Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 6/26/26 Bud Cummins on the ATF’s Killing of Bryan Malinowski

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Scott interviews attorney Bud Cummins about Bryan Malinowski, a man who was killed by ATF agents in a poorly planned and entirely unnecessary pre-dawn raid in 2024. Two years later, no government officials have been held accountable, or have even adequately explained what happened. Cummins is representing Malinowski’s wife in a lawsuit that seeks to change that. Bud Cummins is an American attorney, businessman and politician. He served as United States Attorney with five years of service from 2001 to 2006 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.  Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/43D82oY (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com; Expat Money https://expatmoney.com/scott; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey y'all, me here for expatmoney.com, the great Mikkel Thorup. And of course, they do their big conference every year in October. But all year round, they've got great advice for you, such as this Plan B, Residencies and instant citizenship. And Americans are fleeing. Price inflation and the police state and all kinds of things, blowback terrorism. And they're getting the hell out of the country. And if you decide that's what's right for you, then we can learn from Mikhail Thorup about

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have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people what's going on in this country. We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president doesn't, that means that it is not a leader.

We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys, introducing Bud Cummins, and he is a former U.S. attorney, but is now no longer a government employee. He's in private practice.

and he is representing the wife of a guy named Brian Malinowski. Hope I'm saying that right. Who was killed by the ATF in a wake ghost style raid. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, sir? I'm good. I appreciate you having me on to talk about what I think is both a tragic and very important case. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like one just on the face of it.

So first of all, who is this guy that we're talking about? here. Brian Maldeski, the director of the Little Rock Airport, had been for, he had a whole career in airport administration management by all accounts, pretty good at it. We had one of the less than a dozen airports in the country that was debt free. And so he was well, well regarded. He married for 28 years, 53 years old, no children, had a lot of hobbies. I didn't know Brian, but I feel like I know him now, two years later, having worked on this case,

Brian was a, I would call it, he was kind of a wonk. He didn't know just a little about things he was interested in. He knew everything about the things he knew. So he'd been a lifelong, lifelong coin collector and, you know, could talk coins with you all day. He at one point made a foray into competitive poker playing and by all accounts, was a really good poker player and liked to teach people to play poker. At some point, his father gave him the family gun collection and said, hey, I'm old.

I don't need these anymore. And Brian became interested in firearms. And people that are around firearms, that may seem unusual. I've been a gun guy my whole life. I own a lot of firearms and I like to learn about him. But Brian was kind of, he didn't earn just a little. He would have learned a lot. And at some point, he discovered gun shows and he got it.

And as a hobby, he would go, I don't know how many times, maybe five times a year. The weekend gun shows, which are very, you know, there's a gun show in this part of the country than an hour driving me probably every week. And he would pay to put up a card table and he would display coins. He would display firearms. He would display other things at different times. And he, but he really enjoyed being at the gun show talking to people about coins and guns. and everybody that knew him said that, you know, that was what drove him.

He was the highest-paid city of Little Rock employee. He made over $260,000 a year. And the law says, you and I can go sell guns at the gun show. I can come over to my house and I can sell you a bunch of guns and cash purchase. I don't have to do a background check. I don't have to fill any paperwork as long as we are dealing as hobbyists and collectors. At some point, you're at a lot of. activity indicates that you're now a person engaged in the business of dealing firearms.

And if you reach that point, you're required to buy a $200 federal firearms license, and then you are obligated to do background checks and submit forms when you sell a gun, like people that, you know, export a good. So here's the catch. Nobody knows where that line is. It is a completely subjective test. He uses language like one of the tests is, is your primary motivation for selling guns, livelihood, and profit.

Well, I don't know. He made $260,000 at the airport. If he was making $3,000 or $5,000 a year at gun shows, it'd probably be pretty impressive. I mean, he wouldn't make a lot of money selling guns at guns. ATF goes to gun shows. They probably go to everyone. They have people there, you know, in civilian clothes.

