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January 2015
Busy day
The Jay Dobyns story hit Fox News. The arrogance of Justice Department is staggering. A judge rules that their attorneys are liars and perpetrated a fraud on the court, and bans them from his courtroom, and they challenge this, arguing the Attorney General has a "right" to send anyone he wants to court? In that position, would you really want those people to be the ones to argue for you? On the other hand, I did work ten years in the government, in Washington, DC, and did learn that the arrogance of Justice is, well, pretty breathtaking.
This morning I argued a first amendment case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; it was one of three cases argued. Video for the argument is here. Here's some local coverage of it.
The case was one of three argued that day. After listening for half an hour, I still couldn't figure out what the first argument was about, except that it involved somebody selling software. The third argument I almost understood, and it was chiefly distinguished by an attorney making a mis-step (not knowing that the Supreme Court had recently ruled on an issue) and having the court light him up with a flamethrower. "If you don't know that, then you shouldn't be standing here arguing."
Judgment in Dobyns case
I realized I'd misread the court's docket: there were two judgments entered, one still sealed, the other redacted and unsealed. So here's the latter one. Pretty excoriating. Read the footnotes, too.
The court finds in Dobyns' favor, says that the BATF defense witnesses (who were all highly involved in Fast and Furious, BTW) lied on the stand, that their conduct toward Dobyns was "reprehensible." They tried to frame him for the arson of his house, knowing that this was false.
In fn. 25, the court notes that an ATF attorney blocked a reopening of the arson investigation, telling people that it would hurt this civil case (i.e., show that Dobyns was innocent of the arson), and that she covered that up from the court.
The final fn. explains why the judge ordered the judgment served on the Attorney General, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and the Office of Inspector General. He directs the clerk to call their attention to fn. 25, and says that he will put off disciplining the attorney until he sees what Justice is going to do to them.
Permalink · BATFE · Comments (2)
More on Jay Dobyns case
Got into the Court of Claims docket-- here's the ruling (pdf) in which the Court accuses the Department of Justice attorneys of having committed a fraud on the Court. That's the document which the Court recently ordered unsealed. The uppermost entry is sealed, but from the language -- "Until further order, the Clerk of Court shall not accept filings" -- suggests it's the order that the nine DoJ and ATF attorneys were banned from filing further pleadings in the case. It's a rather startling sanction -- get out of my court, NOW!
The judgment (the order ruling that Plaintiff won) is still sealed. But it must be pretty explosive. Here's the Court docket for that time period. Notice right after entering the judgment, the Court orders that copies of the judgment be served on the Attorney General, the DOJ Inspector General (responsibility to prevent fraud, waste and abuse) and the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (charged with investigating ethics violations). I've never seen a court order anything like that.
UPDATE: here's more, from NYC legal blogger Arkady Bukh.
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Unsealed court files in Jay Dobyn's case full of bombshells
He's the agent who infiltrated the Hell's Angels, had BATF thoroughly backstab him, and sued the agency. Much of the court files were sealed, but were recently unsealed. Here's the local news story on what the reporter found in the formerly sealed files:
The judge accused the government attorneys of perpetrating "a fraud on the court."
Dobyns' house was burned, and he argued it was arson, carried out by Hell's Angels, and successful because BATF had blown his cover and denied him protection. It turns out that a Justice Dept. attorney in his civil case told BATF not to reopen the investigation of the arson, lest its finding help Dobyns in his suit against BATF. That was concealed from the judge until the trial.
""An ATF agent who testified in this case may have been threatened by another witness during the trial." Justice Department attorneys ordered the agent not to report the threat to the court or he would face repercussions, [Judge] Allegra said."
When the judge entered his ruling, he ordered that the seven Justice attorneys who had handled the civil case were not to file any further documents in it -- essentially, they were banned from the court.
Dobyns' attorney complained that he had been under "extreme surveillance for the last sixty days, both fixed and moving..." and that his house and car had been broken into, although no property was taken.
A former BATF agent who testified for Dobyns attested that he, too, was followed after he left the attorney's office.
This is DOJ's Watergate... or worse. Attorneys and agency officials concealing evidence, secretly threatening witnesses, agency surveillance of attorneys and witnesses. All over a civil lawsuit -- can you imagine what they'd do over something big?
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NBC, David Gregory, and why he wasn't prosecuted
Legal Insurrection has the inside scoop. DC police referred the case for prosecution, noting that they'd told NBC that possessing the 30 round magazine would be illegal, and NBC went ahead anyway. The police even swore out an affidavit for an arrest warrant. But DC's "Attorney General" wrote "declined" on it and refused to proceed.
UPDATE: I checked a while back, and the DC statute of limitations on misdemeanors is three years, rather long. Not that Gregory is in any risk, mind you...
Thomas Cooley Law Review
Is out with three articles one of them mine, its theme being "why we fight."
An "I could care less" moment
Some guy named Bryant Gumbel, who hosts something called "Real Sports," announces he hates the NRA.
If I could just find a silver image of the hindquarters of a rat, I could keep it as a symbol of what I do not give. Speaking of which, he said it in Rolling Stone.
