>I suspect the trigger was the realization recent especially egregious cases were being prepared for court cases, which were likely to be won.

I should've thought of this. Can you reference a specific case? I'd like to follow it.

>Agencies like this would rather voluntarily pull back to prevent a court ruling setting precedent. The agency can always bring back similar measures in different forms or with different supposed safeguards but a court ruling is beyond their control.

I need to review the federal jurisprudence on this. IIRC there were some finer points that changed so "don't worry we changed the rule" is no longer as good a defense as it once was and that's part of what led to Bruen making it into court in the first place.

> Can you reference a specific case? I'd like to follow it.

In addition to the cases cited in the article, I've seen some other scary sounding incidents in MSM reporting recently but I didn't bookmark any. My thought was triggered by the article mentioning the Institute for Justice filing a class action which indicates there are a lot and that IfJ feels they have strong grounds.

> "The IG report highlighted an incident documented in a video released four months ago by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties law firm which is pursuing a class action lawsuit against the DEA."

I agree that "we changed our policy" doesn't legally change their existing liability but it'll at least stop more incidents being added and I think it probably does influence the media optics as well as a judge's eventual corrective order (if it gets that far). Plus IfJ will certainly get discovery on all the relevant data including searches, confiscations, claims and the actual amount of criminal activity discovered (which is probably almost none as Justice Dept's own IG cited the lack of effectiveness). Now at least those likely shocking statistics will have a hard stop date a few years in the past by the time it comes out.

Additionally, while this decision was probably being deliberated before the election, it may have been accelerated and/or influenced by the outcome of the election simply because the DEA is now less certain they'll have leadership in the Justice Dept, Homeland Security, etc willing to circle the wagons and stonewall to defend these practices.