ESG, VALIC AND AIG STOCKS ARE HOW BIDEN, PELOSI, HARRIS AND FEINSTEIN FAMILIES GET THEIR BRIBES!
…at the same time Joe Biden just issued an “Executive Order” to try to protect the ESG stock profits owned by his family and his campaign financiers. What a bold-faced act of corruption that was! According to federal investigators and forensic accounting experts, we are now informed that:
A. White House Staff, federal judges and Congress hold ESG, Valic and AIG stocks that conduit for lobbysts and millionaire directives.
B. Case histories are provided, herein, from among many hundreds of thousands of examples, proving that public officials make decisions based on bias, cronyism, favoratism and pre-arranged bribes.
C. Goldman Sachs, McKinsey Consulting, Deloitte, Silicon Valley Bank and a group of insider consultants in the San Francisco Bay area and Washington, DC sell illicit STOCK BRIBERY CONDUITS to White House Staff, U.S. Senators, members of Congress and Department of Energy staff in an organized “enterprise”.
D. The Valic and AIG stock market accounts are arranged for politicians to provide a beneficiary profiteering route, for those politicians, and their family members, in exchange for favorable public policy decisions.
E. Political and economic cronyism bias are the controlling criteria for most judicial and public poliy decisions since 2001.
“ESG”, “VALIC” and “AIG” are code for “Insider Payola DNC Stock Bribes” that exist to benefit White House financiers.
The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment stressed that the due process and equal protection clauses created a right to fair and impartial government acts, hearings and trials. Courts have repeatedly held that an impartial judge or public official is an indispensable element of those rights. The facts, though, show both bias and prejudice in fact and in appearance, and a lack of legal qualification and temperament to preside in modern policy cases. Each alone is sufficient to require many politicians or judge’s disqualification and recusal.
- Due process demands a fair and impartial hearing by a neutral and detached public official or magistrate. Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103 (1975); Ward v. Village of Monroevill, 409 U.S. 57, 62 (1972). A right to an impartial judge is so basic to due process that courts can never treat its infraction as a harmless error. Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 23 (1967). “…the tribunals of the country shall not only be impartial in the controversies submitted to them but shall give assurance that they are impartial…” Berger v. the United States, 255 U.S. 22, 35-6 (1921).
- Rule 1.2 states “Promoting Confidence in the Judiciary – A judge shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality* of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.”
- Public officials have a duty to promote confidence in the judiciary and in Congress.
- The citizens do not feel that the present Congress or White House will act independently, with integrity and impartiality regarding the present matters of public policy because those officials transact bribes via the stock market.
- Actual improprieties include violations of law, court rules or provisions of the Codes of ethics. The test for appearance of impropriety is whether the conduct would create in reasonable minds and a perception that the public officials violated this Code or engaged in other conduct that reflects adversely on the government’s honesty, impartiality, temperament, or fitness to serve the public.
- Rule 1.3 provides the standard. Rule 1.3 states that “Avoiding Abuse of the Prestige of Judicial Office – A judge shall not abuse the prestige of judicial office to advance the personal or economic interests* of the judge or others or allow others to do so.” This is mirrored in other government regulations.
- The current Congress and White House, as public offices, has an economic interest in all matters via stock market ownerships. It would be unfair and unreasonable if the current Congress and White House would be allowed to preside over public matters while owning stock market assets that fill their family wallets with unjust gain and the filth of corrupt gain.
WhereasWhite House executives, U.S. Senators, and Government agency executives colludedwith Silicon Valley oligarchs, operating, together, as an “Enterprise”,to coordinate insider stock market ‘Stimulus Scams’that involved funding blockades, blacklists, contracted tabloid media assassinations and RICO Racketeeringlaw violations, Anti-trustlaw violations, IP law violations,lobbying law violations and various civil and criminal acts that harmed domestic citizens andDemocracy. This case matter is well known to Courts, media, federal law enforcement and innearly a million news articles. It is not possible for this Judge, who knows many of the participants in this case, to not have seen theconflict of interest herein, at first blush.
Asimple cross-comparison of the ICIJ, FINCEN, Interpol, SEC, GAO forensic accounting and XKEYSCORE, et al, databases proves theillicit financial interactions between Defendants. Such a check can be technically accomplished within 60 minutes, or less, according tofederal IT experts.
Almostevery single investor of Elon Musk is also the primary financier and beneficiary of the politicians, and their Congressional shenanigans,that used taxpayer money and resources to give Musk’s companies all that free money. For example, Dianne Feinstein’s family run the HRservice (Herb Newman), the construction company, the railroads, the building leases (CBRE), the China funds (Mart Bailey, Steve Westly,Steve Spinner, et al) and swap staff members for Tesla and Solyndra. Feinstein and Pelosi blocked funding for all Tesla competitors forthe same State and Federal cash and tax waivers and for the NUMMI factory. The California and Washington, DC politicians, personally,made billions off insider trading, pump-and-dumps and payola. Felonies? You Bet! Valic, who the Judge invests massively, with, runspart of the Tesla and Elon Musk cash.
Reporters and family members of California politicians, including U.S. Senators, who Plaintiffs has a personal relationship with and knows the staff of, have contacted Plaintiffs. Based on current investigative information, federal finance reports on the Judge’s sources of income from stock market investments, speakers fees and other sources and social media postings, photographs and social photography archives from Getty, Drew Altizer and related Washington, DC ‘high-society’ photographers there appears t be conflicts of interest between public officials and this case. Senators Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Harry Reid (Deceased, but records acquired), White House staff, and other related parties, appear to have given orders to the Judge’s office to “Stop this case no matter what..” stating that “This will cut off the stock market income of 90% of the DNC..”. As, for example, Chief Judge Elaine D Kaplan is a renown spokesperson and speaker for the DNC and this case has the potential to cause the arrest, indictment, censure, Congressional charges of Contempt, and other hardships for “90% of the DNC”, there is a reasonable assumption, that any person of average intelligence could make, that this Judge is overly conflicted in this matter.
Asone of the founders of the “Anti-corruption Party’, there are also basic conflicts of interest between the “Anti-corruptionParty’s” : “NO Public Official, or their family, should own stock market assets because that is how bribes are paid” stanceand the DNC’s stance, per Nancy Pelosi, that: “All public officials and judges should get stock market perks”. The Plaintiffs is an active proponent of the Expansion, FBI enforcementand application of the federal STOCK ACT, which most of the opposition are in violation of.
Facebook, Google, Alphabet, Tesla Motors, SpaceX and other Big Tech companies as well as the Senators mentioned, co-partnered in the government criminal endeavors mentioned in this case. Reporters have stated to Plaintiffs that financial disclosures indicate that those who own direct, or mutual funds, together, in this entities are Defendants and ‘enemies’ of the Plaintiffs. Plaintiffs and advisors request that the Judge Swear, Warrant and Certify that they, or their partner own no stocks or interests in any “Big Tech” companies and that the points in the Co-Defendant Senator’s financial disclosures (Per https://www.openthebooks.com, https://sunlightfoundation.com/, and Senate Investigators) do not cross over in the Judge’s financedisclosure in any non-coincidence manner.
Youcan see the reports from Congress, Federal Agencies and Investigators verifying these assertions at: https://nationalnewsnetwork.net/public/
The federally documented reports, below, prove that the number oneway to bribe Judges and public officials is via Dark Money stock market transactions and covert Mutual Funds ‘packing’.
Such conflicts cannot even have a hint of possibility in a casethis important to every American citizen.
How can you ever trust a single judge to rule fairly on a caseinvolving famous politicians and notorious millionaires that the Judge knows, parties with, co-invests with and gets political perksfrom?
There is a pandemic of crooked, bribed, judges in America as thefollowing evidence shows. We must not give leverage to ANY possibility that a Judge could be influenced.
TheJudge has confirmed, herself, extensive investments in: Valic Large Cap Investment Fund, Valic Mid Cap Investment, Fund, ValicSmall Cap Investment Fund, Valic Global & Internat’l Equity Fund, Valic Specialty Fund, Valic Fixed Income whichare investment fronts for Google, Alphabet, Tesla and the other corrupt companies who are DOE/Defendants in this case and are underfederal criminal investigations and those companies are regulated by the Senators and White House officials charged in these crimes. TheUnited States Government has sued ‘Valic’, over and over, for a variety of misdeeds and dirty financial tricks. ‘Valic’ recentlyhad to change their name in order to try to ward off more bad press, just like crooked ‘Facebook’ changed it’s name to ‘Meta’ in order to try to ward off more bad press from Facebook being outed as a corruption empire. Thenew name of Valic is “AIG Retirement Serices”.
Readerswill recall that in the 2007-2008 “stimulus scam” a certain contingent of Congress people insisted that a company called AIGshould get handed a massive load of free taxpayer cash. As we all know by now, insurance giant AIG sparked national outrage bypaying more than $165 million in executive bonuses after receiving a $170 billion taxpayer bailout in the last “Stimulus Scam”. Whatfewer people know is that AIG gave more than $9 million in campaign contributions to Congress and the Congress People that lobbied FORthe AIG give-away were the people who AIG gave political resources to. Valic/AIG is suspected to be a money-laundering Dark Money routebetween Big Tech and members of Congress.
Plaintiffs provided information and research to Robert Simon, the Producer for CBS News 60 Minutes TV investigative show. 60Minutes produced segments deeply relevant to this case including: Congress Trading On Insider Information; The Lobbyists Playbook;The Cleantech Crash; The Data Brokers and others. The pertinent sections of those news items can be viewed in the film: HowPolitical Corruption Works located at https://nationalnewsnetwork.net/NEWS_VIDEO_COVERAGE/
Robert (Bob) Simon was killed in a suspiciouscar crash. Bystanders described someone leaning into the car, at the crash, and sprayingsomething.
This information was publicly available to The Judge, for years,prior to this case and was publicly discussed among the Judges peers and associates, to this day:
Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on inside information – butshould our elected officials be able to use that information to pad their own pockets? As Steve Kroft, Bob Simon’s peer at 60 Minutes,reports, members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stockmarket trades in the very industries they regulate. For now, the practice is perfectly legal, but some say it’s time for the law tochange.
Even if a Judge or Senator denies that they could be influenced bypersonal favorites or by stocks that all of their friends own, Psychology proves that assertion to be virtually impossible to bebelieved. Judges, or public officials would not deny that they subconsciously assert influence in a school to make sure their childhas the best treatment and that kids that bully their child get the most punishment. Why should anyone think a Judge or Senator would notconsciously, or subconsciously, assert influence over something that buys them mansions, trips to the Virgin Islands and sexy parties?
Judges and Senators in this case are either financed by, friends, with, sleeping with, dating the staff of, holding stock market assets in, promised a revolving door job or government service contracts from, partying with, personal friends with, photographed at private events with, exchanging emails with, business associates of or directed by; our business adversaries, or the Senators and politicians that those business adversaries pay campaign finances to, or supply political digital search manipulation services to. Criminal U.S. Senators coordinated and profited in these schemes. Their own family members, who Plaintiffs, and his peers know personally, have now supplied evidence against them.
In one published report whereSteve Kroft was the correspondent, withIra Rosen and Gabrielle Schonder as producers,it was shown that, for national elections, public officials, including congressmenand senators are expending much of their time and their energy raising the millions of dollars in campaign funds they’ll need justto hold onto a job that pays $174,000 a year.
Few of them are doing it for the salary and all of them will saythey are doing it to serve the public. But there are other benefits: Power, prestige, and the opportunity to become a Washington insiderwith access to information and connections that no one else has, in an environment of privilege where rules that govern the rest of thecountry, don’t always apply to them.
Most former congressmen and senators manage to leave Washington -if they ever leave Washington – with more money in their pockets than they had when they arrived, and as you are about to see, the biggestchallenge is often avoiding temptation. Judges lives are set according to which Senators, and other public officials are inoffice, Judges have even more incentive to rig political decisions because most of them own mansions they can’t pay for with thespeaker fees and stock perks their office provides.
Renown anti-corruption investigative reporter: Peter Schweizer,was asked to comment:
Peter Schweizer: “This is a venture opportunity. This is anopportunity to leverage your position in public service and use that position to enrich yourself, your friends, and your family.”
Peter Schweizer is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, aconservative think tank at Stanford University. A year ago he began working on a book about soft corruption in Washington with a team ofeight student researchers, who reviewed financial disclosure records. It became a jumping off point for our own story, and we haveindependently verified the material we’ve used.
Schweizer says he wanted to know why some congressmen and senatorsmanaged to accumulate significant wealth beyond their salaries, and proved particularly adept at buying and selling stocks.
Schweizer: “There are all sorts of forms of ‘honest’grafts that congressmen engage in that allow them to become very, very wealthy. So it’s not illegal, but I think it’s highly unethical,I think it’s highly offensive, and wrong.”
Steve Kroft: “What do you mean honest graft?”
Schweizer: “For example insider trading on the stock market.If you are a member of Congress, those laws are deemed not to apply.”
Kroft: “So congressman get a pass on insider trading?”
Schweizer: “They do. The fact is, if you sit on a healthcarecommittee and you know that Medicare, for example, is– is considering not reimbursing for a certain drug that’s market movinginformation. And if you can trade stock on– off of that information and do so legally, that’s a great profit making opportunity. And thatsort of behavior goes on.”
Kroft: “Why does Congress get a pass on this?”
Schweizer: “It’s really the way the rules have been defined.And the people who make the rules are the political class in Washington. And they’ve conveniently written them in such a way thatthey don’t apply to themselves.”
The buying and selling of stock by corporate insiders who haveaccess to non-public information that could affect the stock price can be a criminal offense, just ask hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnamwho recently got 11 years in prison for doing it. But, congressional lawmakers have no corporate responsibilities and have long beenconsidered exempt from insider trading laws, even though they have daily access to non-public information and plenty of opportunities totrade on it.
Schweizer: “We know that during the health care debate peoplewere trading health care stocks. We know that during the financial crisis of 2008 they were getting out of the market before the rest ofAmerica really knew what was going on.”
In mid September 2008 with the Dow Jones Industrial average stillabove ten thousand, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were holding closed door briefings withcongressional leaders, and privately warning them that a global financial meltdown could occur within a few days. One of thoseattending was Alabama Representative Spencer Bachus, then the ranking Republican member on the House Financial Services Committee and nowits chairman.
Schweizer: “These meetings were so sensitive– that theywould actually confiscate cell phones and Blackberries going into those meetings. What we know is that those meetings were held one dayand literally the next day Congressman Bachus would engage in buying stock options based on apocalyptic briefings he had the day beforefrom the Fed chairman and treasury secretary. I mean, talk about a stock tip.”
While Congressman Bachus was publicly trying to keep the economyfrom cratering, he was privately betting that it would, buying option funds that would go up in value if the market went down. He wouldmake a variety of trades and profited at a time when most Americans were losing their shirts.
Congressman Bachus declined to talk to us, so we went to hisoffice and ran into his Press Secretary Tim Johnson.
Kroft: “Look we’re not alleging that Congressman Bachus hasviolated any laws. All…the only thing we’re interested in talking to him is about his trades. “
Tim Johnson: “Ok…Ok that’s a fair enough request.”
What we got was a statement from Congressman Bachus’ office thathe never trades on non-public information, or financial services stock. However, his financial disclosure forms seem to indicateotherwise. Bachus made money trading General Electric stock during the crisis, and a third of GE’s business is in financial services.
During the healthcare debate of 2009, members of Congress weretrading health care stocks, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, who led the opposition against the so-called public option,government funded insurance that would compete with private companies. Just days before the provision was finally killed off,Boehner bought health insurance stocks, all of which went up. Now speaker of the House, Congressman Boehner also declined to beinterviewed, so we tracked him down at his weekly press conference.
Kroft: “You made a number of trades going back to the healthcare debate. You bought some insurance stock. Did you make those trades based on non-public information? “
John Boehner: “I have not made any decisions on day-to-daytrading activities in my account. And haven’t for years. I don’t– I do not do it, haven’t done it and wouldn’t do it.”
Later Boehner’s spokesman told us that the health care trades weremade by the speaker’s financial adviser, who he only consults with about once a year.
Peter Schweizer: “Weneed to find out whether they’re part of a blind trust or not.”
It turns out you CAN pay bribes,though, through Mutual Funds AND Blind Trusts.
Peter Schweizer thinks the timing is suspicious, and believescongressional leaders should have their stock funds in blind trusts.
Schweizer: “Whether it’s uh– $15,000 or $150,000, theprinciple in my mind is that it’s simply wrong and it shouldn’t take place.”
But there is a long history of self-dealing in Washington. And itdoesn’t always involve stock trades.
Congressmen and senators also seem to have a special knack forland and real estate deals. When Illinois Congressman Dennis Hastert became speaker of the House in 1999, he was worth a few hundredthousand dollars. He left the job eight years later a multi-millionaire.
Jan Strasma: “The road that Hastert wants to build will gothrough these farm fields right here.”
In 2005, Speaker Hastert got a $207 million federal earmark tobuild the Prairie Parkway through these cornfields near his home. What Jan Strasma and his neighbors didn’t know was that Hastert hadalso bought some land adjacent to where the highway is supposed to go.
Strasma: “…And five months after this earmark went throughhe sold that land and made a bundle of money.”
Kroft: “How much?”
Strasma: “Two million dollars.”
Kroft: “What do you think of it?”
Strasma: “It stinks.”
We stopped by the former speaker’s farm, to ask him about the landdeal, but he was off in Washington where he now works as a lobbyist. His office told us that property values in the area began toappreciate even before the earmark and that the Hastert land was several miles from the nearest exit.
But the same good fortune befell former New Hampshire Senator JuddGregg, who helped steer nearly $70 million dollars in government funds towards redeveloping this defunct Air Force base, which he andhis brother both had a commercial interest in. Gregg has said that he violated no congressional rules.
It’s but one more example of good things happening to powerfulmembers of Congress. Another is the access to initial public stock offerings, the opportunity to buy a new stock at insider prices justas it goes on the market. They can be incredibly lucrative and hard to get.
Schweizer: “If you were a senator, Steve, and I gave you$10,000 cash, one or both of us is probably gonna go to jail. But if I’m a corporate executive and you’re a senator, and I give you IPOshares in stock and over the course of one day that stock nets you $100,000, that’s completely legal.”
