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Greene Insists She Was 'A Victim Of The Riot' On January 6

Greene Insists She Was 'A Victim Of The Riot' On January 6

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) defended her right to remain on the 2022’s ballot in a Georgia courtroom on Friday by repeatedly saying that she could not recall, nor would take responsibility for, statements posted on social media or uttered on camera that encouraged the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—where Greene insisted that she had been a victim of the violence.

“I was very scared. I was concerned. I was shocked, absolutely shocked,” Greene said. “Every time I [had] said, ‘We’re going to fight,’ it was all about objecting [to ratifying 2020’s Electoral College] and to me that was the most important process of the day. And I had no idea what was going on. And I just didn’t want anyone to get hurt… Yes, I was a victim of the riot that day.”

But Andrew Celli, Jr., the attorney representing a handful of Georgia voters who sued to remove Greene from the 2022 ballot under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which bars anyone from holding a federal or state office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same,” urged Administrative Judge Charles Beaudrot to look past Greene’s denials to videos filmed a day before the insurrection -- where she said that a peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden must be stopped by any means, including violence.

“You saw and heard it with your own eyes, judge. She said the quiet part out loud,” Celli said in his closing statement. “She spoke her truth out loud in a video that she made, that she posted on her own Facebook page, and that she wanted her hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers and the untold millions of other people that she wanted to know – that her point of view was you can’t allow… power to transfer peacefully.

“The is not Internet drivel This is not the dark corners of Parler [a right-wing social media site]. This is a person who is a federal official, a member of government, and this wasn’t even a rhetorical flourish on the back of a campaign truck after a long day,” he said. “This is somebody who sat down in front of a camera and calmly and carefully told her viewers, 'We will not accept a peaceful transfer of power. We can’t allow it.' And then she said we will not go quietly into the night. She framed this as an existential battle, a new Fourth of July, a new Fourth of July 1776.”

Greene’s legal team, led by longtime Republican Party attorney James Bopp, Jr., replied that her statements were protected political speech. He cited Supreme Court rulings that distinguished between political speech that was overheated and speech that directly incited violent actions—which he said that Greene’s rhetoric had failed to do.

“[That’s] the reason there’s the protection of the First Amendment, which we have now seen on full display,” Bopp said. “Full display here—the danger of construing words way beyond their meaning to allow political opponents to smear their opposition in a court of law.”

Bopp said that the pro-Trump rally outside Congress on the morning of January 6, 2021, before the storming of the Capitol that ensued, was “peaceful and nonviolent." He said that Greene’s support of the rally and her participation were constitutionally protected, whereas the riot and interruption of the joint session ratifying the Electoral College count were not constitutionally protected .

“And to drag her into, ‘Well, did you promote the rally?’ ‘Did you, you know, put it on your calendar?’ ‘Were you invited to speak?’ …is to strip her of her First Amendment rights,” Bopp said. “All of these are First Amendment protected activities, every single one of them. And none of them constitute even incitement, much less constitute engaging in unlawful conduct.”

Bopp contended that the constitutional questions raised by the lawsuit coordinated by Free Speech for People, a progressive law firm, to remove Greene from the 2022 ballot were not appropriate for the state tribunal. It will issue a recommendation to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who must decide whether Greene should remain on the May 24 primary ballot. Bopp also raised legal issues that Beaudrot could cite to recommend that Greene remain on the ballot, such as what activities legally constituted an insurrection, and noting that 2022’s primary ballots had already been printed and mailed out.

The administrative law judge appeared to be more interested in Bopp’s assertions than Celli’s arguments. Beaudrot told both sides to file final written arguments by next Thursday, April 28, and said he would issue a decision within a week after that.

But the hearing in the Office of State Administrative Hearings court was not designed to parse complex constitutional issues, as Beaudrot reminded the lawyers during the proceeding. It was, instead, a hearing to gather evidence about what Greene said and its impact.

Celli concluded that Greene’s rhetoric and actions supporting the January 6 insurrection disqualified her from seeking re-election to Congress. Bopp, of course, disagreed.

“We find ourselves back where we started—with the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment and its three very simple requirements,” Celli said. “That the candidate for federal office had taken the oath to the Constitution; that an insurrection occurred; and that the candidate [in 2022, Greene] having taken that oath engaged in insurrection: promoted it, supported it, assisted it, [and] helped bring it into fruition.”

“This is a political agenda,” Bopp said, “and this has been a political show trial.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

#EndorseThis: Kellyanne Takes Shocking Stand On Kavanaugh Accuser

#EndorseThis: Kellyanne Takes Shocking Stand On Kavanaugh Accuser

With Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination suddenly imperiled by a woman’s stunning charge that he assaulted her in high school, Republicans are in disarray. Senate GOP leaders want to ram a vote on Kavanaugh, even as Democrats demand a hearing for accuser Christine Blasey Ford. And the president’s numbskull namesake Don Jr. has taken to mocking her on Instagram.

 Surprisingly, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway spoke up on her behalf today on Fox & Friends. Much of what Conway said was what might be expected of a Republican purveyor of “alternative facts.” But her message about Blasey Ford was not what we expected at all.

 Click for a shock.

Why Kenneth Starr Deserved Censure — And Robert Mueller Deserves Respect

Why Kenneth Starr Deserved Censure — And Robert Mueller Deserves Respect

As Robert Mueller pursues a wide-ranging investigation aimed at Donald Trump, members of Trump’s family, his appointees, and his political associates, the president’s legal advisers have answered by attacking the legitimacy and fairness of the special counsel — which may be the prelude to executive action.