And they had spotted him at gun shows and started being suspicious of him. And that combined with the fact that we can do this, this is a huge political football. The gun control people call it the gun show loophole. Second Amendment rights people have held fast and tried to carve out this safe harbor for private citizens to buy and sell guns without doing paperwork. It obviously creates an opportunity for bad guys. if they want to exploit it to go to a person and buy their gun instead of going to a gun store. If they're not legally entitled to buy a gun, you know, they can go to a private citizen and buy one and the private citizen obligated to check, do a background check. So at times, you know, these guns fall into the wrong hands and that's a fact alive.

Some of his turned up being seized. When the ATF started looking into him, they found that some guns he'd purchased turned up in seizures and police encounters, three times in a, in traffic stops where there was, marijuana in the car and they seized a firearm once during a search of a vacant home, they found one. And they found one on an underage minor. He had a police killer. None of them were fired, but they were seized by police and traced. So this has raised their suspicion that maybe he was in violation.

It doesn't mean that he was in violation of the rule. If his conduct selling the gun was legal, then he's not responsible for what happens to gun later. So they opened this investigation, but this is where it kind of spins out of control. When I was U.S. attorney under a Republican administration that's Second Amendment right oriented, we'd have set this guy a cease and desist left and said, we'd think your activities, too many guns, whatever, you need to go get a license or you need to hire a lawyer and come argue. That's, and that was probably the right outcome here. Instead, because this was in the Biden administration, gun control people or advocates

are a big political supporters of that administration ATF kind of transforms depending on which administration and so you know this is really political weaponization they treated this like we would have treated a major drug organization they started tailing him at night

with agents they put a tracker on his car and then they ultimately went and obtained a federal search warrant from a federal magistrate judge and executed with 10 carloads of agents, six of them in tactical gear with automatic weapons at 6 in the morning in March of 2024. It was over an hour before sunup. It was 32 degrees.

Brian and his wife, Mayor, were in bed. Her name's Maria. She goes by Mayor. And the ATFA, just the law requires that when they serve a search warrant, they were required to knock and give the occupants of the home a reasonable opportunity to respond voluntarily

to the door and admit them in after identifying themselves as law enforcement, a reasonable way. There is, again, there is no case or any law that says this is enough time and that's not enough time. At some point, agents are able to say, well, it's been a,

while and he hadn't come to the door, he's, he's constructively denying us and we can kick the door. Well, at 6 in the morning, March 19, 2024, the ATF agents at his front door, banged on his front door, and in 28 seconds started knocking the exterior glass insulated storm doors, broke them down and then kicked his wood door open. They never made another announcement as far as we can tell of who they were. Brian and his wife heard that crashing. They had lived in about a 2,700 square foot modern home, master bedroom in the back. Brian thought they were home invaders. He grabbed a pistol, went to his closet, got a magazine, told his wife to stay in the room. She didn't. She opened the door and followed him down the hall. He turned a corner just in time to

see the silhouette, an armed man coming in his front door. He took four shots at the man's feet, probably to try to drive him back out of the house. And that was an ATIP agent. He, dope out of the way and the next guy came in and shot Brian in the forehead and fatally wounded it. Hey, y'all Scott here for Moondos artisan coffees. You know, they told me if I kept drinking so much coffee, I would turn into some and then I finally did. And there it is.

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And, you know, there's been a, there's been a lot of outrage about it in Arkansas. It's still on the minds of people. I'm connected with the case and have been for two years. People ask me about it every day. What happened with that? What, you know, is the government ever going to come back and say that they shouldn't have done that? And the United States government, ATF, Department of Justice, no one has ever said a word to address this incident. since it happened. And that really concerns a lot of people in Arkansas.

30 of our 35 state senators signed a letter to President Trump about a month ago and said, look, it's been two years. Nobody's ever explained us how this happened, why it happened, whether it was justified or whether mistakes were made, whether policies have been reconsidered, whether training's been reviewed, nothing, not a word, not a peep. And so we're, you know, we continue to talk about this case because we think it's important. I've been investigated by the FBI. They could have come to my house at 6 in the morning.

And if they did it as incompetently as these guys executed this search warrant, number one, all these tactics were totally unnecessary. Number two, it wasn't a SWAT team. It was a bunch of agents dressed up like a SWAT team, and they weren't trained to do this, and they did it really poorly for a number of reasons I can explain to. And number three, you know,

they created this incredibly risky situation. And I would have thought the same thing Brian Malinowski thought. Even after living with this case for two years, I'd probably come out of bed with a gun if I heard my front door tape six in the morning. So I don't know what to do. I want some assurance that my government's not going to do this. And we haven't, we haven't gotten it. Well, quite a few things there.