Plaintiffs had a social relationship with the staff of former HouseSpeaker Nancy Pelosi. She and her husband have participated in at least eight IPOs. One of those came in 2008, from Visa, just as atroublesome piece of legislation that would have hurt credit card companies, began making its way through the House. Undisturbed by apotential conflict of interest the Pelosis purchased 5,000 shares of Visa at the initial price of $44 dollars. Two days later it wastrading at $64. The credit card legislation never made it to the floor of the House.
Congresswoman Pelosi also declined our request for an interview,but agreed to call on us if we attended a news conference.
Kroft: “Madam Leader, I wanted to ask you why you and yourhusband back in March of 2008 accepted and participated in a very large IPO deal from Visa at a time there was major legislationaffecting the credit card companies making its way through the– through the House.”
Nancy Pelosi: “But–”
Kroft: “And did you consider that to be a conflict ofinterest?”
Pelosi: “The– y—uh–, errr– I– I don’tknow what your point is of your question. Is there some point that you want to make with that?”
Kroft: “Well, err…uhm…I– I– I guess whatI’m asking is do you think it’s all right for a speaker to accept a very preferential, favorable stock deal?”
Pelosi: “Well, we didn’t”, she lied
Kroft: “You participated in the IPO. And at the time you werespeaker of the House. You don’t think it was a conflict of interest or had the appearance–”
Pelosi: “No, it was not–”
Kroft: “–of a conflict of interest?”
Pelosi: “–it doesn’t– it only has appearance if you decidethat you’re going to have– elaborate on a false premise. But it– it– it’s not true and that’s that.”
Kroft: “I don’t understand what part’s not true.”
Pelosi: “Yes sir. That– that I would act upon aninvestment.”
Congresswoman Pelosi pointed out that the tough credit cardlegislation eventually passed, but it was two years later and was initiated in the Senate.
Many believe that, even though they are older than the hills,Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein never retire because they are they key conduits to the West Coast controlled Big Tech stock marketpayola bribes. The “Enterprise” won’t allow them to retire because it would break the whole Big Tech stock market bribery cycle.While it is unlikely that they are “drinking baby blood from Chinese labor camp work prison babies to stay alive so long”,as activists have claimed, these two are not allowed to retire by the “Enterprise” that profits from the Big Tech stock market bribes.
Pelosi: “I will hold my record in terms of fighting thecredit card companies as speaker of the House or as a member of Congress up against anyone.”
Corporate executives, members of the executive branch and allfederal judges are subject to strict conflict of interest rules. But not the people who write the laws.
Pelosi and Feinstein put laws in the operation of America, andDemocracy, that specifically exclude THEM from the law…only them! Everyone knows that it is bad to rape sheep on the front steps ofCity Hall. Imagine how you would feel if you found out that fine print had been quietly added to The Constitution that said “Nocitizen may rape sheep in public….Except Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein!”. That is essentially what happened with the lawaround public officials and stock market payola! When Google, Elon Musk and Facebook are paying Senators off via the stock market,justice has fallen off a cliff!
Schweizer: “If you are a member of Congress and you sit onthe defense committee, you are free to trade defense stock as much as you want to if you’re on the Senate banking committee you can tradebank stock as much as you want and that regularly goes on– in– in all these committees.”
Brian Baird: “There should only be one thing in your mindwhen you’re drafting legislation, ‘Is this good for the United States of America?’ That’s it. If you’re startingto say to yourself ‘how’s this going to affect my investments,’ you’ve got– you’ve got a mixed agenda and a mixed purpose for beingthere.”
Brian Baird is a former congressman from Washington state whoserved six terms in the house before retiring last year. He spent half of those 12 years trying to get his colleagues to prohibitinsider trading in Congress and establish some rules governing conflicts of interest.
Baird: “One line in a bill in Congress can be worth millionsand millions of dollars. There was one night, we had a late, late night caucus and you could kind of tell how a vote was going to gothe next day. I literally walked home and I thought, ‘Man, if you– if you went online and made– some significant trades, you could makea lot of money on this.’ You– you could just see it. You could see the potential here.”
So in 2004, Baird and Congresswoman Louise Slaughter introducedthe Stock Act which would make it illegal for members of Congress to trade stocks on non-public information and require them to reporttheir stock trades every 90 days instead of once a year.
Kroft: “How far did you get with this?”
Baird: “We didn’t get anywhere. Just flat died. Wentnowhere.”
Kroft: “How many cosponsors did you get?”
Baird: “I think we got six.”
Kroft: “Six doesn’t sound like a very big amount.”
Baird: “It’s not, Steve. You– you could have– ‘NationalCherry Pie Week’ and get 100 cosponsors.”
When Baird finally managed to get a congressional hearing on theStock Act, almost no one showed up. It’s reintroduced every session, but is buried so deep in the Capitol we had trouble findingcongressmen who had even heard of it.
Kroft: “Have you ever heard of the Stock Act?”
Steve Palazzo: “The what?”
Kroft: “The Stock Act. Do you know anything about it?”
Congressman: “No.”
Kroft: “Congressman. Congressman. Congressman.”
Congressman Quayle: “I haven’t heard about that one yet.”
Kroft: “Have you ever heard of something called the StockAct?”
Congressman Watt: “No.”
Male voice: “I’ve heard about, but not. I can’t say it’s anissue I’ve spent a lot of time on.”
Male voice: “I would have no problem with that.”
Kroft: “Okay.”
Male voice: “But then again I am a big fan of, you know,instant disclosure on almost everything.”
Kroft: “They’re looking for co-sponsors.”
Male voice: “And yet, I’ve never heard of it.”
Baird: “When you have a bill like this that makes so muchsense and you can’t get the co-sponsorships, you can’t get the leadership to move it, it gets tremendously frustrating. Set asidethat it’s the right thing to do, it’s good politics. People want their Congress to function well. It still baffles me.”
But what baffles Baird even more is that the situation has gottenworse. In the past few years a whole new totally unregulated, $100 million dollar industry has grown up in Washington called politicalintelligence. It employs former congressmen and former staffers to scour the halls of the Capitol gathering valuable non-publicinformation then selling it to hedge funds and traders on Wall Street who can trade on it.
Baird: “Now if you’re a political intel guy. And you get thatinformation. Long before it’s public. Long before somebody wakes up the next morning and reads or watches the television or whatever,you’ve got it. And you can make real– real-time trades before anybody else.”
Baird says “its taken what would be a criminal enterpriseanyplace else in the country and turned it into a profitable business model.”
Baird: “The town is all about people saying– what do youknow that I don’t know. This is the currency of Washington, D.C. And it’s that kind of informational currency that translates into realcurrency. Maybe it’s over drinks maybe somebody picks up a phone. And says you know just to let you know it’s in the bill. Trades happen.Can’t trace ’em. If you can trace ’em, it’s not illegal. It’s a pretty great system. You feel like an idiot to not take advantage ofit.” Public figures trading and manipulating the stock market are an “Enterprise”operating a Racketeering scam at the expense of citizens like Plaintiffs.
The fact remains: Judges and public officials get paidpolitical bribes, in the modern world, not with manila envelopes under a table at a bar but with COVERT DARK MONEY STOCK MARKETASSETS!
Recentlythe Supreme Court’s Roberts said“Judges Must be Ethical” afterOver 100 U.S. Judges Were CaughtViolating Ethics Rules( https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-courts-roberts-says-judges-must-be-ethical-after-over-100-caught-violating-rule_4188383.html )
Thechief justice of the Supreme Court in his year-end report called on federal judges to work hard to adhere to ethics rules afterover 100 were caught violating a rule that requires judges recuse in any matter in which they have a personal financial interest.
ChiefJustice John Roberts cited (pdf) a Wall Street Journal investigation that uncovered violations by131 federal judges across 685 cases between 2010 and 2018.
TheGeorge W. Bush nominee portrayed the number of violations as small, noting that they represented less than three-hundredths of onepercent of the 2.5 million civil cases filed in the district courts in years studied.
“Letme be crystal clear: the Judiciary takes this matter seriously. We expect judges to adhere to the highest standards, and those judgesviolated an ethics rule. But I do want to put these lapses in context,” he said.
Thewording drew a response by James Grimaldi, one of the Journal investigators, who said his team investigated tens of thousands ofcases, not 2.5 million.
“TheJournal’s initial tally was an undercount; it was impossible because of the peculiarities of the judiciary’sfinancial-disclosure process and incomplete information available on case litigants,” Grimaldi wrote on Twitter, adding that Roberts’comment “is technically accurate, the suggestion that we could review millions of cases is misleading.”
TheJournal said Friday that subsequent reporting raised the rally to at least 950 violations.
Robertsalso pointed out that most of the judges involved only had one or two identified violations, painting those instances as likely“unintentional oversights” while singling out judges who had more violations or said they didn’t know of the ethics rule. Each judgeis schooled on ethical duties, Roberts noted.
“Thiscontext is not excuse. We are duty-bound to strive for 100% compliance because public trust is essential, not incidental, to ourfunction. Individually, judges must be scrupulously attentive to both the letter and spirit of our rules, as most are. Collectively,our ethics training programs need to be more rigorous. That means more classtime, webinars, and consultations. But it also requiresgreater attention to promoting a culture of compliance, even when busy dockets keep judicial calendars full,” he added.
Robertsproposed utilizing technology to check whether stocks held by judges and litigants would raise questions, floating the possibility ofobtaining fresh funding from Congress for the purpose.
Healso said that top federal legal experts are already working on addressing the problems, including enhancing the ethics training andrefresher courses.
Robertspens a year-end report annually. Last year, he praised how federal courts performed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As an example: Many U.S.Judges Can Be Taken Out Of Office By Exposing Their Sex Crimes!
Ahuge number of Judges have been charged with sex crimes because “Judges think they are untouchable, but they are not!!”
-NY Judge Bernstein Under Fire as All DNC Judges Re-Examine Their Pasts.
-US judge steps down after accusations of sexual misconduct
Aprominent U.S. appeals court judge announced his retirement Monday days after women alleged he subjected them to inappropriate sexualconduct or comments.
JudgeAlex Kozinski of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a statement that a battle over the accusations would not be good forthe judiciary. He said he’ll step down, effective immediately.
TheWashington Post reported last week that at least 15 women made allegations against Kozinski that go back decades. The allegationsinclude inappropriate touching and lewd comments.
Kozinskisaid while speaking in a “candid way” with male and female law clerks, “I may not have been mindful enough of the specialchallenges and pressures that women face in the workplace,” the statement said. “It grieves me to learn that I caused any of myclerks to feel uncomfortable; this was never my intent. For this I sincerely apologize.”
LeahLitman, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told the Post that the judge talked about having just had sex and pinchedher side and leg at a restaurant the night before they appeared together on a panel at her school in July.
ChristineMiller, a retired U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge, said Kozinski grabbed her breasts during a car ride in 1986 after a legal communityfunction in the Baltimore area. She said it came after she declined his offer to go to a motel and have sex.
Alawyer who was not identified said Kozinski approached her when she was alone at a legal event in Los Angeles in 2008 and kissed her onthe lips and gave her a bear hug with no warning.
Thenewspaper said the woman’s husband confirmed the incident and said the couple didn’t think they could do anything because of the judge’sposition.
ThePost reported last week that six former clerks or more junior staff members accused Kozinski of inappropriate behavior, including showingthem pornography. Kozinski, 67, was chief judge of the 9th Circuit, the largest federal appeals court circuit in the country, from 2007to 2014. He is known for his irreverent opinions, and his clerks often win prestigious clerkships at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The9th Circuit has opened a misconduct inquiry that was transferred Friday to the Judicial Council of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court ofAppeals in New York.
Kozinski’sretirement leaves five seats open on the 9th Circuit, with two more judges already having announced their intention to retire next year.That gives President Donald Trump potentially seven seats to fill on the largest and most liberal appeals court in the country.
Evenif all those judgeships are filled, however, Democratic appointees still will maintain a healthy majority on the court with 17 of the 29seats.
Robed in secrecy: How judgesaccused of misconduct and bribes dodge public scrutiny
Thousandsof complaints are filed against judges every year, but very few result in discipline. Ethics experts say the time for states totransform the judiciary is now. Judges in political cases are very often bribed by U.S. Senators who are involved in the case. Briberyincludes stock ownership.
Somestates investigating judges in judicial conduct complaints do not ever identify them publicly or the judges are later admonishedprivately.
Erik Ortiz reports that when litigants angeredMichael F. McGuire, the county judge in New York state’s Catskills region, he might hit them with “judicial contempt” and order themhandcuffed, or in extreme cases, jailed for 30 days.
McGuire,elected in Sullivan County in 2011, did it on several occasions over the years without warning: to a man who asked the judge to recusehimself because the man said McGuire knew his son; to a mother who had an outburst when she felt ridiculed by the judge; and to agrandmother who contested turning over her grandson to his allegedly abusive father.
Thatwasn’t his only concerning behavior, according to an ethics complaint in 2018 filed by a state watchdog agency, which accused McGuire of berating court staff; making “undignified”comments, such as suggesting people in his court would date a “drug dealer” or a “slut”; presiding over cases in which hisimpartiality could be called into question; and representing family members and friends in personal cases. The watchdog, the New YorkState Commission on Judicial Conduct, said he “lacked candor” during its investigation.
Forhis pattern of “serious” judicial lapses, a state appeals court agreed last year that McGuire — who earned a salary of $210,161 a year — be removed from the bench, the harshest sanction a judge canface. The public, however, had only learned about the ethics charges months before, in March 2020, more than a year and a half afterMcGuire was first served with the ethics complaint and when the appeals court said he had been notified of the commission’sunanimous recommendation to have him punished.
McGuireended up resigning in May 2020, but with another job already lined up — as Sullivan County’s head attorney, a position that he currently holds.
McGuiredid not respond to requests for comment. In hisresignation letter last year, he wrote that “I am quite proud of our achievements” while on the bench and “deeply regret theissues that brought me before this Court.”
JosephLaPiana, who came before McGuire in a family court case last year and is unable to see his 1-year-old daughter as a result, said that“judges work for the public — we should know if they are being investigated for any misconduct.”
Butif McGuire’s misconduct violations had happened in a neighboring state like New Jersey, Pennsylvania or Vermont, the public would havebeen alerted earlier — at the outset of the filing of ethics charges.
WATCH: Judge yells at prosecutor over Kyle Rittenhouse cross-examination
Thatdifference in when the public is allowed to know about allegations against judges can differ broadly among states, with some allowingjudges to go months or years before even credible complaints are in the open. With more than100 million cases filed in local and state courts every year, and judges exerting near-absolute power in deciding whowins custody of children towho can get married towhether a person goes to jail, the public’s ability to scrutinize judicial conduct is crucial for transparency’s sake, anddeserves as much attention as recent calls for policing and prosecutorial overhauls, judicial ethics experts argue.
Judicialmisconduct “undermines confidence in our justice system,” said Susan Saab Fortney, the director of the Program for the Advancementof Legal Ethics at Texas A&M University School of Law.
Misconductfindings are a rare outcome in the judicial complaint process. Legal ethics experts say the minuscule share of judges punished every yearisn’t necessarily indicative that all is well in the judiciary, but suggests a lack of accountability.
Eachstate has aform of a judicial conduct commission to which the public can file misconduct allegations against judges. Generally, it’s up tothat body, which can be made up of fellow judges, lawyers and laypeople, to determine if a complaint violates a state’scode of judicial conduct — guidelines for judges to act with independence, integrity and impartiality. A judge’s conduct insideof a courtroom as well as outside,including on social media, can be subject to discipline.
Judges misusing social media spark calls for reform
Areview by NBC News of various states’ judicial conduct commission data from 2016 to 2020 indicates thousands of complaints are filedacross the United States annually, but about 1 percent of them result in judges being publicly disciplined or stepping down after aninvestigation is opened.
Whilethese commissions maintain that most complaints are frivolous — for instance, a litigant is merely disgruntled over how a judge ruled —for a state to typically record zero public sanctions against judges sounds incredulous, said Robert Tembeckjian, the administrator andcounsel of the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct.
“It’shighly unlikely that any state would have a judiciary that is so above reproach that year after year no one gets disciplined,”Tembeckjian said. “Even in places like New York, where we have very sophisticated judicial education programs, there are numerous casesevery year.”
NewYork’s commission, which oversees about 3,500 state and local judges, has received upward of 2,000 complaints annually in the pastfive years, and each year, the state has sanctioned a judge or had a resignation for misconduct in one to two dozen cases. Other largestates, such as California and Texas, sanction multiple judges every year.
Thelevel of transparency surrounding misconduct cases varies by state. Some that have reported no or few judges publicly sanctioned inrecent years, such as Iowa, Mississippi,South Dakota andWyoming, don’t make cases public until the court or panel that decides discipline gets involved. And in three states — Delaware,Hawaii and North Carolina — misconduct cases are only made public in the final stage of an investigation when a judge is to bepunished.
Inabout two-thirds of states, however, the public can learn much sooner, such as when a judicial conduct commission first charges ajudge with misconduct or when the judge responds to the allegations.
Stateswhere information is kept under wraps argue that confidentiality is necessary for as long as possible to protect judges should theyultimately be cleared of wrongdoing. But it turns out that in some cases, depending on the type of transgression, judges can beprivately admonished by other judges or sent warning letters, meant to jolt the offending judge into correcting their behavior.
NBCNews found many states opt to reprimand judges privately more often than publicly. For instance, Pennsylvania filed formal chargesagainst judges 17 times from 2016 to 2020, but issued private letters of warning or reprimand 172 times in that period.
AsweepingReuters analysis in 2020 on judicial misconduct that examined thousands of discipline cases over a dozen years determined 9 out of10 sanctioned judges were allowed to return to the bench.
“Wehave to recognize that oftentimes we have judges judging judges, and they’re ultimately in control and judging their own,” CharlesGardner Geyh, an Indiana University law professor who studies judicial conduct, said.
Related: ‘One disaster after another’: How a family court judge failedfamilies
Tembeckjianbelieves that states, including New York, should be as transparent as possible once there’s sufficient evidence to back up allegationsagainst a judge, similar to how grand jury investigations are made public when an indictment is unsealed.
