Jack Thompson April 24, 2000 4:13 PM
The Clinton Administration’s procurement of a “search warrant” to raid Elian’s refuge is a window into how out-of-control these goons are.
First off, you don’t get a search warrant
for anything other than inanimate objects. INS Commissioner Doris Meissner was
asked on CBS’s Face the Nation: “What were you searching for?” At this
point, gales of laughter among lawyers had to follow her answer: “The boy.”
You get an arrest warrant to seize a person.
But Elian is not a criminal, so no arrest warrant would be appropriate either.
When Eric Holder, number two at Justice, was
asked by Judge Andrew Napolitano why the government didn’t get a court order
authorizing the raid, Holder said, not knowing of the trick with the search
warrant, “We didn’t need an order.”
Napolitano, then correctly, pointed out that
they sure did, since they asked for one from the 11th Circuit.
So, the government, knowing they couldn’t
get an order authorizing the forced taking of the boy, went to a lowly
magistrate and got a useless search warrant ... useless legally. But useful on
Sunday talk shows so that they could falsely but plausibly say they had a
“court-ordered search warrant” authorizing the raid.
But Bob Shieffer, in his common sense
training, understood that this was not a search; it was the first change
of custody in American history without a court order and at the point of a gun.
NewsMax now has the actual “search warrant”
issued as a phony pretext for the pre-dawn raid upon Elian’s refuge. Upon
review, it appears that the Clinton administration acted more unlawfully than
even NewsMax suspected.
The warrant, in order to be issued, required
Reno’s Justice Department to assert that the boy, Elian, was a “concealed
person”; that is, that the Justice Department did not know where he was by
virtue of his being hidden.
Did not everyone on the planet except Janet
Reno know where the boy was? All the media of the modern world were in front of
Elian’s house because everyone knew he was there! He came out almost every day
to play. If he was to be taken, without a court order, which the 11th
Circuit refused to give, then he would be taken from that house and that house
only.
But “concealed person” is the word required
on any search warrant. The Clinton Justice Department used that word in a
context defining it as the opposite of its clear meaning in order that the
White House spinners would be able to say, dishonestly, that a court approved
the raid.
Elian’s whereabouts were not concealed. They
were know to an absolute certainty. Which is why the search warrant was
illegally obtained and void, thereby rendering the taking of the boy — with no
legitimate judicial approval — illegal in yet another way, unknown until the search
warrant became public.
This is an administration that does not know
what “is” is, and uses “concealed” when disclosed would be the right word. Only
the truth is here concealed from a naive majority by a president and
administration betting heavily on P.T. Barnum’s “sucker born every minute”
maxim.