Tag: evidence
Matt Gaetz

Gaetz Scandal Evidence May Soon Surface In Civil Lawsuit

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz has been out of the news lately, but that may end shortly because a federal judge is expected to soon decide whether to unseal a series of depositions in a civil lawsuit filed by Gaetz associate Chris Dorworth. The lawsuit reportedly includes sealed testimony from a number of women, including Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend, about sex parties and drugs that Gaetz is alleged to have been involved with.

Last Thursday, Dorworth dropped his defamation suit against Gaetz’s former associate Joel Greenberg, a convicted sex trafficker. According to the news outlet NOTUS, this move “sought to bury the scandal,” which has hung over Gaetz, who denies ever having had sex with a minor or engaging in human trafficking. (In late 2022, the Department of Justice recommended no charges against Gaetz in the matter, though a House Ethics Committee continues to investigate similar allegations.)

But on Friday, defense lawyers in Dorworth’s suit against Greenberg submitted papers arguing that the documents in the case should be unsealed, with the alleged victims’ names removed.

In response, Dorworth’s attorneys argue that all the transcripts in the case are “confidential.” However, Greenberg’s lawyer is arguing that the court was already leaning toward unsealing the documents, citing Magistrate Judge Daniel Irick’s comments about keeping the depositions secret.

“This is a case of public importance,” Irick said in court, according to NOTUS. “It is one that there may be media interest in, and it’s one that involves important issues … I’m not seeing any confidentialities that would really overwhelm the First Amendment right for the public to see this case, especially when a plaintiff brings claims in relation to their marriage and spouses and the kind of intimate issues in this case which are laid out in extreme detail in the … complaint. I am unlikely to seal anything because it all seems relevant.”

It is unclear whether Gaetz, who was subpoenaed in the civil case, sat for a deposition and whether any transcripts or video of it would be released if the court unseals depositions. However, any depositions released to the public might help the ongoing House ethics investigation into the Florida congressman. That probe has reportedly gotten its hands on texts and testimony from an unnamed woman who allegedly used to participate in sex parties with Gaetz’s circle of friends. That information could support other reports about the drug- and alcohol-fueled nature of the parties Gaetz was allegedly involved in.

Gaetz has denied all of these reports.

U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, is overseeing the civil case and may make the final decision about whether to release the depositions. The decision is expected to happen by Sept. 19.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Judge Juan Merchan

Hey Judge! Just Lock Trump Up Already

To hear angry MAGA Republicans tell it, former President Donald J. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records is a shock and an outrage. But how could anybody be surprised? Never mind the evidence presented to the New York jury was voluminous and pretty much uncontested.

For all his bragging and whining, Trump didn’t dare testify — officially. But the judge’s gag order didn’t prevent him from spouting off. That was a Trump lie for the MAGA chumps in the cheap seats.

Legally speaking, has there ever been a bigger loser than Trump? Kevin Drum compiled a list on his invaluable website, jabberwocking.com.

He’s pretty much constantly in one court or another, Trump. And he nearly always loses. Following his 2020 election defeat, the candidate filed 62 — yes, 62 — lawsuits alleging election fraud.

And lost every single one.

Back in 2018, a federal court ordered him to pay $25 million in restitution to students defrauded by the Trump University scam. In 2019, a New York judge ordered the Trump Foundation permanently closed for playing fast and loose with the charitable organization’s funds. He and his family were fined $2 million and forbidden to operate a charity in the state again. Trump whined they should have investigated Bill and Hillary Clinton instead.

So, he sued Hillary. That one ended up costing him only $1 million after a federal judge in Florida ruled the suit was “completely frivolous” and should never have been brought. Trump, the judge wrote, was no babe in the woods: “Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.”

That same day, Trump dropped a lawsuit against New York State Attorney General Letitia James that sought to stall her office’s civil case against the Trump Organization. The resulting trial found the Trump Organization guilty of massive tax fraud. “Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” Judge Arthur Engoron wrote.

The chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to five months in prison. He subsequently pleaded guilty to perjury and returned to the slammer for another five months.

For his part, Trump called the ruling a “sham,” the judge “crooked” and James “corrupt.” He denounced the case against him as “ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and a “WITCH HUNT.”

Sound familiar? Evidently, the Trump Organization was staffed by cheats and perjurers like Weisselberg and star prosecution witness Michael Cohen from top to bottom.

Everybody but Boss Trump, who knew nothing.

Elsewhere, Trump has brought lawsuits against The New York Times, CNN, NBC News and The Washington Post. All were dismissed due to lack of evidence. He was successfully sued for sexual abuse by magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay her $5 million in restitution. When Trump continued to mock and malign her publicly, a second jury ordered him to pay her $83 million for defamation. But for the statute of limitations, the judge in the Carroll case commented, Trump could have been convicted of rape.

Needless to say, these levies are all on appeal. Chances are that Trump’s estate will end up owing E. Jean Carroll and the State of New York many millions of dollars in fines and interest.

Meanwhile, the hot-button issue of the day is whether Judge Juan Merchan will put Trump behind bars come his July 11 sentencing. And there, I fear, Trump’s big mouth is giving Merchan no choice.

Normally, a first-time offender of a paper crime would be sentenced to probation. But Trump shows no remorse, only contempt and defiance. During the trial, he openly and repeatedly violated a gag order intended to protect the proceedings against threats to court personnel, witnesses and jurors.

Indeed, Trump continues to defy that order, which remains in force until the judge says it doesn’t. He’s aided and abetted, it must be said, by canting Republican politicians who fear the MAGA horde.

Trump went on Fox & Friends the other day to vend the preposterous lie that he never chanted “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. Anybody who believes that will believe anything — the hallmark of a MAGA cultist. As for jail time, he said the prospect doesn’t trouble him, but he’s “not sure the public would stand for it … You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

And then what? To me, it’s an empty threat. Trump’s been trying to raise a MAGA mob throughout his tenure, and they keep not showing up. People aren’t going to risk their own freedom to save his mangy a**.

But a threat is a threat, and no American court can stand for it. Even if it’s only for a couple of months, Merchan is going to have little choice but to lock him up.

Reprinted with permission from Chicago SunTimes.

NYPD Limits Use Of Condoms Seized From Sex Workers As Evidence

NYPD Limits Use Of Condoms Seized From Sex Workers As Evidence

By Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK — Condoms no longer will be seized from sex workers for use as evidence in prostitution cases, police announced Monday in a move that officials say should help prevent the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases among people at high risk of infection.

The policy change is the latest effort by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, to revamp some of the policing tactics of the previous administration, which were blamed for the souring of police-community relations.

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” de Blasio said after Bratton announced the condom decision. “A policy that actually inhibits people from safe sex is a mistake and is dangerous.”

Although advocates of the change call it a positive step, they say it does not go far enough toward protecting victims of human traffickers, whose captors could still refuse to give them condoms for fear the prophylactics could be used as evidence by police.

The new policy applies only to three crimes related to the sex trade: prostitution, prostitution in a school zone and loitering for the purposes of prostitution. In those cases, Bratton said condoms will be treated as personal property and returned to individuals upon their release from custody and will not be considered evidence.

Condoms confiscated in sex-trafficking cases will continue to be used as evidence, said Bratton, calling the move a “reasonable approach” that would encourage safer sex without hampering efforts to build cases “against the vast criminal enterprise associated with prostitution.”

“It’s very exciting the New York Police Department is taking this issue seriously, but we believe it needs to be expanded,” said Sienna Baskin, co-director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York.

Baskin said advocacy groups would continue pressing for a policy that would stop police from seizing condoms as evidence in any prostitution-related crime. “That would really send a very clear message that people are safe to carry condoms,” she said.