Tembeckjiansaid he’d like to see his judicial conduct commission have the authority to suspend a judge during an investigation, like otherstates’ commissions can do, and continue investigating a case even after a judge resigns. Such changes, however, would require theapproval of the New York Legislature.
Ultimately,ensuring that judges are being rightfully held accountable is essential since guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court allows them tobe largely immune from lawsuits for acts done in their official capacity, Tembeckjian said.
“Ifthere’s no sense that you can get a fair shake by going into a court of law and have confidence that the judge is going to beneutral and fair and apply the law honestly and responsibly, it’s ultimately going to lead to anarchy,” he added. “Then, why notjust settle our disputes in the streets rather than a court of law?”
Effortsare underway to enact meaningful judicial reforms at various levels. On Dec. 1, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passedbipartisan legislation aimed at requiring federal judges to report their financial holdings in response to aWall Street Journal investigation that found 131 federal judges had broken the law and violated judicial ethics by hearing cases inwhich they had a financial interest. A similar bipartisan Senate bill is pending.
Onthe state side, the Supreme Court of Louisiana last month expanded its rules against errant judges when it tacked financial burdens onto the disciplinary process. Not only can judges be made topay for the cost of investigations if discipline is recommended, but they can be ordered to repay the cost of installing a replacementjudge. And if a judge decides to retire or resign before a formal disciplinary process concludes, they can still be required to payinvestigatory costs.
Related: What’s a judge’s moral standard? Allegations of racism, sexismspotlight judicial misconduct
Thestate’s chief justice, John Weimer, said in a statement that the updated rules ensure that even retiring judges are “heldaccountable” and Louisiana taxpayers aren’t on the hook for costs, which in recent investigations have been about $2,000 to$3,000.
Abouta dozen other states, includingArizona, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Massachusetts,New Hampshire and South Dakota, have similar cost recovery rules or impose fines on judges, according to the Center for Judicial Ethics at the NationalCenter for State Courts, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve the judiciary.
MarniBryson, a judge in Palm Beach County, Florida, faces a public reprimand, an unpaid suspension for 10 days and a fine of $37,500after the state judicial conduct commission said she was excessively absent from her duties over a four-year period,records show.
“Iknew what I did was wrong … I have a whole year to reflect and contemplate my actions.” saida suspended ohio judge
InNew Hampshire, former Circuit Court Judge Julie Introcaso was ordered to pay her investigation’s cost, almost $75,000. Introcaso pleaded guilty last month to two counts of tampering with public records and submitting false statements in connection to a childcustody case in which she was friends with a lawyer.
JanineGeske, a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice in the 1990s, said she’d like to see her state implement similar penalties, which might“encourage judges to take responsibility early on” if their behavioral violations are tethered to their finances.
Anotheroption, Geyh said, is to make the payout of a judge’s pension contractually contingent on good behavior.
Ethicsexperts say citizen judicial watchdog programs known as court watchers could be effective, but it’s also incumbent upon other courtroom staff and officials who witness a judge’s poor conduct,particularly lawyers, to speak up. They may be reticent to file complaints, however, because they’re afraid of retaliation if ajudge learns they were behind the allegations, Fortney, the legal ethics expert at Texas A&M, said.
“Alarge percentage of states require that the complaining party be identified,” she added. “This clearly chills reporting.”
Butthere have been cases where lawyers andcourt staff aren’t afraid to stand up to a jurist.
Ohio’shighest court last month suspended a 19-year municipal court judge,Mark Repp, for one year without pay after prosecutors in Seneca County relayed how he had ordered a 20-year-old woman who was sittingquietly in the back of his courtroom to watch her boyfriend’s hearing get drug tested. When she refused, he sentenced her to 10days in jail.
Aninvestigation found that the woman was forced to take pregnancy tests and undergo full-body scans for contraband, although none wasdetected. And while Repp assumed the woman was under the influence of narcotics, there was no evidence indicating she was, and she hadnever been charged with drug-related offenses.
Ina recent interview, Repp told NBC News that he has been concerned by the growing rate of overdose deaths in his community, and, in dealingwith thousands of cases before him each year, he must “come up with some kind of decision that follows the law and also is appropriateunder the circumstances.”
“Iknew what I did was wrong,” Repp said. “I’ll try to make amends on that, and I have a whole year to reflect and contemplate myactions.”
Butit wasn’t the only time Repp, who is up for re-election in 2025, has faced criticism.
“Imaginesomeone sitting in court for the first time, and now they think it’s what the judicial system is like,” said John Kahler II, a lawyerwho once accused the judge of being biased against a client and unsuccessfully tried to get him disqualified from the case.
Onewoman who appeared before Repp in August did file a complaint to say he labeled her a “known meth user” in open court, which she wrotemade her feel “very embarrassed by Repp’s conduct and false accusations.” Repp said the complaint process in Ohio is a “goodone” because the public does learn about judges accused of misconduct early on.
ButAna Petro, who was in Repp’s court for a traffic violation this year, doesn’t believe his suspension can remedy how he made her andothers feel: worthless. A reckoning throughout the judiciary is needed, she said.
“Iunderstand it’s not a judge’s job to be nice, but when he’s abusing his power to be a judge, that’s when I have a problem,”Petro said. “And I don’t trust any judge at all because of him.”
Inanother of thousands of points of proof that Judges are often just as bad as the criminals before them:
ALong Island judge who police say repeatedly broke into his neighbor’s home to steal her underwear has confessed to snatching panties onmultiple occasions, even though he has pleaded not guilty.
Still, Suffolk County District Judge Robert Cicale has been removed from thebench and is facing up to 15 years in prison.
Cicale was arrested on burglary charges and appeared in court Friday morning.
The judge is a married father of three young children, and he is accused of sneaking into ahome across the street and stealing the underwear of a 23-year-old woman who lives there with her parents. He reportedly knew the girlfrom when she worked as an intern at the Islip Town Attorney’s Office, when he used to work there.
In his confession, he said he stole the underwear upon feeling “urges.” Headmitted that on several occasions, he entered the home, opened her hamper and took underwear.
Cicarle was taken into custody after an incident that happened around 9 a.m. Thursday, when theyoung woman was alone. Prosecutors said she was sleeping but woke up when she heard the door open. She called out, “Hello?” andthat’s when she saw Cicale at the doorway.
Authorities say he turned around and ran away, and the victim closed and locked thedoor and called her mother, who called 911. Responding officers say they saw Cicale walking up to a different house and pretending toknock on the door.
They approached him because he matched the description of the person the victim described. They reportedlyfound several pairs of soiled women’s underwear on him, which the victim identified as her own.
Cicale has written letter of apology to victim and also provided a written confession.
Cicaleis accused of stealing his female neighbor’s underwear.
“Thisis highly disturbing,” Suffolk County District Attorney Tim Sini said. “This is an individual who swore to uphold the law. Heviolated it in a very serious way. The message here from both the Suffolk County Police Department and the Suffolk County DistrictAttorney’s office is that no one is above the law, and we’ll prosecute this case to the fullest extent of the law.”
A Nassau County district judge presided over Cicale’s case to prevent aconflict of interest. Cicale is expected to receive mental health treatment.
“His reputation throughout the court is stellar,” defense attorney William Wexler said. “Everyjudge, every lawyer respects him, and we just have to see how the process plays out.”
Wexler went on to say that the judge’s wife is standing by her husband through this process.
Cicale was ordered held on $50,000. Cicale was “temporarily relieved ofhis judicial duties” and the matter was referred to the state’s Court of Appeals to determine whether to suspend the jurist, courtsystem spokesman Lucian Chalfen said.
A judge also issued a restraining order that prevents Cicale from contacting the victimand, as a condition of his bail, Cicale will also be required to wear a GPS monitor, Sini said.
Neighbors were shocked when they learned of the judge’s arrest.
“From what I heard, it’s a little perverted maybe,” neighbor William Bloom said.”And that never makes sense to me.”
Cicale is a graduate of St. John’s Law School, a former legal aide attorney and aformer Islip Town Attorney elected to the District Criminal Court in 2016.
“He’s a family man, he’s always outside playing basketball with his kids,” neighbor Jay Moceri said. “He’salways jogging. He’s always friendly to everybody in the neighborhood.”
(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
What’s a judge’s moral standard?Allegations of racism, sexism spotlight judicial misconduct
ProbateJudge Randy Jinks has mostly denied the allegations by employees. The case spotlights how Alabama handles ethics complaints against judges.
ProbateJudge Randy Jinks faces more than 100 allegations in a scathing complaint. Erik Ortiz goes on the explain:
Sincehe was sworn into office in January 2019, Probate Judge Randy Jinks of Alabama has had a central role in the most significant moments ofpeople’s lives in Talladega County, about 50 miles east of Birmingham. Jinks, the county’s chief election official, has overseenadoptions and guardianships, mental health commitments and the issuing of marriage licenses.
Behindthe scenes, employees accuse Jinks, 65, of cultivating a toxic and hostile workplace that undermined the integrity of his office.
Morethan 100 allegations were outlined in a scathing 78-page complaint issued in March by the Judicial Inquiry Commission, the state body that reviews complaints against judges, detailing racistand sexist conversations that employees claim Jinks initiated, including talking about pornography and a video of a woman doing astriptease. Some allege that he made disparaging remarks about George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, Black people who came intothe office and the office’s sole Black employee.
Someemployees also allege that Jinks, who is white, used profane language and threw tantrums, once going on a tirade after his sandwich wentmissing from a refrigerator, and that he tried to use the power of his position to get or grant favors.
Thecomplaint, which is based on interviews with current and former employees of the Talladega County Probate Office, accuses Jinks ofexhibiting a pattern of behavior “that has created a difficult, unprofessional, and inappropriate atmosphere,” which has”injured respect for the judiciary.”
Jinksis accused of violating the state Canons of Judicial Ethics, the guidelines that say judges must uphold the honor of the judiciary, maintain decorum and avoidimpropriety. He has denied the majority of the accusations, saying some of the incidents have been taken out of context, and he isfighting the allegations in the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.
Jinkswas suspended in March and will remain suspended until the court decides whether the claims warrant punishment, including a longersuspension or removal from office. No trial date has been set.
“Iam a decent person,” Jinks said in an interview on local television station WOTM in March. “I am very respectful around women. I do not use racial slurs. I do notgo on tirades in office. I do get mad if somebody steals my food.” In a 44-page answer to the complaint filed in April, Jinks denies “any inappropriate demeanor regarding African Americans” and said thecomplaint “contains flagrant, false, vague and subjective accusations.”
Thecase, which continues, has put a spotlight on how often complaints against judges in the state are reviewed and whether the mechanism topunish judges for misconduct or ethics violations is sufficient.
“Inthe past, there have been individuals on the Judicial Inquiry Commission that have had a less strict view of judges’ adhering tothe rules, and they simply were not really open to removing judges,” said Sue Bell Cobb, who retired as chief justice of the AlabamaSupreme Court in 2011 and has advocated for reforms. “Judges should be held to a higher standard. End of story.”
‘Grossly inappropriate demeanor’
Jinkswon his probate judge race in November 2018, defeating his Democratic opponent by more than 5,000 votes and becoming the first Republicanelected to the office in Talladega County.
Probatejudges are elected to six-year terms in Alabama, and nearly every county, including Talladega, doesn’t require them to have law degreesor to be lawyers, unlike probate judges in most other states. Jinks is a former program director for the Alabama State Parks, and he hadworked on the campaign of Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, who left office in 2011.
“Ifelt the time was right,” Jinks told The Daily Home newspaper of Talladega in 2018 about why he ran for the judgeship. “The man upstairs wanted me to do this.”
Accordingto the Judicial Inquiry Commission’s complaint, which identifies employees only by their initials, Jinks’ “grossly inappropriatedemeanor” didn’t begin immediately; instead, it ramped up about six months into his judgeship.
Theemployees say he would mouth a racial slur “on occasions” to his deputy chief clerk when he was referring to a Black person.One time, after a Black couple had been in the office to fill out a marriage certificate, he said, “What did their Black asseswant?” an employee recalled, according to the complaint.
Heis also accused of having spoken disparagingly about the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests that erupted across the countryafter Floyd was killed in police custody in Minneapolis a year ago.
Employeessay he commented that “I don’t see anything wrong with the police killing him” and that “he pretty much got what hedeserved.”
Jinkswould also play uncensored videos of racial justice protests that included racial slurs and profane language loud enough that theycould be “heard by others outside his office, including any customers at the front counter,” according to the complaint.
Employeessay that last June, when news reports surfaced that Bubba Wallace, the only Black driver in NASCAR’s top series, had found a noose in his garage stall at Talladega Superspeedway, Jinks commented that Wallace was “just playing the Black card.”
Theonly Black employee among the nine or so people who worked under Jinks at the probate office says in the complaint that Jinks wouldaim racist and unprofessional comments at him.
“Hewas a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” the man, Darrius Pearson, who joined the office as a clerk in 2018 under the previous probatejudge, told NBC News. Pearson said that he had even voted for Jinks but that after months of humiliating and withering comments, he quitin November and wanted to come forward publicly.
Pearsonsaid that in May 2019, Jinks saw his new car and said that he, as a judge, couldn’t afford one. “What are you doing? Selling drugs?”Jinks said, according to Pearson.
LastSeptember, Pearson returned to work after a trip to the post office about the same time that students from Talladega College, a privatehistorically Black college, were marching in support of Black Lives Matter. He said Jinks asked him repeatedly whether he had joined thedemonstration.
“Idon’t want nothing to have to happen to your job, you out there marching — marching ‘Black Lives Matter’ during county time,”Jinks said before he walked off laughing, according to Pearson and the complaint.
Thecomplaint says employees felt uncomfortable and embarrassed by Jinks’ “inappropriate demeanor” toward Pearson and other Blackpeople.
Jinks,who is married with a daughter, is also accused of using demeaning language about women and talking openly about sex. Pearson said thatin July, around the time of a Republican runoff election in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race, Jinks showed him a video of a woman doing astriptease while they were in an election room.
Pearsonsaid he told Jinks he didn’t want to look at the video.
Anothertime, Jinks told a female employee: “I like porn. Don’t you?” according to the complaint. He is also accused of having commentedabout an employee’s breasts and stared at her body, as well as having made other female employees uncomfortable. Employees said he alsoroutinely commented about the physical appearance of female lawyers and spoke derisively about women with tattoos or about their bodysize.
“Don’tever marry a woman. She’ll get fat,” he said after he saw a photo of a female employee in her wedding dress, according to thecomplaint. Jinks’ comments about the employee’s weight were “so prevalent as to give her the impression that her weight matters moreto him than her work performance,” the complaint said.
Pearson,who had been the only male employee in the office, said Jinks gave him a birthday card in September featuring a cartoon cow and donkeyand the message “Thought you’d like to see some teats and ass on your birthday!” The card, which was shared with NBC News, issigned, “Have a Great B’day. Randy.”
Otheremployees refused to sign it, according to Pearson and the complaint. Jinks didn’t deny having given the card but said in his response tothe commission that “office humor has been overblown.”
Thecomplaint also says Jinks’ county-owned cellphone was used to look at a website that sold sex products and to view provocative photos ofwomen. It says he lent the phone to a felon whom he met when she was waitressing.
Inaddition, the complaint details allegations accusing Jinks of having abused the prestige of his judicial office by asking a prosecutor ina neighboring county to help the felon and release her early from her sentence on a narcotics-related charge.
Thedistrict attorney denied the request, saying it was inappropriate, according to the complaint, which said that Jinks tried to solicitthe help of attorneys who appeared before his court to get the felon an early release and that he eventually succeeded.
AmandaHardy, Jinks’ attorney, said that the complaints were “concocted by a few disgruntled” employees and that the commission’scomplaint “fails to mention all exculpatory evidence and testimony.” She said allegations that Jinks is racist were”fabricated to generate antagonism with the public, the Court of Judiciary, and the media.”
‘He thought he couldn’t be touched’
Inhis response to the allegations, Jinks mostly denied what employees told the Judicial Inquiry Commission, according to the complaint.
Hespecifically denied the disparaging remarks about staring at women’s bodies in the office and in court, as well as talking about bodyweight, among other accusations. He also said he couldn’t remember certain actions he is accused of, such as telling an employee that helikes porn, according to the complaint.
Healso denied having made remarks about Floyd.
“TheRespondent believes … that there exists no excuse for the killing of George Floyd, that watching the video is sickening,unconscionable, inhumane and horrifying,” Jinks said in written answers to the complaint. In regard to Pearson’s version of eventsabout Black Lives Matter protests, Jinks “adamantly denies any communication, implied or expressed, that Mr. Pearson should notparticipate in any way with the Black Lives Matter march or the like.”
Jinksalso told the commission that if he did make certain comments, they were in a personal and private capacity, and that employees wereeavesdropping or should have asked him to shut his door.
Hesaid that comments people say they heard may have been taken out of context or were misunderstood jokes and that if he had been told thatsomething was “racially or sexually insensitive and offensive,” he would have “responded in a serious manner.” Jinks didn’tdeny the interaction involving the striptease video that Pearson said he was shown, but he told the commission that it was played for threeseconds or less.
Inhis written response, he said that “sharing the video amounted to a lapse in judgment, the significance of which has beenexaggerated.”
Jinksdenied having asked for favors to help a felon, saying in his answer to the complaint that his helping her “was purely a ministry, inwhich no appearance of impropriety and/or expectation of judicial favor can reasonably be inferred.”
Pearsonsaid the complaints were a collaborative effort by employees who feared retaliation for speaking out but were fed up with Jinks.
“Heis very arrogant, pompous, and he thought he couldn’t be touched,” Pearson said.
Thecomplaint doesn’t specify any grievances or allegations made by litigants, attorneys or members of the public, and it doesn’t say anyof Jinks’ rulings were affected by his alleged misconduct.
Still,Jenny Carroll, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, said that it matters how judges behave outside the courtroom andin front of office staff and that comments that appear to be inappropriate can call into question how they came to rulings.
“Whatif people coming before you are women and Black? If they don’t get the outcome they wanted, they’ll be wondering was it because theirclaim wasn’t strong enough or perhaps the judge carries explicit biases,” Carroll said. “The bottom line is it’s going toraise doubts in people’s minds.”
