Hearsay 37 times over– and we are seriously discussing this?

By Jim George

Semi-Retired attorney, George and George, law partner is wife Judi, my specialty is Admiralty and Maritime Law, two sons, Jim and Brock, active in community affairs, especially Symphony and Opera, fanatical Blue Angels Fan, served in Strategic Air Command, USAF. Have become Floridians very recently--closer to the Gulf and the Gulf Breezes--and, last but not least, The Blue Angels!

| September 27, 2019

71 COMMENTS

I know a number of our colleagues have posted their thoughts about this (new) (latest) disgrace going on in Sewer Central right now; I apologize in advance if anything I say here might step on some of those messages. My lady and I are both at the present time so distraught about this despicable Clown Car show (thanks to the inimitable Roger Kimball for that descriptive phrase) that I felt compelled to point out a fact which has been given short shrift and which seems to us to be extraordinarily significant in the evaluation of this latest mania of the Obama-Clinton-Biden loonocracy.

As lawyers, not Law Professors, not lawyers who put on Black Robes, not “in house Counsel” but as practicing lawyers of the kind (Plaintiffs’ Lawyers – gasp!) who are not paid if they don’t win their cases, we are trained in certain bedrock principles of evidence and admissibility. One of the most bedrock of all those rules is the rule against hearsay evidence. That is, the kind of evidence which does not come from direct knowledge but which comes from one or more other persons who claimed to have direct knowledge. Here is a very direct, and maybe too direct in view of my current sense of everything in the world as we have known it being turned upside down, way of putting it: try to get the kind of report I just read which is supposed to be the basis for the impeachment and removal of the President I and 60 million other Americans voted for into evidence and there is not a Judge in this nation, regardless of political leaning one way or the other, who would not laugh you right out of the courtroom.

I went over this exalted, vaunted, almost sacred pronouncement from on high, several times, and on the last painful perusal, I counted the number of times this CIA spy on the President of the United States of America, used words similar to “more than half a dozen US officials have informed me” or “according to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the call” or similar language: 37 times. Thirty-seven times. Every paragraph is replete with that kind of language.

My honorable colleagues, this has now crossed over into some kind of dreamscape in which our National Legislature is convening hearings, involving the expenditure of no one can even imagine the staff salaries (how quaint! talking about costs! ) and all the other costs associated with all of this, instead of — dare I say it? — legislating and making laws!

I have heard many references lately to the similarities in the modus operandi of Joe McCarthy and the despicable, oily, oleaginous, slimy, cretin Adam Schiff, with which, by the way, I agree totally, so I will just close by remembering a stern question posed by the incomparable Mr. Welch, which we should all ask of Schiff, Nadler, and, most of all, Joe Biden: “have you, at long last, Sir, no shame? Have you no shame?”

I truly fear for our Nation at this critical time in the history of the Greatest Nation Ever Created. May it survive these clamoring mobs of barbarians.

Not. One. Single. Indictment.

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| September 2, 2019

23 COMMENTS

I started this discussion with a question such as: does this impress anyone else as beyond bizarre considering we have witnessed over the last few years; an actual attempt by an administration to use the full powers of the government to overthrow their political opponents? Then I thought better of it, as I read here on Ricochet and elsewhere, and I have also written here on Ricochet on this as well, expressions of similar concerns by many of our colleagues and, of course, in the wider center-right media as well.

Briefly stated: I arrive at this pathetic state of affairs as someone who has practiced law as a trial lawyer for more decades than I care to recount here, and have come to regard as sacred to the establishment upon which our beloved Nation is built the Rule of Law and its central tenet, Equal Justice Under Law, words which are inscribed over the Main Entrance of the United States Supreme Court.

I fear we are not only seeing clear examples, one after another, perhaps some of the most wretched and corrupt “public servants” in American history, receiving what appears to be not only favorable treatment by the institutions we entrust to enforce our laws, but blatant, outrageous, in-your-face favorable treatment, and then going on to spots on CNN or MSNBC and book tours and cushy jobs at major law firms or corporations. The list seems to be almost endless. I saw, just before jotting down these thoughts, the piece by @willowspring about Sidney Powell’s invaluable book “Licensed to Lie,” about which I have written before, urging all our colleagues to get this book for a full appreciation of the deep corruption and sleaziness of some of the players involved in the events of the recent past, and one in particular, Andrew Weissmann, who probably really ran the so-called “Mueller” investigation. People ( ? ) like Weissmann, and we all know by now the entire list of dramatis personae so there is no need to name them here, should, every single one, at least be under indictment, up to and including he for whom the Obama Administration got its name, a name which in my humble opinion will go down in history as one of the two or three most corrupt in our history.

I wish to direct your attention to an article I just saw that sums up these concerns as effectively and succinctly as any I have seen, and I have attempted to read everything about this most sordid chapter in our history as I can get my hands on. I urge all who are similarly repulsed by the disgraceful displays we are currently seeing – Comey wants an apology! Cannot make it up! – to read the article. It is quite brief, but here are some key passages:

“So far, the I.G. is batting zero on justice. The I.G. report on Hillary Clinton’s email investigation showed pervasive bias for Hillary, talk of an insurance policy should she lose, that Hillary should win “100 million to 0.” Yet in the end, Horowitz pulled a Comey, said the investigators’ hatred for Donald Trump, their loyalty to Hillary Clinton, didn’t impact their findings in any way. Huh?

But the attempted coup has been exposed, and one by one, the Deep State cronies are going down: James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Bill Priestap, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Jim Baker, Andrew McCabe, to name a few who have retired, been fired, or been demoted.

So our message to any future insurgents who stage a coup but fail in their efforts to illegally remove a sitting president and overthrow the United States government is, “Be forewarned: treason could cost you your job.” Oh, the humanity!”

The piece also touches upon one of my main concerns, and that is the fact that more and more we seem to be accepting this state of affairs as “just the way it’s going to be now.”

There follows a discussion of those paragons of sanctimonious self-righteousness, Hillary Clinton and James Comey, and then we get to the meat of the coconut, metaphorically speaking, an honorable member of the United States Navy, Kristian Saucier,

“…who takes a picture on a submarine goes to prison while a Washington power broker, Hillary Clinton, who intentionally exposes America’s most closely guarded secrets goes to the Hamptons.

Or a respected general, Michael Flynn, who served honorably for 30 years might be forced to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit while a connected insider, James Comey, who publicly lied under oath, bragged about leaking classified information, goes on a book tour.”

That’s why our Founding Fathers setup “a government of laws, and not of men,” as John Adams put it.”

Referring to a remark in one of the debates with the execrable Felonia von Pantsuit in which Mr. Trump indicated she should be in jail, the author concludes:

That’s the promise you must keep, Mr. President. Otherwise, all your accomplishments, the economy, our strong military, our embassy in Jerusalem, the border wall, all will be taken away when the next lawless Hillary steals an election or the next attempt to overthrow our government succeeds.Corruption in government; Equal Justice Under Law

Oh, I know: cut the drama, it’s happening, really. The bad guys are going down, justice is coming, the guilty will pay, and the check’s in the mail.

Prime Minister Thatcher famously said the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. It seems to me that the same idea can be adapted to the crisis of confidence we now find ourselves in: sooner or later if our institutions keep abusing our belief in their ability/intention to do anything about the many miscreants in our society, you will run out of trust. When that happens, you run out of liberty and freedom.

Justice Gorsuch, the Peace Cross, and the ‘Offended Observers’

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| June 24, 2019

11 COMMENTS

As one who has spent most of a (long!) life as an attorney, I am painfully aware that reading most Court opinions is not viewed as the typical “easy reading” we see in novels, the classics, biographies, or other types of reading we do purely for enjoyment. I use the term “painfully aware” as I was required, in the pursuit of our practice, and in the interest of our clients due to my obligation to be as well prepared as possible, to read many opinions and some of them were, quite frankly, sheer, dreadful, boredom.

Once in a while, most notably in the case of the masterful writing of a Justice Scalia, one is treated to a lovely and pleasurable exception, The Justice is sorely missed not only for his genius of the law, but for his unusual combination of humor and conviviality of the kind which engendered a close friendship with the Justice he probably most markedly disagreed with, Justice Ginsburg, and their shared love of opera and great food and wines.

Also, as one most interested in the High Court’s erratic treatment of issues relating to the Constitution and federalism, I savor every word of Justice Thomas’ opinions, but readily concede that they might not be everyone’s cup of tea, as they are often heavier in the fields of Constitutional history and jurisprudential development of those issues than most readers would readily be drawn to.

I would like to bring to your attention, however, to one of those rare opinions which is not only a lawyer’s dream, assuming that lawyer was at least slightly, or more, to the right of center, but should be one to give an unusual level of pure reading enjoyment to anyone with its blend of plain speaking, irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, slicing remarks about some of the abuses many of us believe the Courts have not only allowed, but, in some cases, even encouraged, such as the centerpiece of his concurring opinion in the Peace Cross case, The American Legion v. American Humanist Association.

It is laced with wittily incisive discussions of where the law has wound up in the area of The Establishment Clause by allowing, it is important to note, in some cases but not in all cases, a person who is offended by seeing something, as in this case, a 94-year-old memorial to that area’s dead from World War I, to be permitted to claim “standing” to sue in a Federal Court for relief. Here is the way he opened his treatment of this “doctrine,” leaving little or no doubt of how foolish he thought the whole idea was:

The American Humanist Association wants a federal court to order the destruction of a 94-year-old war memorial because its members are offended. Today, the Court explains that the plaintiffs are not entitled to demand thedestruction of longstanding monuments, and I find muchof its opinion compelling…

The Association claims that its members “regularly” come into “unwelcome direct contact” with a World War I memorial cross in Bladensburg, Maryland “while driving in the area.” …… And this, the Association suggests, is enough to allow it to insist on a federal judicial decree ordering the memorial’s removal. Maybe, the Association concedes, others who are less offended lack standing to sue. Maybe others still who are equally affected but who come into contact with the memorial too infrequently lack standing as well…. But, the Association assures us, its members are offended enough—and with sufficient frequency—that they may sue. This “offended observer” theory of standing has no basis in law.

After a brilliant and sometimes comic “parade of horribles” he paints a vivid picture of the lunacy which has upset and concerned so many who see these decisions as crazy patchwork with little or no uniformity or predictability, he sums up a few of the most illogical results with some of the examples coming from the Court’s own building and those nearby on Capitol Hill:

Courts … have upheld Ten Commandment displays and demanded their removal; they have allowed memorial crosses and insisted that they be razed; they have permitted Christmas displays and pulled the plug on them; and they have pondered seemingly endlessly the inclusion of “In God We Trust” on currency or similar language in our Pledge of Allegiance. No one can predict the rulings—but one thing is certain: Between the challenged practices and the judicial decisions, just about everyone will wind up offended. Nor have we yet come close to exhausting the potential sources of offense and federal litigation Lemon invited, for what about the display of the Ten Commandments on the frieze in our own courtroom or on the doors leading into it? Or the statues of Moses and the Apostle Paul next door in the Library of Congress? Or the depictions of the Ten Commandments found in the Justice Department and the National Archives? Or the crosses that can be found in the U.S. Capitol building? And all that just takes us mere steps from where we sit.

