Category Archives: legal news

legal news, national news, political news

Judiciary becomes another political arm

I guess it was naïve of many of us to believe the federal judiciary would be above the partisan politics that stymies the executive and legislative branches of government.

I always thought the founders created a judicial system that would be immune from politics. Those silly men.

Gorsuch gets key endorsements

Neil Gorsuch stands before the U.S. Senate awaiting confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two Democratic senators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp said today they would vote to confirm the judge nominated by Donald J. Trump to the nation’s highest court.

Senate Republicans need eight Democrats to join them to get to the magic number of 60 votes to confirm Gorsuch.

I have admitted this already, but Gorsuch is not my choice to become a high court justice. He is, though, the pick of the president, who has the constitutional authority to make these selections.

My hope would be that Democrats wouldn’t filibuster this nomination. They should save their ammo for when it really counts, such as when a liberal justice leaves the court. Gorsuch is a conservative who would replace the late Antonin Scalia, the iconic justice who died more than a year ago.

I also believe that this is a “stolen” seat that in reality belongs to Merrick Garland, who was selected by former President Barack Obama to succeed Scalia. Senate Republicans played pure politics by refusing to give Garland a hearing and a vote. That is to their everlasting shame.

That, I’m afraid to acknowledge, is how the game is played these days.

Judges have become political animals, just like the men and women who get to appoint and decide whether to confirm them to judicial posts. That’s too bad for the system.

legal news, State news

Texas AG handed surprising setback

Ken Paxton wanted to be tried by a jury of his peers in his home county in Texas.

State lawyers who are prosecuting him on charges of securities fraud said the Texas attorney general’s legal team had poisoned the jury pool and asked the judge for a change of venue.

Today, the judge agreed and moved the case out of Collin County; he also ordered a delay in the trial, I presume to give the principals a chance to find a suitable venue to try the attorney general.

This is a bit of a surprise to me.

It’s because a Collin County grand jury indicted Paxton on securities charges stemming from an allegation that he misled investors involved in a company with which Paxton was involved before he was elected attorney general in 2014.

The way I figured at the time, if a grand jury comprising peers of the attorney general would indict him, then surely a trial judge could find a suitable pool of trial jurors to hear the case and then decide on his guilt or innocence.

Paxton, you see, represented Collin County in the Texas Legislature before running for AG three years ago.

Paxton has suffered a stinging defeat to be sure. He now is going to stand before jurors who are ostensibly neutral in this case, who don’t know the AG personally or who’ve never had the chance to vote for him while he served in the Legislature.

Then again, he is a statewide elected official. Which makes me wonder: Where can one find a jury pool that is totally neutral?

legal news

Didn’t they enact an anti-nepotism law?

President-elect John F. Kennedy called the media together shortly after his election in 1960 to announce his choice for attorney general.

It would be his brother, Robert, who never had practiced law privately. He had served as general counsel to a Senate committee chaired by the infamous Joseph McCarthy and later worked with his brother in the Senate.

JFK joked that RFK needed a bit of experience before he would become a successful lawyer, so he named him AG.

The appointment caused some consternation at the time, even though RFK would go on to become a highly effective attorney general.

In 1967, Congress enacted a law that banned such nepotism at the highest levels of government.

Then came Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States. What does he do? He places his daughter Ivanka into a West Wing office, where she now has an actual White House job. Oh, and her husband, Jared Kushner, also now works as a senior policy adviser.

Neither of them has government experience. Neither has any political seasoning.

Trumps take over the White House

But hey, what’s the problem? Ivanka won’t take a salary, which I guess serves as Dad’s dodge in giving her a government job.

However, didn’t Congress have enough fear about nepotism 50 years ago to approve a law to prohibit it?

I don’t believe that concern has lessened.

legal news, national news

What gives with Chairman Nunes?

What is it with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes?

He is up to his armpits with information pertaining to Donald Trump’s possible involvement with Russian hackers and their effort to swing the election in his favor. Nunes also is privy to the circumstances surrounding the president’s phony allegation that Barack Obama “ordered” a wiretap of Trump’s offices in New York City.

He then meets with the president — in the White House! — to tell him about “incidental” intelligence that might have been gathered.

Now we hear that he had a meeting prior to going to the White House with someone, supposedly the source of that “incidental” intelligence.

According to NBC News: “‘Chairman Nunes met with his source at the White House grounds in order to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the information provided by the source,’ said his spokesman, Jack Langer.”

What did they discuss?

Hmmm. I presume you’ll recall the time former President Clinton boarded an airplane in Phoenix to talk to then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whose department was investigating Hillary Clinton’s e-mail matter. Republicans raised all kinds of hell about the appearance of impropriety. They just didn’t know for certain what the ex-president and the AG discussed and they all but accused President Clinton of trying to get Lynch to back off her department’s probe.