Thenine-member state Judicial Inquiry Commission, which is made up of judges, lawyers and private citizens, gets scores of complaints aboutjudges every fiscal year, many of which fail to rise to the level of formal charges to be filed with the Court of the Judiciary, which isalso a mix of legal professionals and laypeople.
Thecommission said it reviewed 174 complaints against judges in fiscal year 2018 and dismissed 132 of them without investigation, citingreasons such as that there was no reasonable basis to charge, that no ethical violation was determined or that a case wasn’t within itsjurisdiction. Of 18 investigations that were completed, all of the related complaints were dismissed, the commission said.
Ultimately,the commission filed no charges against judges in the Court of the Judiciary during fiscal year 2018. Cases are often settled withjudges before trials are held, and judges may decide to retire or resign to avoid public scrutiny, Carroll said.
Inrarer cases, judges are removed from the bench. That happened to Roy Moore, the former state chief justice, who was ousted twice for defying federal court orders. Moore’s appeals were rejected.
Thecommission didn’t immediately respond to requests for further information. Chairman Billy Bedsole, a lawyer, also didn’timmediately reply to requests for comment.
Cobb,the former state chief justice, said changes are needed in the complaint process so people are comfortable coming forward.Currently, she said, the commission’s process is too lenient toward judges, who are notified and kept apprised of investigations and alsoget copies of subpoenas given to witnesses.
Cobbsaid that gives judges the opportunity to use their influence and potentially put pressure on people to dissuade them from filingcomplaints for fear of retaliation.
Shesaid reforms should include doing away with notifying judges about who filed complaints and directing more state funding toward theJudicial Inquiry Commission so investigations don’t have to languish and all complaints can be fully reviewed, not just the most egregiouscases.
Carrollsaid that even after a judge who clearly violated ethical standards is removed, other issues deserve scrutiny, such as identifying casesin which people were the victims of unfair and impartial rulings and offering remediation.
“Gettingproblem judges off the bench is only a piece of the problem,” she said.
Contra Costa Superior Court JudgeSteven Austin Aided & Abetted Real Property Theft
….SaysWhistle Blower Architect
ContraCosta County Superior Court Judge Steven Austin Aided & Abetted Real Property Theft with the help of Assessor Gus Kramer & OtherPublic Officials
Alocal vetted source has provided a complaint filed with District Attorney Diane Becton on June 14, 2018, demanding a criminalinvestigation of several public officials including Gus Kramer and Martinez Superior Court Judge Steven K. Austin. This complaintalleges that Judge Austin colluded with County officials by rigging a trial in an effort to steal real property from an Orinda resident.
Theverified complaint to the District Attorney describes how County and City of Orindaofficials failed to enforce code violations on the property of an architect whocommitted horrific environmental crimes and zoning violations. This architect, with the help of City of Orinda and Contra Costa Countyofficials, was able to double the square footage of his house and also change public records on the assessor’s record to reflect theunpermitted additions. In early 2013, the County Assessor’s office was notified by the whistleblower about the tampering of publicrecords, but Gus Kramer refused to investigate.
Accordingto several forensic engineers and experts, this Orinda architect resorted to extreme tactics with reckless disregard for theenvironment in order to access the whistleblower’s panoramic views and cheat on his property taxes. The architect’s zoning violationsalso included exceeding setback and height limits, grading massive amount of dirt, destroying a ridge line, uprooting several landmarkoak trees, and illegally building decking, structures, pouring concrete and piers next and on top of utility East Bay MunicipalUtility District (EBMUD) drainage pipes. Further, this architect built nuisances on two neighboring properties and tampered withpublic records.
Thesubject experts who reviewed the case documents are in agreement that environmental and zoning violations have placed the surroundinghouses and safety of residents in danger of flooding and created a fire hazard in the Sleepy Hollow, Orinda neighborhood.
Newevidence indicates that recent press articles circulated by the Mercury News may be heavily influenced by the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors. Suchpress alleges that Gus Kramer engaged insexual misconduct, leading to his private censoring. However, in view of the complaint to the District Attorney, it is questionable as towhether the new sexual misconduct allegations are indeed the true crux of Kramer’s wrongdoings, or whether these accusations areintended to detract from the very serious criminal acts that are described in the June 14, 2018 complaint to the DA Becton about theOrinda property theft.
This article states: ”On June 18, County Administrator David Twawrote to one of the accusers — associate appraiser Margaret Eychner — saying an independent investigator determined it was ‘morelikely than not’ that on several occasions in 2014 and 2015, Kramer ‘made comments that were not appropriate in a workplace environmentand that made you feel uncomfortable.’ ”
08-05-2018 CCCounty Gus Kramer embroiled in another sex harassment probe (Click Here)
Itis highly suspicious that within three days after the whistleblower’s complaint having been filed, David Twa resurrects alleged sexualmisconduct by Kramer dating back to 2015. It is reasonable to infer that the county officials are giving Gus Kramer a get out of jailfree card instead of allowing DA Becton to do her job by conducting criminal investigation of Gus Kramer, Judge Austin and others.Strangely enough, the whistleblower’s complaint names David Twa being involved in aiding and abetting the theft of her property aswell.
Board of supervisors, not former DA Mark Petersen, axed the probe into GusKramer’s criminal investigation. (Click here for evidence)
The complaint to DA Becton states that the whistleblower tried to facilitate thearchitect to remove the encroaching nuisance that interfered with her privacy. The architect continuously promised to do so, butdeliberately misled her for two (2) years. He then swiftly ambushed her by filing a lawsuit claiming several baseless legal assertionsincluding outright ownership and punitive damages for accusing him of building without permit.
Beforefiling the lawsuit, the Orinda architect threatened “either you agree to a lot line adjustment or I will drag youthrough the court for years to come and make you lose everything you have.”
Publicrecords show the whistle blower in 2012 involved county deputy director, JasonCrapo, county engineer ThoamHuggett, and former Orinda planning director, EmmanuelUrsu. However, in a meeting both Ursu and Thoam Huggett, threatened that the countywould retaliate and reverse everything by coming after the whistle blower instead, if she didn’t stop complaining about thearchitect’s violations.
Communicationsbetween the whistleblower and the County public officials and the Assessor’s office show a blatant refusal of public officials toinvestigate the architect’s violations. The Orinda city officials, however, opened a code enforcement investigation against thearchitect for encroaching onto another neighbor’s property. Incidentally, this other neighbor was an attorney with politicalaspirations.
Thewhistleblower’s complaint to the District Attorney accuses the officials of selectively applying the rules and failing to prosecutewhite collar crime, as in this case clearly the violations didn’t apply to the Orinda architect. Also, when it came to opening a codeenforcement the rules only applied to an elite group of people, attorneys and others who are politically well-connected.
Obstructedby the tax collector, Gus Kramer, and the Building Department’s refusal to investigate, the whistleblower sought help from the localpolice for unlawful trespass and property damage. The police also refused to do their job, but assured her that she had everylegal right to defend her property by removing the encroaching nuisance from her land. The police offered to protect the whistleblower and arrest the architect, if he interfered with the removal.
Documentedcommunications prove the whistle blower went so far as to call self-proclaimed tree-hugger career-politician Steve Glazer when hewas the mayor of City of Orinda. Steve Glazer ignoredserious California environmental code violations, reckless destruction of protected Oak trees, perjury and falsifying a permitcommitted by the architect’s surveyor, Rick Humann and county deputy director Jason Crapo.
Thearchitect was emboldened knowing one of his many attorneys, H. Clyde Long, had inside connections with the Martinez judiciary, i.e.Judge Steven K. Austin. Attorney Long also serves as the chair of city of Lafayette’s codeenforcement appeal board and advertises on his website that he can help those with “city/county code enforcement.” The complaint alleges that the architect hadinside political influence with the municipal officials, the Assessor’s Office and the Building Department to be able tounlawfully change the public records twice by increasing the square footage of his house, without any evidence of any permits to increasehis house’s size.
Indisputableevidence is provided of open judicial extortion committed by Judge Austin in voluminous trial transcripts involving a lawsuit filed bythe architect in violation of zoning laws who is also cheating on his taxes, demanding an outright ownership of the whistleblower’s landand the court preventing her free speech regarding his violations. Judge Austin’s abuse of power and judicial misconducts andcollusion to steal the whistleblower’s property is captured throughout the trial transcripts:
“THECOURT: So what they are saying is, as I understand from that side, the evidence that’s been developed would be that it’s notrelevant how big the house is even if it’s more than what it’s supposed to be on the records of the city because it has nothing todo with the property line dispute, and that it would be more prejudicial than probative to go into that because you’d make themlook bad because they built a house bigger than it’s supposed to be, right?”
“THECOURT: It sounds like you’re just trying to say that it looks like they must have cheated on their property taxes so they must bebad people” (RT.Vol.4P.168L-5-9).” ”It’s a difficult case, in many respects and exactly how this property will be used,going forward, it’s not going to matter that much as long as they don’t move back, but if they do move back, it’s going to make a bigdifference I think in terms of how the property will be used because of just the history. Okay (RT.Vol.062414P.3301L.9-P.3302L8).”
Dewey Wheeler (represented state farm insurance) openly made fun of JudgeAustin’s Kangaroo trial and jury instructions at the expense of CoCoCounty tax payers when he appropriately called the judicialcouncil a dark hole.
However,the law is clear in stating that: The California Judicial Canon of Ethics prohibit a judge from ignoring indisputable evidence of thecommission of fraud, he has an outright duty to report such fraud to law enforcement. Not to mention that the rules of ethicsprohibit a litigant from using the court system with “unclean hands”. On the record Judge Austin is allowing the architectand his three attorneys to play fast and loose with his court and helped them to correct deficiencies in their lawsuit by coachingthem. The architect acted as though he owned Judge Austin’s court.
Reviewof the trial transcripts by several legal experts show in no uncertain terms, this whistleblower’s case is a posterchild exampleof thuggery run amok in a deeply-embedded incestuous web of municipal officials, the judiciary, attorneys and politicians. The whistleblower was retaliated against and thrusted into a rigged court because she exposed the systemic corruption in the offices of thecounty of Contra Costa and the tax collector, Gus Kramer.
JudgeAustin on the record stated he found attorney misconduct entertaining when presented with evidence of witness intimidation, declarationtampering and obstruction of justice committed by three attorneys, Clyde Long, Brandon Dooley and Dewey Wheeler whorepresented State Farm Insurance. David Miller of Moragawas selected by Judge Austin as the discovery referee and paid by state Farm insurance. He too consistently ignored attorney misconductand was actively engaged in legally abusing the whistle blower.
Thelawsuit substantiates the architect’s initial threats of his intent to use his political and judicial connections to steal her propertyand ruin her financially by dragging her through years of litigation. The court record shows that right from the inception the case wasrigged. Judge Steven K. Austin admitted that he personally hand-picked the case because he found it to be interesting. Bolstering the existence of backroom dealing, Judge Austin just also happens to be a resident of Orinda and buddies with the architect’sattorney Clyde Long. Additionally, the architect’s homeowner’s insurance is State Farm, Judge Austin’s former employer.
Thecomplaint alleges that Judge Steven K. Austinengaged in extortion by threatening that “if you do not give up your land for $10K I will make you fall flat on your face and makeyou pay him, instead. A lot of money.” The complaint also states Judge Austin and public officials concocted a plan to extort thewhistle blower in agreeing to a lot line adjustment, through abusive litigation and wasting taxpayer’s money on allowing a white collarcriminal to come to court with unclean hands. When she refused to relinquish her property rights, the officials with the help of JudgeAustin retaliated. They schemed a plan to manipulate the trial to come up with a fake money judgement that the whistle blower could notpay. The judgment against the whistle blower ended up to become approximately about $300,000, including additional fees.
Thewhistleblower demanded that local politicians and government agencies circumvent the retaliatory judgment, and involved the former DA MarkPetersen and other politicians such as Mark DeSaulnier, Catharine Baker, John Garamandi, Dianne Feinstein, KamalaHarris, and the Board of Supervisors of Contra Costa County, specifically CandaceAndersen. None of the officials apparently did anything to stop the commission of the crimes by Contra Costa County officials.
Reviewingthe emails with public officials show the whistleblower engaged legal counsel who agreed to confront the City of Orinda officials regardingthese officials’ failure to perform their jobs and ignoring perjury committed by RickHumann, the architect’s surveyor. In the meantime, the whistleblower involvedthe County chair of planning commissioner, Duane Steele, who referred her to the Deputy Director of County Building Department ArunaBaht. Aruna Baht, upon reviewing the fraud documents, immediately assigned inspectorJoe Losado to inspect the architect’s house and tag it. Joe Losado admitted tothe attorney that the architect did not have any permits on file.
Inexplicably,however, Joe Losado refused to inspect the architect’s house and engaged in threatening the attorney to back off or the countyattorney, Sharon Anderson, would revoke his license and file a restraining order against his client.
In2017, Mark Petersen had assigned the case to Steve Moawad, former DA, for public corruption. However, DA Moawad was prohibited toinvestigate Gus Kramer, Judge Austin and others at the behest of board of supervisors.
DA Moawad stated in writing that he was going to continue investigatingOrinda officials for failure to open a code enforcement against the architect. Conspicuously, Steve Moawad left the DA’s Office tobecome California Bar Chief Trial Counsel without concluding the case.Several series of emails prove the public officials were complicit in committing crimes against the whistle blower. (Click Here)
Thecourt files demonstrate that the Board of Supervisors and Judge Steven Austin have committed egregious violations in order to silencethe whistleblower and prevent the whistleblower from being able to seek appropriate remedy and redress. Judge Austin conducted anexpensive jury trial in 2013 in which the jurors were provided with manipulated instructions that biased the jury improperly. Inaddition, according to several jurors and the transcripts, Judge Austin gave them a jury instruction that was not part of the record.Sample kangaroo trial transcripts
Further,the County appears to have enlisted State Farm Insurance to hire a private investigator to follow and harass the whistleblower’sdaughter in another state for over two years. The whistleblower accuses Contra Costa County Supervisor CandaceAndersen for failing to mitigate and offer appropriate redress. Incidentally, herhusband Philip Andersen works exclusively for State Farm Insurance as defensecounsel.
Asstated in a law review article by Orlando J. Villalba. “Slapping Criminal Speech; how Evolution ofthe Illegality Exception has Impacted California’s Anti-Slapp Statute”, this type of lawsuit is deliberately brought to financially decimate its opponent. The true desire of the trespasseris to cause delay and distraction. And to punish his/her opponent for standing up for him/herself. (Click here for Villalba’s article)
CAPenal Section SCC. 518. State and Federal Statutes show the definition of the criminal offense of extortion as follows:
Extortionis the obtaining of property or other consideration from another, with his or her consent, or the obtaining of an official act of apublic officer, induced by a wrongful use of force or fear, or under color of official right.
Yearsof articles published by the Mercury News show that a culture of “pay to play” is deeply embedded in Contra Costa County municipalitiesand its court system. At the very core of this crisis is Tax Collector and Assessor Gus Kramer and the Board of Supervisors. As illustrated by Tom Lochner’s article in May of 2008 “Building disputes near an end”, falsifying and forging documents in the Contra Costa CountyBuilding Inspection Department is apparently standard operating procedure. (Click here for the article)
In2011, the District Attorney’s Office axed a probe investigating Assessor Gus Kramer for a financial scheme involving evading transfertaxes in shady land deals. It was just outright nixed—as if it never existed.
Allof this was obviously known to the Board of Supervisors. Thomas Peele, Pulitzer award winning Journalist, exposed Gus Kramer in hisarticle titled “His Deal Deeds and Doubts.” (Click here for the article)
Federalprosecutors have the authority and jurisdiction to hold judges accountable for their unlawful conduct by charging them with afederal crime. Section 242 of Title 18 of the U.S. code ― the so-called “color of law” statute ― is the same federal civil rights legislation thatJustice Department prosecutors use against Law enforcement officers who use excessive force and make false arrests. The law applies toprosecutors and judges too. However, the feds do not use it against judges.
Judgesare responsible to apply the law and are held to the same standards as everyone else, and when judges flagrantly violate the law, thereshould be consequences for them as well. Unfortunately, when judges are caught committing a crime, they are allowed to collect tax payerfunded retirement packages and obtain work as mediators collecting $500 hourly rates with corporate entities like ADR Services Inc.
OurNews Group is a collaborative media organization with a focus on exposing public and judicial corruption, when main stream mediafails. Please email us (californiaexposegroup@protonmail.com) if you have additional information about this case or your rightshave been violated by Judge Austin or parties involved or any other judge in the Contra Costa Superior Court in California.
In another example one can seethat “When The Judge Works For Your Political Adversary And Is Ordered To ‘Take You Out’ By The WhiteHouse”, the rules of Court are abused, ie:
KYLE CHENEY says that Roger Sone’s lawyers say, inparticular, that Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s decision to assert that jurors in the case “served with integrity” strikes at theheart of Stone’s motion for a new trial, which they indicated is largely based on whether at least one juror was inappropriatelybiased against him.
“Whetherthe subject juror (and perhaps others) served with ‘integrity’ is one of the paramount questions presented in the pending Motion,”Stone’s lawyers argued. “The Court’s ardent conclusion of ‘integrity’ indicates an inability to reserve judgment on an issuewhich has yet been heard.”
Jacksonmade her remark during an impassioned rebuke of the arguments Stone’s legal team offered during his trial. She said that Stone and hislawyers minimized the significance of his effort to frustrate congressional investigators as they sought to understand Russia’sinterference in the 2016 election, a grave national security challenge.
“Sure,the defense is free to say: So what? Who cares?” Jackson said. “But, I’ll say this: Congress cared. The United StatesDepartment of Justice and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia that prosecuted the case and is stillprosecuting the case cared. The jurors who served with integrity under difficult circumstances cared. The American people cared. And Icare.”
Stonewas convicted last year on multiple counts of covering up to congressional investigators, as well as a count of witnessintimidation for pressuring an associate to refuse to cooperate with Congress. Lawmakers sought Stone’s testimony regarding his attemptsto act as an intermediary between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign, but he repeatedly refused to tell House members about his multipleefforts to contact Wikileaks head Julian Assange, denying he had communications with certain associates that were later discovered tobe voluminous.
