#11 Civil Asset Forfeiture: How Police Take Your Property Without Charging You
Hey y'all. Welcome back to Everyone Knows. I'm Brian Bullock, Starborne Studios. Speak up or step aside. Three parts. All of them matter.
The war with Iran is not over. The ceasefire has been extended indefinitely by President Trump. Peace talks are set to restart within the next 36 to 72 hours. Meanwhile the Strait of Hormuz is still on fire. And the regime just sent one of its members of parliament to publicly call for the assassination of the President of the United States.
In Minnesota, Democrats voted to protect Tim Walz from impeachment hearings over nine billion dollars in fraud. Voted to protect him. That story is not over. It just moved to a different track.
And the third story tonight is something most Americans have never heard of. But it could happen to anyone listening right now. Police can take everything you own. Your cash. Your car. Your house. Your bank account. Without charging you with a crime. It is legal. It is happening right now. And most people have no idea.
Start with where things actually stand.
The ceasefire between the United States and Iran was scheduled to expire April 22nd. That was today. Instead of letting it run out, President Trump extended it indefinitely. His reason. Iran's leadership could not produce a unified proposal. They were supposed to come to the table this week. They no-showed. Trump gave them another 36 to 72 hours to figure out who is running the country.
That is not a diplomatic problem. That is a regime in open civil war with itself.
Three men are fighting for control in Tehran. IRGC Commander Ahmad Vahidi holds the military power. He does not want a deal. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi want a deal. The generals do not. Supreme Leader Khamenei's son Mojtaba is reportedly in a coma. There is nobody in Tehran with the authority to sign a proposal even if they wanted to.
So while the negotiators argue about who is in charge, the Revolutionary Guard is answering the question in the water.
Today the IRGC attacked three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Seized two. The UK Maritime Trade Operations confirmed the details. Gunboats. Fast boats. Heavy damage to one ship's bridge. A second ship stopped dead in the water. Iranian state media is justifying it by claiming the vessels were Israeli-linked. The shadow war fleet answering their negotiators.
And then there is the United States response.
US Central Command came out publicly today to correct the media record. Twenty-nine vessels turned around or sent back to port since the blockade began. Two Iranian tankers media claimed had slipped through are anchored in Iran under American custody. A third tanker is under US Navy destroyer escort in the Indian Ocean. CENTCOM said it in public. The blockade is working.
The force on station speaks for itself. Three United States Navy carrier strike groups either in theater or arriving in days. USS Ford in the Red Sea. USS Abraham Lincoln enforcing the blockade in the Arabian Sea. USS George H.W. Bush transiting the Horn of Africa and arriving any day now. The Boxer Amphibious Ready Group is already in the 5th Fleet area with 800 Marines of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. Two Avenger-class minesweepers inbound from Singapore. More than ten thousand additional personnel on top of the fifty thousand already staged.
This is the largest naval buildup in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The blockade is not the Strait of Hormuz. It is Iran's ports and coastline. Ships heading to non-Iranian destinations pass freely. Ships heading to Iranian ports get turned around. Iran's economy runs more than 90 percent through seaborne trade. The blockade costs them an estimated 435 million dollars a day.
Trump posted to Truth Social this morning. Iran is collapsing financially. Those were his words.
Here is what collapsing looks like.
The regime is executing its own people faster than it is losing ships. Iran executed Amir Ali Mirjafari on Tuesday. Charged with burning a mosque during protests. Iran International reviewed the video evidence from that night. No mosque was burned. Only regime motorcycles and vehicles caught fire. The regime executed a man for a crime that did not happen.
Wednesday morning Iran executed Mehdi Farid. Charged with spying for Israel. No evidence provided. Farid was an employee of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization when he was arrested. A nuclear employee killed during active nuclear negotiations. Iran Human Rights documented at least 1,639 executions in 2025. A 68 percent rise year over year.
Then President Trump did something no American president has ever done. He saved eight lives in a country that wants him dead. Trump announced today that eight women protesters scheduled to be executed in Iran tonight will not be killed. Four will be released immediately. Four will serve one month in prison. Trump said Iran's leaders respected his personal request as President of the United States.
Read that sentence again. While the Democratic Party and most of the American media spent the morning attacking Trump's handling of the war, the American President picked up the phone and pulled eight women off the gallows in Tehran.
And here is the part you will not hear anywhere else.
While Trump was saving eight Iranian women, an Iranian member of parliament named Mohammad Bayat publicly called for Trump's assassination. Bayat sits on the Iranian parliament's Internal Affairs Committee. His words to Iranian state outlet Didban-e Iran. Killing them alone does not finish the work. The roots must be cut. He named President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu by name.
A sitting member of a foreign government openly calling for the assassination of a sitting American president during active negotiations. You would think this would be the biggest story of the week. Most American outlets have not even mentioned it.