Still, the change announced Monday marks a victory for groups that have battled more than a decade to prevent the seizure of condoms from sex workers, a practice that is common around the world and that has been the subject of studies by health and human rights groups. A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch on the issue quoted sex workers in New York City as saying police routinely stopped and searched them, often commenting on the number of condoms they were carrying and leading many to believe there were legal limits on the carrying of condoms.

“The cops say, ‘What are you carrying all those condoms for? We could arrest you just for this,’” one sex worker, identified in the report as Pam G., told Human Rights Watch.

Since that report, San Francisco and Washington have altered their policies to limit the use of condoms as evidence in prostitution cases, said Emma Caterine, a community organizer for Red Umbrella Project, a New York advocacy group.

Caterine said she hoped New York’s move would encourage other major cities to follow suit and motivate state lawmakers to pass a bill introduced last year barring the use of seized condoms as evidence in most prostitution cases.

Critics of condom seizures say the practice is particularly absurd in cities, such as New York, with huge condom distribution programs aimed at preventing AIDS. New York City health officials give out about 40 million condoms each year.

But changing police policy on condom seizures is challenging because sex workers tend to represent marginalized members of society, Caterine said.

“It’s targeting especially lower-income women and transgender women,” Caterine said, adding that police have been known to search and confiscate condoms from women who are not sex workers but who are “profiled” as sex workers because of where they are walking or how they look.

“These people have had problems getting their voices heard by policymakers,” she said. “I hope we’re slowly making strides at changing that.”

AFP Photo/John Moore

How Many Murdoch Lieutenants Were Complicit In Phone-Hacking?

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire is shaking, as new evidence of lying and snooping and kickbacks at his top British tabloid has cost his company billions of dollars and may take down his son James, the heir to the political-media machine that owns a huge chunk of the British news landscape. No one knows yet how this saga of cozy political relationships and journalistic malpractice will affect Fox News, Murdoch’s most powerful American media asset: it might empower the money-making machine to continue doing what it’s doing (after all, Bill O’Reilly didn’t listen to your voice mail), yet it also might re-open the questions about the behavior of all News Corp. executives — and there’s a grand jury investigation that Fox News chief Roger Ailes has no desire to revisit.

But first, what happened in Britain: It started to get bad on Monday, when an investigation by the Guardian newspaper revealed that the News of the World, the aggressive Sunday tabloid with millions of readers that has been at the center of a “phone-hacking” scandal for years, had not just eavesdropped on the phone messages of the rich and famous: In 2002, it hired a private investigator who illegally hacked into the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a teenage girl who went missing and was later discovered murdered. The investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, allegedly deleted messages, which gave the Dowler family and police false hope she was still alive. (The editor at the time — Rebekah Brooks — now is Murdoch’s top news executive in Britain, and her successor had been the top media adviser to Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.)

The blows have not stopped since, dizzying in their speed and scope. Advertisers like Coca-Cola and Ford started pulling out, Vanity Fairreported that an editor had authorized payoffs to the cops (which had been blamed for under-investigating in the first place), the British parliament held hearings and one lawmaker demanded that James Murdoch be investigated for allegedly destroying crucial evidence at a storage facility in India, Prime Minister Cameron denounced the behavior from Afghanistan just as news began to leak out that the phones of dead soldiers’ mothers had been hacked, the Guardianreported that Brooks knew that one of her star reporters was spying on a senior police detective investigating a murder case because the suspects told him to do so, and — worst of all for the billionaire baron — British politicians are now pushing to stop News Corp’s $15 billion+ purchase of the BSkyB satellite TV company.

This whole nightmare — and the scrutiny now being showered on Murdoch’s top lieutenants — may not bode well for Roger Ailes, the former Republican Party media strategist who now sits astride Fox News and has been the subject of a series of critical magazine profiles. More important than enduring run-of-the-mill bad press, he also is at risk of getting charged with lying to federal agents: In February, The New York Timesuncovered an affidavit describing a tape recording where Ailes ordered publishing executive Judith Regan to lie to federal agents about her relationship with a friend of Rudy Giuliani.

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