DEA admits targeting Emery for his political activity

One last piece of old news before we start to move forward here again and this has been well covered by everyone inside and outside of the reform movement but bears repeating. I told you the night the news of Emery's arrest broke that this had almost nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with Marc's political activism. Well, DEA drug war czarina Karen Tandy of all people proved the truth to those words. In an obvious moment of unintended honesty, she released a statement from the Washington DC office in direct contradiction to earlier USAG statements that Emery's political activity had no bearing on the case. She says:

"Today's arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement."

"Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery's illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on."

Could there be a more specific admission that Emery was targeted on account of his activism? One would think a good constitutional attorney could make some hay with that statement on both sides of the border which perhaps explains why it doesn't appear on the DEA website or apparently anywhere else on the internet. Vive Le Canada speculates it was faxed directly to reporters in an effort to drum up some widespread press coverage for our hapless drug war profiteers.

Good knows they were disgustingly smug at the press conferences and in other statements. It wouldn't surprise me if they were popping bottles of taxpayer funded champagne at the time, which could explain how such a honest and potentially damaging admission of constitutional violations was disseminated in the first place.

Wouldn't it be a delicious irony if in some way Marc could use this down the line to sue for wrongful arrest?