A Legal System Corrupted

 I’ve always had great respect for our legal system. It’s as good as any of which I’m aware. No, I’m not naive. I’m fully aware that every institution depends on the competence and integrity of those involved and that means sometimes decisions are rendered that are wrong -- muddy thinking and sometimes corrupt judges; self-seeking prosecutors; incompetent counsel; bad and poorly written laws; false testimony by liars -- all contribute now and then to unjust resolutions. But in recent years, my faith has been even more badly shaken by continued and obvious corruption all the way down the line.

This week there are three instances that confirm my belief that something is seriously amiss in our justice system:

The FBI’s hidden and far-too-tardy acknowledgment that the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to murder the Republican House leadership in 2017 was a domestic terrorist.

The continued mistreatment (overcharging and continued solitary confinement) of several of the January 6 Capitol demonstrators compounded by the officials’ lies about it and the Department of Justice’s refusal to make available to the public the videos of that event.

And a claim by one of the three defendants in the George Floyd case that a key witness in the Chauvin trial had been improperly coerced to change his testimony and the prosecution (the Minnesota attorney general’s office) did nothing to inform the defense of the interactions the defendant asserts were coercive.

Read the whole thing.

The "Congressional Praetorian Guard"

 

Mark Steyn:

Likewise, the Capitol Police is not really a police force. It's a personal security guard for the Emirs of Incumbistan. That's why they're exempted from the freedom-of-information laws that apply to real constabularies: If Ashli Babbitt had been shot dead by an officer of the Dead Moose Junction Municipal Police Department, you'd know his name; but she was shot instead by a member of the Congressional Praetorian Guard, and thus you have no right in law to know his name. This is yet another example of the political class opting out of the legal regime they impose on everybody else.

The biggest lie of January 6th was that the "rioters" were somehow responsible for multiple deaths that day. Very belatedly, the DC coroner confirmed that, aside from Ashli Babbitt, everybody dead had died of natural causes - including Officer Sicknick, whom most Americans still believe was murdered by Trump supporters bludgeoning him with a non-existent fire extinguisher. The Capitol Police, in both their formal statements and their leaks to media chums, helped advance that lie.

Judicial Watch Issues Statement on Appeals Court Decision Blocking Hillary Clinton Testimony

 

Today I made the following statement about the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit regarding the request of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s and her former Chief of Staff, Chery Mills to avoid testifying under oath about Clinton’s emails. The court granted Clinton’s request to avoid testimony but denied Mills’.

Today’s extraordinary Appeals Court decision protecting Hillary Clinton from having to obey a court order requiring her to testify about her emails is contrary to longstanding precedent and undermines the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The opinion’s deviation from a long line of earlier mandamus cases creates the appearance of favoritism towards Clinton and undermines the public’s confidence in the fair administration of justice. One need only contrast the DC Circuit’s agony over granting General Flynn mandamus relief with the unprecedented mandamus relief so easily given to Clinton.

 

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton hid her government emails, then stole them when she left office. Her lawyers unilaterally determined what would be returned later. The State Department knew this occurred but tried to game a federal trial court into shutting down Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit before Clinton’s scheme became public. In response, the trial court rightly ordered Clinton to testify about the reasons for her actions and their impact on the public’s right to know. That this was too much for the DC Circuit is a miscarriage of justice.

 

In addition to today’s political decision, the Justice and State Departments’ continuing efforts to avoid getting to the bottom of Clinton’s email misconduct are a scandal. President Trump should hold Secretary Pompeo and Attorney General Barr accountable for their failures of leadership.

In my opinion U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman is an idiot and hates the little people smeared by the Washington Post

 If a person as private and unknown as Nick Sandmann can be libeled and slandered in this fashion without any recourse to the courts, then none of us is safe from this abuse at the hands of the media with the collusion of judges who are more interested in currying favor with the right people than administering justice.

