this is a story of a crooked cop who framed an innocent person and then she sat in jail wrongfully for two years I mean is that a fair characterization a Saint Paul police officer named Heather Waker uh began in 2008 a sex trafficking investigation that essentially she just made up the Department of Justice has a conviction rate over 99 and in this case ultimately 33 people were charged with federal crimes and not a single one of them was convicted or took a plea deal and so this was just a spectacular failure um for the federal government via its use of this cross-deputized Saint Paul officer named Heather Waker who framed a bunch of people my client included I was put in jail for 17 months because an officer lied about me and it's thus far completely gotten away scot-free with it right now she's still a sergeant in the Saint Paul police department she's still employed making six figures in fact she was recently sued again in her capacity as a Saint Paul cop I'm a coach I originally became a police officer to try and stop domestic violence and try to make a difference in some of the victims lives being a mom myself and and having several kids it's it's you can kind of look at things in kind of a different perspective and we bring a caring nurturing flavor to a scene I think you should come to St Paul police department and work with all the great officers here we're all supportive of each other and we treat each other like family come over [Music] welcome back to the civil rights lawyer Channel this is the most insane case that you have never heard about that was Saint Paul Minnesota police officer Heather Waker the U.S 8th Circuit Court of Appeals held that this police officer had likely fabricated a non-existent child sex trafficking ring and apparently falsified testimony in court and to a grand jury this led to the false arrest of 30 Somali refugees some of whom spent years in federal prison including the institute for Justice's client here Hamdi Muhammad this is absolutely insane and she there's been no accountability there have been no successful lawsuits against her and she's still working there in Saint Paul as you can see those promotional clips from their YouTube channel were filmed after a federal court had found that she is a liar but it's not over yet there's still a pending lawsuit against this corrupt police officer I have Patrick Giacomo an attorney with the institute for justice who has returned to the channel to discuss this case to discuss the crazy facts and to discuss why this case is so important for government accountability and for our constitutional rights and to tell you how you can help because your help is needed well your money is needed and you also need to help us and help the IJ get this story out there take a look a Saint Paul police officer named Heather Waker began in 2008 a sex trafficking investigation that essentially she just made up and over the course of several years eventually was able to indict about 30 people almost all of them Somali refugees um in this big scheme that she claimed had to do with human trafficking although 30 people were indicted by federal prosecutors in Tennessee interestingly not federal prosecutors in Minnesota who refuse to take the case the few that actually made it to trial were eventually acquitted by the sixth circuit and in something I've never seen before we got a six circuit opinion affirming um the acquittals that basically said we've done a painstaking review of the case in the case history and we found instances of this officer Heather Waker lying repeatedly and we have come to the conclusion that what we're about to describe in our opinion here is a likely fictitious story of sex trafficking that all fell apart completely in 2011 Hamdi and two of her friends ended up being attacked by a third or by a fourth girl named Muna Abdul khadir and unbeknownst to hobby and her friends Muno was one of the secret witnesses that Heather Waker had been using to fabricate this crime ring that she would later be prosecuting when Muna attacked the girls with a knife they called 9-1-1 and Muna took off and hid in a neighbor's apartment and she called Heather Waker now Heather was concerned because Muna was a key witness for her and so to protect Muna and make sure she didn't get arrested what Heather Waker did was call up the on-scene officers via their car computers because she's again a Saint Paul cop these are Minneapolis cops and so she understands the local practices they get a notice saying to call officer Heather Waker out of St Paul immediately which they do and when they call her she feeds them a line of lies about how what actually happened here was that Hobby and her friends were seeking to intimidate a federal witness and so the police on the scene should arrest them instead of arresting Muna Abdul khadir and that's exactly what does happen the three girls were arrested for witness tampering under Minnesota law then the next day officer Waker swears out an affidavit in support of federal charges and has all three of these girls charged with witness tampering under federal law uh charges that carried the potential of life in prison Hamdi and one of her other friends spent about two years in federal prison waiting for trial ultimately the charges against homney were dropped by her friends habo and ifra were both tried and both acquitted in the federal system and so just to zoom out on the likelihood of all of this kind of just