News bits 'n snibbles

Trump’s lawyers sanctioned for frivolous lawsuit

In what is a shocking and rare event, a federal judge lashed out at Trump’s legal team for filing a lawsuit based on pure bullshit. The judge imposed Rule 11 sanctions on the attorneys. I do not recall a single time in my decades of doing law where any federal judge finally got pushed to exasperation and imposed Rule 11. This probably happened once or twice, but I’m just not aware of anyone who could act so bad as to piss off a federal judge and get sanctioned for it. This is astounding. Stunning. Jaw dropping.

The lawsuit was filed by Trump against Hillary Clinton and a boatload of other people for QAnon-level accusations of conspiracy, collusion and interference with his 2016 presidential campaign. Talk about sore winners. Trump will just never stop being deranged, enraged or a crackpot & liar.

Politico writes:

A federal judge on Thursday excoriated and sanctioned several members of Donald Trump’s legal team, saying the former president’s massive lawsuit against his former rival, Hillary Clinton, and dozens of other adversaries amounted to an intentional abuse of the legal system.

“These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims,” said U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks, a Florida-based jurist who dismissed Trump’s lawsuit in September. “This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”

Middlebrooks ordered the attorneys to pay $50,000 to the court and more than $16,000 in legal fees to Charles Dolan, one of the defendants, who initiated the sanctions proceedings against Trump’s attorneys. The attorneys ordered to pay the sanctions costs include one of the most prominent members of Trump’s current coterie of lawyers, Alina Habba, as well as his lead local counsel in the Clinton suit, Peter Ticktin, and two others: Michael Madaio and Jamie Sasson.

Middlebrooks is an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, something that Trump’s lawyers pointed out in asking the judge to recuse himself from the suit against Clinton’s wife. The judge declined that invitation, saying he had no connection to Hillary Clinton. Middlebrooks also accused Trump’s lawyers of filing the suit in a remote clerk’s office in an unsuccessful bid to have it assigned to a Trump appointee, Judge Aileen Cannon. 

In the Thursday order, Middlebrooks contended that Trump’s attorneys knowingly misrepresented facts in the far-ranging lawsuit, which accused a diverse range of defendants of intentionally sabotaging Trump’s presidential bid by raising false claims of Russian influence over his 2016 presidential campaign. He also accused them of using the lawsuit as a ploy to raise political contributions, calling it “performative litigation for purposes of fundraising and political statements.”  

Middlebrooks threw out the initial version of Trump’s suit and declared a revised version to be “in its entirety, frivolous.” He said the case was inherently implausible.

“Not just initiated by a shotgun pleading, this was a shotgun lawsuit,” the judge opined. “Thirty-one individuals and organizations were summoned to court, forced to hire lawyers to defend against frivolous claims. The only common thread against them was Mr. Trump’s animus.”

A shotgun lawsuit of performative litigation for fundraising and political bloviation? Good grief! Nobody can make this stuff up, this legal nightmare has to be real.

Page 14 of Middlebrook’s 19 page cannon blast included these interesting comments:

Every claim [that Trump alleged] was frivolous, most barred by settled, well-established existing law. These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims. This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.

But the courts are not intended for performative litigation for purposes of fundraising and political statements. See Saltany v. Reagan, 886 F.2d. 438 (D.C. Cir. 1989). It is harmful to the rule of law, portrays judges as partisans, and diverts resources that should be directed to real harms and legitimate legal claims. The judiciary should not countenance this behavior and it should be deterred by significant sanctions.

That’s one really pissed off judge. One bemused attorney observing the train wreck commented: “This looks like a classic Rule 11 situation. It’ll be in textbooks for years to come.”

About that always playful Catholic church

In other, lighter and fluffier news, here comes the church. God save us all, please.

One of the things that stands out is how the Catholic church (CC) behaves when under attack or in the face of embarrassment. It isn’t just aggressive. It is vicious. It acts no differently than mafia bosses facing prosecution. I concluded years ago that the CC is an organize crime operation. Attorneys involved in lawsuits against the CC adopted the same tactics and laws that federal prosecutors used to go after mafia families. The CC has actually been sued under US laws specifically passed to prosecute organized crime groups and families. 

This fun snibble is about sleazy Vatican shenanigans in Rome, but this is a fun one for sure. The NYT writes:

A Vatican Auditor Says He Dug Up Too Much Dirt, and Was Buried

Libero Milone is suing the Vatican for wrongful dismissal after he said he found cardinals siphoning off funds. The Vatican has hit him with a criminal investigation of its own.

On June 19, 2017, the Vatican gendarmes entered the offices of the church’s chief auditor. They confiscated his phone and iPad, threw his papers on the floor and ordered the fire brigade to smash open a locked metal filing cabinet, from which they extracted a document that they said proved he was abusing resources to spy on top Vatican cardinals.

“Now you have to confess,” they demanded, according to the auditor, Libero Milone. Faced, he said, with being thrown in a Vatican jail, Mr. Milone signed resignation papers.

In the ensuing five years, the Vatican has done much to clean up its financial act. Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, one of the prelates whom Mr. Milone was accused of spying on, and who Mr. Milone believes masterminded his ouster, has himself been removed from his powerful position by Pope Francis and is on trial in the Vatican for embezzlement and abuse of office and defrauding the church in connection with a disastrous London real estate deal.

Those darned Popes and Cardinals are a feisty but festive bunch for sure. The politics going on in Vatican City reminds me of . . . .   

From the Hey, what’s going on here! files: 

Christian nationalists must be feeling persecuted

because God is smiting the wrong people

The NYT writes about the election of non-heterosexual politicians in Oregon, Colorado and Massachusetts:

Tina Kotek, a progressive Democrat who faced a pair of well-funded challengers, was elected to lead Oregon, according to The Associated Press.

Ms. Kotek’s victory, declared on Thursday, will make her and Maura Healey, the barrier-breaking attorney general who won the Massachusetts governor’s race this week, [some of] the first openly lesbian governors in American history.

Voters previously elected a gay man as governor (Jared Polis of Colorado, who was re-elected on Tuesday) and a bisexual woman (Kate Brown of Oregon, elected in 2015), both of whom are also Democrats.

As we all know by now, Christian nationalists (CNs) hate non-heterosexual people and non-heterosexuality. They openly demand the freedom to legally discriminate against and oppress members of the LGBQTN community. That is core dogma, ordained, sanctioned and blessed by the heterosexual, White Anglo-Saxon male CN God himself. CNs consider the mere existence and acceptance of non-heterosexuals in American government, society or commerce to constitute vicious secularist persecution of, and an enormous burden on, their innocent beliefs and practices.

From the CN point of view, God is smiting the wrong people. Hey, what’s going on here!