Yeah, I talked a long time. It's a difficult story to tell. there's a lot of moving parts to it. Some I haven't even told you, but it's... Yeah, no, it's okay. You hear it, it's troubling. We'll go over some things and get some clarity, and then I got some further questions and things to you.

But first of all, on this sort of all-important question of, are you a hobbyist or are you a dealer who needs a license at the gun show? And how arbitrary that is. You're saying it's not a quantitative test at all, for example, is the majority of your reportable taxable income coming from gun sales rather than your day job, that kind of thing. Instead, it's this completely like whimsical type of a thing.

That seems like a huge... It's really whatever ATF was. And you're right that. And whenever that's brought up, it's always brought up from the other side, as you said. The gun control loophole, oh, see, people are getting away with not submitting to the full amount of

regulation. But then, so when they investigated this guy, you mentioned that, I mean, obviously, you know, we showed the thing here that, as you mentioned, the guy's the director of an airport. So like, maybe he's in bed with the mob, but like that sounds like a pretty legit day job to have, you know, a guy like that. As you say, he's making almost 300 grand a year doing it, I think. And so when they investigated him, I understand even from their point,

you, okay, they find guns that trace back to this guy more than three times. And so they got eyebrows up or whatever. But then you say they are tracking him, they're following them at night. Did they establish, or I guess you have no access to their investigative records, but they don't even claim, right, that they found any connection between him and any criminal underworld or any kind of thing like that. So this is a regular taxpayer, as they would say, a regular law-abiding citizen and in fact even a government employee. Right. With no criminal record, no history of crime or violence, lived in one of the quietest, newest

neighborhoods in Little Rock, kept regular hours, went to work at about the same time every day, parked in the same parking spot, worked in a gun-free zone. I can't. If I had $5 for every time some grandmother walked up to me in the grocery store and asked me about it in Arkansas and said, why didn't they go to his office and just say, we have a search warrant for your house? Can we go out to your house and execute it? Why didn't they meet him in his driveway when he went to work every day at 9 o'clock? We just had no answer to that at all. I mean, because, of course, this is all very reminiscent of the Waco Masker, and that was the question

about David Koresh. Why didn't they just get him here or there? But we know the answer in that case was they had planned a giant publicity stunt and they named it Operation Showtime. and they were going to go after some mullet-headed Trans Am drive and Rednecks to impress the Democrats. And that was why they didn't just get them at Walmart, et cetera. But here you're saying, we don't know anything about it. They're not working. I can speculate. Everything I've told you has been factually documented.

And we know what they knew about him because it's a detailed affidavit that they submitted to get the search warrant. And I can just tell you from being in federal law enforcement, they didn't leave things out. They would have told the judge everything meaningful that they knew that would have led to a suspicion that he was breaking the law. In their post-shooting interviews with the Arkansas State Police, we know they revealed some of their suspicions that were totally unfounded. You know, one agent said, well, we learned that he had competed in some poker tournaments. He had done that in years, but, and we were wondering money laundering. and we knew he was the director of the airport, so we were wondering if he was using the airport to traffic guns.

Well, you know, but they had no basis for those suspicions. I mean, they might as well said, well, we heard he flew somewhere one time when we wondered if he was Superman and he could fly without a plane. I mean, they had no information except for their vivid imaginations to support any of that. They just knew basically that he'd bought, legally bought, some number of guns that was, you know, he legally bought almost 150 guns over three or four years. The bigish number, but it's not a staggering number. I know lots of people that probably have bought 100.

