Dan Love Will Not Be Prosecuted
Love was the Special Agent in Charge of the Bunkerville Standoff in April 2014.
by Staff
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Utah declined to file criminal charges related to evidence mishandling against BLM Special Agent Daniel P. Love.
Though there were multiple scandalous allegations of breaking the law, including using his influence to get tickets to a sold-out Burning Man festival, telling an employee to delete some emails that contained bureau information requested by then-U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, and telling a federal employee to take seized stones known as moqui marbles out of an evidence room so he could give them away as gifts.
The Associated Press tells us:
The report states that Love in the spring of 2016 told a federal employee to take seized stones known as moqui marbles out of an evidence room so he could give them to a contractor who had done work on the agency’s building in Salt Lake City.
The employee told investigators he had “bad feeling” about taking them from the evidence room, but followed instructions because Love was a law enforcement officer and “scary.”
Several other employees also had the stones, and one told investigators that Love was “giving them out like candy.
This is just one of the violations Love has been investigated for. Love declined to be interviewed by investigators and refused to turn over his government-issued laptops saying they’d been lost. According to the investigative report, he previously told colleagues that he planned to do this if he ever got in trouble.
Love was the Special Agent in Charge of the Bunkerville Standoff in April 2014. Though his testimony was a key part of obtaining the indictments against Cliven Bundy and multiple other defendants, Love was not called as a witness in the recent trials. Complaints of violating the defendants Sixth Amendment rights to face their accusers fell on deaf ears.
Sixth Amendment:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
The government has stated they will continue to prosecute citizens for their being at the standoff in Bunkerville, though multiple juries have found these same citizens not guilty of most of the charges. The most recent jury deadlocked on only 6 of 40 charges, with reports of only a single holdout juror.
Currently, a third trial on the same charges is scheduled for September. Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan, as well as multiple other defendants, have been held for a year and a half without bail, still awaiting their day in court.
Yet, the government continues to protecting their own. Dan Love will get away with alleged multiple violations while the citizens sit and languish in jail over charges two juries have rejected so far.
