Their arrests occurred after about 100 protesters took control of 2nd Avenue South and 6th Street South in downtown Minneapolis after rallying at the U.S. Bank building for more than an hour.

The protest was partly a bid to set up tents at the occupation at Hennepin County Government Center Plaza, a request that the Hennepin Count Sheriff’s Department, which controls their plaza, has denied. A medic said he hasn’t yet seen injury from the cold, but that hypothermia was becoming more of a risk as temperatures plummet.

Protesters carried three wooden-framed structures dressed in transparent plastic from plaza to the sidewalk of U.S. Bank building across the street, then to the intersection on the other side of the building.

In the building, it was business as usual as office workers lunched, but outside U.S. Bank set up a security cordon to control who entered the building, initially denying media access. All private areas of the plaza were also fenced off.

Despite the security, protesters willing to be arrested said they were able to sneak inside and almost set up a tent on the 12th floor before being escorted out, but not arrested, by security.

Protester Katrina Plotze said she was willing to be arrested to stand against the influence of corporations and banks.

“I think it is interesting we have not been arrested and that we’ve been occupying this intersection,” Plotze told protesters as she stood near a tent set up in the intersection early in the occupation. “That shows that police and the city know about the 99 percent of this country is on our side.”

When protesters initially took the intersection, police destroyed one of the see-through tents, smashing it into pieces. Protesters occupied the intersection peacefully, with police blocking off traffic on all four sides.

After almost one and a half hours, police announced that protesters who didn’t leave would be arrested. The seven who chose to go to jail sat in tents in the middle of the street until they were led away by police. Don Gerten, 65, wasn’t involved in the civil disobedience. Instead he was standing near the plaza with a sign reading “We were promised a future. Where is it?”

Gerten described himself as a “basically conservative veteran.”

“If you asked if I’d be doing this six months ago, I’d say you were crazy, but this country is in such bad shape you’ve got to do something,” he said. “Things get so bad you got to do something.”

Demonstrators had agreed to erect the tents in defiance of a county ban on the structures. The county said the tents would pose a public safety risk because “illegal activity” could go unnoticed inside them.

In response, demonstrators constructed tents with clear plastic sheeting and called them “transparent structures.” The tents also held a political message, which demonstrators chanted while carrying them to the southern lawn: “Our tents our transparent, unlike the one percent!”

Dozens linked arms around the tents before 5 p.m. Saturday. After 5:30 p.m., Nick Espinosa, an OccupyMN organizer, issued a warning: police said they had five minutes to dismantle them. Anthony Guidotti, 20, took the megaphone and offered a space for people to pray for anyone who faced arrest, “No matter your spirituality.” They sang “We Shall Overcome.”

No police came. They unlinked arms. After 9 p.m., a local news station on scene was broadcasting the night as a “victory” for OccupyMN.

Many were awoken, though, at 1:10 a.m., when roughly 50 officers emerged from the Government Center, Espinosa estimated. He called out code red—the demonstrators had made a plan in the case of police action—and around 70 linked arms around three of the transparent tents, he said. (Some had brought their own opaque camping tents).

“People…sat down around a group of three of the transparent structures in a symbolic defense of our transparency as the 99 percent and what we’re doing,” said Espinosa, 25. “Which is trying to protect our health and safety while addressing [Hennepin County’s] concerns about visibility inside the tents.”

Hennepin County Sheriff’s Deputies have recorded protesters throughout the occupation.

Police took all the tents but made no arrests. “They’ve pretty much been policing themselves,” Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek said of the demonstrators on Sunday, in a brief interview. Stanek would not say how many authorities were involved in the police action or why authorities waited until after 1 a.m. to commence it.

Unconnected to the tent issue, officials arrested Melissa Hill early in the evening—the first arrest since the demonstrations began. An activist who was working as a legal observer at the demonstration, Hill had been banned from Hennepin County property after chalking on it. Police booked her for trespassing. Hill’s bail was set at $50 and she was released from custody just after midnight on Sunday.

Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Lisa Kiava deferred specific questions about the police action to a news release that states, in part, the county erected an open-air canopy to protect the public from poor weather. Demonstrators say the canopy doesn’t provide enough protection from the cold and isn’t large enough.

“County policy accommodates the First Amendment rights of residents on county property, while protecting the free use of government buildings by the public and employees,” the news release states. “As always, conduct on county property that violates county policy, Minneapolis city ordinance or state law is not allowed.”