Sure. Nobody's consented that those weren't legal purchases. Profits a big part of their definition, and they didn't know if he'd made a dime. That's probably part of the reason they were wanting to search his home, see if he kept some kind of records that they could show that he'd made significant profit. You talk about the ambiguity here. You wonder how is it constitutional even prosecuted somebody under a law that can't even define the conduct? And I can tell you, the people that complain about this law the most are the gun control because they want more people prosecuted. And they've documented that even though 90% of the people that go to jury trials and criminal court, federal criminal court, get convicted,

they've only convicted about half the people they've tried on this case because juries read the definitions and they just like, and I can show you cases that are, the facts are much more egregious, much more egregious to Brian Mount House, that the guys walked in a jury trial because, I mean, we have to assume that the jury read the definition and said, who knows what that? Well, and federal juries are notoriously biased toward the state and have the highest can, conviction rates and are all made up. 50% acquittal is the staggering number in federal criminal. Staggered.

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So now talk to me about the search warrant and their excuse to, hit his raid. This is the Rockefeller drug laws. Thank everyone for, thank Nelson Rockefeller for so many wrong things about our society. But this, somehow, even though it was his brother Winthrop was the ruler of Arkansas, I don't know why Nelson Rockefeller's drug laws got to apply down there. Anyway, they got this no-knock thing where they get to just barge in and break your door down and because otherwise you'll flush all your guns down the toilet, I guess, you know. There's a Supreme Court case that says that they only have to wait that 15 seconds is long enough. If it's a drug case, because you can flush drugs down the toilet.

Now, I don't agree with these cases. I believe, you know, the Fourth Amendment's there for a reason. And I've been a participant in the war on drugs, and I don't know that we've made a lot of progress. But in the course of fighting the war on drugs, those cases have almost done away with it. Yeah, well, you know, too, real hard actually. the great journalist Jim Bovard reported on a Supreme Court hearing where they were debating this. And they came to the conclusion that the more drugs you got, the less excuse the cops have for breaking in your door. So if you just have a little bit of cocaine, they can barge right in.

But if you got crates full, well, you can't flush that. And so they have to wait and respect your privacy. And the whole thing is completely ridiculous. In fact, he got thrown out because he's got this great laugh. So when one of the lawyers pointed that out, he got thrown out of court. But anyway, but in this case, there's no drugs, and you can't flush guns down the toilet, but it doesn't matter. The justification for these no-knock raids is, you know, long forgotten.

So, but what did they tell the judge that, and of course, it's beyond question anywhere except this show, but it's at least worth raising the point that no judge can ever be held accountable for anything that they ever do to anyone ever. And so the fact that this guy's dead could never lead to that judge hanging from a rope, even though that judge murdered him. That judge sent a death squad to his house before dawn that killed him.

But you're never supposed to say that. You're supposed to call judges your honor, even though they're not honorable. This one is the leader of a death squad who put out a hit on an innocent man and murdered him. So tell us about this murderous judge who has a lifetime appointment and ultimate sovereign immunity greater than the king of England to murder any of us subjects of his that he feels like.

And what was, what excuse did the ATF give him that he signed off on that said they had the right to go and kick in this guy's door in the morning instead of just serving the warrant in a normal fashion? They, they, well, let me, let me jump in here. A lot of people are critical of the judge. I would tell you that the judge's, is to read their affidavit and see if they've said enough things that constitute probable cause and if they have to issue a warrant.

He doesn't have anything to do with what time they executed except the form he signs says they can only do it between 6 in the morning and 10 at 9. So they came at 601. It would be great if judges could or the U.S. attorney could. Frankly, the U.S. attorney nor the judge are responsible for choosing the tactics. these agencies have total discretion for officer safety to make all those choices. Somebody needs to take a hard look at that because in this case, I know what the threat assessment that they're supposed to go through should look like.

I mean, different agencies use different forms. But of all the boxes, you would check to say, well, maybe we justify these tactics over those tactics. not one of them applied in this case, not a single one. And there's things like criminal history, risk of flight, risk of propensity for violence, risk of destruction of evidence. None of those things existed here. And that was the judge's responsibility to ask.

He has no role in that in our current system. The judge signs as long as they go between the hours of six in the morning and 10 at night, the way our system is set up now, he pats him on the butt and tells him. So he could have said you have to go between noon and 3 p.m. He could have said that if he wanted to, if he had a reason to. And that's not a practice, but that I would say that would have been, I would love to see a system where the judge asked those questions

and does the threat assessment right there. The judges don't want to take on the responsibility of officer safety, though. The agents are going to say, okay, Judge, you're not going to let us go at 6th the morning. Guy gets killed because this guy's dangerous. That's on you. And the way the system's divided up, that's judiciary doesn't take that responsibility. But if a civilian dies, that's not on him.