Itwill also likely reach the receptive ears of the president, who has repeatedly amplified criticism of Jackson and repeated false claimsabout the nature of the charges against Stone.
Trump’sallies are agitating for the president to issue a pardon or commute Stone’s sentence, and though Trump is widely expected to do soeventually, the timing is uncertain. Jackson also used her sentencing comments to underscore that Stone’s overarching effort in impedingCongress was to protect Trump from scrutiny.
Jacksondelivered her sentence Thursday but delayed it until after she considers Stone’s motion for a new trial. Though the motion was filedunder seal, Stone’s team indicated that it will focus on a juror.
“Stone’sMotion for New Trial is directly related to the integrity of a juror. It is alleged that a juror misled the Court regarding her ability tobe unbiased and fair and the juror attempted to cover up evidence that would directly contradict her false claims of impartiality,”his lawyers argued.
“Thepremature statement blessing the “integrity of the jury” undermines the appearance of impartiality and presents a strong biasfor recusal,” they added.
Accordingto the February 5th order issued by Judge Jackson, Roger Stone cited a problem with a juror, however his motion was denied.
Thedetails of the juror are unknown because the order released Wednesday was redacted, however, Roger Stone’s defense team in November tried to strike down several potential jurors who were overt Trump-hating leftists.
Severalpotential jurors in Stone’s case ended up being Trump-hating, Obama-era officials who admittedly voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016so Stone’s lawyer’s tried to strike them as potential jurors.
Oneof the potential jurors actually had a husband who worked in the DOJ and played a role in the Russian collusion hoax that ultimately tookdown Roger Stone — and Judge Jackson allowed her to remain as a potential juror!
Beingthat Amy Berman Jackson denied Stone’s motion for a new trial last week, it occurred before the DOJ backed down from the excessivesentencing handed down by Mueller’s thugs.
Theorder is about a potential issue with a juror and it’s dated Feb. 5, so this all occurred before the resignations and withdrawals andTrump’s intervention.
— KyleCheney (@kyledcheney) February 12, 2020
AmyBerman Jackson is a corrupt liberal Obama judge who imposed a very strict gag order on Roger Stone even though he did nothing wrong.
Stonewas caught up in Mueller’s abusive Russia witch hunt simply because he helped Trump win the White House in 2016.
FederalProsecutors on Monday recommended Trump confidante Roger Stone serve 7-9 years in prison for process crimes during the Mueller witchhunt.
Ina rare move, the Department of Justice backed down from its abusive sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone.
Allfour prosecutors who signed Roger Stone’s sentencing memo seeking an excessive prison term of 7 to 9 years resigned like cowards onTuesday after AG Bill Barr stepped in and smacked them down.
Mueller’sprosecutors and this corrupt judge made for a very toxic and abusive case against Roger Stone.
PresidentTrump torched Demon Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Tuesday night.
Isthis the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did shetreat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking! https://t.co/Fe7XkepJNN
— DonaldJ. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2020
Wereported months ago and again in May 2018, that Obama appointed liberal activist Judge, Amy Berman Jackson, was assigned to the most important court case in UShistory, the Manafort case in the Trump-Russia hoax investigation.
Sadly,Judge Jackson has a horrible far left record on the bench. In 2013 Judge Jackson rejected arguments from the Catholic Church that Obamacare’s requirements that employers provide cost free coverage ofcontraceptive services in spite of being contrary to their religious beliefs. This was overturned by the Supreme Court.
In2017 Judge Jackson dismissed the wrongful death suit against Hillary Clinton filed by two of the families who lost loved ones in Benghazi.The families argued that Clinton had done little to help their sons and then lied to cover it up.
Thenon January 19, 2018, Paul Manafort’s case was reassigned to Judge Jackson on January 19th, a few weeks after being filed.
Itis unknown how she was assigned to the Manafort case or by whom. What is clear is that with her atrocious and slanted record to date,the Deep State and the Mueller team certainly wanted Judge Jackson overseeing the Manafort case.
OnJanuary 3, 2018, we reported that Paul Manafort filed a suit against the “Deep State” DOJ (Jeff Sessions), Assistant AG Rod Rosenstein and CorruptInvestigator Robert Mueller that should have shut down Mueller’s corrupt investigation!
In another example the report:“Immigrant Who Became Hotshot Chicago DNC Judge SentencedTo Jail For $1.4m Mortgage Fraud” shows that Judges veer to crime quiteoften, hen influenced:
Lukas Mikelionis reports that Jessica Arong O’Brien, 51, broke down into tears after the judge sent herto prison after the federal jury convicted her in February of two counts alleging that she took part in a scheme in which severallenders were scammed. (Facebook)
Thefirst Filipina judge in Cook County, Chicago, who came to the U.S. with almost nothing and no education, was sentenced on Thursday to ayear in prison after being found guilty to participating in a $1.4 million mortgage fraud scheme a decade ago.
JessicaArong O’Brien, 51, broke down into tears after the judge sent her to prison following her February conviction of two counts allegingthat she took part in a scheme in which several lenders were scammed, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Shewas convicted of lying to lenders to obtain more than $1.4 million in mortgages on two investment properties that she sold whileshe owned a real estate company.
O’Brienreportedly made money by selling the two homes in 2007 after paying kickbacks to a straw purchaser. Personally, she made a profit of atleast $325,000 from the sales, prosecutors said.
Thelenders, meanwhile, lost money as the straw purchaser defaulted on payments and properties were foreclosed.
JessicaArong O’Brien with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Facebook)
Priorto the sentencing, O’Brien said she was “an embarrassment” and said the scheme was a mistake. “Of course, I have remorse as to mystupidity,” O’Brien said.
Herlawyer Steve Greenberg argued for probation, pointing to her true American dream story, where a Filipina immigrant, who came to theU.S. without anything, educated herself and became a judge.
Accordingto the Tribune, after O’Brien came to the U.S., she earned degrees in culinary arts and restaurant management. She later went to JohnMarshall Law School, graduating in 1998.
Witha law degree, she went on to become the first Asian elected president of the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois and served on the board ofgovernors for the Illinois State Bar Association. She also co-founded a group in 2008 that gives scholarships to law students from diversebackgrounds.
“Itis an inspirational story. She has fallen as far as she can fall. She has lost everything. … There is absolutely no reason to send thispoor lady to jail.”
— LawyerSteve Greenberg
“Itis an inspirational story,” Greenberg said. “She has fallen as far as she can fall. She has lost everything. … There is absolutelyno reason to send this poor lady to jail.”
ButU.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin denied the request for probation, arguing that her fraud scheme wasn’t just a mistake but a ratherelaborate fraudulent scheme.
“Thiswasn’t stupid,” Durkin said, according to the newspaper. “This was a crime… You really didn’t need to do this.”
“Thiswasn’t stupid. This was a crime. … You really didn’t need to do this.”
— U.S.District Judge Thomas Durkin
Prosecutors,meanwhile, used O’Brien’s story to push for a harsher sentence, saying that she committed fraud despite not having thefinancial needs to do it.
Aftersentencing, O’Brien blamed family issues that prompted her to get into real estate business and reiterated that she acted foolishly.
“Ofall those things that everyone has told you about me, one thing was missing — stupid,” O’Brien, according to the Tribune. “Imean, seriously. This whole process is crazy. I can’t put my hands on it.”
“Ihope some day when I am six feet under, they will learn from what happened here,” she added, hoping other lawyers will learn thatthey will be held to a higher standard.
In another example, a websitetargeting corrupt judges, says: “…This is amovie about a disturbed person, which happens to be exactly what occurred to me in real life. I grew up with a psychopath (con-artist, liar, fraud and master manipulator) who learned at an early age how to get what she wants by guilt trips or charming theweak. It’s just an act, a guilt trip, a con job by a immoral beast. You see in public she pretends to be caring, kind and a good person.But those who see through her act and con job know what she really is. A monster that hides behind “I Care A Lot”. I grew up withthis beast that has no business walking around in the free world. Yet it’s obvious I’m not alone these beasts are common. Worse theycheat and lie their way into roles of authority and power. People today don’t care about the facts, evidence or truth they follow afake image which is how these monsters survive. Down at the bottom of this page is an audio file which is an example of how this con-artistlooks for weakness by saying how much she cares and when that does not work seconds later switches to who she really is “Don’t makeme pull the trigger because I really do love you”. But it’s all an act by a cold blooded psychopath. An insect who has no empathy orheart.
Welcometo my world and how a child from birth destroyed her father, hated her brother because he was competition and used the court system,mail fraud, identity theft to embezzle $200,000.00 from her own mother’s bank accounts. Then force her mother into aconservatorship via a fraudulent petition based on perjury. How her husband who with his background as corporate coach, fired healthprovider CEO and CPA background helped find corrupt lawyers and judges to ignore evidence, elder abuse, fraud, perjury and full documentation of (2) missing bank accounts. Allignored by a Judge Candace J Beason
America, LYING DOES PAY and very well. It’s no longer about a GOOD lawyer that knows law but about finding a connected lawyer who can bribe the judge. (This one happened to be the X President of the Pasadena Bar) and frequented the Judges dinners (conflict of interest?). In fact this same lawyer was found to feed cases to one of the most corrupt judges of Los Angeles County Superior Court Probate department Judge Aviva K. Bobb Who was exposed by a series of Probate abuse articles by the Los Angeles Times back in early 2000. Which the court “PRETENDED” to clean up but in fact just dug in deeper and allowed worse corruption. Judge Bobb and Pasadena Lawyer Philip Barbaro Jr. Would form a conspiracy to try and shut me up via a fraudulent Police report claiming I was terrorizing them by posting my opinion on the internet. I spent 3 days in jail then released stating I was only detained. Fact is police told me my version of what took place exposing a corrupt judge and lawyers appeared to be the truth because they could not find any other reason. But like all other authorities FBI, DOJ, APS, LAPD, Los Angeles Bar, California Bar no one did anything when provided with evidence. No one wants to think a judge could be a criminal or a lawyer who “pretends” to fight against elder abuse is a fraud. Like “I Care A Lot” the concept is LIE, put on a fake image, smile and pretend you’re not who they say you are.
My version of events is “Factual, backed up by documents and court records” I’ve even got original emails from my sister back as far as 1995, cards, letter and audio recordings. Witness statements as well and missing bank account numbers which she claims never existed but in her petition wastes no time claiming “if the court found $200K in missing bank accounts” she blames her brother “Me” who was responsible. However never supplies one ounce of evidence or documentation. In fact the entire petition is based on hearsay, lies and perjured info by her and her Glendale lawyer Christopher E. Overgaard of La Crescenta CA who perjure his own petition in the case even going so far as to claim his lawyer partner Michael Jay was a PI and searched for me but could not find me. This is typical how probate courts operate.
Even the lawyer the court forces upon the person conserved works for the court but is paid by the conservator. Meet Pacific Palisades PVP Violet M. Boskovich who helped the conservator cover up her fraud, perjury and lies. Never represented her client and worked hard to keep her silent and away from appearing in court. Point is “It’s all about the money” Follow the money because the participants all are paid by the person made (in charge of the money). The actual owner has zero say, freedom, rights or control of anything. They’re made out to be mentally incompetent (but in reality are over medicated). The game is “Isolate, Medicate and Liquidate” while they smile all the way to the bank.
The Superior Court system in Los Angeles has become a joke for a city that has so much,yet so little,California is ranked F, at present and the Superior Court system here is next to third world as far as fraud, corruption and justice for profit. This system is denying its residents/Taxpayers their due process on so many levels, Banks, Escrow companies and title companies own the courts and they are attempting to own the land. Lawyers wont take a stand against these courts and their judges that’s how bad it has become.Please do the right thing and investigate and replace those who don’t want to play fair.
Apr 4th, 2019
Someone from San Gabriel, CA writes:
My husband was an employee at Los Angeles Department of Warer and Power. He has a Ph.D. and has done exceptional job as a chemist for the department by training other employees. But because of the ongoing discriminatory and retaliatory actions against him for filing an internal grievance about the corrupt and discriminatory promotion process, he never got promoted even though he is only one of the few working there with a Ph.D. degree. He was physically assaulted by an assistant supervisor who got promoted ahead of him despite not having as much job experience and degree credential. Not only was he denied proper justice, he was further retaliated against with excessive amount of work, excessive monitoring with his supervisors’ attempts to force him to commit errors with his work. When he was finally forced to make a mistake which could have been easily avoided had he not been piled so much work, he was denied the chance to correct the mistake (every employee is allowed to correct mistakes as part of the work protocol) and his mistake was grossly exaggerated to one that cannot be scientifically and evidentially supported. He is terminated because he was demoted to do the task of peeling labels and discarding sample waste which resulted in an additional workplace injury. When he reported this additional injury, he was immediately terminated with that supposed “mistake” that he so wanted to avoid and correct from a year ago. The Skelly Meeting and the city appeals both before a supposed arbitrator (Joseph Duffy) and some city commissioners went absolutely nowhere as they refused to consider any scientific evidence. They only consider what LADWP management colluded to say (a bunch of shameless and corrupt PERJURERS), as if a lie repeated many times by enough people, it would become the truth. LADWP went to strike our lawsuit down recently at the Superior Court. I have been following through this case for several years and the corruption and collusion within the whole judicial system is astounding. They have the appearance and facade of “due process” without the real substance. Everything they did was only formality. Whatever LADW managers and supervisors colluded to say (that is, to say only, WITHOUT EVIDENCE) becomes “evidence”, but whatever real object scientific and forensic evidence we present with my husband being also an eyewitness is brushed aside. I guess if I bring over all of my friends and relatives from all over the globe and say LADWP supervisors murdered someone, it would become the truth just because there are enough people repeating the same accusation, then by all means I can lock all of these managers and supervisors up for murders. With the same logic, the judicial system in Los Angeles is such that they consider enough perjurers repeating the same false accusations or claims to be “good evidence” and so they used such “evidence” (whatever they collide together to defame and perjure) to wrongfully terminate my husband and continue to deny him justice. These “judges” and “commissioners” who hold law degrees or have studied law should be utterly ashamed of themselves for such blatant distortion of justice. We should call the judicial system in Los Angeles CORRUPTION SYSTEM.
Aug 29th, 2016
Someone from South El Monte, CA writes:
I Lost my inheritance and my mom and our homes thanks to the court system I was never heard didn’t have an attorney wrote letters filed forms because of how much they have to benefit from the elderly there the ones who win win it all them the attorney and fiduciary’s judges when I’m reporting elder abuse and it’s ignored but my mom is being taken for money when both conservators are passing out money and not to caregivers
Mar 11th, 2017
Patrick M. from Los Angeles, CA writes:
The Los Angeles Superior Court is in my opinion a band of judicial gangsters, that are blatantly denying due process, ignoring valid evidence, violating the Constitution and extorting money from the people of Los Angeles all while being paid off by whichever party has the right price. as a pro se litigant I went up against a lawyer who claim to not be representing any of the defendants yet drafted every Motion in the case and they were all granted and my case was dismissed, even though the court had no jurisdiction as the defendant had no lawyer they had defaulted. A total joke…if you want justice stay away from these people. …you have better luck dealing directly with the Mob.Dec 6th, 2016
Jose H. from Alhambra, CA writes:
I totally agreed since i been emotionally financially and even mentally affected since i got so physical stressed knowing how this court will take my ex wife’s side since she all the time was a step forward in our case and always hiring a lawyer that I couldn’t afford for myself but i had all the time to pay for her attorney since I didn’t have on attorney the judges never pay attention to me and side by side with her lawyer always loosing case by case i little by little lost it all this court left me empty pocket and even my part of the divorce was then giving wrongfully to my ex wife she stole she kicked me out of my own house took my part of the half and half assets and properties and all thanks to the her lawyer that was in a deal with the judge at each case my ex even failed to report to court over payments she fail to follow the court orders she trespass and stole from a property she gave false testimony and i reported all this to the court and to the judge and they ignored me cause they were no getting profits from me as with my ex because the lawyer soplits with the judge they move in a way that I couldn’t believe i have another big story how the judge even moved a clerk from his desk then sent me to talk to a person who all she did was discouraged me from appealing the decision and only hand me the papers without helping me when the usual clerk helps people filling up the papers for people without attorney but this lady the judge sent one throw the papers to me in a very rude way please i need my case to be review as per i ended up on the streets thanks
California is one of the most corrupt Judicial states in America today, from the days of 1996-2011 Ronald M. George who named his own successor Tani Cantil-Sakauye.
Victims go into the millions with police, government and the courts in a huge cover up protecting a manipulated Justice system that is nothing about justice. The legal system in California is designed to destroy family, estates, children’s lives and freedom via dishonest judges and lawyers controlled by a gang called the ABA American Bar Association.
Be sure to scroll down the page for info how to report and file complaints.
Mar 13th, 2017
Someone from Los Angeles, CA writes:
Appellate court denies challenge to LA judges’ ‘double-dipping’ practice Los Angeles County provides Superior Court judges more than $46,400 each in annual benefits, including supplemental health and retirement benefits, while judges in other counties receive substantially fewer supplemental benefits or none at all. The legal fight began in April 2006, when Sturgeon filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court asking that the county be stopped from paying benefits to judges because they were also receiving them from the state through legislation passed in 1997. Mr. Trump is right, the system is rigged.
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- Alternative Resolution Center
- Judge Anthony B. Drewry
- Judge Armen Tamzarian
- Judge Aviva K. Bobb
- 2005 Complaint filed against Judge Bobb in the Marshall Stern Case
- Aviva K Bobb ERASED PROOF
- FrumehLabow.com ERASED PROOF
- JohnTRogersJr.com ERASED PROOF
- Ricky Ritch et al v. Aviva Bobb et al Central District of California, cacd-2:2006-cv-04795 MINUTES
- Ricky Ritch v. Aviva Bobb (2:06-cv-04795-CAS-JWJ)
- Ruling Over Someone’ Has Paid Off Handsomely Guardians for Profit
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- Judge Stanley Blumenfeld
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- Los Angeles Superior Court LAUSD Fraud
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State of California Commission on Judicial Performance
Complaints Against California Judges
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Center for Judicial Excellence
How To Deal With A Bad Judge
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The Black Wall of Silence
https://californiajudicialcorruption.wordpress.com
Exposing Corrupt California Judges, Courts and more. judges Socrates Manoukian, His wife Patricia Bamratte-Manoukian and Erica Yew, Commission on Judicial Performance.Nepotism, Corruption and Fraud in California’s Courts.