Here is where the two sides actually sit in these talks.
The United States wants Iran's enriched uranium physically handed over. Not frozen. Not inspected. Handed over. The American position is that Iran must never obtain a nuclear weapon and the stockpile must leave Iranian soil.
Iran has offered a ten year freeze. Then a twenty year freeze. The United States said no to both. The American position is permanent. Nothing short of the uranium leaving Iran ends this.
Iran is also demanding war damage compensation. Compensation for what the airstrikes destroyed. The United States has not agreed to any of that.
Pakistan's army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir remains the sole mediator. One channel. Pakistan. No other country has a seat at this table.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the financial pressure beyond the blockade. Gulf allies that Iran spent forty days attacking are now handing over the private bank accounts of Iranian regime officials hidden in their financial systems. Bessent called Chinese banks directly. The message. Any purchase of Iranian oil is forbidden. Any dollar transaction gets sanctioned.
China buys more than eighty percent of Iran's oil. President Xi sent Trump a personal letter committing that China would not send weapons to Iran. At the same time US intelligence had documented what China was preparing to ship before that letter arrived. Shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. The kind a single soldier carries and fires at a low-flying jet. An F-15E was shot down over Iran on April 3rd at 7,000 feet. The weapon that brought it down matches the Chinese FN-6 system exactly.
Iran's Shahed drones were already running on Chinese BeiDou satellite navigation. Anti-ship cruise missiles. Rocket fuel components on state-owned vessels. All routed through third countries to hide the origin.
Trump threatened fifty percent tariffs on any nation supplying weapons to Iran. Then he wrote Xi directly. Xi wrote back. Whether you trust that letter or not, the pipeline stopped.
Two American pilots were already shot down. The weapons that may have killed them came from a country we are currently negotiating trade deals with.
Trump said it plainly in an earlier press gaggle. We could take out every one of their bridges in one hour. Every power plant in one hour. The Navy's message to every ship in the Arabian Sea is already being broadcast. If you do not comply with this blockade we will use force.
Here is where Israel comes in. Israel brokered a separate ten day ceasefire with Lebanon that took effect April 16th. Trump personally called Lebanese President Aoun to seal it. The first time the two had ever spoken. The last meaningful peace talks between Israel and Lebanon were in 1983. Iran demanded to be part of Lebanon's negotiations. Lebanon told Iran no. They do not speak for Lebanon. They do not negotiate on Lebanon's behalf. The proxy relationship cracking publicly.
So where does that leave us tonight.
Ceasefire extended indefinitely. Talks restart in 36 to 72 hours. Three carrier strike groups on station or arriving. Blockade holding with 29 vessels turned around. Eight Iranian women saved from execution by direct presidential intervention. An Iranian MP calling for Trump's assassination on state media. The regime unable to produce a unified proposal because the regime is not unified. And the Revolutionary Guard attacking three ships this morning to remind everyone they still have a vote.
This is not a ceasefire. This is a pressure campaign. And the pressure is working.
On April 15th, Democrats in the Minnesota House Rules and Legislative Administration Committee voted in unison to block impeachment proceedings against Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison.
Every Democrat in that room voted to make sure the public never got to see a full hearing on nine billion dollars stolen from Minnesota taxpayers. Eight to eight. Party line. Tie vote. The resolution failed.
Let's put that number in context.
Nine billion dollars. Across fourteen federal programs. Child nutrition services. Autism support. Housing assistance. Medicaid. One organization claimed to be feeding 5,000 children a day. The actual number was close to zero. The money went to foreign bank accounts.
In Los Angeles alone, not Minnesota, Los Angeles, 221 fraudulent hospice centers were shut down in ten weeks under the new administration. The previous governor of California had shut down four in four years. Hospice owners enrolling patients without their knowledge. Collecting Medicare payments. Allowing those patients to die without the care they were entitled to because the care was never delivered.
The federal government spends approximately 1.5 trillion dollars per year on Medicare, Medicaid and related programs. Conservative estimates of fraud in these programs run from 3 to 10 percent. At the low end. Forty-five billion dollars a year stolen. Every year. Under administrations of both parties that treated fraud as an acceptable cost rather than a crime.
Tim Walz has been governor since 2019. He announced January 5th that he is not seeking re-election. His term ends January 2027.
A sitting governor has sovereign immunity. That means he cannot be personally charged for official acts while he is in office. That immunity drops the moment he leaves.
The April 15th vote killed the Minnesota impeachment vehicle. Democrats protected him in St. Paul.
But the Vance federal fraud task force does not care what the Minnesota Rules Committee voted.
Scott Brady, the federal prosecutor who successfully prosecuted the Hunter Biden case, is leading it. Half the cabinet was in the room when it convened. The mandate. Find the fraud. Document it. Prosecute it. Not audit it. Prosecute it.