being chance and not Heather waker's malfeasance putting almost 33 people in prison the Department of Justice has a conviction rate over 99 percent and in this case ultimately 33 people were charged with federal crimes and not a single one of them was convicted or took a plea deal um and so this was just a spectacular failure for the federal government via its use of this cross-deputized Saint Paul officer named Heather Waker who framed a bunch of people my client included and is thus far completely gotten away scot-free with it right now she's still a sergeant in the Saint Paul police department she's still employed making six figures in fact she was recently sued again in her capacity as a Saint Paul cop for tricking her way into a man's apartment without a warrant to search it in that case the federal court granted summary judgment against her the trick in this case in all of these cases that came after Heather Waker was found out is that what they have done is the sort of two-step uh immunity Shuffle where they've said first give me qualified immunity the courts have routinely tossed that out in fact the way the eighth circuit put it when it rejected her claim in the case of Hamdi and her friends was any reasonable officer would know that lying to have another officer arrest an innocent person and to protect a sham investigation is unlawful so that kind of gives you a flavor for the sort of contempt that the courts have had for um Heather waker's Behavior but to get out of any accountability what she's done instead is say I was cross-deputized as a U.S Marshal and so you can only sue me as a Federal Officer and as a Federal Officer there's no Bivins left because my case isn't exactly like Webster bivens's case and therefore I can't be sued at all and so far she's one on these theories hami's case is the last case standing and the issue that we're now advancing is even if she was acting in some federal capacity as a cross-deputized officer she was also acting under color of state law and can be subject to liability under section 1983 because of course she is and was a Saint Paul police officer and a variety of other facts support the fact that when she did what she did here against Hamdi and her friends she was acting at least in this simultaneously as a state officer and a Federal Officer and the added wrinkle here is in hamby's friend ephra's case this 1983 issue has already been decided by the eighth circuit and they concluded based on the facts in ephra's complaint that officer Waker was acting exclusively under color of federal law so when this case came back down after the Supreme Court declined to Grant review on the issue of Bivins in hamdi's case we kind of thought you know we'll be stuck with the same facts that ephra's case had but as it turned out we found some rather crucial documents pertaining to several task forces that are relevant to Heather waker's Behavior the first of which is a task force called the Gerald D Vic task force which we've found out since then and have sought to amend our complaint to put this before the court is a Saint Paula task force explicitly in the documents it says this is a Saint Paul Ed task force with the purpose of stopping human trafficking in Minnesota and Heather wager's entire investigation the one that she was trying to cover up for when she had Hamdi and her friends arrested was a Saint Paul investigation undertaken through this Vic task force and through which Heather Waker had always been supported in some capacity by federal officers proving that the federal component of what happened here didn't somehow take this out of the space of section 1983 but instead just showed that the federal officers were cooperating to support Heather waker's investigation and the other two documents which we've found our documents from other task forces because something I should also point out there's been no Discovery in this case or to my knowledge any of the other cases against Heather Waker because the government has been so successful in having them dismissed so quickly we found other memorandum understanding for task forces between the Saint Paul police department and the FBI so that's Heather wager's employer on the one hand and the sponsor for her Federal marshalship on the other and those documents specifically say if officers are sued for constitutional violations Federal officers are sued under Bivins and state and cross-deputized officers are to be sued under Section 1983. and so now we have this whole new nucleus of facts that prove that Heather Waker was acting under color of state law and the government is fighting like hell to prevent us from amending the complaint and simultaneously asking the district court to dismiss the case um without really even digging into it any further I think there have been more than 20 lawsuits against Heather Waker a bunch of them from the 30 some of the 30 people who she charged in the sex trafficking case and then Hamdi and both of her friends filed separate civil rights lawsuits alleging Bivens and section 1983 claims against officer Waker and just by weird happenstance I mean this is all in front of the same district court and this in of course the same circuit court just by happenstance um hamdi's case was Consolidated with her friend hawos and the issue there was the Bivens issue whether this officer could be sued under Bivens um and the eighth circuit said you can't see we're under Bivens but explicitly they said