Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey listened to prosecutors argue with defense attorneys for three whole days. When they were done, he spent an hour explaining his decision. After he got done talking, the two suspects were unchained and allowed to go home. Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali were released from jail Thursday.
Judge sets imposters free
On Thursday, April 7, two men accused of impersonating federal agents were allowed to go home on their own recognizance. Nobody knows if they are “operatives of a hostile government” or not. Judge Harvey doesn’t care, calling the Justice Department’s whining “overblown.” There was a legal standard to be met and the prosecutors didn’t clear the hurdle.
What that means is both get to go home as long as they promise to stay there and not sneak out of the country or anything. The magistrate made it crystal clear the naughty imposters aren’t allowed to go anywhere near an airport or a foreign embassy, or “talk to any of the federal agents they allegedly duped.”
Dangerous? How can you suggest such a thing. Judge Harvey “lambasted the Justice Department’s claims that the men were dangerous, were trying to compromise agents and were tied to a foreign government.” Just because they provided Jill Biden’s Secret Service team with guns, gear, and free apartments doesn’t mean a thing.
The government, Harvey ruled, made “no showing that national security information was in fact compromised.” He hasn’t seen a shred of evidence yet that “sensitive information was in fact compromised, or that was the intention of the defendants when they gave the gifts in the first place.”
FBI agents have been smoking crack with Hunter Biden, the Judge suggests. “There is no evidence of foreign ties in this case.” Other than the names and nationalities of the defendants that is. Not only that, Harvey points out, there was no “suggestion that any foreign government that is hostile to the United States” was involved in the alleged plot.
He wasn’t phased by the inconsistency that the guys who could pay the rent for Secret Service agents couldn’t pay their own.
Appointed public defenders
Ali and Taherzadeh had no problem laying lavish gifts on Secret Service agents working important security details. That’s really surprising because the men are both broke. They’re destitute enough on paper to qualify for public defenders.
The Judge notes that they “did not appear to have ever paid their rent and had been appointed public defenders, suggesting that they did not have access to the funds normally expected from foreign agents.” He actually bought their story that they “just wanted to feel on the same level” as real feds. Prosecutors are wondering how they can get hizzoner to take a whiz quiz because he’s the one who seems to be on drugs.
The men might not have any money but they had a heck of a lot of guns. “Prosecutors had argued that both men posed a danger to the community because of the cache of weapons investigators found at their Washington, DC, residence.”
Taherzadeh also suspiciously “deleted evidence on his social media page and may try to further obstruct the investigation.” Meanwhile, the prosecutors were convinced “Ali posed a flight risk.” The Judge isn’t believing it.
Judge Harvey made it crystal clear in the hearings that he would have been much happier to have some sort of evidence to help him see things their way. Things like maybe some indication that “Ali and Taherzadeh received” anything from the agents they were grooming. Nobody has a clue what “the men’s intentions were in befriending the agents.”
All prosecutors can do is speculate that they must have been up to something. That doesn’t cut it. That pesky Constitution thing is something federal bureaucrats don’t like dealing with. They usually have ways to sidestep the dusty document but every once in a while they get a judge who insists they actually read the law books and do their job properly. They will be petitioning for a change of venue.