Many of us have viewed the current phenomenon of the “perpetually aggrieved” , represented most graphically on today’s political scene by The Hon. (?) Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, whose most visible characteristic is an unrelenting, day in and day out, anger at everything about the United States, with a blend of some humor and a lot of concern for where all that vitriol can lead. In his closing lines, Justice Gorsuch gives voice to those concerns, with language which indicates to me that major changes in thinking may be taking place at the High Court, to be made even more permanent if the President gets an opportunity to make just one more nomination to that Bench:

In a large and diverse country, offense can be easily found. Really, most every governmental action probably offends somebody. No doubt, too, that offense can be sincere, sometimes well taken, even wise. But recourse for disagreement and offense does not lie in federal litigation. Instead, in a society that holds among its most cherished ambitions mutual respect, tolerance, self-rule, and democratic responsibility, an “offended viewer” may “avert his eyes,” …or pursue a political solution. Today’s decision represents a welcome step toward restoring this Court’s recognition of these truths, and I respectfully concur in the judgment.

A welcome step, indeed.

Thank you, Justice Gorsuch.

The Supreme Court Allows Peace Cross to Stand

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| June 20, 2019

27 COMMENTS

This is, to put it mildly, a most welcome decision with an unusual line-up of votes in that Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissented, as would be expected, but the other two members of the usually-reliable Left wing of the Court, Kagan and Breyer, joined in the majority. The Fox News report includes the following:

For nearly a century, the Bladensburg Cross has expressed the community’s grief at the loss of the young men who perished, its thanks for their sacrifice, and its dedication to the ideals for which they fought,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s opinion. Alito noted that while this particular cross does not serve a religious purpose, removing it because it is a cross would be a religiously charged action.

It has become a prominent community landmark, and its removal or radical alteration at this date would be seen by many not as a neutral act but as the manifestation of ‘a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions,’” he wrote, quoting Justice Breyer’s concurrence in the 2005 decision in Van Orden v. Perry.

The court’s decision reverses the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that the cross was unconstitutional.

Is it too soon to recall that old line, “The times they are a’changing?”

[They] Must All Hang Together, or Assuredly [They] Will All Hang Separately (Comey, Clapper & Brennan Edition)

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| June 4, 2019

12 COMMENTS

Attorney General Bill Barr Photo: Screenshot from CBSNews.com

Like all of us who have followed the activities of the extraordinarily competent new Attorney General, William Barr, I have heard all manner of spin put on his statements, letters, memoranda, casual meetings in hallways with various Government officials such as Nancy Pelosi, and testimony before Congress. Somewhere in that storm cloud of words, one line in his recent interview and earlier in his testimony to Congress kept coming back to me, and so I sat down and read, closely studied in this case, the actual transcript from CBS News of his interview with that network’s Legal Analyst, Jan Crawford, to be absolutely certain I was on sound footing when I used one of the phrases I thought I had heard in that discussion. Sure enough, there it was on p. 13:

JAN CRAWFORD: What have you seen? What evidence? What makes you think, I need to take a look at this? I mean, what have you seen in the summer of 2016?

WILLIAM BARR: Well, I’ll say at this point is that it, you know, I- like many other people who are familiar with intelligence activities, I had a lot of questions about what was going on. I assumed I’d get answers when I went in and I have not gotten answers that are well satisfactory, and in fact probably have more questions, and that some of the facts that- that I’ve learned don’t hang together with the official explanations of what happened. (Emphasis mine)

Those two little words kept coming back to me, like an “ear worm,” and finally it popped into focus when I remembered Dr. Franklin’s use of those words to describe the potential jeopardy in which all the signers of the Declaration of Independence found themselves after that heroic but dangerous act.

I am quite certain that anyone who has read this transcript carefully has to come away feeling that if certain of our “former law enforcement and intelligence officials,” to use the weasel phrase so lovingly employed by the Lamestream Media for their favorite leakers (as if we did not know their names were, among others, Comey, Brennan, and Clapper) have not obtained the best criminal defense lawyers can buy by now, they are even crazier than I think they are. And, that is clearly a rather high (low?) bar, to be sure.

Other members of “our betters,” to borrow one of Dr. Sowell’s favorite sobriquets, who fall into the Praetorian Guard mentality to which the Attorney General made reference (p. 11), such as Felonia von Pantsuit, might also want to take a look at other passages in this interview, such as this passage, which can be found, for the ready reference of her defense lawyer, at pages 12-13:

JAN CRAWFORD: Um, what’s the status of Huber’s investigation in Utah? I think the former Attorney General Sessions had asked him to look at this.

WILLIAM BARR: Right, so Huber had originally been asked to take a look at the FISA applications and the electronic surveillance but then he stood back and put that on hold while the Office of Inspector General was conducting its review, which would’ve been normal for the department. And he was essentially on standby in case Mr. Horowitz referred a matter to him to be handled criminally. So he has not been active on this front in recent months and so Durham is taking over that role. The other issues he’s been working on relate to Hillary Clinton. Those are winding down and hopefully we’ll be in a position to bring those to fruition.

Perhaps Madame Secretary can free up some time from her new gig as a keynote speaker at conferences about Cyber Security (giving new meaning to the old phrase “you cannot make this stuff up”!) and making speeches attacking Bernie Sanders as a “sore loser” (see above) to share this passage with her defense attorney.

Other members of our elite who may wish to have some specific expressions used by the man who will be making prosecutorial decisions on their future to refer to their defense attorney would most certainly include the “FBI lovebirds” to whom the Attorney General was clearly referring when he made these remarks (p. 15):

JAN CRAWFORD: But it seems like you have a concern that there may have been a bias by top officials in the FBI as they looked at whether to launch and conduct this investigation?

WILLIAM BARR: Well it’s hard to read some of the texts with and not feel that there was gross bias at work and they’re appalling. And if the shoe were on the other–

JAN CRAWFORD: Appalling.

WILLIAM BARR: Those were appalling. And on their face they were very damning and I think if the shoe was on the other foot we could be hearing a lot about it. If those kinds of discussions were held you know when Obama first ran for office, people talking about Obama in those tones and suggesting that “Oh that he might be a Manchurian candidate for Islam or something like that.” You know some wild accusations like that and you had that kind of discussion back and forth, you don’t think we would be hearing a lot more about it?

This interview was truly a treasure trove of “fascinating details,” as Mollie Hemingway put it in her excellent review this morning in The Federalist entitled “Top 28 Moments from Bombshell Interview,” shedding so much of the kind of light so many of us had almost despaired of ever hearing again from a high public official.

What was that sound I just heard? Was it possibly the sound made when the plug is pulled and a body of liquid — in this case a muddy, slimy mixture of muck and corruption and sleaziness — begins the sure but slow process of draining?

What a great day for our Beloved Nation! Hallelujah!

Sincerely, Jim

Remembering the Boys of Pointe du Hoc this Memorial Day

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| May 25, 2019

4 COMMENTS

Friday’s online Wall Street Journal carried the usual Saturday column by Peggy Noonan. Aside from having been one of President Reagan’s speechwriters, Noonan is not ordinarily one of my favorites, but today’s column, “Which Way to Pointe du Hoc?” really hit home for me for some very personal reasons.

One of the main reasons I signed up for a D-Day to the Rhine tour was that I wanted to stand on the spot where President Reagan stood when he delivered one of the most powerful speeches ever delivered by any President, “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc,” with a number of the survivors of that truly miraculous assault straight up a 150-foot cliff sitting on the front row. There is a video of that speech and every time I watch it I realize anew that it represents the very essence of what Memorial Day is all about. I have been trying to read everything I can get my hands on about this particular part of D-Day, and every time I find something else, I learn about one or more miracles which took place that day; courage and bravery beyond mere words. They were The Boys of Pointe du Hoc. Thank God for them. And all their Brothers in Arms.

As I assume this column is behind the WSJ paywall, here are a few of the passages which relate to the miraculous climb straight up those cliffs and the President’s remarks on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944:

The week after next marks the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. People will be thinking of D-Day and seeing old clips of the speechifying that marked its anniversaries. I will think of two things. One is what most impressed Ronald Reagan. He spoke at the 40th anniversary, on June 6, 1984, at the U.S. Ranger Monument, and seated in the front rows as he spoke were the boys of Pointe du Hoc.

“Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here,” he told them. “You were young the day you took those cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys.” Many were old now and some wept to remember what they had done, almost as if they were seeing their feat clearly for the first time.

Reagan spoke with each of them afterward, and what moved him most wasn’t all the ceremonies. It was that a bunch of young U.S. Army Rangers had, the day before, re-enacted the taking of the cliffs, up there with ropes and daggers, climbing—and one of the old Rangers who’d been there on D-Day and taken those cliffs 40 years before got so excited he jumped in and climbed along with the 20-year-olds.

“He made it to the top with those kids,” Reagan later told me. “Boy, that was something.” His eyes were still gleaming. Doesn’t matter your age, if you really want to do it you can do it.

There is a video accompanying this article showing President Reagan shaking hands with each of the Rangers, and showing one of them sobbing as the President grabbed his hand; the memory of that day, The Longest Day, was just too much for him, a proud member of Rudder’s Rangers, to bear.

Another passage describes the derivation of the title of her column:

A second thing I think of: My friend John Whitehead once told me, in describing that day, of a moment when, as a U.S. Navy ensign, he was piloting his packed landing craft toward Dog Red sector on Omaha Beach. They’d cast off in darkness, and when dawn broke they saw they were in the middle of a magnificent armada. Nearby some light British craft had gone down. Suddenly a landing craft came close by, and an Englishman called out: “I say, fellows, which way to Pointe du Hoc?”

Jaunty, as if he were saying “Which way to the cricket match?”

On John’s ship they pointed to the right. “Very good,” said the Englishman, who touched his cap and sped on.

John remembered the moment with an air of “Life is haphazard, a mess, and you’re in the middle of a great endeavor and it’s haphazard, a mess. But you maintain your composure, keep your spirit. You yell to the Yank, ‘Which way to Pointe du Hoc?’ and you tip your hat and go.”

It won’t be long before I’ll be standing where our President stood and remembered The Boys of Pointe du Hoc, and I will look down those cliffs and I will look over those graveyards where some of the bravest and most courageous Americans rest, and I will be so proud to be an American, like that aging Ranger, I will cry.

Where is the Outrage of Federal Judges on the FISA Court?

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| May 22, 2019

33 COMMENTS

Lying to a Court is the ne plus ultra of contempt of court. It is defined as follows:

“(1) Misbehavior of any person in its presence or so near thereto as to obstruct the administration of justice; (2) Misbehavior of any of its officers in their official transactions; (3) Disobedience or resistance to its lawful writ, process, order, rule, decree, or command.”

I say, as I must as a member of the Bar, with all due respect, based on my (extensive) experience with Judges in many different Courts, and a great number of them were Federal Judges, the silence of the Judges on the FISA Court who, we now know beyond any reasonable doubt, were lied to must be the kindest and most gentle in the entire system.

Perhaps one could make the argument that the Judges I dealt with were unnecessarily harsh and rule-bound, but most, if not all, of them would have long ago held every lawyer who signed those applications to — gasp! dare I say it?– spy on Carter Page and the Trump campaign in contempt of court.

The reason was that their conduct was, in plain terms, contemptible!

I have been planning to put my concerns about this out there for a long time; every time I start to post them I decide to wait a few days for the “inevitable” contempt order.

Alas, no such order has issued — at least, not publicly.

Do you find their silence as strange as I do?

Sincerely, Jim

Res Ipsa Loquitur: The Letter of the President’s Counsel Speaks (Loudly) For Itself

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| May 4, 2019

19 COMMENTS

In the law, we would have occasion from time to time to use a Latin phrase which often proved quite useful in drafting documents, motions and briefs. The phrase was Res Ipsa Loquitur, and it means “the thing speaks for itself.” That was my first thought after my study of the letter of the Special Counsel to the President, Emmet T. Flood, to the Attorney General, William Barr.