Every agency feeds into one coordinated investigation. Treasury. Department of Justice. Health and Human Services. All Inspector General offices. When a fraudster stealing from Medicaid in one state and child nutrition programs in another and housing assistance in a third gets investigated, all three threads get pulled at once.
Of the fraud referrals the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was receiving from Inspector General investigators, they were only acting on thirty percent of them. Thirty percent. The investigators finding the fraud had their work ignored seventy percent of the time. Dr. Oz told his team he wants one hundred percent of referrals acted on.
Democrats won the procedural vote in Minnesota.
But they may have just signed up for nine more months of public hearings on nine billion dollars in fraud. With a federal prosecution waiting on the other side the moment Walz's sovereign immunity drops in January 2027.
The clock is running on more than just his term.
I want to tell you about something called civil asset forfeiture.
Most Americans have never heard of it. Most Americans assume that in this country the government cannot take your property without charging you with a crime. That assumption is wrong.
Civil asset forfeiture is a legal process that allows law enforcement. Local police. State police. Federal agents. To seize your cash, your car, your house, and your bank accounts based on the suspicion that your property was connected to criminal activity.
Not you. Your property.
In civil forfeiture your property is guilty until you prove it innocent. That is not rhetoric. That is how the law actually works. The government files a case not against you. Against your stuff. The case is literally titled United States versus forty thousand dollars in cash. Or State of Indiana versus a 2019 Ford F-150.
And here is the number that should stop you cold.
In eighty percent of civil asset forfeiture cases the owner is never charged with a crime. Not arrested. Not indicted. Not convicted. Never charged. The government takes the property and the owner is never accused of doing anything wrong.
To get your property back you must hire a lawyer at your own expense. You must prove in court that your property was not connected to criminal activity. The government does not have to prove you did anything. You have to prove you didn't. The burden of proof is reversed. And the legal fees to fight it often cost more than the property that was taken.
This is not a hypothetical. This is documented and ongoing.
A jewelry business owner in Indiana had money seized by state police after a customer sent a payment through FedEx. The police suspected the money was connected to drug activity. The owners were never charged with anything. Indiana prosecutors are still trying to keep the money without ever saying what the couple did wrong.
A man in Philadelphia had his house seized because his son, who did not live there, was arrested for selling forty dollars worth of drugs on the front steps. The man had lived in that house for over a decade. He had nothing to do with the arrest. Philadelphia tried to take his house.
A gas station owner in Mississippi had one hundred thousand dollars in cash seized during a traffic stop. He was on his way to buy equipment for his business. He was never charged with a crime. It took him years and tens of thousands in legal fees to get his money back.
These are not rare exceptions. They are how the system operates by design.
In 1986 the federal asset forfeiture fund took in 93 million dollars. By 2019 annual deposits exceeded two billion dollars a year. Two billion. The incentive structure is built into the program. Law enforcement agencies get to keep a significant portion of what they seize. The more they seize the more they keep. That is not a police force being protected from crime. That is a revenue model.
There is bipartisan support in Congress to reform it. The FAIR Act has been introduced repeatedly. It would require the government to actually charge someone with a crime before seizing their property. It would shift the burden of proof back to the government where it belongs. It has not passed.
In the meantime the law treats your property as guilty until proven innocent while treating you as innocent until proven guilty. Two different standards. One for people. One for stuff. And the stuff standard is the one that can wipe out everything you have built.
Most people will go their entire lives without ever encountering civil asset forfeiture. Just like most smokers will never get lung cancer. But the ones who do encounter it. Who get pulled over with cash. Who have a family member arrested at their address. Who operate a business that handles large amounts of money. Will lose everything while the government never has to prove they did a single thing wrong.
Now you know it exists.
Three stories tonight.
Iran. Ceasefire extended indefinitely. Talks restart in 36 to 72 hours. Three carrier strike groups on station or arriving. Trump saved eight Iranian women from execution by direct phone call while an Iranian MP called for his assassination on state media. The blockade is holding. The regime is splitting. The pressure is working.
Minnesota. Democrats voted to kill the Walz impeachment in committee. Every Democrat. Party line. Nine billion in fraud. They voted to protect him. The federal track is still running. Sovereign immunity drops January 2027. The clock is running.
Civil asset forfeiture. The government can take everything you own without charging you with a crime. Eighty percent of forfeiture cases involve owners who are never charged. Two billion dollars seized per year. Your property is guilty until you prove it innocent. Most Americans have no idea this is happening. Now you do.
That is Everyone Knows. The hard truth, the stuff that nobody else will say, and the things that keep you going.
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at EveryoneKnws1. If this hits you share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com. We're building something here and you're welcome to be part of it.
Because everyone knows. Your silence is your consent.