If you guess drunk driving, you are not even half way there . . .
Continue reading “Can You Guess What This Person Was Charged With?”
It may seem like the nightmare for some over the secularization of England, but police are hunting down Jesus this week. It appears that a man dressed as Jesus for Halloween and attacked another man dressed as a “Jedi Knight” — leaving the second man with a broken ankle.
Continue reading “Laying Hands Upon The Messiah: Police Search For Jesus After Attack On Jedi”
A stretch in confinement is never fun. Whether it is a chain gang or breaking “big stones into little stones,” time in jail can be endless. . . . unless you are a Saudi prince or official. After a surprising crackdown on corruption and the arrest of princes and senior officials, the accused were ordered to be held in home confinement at the ultra-luxury Ritz Carlton in Riyadh. The accused will be guaranteed “three squares a day” on a prison menu at various top restaurants that includes “Squid ink, mixed pan-seared seafood” and “Ossobuco alla Milanese, saffron risotto, and pecorino foam” at hundreds of dollars a pop. While there is no prison yard with a weight set, there is the spa with the “Royal Groom of Arabia treatment.”
I will be speaking today at a conference at Yale as part of the annual William F. Buckley Jr. Program. The conference is on “The Constitution and the Courts: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Future of Freedom.” My specific panel addresses “Judicial Confirmations and Interpreting the Constitution: Borking, Activism, and Originalism.”
Speakers at the conference will include former U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte, Randy Barnett, Carlos Eire, E. Donald Elliott, David French, Mollie Hemingway, Michael McConnell, Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., Nicholas Rosenkranz, Peter Schuck, Ilya Shapiro, Jonathan Turley, Ed Whelan, and Adam White.
Below is my column in the Hill Newspaper on the highly controversial move of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to use Paul Manafort’s own lawyer as a witness against him. What is most striking about this move is that it was entirely unnecessary given the other evidence of alleged violations of federal law governing foreign agents. The case against Manafort is strong but the denial of attorney-client protections in the case should be a matter of great concern for all citizens — regardless of your view of the underlying merits of the Russian investigation.
The DNC and Clinton emails released by Wikileaks ultimately exposed a pattern of false statements by Democratic leaders particularly Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Schultz insisted that they were completely neutral in the primary despite every indication to the contrary. It was later revealed that Donna Brazile, who replaced Schultz, had first leaked questions for the debate with Sanders to Clinton and then lied about the incriminating emails later to the media (she suggested that they were fake). Now Brazile is making a come back and has been put back into a position of power at the DNC and ironically on the Rules Committee. She is also shopping a book. In the book, Brazile confirms that Hillary Clinton essentially bought the DNC by assuming responsibility for its crippling debt in exchange for control over the organization before the primary. In other words, as shown by the earlier emails and now by Brazile’s own account, the primary was indeed rigged against Bernie Sanders and anyone running against Clinton.
It has been something of a nightmarish week for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). First, former DNC head Donna Brazile revealed in her book that Hillary Clinton effectively bought the DNC before the primary by assuming its towering debts in exchange for control over critical parts of the organization. In addition to the emails showing the DNC favoring Clinton, the book seems to confirm that Clinton and her allies took over key financial decisions for the DNC before the primary. The deal would show that a variety of Democratic leaders, including most notably Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, openly misled the public in the primary. The disclosure in the book came right after the DNC moved to push out Sanders supporters and bring back Clinton allies into key positions last month.
While this scandal was brewing this week, an email surfaced showing that a DNC official told staff not to share employment opportunities with straight white men — a clear effort to discriminate in access to job opportunities. I (and many others) tried to get the DNC to confirm the email. The DNC has largely stonewalled all inquiries beyond a belated and ambiguous statement.