It does, indeed, speak for itself — quite directly, bitingly, and bluntly — definitely not in the nuanced way so favored by the oh-so-polite denizens of the Deep State. I cannot urge too strongly a careful reading of every word.

As you do, would you agree with me that if the Three Stooges — Messrs. Comey, Brennan, and Clapper — have not already hired some of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country, they are crazier than even I think they are (and that’s a stretch)?

Final thought, and I regret I don’t have the Latin phrase handy for it: The fat is well and truly in the fire!

Out-Foxxed in MAGA Country (Making Arrests Go Away): Where’s the Justice for the Nobody People?

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| April 5, 2019

16 COMMENTS

While it may raise howls of derision from the apparently millions of Americans who think that lawyers are a blight upon the Republic, it is my firm belief that approximately 99% of American lawyers strive to conduct their practices in an honest, civil and, most importantly, ethical manner. I cannot speak for every single one of that cohort, but I can definitely speak for two of them, my law and life partner, Judi, and myself when I say that the antics — and there’s no better way to describe her conduct — of State’s Attorney of Crook, er, Cook County in regard to the Jessie Smollett case in Chicago are blatantly and sickeningly unethical.

It was disgusting to read the first accounts of her apparently newly created method of “alternative dispositions,” about which more later, as it appeared, in the early stages, she might just get away with her brand of “in-your-face” lawlessness. Almost as gag-inducing was the sanctimonious speech Smollett gave, telling the world he had been “exonerated” and that he “wouldn’t be my Mother’s son if I had done the things reported.” What unmitigated rot! Pure fiction, although there are several much more, shall we say, colorful words I could have — and have– used to describe this entire kabuki dance.

One of the several reasons I decided to research this entire dismal episode what that I saw writings in what was once called the Mainstream Media, at a time when that title was accorded with respect, now composed of thoroughly discredited propaganda organs of the Democrat Party, buying hook, line, and sinker Smollett’s Courthouse steps speech proclaiming his complete and total innocence of 16 felony charges handed down by a Grand Jury. One such column, also as cringe-worthy as Smollett’s speech, if not more so, appeared in the New York Times over the weekend. There, in that publication referred to by Klavan as “a former newspaper”, the always reliable propagandist for the far-left and a bona-fide Trump hater, Charles Blow, put together a series of statements which were, for the most part, divorced from reality, and from the actual facts which have been in the public domain since about mid-February.

The author referred to the incident as a “trivial crime and entertainment story” and “an “interesting Hollywood drama, but meaningless in the grand scheme of things” and concluded with this lovely piece of — dare I say it? — hateful commentary:

Folks, what you are seeing is a media being bullied into bending over backward to placate the people who endlessly accuse them of bias. I believe you are also seeing an expression of subconscious race bias in the media itself that truly registers sensation at the thought of this black man’s deception.

Smollett’s greatest offense in this regard was not lying, if indeed he did, but lying about white people who support a racist in the White House.

Now that we have, in the interest of balance, heard from “the other side of the moon,” we should consider the real world, many views from Chicago writers and authorities of Bar Associations opining on the ethical issues Ms. Foxx has stumbled (?) into.

We start that look at the real world of Chicago politics, which one might hear from time to time is the very pinnacle of corruption in our country. I’m also aware that such a word as pinnacle, denoting lofty altitudes, is the wrong word to describe such a universally known level of corruption. Our look at that real world, one Ms. Foxx occupies and has sullied by her actions, should start with the Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association, which issued a statement sharply critical of her actions in this matter. I urge reading it in full for a solid grounding in the serious ethical issues involved in her handling of this case:

The manner in which this case was dismissed was abnormal and unfamiliar to those who practice law in criminal courthouses across the State. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges alike do not recognize the arrangement Mr. Smollett received. Even more problematic, the State’s Attorney and her representatives have fundamentally misled the public on the law and circumstances surrounding the dismissal.

The public has the right to know the truth, and we set out to do that here.

When an elected State’s Attorney recuses herself from a prosecution, Illinois law provides that the court shall appoint a special prosecutor. See 55 ILCS 5/3-9008(a-15). Typically, the special prosecutor is a neighboring State’s Attorney, the Attorney General, or the State Appellate Prosecutor. Here, the State’s Attorney kept the case within her office and thus never actually recused herself as a matter of law.

Additionally, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office falsely informed the public that the uncontested sealing of the criminal court case was “mandatory” under Illinois law. This statement is not accurate. To the extent the case was even eligible for an immediate seal, that action was discretionary, not mandatory, and only upon the proper filing of a petition to seal. See 20 ILCS 2630/5.2(g)(2). For seals not subject to Section 5.2(g)(2), the process employed in this case by the State’s Attorney effectively denied law enforcement agencies of legally required Notice (See 20 ILCS 2630/5.2(d)(4)) and the legal opportunity to object to the sealing of the file (See 20 ILCS 2630/5.2(d)(5)). The State’s Attorney not only declined to fight the sealing of this case in court, but then provided false information to the public regarding it.

The appearance of impropriety here is compounded by the fact that this case was not on the regularly scheduled court call, the public had no reasonable notice or opportunity to view these proceedings, and the dismissal was done abruptly at what has been called an “emergency” hearing. To date, the nature of the purported emergency has not been publicly disclosed. The sealing of a court case immediately following a hearing where there was no reasonable notice or opportunity for the public to attend is a matter of grave public concern and undermines the very foundation of our public court system.

The Bar Association’s statement also puts the lie to Ms. Foxx’s assurances to the public that this procedure, which she termed a diversionary program “available to all defendants”:

Lastly, the State’s Attorney has claimed this arrangement is “available to all defendants” and “not a new or unusual practice.” There has even been an implication it was done in accordance with a statutory diversion program. These statements are plainly misleading and inaccurate. This action was highly unusual, not a statutory diversion program, and not in accordance with well accepted practices of State’s Attorney initiated diversionary programs. The IPBA supports diversion programs, and recognizes the many benefits they provide to the community, the defendant and to the prosecuting agency. Central to any diversion program, however, is that the defendant must accept responsibility. To be clear here, this simply was not a deferred prosecution.

Their reprimand concluded by describing her conduct as the polar opposite of “trivial,” as tut-tutted by the New York Times:

This irregular arrangement was an affront to prosecutors across the State, the Chicago Police Department, victims of hate crimes, and the people of the City of Chicago and Cook County. We strongly encourage our members and the public to review the National District Attorneys Associations statement on prosecutorial best practices in high profile cases.

Before turning to the opinions and analysis of some of the better writers in that real world — Chicago — it should be noted that the Chicago Tribune has published an excellent comprehensive timeline of all events in this case up to March 29. It is a very helpful resource in trying to sort out all the twists and turns in this sad display of pure corruption.

Now to take up events “on the ground.” Consider first the columnist I consider to be the “best of the best,” John Kass of the Chicago Tribune. He has been reporting on Chicago politics for over 30 years, and starts his discussion in his usual pithy and direct manner:

““I think it (the Smollett case) has opened an opportunity for us to have conversations around what does justice look like,” Foxx told WBEZ.

Oh, really? What justice looks like? In Cook County? Kim Foxx, that’s so precious. Are you serious?

Since I was born in Chicago, with the smell of the Union Stockyards in my nose, I can’t really tell you what justice looks like with Kim Foxx leading the parade.

But I can tell you what desperate politics looks like. And I’m going to tell you some of it today, including a story about the desperate emails sent to Foxx’s employees, asking them to come up with examples to support her foolishness with Smollett.

And about Foxx’s so-called “recusal” from the case, which wasn’t a true recusal. It was a story, the kind Chicago politicians tell to children and journalists.

Foxx’s troubles began when she inexplicably compromised herself ethically through inappropriate contacts with Obama Celebrity Friends who wanted her help with the Smollett case.

And then she dropped charges against Smollett — charges approved by a Cook County grand jury — alleging that the Hollywood star of the TV show “Empire” faked his own hate crime and blamed it on supporters of President Donald Trump.

He then got to the meat of the whole ethics imbroglio in which Foxx’s office sent out a request to other prosecutors to help her out of the ethical dilemma she had gotten herself into.

And then came that panicky email Foxx’s office sent out, asking prosecutors for “examples of cases, felony preferable, where we, in exercising our discretion, have entered into verbal agreements with defense attorneys to dismiss charges against an offender if certain conditions were met, such as the payment of restitution, completion of community service, etc. but the defendant was not placed in a formal diversion program.”

In other words: Please help me. I’ve screwed up, and I need examples to show people that what I did is really not all that unusual.

I asked a Cook County judge about this.

““How stupid is it to put in writing that you’re advertising for excuses after the fact?” said the judge.

“No further questions, Your Honor.”

Another writer with the Tribune, Eric Zorn, noted a few other “tone-deaf” statements by Foxx in trying to extricate hersself from the pit she had dug for herself, entitled “Kim Foxx will and should lose her job over the Jussie Smollett case”:

Her tone-deaf statements included equating Smollett to the raft of no-name, low-level, nonviolent offenders who have received the “go and sin no more” treatment, and patronizing those who are outraged by the outcome as “people who don’t understand the intricacies of the justice system.”

Here’s what we understand: High-profile criminal cases are the lens through which the public sees and evaluates the administration of justice as a whole.

…It was a fairly basic task. They failed spectacularly.

The process that brought a surprise end to the case was anything but transparent. Prosecutors didn’t even alert reporters to the “emergency” hearing where they dropped, without explanation, all 16 felony disorderly conduct charges, and where they didn’t object to the sealing of the court file.

And although prosecutors got Smollett to forfeit his bond of $10,000 — not much of a dent in the budget of an actor who reportedly makes more than 10 times that amount per episode of “Empire” — they did not even ask for a confession or apology.

That allowed Smollett to repair immediately to the courthouse lobby and preen for the cameras about his innocence.

His lawyers have since repeatedly echoed this claim, for example responding Thursday to the city’s demand that Smollett pay the cost of the investigation, later estimated at $130,000, with a statement saying, “It is the mayor and the police chief who owe Jussie — owe him an apology — for dragging an innocent man’s character through the mud. Jussie has paid enough.”

Such galling pieties have infuriated all of us who wanted to see the accused selfish charlatan humbled and fined for allegedly perpetrating such an ugly hoax.

Other good discussions can be found here, here, here, and here.

Interestingly, the last piece looks into whether Smollett got a sweetheart deal by “ratting out” his celebrity lawyer, Mark Geragos, who was implicated in the embezzlement charges against “Porn Lawyer” Avenatti, those charges being filed one day before Smollett got “the deal of a lifetime”:

Smollett’s celebrity attorney Geragos is officially the co-conspirator in Avenatti’s criminal case in two different states for trying to extort $25 million from Nike. Avenatti claims he has proof that Nike was paying college and high school basketball players and that the sportswear company’s practices were illegal. He is also facing charges of defrauding a bank for a loan for over $4 million as well as lying to clients about their settlements in order to use their monies to fund his own enterprises, including a chain of coffee houses.

To be “fair and balanced,” a phrase which seems to drive some of he far-left batty (perhaps better said: more batty), I should note that Foxx wrote an Op-Ed in the Chicago Tribune defending her actions, replete with many of the buzzwords our progressive colleagues like to bandy about such as “have a conversation,” “transparency,” “smart justice,” “rethink the justice system,” etc. It was also replete with what the reprimand of the Bar Association, quoted above, called “repeated deceptive and misleading statements”:

So, why isn’t Smollett in prison or at least on trial? There are two different answers to this, both equally important.

