Category: Legal

Roll Call reports that Corrine Brown, the ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, along with her chief of staff, Elias “Ronnie” Simmons have been indicted in Florida;

The Florida Democrat and Elias “Ronnie” Simmons were charged with 24 counts, among them mail and wire fraud, theft of government property, and filing false tax returns.

Brown faces up to 357 years in prison, a fine of up to $4 million and three years of supervised release. She pleaded not guilty on all counts Friday.

Bail for the congresswoman and Simmons was set at $50,000, which they must pay only if their release terms were violated.

A trial is expected in the fall.

Roll Call also reports that she stepped down from her position on the committee.

Brown said that “due to House rules,” she is temporarily stepping down “to avoid potential distractions from the important work of this committee,” and she noted her work on homeless veterans, women’s issues and healthcare.

Maybe the committee can get something done with her gone now. I doubt it, but there’s hope.

Updated 7-11-2016 from WFTV;

Brown likened her situation to the recent police shooting deaths of two black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and St. Paul, Minnesota, and the deaths of five Dallas police officers during a protest march Thursday night.

“Last week was very rough,” Brown wrote. “Two black men were needlessly gunned down by police; five Dallas police officers were slain by a demented man; and on Friday I had to appear in federal court.”

Calling the indictment “very scary,” Brown said her “spirit remains unbroken.”

“My conscience is clear because I’m innocent,” she wrote. “I’m not the first black elected official to be persecuted, and, sad to say, I won’t be the last.”

Dave sends us a link to the Washington Times which tells the last chapter of the Richard Posner story. Posner is a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court. Posner wrote in the pages of Slate that judges spend too much time paying attention to the US Constitution;

I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, day, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation (across the centuries—well, just a little more than two centuries, and of course less for many of the amendments). Eighteenth-century guys, however smart, could not foresee the culture, technology, etc., of the 21st century. Which means that the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the post–Civil War amendments (including the 14th), do not speak to today

I guess we can just disregard the fact the government derives it’s authority from the Constitution and many of our basic human rights are protected from an overarching government in those words. That the state of our human rights aren’t dependent on fickle cultural norms.

Of course, he could be setting himself up for a nomination to the Supreme Court – he sounds like someone that the current or next President would love to nominate.

Richard and Chip send us links to the latest chapter to the “Scruff Face” story. An appeals court has tossed out the $1.8 million judgement in the case of Chris Kyle and Jimmy Janos AKA Jesse Ventura. Kyle claimed in his book that he had knocked out Janos in a bar fight after Janos was disrespectful towards a fallen SEAL.

The Miami Herald explains;

A key issue in the appeal was whether Kyle acted with “actual malice,” a demanding legal standard laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Times v. Sullivan case in 1964. It means a plaintiff who’s a public figure must prove that a defendant knew that the statement in question was false or made it with reckless disregard for whether it was false. Kyle’s estate argued that the judge gave the jury faulty instructions on that point.

A separate issue was the $1.3 million award for unjust enrichment. Ventura’s attorneys argued that “American Sniper” shot to the top of the best-seller lists only because Kyle’s statements about Ventura thrust him into the national spotlight. The Kyle estate argued that no other court had awarded damages for unjust enrichment for allegedly defamatory speech.

The majority of the three-judge 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel says that portion of the entire case fails as a matter of law.

The majority also vacated the defamation award, but sent that portion of the case back to court for a new trial.

We have a fairly long history with Joe Teti, the reality show personality on Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival program. We published his records about three years ago, he went nuts on us a few weeks later. It all began because David Canterbury, Lundin’s co-personality on the show was fired because of lies about his military service and experience. Before we published Teti’s records, I talked to him for an hour or so on a Sunday. He kept reminding me that he was a “star’ and that I should tread lightly. His problem, of course, wasn’t with what I wrote, but rather what everyone else wrote about him in the comments. Mostly, he didn’t like that people wouldn’t accept him as a veteran of the global war against terror because he wasn’t in the military – he was a contractor.

A number of people examined his records and decided that he wasn’t all that he said that he was – some of his training was lacking. So he sued them. As far as I know, that case is still wending it’s way through the court system.

Yesterday, we got word that Cody Lundin, Canterbury’s replacement on the show is suing Teti, according to TMZ;

Lundin says producers made it look like he was losing it on set — but according to the docs, his partner, Joe Teti, was the real menace. He says while shooting in Norway … Teti threatened to “bury” him on a mountain while waving around an ice axe. During a shoot in Hawaii, Lundin says Teti threatened to impale him with a spear.

Lundin says Teti, a former CIA operative, once said … “You better not blow this for me … I think you know what is going to happen to you” — and also flaunted pics of people he allegedly killed during his CIA days.

I have no idea how we dodged the lawsuit that Teti filed against the world, so I won’t poke this bear, either.