The wailing on the 911 call looks bad for Zimmerman

[Catherina]

32. Father says he was a magistrate judge. They have enough power to subpoena Twitter on Wikileaks

It's hard to put any credence in anything coming from a Zimmerman's mouth at this point but if true that Robert Zimmerman was a Chief Magistrate Judge/Magistrate Judge for the Supreme Court, that puts him a little higher.

These guys aren't powerless clerks just handling routine traffic tickets as some people have tried to paint them. Here's just one example

On December 14, a magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria, issued an order requiring Twitter to provide information pertaining to several subscribers who have been associated with WikiLeaks in the past. The order seeks a variety of information about the account holders, including all IP addresses from which the subscribers have tweeted from November 1, 2009 to the present and identifying information concerning anyone with whom they have communicated through Twitter’s private messaging feature. The order was issued pursuant to the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2703, which allows the government to seek a court order requiring disclosure of customer information from an electronic services provider upon a showing of “reasonable grounds” to believe that the records “are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” There are very likely other sealed orders against Google, Facebook, and other e-mail or social networking providers seeking additional information about these individuals.

The ACLU and Electric Frontier Foundation represent one of the targeted individuals, Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Parliament of Iceland. We have filed a motion to vacate the order to Twitter, and a motion to unseal the government’s application for the Twitter order, as well as materials related to any similar orders to other ISPs. The motions were heard on February 15, 2011.

...

On March 11, 2011, the motion to set aside the Twitter order and motion to unseal similar orders to other ISPs were denied by the Magistrate Judge. We appealed to the District Court, which on November 10, 2011 ruled that the government can collect the private records of three Twitter users as part of its investigation into WikiLeaks. The court also refused to unseal or publicly list all orders and other court documents relating to the parties in the case, including orders that may have been sent to other companies besides Twitter. We have appealed.

Court Documents (click link to view .pdf)

https://acluva.org/7364/in-re-%C2%A72703d-orders/

Earlier someone at DU posted that Magistrate Judges in Virginia mostly handle traffic tickets and it's a low-paying position of about $36,000/yr.

This isn't true. It's not relevant to your post but I'm just throwing this up here since I have the page up and want to add this to my journal for future reference.

The salary range for a Virginia Magistrate Judge is between $128,000 to $179,567 a year, depending on the area.

http://www1.salary.com/VA/Judge-Magistrate-salary.html