McGregor Scott is the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California. A brief description of his job is to "Put criminals in prison and to safeguard the national treasury." The Eastern District is large: it is the 10th largest by geography and the 8th largest by population; It has 87,000 square miles and stretches 600 miles from north to south. He has 97 attorneys working for him, and one of his jobs is to go Washington D.C. to try to get more resources, more attorneys, and/or more FBI agents for his district. The current priorities for the Department of Justice are to: 1) reduce violent crime, 2) reduce opioid deaths, 3) attack transnational criminal activity, 4) fight human trafficking; and 5) enforce civil rights laws. These priorities get passed down and implemented by McGregor Scott for his district. He has also added one of his own: to combat illegal marijuana grows, especially ones started on federal, often Forest Service, land and using pesticides and animal poisons which wreak huge destruction of our environment. More on a couple of these: Transnational criminal activity: The district has targeted gang operations, such as MS 13, Nuestro Familia, Hell's Angels and the Aryan Brotherhood. The small town of Mendota, CA had experienced many murders committed by members of MS 13. The Eastern District's attorneys have indicted 36 of the MS 13 members and shut this operation down. Illegal Marijuana grows: The Mexican cartels are using Forest Service land to grow cannabis. To reduce competition, they use the poison Carbofuran mixed with rice as bait to kill animals. This poison contaminates the soil, threatens endangered species and gets washed into downstream water supplies. It doesn't take much to kill humans. When using these sorts of environmental facts to buttress the case against the foreign nationals working on these grows, federal judges have been much more agreeable to harsher sentences and/or deportation to combat these operations. |