This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Legal

  • Stultus est sicut stultus facit

    Thanks to Devtun for the heads up on this one.

    A retired USAF General has been deprived of two of his stars for bullying a subordinate into having sex with him.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4182326/Air-Force-general-stripped-2-stars-sex-misconduct.html

    And from Air Force Military News

    http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/1067881/retired-air-force-general-retroactively-retired-to-major-general-following-find.aspx?source=GovD

    In my view, Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VII, this would get him fired. I think the woman could justifiably sue his ass for monthly compensation from his retirement pay.  If you whack these jerks in the pocket, it’s much worse than just losing a couple of stars. The perp has to explain things to people who thought he was going to get a fat retirement check, and then there’s that whole thing about those jobs with government contractors.  They’re REALLY hinky about hiring someone whose reputation for being an asshole precedes him.

    Here’s some info regarding sexual harassment on the job, for the uninformed:

    Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII applies to employers with 15 or more employees, including state and local governments. It also applies to employment agencies and to labor organizations, as well as to the federal government. Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.

    Sexual harassment can occur in a variety of circumstances, including but not limited to the following:

    • The victim as well as the harasser may be a woman or a man. The victim does not have to be of the opposite sex.
    • The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, an agent of the employer, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or a non-employee.
    • The victim does not have to be the person harassed but could be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.
    • Unlawful sexual harassment may occur without economic injury to or discharge of the victim.
    • The harasser’s conduct must be unwelcome.

    It is helpful for the victim to inform the harasser directly that the conduct is unwelcome and must stop. The victim should use any employer complaint mechanism or grievance system available.

    In case you’re quibbling about ‘well, it’s military, not civilian’, the term ‘federal government’ should include military if it hasn’t before.

    At the same time, the woman in question did have legal help available if she had used her head. As I understand it, Dave Hardin just took the door off his cubbyhole so that the Master Sergeant couldn’t shut it any more.

  • Asking for pardon

    1LT Clint Lorance has people asking for a pardon for his for murdering two Afghan men.  According to this story, Lorance ordered his unit to shoot the two Afghans, but did not shoot them himself, and there is evidence connecting the two Afghan men to a roadside bomb that exploded.

    http://www.stripes.com/news/trump-is-asked-to-pardon-army-officer-convicted-of-afghan-murders-1.452228

    This brings up the questions about Wm. Calley’s conviction for personally shooting 22 villagers at My Lai. A total of 109 Vietnamese civilians were killed, but there was never any indication that he gave an order to his men to do that. They acted independently.

    http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/calley-charged-for-my-lai-massacre

    The question that needs to be answered is direct. In a war zone, under direct attack or an unexpected ambush, why is it not understood that the reaction to being attacked, and subsequently trying to find the enemy to take him out, but failing and taking the anger out on the next perceived enemies is exactly what happens in warfare?

    I’m not saying it’s right when it happens. I’m questioning the lack of understanding of the reaction itself. When these accusations and charges by people who were not in the war zone are inflicted on people reacting normally under extreme duress, why is this reaction to being attacked, or not finding the enemy but finding a viable substitute, not understood?

     

  • Bergdahl’s defense team switches up

    Bergdahl’s defense team switches up

    According to our friends at Legal Insurrection, the Bergdahl defense team, instead of defending their client from charges that he’s not a traitor, are going to blame the President and campaign rhetoric. They’ve put together this video of more than two years of Trump calling Bergdahl a traitor.

    From The Hill;

    Lawyers for former prisoner of war and Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl made good on their promise to call for his case to be dismissed based on President Trump’s campaign comments against him, filing a motion on Inauguration Day.

    […]

    “President Trump has made it impossible for SGT Bergdahl to obtain a fair trial,” his lawyers wrote in the 57-page filing, complete with a screenshot of a Trump tweet about Bergdahl and photos of Trump pantomiming executions at this rallies. “President Trump transformed his rallies into a televised traveling lynch mob. Justice cannot be done and public confidence in military justice cannot be maintained under these circumstances.”

  • Clock Boy’s lawsuit dismissed

    Clock Boy’s lawsuit dismissed

    You might remember that Mohammed Mohammed, the father of Ahmed, known as the “Clock Boy,” filed a lawsuit against the Center for Security Policy because of comments made by Jim “Uncle Jimbo” Hansen that made note of the “clock’s” resemblance to a bomb. From the Center for Security Policy;

    Fortunately, a Texas statute prohibits Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP), thereby protecting free speech and citizens’ right to speak their minds without having to defend themselves in court.

