Prosecutors in Riverside County, California have been responsible for 1 out of every 5 wiretap approvals in the country. Their tactics, however, are coming under the microscope as there seems to be the breaking of federal laws involved.
Government prosecutors in Riverside, Cal., may be facing charges of illegally authorizing wiretaps and have likely violated almost every federal statute possible with regard to wiretapping individuals. These potentially illegals wiretaps accounted for more than 300 arrests as well as the seizure of huge amounts of drugs and cash across the country.
The potential federal law-breaking by prosecutors in Riverside could lead to eventual charges, reports USA Today. In the last year and a half, Riverside prosecutors approved of 738 wiretaps. To put this mind boggling figure into perspective, that’s one out of every five wiretaps approved in the whole country during that time.
What was done with those wiretaps was to hack in and listen to private telephone conversations as well as text messages of over 52,000 American citizens. Under federal law, governments must seek the approval of a prosecutor in order to get a court approved wiretap. This was initiated in the 1960’s to prevent the FBI from running roughshod over the Constitution as it sought to undermine the civil rights movement at the time.
What court records are revealing is that Riverside prosecutors weren’t approving of many of the wiretaps. They were sending the requests down the chain to low level lawyers who then made the call. Not only does this show the potential for violating federal wiretap laws but the evidence gathered from those illegal wiretaps will not be admissible in any court in the United States.
The Justice Department is now opening and investigation and further records and investigation shows that the DEA had turned Riverside into the nation’s central hub for wiretap requests because so few were rejected by the low level lawyers who weren’t even suppose to be doing such work. All of this was done even though federal prosecutors had warned that what was being done would not stand up to a court challenge.
Federal DEA agents concealed the wiretap evidence from defense attorneys and from judges while they made arrests all across the country. In 2013, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that all wiretaps had to be signed off on by a district attorney. There could be no exceptions.