In a 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman noted that the Post never mentioned Sandmann by name in its initial coverage of the incident, referring only to groups of “hat wearing teens.” Bertelsman added that “the words used contain no reflection upon any particular individual” and thus could not be constituted as defamation. The judge also ruled that the newspaper used language that was “loose, figurative,” and “rhetorical hyperbole” which is protected by the First Amendment.

This is insane. It is now legal for a major newspaper to single out a teenager and label him a racist and generate an online mob to make death threats and to cause incalculable to the kid’s future because this incident will be on the internet forever, visible to college admissions staff and human relations staff, none of whom are the sharpest tools in the shed and could fail to find the resolution of the issue.

The Sandmann family said they would be asking the appellate court to review the trial court’s decision on appeal.

“I believe fighting for justice for my son and family is of vital national importance,” said Ted Sandmann, Nicholas’ father. “If what was done to Nicholas is not legally actionable, then no one is safe.”

“The law must protect innocent minors targeted by journalists publishing click-bait sensationalized news,” Todd McMurtry, co-counsel for the Sandmann family, said in the statement. “This is especially true in the current hyper-partisan political environment.”

Bingo. What the Washington Post did was wrong and they did it for the political hit against Trump and for the f***ing clicks. What this shows more than anything else is how we are now subjects and not citizens. The institutions of government and the large corporations are allies. They protect one another against the powerless and we’re expected to nod at their wisdom and move on. If a person as private and unknown as Nick Sandmann can be libeled and slandered in this fashion without any recourse to the courts, then none of us is safe from this abuse at the hands of the media with the collusion of judges who are more interested in currying favor with the right people than administering justice.

This proves conclusively that the judiciary is partisan, biased and evil.   And Judge William Bertelsman is exhibit "A" for what's wrong and needs to be impeached.   These are members of the ruling class, protecting each other.

Clinton Projection Syndrome

The reason that foreign oligarchs are no longer donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and that Bill Clinton is not being offered $500,000 for speaking appearances in Moscow, is simply because Hillary Clinton is not secretary of state. She is no longer in a public position to hector her colleagues into approving pro-Russian commercial deals, such as the one that gave Russian interests access to North American uranium....

For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.

For Clinton now to project that the president should be indicted suggests she is worried about her own potential indictment. And she is rightly concerned that for the first time in 40 years, neither she nor her husband is serving in government or running for some office, and therefore could be held accountable.

The Courts Have Shown Too Much Deference to Unaccountable Government Officials

The case in question, Jessop v. City of Fresno, concerns the alleged theft of $276,000 by City of Fresno police officers while carrying out a raid in search of illegal gambling machines. Pursuant to a warrant authorizing the officers to seize any such machines, as well as any money connected to the sale or control of them, the officers officially seized approximately $50,000.

In reality, according to appellants Micah Jessop and Brittan Ashjian, the officers stole an additional $276,000 in cash and rare coins for themselves. Jessop and Ashjian sued the officers for violating their right not to face unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment and their right to due process of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. They hoped to find justice, but they were in for a rude awakening.

Both the trial court and the three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled that, because “appellants did not have a clearly established Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from the theft of property seized pursuant to a warrant, the City Officers are entitled to qualified immunity.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, according to the Ninth Circuit, you don’t have a “clearly established” right to not have police steal your property while executing a search warrant (though you may be able to pursue a claim against the offending officers under state tort law, and the state is presumably still free to prosecute them).

Unfortunately, the injustice suffered by Micah Jessop and Brittan Ashjian in this case is a symptom of a larger disease: the reflexive, blind deference most courts show to government officials even when they are clearly in the wrong.

Victor Davis Hanson: "An Epidemic of Erasures, Redactions, Omissions, and Perjuries"

Imagine the following: The IRS sends you, John Q. Citizen, a letter alleging you have not complied with U.S. tax law. In the next paragraph, the tax agency then informs you that it needs a series of personal and business documents. Indeed, it will be sending agents out to discuss your dilemma and collect the necessary records.

But when the IRS agents arrive, you explain to them that you cannot find about 50 percent of the documents requested, and have no idea whether they even exist. You sigh that both hard copies of pertinent information have unfortunately disappeared and hard drives were mysteriously lost.