43 California judges were reprimanded for misconduct last …
https://www.latimes.com › local › california › la-me-judges-discipline-20150404-story.html
Apr 4, 201543 California judges were reprimanded for misconduct last year By Maura Dolan Staff Writer April 4, 2015 7:37 PM PT Reporting from SAN FRANCISCO — Two judges had sex with women in their chambers,…
Corrupt Judges are out of control in America
https://uglyjudge.com › judges
Santa Clara County California is a hotbed of Corruption that focuses on one judge Socrates Peter Manoukian where several documented cases have been sabotaged by the judge. There is even an official Judge Socrates Manoukian web site which documents the corruption and crimes.
5 Corrupt Judges & The Countless Lives They Tried To …
https://www.investigationdiscovery.com › crimefeed › bad-behavior › 5-corrupt-judges-the-countless-lives-they-tried-to-destroy
Thomas J. Maloney was a judge in Cook County, Illinois from 1977 to 1991. Maloney and numerous fellow Cook County judges were the focus of an investigation named Operation Greylord. The o peration was a joint investigation by the FBI, IRS, USPS and the Illinois State Police to track down corrupt judges.
Corrupt Judges – Judiciary Report
https://judiciaryreport.com › corrupt_judges.htm
The Corrupt Visiting Judge Judge Richard Markus is openly violating the constitutional rights of citizen Elsebeth Baumgartner for simply exercising her right to free speech in a non-threatening, peaceful manner. The lengths this just has gone to is sickening and appalling and is another black
How Corrupt Judges are Destroying Our Society
https://www.citywatchla.com › index.php › 2016-01-01-13-17-00 › los-angeles › 15903-how-corrupt-judges-are-destroying-our-society
To add insult to the indignity of being preyed upon by corrupt judges, Californians have to endure the Commission of Judicial Performance [CJP], which is the watchdog agency where the wolves monitor the wolves who are feasting inside the hen house.
Thousands of U.S. judges who broke laws or oaths remained …
https://www.reuters.com › investigates › special-report › usa-judges-misconduct
The country’s approximately 1,700 federal judges hear 400,000 cases annually. The nearly 30,000 state, county and municipal court judges handle a far bigger docket: more than 100 million new …
Corrupt justice: what happens when judges’ bias taints a …
https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › 2015 › oct › 18 › judge-bias-corrupts-court-cases
Oct 18, 2015Corrupt justice: what happens when judges’ bias taints a case? … California’s score, 77, the highest of any state, was seven points below the federal government’s grade of 84.
Directory of Judges – The Superior Court of California …
www.sanmateocourt.org › general_info › judges › directory.php
Effective September 10, 2021. Hon. Leland Davis, III, Presiding Judge Department 1, Courtroom 2H 400 County Center Redwood City, CA 94063 (650) 261-5101
Inanother example MICHAEL BERENS and JOHN SHIFFMAN report that Thousands of U.S. judges who broke laws or oaths remained on the bench
In the past dozen years, state and local judges have repeatedly escapedpublic accountability for misdeeds that have victimized thousands. Nine of 10 kept their jobs, a Reuters investigation found –including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them Black, over traffic fines. Judge Les Hayes once sentenced a single mother to 496 days behind bars forfailing to pay traffic tickets. The sentence was so stiff it exceeded the jail time Alabama allows for negligent homicide. Marquita Johnson, who was locked up in April 2012, says the impact of her time in jail endures today.Johnson’s three children were cast into foster care while she was incarcerated. One daughter was molested, state records show. Anotherwas physically abused.
“Judge Hayes took away my lifeand didn’t care how my children suffered,” said Johnson, now 36. “My girls will never be the same.”
Fellow inmates found her sentencehard to believe. “They had a nickname for me: The Woman with All the Days,”Johnson said. “That’s what they called me: The Woman with All the Days.There were people who had committed real crimes who got out before me.”
In 2016, the state agency thatoversees judges charged Hayes with violating Alabama’s code of judicial conduct. According to the Judicial Inquiry Commission, Hayes broke state and federal laws by jailing Johnson and hundreds of other Montgomery residents too poor to pay fines. Among thosejailed: a plumber struggling to make rent, a mother who skipped meals to cover the medical bills of her disabled son, and a hotelhousekeeper working her way through college.
Hayes, a judge since 2000, admitted in court documents to violating 10 different parts of thestate’s judicial conduct code. One of the counts was a breach of a judge’s most essential duty: failing to “respect and comply withthe law.”Despite the severity of the ruling, Hayes wasn’t barred from serving as a judge. Instead, thejudicial commission and Hayes reached a deal. The former Eagle Scout would serve an 11-month unpaid suspension. Then he could return tothe bench. Until he was disciplined, Hayes said in an interview with Reuters, “I never thought I was doingsomething wrong.” This week, Hayes is set to retire after 20 years as a judge. In a statement toReuters, Hayes said he was “very remorseful” for his misdeeds. Community activists say hisdeparture is long overdue. Yet the decision to leave, they say, should never have been his to make, given his record of misconduct.
“He should have been firedyears ago,” said Willie Knight, pastor of North Montgomery Baptist Church. “He broke the law and wanted to get away with it. Hissudden retirement is years too late.”
Hayes is among thousands of stateand local judges across America who were allowed to keep positions of extraordinary power and prestige after violating judicial ethicsrules or breaking laws they pledged to uphold, a Reuters investigation found.
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Reuters database: Judges who were publicly disciplined – and what they did
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Judges have made raciststatements, lied to state officials and forced defendants to languish in jail without a lawyer – and then returned to the bench,sometimes with little more than a rebuke from the state agencies overseeing their conduct.
Recent media reports havedocumented failures in judicial oversight in South Carolina, Louisiana and Illinois. Reuters went further.
In the first comprehensiveaccounting of judicial misconduct nationally, Reuters identified and reviewed 1,509 cases from the last dozen years – 2008 through2019 – in which judges resigned, retired or were publicly disciplined following accusations of misconduct. In addition,reporters identified another 3,613 cases from 2008 through 2018 in which states disciplined wayward judges but kept hidden from thepublic key details of their offenses – including the identities of the judges themselves.
All told, 9 of every 10judges were allowed to return to the bench after they were sanctioned for misconduct, Reuters determined. They included aCalifornia judge who had sex in his courthouse chambers, once with his former law intern and separately with an attorney; a New York judge who berated domestic violence victims; and a Maryland judge who, after his arrest for driving drunk, was allowed to return to the bench provided he took a Breathalyzer testbefore each appearance.
The news agency’s findingsreveal an “excessively” forgiving judicial disciplinary system, said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University whowrites about judicial ethics. Although punishment short of removal from the bench is appropriate for most misconduct cases, Gillerssaid, the public “would be appalled at some of the lenient treatment judges get” for substantial transgressions.
Among the cases from the pastyear alone:
PUBLIC WARNINGS
Burst into a jury deliberation room, exclaiming that God told him the defendant was innocent.
The Herald-Zeitung/Handout via REUTERS
In Utah, a judge texted a video of a man’s scrotum to court clerks. He was reprimanded but remains on the bench. In Indiana, three judges attending a conference last spring gotdrunk and sparked a 3 a.m. brawl outside a White Castle fast-food restaurant that ended with two of the judges shot. Althoughthe state supreme court found the three judges had “discredited the entire Indiana judiciary,” each returned to the bench after asuspension. In Texas, a judge burst inon jurors deliberating the case of a woman charged with sex trafficking and declared that God told him the defendant was innocent. The offending judge received a warning and returned to the bench. The defendant was convictedafter a new judge took over the case. “There are certain things wherethere should be a level of zero tolerance,” the jury foreman, Mark House, told Reuters. The judge should have been fined, Housesaid, and kicked off the bench. “There is no justice, because he is still doing his job.”Judicial misconduct specialists say such behavior has the potential to erode trust in America’scourts and, absent tough consequences, could give judges license to behave with impunity.“When you see cases like that, the public starts to wonder about the integrity and honesty of thesystem,” said Steve Scheckman, a lawyer who directed Louisiana’s oversight agency and served as deputy director of New York’s. “Itlooks like a good ol’ boys club.” That’s how local lawyers viewedthe case of a longtime Alabama judge who concurrently served on the state’s judicial oversight commission. The judge, Cullman DistrictCourt’s Kim Chaney, remained on the bench for three years after being accused of violating the same nepotism rules he was tasked withenforcing on the oversight commission. In at least 200 cases, court records show, Judge Chaney chose his own son to serve as acourt-appointed defense lawyer for the indigent, enabling the younger Chaney to earn at least $105,000 in fees over two years.
In February, months after Reutersrepeatedly asked Chaney and the state judicial commission about those cases, he retired from the bench as part of a deal with stateauthorities to end the investigation. Tommy Drake, the lawyer who firstfiled a complaint against Chaney in 2016, said he doubts the judge would have been forced from the bench if Reuters hadn’t examinedthe case. “You know the only reason theydid anything about Chaney is because you guys started asking questions,” Drake said. “Otherwise, he’d still be there.”
Broken Bedrock of American justice
State and local judges drawlittle scrutiny even though their courtrooms are the bedrock of the American criminal justice system, touching the lives of millions ofpeople every year. The country’s approximately1,700 federal judges hear 400,000 cases annually. The nearly 30,000 state, county and municipal court judges handle afar bigger docket: more than 100 million new cases each year, from traffic to divorce to murder. Their titles range from justice of thepeace to state supreme court justice. Their powers are vast and varied – from determining whether a defendant should be jailedto deciding who deserves custody of a child. Each U.S. state has an oversightagency that investigates misconduct complaints against judges. The authority of the oversight agencies is distinct from the power heldby appellate courts, which can reverse a judge’s legal ruling and order a new trial. Judicial commissions cannot change verdicts.Rather, they can investigate complaints about the behavior of judges and pursue discipline ranging from reprimand to removal.
REPRIMANDED:
General Sessions Court, Tennessee
Granted jail credit to women who received surgical implants for birth control and men who received vasectomies.
TNcourts.gov/Handout via REUTERS
Few experts dispute that thegreat majority of judges behave responsibly, respecting the law and those who appear before them. And some contend that, when judgesdo falter, oversight agencies are effective in identifying and addressing the behavior. “With a few notable exceptions, thecommissions generally get it right,” said Keith Swisher, a University of Arizona law professor who specializes in judicialethics.
Others disagree. They note thatthe clout of these commissions is limited, and their authority differs from state to state. To remove a judge, all but a handful ofstates require approval of a panel that includes other judges. And most states seldom exercise the full extent of those disciplinarypowers.
As a result, the system tends toerr on the side of protecting the rights and reputations of judges while overlooking the impact courtroom wrongdoing has on those mostaffected by it: people like Marquita Johnson. Reuters scoured thousands of state investigative files, disciplinary proceedings and court recordsfrom the past dozen years to quantify the personal toll of judicial misconduct. The examination found at least 5,206 people who weredirectly affected by a judge’s misconduct. The victims cited in disciplinary documents ranged from people who were illegally jailedto those subjected to racist, sexist and other abusive comments from judges in ways that tainted the cases. The number is a conservativeestimate. The tally doesn’t include two previously reported incidents that affected thousands of defendants and prompted sweepingreviews of judicial conduct.
“If we have a system that holdsa wrongdoer accountable but we fail to address the victims, then we are really losing sight of what a justice system should be allabout.”
In Pennsylvania, the stateexamined the convictions of more than 3,500 teenagers sentenced by two judges. The judges were convicted of taking kickbacks as part ofa scheme to fill a private juvenile detention center. In 2009, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court appointed senior judge Arthur Grim tolead a victim review, and the state later expunged criminal records for 2,251 juveniles. Grim told Reuters that every state should adopt a way tocompensate victims of judicial misconduct.
“If we have a system that holds a wrongdoer accountable but we fail to address the victims, then weare really losing sight of what a justice system should be all about,” Grim said. In another review underway in Ohio, state public defender Tim Young is scrutinizing 2,707 cases handled by a judge who retired in 2018 after being hospitalized for alcoholism. Mike Benza, a law professor atCase Western Reserve University whose students are helping identify victims, compared the work to current investigations into policeabuse of power. “You see one case and then you look to see if it’s systemic,” he said. The review, which has been limited during the coronavirus pandemic, may take a year. But Youngsaid the time-consuming task is essential because “a fundamental injustice may have been levied against hundreds or thousands ofpeople.” ‘Special rules for judges’ Most states afford judges accused of misconduct a gentle kind of justice. Perhaps no state betterillustrates the shortcomings of America’s system for overseeing judges than Alabama.
CENSURED JUDGES:
Had sex in his chambers with his intern and with an attorney practicing before his court.
Twitter/Handout via REUTERS
As in most states, Alabama’snine-member Judicial Inquiry Commission is a mix of lawyers, judges and laypeople. All are appointed. Their deliberations are secret andthey operate under some of the most judge-friendly rules in the nation.Alabama’s rules make even filing a complaint against a judge difficult. The complaint must benotarized, which means that in theory, anyone who makes misstatements about the judge can be prosecuted for perjury. Complaints aboutwrongdoing must be made in writing; those that arrive by phone, email or without a notary stamp are not investigated, although sendersare notified why their complaints have been summarily rejected. Anonymous written complaints are shredded. These rules can leave lawyers and litigants fearing retaliation, commission director Jenny Garrettnoted in response to written questions.
“It’s a ridiculous systemthat protects judges and makes it easy for them to intimidate anyone with a legitimate complaint,” said Sue Bell Cobb, chief justice ofthe Alabama Supreme Court from 2007 to 2011. In 2009, she unsuccessfully championed changes to the process and commissioned anAmerican Bar Association report that offered a scathing review of Alabama’s rules. In most other states, commission staff members can start investigating a judge upon receiving a phonecall or email, even anonymous ones, or after learning of questionable conduct from a news report or court filing. In Alabama, staff willnot begin an investigation without approval from the commission itself, which convenes about every seven weeks.By rule, the commission also must keep a judge who is under scrutiny fully informed throughout aninvestigation. If a subpoena is issued, the judge receives a simultaneous copy, raising fears about witness intimidation. Ifa witness gives investigators a statement, the judge receives a transcript. In the U.S. justice system, such deference toindividuals under investigation is extremely rare. “It’s a ridiculous systemthat protects judges and makes it easy for them to intimidate anyone with a legitimate complaint.”“Why the need for special rules for judges?” said Michael Levy, a Washington lawyer who hasrepresented clients in high-profile criminal, corporate, congressional and securities investigations. “If judges think it’sfair and appropriate to investigate others for crimes or misconduct without providing those subjects or targets with copies of witnessstatements and subpoenas, why don’t judges think it’s fair to investigate judges in the same way?” Alabama judges also are given an opportunity to resolve investigations confidentially.Reuters interviews and a review of Alabama commission records show the commission has met with judges informally at least 19 timessince 2011 to offer corrective “guidance.” The identities of those judges remain confidential, as does the conduct that promptedthe meetings. “Not every violation warrants discipline,” commission director Garrett said.
Since 2008, the commission hasbrought 21 public cases against judges, including Hayes, charging two this year. 496 = Number ofdays Judge Hayes sentenced Marquita Johnson to jail for unpaid traffic tickets.Two of the best-known cases brought by the commission involved Roy Moore, who was twice forcedout as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for defying federal court orders.Another Alabama justice fared better in challenging a misconduct complaint, however. Tom Parker,first elected to the state’s high court in 2004, pushed back when the commission investigated him in 2015 for comments hemade on the radio criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage. Parker sued the commission in federal court, arguing the agency was infringing on his FirstAmendment rights. He won. Although the commission had dropped its investigation before the ruling, it was ordered to cover Parker’slegal fees: $100,000, or about a fifth of the agency’s total annual budget.
In 2018, the people of Alabama elected Parker chief justice. These days, Parker told Reuters, Alabama judges and the agency that oversees them enjoy “a muchbetter relationship” that’s less politically tinged. “How can I say it? It’s much more respectful between the commission and thejudges now.”
“Gut instinct”
Montgomery, Alabama has a deephistory of racial conflict, as reflected in the clashing concepts emblazoned on the city’s great seal: “Cradle of the Confederacy”and “Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement.” Jefferson Davis was inauguratedhere as Confederate president after the South seceded from the Union in 1861, and his birthday is a state holiday. As wascommon throughout the South, the city was the site of the lynchings of Black men, crimes now commemorated at a nationalmemorial based here. Police arrested civil rights icon Rosa Parks here in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a city busto a white passenger. Today, about 60% ofMontgomery’s 198,000 residents are Black, U.S. census records show. Even so, Black motorists account for about90% of those charged with unpaid traffic tickets, a Reuters examination of court records found. Much of Judge Hayes’ work inmunicipal court involved traffic cases and the collection of fines. Hayes, who is white, told Reuters that “the majority of people whocome before the court are Black.” City officials have said thatneither race nor economics have played a role in police efforts to enforce outstanding warrants, no matter how minor the offense.In April 2012, Marquita Johnson was among them. Appearing before Hayes on a Wednesday morning, the28-year-old single mother pleaded for a break. Johnson had struggled for eightyears to pay dozens of tickets that began with a citation for failing to show proof of insurance. She had insurance, she said. But when shewas pulled over, she couldn’t find the card to prove it. Even a single ticket was aknockout blow on her minimum-wage waitress salary. In addition to fines, the court assessed a $155 fee to every ticket. Court recordsshow that police often issued her multiple tickets for other infractions during every stop – a practice some residents call“stacking.”
Under state law, failing to pay even one ticket can result in the suspension of a driver’s license. Johnson’s decision to keepdriving nonetheless – taking her children to school or to doctor visits, getting groceries, going to work – led to more tickets anddeeper debt. “I told Judge Hayes that I hadlost my job and needed more time to pay,” she recounted.
By Hayes’ calculation, Johnsonowed more than $12,000 in fines. He sentenced Johnson to 496 days in jail. Hayes arrived at that sentence by counting each day in jail as$25 toward the outstanding debt. A different judge later determined that Johnson actually owed half the amount calculated by Hayes, andthat Hayes had incorrectly penalized her over fines she had already paid. To shave time off her sentence, Johnson washed police cars andperformed other menial labor while jailed.
