As we reported previously, there are many indications the recent indictment of Steve Bannon, Brian Kolfage and others by the SDNY smells of prosecutorial abuse. But nothing compares to what was done to triple amputee Iraq war hero Brian Kolfage.
Three weeks ago Kolfage was arrested for bogus charges related to his, Bannon’s and two other gentlemen’s efforts in building a wall on the Southern Border. New York sent 15 USPIS agents to his arrest.
(Above a picture of the USPIS Agents arriving at Kolfage’s house.)
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The New York Post reported yesterday on the arrest:
Kolfage claimed the feds sought to humiliate him during his Aug. 20 arrest.
He said that morning a squad of United States Postal Inspection Service agents ordered him out of bed and would not allow him to take his prosthetic limbs for the 90-minute drive to a Pensacola courthouse.
“How does a person with no legs get into a vehicle that’s not equipped for a wheelchair?” the former Air Force senior airman said. “I had to get on my butt and crawl up into it like a monkey with one arm and in the rain. My kids were watching. It was humiliating.”
One reader provided us insights into this massive abuse of power and total disregard for an American hero’s rights as a disabled American:
Brian’s comments above are EXACTLY what U.S. Air Force senior airman and triple amputee Brian Kolfage needed to say to the American public through the media, which he did through the New York Post yesterday. Americans need to hear the gruesome details of this American veteran’s arrest.
Not only did these New York Division of the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) officers neglect to bring an accessible van with a power-lift, they REFUSED Brian – a triple amputee – access to and the use of his wheelchair, which was sitting in his home, yards away from no less than fifteen USPIS officers!
What is even more unbelievable is that these crazed New York State USPIS officers not only deprived Brian of his wheelchair, they also pointedly denied Brian the use of his prosthetics! Prosthetics are, to a person who uses them every day to get around, akin to the eyeglasses many of us need, day-to-day. so we can see to get around, the hearing aids we use, so we can hear to get along and the canes some of us may need. No difference, all accommodations to a temporary or permanent disability. Yet these NY USPIS officers pointedly deprived Brian of the accommodations he specifically needs to move around day-to-day as person with a disability: his wheelchair and his prosthetics.
They forced this United States’ veteran to crawl. They even all stood by and watched while he crawled. The officers who conducted this arrest, their New York bosses and the U.S. DOJ Southern District of New York (SDNY) attorneys who ordered this arrest in this fashion, should be losing sleep over this incident. More to the point they should have lost their jobs by now.
The SDNY and the USPIS officers clearly violated his civil, human and disability rights. Specifically, in the course of arresting him, they violated the most well-known of American disability law, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended (Section 504), and Title II of the American with Disabilities (ADA). What those SDNY and NYS USPIS employees cooperated in doing to this wounded and disabled war veteran is despicable, unconscionable, illegal under MULTIPLE state and federal laws, and just plain wrong. This is a textbook example of a “bad arrest” of an American with a disability, a veteran no less, one of the worst ever heard of in the United States, to date.
These NYS USPIS officers, and the SDNY attorneys who ordered this arrest, one can only assume given the outcome, are either utterly incompetent at their jobs or they must have FULLY INTENDED TO utterly embarrass and humiliate Brian in front of his two little children and his wife. How frightening for this little family, with no less than fifteen officers showing up from New York State, unannounced, at their Florida front door, with guns ready! This arrest exhibits depraved indifference by these New York USPIS officers, and their New York bosses, and the SDNY attorneys issuing the arrest warrant – in this case to an American wounded war hero with significant disabilities acquired while defending his country.
Under Section 504 (covering federal entities) and Title II of the ADA, when a federal, state or local government administers or offers services, programs or activities, they have to make sure these are accessible to ALL people with many differing types of disabilities. The ADA states they need to provide “reasonable accommodations” or “reasonable modifications” so that their services, programs and activities are made accessible. For example, if you use a wheelchair your local post office has to have a ramp into the building. If you are blind, a state office has to provide paper offerings in braille or have a means to transmit the data that is accessible by a blind person: e.g., an audio recording. If you are arrested and use a wheelchair, the local, state and federal entities would be required to transport and house you “reasonably accommodating” your use of prosthetics and a wheelchair, manual or power, whatever you usually use, from the moment the arrest begins. Forcing an arrested disabled man, a war hero who lost three limbs in the service of his country, to drag himself over rough pavement, into an inaccessible vehicle – not only because the USPIS officers NEGLECTED to bring a wheelchair accessible van with a power lift with them, but because they also DENIED Brian both the use of his prosthetics AND the use of his wheelchair FORCING him to drag his body, with great difficulty, into this inaccessible vehicle – all while it was raining and in full sight of his two young children and his wife! – is beyond humiliating, beyond shocking, beyond cruel, and so far from unprofessional conduct, there are no words strong enough to describe these unbelievable actions of the SDNY attorneys and their NY USPIS arrest team. This sounds like something you would read about from some power-crazed, violent dictator’s banana republic, not as related to officials operating out of the state of New York.
In Brian’s case, in the course of arresting him, they were REQUIRED – it’s the law – that they provide him with “reasonable modification” of their service to his disability, during the course of the arrest, under both the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, and Title II of the ADA and, a host of human and civil rights laws specific to New York State and to Florida. Will the SDNY and the NY USPIS argue that it was “unreasonable” to expect a triple amputee to need his prosthetics? To need his wheelchair? To be transported in an accessible van with a power lift? To have access to meds he might need every day? To be housed in an accessible jail cell? To have access to an accessible bathroom?
