It’s payback time. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will probably disbar me by the end of next week. The court gave me less than 30 days notice of an August 30, 2016 trial date, it will not allow me to present any witnesses at my trial, and it is giving me a total of 30 minutes to defend my reputation, my career, and my livelihood. That’s the sort of “justice” I would expect in Cuba or China.
And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’ve followed this blog or read DirtyRottenJudges.com, you know that I filed a judicial misconduct complaint against U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle in early 2015 after I learned that she had secretly communicated ex parte with my opposing counsel while a case was pending in her courtroom. Attorneys Patrick Kearney and Michael Bramnick forged their client’s signature onto a false affidavit, knowingly filed false discovery responses to hide an adverse witness, and suborned perjury, but Judge Huvelle repeatedly refused to do anything about it.
After trial, I learned that Judge Huvelle had been secretly relaying messages to Mr. Kearney or Mr. Bramnick (or someone working with them) around the same time that the chicanery was happening in her courtroom. I also learned that Mr. Bramnick tampered with the medical records of his client, William C. Cartinhour, Jr., in order to conceal the fact that Mr. Cartinhour is a paranoid schizophreic and a pathological liar. Worse, Judge Huvelle may have learned about the schizophrenia during ex parte communications with Mr. Cartinhour’s psychiatrist (I cannot yet say for certain because the courts have blocked my access to the evidence). If so, she never tried to stop the fraud.
I filed grievances against Mr. Kearney and Mr. Bramnick, and in a sane world the judiciary would have disbarred Mr. Kearney and Mr. Bramnick and referred them for criminal prosecution. Instead, the court’s committee on grievances has held the grievances in limbo for 18 months, but it is trying to disbar the person who filed them, i.e., me. Meanwhile, my complaint against Judge Huvelle was dismissed without an investigation.
Time and again, the federal judiciary has shown that it will go to extraordinary lengths to protect its members. In my July 11, 2016 post, I wrote about the Fifth Circuit’s efforts to downplay the extent of Judge Walter S. Smith, Jr.’s sexual misconduct, similar to its efforts to downplay the extent of former Judge Samuel Kent’s sexual misconduct (Kent subsequently resigned before his impeachment trial began, and an appellate panel recently ordered the Fifth Circuit to fully investigate my complaint against Judge Smith). The Fifth Circuit is still protecting Judge Harry Lee Hudspeth, who covered up at least one of Judge Smith’s sexual misconduct incidents at the time it happened.
The ruling class protects its own, and the problem is particularly bad in the D.C. Circuit, the only appellate circuit where all of the district and circuit judges share the same building and the same lunch room. It should come as no surprise, then, that the life-tenured gods of the federal judiciary are trying to silence an insolent mortal who dared to criticize their lawlessness and corruption. And make no mistake, my disbarment case is 100 percent retaliation. The State Bar of Texas originally filed charges against me based on the same allegations, but it dismissed those charges after I provided evidence (1) that Mr. Kearney and Mr. Bramnick did exactly what I accused them of doing, and (2) that Judge Huvelle was communicating ex parte while she was covering up their crimes. Meanwhile, some powerful people have been protecting Judge Huvelle, including Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer, David “The Deleter” Kendall, and President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Chief Judge Merrick Garland.
So pardon me if I borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, but the game is indeed rigged. The D.C. federal court obviously is not content with the outcome in Texas, so it wants to home cook me in a political show trial that it can control. And “control” is the operative word here, because the court is severely limiting my ability to present a defense (e.g., by giving me only 30 minutes to present my entire case).
The court has also refused to rule on my motions to dismiss the case for selective prosecution, transfer the case to another court, and permit discovery, even though all three motions are unopposed and have been since February. Instead, the court wrote in its July 19, 2016 order that it would wait until after the trial to rule on my motions. So the court is going to wait until after trial to decide (1) whether the case should be transferred and (2) whether I should be permitted to subpoena documents or depose witnesses. What good is that going to do me after the trial is over? The motions will be moot at that point.
Fortunately, my Texas law license should be safe even if I get disbarred by the D.C. federal court. Unfortunately, most other federal courts will reciprocate automatically if I get disbarred in D.C. That’s a problem if you are, like me, a civil rights lawyer with cases in federal court. I’ll have a chance to argue that the D.C. proceedings were tainted, but I suspect it will be very hard to convince federal judges elsewhere to admit that their colleagues in D.C. did something dirty and unlawful.
I’m not asking my friends to write their Congressional representatives, because frankly it wouldn’t do any good. Judicial corruption is not a sexy issue on Capitol Hill because it doesn’t generate any campaign contributions from the lobbyists on K Street. As a result, the average congressman doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about it. Consider, for example, the case of Congressman Bill Flores of Texas, a.k.a. “Spineless Bill.” In a June 30, 2016 guest column for the Waco Tribune-Herald, I noted that the congressman talked tough about impeaching Judge Smith for sexual misconduct, then dropped the issue as soon as his primary election was over. I don’t think Spineless Bill is particularly unique in that regard.