Yeah, yeah. It should be on him. The judge is the guy that took out the hit on the civilian. He can blame. There's no one else, nowhere else. I think the U.S. attorney is more and should be more involved, even though the U.S. attorney's office has no direct authority to tell ATF how to execute search warrant.

They have a practical ability to do it. And I did that when I was U.S. Attorney at times, I'd say, what are you going to do here? And if it didn't make sense to me, I said, go back and rethink that. And the U.S. attorney can be the grown-up in the room that draws these people back. And in fact, I've told people, especially since I've known this for a long time, this case, certainly. When I became U.S. attorney, I was in my 40s. I was wanting to be a crime fighter. I was a lifelong conservative, law and order guy.

And when I got done, I wanted every FBI agent, the agent say, man, that Bud Cummins, man. He had our back all the time, and he was out there knocking down all the hurdles to us doing justice out there. That's not the job. The president puts the U.S. attorney here because we give all these guys a long list of weapons to ruin people's lives. they can drop grand jury subpoenas on them that cost them tens of thousands of dollars to comply with.

They can ruin their reputation in the community just by investigating. They can come and search their house and embarrass them in the community. They can charge them and make them face really hard decisions about pleading guilty or going to a jury trial and facing consequences that are five times worse than they could get in a plea. they can ruin people's lives and the president puts the U.S. attorney there or should put them there to protect the rest of us from those guys. And that's really the main job in my view at this stage of my life of the U.S. attorney. Now, they don't teach that at Department of Justice, but they should. Because he's the guy or gal that can impose some common sense and sanity, but that didn't happen

here. The U.S. attorney never heard about this. The judge didn't have any authority to tell them what to do. and we still not really know who made the decisions because the government has never addressed this. And then so, you know, maybe this is a bygone era, but it seems like this could be a political issue for some Republicans in the House of Representatives to hold some hearings and demand some answers from, it can't be that they just refuse to put out a report at all

and just completely stoned while everyone forever. We have hearing. So tell us about the lawsuit, or tell us about Congress and tell us about the lawsuit. Jim Jordan convened a hearing two months after this happened back in 2004 in May in the Judiciary Committee. And it was a, it went two days. I testified for, you know, two or three hours.

And then the next day they had the ATF under Biden, the ATF director come in who refused to answer him questions, but they beat him up. Go, go to YouTube and type in Bud Cummins and Malinowski and you're going to see clips from that hearing. and they're all entertaining because the members of Congress were just whooping up on them and asking them all the right questions about how in the world could decide, and you know you have some former law enforcement people in Congress that really teed up on them. I thought after that there would be accountability pretty quickly,

and they demanded that ATF answer. That was what happened that day. Congress has moved on to other issues and nothing's ever happened. an ATF's never been required to respond or to account for their conduct or explain it in any way. Now, there is a lawsuit. It is. It's just, I guess, relativity, right? We just get desensitized to it.

If they can do Waco and get away with that, then they can do these all day long and kill one or two guys at a time. And they do. Not always just the ATF, but various SWAT teams. Unleash Waco-style night raids, Afghan-style night raids on family homes across this country. 365 days a year. And like I said, I want to stress, this wasn't a SWAT team. This was a SWAT team is, you know, eight individuals or six or 10 that have been designated as a SWAT team.

And they train together and they go out and practice these scenarios and they know who everybody's job is and they go to regional competitions. And so when they're called on to do something like this for a real reason, they know how to do it right. This was a bunch of untrained agents with SWAT team deer on, but they were the Keystone cops. They didn't have, there was a guy who was supposed to go in with a shield, the bulletproof shield, said police, that would have been helpful in this scenario. Should have never got to that point, but he laid it down and didn't go in first. So the guy that was supposed to go in second, just kind of looked at him, and he blundered into the house. Nobody was making announcements of police.

you know, it just went on and on and on the mistakes these guys made and it just makes it work. They created this most, the most risky situation. They could have possibly designed. And then it was totally unnecessary. There wasn't any of it that was necessary. And then they screwed it up and a guy died. Yeah.

