Posted on 02/05/2010 4:13:23 PM PST by American Dream 246
This week we broke the story of possible criminal wrongdoing in the government takeover of insurance giant AIG. In the last several months, the US government has tried, unsuccessfully, to throw out plaintiff Kevin Murray’s case, alleging that the government’s takeover of AIG puts it in the position of supporting and promoting Islam and Shariah finance.
In the discovery process attorneys for Murray, David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise (of the Thomas More Law Center), discovered that the takeover itself may have been illegal, and have attempted to get Treasury Secretary under oath to try and untangle this mess. Again, the Fed and the Treasury Department tried to stonewall.
This past Tuesday, Federal district court judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff rejected the Treasury Department’s and the Fed’s effort to prevent any further discovery while the government attempts to convince the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Judge Zatkoff’s earlier ruling rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss the federal lawsuit challenging the government’s takeover of AIG on First Amendment-Establishment Clause grounds.
Tim Geithner: The “extraordinary move to depose a sitting Treasury Secretary”
The lawsuit, captioned Murray v. Geithner et al., was brought by attorneys David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise, representing the plaintiff, Kevin Murray, a tax payer and former combat Marine who served in Iraq. The federal lawsuit alleges that the U.S. government’s takeover and financial bailout of AIG was in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Specifically, at the time of the government bailout (September-December 2008), AIG was (and still is) the world leader in promoting Shariah-compliant insurance products. Shariah is Islamic law, and it is the identical legal doctrine that demands capital punishment for apostasy and blasphemy and provides the legal and political mandates for global jihad followed religiously by the world’s Muslim terrorists. By propping up AIG with tax payer funds, the U.S. government is directly and indirectly promoting Islam and, more troubling, Shariah.
After the court rejected the government’s motion to dismiss the case and granted Plaintiff’s attorneys until May 2010 to conduct discovery into the AIG takeover, the government filed a motion asking Judge Zatkoff to certify the case for immediate appeal of his denial of the motion and to stay all further discovery. Today the government got its answer: No and no.
In what is an extremely well-written opinion, Judge Zatkoff scolded the government lawyers for filing the wrong motion at the wrong time and then proceeded to tell them they would have lost in any event because his earlier denial of the motion to dismiss was proper and well-considered.
The Court’s recent decision is especially timely and critical for Plaintiff Kevin Murray because his attorneys had previously filed a motion to compel Secretary Timothy Geithner to sit for a three-hour deposition. The basis for the “extraordinary move to depose a sitting Treasury Secretary” arose because Plaintiff’s counsel had earlier deposed the witnesses provided by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board and the government witnesses either testified inaccurately or feigned ignorance. The only one with all the answers turns out to be Secretary Geithner.
While forcing high government officials to sit for a deposition in civil litigation is extraordinary, federal rules allow a court to take this step when the government official has personal knowledge of a relevant element of the litigation and where the moving party has no reasonable alternative. In this case, attorneys Yerushalmi and Muise argued in their court papers that this exception fits their circumstances in spades.
“The witness designated by the government to testify on behalf of the Fed was less than forthright in his sworn testimony,” Plaintiff’s counsel Robert Muise of the Thomas More Law Center explained. “To his credit, he admitted he had prepared for his deposition by reading media reports and not actually reviewing the relevant documents. That might suggest that his lack of candor was willful blindness.”
David Yerushalmi, who is co-counsel with Robert Muise, laid out the grounds for the motion:
At the time of the takeover decision, Secretary Geithner was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and he was the leading advocate of the AIG takeover.
Moreover, he designed how the U.S. government would not only bail out AIG with tax payer dollars, but how the government would illegally take control of 80% of the voting shares through what was patently an illegal and invalid trust arrangement. It is apparent from the discovery we’ve conducted to date that this was done purposefully and with an intent to conceal the illegal takeover with a fraudulent trust.
Attorneys Yerushalmi and Muise want to ask Secretary Geithner:
* Why he forced AIG to take on so much debt that AIG’s credit rating, already in peril, was sure to collapse without yet additional government funds, essentially guaranteeing AIG would remain a ward of the state?
* Why he imposed such Draconian terms on AIG that there was no way it could survive without additional billions from U.S. tax payers?
* Why he then used AIG to secretly funnel 100% payoffs to AIG’s counterparties, including his colleagues and friends at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and the European giant, Société Générale. In other words, why did Geithner decide to destroy AIG’s chances of survival as a private entity while surreptitiously saving and preserving private ownership of other domestic and foreign financial companies? And,
* Why he took control of 80% of AIG’s voting shares without legal authority to do so and used a fraudulent trust arrangement to conceal the illegal takeover?
BREAKING NEWS:
The court just today granted plaintiff Murray’s motion for leave to amend the complaint to include yet additional TARP funds provided to AIG after the filing of the complaint. While the court did not allow the plaintiff to add AIG as a defendant as he had also requested, Murray’s attorneys tell us that they had accomplished enough discovery to know where to look for the skeletons in AIG’s closet in any event.