Lynch and Clinton said they talked about all manner of things — except that issue.

So, I believe it’s reasonable to ask: What did Chairman Nunes discuss at the White House — and with whom did he discuss it?

I am now believing that Devin Nunes should not be chairing the House committee that’s assigned to investigate these increasingly frightening matters involving the president of the United States.

legal news, media news

So long, Judge Napolitano

Readers of this blog know that I am not likely to offer many compliments to the Fox News Channel.

I am about to break tradition and declare that Fox has done the right thing by taking a loudmouth “legal analyst” off the air for blabbing something utterly irresponsible.

Andrew Napolitano has been yanked off the air indefinitely by Fox for declaring on the air that a British intelligence agency was complicit in wiretapping Donald J. Trump’s campaign office in New York City. The agency, according to the former judge, was working at the behest of former President Obama; Napolitano, therefore, was giving credence to the scurrilous charge leveled by Trump that Obama had ordered the wiretap at Trump Tower.

FBI Director James Comey debunked Trump’s tweet today in a congressional hearing.

Fox gives judge the boot.

Meanwhile, we have this (so-called) judge keeping this lie alive by suggesting that the Brits played a role in an event that — according to Comey — did not occur.

I hope Fox boots this clown off the air for keeps, even though he most likely would end up somewhere else spouting such reckless right-wing bile.

legal news

Democrats sharpening their long knives

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats are making it plain: They don’t want Judge Neil Gorsuch to take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Oh, my.

What these folks do not seem to understand — or choose to ignore — is this simple point: Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation to the nation’s highest court will not tilt the court’s ideological balance one tiny bit from where it was when the late Antonin Scalia served on it.

Not one bit. Not one iota.

Scalia, who died a year ago, was a conservative jurist, and an iconic one at that. Gorsuch is a conservative jurist. Yet we hear Democrats, such as Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, declare his intention to all he can to block Gorsuch’s confirmation; that includes a “filibuster,” Blumenthal said.

Give me a break, man!

This fight is unwinnable. Gorsuch will need 60 votes in the Senate to be confirmed; if it appears he’ll fall short of the magic number, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, will change the rules to allow a simple majority to confirm Judge Gorsuch.

So, what’s the big deal? Gorsuch at worst will mirror Justice Scalia’s view of the U.S. Constitution.

Democrats need to sharpen their long knives — and then put them back in their scabbards and save them for when it really matters.

Such as when a liberal justice leaves the court. That’s when the court’s ideological balance becomes the defining issue.

Not this time.

legal news, national news, political news

Collusion or not? Let’s wait for the FBI to do its job

FBI Director James Comey today dropped two more live grenades into our laps.

The first one is that the FBI can find no evidence, zero, that President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of Donald J. Trump’s campaign office in Trump Tower. He cannot locate any indication that any order was given by a federal judge; he cannot find evidence of any sort of surveillance.

So …

The suggestion that the president of the United States essentially defamed his predecessor — when he tweeted the allegation of wiretapping — now has been given some credence.

The bigger grenade might be the second disclosure that Comey made to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee.

It is that the FBI is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Comey said FBI policy usually doesn’t allow comment on active investigations. The director made an exception in this case. The public interest is too great to ignore, he said.

What in the world does that mean?

I believe that if the FBI determines there was collusion, that the Trump campaign worked actively with Russian spooks/goons/intelligence officers to torpedo the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton … well, I think we have a certifiable impeachable offense on our hands.

To be fair, there hasn’t been a shred of evidence presented yet to suggest any such collusion. There’s been a lot of chatter, gossip and what might be called charitably “circumstantial evidence.” We cannot go on circumstance, however. We need incontrovertible proof, man!

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Comey told committee members that this probe will require lots of time to complete. It’s complicated and detailed, he said.

Take all the time you need, Mr. FBI Director. I think we can wait for a detailed answer, no matter your conclusion.

legal news, national news, political news

Rep. Schiff: We’re at the ‘bottom’ of wiretap story

Adam Schiff strikes me as a thoughtful young man.

He’s the ranking Democrat on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. He and the Republican chairman, Deven Nunes, also of California, have become a sort of tag-team that seeks to get Donald Trump to produce proof of a dangerous allegation he has made about former President Obama.

Today, Schiff said on “Meet the Press” that Congress appears to have reached “the bottom” of the president’s assertion — that Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump’s offices in New York City.