    Upon learning that, as recommended by the Center’s counsel, the American Freedom Law Center, District Court Judge Maricela Moore had dismissed the suit, Jim Hanson observed:

    This ruling reaffirms our most fundamental liberty – the right to free expression – and punishes Mr. Mohammed and his allies for attempting to suppress ideas they oppose. The Center for Security Policy will continue to stand firm against all attempts by individuals and groups like CAIR that seek through lawfare and other means to prohibit any criticism of totalitarian Islamist doctrine and to brand as Islamophobes those who point out their efforts. Shutting down free speech is anti-constitutional and un-American.

    From the American Freedom Law Center;

    During the lengthy hearing, Judge Moore pressed Mohamed’s lawyer, Fort Worth attorney Susan Hutchison, to provide any facts that would suggest that Hanson and the other defendants had said anything false or defamatory about Mohamed or his son during the television broadcasts.

    After spending a painfully embarrassing 15 minutes flipping through reams of paper, Mohamed’s lawyer was unable to provide any such evidence.

    At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Moore took the matter under advisement but informed the parties that she would rule by the end of the day. Today, the Court published Judge Moore’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit against Hanson and CSP with prejudice.

  • Ronald A. Gray closer to execution

    Ronald A. Gray closer to execution

    Ronald A. Gray

    In 1988, Ronald A. Gray was sentenced to death by the Army for two murders and three rapes while he was a specialist and worked as a cook at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In a civilian court, he pleaded guilty to two other murders and five other rapes. He was sentenced to eight life terms in that court. A stay was placed on his scheduled execution because he claimed that his lawyer in the initial trial was ineffectual.

    U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten last week sided with the U.S. government in denying a bid by former Fort Bragg, North Carolina, soldier Ronald A. Gray to block the military from pressing ahead with the execution by lethal injection.

    […]

    No known execution date has been set for Gray as of Tuesday. Though Gray’s attorneys have said in recent court filings that they plan to ask military courts to intervene, that status of those appeals was unclear Tuesday.

    Gray would be the first prisoner executed by the Army since they executed John A. Bennett who was convicted and hanged in 1961 for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl.

    There are six others on the Army’s death row, including Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood terrorist and Hasan Akbar who murdered two of his officers during the advance on Baghdad in 2003.

  • Meet Clintoon’s Other, “Private” Admin Assistant

    While FBI Director Comey was readying his bucket of whitewash yesterday, some additional information was being reported about Ms. Clintoon’s handling of sensitive materials while SECSTATE.  Thanks to that additional reporting we now know who often helped her out with the administrative and practical details of doing sensitive State Department business – e.g., sensitive faxes, printing out emails and attachments, and the like.

    Who might that be, you ask?  Wouldn’t that be her protégé, one each Huma Abedin – the Weiner wifey?

    Well, I’d guess Abedin did help her out at times with those kinds of things; Clintoon is reportedly manifestly incompetent when it comes to electronic devices.  But apparently someone else did as well.

    Reportedly, that someone else would be her housekeeper in DC – Marina Santos.  She’s an immigrant from the Philippines.

    Ms. Santos has no security clearance.

    And yet, Ms. Santos apparently was forwarded and often printed out emails and document attachments sent to Ms. Clintoon while she was SECSTATE.  Some of the documents were sensitive – and, on at least one occasion, documents sent to her to be printed appear to have been classified

    Ms. Santos also appears to have had access to the SCIF installed by the State Department in Clintoon’s DC residence.  She reportedly sometimes collected documents sent to Ms. Clintoon via the secure fax in that SCIF.

    Per the FBI, one of the items sent via secure fax to Clintoon on occasion was the Presidential Daily Brief.  Needless to say, that document is typically rather highly classified.

    Ms. Santos has apparently never been interviewed by the FBI during the Clintoon email investigation.  Additionally, her iMac – which Santos apparently used to receive and print documents and emails for Clintoon – apparently has never been turned over to or examined by the FBI.

    It’s also believed that Santos may know the whereabouts of a thumb drive containing a large archive of Clintoon emails – as well as the whereabouts of a MacBook formerly used by another close Clintoon crony, Monica Hanley.  Sometime in 2013 Ms. Hanley reportedly used the MacBook in question to download Clintoon’s emails from her private server, then to copy them to a thumbdrive.  Neither of those devices so far have been turned over to or examined by the FBI, either.

    The NY Post and Empty Lighthouse Magazine today each have articles worth reading.  The Post article discusses the matter described above in some detail, while the Empty Lighthouse article gives additional background on Ms. Santos.