No reason. It claims all the fence while they're standing in some other guys' foyer. Yeah. And we do have a lawsuit and the judge just took them apart. on the self-defense aspect. They had claimed several defenses and tried to get the case dismissed. And the judge said, well, self-defense doesn't work here

because self-defense means he shot first, so we shot back. But it ignores how did you get there? And if the facts that are alleged in the complaint, which are straight out of the documentation, the police report, are true, you were there illegally and unconstitutionally. The judge said that.

And so you were the initial aggressor, not him. He was responding to the initial aggression that's his perception of this invasion of his home. And so the judge just, you know, kind of dropkick that argument. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Hey guys. Scott here for Matt Sersely at agoristtaxadvice.com. And he's a great tax lawyer and he hates the government as much as you do and he wants to help you keep your money.

And his service is for small businesses and for high salary professional types who are looking for ways to protect their earnings from the national government and its depredations. So check them out. Matt Sersley at Agarceli at Agarston. Andagriststaxadvice.com. Yeah, people call me a lot of things, including publisher. That's right, because I'm the director of the institute and we publish books. Libertarian Institute.org slash books. Now, five of them are mine.

Three of them I wrote. Two of them are compendiums of interviews I did about nuclear weapons and with the great Dr. Ron Paul. But then I published 15 more, including the latest here by Ken Silva, the Trump assassination plots, Joseph Solis Mullins on classical liberalism, Charles Goyette, the Empire of Lies, and so many more. Check them all out. Creative chaos about Syria. Man, this is some really great stuff. Libertarian Institute.org slash books.

And that only makes sense that if they had announced themselves as police and made it clear that in such a way that he knew for sure that they were police, then there's no reason the world to think that he would have took a shot at them. He's defending his wife from criminals at the time. And turns out that was also true that the police were criminals in this case. Yeah. Well, and it's offensive, but, you know, I have been to Washington and tried to meet with the, you know, officials of Department of Justice, you know, basically say, come on guys, what are you doing here? And the dilemma they've had is that ATF had reported upstream to them that they, these are basically quotes, he was a significant gun trafficker and that he knew they were police when he shot at them.

So they're basically saying he committed suicide by cop. This guy that had a great job, been married for 28 years, no criminal record, that he made a decision that morning that he was so offended that the police showed up at his house that he'd just die. Yeah. I put this up there earlier, but this is the prosecutor declines to file charges in ATF shooting. And this is where, you know, they're all in on it against us. This is the supposed check and balance is the different branches of the government protecting each other from the people of the country who they victimize. That was a very cursory investigation and the local prosecutor.

He did, his analysis went like this. The ATF was standing in this store, in this front hallway of this home and a guy came out and shot at him and they shot back. Self-defense, end of, end of analysis. He didn't ask, he didn't even, he didn't even. an analyzer question how they came to be in the front hallway of this guy's house. And there's a statute in Arkansas and probably in every state that says if your reckless conduct results in the death of another, that's called manslaughter. And I book, planning the unnecessariness of the whole operation and the incompetent execution

can only be called reckless. And it did result in a guy. Now, I'm not calling for the criminal prosecution of these agents. I don't really believe in that. I think law enforcement is really hard and that when people screw up in the job, maybe they don't need to be in the job, or maybe they got really poor training. And almost always they had really poor leadership.

I do kind of believe that 9% of the time, those issues should be resolved civilly in court. And but they should also be resolved through good leadership. I mean, the political leadership, should go cure this. And they should have done it two years ago and they haven't done it. You realize, I mean,

I understand that you're a former U.S. attorney and everything, but you realize how absurd that sounds. A government employee should be able to commit manslaughter and not have to go to jail. Maybe only you ever get fired. But this guy's dead. Which one of these guys are you going to put in jail? I mean, you're going to put the guy in the office

that didn't even come out there that morning in jail that approved the plan? Are you going to put the guy in jail that didn't require all them to have? have decent training so they weren't incompetent when they tried to do it. I really like this, bud. You see, I appreciate the fact that it sounds absolutely absurd that the people who did this could ever or should ever even be held accountable.

