this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Exactly what a duress code is for, watch this charge shrivel like a dick in the cold when they try to identify exactly what “evidence” was deleted.
That's not how the law works. In fact, that's intentionally not how the law works specifically because of what you said. They don't have to "identify the evidence" that was deleted; they need to show that records were destroyed knowingly and intentionally which the government intended to and had the lawful authority to seize – namely and quite broadly the contents of his phone, which he obviously, knowingly did. In fact, this is so not-how-the-law-works by design that the US legal system uses the common law concept of adverse inference for cases when evidence is withheld or destroyed.
If the federal government shows up to search my house and I burn my house down, the point isn't "well show me what evidence I destroyed lol". This is borderline SovCit pseudolegal logic.
Here's the statute he was charged under.
As I noted in another comment, it's likely the "lawful authority" of the government to have performed the search in the first place will be challenged, which is what the statute requires in part (a). It'll be up to the government to show they had this authority – which it seems like they didn't, and I hope it gets thrown out, but regardless, your interpretation of this is abject nonsense.
TL;DR: They do not need to know a single byte of information that was on his phone for this charge provided they can show they had lawful authority to seize it.
In this particular case, there are also 5th amendment issues with the Miranda warnings.
The CBP officers repeatedly ignored the defendant's requests for a lawyer, and they continued to question him anyway. Then, the defendant allegedly told them the "unlock" / duress code.
There's existing case law in the US that phone unlock codes are "testimony" within the 5th amendment's right to remain silent, so a search warrant cannot compel someone to divulge them. (This is different from a phone unlock fingerprint, which can be compelled with a warrant).
I halfway expect the government to argue somewhat against this case law, but who knows? DOJ is now scraping the very bottom of the barrel to find lawyers, so sometimes it's hard to tell if they have any kind of coherent plan at all.