a dispute over a religious symbol on public land Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia was having difficulty understanding how some people might feel excluded by a cross that was put up as a memorial to soldiers killed in World War I.
"It's erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead," Scalia said of the cross that the Veterans of Foreign Wars built 75 years ago atop an outcropping in the Mojave National Preserve. "What would you have them erect?...Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?"
Peter Eliasberg, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer arguing the case, explained that the cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and commonly used at Christian grave sites, not that the devoutly Catholic Scalia needed to be told that.
"I have been in Jewish cemeteries," Eliasberg continued. "There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."
There was mild laughter in the packed courtroom, but not from Scalia.
"I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that's an outrageous conclusion," Scalia said, clearly irritated by the exchange.