Everybody knows you guys are our overlords and you can kill us if you want to. Like, of course you can. It sounds crazy to think that the people who are going to be consequences. There ought to be consequences. And, you know, people would be surprised. to learn how hard it is to hold the government accountable. I mean, there is a civil suit, but law enforcement officers generally are given the highest, except for judges, the highest level of immunity and so many defenses that other people wouldn't have in similar situations. And

federal agents are actually protected more than state and local officers. So we're having to really battle through a whole lot of some of the most complex law I've ever dealt. with and attorney to even seek accountability. And it's two years and we're just, we're still in the early stages of a lawsuit. It's probably going to drag on for a long time. The government can drag these things out.

Yeah. Well, I mean, best of luck to you. It seems, it's so incongruous, the, the level of atrocity and then just the total, you know,

difficulty in getting any kind of accountability or, you know, like even in Congress, maybe if more people had died or some had gotten a little bit bigger headline, they would have really made a thing out of this instead of, you know, just two days and then it's over. Timings everything in politics. And those incidents in Minnesota with the ICE officers probably made it harder politically for this administration to embrace the Malinowski case. I've been a little surprised because I've got a pretty deep political background. If it were me and I were part of the Trump administration, this happened under Biden's watch.

It was part of their political agenda, the gun control bigger, you know, to throw these huge resources at a, but at his poor, if he was in violation of anything, it was a regulation. It was a regulatory matter. And I think that the Trump administration could have made huge hay out of this about how they murder. ordered a well-respected citizen over their pervert to impose gun control on Americans. I think it's also close enough to, you know, the excessive force allegations in Minnesota and things like that, that it probably was not a good timing for them to try to really embrace this as a political issue. But I still think they're wrong. I think that they could make this into a great political issue. Because, but the bottom line is, I don't care what your politics are.

you know, if you don't like guns, pretend like this is your favorite abortion doctor, and they were coming out to investigate him. I mean, you know, you're a libertarian. Just pretend like it's your neighbor that put too much roundup on his yard, didn't know he was violating an EPA regulation. Right. Exactly. A lot of people want to know, is this okay?

You know, one state senator that signed that letter to the president said to me, he said, all I know is if what they did to Brian Malinowski is legal, somebody needs to change the damn long because nobody thinks that this is okay. But for two years, our government has not been able to tell us that it's not okay and that steps have been taken to ensure that it doesn't happen. Right. Yeah. Well, look, I sure appreciate you fighting a good fight on this one.

And I wish the widow, the best of luck in her lawsuit. And hopefully there'll be some accountability here, at least. I mean, as you were saying, they won't even tell us the names of the people. who ordered all of this stuff yet. So at least all of that should come out and make these people infamous, if nothing else. Well, I didn't, you know, I don't know if you're a lonesome dove fan,

but in the movie Lonesome Dove, I know of it. Character Woodrow Call promises his lifelong buddy, Augustus McCray, that he'd take his body after he died from Montana all the way back to San Antonio and bury him. And it's an arduous journey. And, you know,

a lot of bad things happened to him, trying to drag this rotting corpse back to Texas. And, you know, he makes a statement. I think I've got to be a little more careful about what I promised people in the future. And I promised Ms. Malinowski when I, she reached out to me when this happened, that I would stick with it until we got some accountability.

I didn't think we'd still be here after two years still, you know, zero accountability. But I may have to be a little more, careful about what I promise in the future. But I made that promise, so I'm going to stick with it. And I think eventually we're going to require them to answer for this. Not just in money. I mean, lawsuits are about money.

That's an imperfect way to compensate somebody for damage or for loss like this. But a lawsuit isn't about who made the decisions and why and all that. It's just about really the constitutionality of that 28-second weight kicking the door in, whether it was reasonable for him to perceive them. as home invaders. That's the lawsuits very narrow. Everything else is protected by immunity and all those things. Right.

All those decision making. But his boss is a DOJ. ATS boss is a DOJ certainly have a supervisory responsibility over all the decisions. And I think it's pretty outrageous that they haven't transparently, you know, told the citizens not a justice to Arkansas, but the entire country, why this happened and why it shouldn't happen again? Yeah. I go to bed and nervous every night.