Surely, a fearful Trump is contemplating how to rid himself of the former FBI director now overseeing the probe into Russia’s interference with the 2016 election. Within the past few days, the president has openly warned Mueller that he deems any examination of the Trump Organization’s business dealings to be a “violation” of the special counsel’s mandate. Meanwhile the White House complains that Mueller and his staff are “partisan” and biased against Trump. And it is all fair play, according to Trump’s friends in right-wing media, because the Clinton White House and its allies criticized independent counsel Kenneth Starr during the Whitewater and Lewinsky investigations.

Nobody can deny that the Trump White House has every right to examine the record of Mueller and his staff and raise questions about them on the press dais, on Twitter, and possibly in court. But no comparison between Mueller and Starr will survive even cursory inspection.

An outstanding nonpartisan attorney with a sterling career in law enforcement, Mueller was asked to serve as special counsel by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, whose own appointment was approved by the president.

As President Trumps White House reportedly gears up to attack the team recruited by Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of the Russia probe, former Attorney General Eric Holder defended the integrity of the independent investigation and said the president cannot define or constrain its scope.

Starr was a distinguished lawyer and former judge, but his partisan coloration was unmistakable. He had served in the Reagan Justice Department and as Solicitor General under President George H.W. Bush, who had considered him for a Supreme Court nomination; he had donated and raised funds for Republican candidates; he had served as a stalwart of the Federalist Society, the high-powered organization of right-wing Republican lawyers; and he had nearly run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia in the 1994 Republican primary.

 

Unlike Mueller’s appointment, which was praised almost universally by Republicans and Democrats alike, the naming of Starr as independent counsel was tainted from the beginning.

Starr replaced the first Whitewater independent counsel, Robert B. Fiske, Jr. — a former Federal prosecutor and a moderate New York Republican, who had rejected the wilder conspiracy theories about the Clintons, including insinuations of foul play in the 1993 suicide of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster. Indeed, he appeared to be moving briskly toward the Clintons’ inevitable exoneration in Whitewater. (Unlike the Russia investigation, the Whitewater “scandal” and its offshoots were truly fake news.)

Outraged Republicans in Congress and the media roared for Fiske’s removal — and the panel of three Republican federal judges that controlled appointments under the old Independent Counsel Act obligingly forced him to step down. One of those judges, David Sentelle of North Carolina, had even met with his home state’s Republican Senators Lauch Faircloth and Jesse Helms in July 1994 to discuss the replacement of Fiske. Three weeks later, the deed was officially done — and Starr became the new Whitewater independent counsel.

For reasons beyond the unethical maneuvering that removed his predecessor, Starr was a controversial choice. Lacking any background as a prosecutor, his partisan credentials appeared to be his only qualification for the job. He proceeded to hire experienced but highly partisan prosecutors as his deputies, notably Hickman Ewing, Jr., former U.S. Attorney in Tennessee, where he cultivated close ties to the religious right; and Jackie Bennett, former U.S. Attorney in south Texas, where he had pursued Democratic officeholders aggressively. Eventually Starr hired a few Democratic deputies, but Republicans set the legal agenda and hostile tone of the Office of Independent Counsel.

Unlike Mueller, who resigned from a lucrative partnership at Wilmer Hale immediately following his appointment as special counsel, Starr not only failed to resign from Kirkland & Ellis, but continued to receive payments as a senior partner, serve on the firm’s management committee, and advise clients. His partnership draw from the powerhouse law firm was then estimated at around $1 million annually.

His self-serving decision instantly drew attention to several stark conflicts of interest, including Starr’s appellate work on behalf of major tobacco companies in litigation with the Clinton administration; his role representing the state of Wisconsin in a school-voucher case against the Clinton administration, for which he he had received payment from a right-wing foundation; and his legal advice to a conservative women’s group in support of the Paula Jones lawsuit against President Clinton.

Perhaps Starr’s most blatant legal conflict — revealed in a 1996 article for The Nation magazine that I co-authored with Murray Waas — involved the Resolution Trust Corporation, a federal corporation set up in 1989 to liquidate the assets of thrift institutions that had failed in the savings-and-loan financial crisis. At the same time the RTC was suing Kirkland & Ellis over its representation of a failed Colorado thrift called First America, Starr opened an independent counsel investigation of the RTC and several of its officials as part of the Whitewater investigation.

More than a year later, when the RTC settled its action against Starr’s law firm for approximately one-third of its initial claim, Kirkland & Ellis insisted on a strict secrecy clause in the settlement agreement — presumably to save the firm and its star partner from the embarrassment of exposure.

Ultimately Starr was cleared by his well paid “ethics adviser,” and although the New York Times published a scolding editorial about his myriad conflicts, he suffered no consequences at all. Later still, even more troubling conflicts emerged, concerning the independent counsel’s tangled connections with billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, secret financier of the anti-Clinton “Arkansas Project.” Yet these ongoing exposures scarcely hindered Starr’s pursuit of the Clintons, which continued for almost seven years.

So when Trump advisers bark indignantly about Mueller’s supposed “conflict” over a membership fee dispute with a golf course owned by the president — a dispute that Mueller denies even occurred — it is difficult not to laugh.

Yet the legacy of the Starr investigation could still provide important guidance to both the special counsel and the Trump White House.

In 1998, the independent counsel commissioned an exhaustive legal research memo that was buried for almost 20 years, until the National Archives disclosed it in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times.

According to that 56-page document — authored by conservative legal scholar Ronald Rotunda — the president of the United States is not immune from federal prosecution and is indeed subject to indictment by a grand jury “for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the president’s official duties.”

He can’t say he wasn’t warned.

IMAGE: Kenneth Starr speaks on behalf of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 during arguments before the California Supreme Court,  March 5, 2009. REUTERS/Paul Sakuma

Danziger: Call Him Fredo

Danziger: Call Him Fredo

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army as a linguist and intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He was born in New York City, and now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.