    Too bad we didn’t know all of this some time before Comey      tried to sweep everything under the rug      erroneously and prematurely closed the FBI’s very obviously incomplete investigation some months ago – and then did the same again yesterday.  As I noted above:  Ms. Santos still apparently hasn’t been interviewed by the FBI, and her computer hardware hasn’t been examined.  So there’s no way in hell this so-called “investigation” was legitimately completed.

    Yes, you or I would be in freaking jail by now – deservedly so.  But Clintoon isn’t.

    I guess that’s what happens when you have a political hack as FBI director instead of a LEO that takes his responsibilities seriously.

  • “Only the ‘little people’ follow ethics rules.”

    Well, it appears as if the Clintoon Foundation – and its namesakes – are in the news again.  And not in a good way, either.

    When Clintoon became SECSTATE in 2009, she and her husband – the famous cigar lover – did not divest themselves of their interests in their Clintoon Foundation.  However, Ms. Clintoon did enter into a written ethics agreement with the State Department regarding the financial operations of that foundation.

    Specifically, she agreed that she would “notify the State Department’s ethics official if a new foreign government wished to donate or if a current foreign donor wished to ‘increase materially’ its contributions.”

    In 2011, the government of Qatar gave a $1 million donation to the Clintoon foundation.  Ostensibly, the purpose was to honor Cigarman’s 65th birthday.

    I don’t know about you, but I’d consider a $1 million “donation” to be a “material increase” in anyone’s contributions.  That’s especially true since the Clintoon Foundation itself says that they’ve received donations of “between $1 million and $5 million” from the Qatari government.  That means that the $1 million in question is at least 20% of the Qatari total – and maybe most or all of it.  That damn well seems significant to me.

    But maybe that’s just me.

    In any case:  neither Ms. Clintoon nor the Clintoon Foundation ever notified the proper State Department ethics official of the donation.  And the following April, Qatari government officials sought to meet with Mr. Clintoon personally.

    Hmm.  For some reason the term “pay for play” comes to mind.  Yet again.

    Fox today has a decent article on the matter; Reuters had a similar one a couple of days ago .  IMO they’re both worthwhile reading.

    Apparently Ms. Clintoon has decided to follow the lead of another “paragon of virtue”, Leona Helmsley.  Ms. Helmsley famously once remarked that, “Only the little people pay taxes.”   It certainly seems to me that Ms. Clintoon – and likely Mr. Clintoon as well – feels the same regarding following Federal laws and regulations.

    Hopefully they’ll eventually get the same comeuppance as did Ms. Helmsley.

  • “Follow the Money.”

    We’ve all heard about the latest Clintoon email revelations.  Everyone’s probably also heard by now that the FBI has reopened their Clintoon email investigation due to a Weiner-related discovery.  (smile)

    But for Clintoon, that’s likely not her only potential major legal issue.  You see, it seems that the FBI has also been quietly pursuing its investigation of the Clintoon Foundation’s finances over the past year also – even though there appears to have been substantial pressure from the Department of Justice to either “slow-roll” or squash it.

    Indeed, the FBI’s investigation of the Clintoon Foundation is reportedly now “high priority”.  One media outlet has gone so far to cite FBI internal sources as saying that a pay-for-pay indictment regarding the Clintoon Foundation is now “likely”, “barring obstruction in some way” by the Justice Department.

    The FBI apparently isn’t the only agency investigating the Clintoon Foundation, either.  Turns out the IRS also is investigating the Clintoon Foundation – with focus on its tax status.

    Follow the money, indeed.

    Oh, and FBI sources also say with high confidence that Clintoon’s email server appears to have been hacked by at least five (!) Foreign Intelligence Services.  So it’s a virtual certainty that anything that was stored on that server is now in the possession of multiple foreign nations.  Nice.

    And while we’re discussing Clintoon email issues: it also seems as if both Justice Department and State Department officials were in contact with Clintoon campaign officials concerning the matter. State department officials appear to have coordinated with the Clintoon campaign concerning the department’s position on her use of “private” email before the matter was revealed to the public.

    Specifically, it appears as if the Clintoon campaign was provided an advance copy of a State department statement or press release on the matter – and both requested and got at least one change to the draft release before it was made public. It also appears that at least one senior Justice department official later tipped John Podesta, her campaign manager, that another senior Justice department official would be testifying before Congress shortly and was “(l)ikely to get questions on State Department emails.”

    Stay tuned.  The next few days – along with the weeks afterwards – could end up being one helluva bumpy ride.