On Sunday afternoon in a planning committee, several dozen demonstrators deliberated for hours about how to carry on a protest with Minnesota’s winter looming while sending a message in response to the confiscation of the tents, which several compared to a foreclosure. The committee voted to eventually set up tents across the street, on the plaza in front of U.S. Bank, within the next two days. Anyone could set up cardboard boxes if they needed shelter in the meantime—a move that would still defy the county’s ban.

“There’s a plaza that’s city property; it’s out of Sheriff Stanek’s jurisdiction,” said Espinosa. “We found Sheriff Stanek just not that willing to work with us to find a solution to us needing our health and safety covered for this Minnesota winter and the weather as it’s getting colder and rainy on us.”

“There is no question in my mind that Sheriff Darr should resign,” said Luis Toro, director of Ethics Watch in a release Monday. “Any person who uses their office to retaliate for political expression… no longer deserves the office nor the trust of the people who put him in office. This is corruption at its most obvious, and Sheriff Darr should resign his office immediately.”

The details uncovered in the trial are damning.

Darr managed to defeat Deputy Mark Nicastle in November but, in the years between the time Nicastle announced his intention to run for sheriff and Election Day last November, Darr launched two internal investigations against Nicastle and demoted him from lieutenant to sergeant.

The nine-member jury voted unanimously that Darr violated Nicastle’s First Amendment rights and awarded Nicastle $24,600 in back pay and $99,000 in damages for pain and suffering.

Toro said Darr’s resignation would be the best way to restore public trust in Adams County government.

Darr did not return messages for comment.

“I’ll put you through to his office,” said an Adams County deputy, “but I doubt anyone there will talk to you about this.”

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

The alleged conspiracy involves “forced-place insurance,” by which banks offering home loans force uninsured homeowners to adopt home insurance policies as part of qualifying for a loan. The former employee behind the leak says that because banks both hold the loans and own the forced-place insurance companies, they’re free to charge astronomical premiums.

The emails, however, don’t seem to be quite the smoking gun they were advertised to be. They depict an approved request from an employee at Balboa Insurance, a subsidiary of Bank of America, to remove identification numbers from a series of insurance policy documents that were evidently sent to policyholders in error. The last email from anyone at Balboa questions the practice, as Jason Vaughn, a middle manager in one of Balboa’s Arizona’s offices, says that mismatched documents could be a “red flag” for auditors.

So, essentially the emails demonstrate a request to conceal an error from insurance policyholders. This certainly may be unethical, and may even be criminal fraud — though to what end the Balboa employees sought to do so is unclear, as is whether the practice was actually executed in light of the concerns brought up by Vaughn. But it also appears on the surface to have little connection with the larger claims made by the anonymous leaker, whose grievances range from vague (“They took everything from me.”) to oddly specific (for example, he claims that his employers spilled soil on his American flag when they were packing up his belongings after he was fired).

The person behind the leaks does say that there are more to come, so time will tell if there is substantive evidence for the allegations of fraud and conspiracy.

The Huffington Post has a succinct explanation of forced-place insurance, while the New York Times’ Dealbook has a clear detailing of all the allegations. Business Insider is critical of the hype over the emails and says that Bank of America’s explanation is likely the correct one. The blog Public Intelligence has the full text of the internal emails. A site started by Anonymous, bankofamericasuck.com, originally posted the emails as well as a statement from the leaker and correspondence between him and Anonymous moderators, but the site has been down most of today due to heavy traffic.

That wasn’t all, Talking Points Memo reported:

Excerpts of the reports, obtained by TPMMuckraker, show officials from Arpaio’s office made trips to Orlando, D.C., Honduras, Tempe, Belize, Alaska and Puerto Rico on the county’s dime and racked up other questionable expenses, like $741 at Sardella’s Pizza and Wings. The county was also charged $350 for a hotel room upgrade for one official’s spouse. One employee went on multiple extradition trips without submitting receipts for the $62,750 he or she spent — including $1,341 on Disney World Yacht Club Resort food and entertainment. [...]

County officials additionally allege that the sheriff’s office deliberately misused procurement codes and made capital purchases during spending freezes; used outside bank accounts; had problems handling inmate cash; demonstrated extradition travel irregularities; improperly used county credit cards; and spent public funds unusually.

The officials’ report comes less than a week after an internal memo from a subordinate was released urging Arpaio to stop corruption within the sheriff’s department. It is also in the midst of a Justice Department investigation into alleged civil rights abuses by Arpaio’s office. The DOJ sued Arpaio earlier this month for refusing to hand over documents for its investigation.

Notably, Arpaio received a favorable audit from the U.S. Marshal Service on how he treats his inmates, the Wall Street Journal reported today.