First, the law. There were specific aspects of the evidence and testimony presented to the office that would have made securing a conviction against Smollett uncertain. In determining whether or not to pursue charges, prosecutors are required to balance the severity of the crime against the likelihood of securing a conviction. For a variety of reasons, including public statements made about the evidence in this case, my office believed the likelihood of securing a conviction was not certain.

In the interest of full transparency, I would prefer these records be made public. However, in this case, Illinois law allows defendants in certain circumstances to request that public records remain sealed. Smollett chose to pursue that avenue, and so my office is barred from releasing those records without his approval.

…I was elected on a promise to rethink the justice system, to keep people out of prison who do not pose a danger to the community. I promised to spend my office’s finite resources on the most serious crimes in order to create communities that are both safer and fairer.

Our community is safer in every sense of the word when murderers and rapists are locked away. But we can’t allow fearmongers to devalue the tremendous progress we’ve made in the last year. Since taking office, I’ve sought to employ alternative prosecutions, diversions, alternate outcomes and other forms of smart justice, and it has been working — violent crime in Chicago is down overall.

Notwithstanding her defenses, in the real world:

Foxx could be in trouble. According to FOIA documents released several weeks ago, she communicated with both a former aide to President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, and a member of the Smollett family, believed to be Smollett’s sister. Because of those communications, Foxx supposedly “recused” herself from the Smollett case, but last week her office revealed that Foxx had used the term only “colloquially” and had never officially stepped away from the case.

Finally, I used the phrase “nobody people” in my title. It caught my eye as a fitting description of those who really do suffer from this unequal justice under law, and it appeared in one of several analyses in the past few days about people who are not named Smollett or Clinton, but who have names like Watts and Bohanon-Silmon. This article related the tragic account of Ms. Silmon’s 21-year-old son, Andre D. Bohanon, who was robbed and killed in 2005. His murder is still unsolved. She expressed her frustration in these words:

“I’m insulted and quite frankly heartbroken that all of this time, attention, detective work, manpower and hours upon hours were spent on this Jessie [sic] Smollett case, yet hundreds of murders go unsolved every year!” Deneen Bohanon-Silmon complained in an email.

Adowa Watts’ daughter was fatally shot in 2016 while riding in a vehicle with an ex-boyfriend, Darrell Junious. The evidence was strong that he had shot her, according to this account:

“He admitted firing shots, but allegedly told police he threw the gun away, according to Watts.

“She had a gunshot wound on the left side of her head that blew off the back part of her head,” the mother told me.

Watts said Junious “drove around for a few hours, passing up hospitals” before taking Ali to West Suburban Hospital where she was DOA.

“When I got to the hospital, he did not have any blood on him nowhere which means he changed his clothes, because there was a splatter of blood all over his [car] seat,” she told me.

Watts is outraged that Junious was charged only with unlawful use of a weapon.

“Police came right out and said he was guilty of murder but they couldn’t prove it,” she said.

She said that she and a group of Mothers who have lost chidren to gun violence met with prosecutors for an outreach and counselling session attended by Foxx:

“We never got an answer to our questions about why the shooters weren’t charged. She kept saying that we are backed up and it’s not that they are not trying to get to the case,” Watts recalled.

“If this had happened politicians and police officers or doctors or someone like that, they would have done something already. We are nobody people.”

Those words embody the potential dangers which many see as troublesome fault lines in our society caused by well-founded concerns that certain classes “get away with murder” and “skate” because of their celebrity, money, political clout or all of the above.

I am definitely of that view and, for that reason, among others, this article is most respectfully dedicated to “the nobody people” everywhere.

* I am grateful to the incisive wit of John Kass for the new words for MAGA in the headline.

Lawsuits Are Terrible for the Country – Except When They’re Not

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| March 2, 2019

44 COMMENTS

Too little, too late, proclaims a title of a piece this morning about the pathetic attempt by the Washington Post to ameliorate its enormous exposure to potentially crippling damages stemming from the — gasp! — lawsuit filed by Nick Sandmann and his family over its disgraceful, dishonest, despicable fabrication of an article about the so-called “Lincoln Memorial confrontation” between Nick and his friends with the poor, beleaguered “Indian chief” and “Vietnam War veteran” who turned out to be as fraudulent as the Post.

Here is the Post’s “apology” in full:

Editor’s note related to Lincoln Memorial incident
By Washington Post Staff March 1 at 5:17 PM

A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict. The high school student facing Phillips issued a statement contradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statement condemning the students; and an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos. Subsequent Post coverage, including video, reported these developments: “Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed”; “Kentucky bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students, says he expects their exoneration”; “Investigation finds no evidence of ‘racist or offensive statements’ in Mall incident.”

A Jan. 22 correction to the original story reads: “Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips said he served in the U.S. Marines but was never deployed to Vietnam.”

See any actual apology? Neither do I.

Here’s a common sense report on the “apology” from the piece in the Washington Examiner, linked above:

The teens abused no one. They mistreated no one. Yet, they were treated like monsters all the same, and all because newsrooms couldn’t be bothered to double-check whether there was a longer, uncut version of the viral footage that had sparked this especially grotesque news cycle. The Covington boys were pilloried, publicly condemned by even their own bishop, and threatened with violence. One student in particular, Nick Sandmann, received the brunt of the hate because he is the most visible of the students captured in footage of the incident.

Unedited tapes of the confrontation between Phillips and the Covington students show the teens were accosted first by Black Hebrew Israelites, a loathsome fringe hate group. The footage also show that it was Phillips who approached the students, not the other way around.

Sandmann filed a defamation lawsuit against the Post in early February, seeking $250 million in damages — the same amount the Post’s owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, paid for the newspaper in 2013.

The journalism “profession” has beclowned itself (admittedly a poor choice of words as there is nothing funny about setting out to deliberately ruin young men’s lives) so thoroughly it is difficult, for me at least, to see a return to the august position it once held as a beacon of truth, integrity, and honest reporting any time in the foreseeable future.

The title I chose for this post was prompted by a lifetime of filing and pursuing lawsuits on behalf of (mostly!) deserving clients in various courts, State and Federal, and hearing, time after time, lawsuits being called various forms of the scourge of the Earth.

Note to anyone who believes the Washington Compost would have ever published even that sad imitation of an apology without that lawsuit: I’ve got some beachfront property in Montana I’ll let you have cheap.

Eight Days In May–Rosenstein Did Wear a Wire and Discuss Using the 25th Amendment to Remove the President of the United States

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| February 15, 2019

46 COMMENTS

I had written a slightly sarcastic post about how it was our civic duty as American citizens to rush out and read the latest book by a member of the Swamp, and how their families could probably use the money in the future when all appeal delays have expired after criminal proceedings have been wrapped up, and then I read Byron York’s piece of this morning, and Powerline’s comment on the same, and saw the book in a whole new light.

I strenuously urge a reading of York’s discussion of the number of suspicions and speculations some of McCabe’s book confirms, such as:

“If it’s all true, that is, if revelations in an upcoming book by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe are accurate. The bottom line on that is that, at least from what we know now, McCabe’s story seems consistent with information congressional investigators have been able to glean elsewhere.”

“It’s just like we thought all along,” said one House Republican upon hearing the news. “If McCabe’s account is true, it confirms what we thought, that Rod Rosenstein was serious when he talked about wearing a wire and invoking the 25th Amendment. Rosenstein should be under oath answering our questions. We need to know who was in the room and what was said.””

There is a lot more in York’s piece, especially about Rosenstein who is, in my opinion, one of the most dangerous people in government today.

As John Hinderaker concluded on Powerline, “Someone should be doing hard time.”

Indeed.

Sincerely, Jim

My Open Letter to Nick Sandmann

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| January 23, 2019

9 COMMENTS

Dear Nick,

I am writing this note to you in the hope that it will be just one of the thousands of similar letters you will receive expressing both support for you and your friends after what took place at the Lincoln Memorial. I’d also like to express great pride in the restraint you showed and the gentlemanly approach you took with the person who got in your face with a hand drum. In the midst of all the early, and totally erroneous and evidence-free, things which were said about you and your friends, and with a feeling that something just did not feel right about what I was hearing (not to mention that I also have a MAGA hat which I wear with pride!) I decided to do that which I now wish more “tweeters” and “Facebookers” and “journalists” had done — study the matter further and look at the actual video of the incident. After I did that, and continued reading many articles which were written with a more reasoned foundation, I became more and more upset at what I was seeing, and, at the same time, more and more proud of your conduct and that of your friends. I should explain there is a reason I took such a personal interest in this incident, beyond feeling a general sense of revulsion at unfair treatment of anyone, is due to my many decades of practicing trial law in many Courts for a number of decades.

Back then, I was also surrounded by a group of protesters who were expressing their disagreement with certain decisions being made in the War on Terror on the Plaza at Santa Fe, New Mexico. In doing this, they were, of course, exercising one of the most sacred rights passed to us by our Founding Fathers in the form of the First Amendment, “…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” While not questioning, for a single moment, their right to do so, I decided, wrongly as it turned out, that they might be willing to listen to some facts contrary to those I was hearing from them, as they differed dramatically from what I had learned in my study of those policies. As I walked up to them to attempt to introduce them to some facts it did not seem they had considered, it became quickly apparent that they not only were not interested in hearing anything which conflicted with their own contentions, but that a couple of members of their group were getting greatly agitated by my mere presence (on, of course, a public space) and it became quickly obvious that my continuing attempt to have a discussion with them was not going to be conducive to my good health.

The reason, Nick, that I relate this story to you is one of the main reasons I decided to dig much deeper than so many people took the trouble to do was that the moment I saw the smile on your face in that photo which caused so many to jump to so many wrong conclusions I remembered the discomfort I experienced in that confrontation on the Santa Fe Plaza.

Nick, I have two sons, and should either one of them have conducted themselves in exactly the same manner you did, under those highly tense conditions, I would have been immensely proud of them. I just want to be sure that you know there are so many parents who took the time to understand the facts who are so proud of you at this time. In the hope that this might be the best way to get this letter to you.

Thank you for being a gentleman under such trying circumstances.

Sincerely, Jim George

I Spent the Day in America Today

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| October 29, 2018

32 COMMENTS

I spent the day in America today.

The real America, a place where Americans live — where it is well nigh impossible to find a single person who hates America, who hates the Founding Fathers and who still call them Fathers, as they all in fact were, a place where there are American flags and references of one kind or another to guns and religion.

A place, in other words, which is definitely nowhere near the so-called “Clinton Archipelago” and is certainly not named New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Harvard, Yale, or Palo Alto.

A place, it might be noted, which was recently on the edge of the recent hurricane which, while not at the epicenter still received much noticeable damage. But, in this small town in actual America, in the restaurant where we had real, honest-to-God (and they — gasp — actually used that very phrase) American, of course, home cooking, neighbors were “visiting” with each other, as it is called in America, not networking, about damage to their homes and reassuring each other that all would be well. And, it will be — in America.

Not once did I hear a single one of these fine citizens grumble about the fact that “man-made warming” caused their losses and one got the distinct impression that if someone did, he would get very lonesome, very fast.

They simply don’t think in those terms — in America.