You nonchalantly add that you smashed your phone, tablet, and computer with a hammer. You volunteer that, of those documents you do have, you had to cut out, blacken or render unreadable about 30 percent of the contents. After all, you have judged that the redacted material either pertains to superfluous and personal matters such as weddings and yoga, or is of such a sensitive nature that its release would endanger your company or business or perhaps even the country at large.

You also keep silent that you have a number of pertinent documents locked up in a safe hidden in your attic unknown to the IRS. Let them find it, you muse. And when the agents question your unilateral decisions over hours of interrogatories, you remark to them on 245 occasions that you have no memory of your acts—or you simply do not have an answer for them.

In some instances, you state things that are not true, cannot be true by any stretch of the imagination, and contradict things you have said in the past—and you make it clear that you don’t think much of such inconsistencies. When pressed with contradictory evidence, you nonchalantly reply that you gave the “least untruthful” answer.

What would happen to you, a typical American citizen, should you follow this current Washington model of erasing, redacting, omitting, forgetting, and lying?

Of course, you are a citizen and so must obey the law. Therefore, you might well find yourself either broke, out on bail, in jail, or mired in endless litigation. But since 2016 we have seen how many high government officials involved in any number of such investigations, were not so much citizens as hyper-citizens above the law, who felt they were not subject to audit. And they were largely right in their assumptions.

Read the whole thing.

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It's Not Illegal

Andrew Weissman breaks the law and stomps on the broken pieces.

LEGAL ANALYSIS: Why Mueller’s Seizure of Transition Emails Likely Violated the Law

According to published reports, Special Counsel Robert Mueller engaged in a mass seizure of all emails of the Trump transition team without even a warrant or a subpoena. In my opinion, a mass seizure – as is alleged here against Mueller – cannot conform to either Fourth Amendment standards or attorney-client privilege protections. The questions boils down to this: was there a reason for the individuals communicating by email, including with their lawyers, to believe their communications were private or privileged? Or, did the individuals forever waive or “implicitly consent” to any future search or seizure of their emails?...

The Mueller search runs afoul of many of these established court precedents and Fourth Amendment privacy and privilege principles. First, it appears Mueller searched and seized every email, without any kind of categorical or keyword search. This is exactly the kind of search the Supreme Court made clear was not allowed under the Fourth Amendment. This means Mueller can only prevail if he didn’t seize a single email of a single individual that the individual could have any expectation of either personal privacy or attorney client privilege in.

The primary excuses proffered so far for the broad seizure is the faulty assumption the use of a government server waived all privacy and all privilege of every email ever made over that server. As identified above, that has never been the law. The security and efficacy of government-owned servers for transition employees are not intended as a trap for the unwary to forever forfeit their privacy and privilege rights in their communications. Indeed, doing so would undermine use of such communications, and invite Hillary Clinton type bathroom closet email servers for everybody.

Mueller’s problem here is these were not even government employee emails; they were the emails of private individuals stored temporarily on a government server, and publicly declared to be “private materials” as a matter of custom, practice and the public policy of the National Archives. As Professor Jonathan Turley identifies, the National Archives recognize transition email records “are not federal or presidential records, but considered private materials.”

The only “notice” evidence otherwise given publicly is that an agreement between the GSA and the transition team identified the possibility of technical and maintenance audits, with some claiming this as a “waiver” of all privacy and privilege rights in the emails forever. Here again, the law does not support such a claim; even cases with much more specific notices and much less invasive searches, found privacy and privilege objections persisted. So far, a striking lack of arguments and evidence has been mounted for claiming every single email lacked any privacy or privilege.

It appears to me, Mueller deliberately skipped the court, the grand jury, and the government-imposed limits on investigative inquiries into worker conduct under Supreme Court precedent; he might have done so because he wanted a tactical edge, and was walling to ignore the Fourth Amendment restrictions on him to do so. Mueller may come to regret his choice.

Hillary above the law