but that doesn't mean the case is over if you can prove she was acting under color of state law you may be able to proceed under Section 1983. in regards to the your client uh Hamdi Muhammad this is a story of a crooked cop who framed an innocent person and then she sat in jail wrongfully for two years I mean is that a fair characterization absolutely so this is a crooked cop who framed three innocent girls who were teenagers at the time and Hamdi was actually a minor and these are people who are already coming from um a difficult background they're all three Somali refugees who came to this country under Refugee status so they don't have a lot of money they don't have a lot of connections and doing this to them completely derailed all of their lives and so ever since then despite you know being let out of prison they've gotten no remedy for the violation of their rights to be able to get their lives back on the right track meanwhile this crooked cop is still out there violating people's rights and being paid by the taxpayers of Saint Paul Minnesota yeah my first ques after I read the second amended complaint and I read some of the the other documents that you guys had posted on the website my first question to you is going to be what happened to to this Heather weiker what happened to this crooked cop and it sounds like nothing yeah so uh what happened was nothing criminally all of the Civil Rights lawsuits like I said so far have stalled out on some form of immunity or another and um the the police department opened an internal investigation against her which they just kept open for years and years and years and used as a way to Stonewall providing information and then fairly recently just closed that investigation without any sort of finding of of wrongdoing against Heather Waker and so like I said she's still employed by the Saint Paul police department she's now a sergeant she makes six figures um and even still she is behaving like she's above the law an interesting thing about officer Waker is you know if you type her name into Westlaw there are a number of cases outside of this case like I mentioned where courts have called into question uh the truthfulness of things she said in fact there was a stake case where I think the Minnesota Court of deals had a dissent where the the judge described Heather waker's telling of what happened in the back of a squad car with a very sarcastic tone in his disbelief of what she said happened where this guy had his hands handcuffed and somehow was able to get his keys out of his pocket and provide them and along with them consent to search something yeah I just Googled her name you know officer weiker Minnesota and the first thing that came up is a New York Times article if the police lies should they be should they be held liable but isn't that crazy I mean all right Minnesota contrast the George Floyd case with this case yeah and this is you know I part and parcel with our other work for instance in King versus Brownback and several other cases is is what we've seen is and something that's very under reported and and not well understood is this proliferation of these state federal task forces um which which is which is bad in its own right I think because it essentially has allowed the federal government to become the local police wherever you live you know including the Twin Cities including Grand Rapids Michigan including basically everywhere in the country now you have these task force task forces staffed by federal officers with the FBI or the U.S Marshals or ice or you name it and then some combination of local officers who are often cross-deputized with a single piece of paper that now says well I'm also a federal Marshal too what we've seen is not only do these allow this expanded Authority where the feds can act under state law and the state officers can act under federal laws so they've doubled The Authority that they have and they can go places that they couldn't go before but because the courts have cracked down on the availability of Bivins the government has also figured out that by cross-depotizing these officers you can essentially immunize them above and beyond qualified immunity and so you'll see situations where like this one portrays the officer is denied qualified immunity so you're able to get past that enormous hurdle but they're still immune from suit via Federal immunity because there's no Bivens cause of action against them according to the courts even though again we're talking about a state or local police officer the exact sort of person that Congress enacted section 1983 to cover and you just have the sort of federal Midas Touch now that that places them Above the Law and above the Constitution and that's what this case is really about how do you best explain to somebody for a lay person why you can sue right under the current state of affairs why can you sue a state or local police officer for civil rights violation but you cannot Sue a Federal Officer yeah I don't think there's a good explanation um we've seen uh judge Don Willett in another IJ case actually called Bird versus lamb we're a DHS agent tried to murder our client um Kevin Byrd for asking questions about this DHS agent's son's involvement in a drunken crash the night before there again like this case the officer was denied a qualified immunity but it went to the fifth circuit and they said there's no cause of action under Bivens and so you simply can't sue this