Fearful that the longer Rangel stalls, the more ammunition he will supply Republicans for painting Democrats as corrupt in November, House Democrats are pushing Rangel to accept a previous offer by the ethics committee that includes an apology but allows him to remain in Congress. “Democrats don’t want to give Republicans an opportunity this summer,” a senior Democratic aide told Politico. “Rangel is very well liked, but no one is willing to lose their seat or chairmanship over him.

Rangel, so far, hasn’t displayed any particular urgency in getting the issue resolved, nor does it appear that his Harlem district is about to turn on him:

Rangel, who has denied the allegations, didn’t spend the weekend hunkered down with lawyers. He returned to New York to keep up his usual hectic weekend schedule — cruising through the streets of Harlem from one event to the next. He rode in the front seat of a gray Cadillac, a briefing book in one hand and a cellphone in the other. [...]

“I don’t believe the back-and-forth. But we are in total support of the chairman. And I still call him the chairman. He’s done a marvelous job for this community and this nation,” said Weaver, chairman of the Community Advisory Board for Harlem Hospital Center, where Rangel spoke Saturday and had a brief question-and-answer with reporters. “They are making a lot of whether the Republicans are going to pick on him, but I don’t think someone in another state won’t vote for a Democrat because of what Charlie has allegedly done in New York.”

Task Force 2010 was conceived by Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Mike Mullen and is led by Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault. (St. Petersburg Times/ZUMA Press, navy.mil)

It has an uncertain budget, a team of fewer than two dozen military officers and civilians, and barely a year to make its mark on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan before the U.S. begins its transfer of security responsibilities to Afghans. In that time, a new military task force will attempt to get a handle on one of the thorniest aspects of the way the U.S. military fights its wars: its relationship with the small army of contractors it hires for support.

[Security1] The brainchild of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the new task force in Afghanistan, known as Task Force 2010, will “follow the money,” as Petraeus testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday, to ensure that billions of dollars’ worth of Pentagon contracts dispersed to U.S., Afghan and foreign companies don’t end up in the hands of U.S. adversaries or otherwise subvert U.S. strategy.

Task Force 2010 is led by Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault, a longtime Navy logistics officer who served as senior contracting overseer when Petraeus commanded the U.S. war in Iraq. Dussault arrived in Kabul last week after meeting the week before with John Brummet, the head of audits for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, for a briefing on “forensic audits,” something Brummet described as a “data-mining effort to look at financial transaction data” for “various anomalies” indicating waste, fraud or abuse.

While it’s too new to have a specific agenda delineated yet, U.S. officials who would not speak for attribution described Task Force 2010 as focusing on the intersection of contractor money and political power in southern Afghanistan, and giving senior military officers a greater amount of visibility into murky networks of subcontractors using taxpayer dollars than they currently have. Among its areas of focus are the private security companies outside of the U.S. military command’s operational control whose independent activities have sometimes proven problematic for the U.S. in Afghanistan. The task force has established an Armed Contractor Oversight Division to help advise Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, on how to deal with the companies.

“It’s not just about illegal activity for this task force,” said a U.S. military officer familiar with Task Force 2010′s work. “There’s also perfectly legal activity undercutting what we’re trying to do in Afghanistan. Whether it’s prime [contractors] or subs, getting down to power brokers and money lords, it’s absolutely undercutting what we’re trying to do.”

Expect to hear the term “power broker” a lot with regard to Task Force 2010. It’s a politically neutral euphemism for one of the most complex problems that the U.S. faces in Afghanistan, and particularly in southern Afghanistan: how U.S. contract money entrenches local political dynasties, some of which raise or hire independent security forces and can have transactional relationships with the Taliban. Some use their contract money to consolidate their hold on power by providing jobs, thereby emerging as potential obstacles to the overarching U.S. strategy of expanding the Afghan government’s reach, capability and relevance, which McChrystal considers pivotal for securing U.S. interests in the country.

The most important of those power brokers is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council and the brother of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Wali Karzai is widely believed to be a “facilitator” of the opium trade in the south — and a recipient of CIA money. A May 28 report from the Institute for the Study of War co-authored by Kimberly Kagan, an adviser last year to McChrystal, warned that an impending consolidation of private security companies under Ahmed Wali Karzai’s control “compete[s] with state security forces and interfere[s] with a government monopoly on the use of force,” and also undercuts the development of the Afghan National Army and Police. But in a Washington appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month, Hamid Karzai said that the U.S. understood his brother is simply a political fact of life in Kandahar.

