Here’s some news you won’t see in the New York Times or the Washington Post: In an order dated November 17, Maryland’s highest court temporarily blocked a lower court order that required bar prosecutors to investigate Hillary 
Clinton’s lawyers for destroying evidence. At the same time, the Maryland Court of Appeals denied my request to appoint a special counsel to investigate the crimes that bar prosecutors keep trying to bury.
The appellate court’s stay order will remain in effect until oral argument in March, but the handwriting is already on the wall: the left-wing court intends to protect attorneys David Kendall, Cheryl Mills, and Heather Samuelson at all costs, never mind the law and the facts.
How do I know the case is rigged? Let’s start with the stay order itself. Normally, when a party asks an appellate court to temporarily stay a lower court’s order, that party must first request a stay from the trial court. If the trial court denies the request, then the appellate court will then consider it. In this case, however, the bar prosecutors never requested a stay from the trial court, but the Court of Appeals granted a stay anyway.
Similarly, appellants normally must raise arguments or objections at trial before those issues can be raised in the Court of Appeals. In their petition asking the Court of Appeals to hear the case, the bar prosecutors asked the court to apply an amended rule retroactively in order to bury my complaints against Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers, but they had never presented that argument in the trial court. Even though bar prosecutors offered no excuse whatsoever for failing to raise the argument at trial, the Court of Appeals decided to hear it anyway.
Perhaps most troubling is the denial of my recusal motion. As reported in The Washington Times and the Annapolis Capital Gazette, bar prosecutors asked the Court of Appeals to change Maryland Rule 19-711, which governs bar grievances, while my case was already pending in the trial court. The rule change appears to have been targeted directly at me, and it was done behind my back.
That might not be a problem but for the inconvenient fact that I referenced above, i.e., bar prosecutors have now asked the Court of Appeals to apply the rule retroactively. It thus appears that bar prosecutors used the administrative rule-making process to communicate secretly with the Court of Appeals in order to change the outcome of my case. That, in turn, looks and smells a lot like an ex parte communication (and those are supposed to be illegal).
The appellate judges should have removed themselves from the case or refused to hear arguments about whether the amended rule applies retroactively. They did neither. Instead, they denied the recusal motion without explanation, which is standard operating procedure when appellate judges want to do something dirty or otherwise indefensible (i.e., if you can’t come up with a good explanation, give no explanation at all).
Meanwhile, the stated reasons for the rule change reek of impropriety. Consider this excerpt from the report that recommended the change:
At the request of Bar Counsel, several amendments to Rule 19-711 are proposed… [Under the revised rule,] Bar Counsel may also decline a complaint from an individual who has no personal knowledge of the subject matter of a complaint but seeks to be designated as a complainant by filing a complaint based on publicly available information, often with some political motivation or agenda. Bar Counsel would like to have the authority to decline these complaints and not be required to provide these individuals with confidential responses from attorneys, who may be the subject of media reports, when the complainant appears to be driven by a particular political or ideological persuasion or a desire for self-publicity or both.
Supplement to 193rd Report, Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, Maryland Court of Appeals, p. 57 (emphasis added). Only a government lawyer would be brazen or incompetent enough to record in writing an agency’s intent to discriminate against people based on their “particular political or ideological persuasion.” That is a textbook example of what the U.S. Supreme Court calls First Amendment “viewpoint discrimination,” and it is flagrantly unconstitutional.
Note the bar prosecutors’ concern that they might have to provide me “with confidential responses from attorneys, who may be the subject of media reports…” Yes, I most certainly would share any responses from Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers with the FBI, Congress, and the media, as is my First Amendment right, and that’s what makes the establishment left so nervous.
As I explained in my October 16, 2017 post, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers would be faced with a difficult dilemma if they were ordered to respond to my bar complaints. On the one hand, they could answer the charges, in which case their answers could be used against them (and Mrs. Clinton) in a criminal proceeding. On the other hand, they could assert their Fifth Amendment right to not answer, but that could still be used as grounds for disbarment since since bar proceedings are civil matters (ergo there is no Fifth-Amendment protection from self-incrimination).
Will that ever happen? It looks unlikely, at least in Maryland. The bar prosecutors openly disclosed their intent to discriminate illegally against me (or people like me), the Court of Appeals ratified the unlawful discrimination by adopting the rule change anyway, and the judges who adopted the rule expect me to believe that they don’t harbor any bias against me. Sure, and Bill Clinton flew to the Caribbean on the “Lolita Express” with a porn actress and a convicted sex offender because he wanted to scuba dive.
RULES FOR THEE AND NONE FOR ME
Here’s a question I asked in my June 21, 2017 blog post: if a storefront divorce lawyer in Western Maryland had systematically destroyed thousands of items of evidence, is there any doubt that Maryland’s Office of Bar Counsel would file charges? Of course not. Yet if politically-powerful lawyers destroy thousands of items of evidence, bar prosecutors and entire state supreme courts (starting in D.C.) will flout the law in order to save the crooks.
It may not be the worst example of naked political partisanship in the judiciary — the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision to put Frank Lautenburg on the ballot comes to mind — but it is plenty bad enough. And it is but one example of a much larger problem. In courts throughout the United States, the law is barely worth the paper it’s printed on, and that’s because we live in an era of radical subjectivism, where the plain words of the law are meaningless, gender is a social construct, and the only guidelines are the whims and prejudices of the people in power.
I often ask myself why I should keep practicing law when the law has become so irrelevant, and it’s getting a lot harder to answer that question.
ODDS AND ENDS
Below are links to the documents that have been filed in the Maryland Court of Appeals:
Bar Counsel’s Petition for Certiorari (asking the Court of Appeals to hear the case)
My Response in Opposition and Counter-Petition
My Motion to Recuse the Court of Appeals Judges
Bar Counsel’s Opposition to the Recusal Motion
My Reply in Support of the Recusal Motion
My Response in Opposition to the Motion to Stay
11/20/2017