In the friendly, warm, welcoming restaurant where we had what must be the very personification of the phrase “down-home-country-cooking,” it would have been unthinkable for some “outsider” to come in and demand that someone leave because they were wearing clothes carrying the wrong message — like “God Bless America” or “America — Love it or Leave It”, or a message as outrageous as “Make America Great Again!” As a matter of fact, based on the size and build of some of the younger citizens I saw in that wonderful place, that kind of insulting, rude, and, dare I say it, uncivil behavior might happen once in that restaurant — but only once. And the types who tried to claw — literally — their way through the doors of the highest Court in our land would never, ever, ever come back for a second helping, of that I am sure.

And, along those lines, this was not a place for a certain former person in the higher atmospheres of the “leadership” of the FBI, as if Peter Strzok thought he could “just smell the Trump support” in that Virginia Wal-Mart, had he even been fortunate enough to get through the door of that restaurant, he might well have been knocked down by the support of, again, dare I say it, the purest perfume of Americanism either he or his fellow (?) FBI colleague, Ms. Page, have ever drawn through their olfactory senses. The citizens I saw today would teach Strzok and Page a whole new meaning of the phrase he used about the election of the President of the United States — “we’ll stop it” — one which might well have borne unpleasant memories for both of those swine.

In the America I visited today, the parking lots of the churches were full to overflowing and the towns were, for the most part, save the obvious scars left by the nightmare named Michael, lovely, well-tended, and quiet on a pretty Sunday afternoon.

This is the America in which My Lady and I were both raised and while I have read much lately about how America is finished — and even I have had those thoughts myself — what I saw today in the America I visited convinces me that the foundations our Forefathers built this great Nation on are simply driven too deep to be “fundamentally transformed” by Alinsky-ite Marxists wearing stupid hats and wailing at the sky like wounded animals.

So, if you’re getting a little, or a lot, down by the steady drumbeat of the San Francisco Democrats (look what they did to one of the most beautiful cities on the face of the earth) wearing their symbols of nuttiness like pussy hats, I have a little elixir which I hope will lift your spirits as they did mine this very day.

Spend a day in America! It’s a wonderful place!

A Little Boy and an Anonymous Gift

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| October 22, 2018

6 COMMENTS

It is one of those days which is so beautiful, clear as crystal, crisply cool, here in the far West of the Panhandle, the part which the Good Lord willed to be spared the ravages of the nightmare named Michael, that I thought I might note how grateful I am to Him for this gift he has granted us.

I was moved to note these feelings of the deepest kind of gratitude, the kind which is simply not capable of being captured by mere words, by reading a truly poignant column in my daily scan of news items, an undertaking which is almost always, shall we say, not exactly uplifting but overflowing with news which is the polar opposite of inspirational. This piece, by Salena Zito, is entitled “A 90-minute flight, 45 presidents, and an 8-year-old American boy” and, especially if you’re not having the kind of lovely afternoon with which we have been graced, please go read this wonderful and inspirational piece. Ms. Zito tells of meeting two uniquely, and true, Americans — one, the little boy of the title and another who does, indeed, qualify as one of the heroes of the story.

She sets the stage thus:

Sometimes, you meet special people, people who have an impact not just on your day, but on your outlook in life. People who provide you a priceless gift by letting you see the world through their eyes, and thus showing you that everything is a little better than you thought it was before you met them.

Sometimes, those people are only eight years old.

The first thing you will learn about Jared Gyure when you meet him is that he likes U.S. presidents.

He has no problem sharing that affinity, which he did the moment he plopped himself down in seat 17E on an American Airlines flight from Charlotte to Pittsburgh, sitting next to his mom, with his dad and his 3-year-old brother, Jackson, in front of him. Two older brothers sit way up in the front of the plane.

They are all heading to Uniontown, Penn., for the funeral of the boys’ great-grandmother.

Our young student of this particular aspect of American history then proceeds to demonstrate his remarkable knowledge of all, not just a few, of our Presidents, and is awestruck when Ms. Zito tells him she has actually interviewed several Presidents, including the present occupant of that office.

Which brings us to the second hero of this flight to Uniontown, PA:

For someone who rarely flies, I find myself for once enjoying the opportunity to meet someone so inspiring and inquisitive on a plane all packaged into one small compact boy.

Jared receives a lot of smiles as the passengers exit the plane. Our boisterous conversation has touched more than one person traveling from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, including an African-American young man dressed in a deep-blue dress sweatshirt and pants with the traditional gold Navy emblem across the front.

He pulls out his white navy sailor’s cap and asks Jared’s mom, Adrienne, if he could give it to the precocious boy, who probably taught everyone on the plane a few things about U.S. presidents — most importantly, a deep respect for the office outside of politics.

Jared is stunned as the sailor hands him the hat. He pauses to take a photo with him, then walks away with a broad smile, without giving his name.

It’s a reminder that sometimes lightning strikes twice in one day, when you meet two special people who make an impact not just on your day, but on your outlook in life.

Jared likely made such an impact in so many ways Wednesday evening on a plane over the middle of the country to a lot more people than he’ll ever know.

That lovely vignette just filled my heart with gladness and as I sat outside in this glorious weather, and thought about Jared and his brand new friend, one of those brave defenders of all we hold dear in this, the greatest Nation ever created by Man in history, I reflected on how immersed we all are in the “unlovely” news of the day. I probably should amend that statement as even I am not presumptuous enough to speak for “all”, but I know that I must plead guilty to spending far too much of my time on the “unlovely” and not near enough time learning about the Jareds of the world, and of the kinds of men like the “other hero” in the story, a proud member of the United States Navy, who gave a little boy the gift of a lifetime!

The Kavanaugh Hearings: One Step Away from “Room 101” in 1984?

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| October 13, 2018

15 COMMENTS

Perhaps some day we will come to see Justice Kavanaugh as the closest thing we have in modern times to the abjectly miserable Winston Smith in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, who suffered unspeakable forms of torture in “Room 101,” the worst torture chamber of all in Oceania.

Perhaps, in fact, that day is here, as the final day of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings brought us to a new low of ruthless cruelty in an attempt to destroy a man and his family. I would posit that this kind of barbarity and savagery is just one baby step away from the “creative” methods of torture administered to Winston Smith and any of his fellow Oceanians who ran afoul of the dreaded “Thought Police”.

And, what was in Room 101? As O’Brien told Winston as he was being led to the room of so many nightmares on Oceania:

“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

“The worst thing in the world,” said O’Brien, “varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths.”

“‘In your case,” said O’Brien, “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.”

In the novel, recalling an earlier incident when Winston and his (forbidden) paramour were intruded upon by a large rat, surveilled by the “Thought Police” through the all knowing telescreens installed everywhere in the country, the “worst thing in the world” to Winston was a rat. O’Brien goes on to explain the nature of the horrific torture he has planned for Winston, involving an imaginative device which fits onto Winston’s face containing very large, and very hungry, brown rats. The thing, a cage with several chambers which can be opened in sequence allowing the rats to get closer and closer to the face of the “enemy of the State” until he or she either dies of shock or tells the Thought Police what they want to hear. O’Brien describes their demonic reasoning in this passage:

“By itself,” he said, “pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable—something that cannot be contemplated. … It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wish to. You will do what is required of you.”

For those of you who followed this National disgrace as we did, you will know where this is going, because what would be the worst thing in the world for a man like Judge Kavanaugh, a man whose life’s record of accomplishment is simply, there is no other word for it, legendary in the annals of law and jurisprudence? While none of us can claim to know the answer to that question, we may reasonably surmise an answer based upon the intensity and emotion of his responses at the now-iconic speech he gave in answer to the gutter slanders of the despicable creatures on the Democrat side of the committee.

The “worst thing in the world” for this devoted and loving husband of Ashley and father of Margaret and Liza, son of his Mom and Dad, brilliant student and lawyer and closest assistant to a President of the United States, a Judge whose 312 opinions are masterpieces of legal erudition—would be for his honor and integrity to be besmirched before the world—but so much more importantly to this fine man—before his wife and little girls and Mom and Dad.

And so it was in our modern version of Room 101, which contained “the worst thing in the world” for The Honorable Brett Kavanaugh.

And, don’t believe the remnants from Oceania such as Spartacus and the blandly sinister Feinstein and Stolen Valor Blumenthal and their fellow brown rats didn’t know exactly what the “worst thing in the world” was for this truly Honorable man.

To those who may feel I have become just a tad overwrought about this: I have in my family beautiful little girls I absolutely adore, I have a wife who has been my life partner for almost half a century without whom I cannot envision life, I had a Mom and Dad I revered and I have been blessed with some of the most amazing friends, far and wide, anyone could hope to have. I simply cannot imagine what a man of such towering quality must have gone through while having his obviously adoring wife and precious little girls hearing this steady stream of raw sewage being poured all over their Dad and Husband by bottom feeding vermin like those who mounted this dreadful lynching.

Room 101?

Yes!

Complete with a pack of avariciously hungry rats.

Search and Destroy

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| September 28, 2018

22 COMMENTS

I watched almost every single minute of this pathetic exercise in how far so-called well educated and accomplished people can go when they are devoid of any shame or boundaries whatsoever and will do anything, including destroy one of the finest men to ever be nominated to the Supreme Court, and his beautiful family, his devoted wife and their little daughters, one of whom prayed for “the lady” at her nightly prayers, and all his family, his stricken Mother and Father, and his friends. I watched because I wanted, once and for all, to know for myself, and not from the now-totally-out-of-control media but from what I saw for myself what really happened.

What happened today was, as one of the Republican Senators said, worse than the Bork hearings and worse than the Thomas hearings, as hard as that is to believe. If you had watched every minute of it, you would well know what I mean. The Judge was right on the target when he said “Advise and Consent” had now become “Search and Destroy,” in addition to becoming an audition for candidates for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020.

What happened today, also, at least for this one viewer, is that I will never — although I was very close to this before today — never, never, never ever again believe the summary presented to us by the media, and in this I very sadly and reluctantly include the only news outlet I still have any faith in, Fox News, to tell me what really happened in a given event. I will always insist on having to see it, from stem to stern, with my own eyes. The very idea that Fox News would have a Valley Girl airhead like Marie Harf commenting on a man of the unbelievable substance of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and telling viewers what he said and how he said it, is as insulting as I can imagine anything being in this admittedly upside-down world we are now living in.

I made myself watch all of this so I could know whether my previous feeling that the Democrats on this committee were among the most corrupt people who have ever served in the US Senate was well founded. I came away with a deep and abiding certainty that they were not only that, but that they were some of the most mindlessly ruthless and heartless group of people (?) who have ever been gathered in the already checkered and spotty history of that “Most Exclusive Club In The World.”

If this is what an exclusive club looks like, I’ll just say what Uncle Earl Long said years ago. Someone asked whether he didn’t resent it that he had never been admitted to the ultra-elite Boston Club in New Orleans even though he had been elected Governor. Long said, “the only way they would let me in would be if I had a mask and a gun.”

That’s the kind of image I got with senators (who actually votes for some of these people?) who actually spent the time we pay them to do serious matters asking about whether a 17-year-old boy really meant to write about flatulence and whether or not the “f” symbol really meant the “f-word.”

As a person who has dealt with far more lying witnesses than I care to actually count in some of our cases, I must admit to a feeling of some kind of awe that the Most Honorable Ranking Member, as we are supposed to refer to her in “polite company,” as if there is any such thing any more, could actually make her little speech about how innocent she is in front of an entire world which now knows, beyond peradventure, that she concealed “Dr” Ford’s letter for about seven weeks, a time in which all of this could have been investigated thoroughly and in a way that would have completely honored her request for confidentiality.