guy at all and judge Willett concurred because they had to follow circuit precedent and he said look this situation doesn't make any sense to me as a federal judge or just as an American person and the fact that you can sue state and local officers under a federal statute but you can't sue Federal officers for violating the Federal Constitution smacks of self-dealing by Congress and it's something that I think should be addressed and should be taken care of because obviously before you know the 14th amendment was passed the Federal Constitution only applied to Federal officers but now today it seems it doesn't apply to them at all and you know it's especially this isn't especially difficult topic today with all the discussion of weaponizing the federal government and I'm afraid that a lot of people in Congress are sort of missing the point they're concerned about weaponizing the government they want to do something about it the easy solution is to add four words to section 1983 and include Federal officers in the sort of civil rights liability space that their state and local equivalents already existed and then we can fight about whether qualified immunity should protect any of these individuals how did this client um Hamdi find her way to the institute for justice and I mean how did that I know so many people have so many problems logistically how did that happen that she ended up getting you guys to help her yeah this was a case that we found after the eighth circuit's decision and so we reached out to hamdi's attorneys um how was attorneys and he for his attorneys um just because what we saw Happening Here was so egregious and was such a terrifying illustration of this task force immunity loophole that we've seen expanding and expanding um and and that's where things started I mean how is it possible that the the federal courts have denied qualified immunity to this woman and made findings that she had intentionally violated people's civil rights and been responsible for all this and she's still working with I mean is she on some sort of Brady list I mean uh you know I have I have no idea I actually wondered that myself she has to be you know I I would think she has to be on the Do Not Call list or the jiglio list or whatever they call it in Minnesota because you can imagine you know being a criminal defense attorney and Googling Heather Waker and you just instantly have the perfect impeachment evidence that you could ever hope for um and so I I don't understand at last I knew she was working at like a library or something so that led me to believe that she was on some sort of you know list but then we found this case that is so you know technically going forward where she had broken into someone's apartment under false pretenses and searched it without a warrant um so she's obviously still out there on the street doing normal policing and to your point I don't see how that's possible when it comes to actually pursuing charges via prosecution because you know who would believe this woman at this point unless there was just no disclosure and the the defense lawyers working on her cases just don't Google her name yeah I don't know what I can do about that I mean the New York Times article seems like it would be enough uh the Star Tribune has done excellent reporting on um waker's malfeasance in this case uh so so I I don't know but I I that's you know that's a little bit outside of my wheelhouse how was the how was the truth discovered like like that there was this that she had framed all these people or at least Frank Hamdi yeah so um it was discovered basically when everything started falling apart in these cases and and people just started you know pushing kind of ever so gently on the theory because as you know um all of these cases the investigation starts the indictment begins um the charges abroad and all of that is done exclusively on the word of the government and the government's agents and so up to that point everyone takes that word as gospel and so if you go back and look in the newspaper records which is actually great things we quote in our amended complaint are drawing from these things there's all these glowing stories about Heather Waker way back then it was like you know how how do local cop crack this giant sex trafficking ring and everything is framed around like this woman is a hero and how did she save all these young girls who were being sex trafficked and and these terrible gang members how did she manage to Infiltrate The System and as we know now most if not all of that stuff was completely made up but it took the adversarial process to push back and cross-examination and just question asking by the federal courts at the most basic level um and once that happened everything completely fell apart and um the charges all fell apart some of them were dismissed I can't for the life of me understand why some of them were still pursued why for instance Howell and ifra had to go through criminal trials um but but that's what happened so what's the status of amdi's case right now um right now we are all briefed up on our motion to amend which of course the government is vigorously opposing um it's the big it's the most paper I've ever spent on a motion to amend the government's argument is essentially about futility we have a 30 plus page of reply brief meanwhile in parallel the government has moved to dismiss the case on the old complaint which is kind of you know strange um but