Hayes told Reuters that hegenerally found pleas of poverty hard to believe. “With my years of experience, I can tell when someone is being truthful with me,”Hayes said. He called it “gut instinct” — though he added, in a statement this week, that he also consulted “each defendant’scriminal and traffic history as well as their history of warrants and failures to appear in court.”
Of course, the law demands moreof a judge than a gut call. In a 1983 landmark decision, Bearden v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state judges areobligated to hold a hearing to determine whether a defendant has “willfully” chosen not to pay a fine. According to the state’s judicial oversight commission, “Judge Hayes did not make anyinquiry into Ms. Johnson’s ability to pay, whether her non-payment was willful.” From jail, “I prayed to return to my daughters,” Johnson said. “I was sure that someone wouldrealize that Hayes had made a mistake.” She said her worst day in jailwas her youngest daughter’s 3rd birthday. From a jail telephone, she tried to sing “Happy Birthday” but slumped to thefloor in grief. “She was choking up andcrying,” said Johnson’s mother, Blanche, who was on the call. “She was devastated to be away from her children so long.”
When Johnson was freed after 10months in jail, she learned that strangers had abused her two older children. One is now a teenager; the other is in middle school. “Mykids will pay a lifetime for what the court system did to me,” Johnson said. “My daughters get frantic when I leave the house. Iknow they’ve had nightmares that I’m going to disappear again.” Six months after Johnson’srelease, Hayes jailed another single Black mother. Angela McCullough, then 40, had been pulled over driving home from FaulknerUniversity, a local community college where she carried a 3.87 grade point average. As a mother of four children, including a disabledadult son, she had returned to college to pursue her dream of becoming a mental health counselor. Police ticketed her for failingto turn on her headlights. After a background check, the officer arrested McCullough on a warrant for outstanding traffic tickets. Shewas later brought before Hayes. “I can’t go to jail,”McCullough recalled pleading with the judge. “I’m a mother. I have a disabled son who needs me.”
Hayes sentenced McCullough to 100days in jail to pay off a court debt of $1,350, court records show. Her adult son, diagnosed with schizophrenia, was held in aninstitution until her release. McCullough said she cleaned jailcells in return for time off her sentence. One day, she recalled, she had to clean a blood-soaked cell where a female inmate had slit herwrists. She was freed after 20 days, using the money she saved for tuition to pay off her tickets, shesaid. Jail was the darkest chapter ofher life, McCullough said, a place where “the devil was trying to take my mind.” Today, she has abandoned her pursuit of a degree. “Idon’t think I’ll ever be able to afford to go back.”
SUSPENDED 6 MONTHS:
Deliberately postponed the appointment of public defenders in probation violation cases.
A clear sign that something wasamiss in Montgomery courts came in November 2013, when a federal lawsuit was filed alleging that city judges were unlawfully jailingthe poor. A similar suit was filed in 2014, and two more civil rights cases were filed in 2015. Johnson and McCullough were Plaintiffs.The lawsuits detailed practices similar to those that helped fuel protests in Ferguson, Missouri,after a white police officer killed a Black teenager in 2014. In a scathing report on the origins of the unrest, the U.S. Department ofJustice exposed how Ferguson had systematically used traffic enforcement to raise revenue through excessive fines, a practice thatfell disproportionately hard on Black residents. “Montgomery is just like Ferguson,” said Karen Jones, a community activist and founder of alocal educational nonprofit. Jones has led recent protests in Montgomery in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the Black manwhose death under the knee of a cop in Minneapolis set off worldwide calls for racial justice. In Montgomery, “everybody knew that the police targeted Black residents. And I sat in Hayes’court and watched him squeeze poor people for more money, then toss them in jail where they had to work off debts with free labor to thecity.” It was years before the flurry ofcivil rights lawsuits against Hayes and his fellow judges had much impact on the commission. The oversight agency opened its Hayes casein summer 2015, nearly two years after Plaintiffss’ lawyers in the civil rights cases filed a complaint with the body. Hayes spentanother year and a half on the bench before accepting the suspension.
Under its own rules, thecommission could have filed a complaint and told its staff to investigate Hayes at any time. Commission director Garrett said sheis prohibited by law from explaining why the commission didn’t investigate sooner. The investigation went slowly, Garrett said,because it involved reviewing thousands of pages of court records. The commission also was busy with other cases from 2015 to early2017, Garrett said, issuing charges against five judges, including Moore.
“Slap in the face”
A few months after Judge Hayes’suspension ended, his term as a municipal judge was set to expire. So, the Montgomery City Council took up the question of the judge’sfuture on March 6, 2018. On the agenda of its meeting: whether to reappoint Hayes to another four-year term.
Hayes wasn’t in the audiencethat night, but powerful supporters were. The city’s chief judge, Milton Westry, told the council that Hayes and his colleagues havechanged how they handled cases involving indigent defendants, “since we learned a better way of doing things.” In the wake of the suits,Westry said, Hayes and his peers complied with reforms that required judges to make audio recordings of court hearings and notify lawyerswhen clients are jailed for failing to pay fines. As part of a settlement in thecivil case, the city judges agreed to implement changes for at least two years. Those reforms have since been abandoned, Reuters found.Both measures were deemed too expensive, Hayes and city officials confirmed.Residents who addressed the council were incredulous that the city would consider reappointingHayes. Jones, the community activist, reminded council members that Hayes had “pleaded guilty to violating the very laws he was swornto uphold.” The city council voted torehire Hayes to a fifth consecutive term.
Marquita Johnson said she can’tunderstand why a judge whose unlawful rulings changed the lives of hundreds has himself emerged virtually unscathed. “Hiring Hayes back to the bench was a slap in the face to everyone,” Johnson said. “It was amessage that we don’t matter.” On Thursday, Hayes will retirefrom the bench. In an earlier interview with Reuters, he declined to discuss the Johnson case. Asked whether he regrets any ofthe sentences he has handed out, he paused. “I think, maybe, I could havebeen more sympathetic at times,” Hayes said. “Sometimes you miss a few.”Additional reporting by Isabella Jibilian, Andrea Januta and Blake Morrison. Edited by Morrison. In another example reported by JOHN SHIFFMAN , A watchdog accused, a pattern of rulings delayed, a repeat offenderwherein Three recent cases illustrate how Alabama judges who were cited forwrongdoing were able to remain on the bench for years. Judge Chaney: Enforced, broke rules!What happened when a trial judge who also served on the state’s judicial oversight board wasaccused of misbehavior. Alex Chaney was just a year out of law school in 2015 when he started receiving lucrativeappointments at taxpayer expense. A district judge began assigning him to represent people too poor to afford a lawyer.That judge was his dad, Kim Chaney.
Judge Chaney is a powerful figurein rural Cullman County, where he was first elected to the bench in 1992. Chaney serves on a local bank board and has led severalstatewide justice associations. In 2012, the governor honoredChaney by selecting him to also serve on Alabama’s nine-member Judicial Inquiry Commission, which investigates misconduct by judges.While on the commission, Chaney broke its ethics laws in his own courtroom.In 2016, local attorney Tommy Drake filed a complaint against Chaney, alleging that the judge wasappointing his son to represent indigent defendants, violating ethics rules that prohibit nepotism. Alex Chaney was paid $105,000 from 2015to 2017 by the state for such court-appointed work, accounting records show. Because Judge Chaney served on the judicial commission, Drake sent his complaint to a differentstate watchdog agency, the Alabama Ethics Commission. On October 4, 2017, the Ethics Commission found that Judge Chaney violated ethicsrules and referred the case to the state attorney general. The following day, records show,Judge Chaney resigned from the Judicial Inquiry Commission. But he remained a trial judge in Cullman. Eighteen months passed.Last summer, a Reuters reporter began asking state officials about the status of the case. Theofficials declined to comment. In November, Reuters sent JudgeChaney and his son queries. They did not respond. The judge’s lawyer, John Henig Jr, wrote to Reuters: “Judge Chaney is a personof remarkably good character and would never knowingly do anything unethical or wrong.”Henig said that Judge Chaney appointed his son from a rotating list of lawyers to representindigent defendants. Henig called the appointments “ministerial” in nature.
“If Judge Chaney’s son’sname was the next name on the list for appointments, Judge Chaney would call out his son’s name and thereafter immediately recusehimself from the case,” Henig wrote. A Reuters review of court recordsshowed otherwise: Judge Chaney participated in several cases after appointing his son and issued substantive decisions. For example,records show that the judge reduced bond for one of his son’s clients, and approved another’s motion to plead guilty. Henig didnot respond to questions about these records.
This February 7 – eight monthsafter Reuters began inquiring about Chaney – the commission charged the judge with appointing his son to more than 200 cases and makingrulings in some of them. Chaney struck a deal with the commission and retired from the bench, avoiding a trial. During a hearing to approve the deal, commission lawyer Elizabeth Bern said Chaney shouldhave known better than to appoint his son, especially given that he did so while a member of the oversight agency. During Chaney’stenure, the commission had disciplined two judges who abused their office to benefit a relative. “The nepotism provision is clear and unequivocal without exception,” she said.
Chaney did not speak during thehearing. Drake, the lawyer who filed thecomplaint in 2016, said that absent the Reuters inquiries, he doubts Chaney would have retired from the bench because he is sopolitically powerful. Indeed, shortly after the judgestepped down in disgrace for steering work to his son, the local bar association issued a resolution praising him.Of Chaney, the local lawyers said, “He has always maintained the highest ethical and moralstandards of the office and has been an example to all, what a judge should represent.”
Judge Kelly: “Callous indifference”
How a judge left children in limbo by repeatedly failing to perform her most basic duty: ruling oncases. Montgomery Circuit Court Judge Anita Kelly hears time-sensitive family matters such as childcustody, adoption and divorce – cases in which a child remains in limbo until she rules. Starting in 2014, court and judicial commission records show, word of years-long delays in hercases began to emerge from foster parents, lawyers, social workers and appeals court judges. Commission officials are barred by law fromdiscussing the case, but Reuters pieced together the scope of the investigation through juvenile court records, public documents andinterviews with people involved. In May 2014, foster parents Cheri and Travis Norwood filed a complaint about Kelly with thejudicial commission. They alleged the judge’s incompetence led to a traumatic, years-long delay in which a foster child who began livingwith the Norwoods as an infant was taken away from them at age 3 ½ and returned to live with her teenage biological mother.“If Judge Kelly thought they should have been together, fine,” Travis Norwood said in aninterview. “Why didn’t this happen sooner? Because children can’t wait. You can’t freeze a child, hold her in suspended animationuntil her mother is ready.” Social workers who heard about the Norwood complaint forwarded their own concerns about Kelly’sconduct in several other cases. Nonetheless, the commission dismissed the Norwood complaint in early 2015, finding “no reasonable basisto charge the judge.”
Over the next year, more redflags emerged. State appeals court judges raised concerns about Kelly’s “continued neglect of her duty,” citing at least fivecases that had untenable delays. In November 2015, a supreme court justice criticized the nearly three years it took todetermine one child’s fate. “I refuse to be another adultwho has totally failed this child,” Justice Tommy Bryan wrote. Another 20 months passedbefore the judicial commission took action. In August 2017, it charged Kelly with delays that “manifest a callous indifference orlack of comprehension” to children’s well-being. One child’s case, it noted, had dragged on for five years. Kelly took her case to trial before the Court of the Judiciary, the special tribunal thatweighs charges against judges. Her attorney argued that the judge worked hard and had shown no ill intent.
In 2018, the tribunal found Kelly failed to “maintain professional competence.” Kelly was suspended for 90 days. Still, she kept her job. The courtsaid it likely would have removed Kelly from the bench if not for two factors: Voters re-elected her in 2016, and she exhibited “goodcharacter and the lack of evidence of scandal or corruption on her part.” Her lawyer, Henry Lewis Gillis, applauded her reinstatement and said the delays neveraffected the quality of her decisions. “Judge Kelly cannot changeyesterday,” Gillis said. “Rather, she chooses to learn from her past experiences as she continues to handle the many, many, manycases that come before her today.”
Judge Wiggins: Give blood or go to jail
A judge who is a repeatoffender – four times over – remains on the bench. Circuit Judge Marvin Wiggins hasbeen hit with misconduct charges by Alabama’s judicial conduct commission four times over the past decade. In 2009, he was reprimanded and suspended for 90 days for failing to recuse himself from a voter fraud investigation involving hisrelatives. “The public must be able totrust that our judges will dispense justice fairly and impartially,” the Court of the Judiciary concluded. “Judge Wiggins, by hisactions, disregarded that trust.” In 2016 – in a case that madeglobal headlines – Wiggins was censured for offering defendants the option of giving blood instead of going to jail for failing to pay fines. A local blood drive happened to be taking place at the courthouse thatday. “If you do not have any moneyand you don’t want to go to jail, as an option to pay it, you can give blood today,” Wiggins told dozens of defendants, according toa recording. “Consider that as a discount rather than putting you in jail, if you do not have any money.”Forty-one defendants gave blood that day, and the commission called Wiggins’ conduct “reprehensibleand inexcusable.” Wiggins acknowledged that his comments were inappropriate, but noted he did not send anyone to jail that day forfailure to pay fines.
Wiggins’lawyer, Joe Espy III, said that the judge “has always tried to cooperate” with authorities. Espy noted that Wiggins is a communityleader, an ordained pastor and has been repeatedly re-elected to the bench for more than 20 years.“He is not only a good judge but a good person,” Espy said.Last year, Wiggins was reprimanded for directly calling the father in a custody dispute – a conversation that violated a rule prohibiting a judgefrom discussing a case without both sides present. A recording of the call became a key piece of evidence against Wiggins. In preparation for trial in that case, the commission said it found a “pattern and practice” ofsimilar one-sided calls. The commission also said it found evidence that Wiggins was meeting with divorce litigants in his chamberswithout lawyers present. In November, this prompted a newcommission case against Wiggins – his fourth in 10 years. “At a very minimum,” thecommission alleged, his track record indicates a “pattern of carelessness or indifferent disregard or lack of respect for the highstandards imposed on the judiciary.” But at a pretrial hearing inJanuary, and in a subsequent order, Wiggins scored a victory before the Alabama tribunal that issues final judgment on such cases, theCourt of the Judiciary. The presiding judge raised questions about whether proper procedures had been followed in the case againstWiggins. Three weeks later, the commissiondropped the case. And Wiggins returned to the bench.
Theseare only a few examples, supplied by major investigators and public official that prove that some Judges believe they are immune toviolations of the law in order to protect their special interests. These, and many other reports, validates Plaintiffs’s concerns.
Plaintiffs,and his team associates, have helped develop and promote software, for use by every member of the public, by every member of Congressand by every law enforcement and regulatory agency. This software catches conflicted public officials..from Senators, to Judges, toWhite House staff.
Thesesoftware tools are new open-source, and free, public software let any citizen get anycorrupt official arrested. Any voter can use the software from the comfort of their living room. The AI replicates itself (Like A benigndigital version of Covid) across the entire web.
You can download a copy ofthe software or build-your-own version of it from freely available code at Github, CERN and Linux repositories. Plaintiffs,and his peers, have consulted with theSEC and the GAO on this technology.
After suffering millions ofdollars of losses from public official’s Insider Trading schemes, Plaintiffsdecided to do something about that!
Illegal and corrupt Congressional, Judge and major public servantinsider trading tends to be something you don’t hear about until it’s hit the big news networks and newspapers as the SEC goes for thethroat of the accused. By then, unfortunately, those committing the crimes have made their gains, usually in the multi-millions ofdollars, and the damage has been done to the stock, its company, investors and the American Way. Covert stock market trades are nowthe #1 form of bribes in California and Washington, DC.
Quite frankly, the jail time assessed doesn’t correct the damagedone, and the fines rarely aid the investors, or the voters, in getting their money and their democracy back. Many of those hurt areAverage Joe’s and Jill’s, like Plaintiffs, who were just trying to save their retirement nest eggs.
‘Public Shame’ is the tool that works best to take down thecorrupt!
These crimes involve an investment banker spouse anda Senator or other top official, using information, which was not available to the public, buying and selling a company’s stock in anunderhanded manner. In many cases bribes have been paid with Google, Tesla or Facebook stock in a covert manner. It isparticularly onerous when a Senators buys Tesla, Google, Facebook or Solyndra stock, and makes laws that only benefits Tesla, Solyndra,etc, while sabotaging their competitor constituents. Because the dealings involved are pretty much done on the sly, it’s beendifficult, until now, for the governing body of the SEC to prove illegal insider trading, unless one of the cohortstattles on the others or their actions become glaringly obvious. In some cases, a sharp mind around the action may take notice and becomewhat’s called a whistle-blower.
Previously, writes Andrew Beattie of Investopedia: “… insider trading is often difficult for the SEC to spot. Detecting it involves a lot ofconjecture and consideration of probabilities.” That was the ‘old days’, though. Today, the new AI software can bustthrough these scams like a hot knife through butter!
With this new open-source, free, public spy agency-class software,detecting illegal insider trading is actually less complicated than it sounds.
To the eyes of this new super-powerful AI observer server bot andpeer-to-peer databases, it is easy work. You, the citizen, just type the politician or agency employee name into a field and hit the”analyze” button. A few minutes later you receive a multi-page PDF report similar to an FBI report on the target. You caneither research the subject in more detail or send copies of the report to the FBI, GAO, OSC, SEC or other enforcement group.
The software is an automated AI temporal matching system whichincludes 24/7 analysis of all stock trades involving politicians to its information source, politician finances, communications andpolicy participators. it uses some of the same software code used by the CERN mega-research center in Switzerland.
The technology Core Evaluation Points:
- Analyst estimates – these come from what an analyst estimates that a company’s quarterly or annual earnings will be. They are important because they help approximate the fair value of an entity, which basically establishes it price on the stock exchange.
- Share volume – this reflects the quantity of shares that can be traded over a certain period of time. There are buyers and there are sellers, and the transactions that take place between them contribute to total volume.