The oiliness of Durbin, the strangely sinister mien of the “Ranking Member” who caused this entire nightmare, the moron who is the Senator from Hawaii, who, amazingly, today I learned is a graduate of one of the most distinguished law schools in the country, Georgetown, the rank idiocy of “T-Bone Spartacus,” the smallness, in so many ways, of the pathetic little Chris Coons, the downright frightening demeanor of the probable next Democrat nominee for president, Kamala Harris, the reptilian approach of perhaps the most wretched of all, as he lied about his military service, Blumenthal, and the fact that, as one of the prominent Republicans noted, they have already reserved a URL for the next nominee, causes me to — truly — weep for the future of our country. I simply do not know how we survive repeated flows of sewage like this through the Public Square without despoiling it beyond repair.

God Bless Judge and Mrs. Kavanaugh and their beautiful family and the really great heroes of this day like Lindsey Graham and Sen. Tillis and Cruz and Lee and Kennedy and Hatch and Cornyn and Grassley and God Help America if this is what our future holds.

Worse Than Watergate? Only Question Is One of Degree.

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| July 25, 2018

24 COMMENTS

I’m old enough to remember the times when lying to a Court would net an attorney, at the very least, a serious and sobering “chat” with a Judge in Chambers, and could very well lead to disciplinary action by the Bar Association. It could lead to further action, as well, such as suspension of the right to practice, or, in rare cases involving repeated conduct of this nature, permanent disbarment.

Alas, those days seem to be receding into the mists of time, as it appears that some of the highest ranking lawyers in the Department of [in]Justice and FBI brazenly lied through their teeth to a Judge, or multiple Judges, of a Federal Court, in this case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The very thought of what would have happened to me had I lied to a Federal Court, especially with a few of the Federal Judges I respected most highly, sends shudders through me at the idea of what might have become of me and my career at the Bar.

Lawyers are trained from early days to expect they will be required to corroborate and substantiate any statement or argument they make in behalf of their client’s position and I will attempt to do that here and now, although based on the lengthy commentary following @ctlaw‘s post “The Carter Page FISA Application” it is obvious there will be some (many?) who will remain unpersuaded no matter what the foundation may be for these statements.

I have long been astounded at the hubris demonstrated by the denizens of the Swamp with law licenses and what they thought they could get away with; the passage of a considerable amount of time which this “investigation” has taken combined with a total absence of any kind of disciplinary action whatsoever makes me wonder if they may skate completely in the face of what seems to me, at least, to be some of the most unsavory and unethical conduct I have ever seen. And, yes, I make that statement as a lawyer who spent more decades than I care to recount here as a member of the Bar of the State of Louisiana. However, I know I cannot be too far off base when an analyst of the stature of Andrew McCarthy draws conclusions like this in one of several excellent treatments of this disgraceful scandal published after the release of this “verified” application, in which he openly wonders about the conduct of even the Judges of the FISC:

In my public comments Sunday morning, I observed that the newly disclosed FISA applications are so shoddy that the judges who approved them ought to be asked some hard questions. I’ve gotten flak for that, no doubt because President Trump tweeted part of what I said. I stand by it. Still, some elaboration, which a short TV segment does not allow for, is in order.

I prefaced my remark about the judges with an acknowledgment of my own personal embarrassment. When people started theorizing that the FBI had presented the Steele dossier to the FISA court as evidence, I told them they were crazy: The FBI, which I can’t help thinking of as myFBI after 20 years of working closely with the bureau as a federal prosecutor, would never take an unverified screed and present it to a court as evidence. I explained that if the bureau believed the information in a document like the dossier, it would pick out the seven or eight most critical facts and scrub them as only the FBI can — interview the relevant witnesses, grab the documents, scrutinize the records, connect the dots. Whatever application eventually got filed in the FISA court would not even allude en passant to Christopher Steele or his dossier. The FBI would go to the FISA court only with independent evidence corroborated through standard FBI rigor.

Should I have assumed I could be wrong about that? Sure, even great institutions go rogue now and again. But even with that in mind, I would still have told the conspiracy theorists they were crazy — because in the unlikely event the FBI ever went off the reservation, the Justice Department would not permit the submission to the FISA court of uncorroborated allegations; and even if that fail-safe broke down, a court would not approve such a warrant.

It turns out, however, that the crazies were right and I was wrong. The FBI (and, I’m even more sad to say, my Justice Department) brought the FISA court the Steele-dossier allegations, relying on Steele’s credibility without verifying his information…

“Well, guess what? No one knows that better than experienced federal judges, who deal with a steady diet of warrant applications. It is basic. Much of my bewilderment, in fact, stems from the certainty that if I had been so daft as to try to get a warrant based on the good reputation of one of my FBI case agents, with no corroboration of his or her sources, just about any federal judge in the Southern District of New York would have knocked my block off — and rightly so.”

I must note, in quoting McCarthy at such length, that I regard him as one of the most measured and careful commentators in this field, and one whose opinions are based on many years of actual experience as a Federal prosecutor, as opposed to so many “analysts” who simply have no idea what they are talking about. McCarthy does, and the only times I have found myself in even mild disagreement with him were the times when he was so slow to be persuaded that his former colleagues, like Comey et al., were just as corrupt as we now know, beyond peradventure, they are– and were.

Another of my favorite, “go-to” writers is Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, who had a similarly accurate assessment in The Federalist in a piece entitled “Confirmed: DOJ Used Materially False Information To Secure Wiretaps On Trump Associate”, which opens with this observation:

Newly released documents confirm House and Senate investigators’ claims that the Department of Justice and FBI used materially false and misleading information to secure wiretaps on Carter Page, a former volunteer foreign policy advisor to President Trump. The highly redacted documents released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests show how the FBI was able to convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil the Naval Academy graduate and energy consultant for a year of his life.

Ms. Hemingway, surely one of the most professional and incisive writers today was saying in the most civil possible terms what many of us have long believed about the DOJ and FBI cabal, as I would venture to say that almost any Judge you might ask whether they would accept “materially false and misleading information” to support any warrant, much less one as invasive and fearsome as a FISA warrant against a United States Citizen, might well look at you as if you had gone around the last bend. The conduct that phrase describes is, quite simply, lying to a Court; there is no dressing it up.

As hard as it is to find anything even the slightest bit humorous in all of this sordid and rotten treachery, Ms. Hemingway’s column concludes with a wry tongue-in-cheek passage which is just delicious and must be savored:

It remains possible that Page is the most talented spy who ever walked the earth and fully deserved to be surveilled by the federal government. It is also possible that the surveillance was ordered merely because the country has an intelligence apparatus that was unable to recognize their main source was a liar whose sub-sources were at best playing him and whose recklessness left his little partisan research project open to manipulation by foreign adversaries.

Barring those options, our intelligence apparatus misled a FISA court with materially false claims.

Of special note is the opinion piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal by William McGurn, entitled “Abolish the FISA Court”, a sentiment no one will be surprised to learn I wholeheartedly endorse. In the course of his fine analysis, he makes reference to an article by a Yale Law Professor which points out the dangers of such a Court; his name was Robert Bork and he would have become one of the greatest Justices ever to serve on the Supreme Court had it not been for the outrageous demagoguery of that well known beacon of truth, morality and all that is good, “The Lion of the Senate”, Ted Kennedy, and his sidekick on the Judiciary Committee at that time, “Jumpin’ Joe” Biden, who later became famous for his description of the Obamacare legislation as a “big [ C of C] deal”:

When President Trump tweeted Monday morning that it was “looking more & more like the Trump Campaign for President was illegally being spied upon,” the common rejoinder was four judges had signed off on it.

Now ask yourself: Would Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (who signed one of the renewal applications) and others be so quick to put their names on something like this if they didn’t have a FISA judge to give them cover?

The argument is not new. Just before FISA became law, a Yale law professor wrote a prophetic article in these pages about the abuses to come. His name was Robert Bork, and among his worries were that judges would show undue deference to intelligence agencies, that congressional committees wouldn’t be able to summon judges to explain their warrant approvals, and, above all, that giving courts the last say would have “the effect of immunizing everyone, and sooner or later that fact will be taken advantage of.”

The lead editorial in the morning’s Wall Street Journal, entitled “The FBI’s FISA Faults”, also contains a good discussion of this very dangerous episode which should frighten every American citizen who might, some day in the future, serve as an unpaid volunteer for a campaign for a person not on the “approved” list in the higher echelons of that amorphous cloud which calls itself “The Elite”, but which is more and more referred to, correctly in my view, as The Deep State.

Finally, I have seen comments of some observers who, in good faith no doubt, have the opinion that this document refutes all the assertions in the Nunes memo of February. To those who hold that view, I would most respectfully refer them to the extensively researched article by Byron York, who has spent as much time and energy studying all the twists and turns of this now-full-blown scandal as anyone, in a piece entitled “FISA warrant application supports Nunes memo” which sets out, chapter and verse, each of the 13 substantive paragraphs in that memo, and comes to this conclusion:

Parts of the Nunes memo, like references to the Strzok-Page texts or Bruce Ohr’s testimony, contain information that was not in the application. But that does not make it any less accurate. The bottom line is that, whatever the criticism it has received, the Nunes memo was almost entirely accurate. The release of the FISA application supports that view.

Worse than Watergate? When in our history have we ever had an administration unleash the entire power of the intelligence gathering system of the government — the most powerful in the world– to assure the destruction of the Presidential candidate of the opposite party? I thank God every day of my life that Madame Hillary was defeated, fully admitting the blemishes of the current occupant of the office of President, for so many reasons, one of the major reasons being that had she won, none of this would have ever seen the light of day. As a lawyer who deeply believes in the integrity of most members of the Bench and Bar, no matter what pop culture has to say about our profession, it is my fervent hope that all the sleazy lawyers who perpetrated this hoax on the American people will get the punishments they all so richly deserve.

Excellent and Creative Writing by Sharyl Attkisson: “The FBI’s Fractured Fairytale”

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| June 12, 2018

9 COMMENTS

Sharyl Attkisson has written one of the most creative pieces I have seen in a very long time, published this morning under the title “The FBI’s Fractured Fairytale”; it graphically, and in the process hilariously, illustrates the utter contempt in which we deplorables are held by the reptilian denizens of the Deep State (Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as the Deep State) in that they actually believe we are so irredeemably (love that word!) stupid that we will actually believe a word spoken by such bottom feeders as Brennan and Clapper.

Lucianne.com has deemed this the “read of the day”; I fully concur and cannot recommend it too highly.

Enjoy!

Why Don’t the Little Girls of England Count?

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| June 4, 2018

172 COMMENTS

Full disclosure: Were I writing this in Merrie Olde England, I would immediately be branded as “far-right” or “alt-right” or “a hooligan” or, maybe even worse, “a pest at a trial” who should be imprisoned. Thank God Almighty, I am writing this as an American, with all the rights and freedoms my Founders granted me!

I had a most interesting thought experiment recently, prompted by my reading of the truly astonishing treatment of Tommy Robinson by the British Courts and the gag order issued by the Judge, who must have set some kind of modern record in having him arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced and sent to prison–all in less than four hours.

That thought experiment involved taking the time to read a few of the reports of this outrageous travesty in the British papers, home, apparently to a number of “journalists” who seem to be perfectly content in being told what they can, and mostly cannot, report and opine about.