There is no “bottom,” Schiff said. No proof. No evidence. No substantiation. The president, said the congressman, has now introduced a dangerous new standard for recklessness that could have profound impact on any business the United States seeks to conduct at home or abroad.

Indeed, how are our allies going to react to anything that comes from the president’s Twitter account? He’s already dragged the British intelligence network into this tawdry matter, asserting that the Brits had a hand in the alleged wiretap.

He stood with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and sought to lure her into the ongoing matter, suggesting that Obama had wiretapped Merkel and other European allies.

The president is not backing off. He’s offering not a hint of proof. Nor is he offering the scent of contrition.

What in the world is this man — the president of the United States — going to do next? Who else is he going to slander?

We might find out plenty this week when FBI Director James Comey walks onto Capitol Hill to testify about what he knows and whether there was any authorization given to do what Trump has accused the former president of doing.

I would think the FBI boss would know.

If not, well, Rep. Schiff is right. We’ve found the bottom of this story. And as the late Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, Calif.: We’ve found “there is no there there.”

legal news

‘Ideological balance’ not a SCOTUS issue

Reuters News Agency has declared in a headline that Neil Gorsuch’s selection to the U.S. Supreme Court means the court’s “ideological balance” is at stake.

Excuse me for a moment while I clear my throat.

Cough, cough …

Um, no. It isn’t.

Judge Gorsuch has been tapped by Donald J. Trump to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia. As my dear old Dad would say, “It’s six to one, half-dozen to the other.”

Gorsuch is a conservative. So was Scalia. And yet, progressive thinkers are all a-flutter  because Gorsuch, they say, according to Reuters, “that he is a pro-business, social conservative insufficiently independent of the president.”

Do they think Scalia would have been any different had he not died before Trump took office? Do they think Gorsuch is going to somehow become so persuasive in his opinions and writings that he is going to bring some progressive court justices to his side of an argument?

Let’s get a grip here.

Scalia was an iconic figure among judicial conservatives. It’s not yet clear whether Gorsuch will attain that kind of status if he gets confirmed to the Supreme Court.

My advice to Senate Democrats and their progressive allies in the judicial community is this: Save your ammunition for the day one of the high court’s liberal justices takes a hike.

Although I agree fully that Trump never should have been given the chance to replace Scalia. That task should have been fulfilled by his presidential predecessor, Barack Obama, who nominated an equally qualified jurist, Merrick Garland, to take his place on the high court. Senate Republicans played bald-faced politics, declaring that Obama didn’t have the right to appoint someone to the court; that task, they argued, belonged to the next president.

That’s utter horse manure. The GOP’s tactic worked. Trump got elected and now he has appointed a judicial conservative to the court — just as he pledged he would do.

As one who stands foursquare behind presidential prerogative on issues such as this, I recognize that elections have consequences.

One “consequence” of the 2016 election is that Trump has chosen a “well-qualified” jurist — in the words of the American Bar Association — to become the next Supreme Court justice. There is no “ideological balance” to discuss with this selection.

What about the next one? And what if it involves the departure of a liberal justice?

Well, that’s a different matter altogether.

legal news

Big week awaits the president

Donald “Smart Person” Trump is going to have a big week.

Part of it might bode well for the president. The rest of it, well, possibly not so well.

* Neil Gorsuch takes the stand this coming week as the Senate Judiciary Committee grills him on why he should take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gorsuch is Trump’s choice to fill the seat vacated by the sudden death of conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia — more than a year ago! The seat should have been filled by President Obama, who picked Merrick Garland, but the Republicans who control the Senate stonewalled the president and blocked Garland’s confirmation.

Now we have Gorsuch. He’s a solid jurist. He’s a bit too conservative for my taste, but hey, Trump’s the president, not me. He gets to pick someone for the high court. The American Bar Association has declared Gorsuch to be “well qualified.”

* Then we get to hear from FBI Director James Comey, who’s going to have a thing or three to say about wiretapping and whether Trump has the goods on whether President Obama ordered the bugging of Trump’s offices in New York.

Comey has hinted broadly that Trump has fabricated the assertion that Obama committed a felony, which to my way of thinking is a defamatory accusation. Senators will get to grill Comey heavily on all of that.

It’s ironic in the extreme that Comey would turn on Trump, given the manner in which he torpedoed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign 11 days prior to Election Day with that letter to Congress announcing he was taking a fresh look at those “damn e-mails” that dogged Hillary’s campaign from its outset. Trump was ecstatic about the disclosure of the letter and just couldn’t say enough positive things about the FBI director.

I wonder what he’s going to say if and/or when Comey debunks this ridiculous notion that President Obama bugged Trump Tower.

Let’s all stay tuned. Get the popcorn ready.