#lawfare

From tactics

• Family court squeeze play

  Using family court process (custody motions, contempt filings, ex parte orders, repeated re-litigation of settled questions) against a target as the actual operation, not because there is a real grievance the court is being asked to resolve. The three outputs it is built for: drain the target's finances, keep them in sustained emotional crisis, and build an on-paper record that can later be characterized as "litigious" or "unstable." The case is the means. The costs the case imposes are the end.

• Frame job

  The deliberate manufacturing of evidence (placed items, fabricated communications, recruited witnesses, staged scenes, manufactured paper trails) designed to be discovered and to look like the target did something the target did not, in order to trigger a specific adverse institutional response: arrest, prosecution, firing, license revocation, custody loss, restraining order, involuntary commitment, social exile. The frame is the procedural cousin of the smear: where the smear aims at degraded standing, the frame aims at a decision a specific institution will make about the target on the basis of the manufactured material.

• Power of attorney capture

  Obtaining a power of attorney over a target by fraud (forgery, undue influence, signature during a moment the target was not in a position to consent meaningfully) or by soft-coercion (talking the target into a "just in case" instrument the target did not actually need) and then using it to act on the target's finances, medical decisions, contracts, property, and correspondence. The acquired instrument does the work that direct compulsion could not. Banks, hospitals, attorneys, and courts generally honor a facially-valid POA on its face, so the burden of un-doing it falls on the target.