Incidentally, I asked a friend to give me feedback as I was drafting this post, and she asked me whether the judges presiding over my trial might hold it against me. “Of course they will,” I told her, “but what are they going to do? Disbar me twice?” (Or send me to Gitmo? Or shoot me in the back of the head?) Frankly, I sort of want the sanctimonious crooks in D.C. to disbar me, because I know a few things that they don’t, and I know who’s going to get the last laugh.
Finally, here’s something to ponder: The people presiding over my disbarment are the same people who secretly decide whether the NSA gets to read your emails and record your phone calls. Comforting, huh?
ABOVE THE LAW
Speaking of sanctimonious crooks, the Washington Post reported yesterday that the FBI recovered almost 15,000 emails that David “The Deleter” Kendall and colleagues Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson deleted from Hillary Clinton’s secret email server. The emails in question were subject to various subpoenas (and FOIA requests), ergo they were evidence. If Mr. Kendall and his colleagues destroyed that evidence, then they could be charged with a felony under various federal statutes, like 18 U.S. Code § 1505.
They could also be disbarred by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, whose grievance committee Mr. Kendall chaired when the disbarment charges were filed against me (in fact, Mr. Kendall signed the charges against me). Now don’t worry, I’m not so naive as to think that one of the golden boys like Mr. Kendall would ever be held to the same standard as a peon like me. Mr. Kendall is Judge Huvelle’s former law partner and Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer, after all, so that means there’s a better chance of Kim Kardashian saying something intelligent on live television than Mr. Kendall being held accountable for his crimes. Mr. Kendall is above the law, and he knows it.
That’s why he seems more than willing to take the fall for Ms. Clinton, i.e., because he knows that there will be no fall. Consider this July 7, 2016 exchange between FBI Director James Comey and Congressman Jim Jordan during Mr. Comey’s Congressional testimony:
JORDAN: Did Secretary Clinton know her legal team deleted those e- mails that they kept from us?
COMEY: I don’t believe so.
JORDAN: Did Secretary Clinton approve those e-mails being deleted?
COMEY: I don’t think there was any specific instruction or conversation between the Secretary and her lawyers about that.
JORDAN: Did you ask that question?
COMEY: Yes.
JORDAN: Did Secretary Clinton know that her lawyers cleaned devices in such a way to preclude forensic recovery?
COMEY: I don’t believe she did.
JORDAN: Did you ask that question?
COMEY: Yes.
So let’s put that in context. Ms. Clinton turned over the emails to Mr. Kendall and his colleagues (even though they lacked the proper security clearances at the time), and they systematically destroyed thousands of pages of evidence, but she had no idea that they would do such a thing. While it is nearly impossible to believe that Ms. Clinton was in the dark, it is also irrelevant where Mr. Kendall and his colleagues are concerned. Regardless of whether Ms. Clinton knew what they were doing, Mr. Kendall, et al. perpetrated multiple felonies.
Again, I’m well aware that insiders like Mr. Kendall are immune from the rules that apply to the rest of us. Hillary Clinton proved conclusively that in our current government, rules are for little people. Furthermore (and relatedly), class loyalty trumps all else, 
particularly where the ruling class is concerned. That’s why right-wing federal judges protect left-wing federal judges, and that’s why someone like Mr. Comey, the FBI director who formerly served as George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general, would sell his soul to protect a corrupt Democrat like Hillary Clinton.
In their gilded world, it is unseemly to judge gods by the standards applied to mere mortals. So corrupt, ruling-class phonies like David Kendall become chairmen of grievance committees and advisers to presidents, pretending to be the guardians of ethics and morality while they break the law, whore themselves out to the highest bidder, and walk all over the lesser mortals who stand in their way.
Hence the rise of Donald Trump. My Never Trump friends often try to convince me that Mr. Trump would be a bull in a china shop, therefore I should not vote for him. What they fail to grasp is that there are millions of Americans who want to turn a bull loose in the china shop. In fact, some of us want the bull to tear the china shop to the ground.
And while many of us cringe when Mr. Trump says something crude or uncouth, we also delight in the fact that he offends the ruling class (and the French) far more than he offends us. We also know that with Ms. Clinton as president, we’re guaranteed to get business as usual. In a Trump Administration, on the other hand, people like “David the Deleter” just might get hauled before a federal grand jury. After all, Mr. Trump is too crude and unsophisticated to realize that he’s not supposed to offend the ruling class.
8/23/2016