Asymmetric Lawfare |
There’s actually a small window of time to completely break the Left, and this opportunity will not come again.
August Harriman | July 5, 2026
The Left can be badly weakened — perhaps even broken. The process has a misleadingly dry name — civil asset forfeiture.
This legal procedure allows law enforcement officials — typically the Attorney General or a District Attorney — to seize property based solely on suspicion of criminal activity. No criminal charge, let alone conviction, is required. The justification rests on the extraordinary legal fiction that the property itself, rather than its owner, is the defendant. However implausible that premise may seem, it is firmly embedded in American law and has been repeatedly endorsed by the Supreme Court.
A common fiction is that it’s applied solely against organized crime. In reality it’s often against the innocent.
Between 2000 and 2021, 82 billion dollars, in the form of real estate, commercial businesses, cash, and financial instruments has been taken by forfeiture.
For the initial seizure of property, the government need only establish a reasonable basis to believe the asset contributed to criminal activity. In other words, there must be a plausible suspicion. If the owner challenges the seizure, the government then needs to meet only the low preponderance-of-the-evidence standard — that is, show that the forfeiture is more likely warranted than not (often described at “50 percent plus a feather”). The forfeiture is a civil, not a criminal case. But contesting the seizure can pose very serious problems for the party whose property was seized. Contesting exposes the claimant to broad discovery by the government, including interrogatories, requests for production, requests for admission, depositions and subpoenas for records held by third parties, any of which can lead to felony charges.
The government has further critical advantages. Under Rule 38 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if the........