that's all briefed up as well and so now we're just sort of sitting waiting to see whether the district court will set a hearing date or multiple hearing dates um and then we'll see what happens going forward whether they allow us to amend and then we go through another process of of briefing on another motion to dismiss or for summary judgment or whether they throw the whole case out just because they're tired of dealing with this for the last Almost decade now um and then there'll be an appeals process and this is being defended by the doj yes this is being defended by the Department of Justice in Washington D.C being paid for by the federal taxpayers dollar I mean you and I are paying to defend Heather Waker in in some extremely dark way um you and I are the money that we make while def you know while litigating on behalf of Hamdi Muhammad and people like her um is being taxed and that money is being paid to defend Heather Waker so the the goal is to get into Discovery and then ultimately to a jury trial but there's been a lot of paperwork and there's going to continue to be a lot of paperwork because they're fighting this so hard yeah absolutely I mean this that's the crazy thing about all these sorts of immunities is um essentially the courts treat them as an immunity from suit not an immunity from liability and so they're very Vigilant about making sure that cases don't go to Discovery if there's a possibility of immunity and the result is that instead of just going through Discovery for six to nine months then having a trial and having the jury way the facts and be done with this stuff in like a year year and a half you spend a decade litigating in every level of the federal system filing probably about a thousand pages of briefing at this point um and the system is just much less efficient it takes much longer everyone is still tied up like this lawsuit has been going on against Heather Waker and so presumably she's having to disclose it on things in her life obviously Omni and and her friends have been dealing with this for such a long time and the ostensible reason is that it would be too burdensome to put Heather Waker through discovery which just doesn't you know two and two does not add up here when the alternative is Decades of litigation which is what we're seeing in most of these cases which of course as you know gives a huge piece of Leverage to the government in all these cases because you know civil right you know thankfully at The Institute for justice we're a non-profit and so we're not motivated by the potential settlement value or jury value and getting a contingency fee or anything like that but if you are the prospect of one of these cases taking a decade is something that a lot of private attorneys just aren't set up to deal with and so it gives the government this enormous stick to beat plaintiff's with that'll say look you can try to sue us even if you could win it'll take you 10 years good luck finding a lawyer who's willing to to put all the effort in to do that and so I think a lot of the cases are cases we never even see because no one bothers finding a lawyer if they if they try to they can't um plenty of attorneys willing to take these cases at all if you had to guess how many hours do you think the IJ attorneys have including yourself have into this particular case oh a thousand at least by now um it's this I mean this is like these are difficult issues how can people help um now you guys obviously take donations yeah so uh like you said we take donations we are a 501c3 non-profit charity all the work we do is completely free to our clients uh we'll never charge them a penny if we win their case we don't take a contingency fee um so everything we do is is dependent on the generosity of our thousands and thousands of individual donors and so if you want to help cases like homies and there are many other types of cases and the institute for justice does other work in the space of property rights and economic Liberty and the Fourth Amendment lots of other very interesting um constitutional issues you can go to ij.org and you can donate there you can set up a monthly donation there's no donation to big or too small everything is very much appreciated and completely needed to do these things because like we were just discussing um it's very expensive to you know have attorneys on staff and pay all the filing fees and travel all across the country to do what you need to do to meet clients and go to hearings and try to gather evidence and so we rely on those donations to make sure that we can stay in these fights for as long as it takes to see them through to the end and help people like Hamdi Muhammad who never in million years could pay an attorney's hourly rate to help her for for something like this and so it's it's incredibly important and we're so thankful to get to do this job and help people like Hamdi and her friend ephra um because of the generosity of donors so if you go to ij.org you can donate um and and it would really help IJ keep to keep doing things like this for people like Omni [ __ ] or many many other clients how is Hamdi doing now um she to be honest with you she has been one of the more traumatized clients I've had and as you know John you know my practice involves uh plaintiffs who've almost all gone through something extremely traumatic whether that's being physically beaten or imprisoned or something terrifying and frankly something that thankfully