U.S. military officials said that Task Force 2010 did not yet have any agenda for what contracts it will study, only an ethic for investigative diligence. It will be “following subcontracting networks wherever they lead, provide that information to the battlespace owner and Gen. McChrystal, and they make a decision about what to do,” said the military officer. In keeping with its early focus on southern Afghanistan, the officer said that the task force will seek to “make as many improvements as possible by the September/October time frame,” aligned with McChrystal’s plan to provide a “rising tide” of security for Kandahar ahead of July 2011, when the U.S. will gradually begin to transition security responsibilities for Afghan control.

Task Force 2010 will synthesize information “already collected” on private security contractor networks in Afghanistan, the officer said, and will “absolutely be linked in to the intelligence community,” but it is “not an intelligence gathering agency.” The task force will have civilian members, including from the FBI, and contributors from international agencies as well. It it unclear if the CIA will contribute any personnel to the task force.

The task force will seek to collaborate with the Afghan government and international bodies. But the U.S. military officer said that it did not have a mandate to reduce corruption within the Afghan government. “We want to improve contracting on our side of things, so when Gen. McChrystal approaches the Afghan government [on corruption] it’s from a position of credibility,” the officer said. “No one here is saying ‘stamp out corruption.’ We’d love to, but corruption was here before the international community arrived [in Afghanistan], and unfortunately, it’ll be here afterward.”

Southern Afghanistan and private security contractors won’t be the only focus of the new task force. It will also seek to understand the murky network of contractors that aid with the training and equipping of the Afghan National Security Forces, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s post-2011 strategy for securing the country. Earlier this year, a Senate investigation discovered that a shell company established by Blackwater, one of the most infamous private security contractors, diverted hundreds of rifles for its guards’ personal use that were intended for the Afghan police, and other contractors opened fire on Afghan civilians on a Kabul road.

“Any effort that neglected to look at the training effort would miss big part of the puzzle,” the officer said, so Task Force 2010 will “absolutely” examine contractor contributions to the U.S. and NATO training command.

But Task Force 2010′s most immediate task will be to trace the influence of U.S. contract money to help McChrystal execute his strategy, something politically perilous if it threatens the Afghan “power brokers” with whom the U.S. has worked in the south.

“Who knows what we’ll find?” said the military officer. “We see our job as providing information to decision-makers on how we do contracting. Absolutely, there could be large political implications to what we find — there may or may not be.”

Local news is reporting that he wants to spend more time with his family.

Amb. Eikenberry replied that “the quality of the Afghan ministries, the leadership of the Afghan ministries, is impressive in a lot of areas,” particularly the security services, health and agriculture. Beyond that, “on Taliban justice, you’re absolutely correct,” Eikenberry said. “In areas where there is absolute corruption in the countryside, there is no legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Taliban can deliver a very predictable justice. But it’s a very brutal justice.” Not that Wicker challenged that point, but still.

“Every poll that’s been taken, still, since 2002 … still shows the Taliban to be deeply unpopular,” Eikenberry continued. “But when you reach a point in parts of Afghanistan where the alternative is an absolutely rapacious or brutal government alternative, then the Taliban will find an opening.” That’s why the United States is trying to encourage the Afghanistan ministries to broaden their capabilities out into the provinces, particularly in the south and east.

The law at issue, an amendment to the Wire and Mail Fraud Act of 1988, makes it illegal for public or private employees to “deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.”

What exactly does that mean?

The Washington Post reports today that former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black is arguing that the government should have had to prove that he caused economic harm to his company, in addition to diverting company funds to himself.

Former Republican Alaska state representative Bruce Weyhrauch, meanwhile, argues no state law required disclosure of his private communications with an oil services firm, so he shouldn’t have been prosecuted for it, even though the firm was simultaneously lobbying him on a proposed tax bill.

And former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling claims the government failed to prove that he was trying to enrich himself, rather than just save the company, by his fraudulent accounting scheme that ultimately brought Enron down.

Justice Antonin Scalia has said that the law in dispute “invites abuse by headline-grabbing prosecutors in pursuit of local officials, state legislators and corporate C.E.O.’s who engage in any manner of unappealing or ethically questionable conduct.”

If the law is struck down, it could call into question other high-profile fraud convictions. The law was key to the prosecutions of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former Illinois governor George Ryan (R) and former Enron executives.

The same law is also central to the government’s plans to prosecute another former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich (D), who is accused of trying to auction off President Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat.

Black v. United States and Weyhrauch v. United States will be heard on Tuesday.  Skilling v. United States is scheduled for argument in 2010.