Editor’s Note:
When this video aired, a hearing in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case was scheduled for this Friday. On Monday, that hearing was rescheduled by more than one month, but All Rise News will continue to follow the case live and in person.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s legal team on Monday likened their client’s “vindictive” prosecution to Donald Trump’s effort to strongarm a former U.S. Attorney to charge New York Attorney General Letitia James with a crime that the evidence didn’t support.
Abrego’s attorney Sean Hecker drew the analogy in the opening lines of his legal brief, writing that his client’s case is “hardly the only time the President has sought to use [the] DOJ to get revenge.”
“The U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia was forced from office for not vindictively charging New York Attorney General Letitia James,” Hecker wrote in his latest filing, citing Trump’s demand that Attorney General Pamela Bondi start prosecuting his political rivals “NOW.”
Learn the latest on Abrego’s case by watching my recent Substack Live conversation with
from Sunday.On Friday, now-former Eastern District of Virginia U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert resigned rather than pursue unsupported charges against James, and Abrego’s attorneys note that a similar trajectory happened in their client’s case.
“In our case, the Chief of the Criminal Division resigned rather than bring this vindictive prosecution himself,” the defense filing states. “That Mr. McGuire professes to believe that this case is a righteous one, while claiming ignorance of its origins, is no answer to our motion. It’s a dodge.”
The former Middle District of Tennessee Criminal Division Chief, Ben Schrader, resigned the day that Abrego was indicted.
In a footnote, Abrego’s latest defense filing reveals that Schrader attended a proffer interview of a cooperating witness. That is significant because Abrego’s attorneys note that the prosecution’s case heavily relies upon the testimony of two men convicted of felonies, who were promised unspecified help from the government in their criminal and immigration cases in return for their cooperation.
Abrego’s attorneys say that the Trump administration opened a criminal investigation of their client over a roughly three-year-old traffic stop in order to punish him for successfully fighting the government’s spiriting him to El Salvador in defiance of a court order.
In 2022, Tennessee police pulled him over in a traffic stop and released him without even a speeding ticket.
Weeks after the Supreme Court demanded his return to the United States, prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the years-old incident, and the government now claims that bodycam footage from the stop shows Abrego smuggling immigrants in an SUV.
Senior White House, Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security officials immediately started declaring Abrego guilty before the ink started drying on his indictment.
“To be sure, neither we nor the government have found a case in which the most senior officials in the White House, DOJ, and DHS banded together to use the law enforcement power to punish a man who prevailed in civil litigation,” Hecker wrote. “But that does not mean that this prosecution is not vindictive. It just means that its vindictiveness is unprecedented.”
At the time of the recording of this interview, Abrego was scheduled to appear in Nashville on Friday for a status conference.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw just cancelled those proceedings and scheduled Abrego’s next court appearance for Nov. 3.
Read Abrego’s latest defense filing here.