If you have never done this, I highly recommend it, as you will come away with a new appreciation for the magnificent gift our Founders bequeathed to us in the form of the First Amendment. It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand what has happened to all the freedoms England conveyed to us over 200 years ago, as summed up in a recent report — by an American reporter, of course — titled “Swift Injustice: The Case of Tommy Robinson”:

The very first time I set foot in London, back in my early twenties, I kicked up into an adrenaline high that lasted for the entire week of my visit. Never, in later years, did any other place ever have such an impact on me — not Paris, not Rome. Yes, Rome was a cradle of Western civilization, and Paris a hub of Western culture — but Britain was the place where the values of the Anglosphere, above all a dedication to freedom, had fully taken form. Without Britain, there would have been no U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or Bill of Rights.

In recent years, alas, Britain has deviated from its commitment to liberty. Foreign critics of Islam, such as the American scholar Robert Spencer, and for a time, even the Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders have been barred from the country. Now, at least one prominent native critic of Islam, Tommy Robinson, has been repeatedly harassed by the police, railroaded by the courts, and left unprotected by prison officials who have allowed Muslim inmates to beat him senseless. Clearly, British authorities view Robinson as a troublemaker and would like nothing more than to see him give up his fight, leave the country (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands), or get killed by a jihadist (as happened to the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh).

One must add to this sad tale of the collapse of a once-great — free! — nation that it is the one who gave us the Magna Carta in 1215, from which so many of our modern rights, privileges, and freedoms flow.

The background of this lunacy is briefly as follows. Tommy Robinson (real name: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) is a British political activist and “citizen journalist” who founded the English Defence League (EDL) about 10 years ago. One of its main objectives was to speak out against the 7th-century barbarity of radical Islam, and its many adherents flooding into Britain as a result of the “multi-culti” no-borders belief which has caused such turmoil there, and across Europe, in recent years.

He and his group were immediately branded “far-right” or even “alt-right,” which seem to be the moniker of choice hung on anyone who says anything negative about Muslims. He left the EDL five years ago after he realized it had become a magnet for neo-Nazis and began to focus on a type of citizen journalism and activism, in the process of which he got crosswise with authorities on several occasions, such as a previous trial of a “Grooming Gang of the Week” (as the inimitable Mark Steyn refers to them) in Canterbury. There, the judge sentenced him to three months imprisonment suspended for 18 months, with a stern warning not to “cause a fuss” at any future trial (“causing a fuss” at a trial apparently being one of the most serious offenses one can commit in present-day England).

Before that, he had been convicted of misrepresentations on a mortgage application, a crime reported to be almost never prosecuted there, perhaps like Dinesh D’Souza’s recently pardoned crime, and sentenced to 18 months in prison. During that incarceration, he was almost beaten to death by Muslim gangs who, as Steyn reports, “operate with impunity in many UK prisons.”

The basic facts of the Kafkaesque scenario of last Friday are described in Bruce Bawer’s piece at Gatestone Institute:

On Friday, as reported here yesterday, the saga of Tommy Robinson entered a new chapter. British police officers pulled him off a street in Leeds, where, in his role as a citizen journalist, he was livestreaming a Facebook video from outside a courthouse. Inside that building, several defendants were on trial for allegedly being part of a so-called “grooming gang” — a group of men, almost all Muslim, who systematically rape non-Muslim children, in some cases hundreds of them, over a period of years or decades. Some ten thousand Facebook viewers around the world witnessed Robinson’s arrest live.

The police promptly dragged Robinson in front of a judge, where, without having access to his own lawyer, he was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.

As if this is not nightmarish enough to be taking place in a supposedly free country, the judge then took his totalitarianism several notches higher (perhaps “lower” would be more appropriate here):

Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced him also ordered the British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. Even ordinary citizens who had written about the arrest on social media removed their posts, for fear of sharing Robinson’s fate. All this happened on the same day.

A kangaroo court, then a gag order. In the United Kingdom, where rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying. On various occasions over the years, I have been subjected in person to an immediate threat of Islamic violence: I have had a knife pulled on me by a young gang member, and been encircled by a crowd of belligerent men in djellabas outside a radical mosque. But that was not frightening. This is frightening — this utter violation of fundamental British freedoms.

In an article at National Review Online on this sordid misadventure by Douglas Murray, author of the recent chilling book The Strange Death of Europe, he observes:

What can be said with absolute certainty is that Tommy Robinson has been treated with greater suspicion and a greater presumption of guilt by the United Kingdom than any Islamic extremist or mass rapist ever has been. That should be — yet is not — a national scandal. If even one mullah or sheikh had been treated with the presumption of guilt that Robinson has received, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the rest of them would be all over the U.K. authorities. But different standards apply to Robinson.

And here is the truly heartbreaking part of this entire frightening episode, other than the obvious fact that a sentence of over a year will probably mean that Tommy Robinson will die in prison at the hands of the Muslim gangs, as best described in Steyn’s article titled “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that … an’ Tommy go away”:

It is striking to read Judge Norton’s sentencing remarks from last year (Judge Marson’s do not appear to be available: he rules in darkness). Her Honor huffs and puffs about Mr Robinson referring to “Muslim paedophiles” and “Muslim child rapists”. I can appreciate that that might be vaguely annoying if one were a non-paedophile Muslim – although evidently not so annoying that spokespersons for the wider Muslim community ever rouse themselves to object to all the industrial-scale sex slavery. But it is a fact that in 21st-century England – in Yorkshire, in Shropshire, in Lancashire, in Oxfordshire, in the Home Counties – child-rape gangs are Muslim. It is a phenomenon, one that has never existed previously in the British Isles and one which will continue and metastasize until there is honest debate about it.

And, while Judge Norton is evidently outraged by Tommy Robinson’s ill manners in referring to Muslims who rape children as “Muslim child rapists”, one notices that neither she nor anybody else display any such outrage about the ruined lives of thousands of victims of men who get away with their evil for years …because officialdom has chosen to prioritize “Islamophobia” over real crimes.

My review of several of those reports of British “journalists” certainly backed up that assertion, as I saw not a single mention, much less outrage, about crimes in which, at last count in only one of of the towns in which this savagery was taking place, Rotherham, 1,510 very young girls were raped, tortured and subjected to all manner of depraved cruelty. Not one. But there was quite a lot of chin-pulling about the “far-right” and the “alt-right” and the “radical right” “causing a fuss during a trial.”

Out of curiosity, I counted the number of times those phrases were used in short articles–14 times in one short piece and seven times in a shorter piece. In one of those articles, the “journalist,” apparently a leading opinion writer for The Guardian, after noting he is perfectly content to be “heavily restricted in what I can write about Yaxley-Lennon,” then gives his personal view of free speech:

The far right has always embraced the discourse of victimhood and persecution. Its cynical embrace of “free speech” is a dishonest ruse to propagate hatred, nothing more. If it managed to seize power, it would swiftly strip away the rights and freedoms of those it deemed treacherous opponents. Freedom of speech is precious indeed. Just don’t be deceived by a resurgent far right for which it is a rhetorical device to attack democracy, and nothing more.

A glimpse into the Socialist worldview of the author can be found in this passage:

Yes, I would argue that platforms are not fairly distributed: the vast majority of Britons support renationalisation of utilities, for example, or higher taxes on the rich, but those opinions are not adequately represented in the media. But that is a separate argument from freedom of expression.

Another of the British analyses, this one in The Economist, bewailed the portrayal of Britain resulting from this case and the gag order emanating from it:

Mr Robinson’s arrest fed into a wider narrative about Britain put forward by a nexus of far-right websites and politicians in America and Europe. Britain is portrayed as a police state that is overrun with Muslims and home to a sinister, “socialised” health service that delights in letting children die.

What else would one call a country which arrests, tries, convicts, sentences and sends one of its citizens to prison for over a year, all in the space of about four hours, other than a police state? What other fair interpretation of the facts could one give to the inane leniency given to Muslims and radical Islam by the increasingly dangerous multi-culturalism taking over Britain and Europe than that it is “overrun with Muslims”?

Why not call a country a police state when one of its leading opinion writers opens an article with the words “I am heavily restricted in what I can write about…” as that is one of the sure signs that a society is heading toward totalitarianism?

What the (almost totally Muslim) rape gangs did to these girls, some as young as 11 years old, is, in the truest sense of the word, unimaginable. The details of these crimes are spelled out, with painful clarity, in the 153-page report of the “Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997-2013),” authored by Prof. Alexis Jay — the conduct outlined there is truly an assault on the conscience. However, the recent article by Mark Steyn contains a good brief description of what some of these girls were subjected to:

To Mad Ash and his fellow ‘Asians’, the likes of Jessica and Katie are ‘white slags’. To Her Majesty’s Constabulary, they’re mere ‘Paki-shaggers’, and thus unworthy of valuable police resources. The girls recall the night Mad Ash’s brother Bannaras was in his car having sex with a twelve-year-old. A ‘jam sandwich’ — a police cruiser — pulled up alongside, and the officer rolled down the window. ‘She’s just sucking my [expletive], mate,’ said Bannaras Hussain…

The cops drove away. It must have been an abiding image for Jessica, for Katie, for Bannaras Hussain’s twelve-year-old, for the girl who would later testify that all three brothers pissed on her like ‘a pack of animals’, for a thousand and more ‘Paki-shaggers’ and ‘white slags’ all over Rotherham, year in year out, for decades: The police driving away …and leaving them….

and heading off to arrest one man with a cellphone, over and over and over.”

Of all the succinct descriptions I have seen by American writers, as they are the only ones with the freedom to write with any meaningful substance, possibly the best was by Bawer: “UK: You’re Not Allowed to Talk about It. About What? Don’t Ask.”

However, another headline neatly summarizes what is happening to “Justice” in the land which gave us that very concept, the bedrock system of justice which prompted Sir Winston to remark: “….democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”

What would Sir Winston think today, upon picking up an article under the title “Britain Moves From Orwell to Kafka, Imprisoning Tommy Robinson and gagging media reports?”

Orwell to Kafka: a good shorthand summary of a true tragedy, in the land which gave us the Magna Carta, The Mother of Parliaments, and so much more.

Here Comes Da Judge: This One’s for You, “Special” Counsel Mueller

By Jim George

Member

Jim George

| May 10, 2018

31 COMMENTS

I was not in Law School long, faced with a frightening attrition rate after the first year, when I had to face the painful fact that as I was not the brightest bulb in the lamp the only way I was going to make it would have to be by dint of hard, grueling, constant work. Out of that grew my practice, in getting our cases ready for trial, of methodically re-reading and studying and then personally — not via Law Clerks or Paralegals like what my friends in Arkansas call “The Tall Building Lawyers” did — outlining each witness’ deposition so I would readily know their previous testimony.

While my Courtroom days are far behind me (insert smiley-face here) I once again turned to that approach in studying the truly stunning, and most welcome, remarks of Judge T.W. Ellis III Federal Court in Virginia recently in the Manafort-Gestapo matter being waged by “Special” Counsel Mueller and his team of savages-at-law. The reason I did this is that I found, upon my first reading, several noteworthy and rather surprising areas so I decided to go back through the Court’s observations in order to be able to share a lawyer’s analysis, hopefully to illuminate just a few areas either not noted by the media or, in too many cases, simply ignored by the narrative-driven segments of the press.

Here, for what it’s worth, is the result of my deeper study of this most significant hearing, in which the “Special” Counsel and his team of intimidators more than met their match in the person of The Hon. T.W. Ellis, III, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

1. Judge Ellis calls on the Prosecution first in a hearing on a Defense Motion, an unusual procedural turn.

The first thing the transcript reveals is the Court’s very obvious desire to understand how transactions which took place over 10 years before the President even announced his candidacy could possibly be related to the appointment of a Special Counsel after his election to look into matters, by definition in his appointment Order, having to do with his campaign for President. In his determination to understand, he did something very unusual in calling upon the Special Counsel team first — although it was the Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss the Indictment which was set for argument.

