It’s bad enough when a judge on our very leftist U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which sits in San Francisco and Oakland and is an integral part of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, nixes the president’s executive order preventing illegal aliens from applying for asylum – this, while over 10,000 (including many criminals and probably some Middle Eastern terrorists) amass at our southern border ready to “invade.”
What’s equally disturbing is the politicized and dire state of our federal judiciary today.
After President Trump strongly criticized the “Ninth Circuit” – calling it a “disgrace” (and there are a few good and even liberal judges there, such as the Honorable Ronald Gould) – Chief Judge John Roberts attacked the president for telling the obvious truth about the politicized state of the federal judiciary. Roberts pushed back at Trump last Friday by arrogantly declaring,
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
What planet does Roberts live on, if any, in our solar system?
The issue is not one judge in Ninth Circuit – particularly since other circuits are almost as seriously compromised by judges who wear their political and other affiliations on their sleeve and do not follow the rule of law, much less the Constitution. The U.S. Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and 11th Circuit, where I have practiced most of my 41-year career, are nearly equally infected by this contagious disease. One judge in the D.C. circuit, Patricia Millet (an Obama appointee), recently sat on a case which I had filed against Mrs. Clinton for Gold Star parents whose sons were killed at Benghazi. I politely asked her to recuse herself, since she had donated monies to Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. When she refused, I asked her fellow judges on the D.C. circuit to assign a non-conflicted judge to the panel to hear the case, which – not coincidentally – a lower court Obama judge had earlier dismissed on the eve of Memorial Day (an insult to my clients). Of course, Millet’s fellow judges, both Democrat- and Republican-appointed, refused to step in.
This is just one example of why I conceived of and founded Judicial Watch on July 29, 1994: to watch over judges and further ethics in the legal profession and the government as a whole.
Over my then-17-year legal career, I had experienced judges of all stripes – liberal and conservative – favor the well-connected, rich and powerful, while currying favor with the politicians, most notably the president and his senatorial cronies who put them on the bench. I was offended by this, since judges are in principle our most important public servants. They were intended by our Constitution’s framers to protect us against the tyranny of the other two branches of government and ourselves, when We the People behave in a lawless fashion. I believe in a justice system for all of us – not one skewed to political, cultural, religious, ethnic, or gender biases and prejudices.
But the nation does not have that today, and there seems to be no remedy short of impeaching judges and possibly amending our Constitution so we get the best, brightest and most intellectually honest people on the bench, and generally clean up the cesspool in our legal system, which (I might add) includes lawyers.
Regrettably, our state bar disciplinary counsels, which often are highly leftist (particularly in the District of Columbia) generally seek only to prosecute those lawyers who are politically at odds with them. To the contrary, on their side of the political spectrum, take lawyers Lanny Davis and David Kendall as two examples. Davis, a Clinton crony and Democrat hack, recently was forced to admit to lying about his client Michael Cohen to do a number on President Trump, yet the D.C. Bar Disciplinary Counsel failed to take action for his public lies. At the same time, the counsel entertained an ethics complaint filed by tens of liberal law professors against Trump White House counselor Kellyanne Conway for allegedly lying in a cable news interview.
Then there is the case of attorney David Kendall of Williams & Connelly, the law firm of the Clintons and (not coincidentally) the leftist Washington Post. It is beyond dispute that Kendall and his colleagues assisted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to hide and destroy the so-called 33,000+ “missing emails,” many of which contained classified national security information, including the secret location of Benghazi-murdered U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stephens. This allowed her private server to be hacked by Iran and terrorist groups, resulting in the deaths of not just Stephens, but of our Gold Star parents’ sons Ty Woods and Sean Smith. Yet here again, the D.C. Bar Disciplinary Counsel chose to look the other way, and dismiss the complaint filed by conservative activist attorney Ty Clevenger.
The former premier legal ethics expert, Ronald Rotunda (who sadly died recently) had told me on more than one occasion that these bar disciplinary counsels routinely selectively prosecute those on the other side of the political fence, but leave their comrades in the legal profession alone.
And, when it comes to federal judges, the judicial councils in the various federal circuits – which are designed to remedy ethical violations by jurists – routinely circle the wagons and protect their own, almost never meting out sanctions, much less even criticism, for the unethical acts of their brethren.
To get back to Chief Justice Roberts: A few years ago, in the high court’s annual report on the state of our legal system, on top of which he sits as its chief administrator, Roberts incredibly stated that his fellow justices are not subject to the Code of Judicial Conduct, as it is (according to Roberts) likely unconstitutional as applied to them. How convenient, as intellectual dishonesty and corruption on the bench marches on!
The bottom line is this: As a matter of principle, if anyone needs to be impeached, it is Chief Judge Roberts, not our president – to set an example for his fellow jurists on all of the courts which he oversees, that our system of justice needs to operate in the intended mold of a blind “Lady Justice,” and not be perverted by the inherent runaway biases and prejudices of those who are sworn to uphold the rule of law! Go to Freedom Watch to enlist in our Justice League and its Judicial Selection Strike Force to help reform the judiciary and the legal profession as a whole.