One Way The AI Detects Congressional Insider Trades
Metricized signs of illegal insider trading occur when tradesoccur that break out of the historical pattern of share volume traded compared to beneficiary participation’s of those connected to companyand political entity. Another clue of the illegal insider trading is when a lot of trading goes on right before earnings announcements.That tends to be a sign that someone already knows what the announcement is going to indicate, and it’s an obvious violation. Onemodule of the new software hunts these trends around-the-clock in an unmanned manner like a detective who never needs to sleep.
The software red alerts are issued when trades are linked closerto the actual earnings and politicians bills instead of what the predicted earnings were. In a corruption case, it’s clear the trades- especially made by politicians close to the company – stemmed from information that was not readily available to the general public.
In other words, at the time an insider makes a trade, the tradehas a stronger relationship to earnings guidance rather than to earnings results achieved.
Part Of The Insider Trading Detection AI Uses ‘DynamicTime Warping (DTW)’
In econometrics, which is a concept frequently used byquantitative analysts to evaluate stock market prices, dynamic time warping (DTW) is an algorithm that can be used for measuringsimilarity between two data sequences by calculating an optimal match between the two. This sequence “matching” method is oftenused in time series classification to properly “line things up.”
The method, coupled with AI machine learning ensemble methods, canprovide a clear path between the trades made by insiders and public data used to make the trades.
This is a product of artificial intelligence that has beenexpanded by Indexer, Splunk, Palantir and other firms fast becoming experts in products that can be used to advance the art ofmanipulating political and social trends in business and markets by using social media, financial data and news stories. The new softwareprocess has taken that sort of approach to the next level and targeted every member of Congress, their staff, family and friends.The first emphasis is on California and Washington, DC public figures.
In a hypothetical example, a group of executives failed to tradeby industry standards by leveraging material non-public information and policy manipulation. Although consensus estimates called forhigher commodity prices at the end of 2015, it appears key executives traded for their personal accounts as a result of the forecastprovided by a specialist system within the firm that was adept at predicting prices alongside lobbyist manipulations. Flash-boy tradingis now dirtier and powered by Google-class server systems.
In the hypothetical scenario the software aggregates executivetrades in 2014 and 2015 and finds a strong link between buys and sells of executive stock options, which line up with materialnon-public estimates of commodity prices that were provided by the specialist system.
For example, in a “Exec Sell and Exec Buys” graph, agreen line represents sells, while a black line represents buys. In the corresponding period, one finds a red line represents unrevisedprices provided by the specialist system, and green line represents consensus estimates.
During Q1-2014, there was $28M in purchases of executive stockoptions, while in Q2-2014, there was $25M in sales of executive stock options. The specialist system called for Q3-2014 commodity prices tomake a precipitous decline going into the end of 2014. Remember, under this scenario, no revisions were made to the specialistsystems’ price forecast. In this example, executives were afforded a significant advantage using price predictions from the specialistsystem.
In a final bullet chart, there was a dynamic time warping distancebetween trades and consensus estimates of 7.23, but this distance is only 2.19 when comparing specialist system estimates and executivetrades. Please note, the closer the distance score is to zero, the more similar the trades are to the estimates they are measuredagainst.
We have applied this process to companies well-known forinfluence buying like, Google, Tesla and Facebook
It’s obvious that the tech executives involved did not followindustry standards in their actions and make public the “insider” information they had access to prior to the trades they made. Thelobbyists they hired promoted this rigged trend and paid off Senators with perks. These are the kind of violations the SEC and othergoverning bodies can look to in attempting to protect the trading public and the integrity of financial marketplaces. Artificialintelligence tools are a major factor in assisting the tracking of insider trading.
“Every facet of our everyday lives has been impacted,infiltrated and greatly influenced by artificial intelligence technologies,” says Vernon A. McKinley, a multi-jurisdictionalattorney, based in Atlanta. “In fact, the U.S. government and its multiple agencies have developed specialized intelligence unitsto detect, track, analyze and prosecute those unscrupulous individuals seeking to profit from the use of such tools,specifically in the financial industry, and to protect the integrity and strength of the U.S. economy and its investors.” Now thesetools are being turned against the corrupt!
The public can now detect trading anomalies in financialsituations using this artificial intelligence software on their desktop computers. No public official will ever be able to do thesekinds of corruptions, again, without getting caught.
This approach has already had an impact on how political insiderstrade on Wall Street and in financial markets around the world.
This technology can end this corruption forever!
A module of the software uses data from The Center for ResponsivePolitics, ICIJ Panama Leaks records, Swiss Leaks records and FEC files to reveal covert routes. Famous politicians own part of TeslaMotors, Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube and other companies they helped get government money for. All of their competing constituentshave suffered for it or been put out of business by exclusive deals that only Tesla Motors, Facebook, Google, Netflix and YouTube got.That is a crime and charges have been filed with federal law enforcement.
A large volume of forensic research proves that Silicon ValleyCartel tech firms receive benefits from politicians and politicians,at the same time, benefit from these firms.
This evidence on the exchange of benefits between politicians andfirms proves an agreement between the politicians and the companies. This agreement, however, cannot be in the form of a written contractas writing direct fee-for-service contracts between a politician and a firm is considered bribery (Krozner and Stratmann 1998; 2000). Inaddition, either party to this agreement might renege on its promise and the other party cannot resort to the courts.
Procon.org, for example, reports: “Less than two months afterascending to the United States Senate, and before becoming President, one Senator bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in twospeculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors. One of the companies was a biotech concernthat was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying thousands of dollars of its shares, thisSenator took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease. The most recent financial disclosure form thisSenator . . . shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications businesswhose principal backers . . . hadraised more than $150,000 for his political committees.” See more examples from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics inWashington (CREW) report (2009).)
The literature and eye-witness experience proves that politically-connected SiliconValley tech firms monthly obtain economic favors, such as securing favorable legislation, special tax exemptions, having preferentialaccess to finance, receiving government contracts, or help in dealing with regulatory agencies. The evidence proves that Google’s support,for example, can help in winning elections. For example, firms can vary the number of people they employ, coordinate the opening andclosing of plants, and increase their lending activity in election years in order to help incumbent politicians get re-elected.(SeeRoberts 1990; Snyder 1990; Langbein and Lotwis 1990; Durden, Shorgen, and Silberman 1991; Stratmann 1991, 1995, and 1998; Fisman2001;Johnson and Mitton 2003; Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Ueda 2004; Sapienza 2004, Dinç 2005; Khwaja and Mian 2005; Bertrand,Kramarz,Schoar, and Thesmar 2006; Faccio 2006; Faccio, Masulis, and McConnell 2006; Jayachandran 2006; Leuz and Oberholzer-Gee 2006;Claessens,Feijen, Laeven 2008; Desai and Olofsgard 2008; Ramanna 2008;Goldman, Rocholl, and So 2008, 2009; Cole 2009; Cooper, Gulen,and Ovtchinnikov 2009; Correia 2009; Ramanna and Roychowdhury 2010;Benmelech and Moskowitz 2010.)
The software can see that the share ownership of politiciansserves as a mechanism to quid-pro-quo their relationships with big tech firms, is as follows: The ownership of politicians playsmultiple distinct (but not necessarily independent) roles; one that relies upon the amount of ownership and one that does not. First, asinvestors in firms, politicians tie their own interests to those of the firm. Thus, harming (benefiting) the firm means harming(benefiting) the politician and vice versa. By owning a firm’s stock, politicians commit their personal wealth to the firm and reduce afirm’s uncertainty with regard to their actions toward the firm. This will,in turn, enhance the firm’s incentive to support thepolitician-owner during both current and future elections in order to prolong the incumbency period for as long as possible. Firms havetheir lobbyists push to be able to know the amount of ownership likely to be material to politicians. This knowledge, in turn,enables them to judge whether the politician’s interest is aligned with the firm’s interest and optimize quid-pro-quo.
The Political Action Committee (PAC) contribution of firms (whichis a direct measure of benefits flowing from firms to politicians) is a significant determinant of ownership allocations by members ofCongress. The ownership of Congress members in firms that contribute to their election campaigns is roughly 32.8% higher than theirownership in noncontributing firms even after accounting for factors that are associated with both ownership and contribution (such asfamiliarity, proximity and investor recognition).
The committee assignments of politicians is a proxy for whethertheir relations with firms are enforced (Krozner and Stratmann 1998). Silicon Valley tech firms like Facebook, Tesla and Google obtainprivate benefits out of their mutual relations with politicians. When the strength of the association between ownership and contributionsat the firm level increases, the provision of government contracts to those firms increases.
Members of Congress, candidates for federal office, seniorcongressional staff, nominees for executive branch positions, Cabinet members, the President and Vice President, and Supreme Court justicesare required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to file annual reports disclosing their income, assets, liabilities, and otherrelevant details about their personal finances.
Personal financial disclosure forms are filed annually by May 15and cover the preceding calendar year. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) collected the 2004–2007 reports for Congress membersfrom the Senate Office of Public Records and the Office of the Clerkof the House. The Center then scanned the reports as digitalimages, classified the politicians’ investments into categories including stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and built a databaseaccessible via a web query.
Using CRP’s data, you can use the software to collect the sharesin S&P 500 firms held by members of Congress between 2004 and 2007, for example.You can collect the stock ownership data for everyfirm that joined the S&P 500 Index any time between January 2004 and April 2009;regardless of when it joined the index, and thesoftware can obtain all the available stock ownership data for that firm between 2004 and 2007. Likewise, if a firm dropped out of theindex at any time during 2004–2008, the software, nevertheless, will retain the firm in a sample for the target period. As such, thesample would include stocks in hundreds of unique firms owned by politicians between 2004 and 2007, for example.
Politicians are required to report only those stocks whose valueexceeds $1,000 at the end of the calendar year or that produce more than $200 in income. They are CURRENTLY not required to report theexact value of the holding, but instead must simply check a box corresponding to the value range into which the asset falls. The CRPthen undertakes additional research to determine the exact values of these stocks. When the Center makes these determinations, it reportsthem instead of the ranges and I use these values in my study. When only the range is available, you should use its midpoint as theholding’s value. You would, thus have data on the stock holdings of hundreds politicians for that time period.
Using the software, you can search for all Political ActionCommittees (PACs) associated with tech firms. It then collects data on each contribution these PACs made to candidates (both the winnersand losers) running for the Senate and House elections. Tricky corrupt Silicon Valley firms establish several PACs, each in adifferent location, and each of these PACs can contribute to the same candidate. In such cases, the software would total, for eachcandidate, every contribution he or she received from PACs affiliated with the same firm. To parallel the investment data sample period,for example, the software collects every contribution made from the 2003–2004 cycle up to and including the 2007–2008 cycle. ManySilicon Valley tech firms use deeply covert Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, BlackCube, Psyops-type service to make very hidden additional payolapayments to California politicians.
For sources, for example, the software collects governmentcontract data from Eagle Eye Publishers, Inc., one of the leading commercial providers of Federal procurement and grant businessintelligence and http://www.usaspending.org. Eagle Eye collects its contract data from Federal Procurement Data System–Next Generation(FPDS-NG), the contract data collection and dissemination system administered by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).FPDS-NG provides data on procurement contracts awarded by the U.S. Government. When these contracts are awarded to company subsidiaries,Eagle Eye searches for the names of their parent companies and assigns each subsidiary to its appropriate parent. The softwarecollects both the number and aggregate value of government contracts that were awarded to sample firms between 2004 and 2007 in thisexample time-frame..
The software reveals, for example, that one Representative is aten-term member of Congress and a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee. They arranged a meeting between theDepartment of Treasury and One United Bank, a company with close financial ties to themselves, involving both investments andcontributions.
“In September 2008, the Representative asked then-Secretaryof the Treasury Henry Paulson to hold a meeting for their friends in banks that had suffered from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac losses.
The Treasury Department complied and held a session with approximately adozen senior banking regulators, representatives from those banks, and their trade association. Officials of One United Bank have closeties to the Representative and attended the meeting along with the Representative’s chief of staff. Kevin Cohee, chief executive officerof One United, used the meeting as an opportunity to ask for bailout funds.
. . . Former White House officials stated they were surprisedwhen One United Officials asked for bailout funds. . . . In December 2008, the Representative intervened again, asking Treasury to hostanother meeting to ensure their banks received part of the $700 billion allocated under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. . . .Within two weeks, on December 19, 2008, One United secured $12.1million in bailout funds. . . . This was not the first time theRepresentative used their position to advance the interests of the bank. the Representative’s spouse became a shareholder in OneUnited in 2001, when it was known as the Boston Bank of Commerce. In 2002, Boston Bank of Commerce tried to purchase Family Savings, afriend of the Representative in Los Angeles. Instead, Family Savings turned to a bank in Illinois. The Representative tried toblock the merger by contacting regulators at the FDIC. The Representative publicly stated they did not want a major bank toacquire a bank that the Representative was friends with.
When the Representative’s efforts with the FDIC provedfruitless, the Representative began a public pressure campaign with other community leaders. Ultimately,when Family Savings changeddirection and allowed Boston Bank of Commerce to submit a winning bid, the Representative received credit for the merger. The combinedbanks were renamed One United. . . . In March 2004, the Representative acquired One United stock worth between $250,001 and$500,000, and the Representative’s spouse purchased two sets of stock, each worth between $250,001 and $500,000. In September 2004,the Representative sold their stock in One United and their husband sold a portion of his. That same year, the husband joined the bank’sboard. . . . One United Chief Executive Kevin Cohee and President Teri Williams Cohee have donated a total of $8,000 to theRepresentative’s campaign committee. . . .On October 27, 2009, less than two months before One United received a $12 million bailout, thebank received a cease-and-desist order from the FDIC and bank regulatory officials in Massachusetts for poor lending practices andexcessive executive compensation . . . the bank provided excessive perks to its executives, including paying for Mr. Cohee’s use of a$6.4 million mansion . . .” (Ref: CREW report 2009,pp. 123–125)
Thanks to Crony quid-pro-quo revelations by an earlier version ofthe software, you can also see that Fisker Automotive, Inc.’s $529 Million U.S. Taxpayer Loan Approval by the Department of Energy wasdirty. Fisker Automotive’s Chief Operating Officer Bernhard Koehler pleaded with the Department of Energy in a panicked Saturday midnighthour email to receive a $529 million loan as the company was 2 weeks from Chapter 7 liquidation, that it was laying off most of itsemployees, that no private sector investors would fund the company without DOE guarantees, and that Fisker was unable to raise anyfurther equity funding from independent private-sector investors given the company’s financial condition.These statements were made toa Loan Officer at the DOE . No private sector Loan underwriting (approval) committee would ever grant a low interest loan to adesperate buyer that had just confessed it was in a state of insolvency and was about to layoff most of its staff. Yet within afew weeks the DOE would approve a $529 Million Credit Facility to Fisker. Despite the DOE Loan Officer official’s sworn testimony atApril 24th’s House Oversight Committee that the DOE used “same private sector underwriting standards when approving Fisker and otherapproved Taxpayer Funded Loans” – likely perjury based in documents.
In a ‘U.S. GOVERNMENT CONFIDENTIAL EMAIL’: FISKER AUTOMOTIVE:August 2009: Co-Founder Bernhard Koehler emails U.S. Dept. of Energy Loan Officer in Sat. midnight Panic admitting VC Firms all declinedto invest, and company is out of cash. Weeks later the U.S.Department of Energy approves $529M U.S. Taxpayer Funded Loans to FISKER. NOPRIVATE SECTOR Lender would every authorize a Loan for even $5 Million let alone $529 Million after receiving this email statingprivate sector investors had examined the company and declined equity investments, that they might loan money as more secure Debt, and theChief Operating Officer of the company further stating that the borrower is totally insolvent. (Weeks after this email the U.S.Federal Government Dept. of Energy Loan Committee Approves Fisker Automotive as a credit-worthy borrow for $529 Million in U.S.Taxpayer Funded Loans). Fisker got the cash because President Obama said to “give it to them” in order to please his campaignfinanciers.
The same thing happened with Tesla Motors. Elon Musk and TeslaMotors were broke when DOE gave them the money.
PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh stated in an official statement: “Thedocuments obtained by PrivCo paint a picture of how an insolvent,unproven automaker received $192 million in taxpayerfunding. The Department of Energy made a loan that no rational lender would have made. This loan was the equivalent of staying execution ona company that was terminally ill to begin with.” Tesla and Fisker could not have been taxpayer funded unless bribes and criminalquid-pro-quo was underway by President Obama and the U.S. Senator insider traders.
Since its ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, the U.S. Supreme Court hasexpressed concern regarding corruption or the appearance of corruption stemming from political quid pro quo arrangements and thedeleterious consequences it may have on citizens’ democratic behavior. However, no standard has been set as to what constitutes“the appearance of corruption,” as the Court was and continues to be vague in its definition. As a result, campaign finance cases afterBuckley have relied on public opinion polls as evidence of perceptions of corruption, and these polls indicate that the publicgenerally perceives high levels of corruption in government. The present study investigates the actual impact that perceptions ofcorruption have on individuals’ levels of political participation. Adapting the standard socioeconomic status model developed most fullyby Verba and Nie (1972), an extended beta-binomial regression estimated using maximum likelihood is performed, utilizing uniquedata from the 2009 University of Texas’ Money and Politics survey. The results of this study indicate that individuals who perceivehigher levels of quid pro quo corruption participate more in politics, on average, than those who perceive lower levels ofcorruption.
Quid pro quo is not a difficult concept to understand. Too bad themedia doesn’t endeavor to investigate and explain it. Your politicians don’t work for you, they work for their own insidertrading stock market holdings for themselves!
Corruption-finding software, such as that described above, will beused by Plaintiffs, and Plaintiffs’s investigative news reporter associates, law enforcement contacts, intelligence agency contactsand regulatory agency contacts on all opposition parties associated with this case.
The facts imply that most public officials arebiased towards their friends, business partners and political associates who are sometimes Defendants in these cases and under investigation inactive federal criminal cases that have been reported to law enforcement and regulatory agencies.
DOES1 through 20, as additional Defendants in this case, are thought, by investigators, to include persons friendly with the Judge, infinancial investments with the Judge and the leadership of organizations for which the Judge is a spokesperson. If those personsare also under active investigations by SEC, FTC, OGE, OSC, FEC, DOJ, FBI, and other organizations that Plaintiffs reports to, then thepotential conflicts of interest are compounded.