2. A Very Well Prepared and Thorough Judge

It was also apparent that this was one well-prepared Judge, always something attorneys appreciate and welcome, whether on the winning side or not. Judge Ellis had obviously read every jot and tittle of everything in the record, and he early on got right to the meat of the coconut:

MR. DREEBEN: The issue, I think, before you is whether Mr. Manafort can dismiss the indictment
based on his claim.
THE COURT: Yes. Now I asked you: Where am I wrong about that?
MR. DREEBEN: Your Honor, our investigatory scope does cover the activities that led to the
indictment in this case.
THE COURT: It covers bank fraud in 2005 and 2007?
MR. DREEBEN: Yes, because —
THE COURT: Tell me how.

The Court kept at it for some time, dealing with the constant evasion and deflection of the attorney for the Special Counsel, Michael Dreeben:

THE COURT: You’re running away from my question again. You know, I’m focused on the
indictment that is here.
MR. DREEBEN: Correct.
THE COURT: It involves facts and circumstances that go back as far as 2005 and come forward, Mr. Manafort’s loans from several banks that you all claim he submitted fraudulent statements — I’m asking you, and I’ve already established this investigation long predated the special prosecutor. And so what is really going on, it seems to me, is that this indictment is used as a means of exerting pressure
on the defendant to give you information that really is in your appointment, but it itself has nothing whatever to do with it.
MR. DREEBEN: Well, Your Honor, I understand the question. I’m trying to explain why I think that it does have to do with our investigatory scope, and I think there are a couple of premises that may help
illuminate what that investigatory scope is. The first one is that in examining an individual who was associated with the Trump campaign and did have Russian-affiliated connections, which Mr. Manafort did —
THE COURT: Are they Russian or Ukrainian?
MR. DREEBEN: Both. Mr. Manafort worked extensively in Ukraine, and he also has business connections and other connections to individuals associated with Russia.

3. Judge Ellis: “…they may not just sing. They may also compose.”

After more discussion in which it was established that these alleged crimes could not possibly be related to the reason the Special Counsel was appointed, the Court made a most interesting comment about a potential danger in “persuading” a Defendant to “flip” against another:

THE COURT: That’s right, but your argument says, Even though the investigation was really done by the Justice Department, handed to you, and then you’re now using it, as I indicated before, as a means of persuading Mr. Manafort to provide information. It’s vernacular by the way. I’ve been here a long time. The vernacular is to sing. That’s what prosecutors use, but what you’ve got to be careful of is they may not just sing. They may also compose. I can see a few veteran defense counsel here, and they have spent a good deal of time in this courtroom trying to persuade a jury that there wasn’t singing, there was composing going on.

In one of the best comments on the Court’s remarks, Professor Alan Dershowitz, a scholar of international renown in the field of Criminal Law and Procedure, had this to say about these observations in an article aptly titled “Federal judge rightly rebukes Mueller for questionable tactics”

This is what Judge T.S. Ellis III said at a hearing Friday: “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud … What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.

This tactic is as old as Adam turning against Eve. But, as the judge correctly pointed out, it risks the possibility that the squeezed witness will not only sing, he will compose. Here is what Ellis said about that: “This vernacular is to ‘sing,’ is what prosecutors use. What you got to be careful of is, they may not only sing, they may compose.

I have been using this “compose” metaphor for decades and I am gratified that a judge borrowed it to express an important civil liberties concern. Every experienced criminal lawyer has seen this phenomenon at work. I have seen it used by prosecutors who threaten wives, parents, siblings and, in one case, the innocent son of a potential witness who was about to graduate law school. Most judges, many of whom were former prosecutors, have also seen it. But few have the courage to expose it publicly, as Ellis has done.

Defenders of Mueller’s tactic argue that the threatened witnesses and their relatives are generally guilty of some crime, or else they wouldn’t be vulnerable to the prosecutor’s threats. This may be true, but the crimes they are threatened to be charged with are often highly technical, elastic charges that are brought only as leverage. They are dropped as soon as the witness cooperates.

This was precisely the point Ellis was making with regard to Manafort. A similar point could be made with regard to Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and perhaps to his personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Indeed, Flynn pleaded guilty to a highly questionable charge precisely because his son was threatened with prosecution.

4. Judge Ellis makes it clear what he thinks about “unfettered power” in America

THE COURT: What we don’t want in this country is we don’t want anyone with unfettered power. We don’t want federal judges with unfettered power. We don’t want elected officials with unfettered power. We don’t want anybody, including the president of the United States, nobody to have unfettered power. So it’s unlikely you’re going to persuade me that the special prosecutor has unlimited powers to do anything he or she wants.

5. A 10 Million Dollar Budget? The Judge Wants To Know.

THE COURT: By the way, your office was appointed, you say, in May 2017. Is there any requirement that you make reports periodically to the attorney general?
MR. DREEBEN: Yes.
THE COURT: Does that include financial? I think you were given $10 million to begin with.
MR. DREEBEN: We have proposed a budget and had a budget approved.
THE COURT: Of $10 million?
MR. DREEBEN: I believe that’s correct.
THE COURT: Have you spent that yet?
MR. DREEBEN: I am not in a position to talk about what our budget is.
THE COURT: Are you in a position to tell me when the investigation will be over?
MR. DREEBEN: I am not, Your Honor.

6. “I’ll be the Judge”

The Judge notes that 75 percent of the August 2 “supplemental” scope letter is blacked out and the Special Counsel attorney responds with the hubris and arrogance which has, unfortunately, come to typify all of their conduct:

MR. DREEBEN: There is in this record a memorandum that he has issued on August 2 that explains that crimes that arose from Mr. Manafort’s receipt of payments from Ukraine is within our jurisdiction and was at —
THE COURT: Yes. I have that right here, and I’m glad you raised it because 75 percent of it is
blocked out, redacted. Why don’t I have a full copy of it?
MR. DREEBEN: The only paragraphs that are pertinent to Mr. Manafort are the ones that are contained in this record.
THE COURT: Well, let me use a phrase that I’m fond of that I used to use with my children. I can’t use it with my wife, but I’ll be the judge of whether it relates to the others. I think you should give me under seal to be sure — and you can do it ex parte if you wish — under seal, ex parte a complete copy of the August 2, and I’ll be the judge of whether it has anything to do with Mr. Manafort.

7. The August 2 “supplemental” letter — Rosenstein’s attempt at retroactive correction of his mistake?

One of the first things Manafort’s attorney brought up, in what I thought was a very fine, if not excellent, argument, was that the so-called “supplemental” “scope letter” could not be allowed to retroactively cure what was obviously an error of the Most Righteous Deputy Attorney General, he who attacks any attempt by Congress to do what is its sworn duty of oversight of “his” Department, in expanding the scope of the jurisdiction of the Special Counsel to include matters in which Manafort had allegedly been involved, i.e., with Ukraine, not Russia:

THE COURT: Well, let me ask you: So what? In other words, is what you’re arguing that the use of that investigation in this case is contrary to the regulation that requires the acting attorney general here, Rosenstein, to be specific about what areas he wants investigated, and you’re saying he was too general. In this supplemental, doesn’t he remedy that in the August 2 letter?
MR. DOWNING: He can’t retroactively remedy it. The question is as of that date, what he did, does it give jurisdiction to the special counsel, or is it still so unrelated to the specific mandate as to be in violation of the regulations and the underlying statute? That’s the question. You, I think, early on got right to the point, which is this doesn’t really make any sense. This doesn’t look like it’s related.

Lest we fail to note, by the way, that this “supplemental” “oops” memo, came shortly after the Mueller goon squad of Jackboots conducted an early morning “raid” in which they broke the door down of Mr. and Mrs. Manafort’s home, with guns drawn, including on Mrs. Manafort still in her night gown, and one may be excused for a little cynicism in asking, in the best Columbo style, if this “supplemental” “oops” memo might have had just a teeny, weeny little bit to do with correcting that egregious show of totally out of control Gestapo tactics.

8. Judge Ellis has some pungent remarks about the “honor” of the Department’s representations to the American people. “C’mon man!”

THE COURT: Well, I understand your argument, but let me characterize it and see if you find it as satisfying as you appear to indicate that you think it is: We said this is what the investigation was about. But we’re not going to be bound by it, and we weren’t really telling the truth in that May 17 letter. I don’t watch pro football, but I used to enjoy the program that came beforehand where a bunch of players would get on and essentially make fun of everybody. But they would put on some ridiculous thing, and then they would all say in a chorus, Come on, man.
I loved that. I thought that was great. So your argument that we said this was the scope of the investigation but we really didn’t mean it because we weren’t required by any law or regulation to say what the scope was, I understand that argument, but it kind of invites, Come on, man. You said that was it.
But I think your argument goes on, and you say, Look, the May 17 letter isn’t the end of it. There is the August 2 letter, and in the August 2 letter, it’s expanded considerably because it then says — Russian government is number one, and then it goes on to the Ukrainian government which is never mentioned beforehand. Who knows what else, of course, went on?
In any event, I wanted you to be clear how I understand that particular argument.

9. Judge Ellis knows what a “Special Prosecutor” must do: indict someone for something!

You know, when a prosecutor is appointed, he’s appointed to get an indictment. He’s appointed to go after somebody. Somebody mentioned to me not long ago that this is a different scheme, that it’s not the scheme that was in effect in the ’60s and ’70s. That’s true, but I suspect the change in this process is not significant. It’s still the same. It’s still the same. You appoint a prosecutor, and that prosecutor goes after with the intent — whether it was Clinton or whoever else it was, Reagan or whoever, they go after him with the idea they’ve got to get an indictment. If they don’t, they’re very unhappy. I remember speaking to one special prosecutor, the Iran-Contra thing, and he was terribly disappointed. That’s what prosecutors do. I understand that.

10. Where is the “record memo” Rosenstein almost certainly put in the record to explain the Aug. 2 “oops” memo?

THE COURT: Do you have anything else to add?
MR. DOWNING: Just briefly, Your Honor. The one thing we would ask this Court to do before deciding the motion before the Court is to ask the government for what anybody who has had any experience with the Department of Justice knows exists, which is the written record. Where is the written record before Mr. Mueller was appointed? Where is the written record about the decision —
THE COURT: What do you mean by the written record?
MR. DOWNING: Mr. Rosenstein had a process he had to go through in order to determine that there was a conflict that gave rise to the appointment of special counsel, the specific matter that the special counsel was going to investigate in any additional jurisdiction he granted. It would all be written down somewhere. That’s how the Department of Justice works.
Mr. Rosenstein even conceded when he was testifying up on the Hill and he was confronted with the question of, When did you expand the jurisdiction to the special counsel? He couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the question, but he did say very tellingly, I will go back and check my records, and I will get back to you. So we would ask that this Court order the government to turn over those records so that the Court doesn’t have to guess what happened.

11. Judge Ellis is Mueller’s and Rosenstein’s worst nightmare

For creatures of the Swamp, there can be no more horrible nightmare than to run headlong into a Federal District Court who not only asks questions which so many Americans have been asking ever since this farce began, such as who gave you such unfettered power, etc., but who has the power to back up those questions with orders to produce entire, unredacted copies of pertinent documents, so, as he so trenchantly put it, “I’ll be the Judge” of whether it is pertinent or not.

12. Conclusion

Hallelujah!

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Conservative Conversation + Podcasts

Jim George

@jimgeorge

Hearsay 37 times over– and we are seriously discussing this?

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Jim George

@jimgeorge