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It's so interesting, isn't it, the way the issues involved here are all contradictory, politically coded this way and that way, where conservatives, you know, the right are the ones who care about guns. Virtually no one on the left does, but the right cares a lot about that. But the right also loves cops. But the right also can get very upset at jackbooted thugs

when they're the ATF murdering people enforcing gun control laws like G. Gordon Liddy, who was himself a former FBI agent, called the ATF after what they did and killing the initial sick. people and kicking off the Waco siege and later massacre. And so sometimes it's okay for a right-winger to be against a cop if it's a federal cop and he's inflicting gun laws.

But then as you're saying, the leftists who usually are the liberals, progressives, whatever, who usually like the feds a lot more than they like local cops because that's who's usually arresting them for stuff. they right at this time were in the middle of a conflict with federal immigration cops so then that made the entire right especially with a new trump republican administration in power and the entire right is now on the side of the national government under trump and these ice cops versus the hippies protesting in the streets as you put it makes it a very bad time for the Republican administration to provide a little accountability for cops who did the wrong thing

against essentially a conservative victim under Biden rules and Biden enforcement, but just at a time right when the right is rallying around federal cops. But you know, if we have another minute, you know, stepping back, I've been a Republican my whole life. I ran for Congress in 1996 and was narrowly defeated. I've worked for Governor Huckabee as Chief Legal Counsel. So, you know, and I was political pointy under George W. Bush. I'm a law and order guy.

I participated in the war on drugs. But, you know, you get older and you start looking at things a little bit differently. We have a system now that's a couple of things. We've got some really harsh criminal justice rules that pretty much are Republicans are responsible. Minimum sentences. Sentencing guidelines are in. saying some of the sentences, the sentencing guidelines spit out in the federal system.

We've over-militarized local law enforcement. I was there right after 9-11. I was on the Attorney General's counterterrorism. Maybe we stood up a national domestic counterterrorism operation that didn't even exist before 9-11. In the course of that, the federal government did what it did after COVID, what it does after, you know, the finance, they don't know what to do so they take a trillion dollars just dump it out in, you know, PPP loans or whatever.

And after 9-11, there was hundreds of, you know, there are billions of dollars being poured out for state and local law enforcement. We were buying them, you know, armored cars and automatic weapons, bulletproof vests. And, you know, we took what used to be kind of a, you know, community ombudsman out there that happened to carry a six-shot revolver in case there was trouble into these, you know, heavily militarized law enforcement units.

And, you know, I think the conservatives are probably responsible for a lot of that. But I don't know that. And we eviscerated the name of the war on drugs. We eviscerated the Fourth Amendment protections. We all used to think we're pretty valuable. So I think as a conservative, you know, I think we might have overstepped in some of these areas and not considered the ramifications. when you give the government these powers, you're always put,

when I was U.S. attorney, they marched me out to talk about, talk up the Patriot Act. They wanted to pass the Patriot Act. And I had, my senator was, Mark Pryor was a Democrat, but he was a moderate Democrat and considered a swing vote.

So they had me out talking in the community, talking up the Patriot Act. And I was promising people. He needed these tools, these intrusive tools to fight terrorism. And, you know, they would always be used wisely. and I wouldn't give those speeches now because when I gave that speech,

I was picturing me having the responsibility to use it wisely and not abused. But now I've seen what other people do when you give them these really intrusive tools to go ruin people's lives or target their political opponents. And I would rethink a lot of that. I think we could probably

literally withstand an extra terrorist attack every now and then if it meant preserving individuals, Liberties of Americans. So I look at the world a little differently than I did, you know, when I was 30 or 40. Well, and that's not even the tradeoff. I mean, if we want to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks, we just have to stop intervening in the Middle East and supporting terrorist groups and then opposing them again and all of that stuff.

And then we'll be our patriot act or nothing. But listen, I got to run. I'm sure you do too. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate what you're doing here. And, you know, no matter. how the lawsuit goes, at least in continuing to bring attention to this crucial issue and the victimhood of this poor guy, Brian Milanoiske. So good for you. Thank you. And I like your shows

and keep doing what you're doing. I think it helps. And we appreciate the time. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokridge, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS radio news. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fool's errand, enough already, and my latest, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia

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