Below is my column in USA Today on the Rick Gates indictment and his potential as a witness for the prosecution in the Mueller investigation. The other obvious concern for the defense should be General Michael Flynn. It is curious that there was no indictment of Flynn given his similar alleged violations involving work as a foreign agent. Flynn would also be a natural target for prosecutors in seeking cooperative witnesses. With George Papadopoulos’ plea and cooperation, other witnesses will start to consider whether they will get a chair when the music stops. The President’s attack on Papadopoulos certainly sends a chilling message for those who might follow his lead, but these are heavy potential charges for potential targets.
Here is the column:
Below is my column in the Hill Newspaper on the Manafort indictment. Details continue to unfold in the Mueller investigation, particularly after the plea agreement with George Papadopoulos, 30. While Papadopoulos is clearly cooperating and could spell bad news for the the White House, the Manafort indictment was conspicuously removed from the Trump campaign. Mueller appears to have bagged a former high-ranking Trump campaign official, but the center of gravity of the criminal complaint remains far afield from the White House.
Here is the column:
Continue reading “THE MANAFORT INDICTMENT AND INVESTIGATING WHERE THE LIGHT IS”
George Papadopoulous is the ultimate man in the middle. He is sitting above between Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump during the campaign — around the time when Trump was touting the young oil and gas adviser as one of his key foreign affairs advisers. Now he is the man in the middle of President Trump and Robert Mueller and that is not an ideal place to be when the stakes could be the White House itself. Papadopoulous got a taste of his new life with a tweet from President Trump calling him a liar. It was a curious attack since Trump had previously labeled this “liar” as an “excellent” guy.
Continue reading “Liars Gotta Lie: Trump Blasts Former “Excellent” Adviser As “Lair””
Professor Joseph Mifsud has been described as a “Russian stooge,” a “KGB cutout,” and an intelligence handler. Not since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the character of Professor James Moriarty as the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes has an academic emerged as such a shadowy and sinister figure. Mifsud however has gone public to declare that his apparent love for one of the world’s most bloodsoaked authoritarian figures, Vladimir Putin, has left him with a clear and clean conscience. What is clear is that the Lond-based Mifsud had no qualms in serving as a conduit for dirt on Hillary Clinton and an effective asset of the Putin regime.Continue reading “Academic Or Asset? Professor Emerges From Shadows Of The Russian Investigation”
An official at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has posted a help wanted ad for its technology department that seeks the best candidates unless they are heterosexual white males. The alleged email from Data Services manager Madeleine Leader was express and open about her prejudice against straight white males but neither the DNC nor Leader felt obligated to respond to the controversy. The story was reported from the Daily Wire.
I have written to the DNC to try to get a comment but have not received a response. I will update with any response from the DNC.
The death of Marisa Harris, 22, proved to be a terrible tragedy matched only by its sheer irony. Harris was a Marymount University graduate student who committed her life to working with depressed teens. Her life was cut short when a depressed 12-year-old boy reportedly jumped from an interstate overpass and hit her car.
Here is our annual list of Halloween torts and crimes. Halloween of course remains a holiday seemingly designed for personal injury lawyers around the world and this year’s additions show why. Halloween has everything for a torts-filled holiday: battery, trespass, defamation, nuisance, product liability and more.
So, with no further ado, here is this year’s updated list of actual cases related to Halloween.
Continue reading “Spooky Torts: The 2017 List Of Halloween Litigation Horrors”
We have previously discussed how President Donald Trump has repeatedly been used by federal courts as the most important witness against his own policies due to his ongoing and ill-advised tweets. Indeed, in all three rounds of the immigration litigation, Trump’s tweets and comments were critically important to courts in ruling against his Administration, including the most recent injunction rulings of the third travel ban order. Now a judge in Washington has relied on Trump’s tweets to rule against him on his ban on transgender military personnel. Judge Colleen Kollar Kotelly of the US District Court for the District of Columbia in Jane Doe v. Donald Trump (pdf), found that the plaintiffs were “likely to succeed” on their claims that the ban is discriminatory. The court decision, again, features a Trump tweet.