I don’t think anyone’s surprised:
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana—Minutes after two cops killed Alton Sterling outside of a convenience store, police confiscated all surveillance video of the incident without a warrant and allegedly without permission.
An attorney for the owner of the Triple S Mart, Abdullah Muflahi, told The Daily Beast a hard drive containing the complete recording of the Sterling’s death at the hands of Baton Rouge Police Department Officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake was unlawfully taken by police. Muflahi showed The Daily Beast the barren cabinet where the hard drive had been.
All that’s left of the storage unit is a sole barren wire.
That wire went out to surveillance cameras on the front of the building. One of the cameras would have had a direct line of sight to where Sterling was standing when he was tasered, tackled, shot and killed by police.
[…] When The Daily Beast requested the both the surveillance video and the supposed warrant from the Baton Rouge Police Department, a lawyer from the department first denied the request by saying they could not turn over any documents from a “criminal investigation.” When told that a warrant is a public court document and could not be withheld, the lawyer then outright refused to confirm or deny if a warrant for the surveillance video even existed.
After backtracking on the existence of the warrant, the attorney backtracked on the possession of the surveillance video, saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the hard drive.
“My client has not been informed of that,” said Porter, the attorney for the store owner.
The FBI refused to confirm or deny the police department’s claim.
“This is part of an ongoing investigation and we are unable to comment at this time,” Craig Betbeze, an FBI spokesperson told The Daily Beast.
“This is an on going investigation, so we cannot confirm whether the Fourth, Fifth or Sixth Amendment applies. Next question!”
Something tells me that the hard drive is in the same place as Chris Christie’s cell phone.