Trump Admin Announces Investigation Into Portland Police for Biased Policing/Nick Sortor’s Arrest

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Yesterday, we covered the arrest of journalist Nick Sortor by Portland police, here, here and here. And our fellow Twitchier Amy covered how the local authorities claimed that they enforced the law without regards to viewpoint. This author is currently pressing the Doubt button in the game L.A. Noir on that one.

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And so is the Trump administration. As we alluded to yesterday, both Attorney General Bondi and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon are now investigating the Portland Police Bureau for a potential violation of citizens civil rights, according to a certain journalist you might have heard of…

The cut off text:

@AGPamBondi personally called me to deliver this news, and I’m incredibly grateful to her for doing so.

The Trump DOJ WILL NOT allow Portland Police to continue to do the bidding of Antifa.

And indeed, this was confirmed by Dhillon herself.

That post is ‘quote posting’ a post where she shares a letter she wrote to Portland authorities. To reduce the need to squint, here’s a copy of the same letter.

As you can see, she states that there was a settlement Agreement governing how Portland engages in policing and indeed there is one:

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But calling it a settlement agreement is a bit underselling it. The better term is ‘consent decree’ because as you can see if you read it, it is not just an agreement between parties. Rather it is officially ratified by the court as an order, which means that apart from any remedies in the agreement, contempt is available. Meaning that if the city violates the agreement the judge can hold them in contempt and punish them for it, up to and including fines and imprisonment.

And, of course, if Portland police are engaging in viewpoint discrimination, that would be enough to violate the agreement. Specifically it says that 

PPB shall revise its existing use of force policy … to ensure that all force… is used only in accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States;

And as we have said repeatedly, the First Amendment forbids the government from engaging in viewpoint discrimination in law enforcement. So, for instance, in that prior piece we justified the January 6 pardons because it was clear that federal authorities were treating left-leaning rioters radically differently than the rioters on January 6. This wasn’t a defense of any of those riots, but rather a demand that all rioters be treated equally, regardless of why they were rioting.

So, at this point, we have to wonder what the reaction from Portland authorities will be. They could fold under the increasing pressure of the Trump administration. They could dig in their heels and claim that they are acting in an unbiased fashion.

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On to reactions:

As a matter of inside baseball, Coleman used to work with her in private practice.

By investigating whether or not Portland Police have been weaponized? Huh? What is even the contradiction?

We see a lot of people bringing up different specific victims of this alleged viewpoint discrimination.

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Dude, did you even look up whether or not there was a real settlement agreement before you posted that? And then there is the fact that the First Amendment might have been violated and the Federal Government has a right to enforce that granted to it by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Yeah, that’s a problem, but it doesn’t get Portland authorities out of trouble.

Sometimes it’s not what is being said, but who said it. That is definitely the case for Mr. Ngo.

For one thing, we don’t believe he actually was disorderly.

The cut off text:

Wonderful to see @AAGDhillon pick up Eric Holder’s baton and zealously enforce THEIR terms as it seems Portland PD needs a remedial lesson on the constitution.

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Correct. The settlement agreement seems to be from a prior administration because it seems to be concerned about excessive force being used against mentally ill people. But it doesn’t just protect mentally ill people.

Finally:

Seriously, aren’t the lefties the ones constantly yelling about ‘journalists’ being killed in Gaza? 

What it actually comes down to is this. These days anyone can be a journalist, at least by this author’s definition. Unlike being a lawyer or a doctor, there is no government agency telling people who are and are not journalists—nor should there be. And we dissent from a lot of people when we say that journalists are not required to be unbaised. Up until the 20th century, journalists never even pretended to be unbiased, with their newspapers being explicitly used to grow a particular political party. Whether you prefer your journalists to be unbiased on not, its hard for us to buy into the notion that the definition of a journalist requires a person to be unbiased.

It seems to us, then, that a journalist is simply a person who does journalism, which is nothing more than attempting to inform the masses about something, biased or not. Dan Rather was a journalist—and arguably he still might be. And so were the bloggers who poked holes in his reporting until they brought Dan Rather down. And so is the guy who sees a scuffle between the police and a suspect and turns on his camera phone, and then posts it to social media. Or someone who scours social media and public websites and exposes bad behavior by others—which is why we call Libs of TikTok a journalist, too.

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But if we adopt such a broad definition of journalism and journalist, then we have to recognize that being a journalist doesn’t stop you from being a criminal or even a terrorist. So even though we doubt that Sortor did anything worse than gently taking a burning flag away from someone and stomping out the flames and lawful self-defense, we remain open to the Portland Police showing that he deserved to be arrested. And, of course, a ‘journalist’ killed in Gaza might really be a journalist, who also committed terroristic acts that would make him or her a valid target in war. The two are no mutually exclusive.

So, we are not impressed when someone merely says that someone is a journalist is killed or arrested. Being a journalist, even if we limit the definition to someone who works for a traditional newspaper or television station, doesn’t make that person magically incapable of committing an act that legally justifies arrest or even having to use lethal force against that person. But at the moment we could trust the Portland police about as far as we could throw them. All of them. At once.

So when it comes to Sortor, we remain extremely skeptical of the Portland Police’s motives and justification, but still open to persuasion.

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