More coming soon.
If you are talking about the Constitution, the authors took pains to make everyone in government accountable. You do believe in the Constitution, right?
I see you stopped Bernanke's reappointment for example; oh no, wait, you didn't.
I thought about opposing Bernanke's nomination, but if he was fired, Obama would nominate someone much worse. I did call my senators to oppose Southers (collective bargaining for security) for TSA chief.
You stand out on the street corner in a washboard hawking hatred of finance and pretend it is "capitalism";
Interesting strawman, but I don't know what washboards have to do with anything. No, I don't hate finance. I don't like finance and government being so close.
we run the world.
Reminds me of Obama's "I won." I and many others are tired of that kind of arrogance.
The banks become parasitic when they become regulated, and capture the regulators. Unregulated banks are not parasitic; the host can reject them if they do not stay within useful bounds. Once the government begins protecting the banks, however, and granting them monopolies, they can and will destroy the Republic, just as Jefferson foretold:
“If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied … I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.”
You believe that banks in the late 18th/early 19th century were highly regulated...and, therefore, Jefferson opposed them? Darnit, if we could have just kept the Articles of Confederation in place, we woulda had it made.
No, not the entire quote. The second part is close to the last sentence in a letter Jefferson wrote to John Taylor in 1816:
Fake but accurate?
banking institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies
Railing against banks, not quite the same thing as....
swindling futurity on a large scale.
worrying about government borrowing
Thank you for educating me about the quote; this is one of the great things about Free Republic.
Here is a link to what appears to be an authoritative collection of Jefferson quotations concerning banking, hosted by his alma mater, the University of Virginia.
http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1325.htm
One cannot read these quotes fairly without distilling them into a less-prescient conclusion along the same lines as the spurious portion of the quote I used.
For example,
“Certainly no nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the quantum of circulating medium for the nation — to inflate, by deluges of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property at 1s. in the pound, having first withdrawn the floating medium which might endanger a competition in purchase. Yet this is what has been done, and will be done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature. The evil has been produced by the error of their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice, wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it before the schemes of plunder and spoilation desolate the country.” —Thomas Jefferson to William C. Rives, 1819. ME 15:232
One of the reasons we have even the vestiges of a Free Republic is because back then, people understood banking and money. But how few today could venture to explain why Thomas Paine said that any politician who even proposed tender laws should be put to death? “My people are destroyed for want of knowledge,” as the prophet Hosea said.
I hope you're not including Jefferson as one of those people.
Buchal: "I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies."
Actual Jefferson quote: "And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies;..."
Your reading skills are usually better than this.
Railing against banks, not quite the same thing as.... worrying about government borrowing
Unless the banks and the government are working together.
Yeah, after seeing that fake quote for the thousandth time, the screen gets a bit blurry.
I get the feeling you don’t think much of accurate Jefferson quotes either :)
Sorry, but this is just a cop-out. I'm glad you realized the quote was fabricated, but there should be no need to "distill" Jefferson's letters. It's not like he wrote in Old English.
Jefferson knew when to button his lips and let the pros do the work. Thus, we have the Louisiana purchase.
"There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army." --Thomas Jefferson to David Humphreys, 1789. ME 7:323
I didn't even have to combine that with another quote.
If a bank acts in good faith and accepts the consequences of its actions, no.
and disband the military?
No. Are you sure that's not a Ron Paul quote?
Maybe you could send all the troops home until needed in the 18th century, but not today.
The cause of a Free Republic is doomed if everyone thinks well, just because we had the Louisiana Purchase, the federal government can do anything it wants, and the Constitution poses no constraints. Or just because Jefferson supported the Louisiana purchase, we shouldn’t pay attention to anything he said about the dangers of excessive government power.
I agree. I see a danger in the government getting too cozy with some interests at the expense of others, and that applies to both parties.
I think Obama is too close to Acorn, Andy Stern, and amnesty movements, because they give him an unfair advantage in elections. (GWB pushed amnesty too. Why would he want to swell the ranks of Dems, or worse, with 10s of millions of new voters?). Ditto Obama with global warming zealots and people like Jeffrey Immelt (on the new York FED and stands to make big bucks via GE on crap and trade). Don’t get me started on the UN/IPPC and “climate change” scams.
Financial firms are not immune to corruption, and I see the billions coming from the FED and various government sources as a concern.
The shariah finance aspect was news to me.
Chilling. What IS going on in our country?<<<
I think it is known as a sellout or a takeover.....ask a democrat to answer the question.
Once the bailouts started, you could have guessed what would follow.
Are you saying this with a straight face?
...we shouldn’t pay attention to anything he said about the dangers of excessive government power.
No, we shouldn't pay attention to fabricated Jefferson quotes.
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