most of us will never have to um encounter in our lifetimes um and so she's doing well all things considered but I this is absolutely left an indelible mark on her life emotionally and psychologically in addition to completely stunting her ability to move forward and have you know a successful career or an education things like that and so hobby is a sweet lovely woman she's a mother um I think she's very Charming but you can talk to her and immediately know that this is something that will stay with her for the rest of her life and and it to me it really says something because you know she came from a traumatic background experience fleeing War um in Somalia and to have this thing be the kind of main trauma in her life is really shy shocking and I think it it it it's especially um it's especially sad to see as a foil like what happened to this Refugee from another country who fled was so traumatic that she found out in the United States of America um the place that's supposed to provide all this promise and all this freedom and all these rights that this kind of thing can happen to you and there's almost nothing you can do to stop it and even after it's done there's almost nothing you can do to get any accountability and enforce the rights that are promised to you under the American Constitution this is a tragic story that I think people need to hear about and it does illustrate the fact that we are we don't have equal justice under the law and there probably are countries in Africa that have uh more fair judicial system than we have when it comes to civil rights violations I mean it's it's just insane well hopefully she gets her day in court and hopefully officer weiker gets her day in court as well and gets gets held accountable but you're right that's the system that we live in and you know that's why the institute for justice exists and we will keep um banging on the door until they let us in on these issues because fundamentally we know um on a basic first principles level that someone like Hamdi Muhammad deserves her day in court and someone like Heather Waker deserves to be held accountable for what she's done yeah I mean that's exactly what we're supposed to do is protect the most vulnerable Among Us I mean that should be our job and then what does the government do it attacks the most vulnerable it attacks the the not the hard targets usually but the weaker targets and really an atrocious case and I I really thank you guys for taking it on and I wish I had been following this sooner but you know really want to encourage anybody who has the ability to to to donate and I'll put the link in the well it's already in my description permanently as I always try to get people to donate to you guys but uh hopefully we can raise some money here with with this video and and bring some light to what's happening yeah we don't have any we don't have any salacious video footage of what happened or anything like that but we have some salacious court orders and you know that illustrate that here you have a crooked cop took somebody who was vulnerable Among Us already and just put her in prison for two years and there's no accountability at all and you guys are still fighting for accountability if things go your way in court you're still going to get to put that officer under oath and take her deposition ultimately put her before a a jury and try to get at least a money award for for homies so this is something where people can donate and spread the word and it really really they will help yeah thank you so much John and thank you everybody out there for just for listening because these stories often go unheard all right Patrick well it's always a pleasure I appreciate it um I know you're you're busy so I'll let you go um hopefully we can talk again soon on some other atrocious uh case of Injustice involving our government yeah sadly there is no there's no bottom of the list all right fascinating conversation in case you couldn't tell Patrick is one of the top civil rights lawyers in the country again he's with the institute for justice and you may have seen a donation link for them in my usual description on on all my videos and that's because they do such great work if you want to help and you don't know how you can help that is how you can help you can donate money to the IJ and keep civil rights lawyers like Patrick busy suing the government 24 7 365 days a year so this case as he said is important because not only do we already have to get overqualified immunity but now police officers have found a a loophole for liability where they just act as a as a federal task force and now if they're if they're seen as a federal officer in addition to being a state or local officer you can't even sue them at all under through section 1983 so that's why it's imperative that they win this case and the other cases that they're working on so I urge you to please donate to them some of the videos I've done about their cases in the past have been very successful at raising thousands of dollars for their cause so show them the power of the YouTube audience and go to the donation link right now and whatever you have if it's a dollar just donate donate what you can to help so as always thanks for watching and I look forward to doing some more videos with the institute for justice in the near future they have a lot of exciting cases that I'm excited to tell you about remember freedom is scary deal with it foreign foreign