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As always, we're in the best of hands
The Supreme Court today handed down a ruling in Dept of Homeland Security v. MacLean, essentially overruling the firing of an Air Marshal.
The marshal had been briefed on a highjacking alert... and then told that, to save money, DHS was canceling all overnight missions (that is, flight of air marshals) from his airport for the remainder of the month (the idea was to save on marshals' hotel bills when assignments were overnight). Believing that was dangerous (and illegal, since statutes said that flights of the type involved should be a high priority since they would be prime targets), he leaked the story to a reporter. As a result, DHS reversed the policy. DHS traced the leak to him and fired him.
The Court holds that he was entitled to the statutory protection for whistle-blowers, and that the exemption for whistle blowers who leak info whose release is "specifically prohibited by law" mean prohibited by law, not by agency regulation.
The next big Fourth Amendment issue...
Police use of radar that can see into a house. In its present form, it can only report on whether someone is inside, and their distance, but as the article notes, more advanced forms are becoming available.
Theodore Roosevelt's suppressed rifle
From the NRA Museum. Very cool.
Why the CDC isn't funding antigun propaganda just now...
It's because it fears what Congress would do to its budget if it did.
Good. All the solid work in this field was done decades ago by criminologists. They've had a lot to say about the CDC's produce, and none of it is good. The medical studies being cranked out ignored basic principles of criminology, and did not deal with prior criminological studies.
I found several that concluded that gun density (percent of households with guns) were positively related to gun fatality rates. The logical problem: they estimated gun density by percent of suicides that involved firearms, and measured gun fatalities to include suicide (which far outnumber murders, and make up about 60% of the total). So their real conclusion was: where guns are more often used in suicide, guns are more often used in suicide. Well, yes.
Academia and enforced conformity
Prof. Brian Anse Patrick has thoughts and experiences there.
"Perhaps I was and remain naïve in expecting free and respectful discourse, but one of my chief intellectual interests is the informational sociology of what I have described elsewhere as the new American Gun Culture. It soon became apparent this was a forbidden topic. For my dissertation work I examined the role of negative media coverage in mobilizing NRA membership, discovering that the more negative coverage NRA received over a ten-year period, the more its membership increased. My dissertation findings became my first book. But in graduate seminars at UM a senior professor would make curdled milk expressions when my research topic came up. He would say things like, "I don't let my children even play with toy guns," obviously disgusted, as if this absolutely refuted the findings. When I was nearing the end, at the dissertation writing stage, Professor Curdled Milk attempted to divert away from me a crucial dissertation writing fellowship that had so far gone to all other members of my graduate program to help them finish in a timely fashion. I called him on this and got the fellowship, but he never looked at or talked to me again."
I've encountered much the same. Folks who talk of "improving diversity" but don't want to think of improving intellectual diversity (which you'd think would be the most important kind, for a teaching institution). My late friend Prof. Bill Bailey, probably the most brilliant man I have ever known, couldn't get articles published (and thus was denied tenure) because the academic editors would say they were "politically naive" (code for "insufficiently Marxist," and I mean that literally). He was also in the communications field, where you'd think a person could contribute thought without worrying whether it was Marxist, Hegelian, of faithful to Freud.
CA: antigun Kamala Harris bids to replace antigun Sen. Boxer
So reports Dave Workman. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Permalink · Politics · Comments (2)
Pa preemption lawsuit filed
Story here. It's filed by a chapter of US Law Shield against the City of Harrisburg. As I recall, the preemption law had problems under the State constitutional requirement that a bill have but one purpose.
Military Warriors Support Foundation
Yesterday I flew next to Lt. Gen. Leroy Sisco, the CEO of Military Warriors Support Foundation. They function to give homes to disabled veterans, in exchange for them accepting financial mentoring and other help (most of these are young folks). In 2014 they set up 200+ vets in houses. (They also set them up with apartments). I recall there is some controversy about Wounded Warrior Project being antigun... this is definitely a different group. Gen. Sisco, its CEO, was flying back from an NRA Board of Directors meeting, and showed me a picture of a custom 1911 that he would soon be receiving. I don't think we have to worry about these guys being anti!
The "Cromnibus" and gun laws
I've been reading that massive enactment, after a comment a few days ago pointed out that it might affect folks who had both a firearms permit and a medical marihuana card. So far I've found three areas relating to firearms.
On p. 58, the usual appropriation riders forbidding BATF to process petitions for relief from disabilities (i.e., the dis-ability to possess firearms. And, as usual, an exception for petitions filed by corporations! Also, no money can be spent to transfer BATFE's functions to other agencies or departments.
P. 78: no more "Operation Fast and Furious" type operations.
Pp. 82-83: restrictions on agencies limiting firearm exports to Canada. And one restricting denials of permits to import curios and relics.
Pp. 272-73: Fees collected by Interior for testing nontoxic shot may be kept and spent for that testing. (Normally an agency has to turn over all fees to the government's General Fund, and hope to get them back through appropriations).
Burial places of NRA Presidents
Webpage here. The most frequent resting place of those already listed is Arlington National Cemetery. Three of them earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. One, "Red Mike" Edson, received that plus two Navy Crosses (the second highest award for gallantry) and the Silver Star (the third highest award for gallantry).
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