Posted on 09/25/2023 11:32:13 AM PDT by Red Badger
“There’s literally been no explanation,” Pearsons said. “I think you have to assume that it’s the simplest explanation, and I think, unfortunately, the simplest explanation is they took it or lost it.”
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The nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice has filed two lawsuits on behalf of clients who allege that the FBI failed to return valuable rare coins and other property it took during a March 2021 FBI raid on the Beverly Hills–based U.S. Private Vaults.
“We don’t know for sure how the property disappeared, we just know it disappeared,” Joe Gay, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, said on Friday. “And whether it’s negligence, whether it’s something worse, the government shouldn’t be able to rely on its own shoddy recordkeeping to avoid responsibility for losing their property.”
Don Mellein had sued the government in 2021 to get the coins back, which he estimates are worth hundreds of thousands. So far, only 47 out of 110 have been returned so he decided to sue again.
“The FBI had no reason to go through my box and they were careless in losing my savings,” Mellein said. “For months I was told they didn’t have any of my coins before they eventually found some of them.”
Jeni Pearsons said she had $2,000 worth of cash in a box that was taken during the raid and it has not been returned.
“Could be that the way that the FBI and the law enforcement carried this out is just really sloppy work,” she said. “Or there was never any intention of giving it back, and so it really didn’t matter because they thought they just got to keep everything. So to them, there was one pile.”
Gay said he hopes the latest lawsuits help other victims of civil asset forfeiture.
"We're basically fighting against the notion that people shouldn’t have a remedy against the government when the government takes their property," he said.
Just check the receipt they gave you!....(/S)
A collection of valuable coins is very unlikely to have ‘gotten lost’. It’s unfortunate that we now have to be just as wary of the FBI handling personal goods as we have learned to be with the TSA agents at airports.
Maybe the FBI has needed to lower trainee standards just to keep going. Something like our military.
They didn’t lose any rare coines. They stole and sold them.
Didn’t the Supremes already rule such confiscations as Finders Keepers?
That coin collection is probably sitting in some FBI employee’s home, right next to a few choice pairs of Melania’s underwear, and whatever else they stole from Mar-a-lago. Or it’s already all been sold to a private collector. What a bunch of thieves.
These peoples’ stuff was stolen from private safety deposit boxes.
The FBI didn’t charge them with any crimes.
They just took all the stuff that was in them...........................
Warehouse 13?
Criminals have been known before in the past to KEEP the loot they got from an Armed Robbery.
We are that banana republic.
No wonder the democrats want to protect Ukraine so much.
They’re at some FBI Agent’s house, if they haven’t already been fenced for money to buy dope.
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