It seems that their “reasonable” answer was to make this United States, triple amputee veteran crawl as they arrested him. They should have, first of all, ASKED Brian, through his attorney, what he needed given that he has significant disabilities and clearly needs accommodation. These officials SHOULD then have had all of Brian’s reasonable modification requests worked out ahead of time with the U.S. Marshals’ office and the Florida state officials. In fact, the most logical question of all becomes, when you sit back and consider the whole picture: Why didn’t the SDNY task this arrest with Florida officials in the first place and simply ask Brian to show up at a certain time and date, under his own (accessible) power, given that this was a civil not a criminal issue? But no, these cowboys from corrupt and socialist-run New York State, and its corrupt SDNY attorneys, and its clearly corrupt NY USPIS office, had to create a horrific scene, frighten this man’s wife and children, violate his 504 and ADA rights and, finally, utterly humiliate and denigrate him in front of his wife and two little children. They intentionally stripped this man of his dignity.
None of this was necessary, none of this was legal, and their periodic and federally-mandated employee trainings in the ADA and 504 should have guided their actions. Apparently, they were all asleep when these ADA and 504 trainings were given to their agencies and divisions. Instead of “reasonable” they chose physically painful, shocking, humiliating and denigrating for this one American veteran. The ADA has been law in the U.S. since July 26, 1990. For the SDNY and the New York USPIS executives, bosses, and the involved attorneys, officers and staff to claim – after the fact, if they do so – that “they didn’t know about Brian’s Section 504 and ADA rights” – is absurd, laughable, not believable, and an outright fabrication of the truth, given that the ADA has been the law of the land for 30 years, and the Rehab Act has been the law of the land for 47 years. In a shake your head moment, it is one division of the U.S. DOJ, its Civil Rights Division, which oversees civil rights’ violations in the United States and can decide to take on civil rights cases.
Therefore, is the U.S. DOJ Civil Rights Division and its civil rights’ attorneys going to sue the SDNY Division attorneys of the U.S. DOJ for this flagrant and abusive violation of Brian Kolfage’s civil rights as a disabled American veteran, under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended?! Or will the U.S. DOJ Civil Rights Division, filled with loyal, Obama-era attorneys & employees, and secretive Never Trumpers, once again cover for the wrongdoings and civil rights violations of its own progressive employees?
Will this American citizen, Brian Kolfage, who was disabled in the course of defending us all as an honored United States Air Force senior airman, ever see justice served upon the attorneys of the U.S. DOJ Southern District of New York? Upon the federal officers of the New York USPIS? What happened to Brian Kolfage and his family could happen to any one of us. When the rights of one person are flagrantly violated like this – and the wrong is not righted – it puts every single American at risk for the same kind of illegal, abusive and unjust treatment.
As for the United States Postal Inspection Services office, given that the federal agency which oversees them, the United States Postal Service, will be charged with safely & securely delivering 100% of the absentee and mail-in ballots in 50-odd days, unless something is done to immediately rein in this agency, we can count on and anticipate election corruption to rule the roost. Plan for it. How many bags of ballots will disappear, just as this agency disappeared Brian Kolfage’s rights? For if the USPIS could not safely & securely deliver Brian to where he was supposed to go – a simple task – how can the USPS, its boss, be expected to safely & securely deliver 100% of our sacred American ballots to where they are supposed to go? Where is Brian’s safety & security? His “social justice”? Since when do his civil & human rights not matter? Since when has compassion, let alone following the law, been abandoned by attorneys and officers of the SNDY court, the officers of the NY USPIS? Where are the federal higher-ups in these two agencies, reprimanding and managing the professional behavior of these out-of-control employees?
Since when do we, as Americans, allow our honored, disabled American veterans – who protected us all and some of whose lives will be even more difficult with disabilities to cope with when they come home – to be subjected to this type of abuse, manhandling, human rights’ violations and denigration, on our own shores …by pencil-pushing bureaucrats and officials working within New York State and within our own federal government, within our own Department of Justice and within our own United States Postal Service? Since when do we sit by, as Americans, and allow an American veteran to be forced to crawl UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER?
Brian Kolfage and his family deserve so much more than this. His two little children and his wife are now also victims. These wrongs need to be righted, for this American serviceman, for his family, for all of the service men and women still out in the field, and for those recovering at home, for those who will never come home, and for us as American families, who had better not continue to allow the corrupt forces of progressive ideology – manifested in this one, ugly, botched arrest operation, dreamt up in New York State – to trample upon and tear our beloved country apart. [NOTE: If Brian’s attorneys can get proof that the SDNY and the USPIS people involved got trainings in 504 and the ADA (which there is no way they HAVEN’T had multiple such trainings), that will help his case even more. These types of trainings are required of employers by the feds on a periodic basis, just as they require, for example, periodic trainings about sexual harassment or bullying in the workplace. His lawyer could FOIL SDNY and USPIS’s respective personnel directors and request data about ALL Section 504, ADA, human and disability rights’ trainings provided to all staff, over the last five or ten years, or to each individual employee involved in this incident and their supervisors, as the fact of these trainings should be included in their personnel files. This would prove they knew the specifics of the ADA and 504 and their responsibilities under these federal civil rights laws, and they violated them anyway.
