Posted on 05/18/2018 9:19:31 AM PDT by Meet the New Boss
Tensions escalated Wednesday between the special counsel’s office and the Reed Smith defense lawyers representing a Russian business charged with interfering in the 2016 presidential election, as the two sides disputed whether a recent phone conversation ended with an abrupt hang-up.
snip
Wednesday’s status hearing came two days after Dubelier and his co-counsel, Reed Smith partner Katherine Seikaly, filed a brief asking to review the legal instructions Mueller’s team gave to the grand jury that indicted Concord Management and Consulting.
But the request went further than that. The Reed Smith lawyers ridiculed the alleged crime as “make-believe” and derided the prosecution as having “absolutely nothing to do” with the special counsel’s core mandate of investigating coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
In the court filing, the Reed Smith lawyers said the prosecutors’ reason for bringing the case “is obvious, and is political: to justify his own existence the special counsel has to indict a Russian—any Russian.”
snip
On Wednesday, Dubelier said he was agitated by language that grouped Concord Management and Consulting in with the other defendants in the case. He said the 13 Russian individuals were affiliated with another entity, the Internet Research Agency, and noted that Concord Management and Consulting is accused of funding the alleged conspiracy.
(Excerpt) Read more at law.com ...
lol
Well that’s what I was thinking. How many man hours does it take to go through 2 TB of text? A lot!
“The standard answer is that a page of text is 2k bytes. Not always but that’s a good number. To find how many Kilo Bytes are in a Tera Byte, multiply by 1024 to get Giga Bytes. Do it again to get Mega Bytes, then do it once more to get Kilo Bytes. That gives you 1,073,741,824 KB per TB. Divide by 2 (since your page of text is 2 KB, and you get 536,870,912 pages of text in a TB.
But as an inferior officer, he is severely restricted in scope and can only be hired for a specific narrow field. He does not become an “at large” US Attorney with more power than a US Attorney.
No US Attorney gets an unlimited budget, and can proceed anywhere he wants including the White House.
So if he is indeed an inferior officer as has been ruled, he is far out of bounds.
89c72c6c77f030c2ebcb467c0247368ef4a8e9bf4e3d0fa0442b78457cbb9c1c d3640c0540a9133eeac984564aeb1f72e0fbe0e62fc643f0fe97ce58abd7b337 df086e151af5e2493f4862826094e8d14763e3f6e62cdc78160d5fc40085bd60 184aae4c091e0fb9f93e100c02a2f5232f155d5aafbe897c6b1862c21558e22b 55e7561f88658fff6ed1005fc895ed290376277bd9b13652e1ff5b343a10383c f2f4cf4e87915ff88ea3c2e27b1eb47cf6caf62c8b8378081b1996420176e5eb 0953f05e5bd0f6b02ee4ebe83b096eda9c29cfdbde92d4bbbea71cd9c65f149a d44f88b2c6f30bb6482cbe3306ce63501aeab24f5abd9d93057b9fa79ad1c6fe 54817dcd127cf0482a4a305219858a97a6823317cda3078af4e3bb3bc6d05210
This is where Muller is going to look really bad. He thought he could just indict these foreign nationals and that they would not show up and challenge the charge. Now, they have not only appeared, but they are going scorched earth pretrial litigation. This is going to be hilarious.
“I don’t think defense WANTS the case dismissed.
I think they want to get their hands on all the documents they’ve demanded in the discovery process.”
How dare someone defend themselves and ask for access to all documents in the case!? When the US Government prosecutes someone, the word of the prosecutor should be enough for anyone! /s (just for the few dim bulbs who can not recognize obvious sarcasm)
If this is true, that is sanctionable conduct on the part of the government’s attorneys.
That’s the problem with cell phones, you can’t dramatically slam the phone down on anyone anymore. Maybe there’s an app.
2 terabytes of untranslated information?
Sounds like the persecution is trying to buy themselves some time. :-)
I doubt think Dan excepted it. He’s linked to a blog post that is exceprting an article on a legal website that is behind a paywall.
He may have excepted an excerpt though.
Lol.
Yeah, but they’re using Windoz, so that takes up close to a terabyte just for the O/S, then all the files are in M$ format, which adds another terabyte of extraneous formatting data to the 100 K of actual text material.
I tend to agree. Muellers problem isnt that hw asnt confirmed by the senate. Rather that the entire appointing procedure was irregular and not consistent with doj regs. That could cause him some problems down the road. Unlike US attys, you are right he does not have unfettered discretion.
I believe the really problematic issues for mueller involve the appointment procedure, undefined scope and issues about charging someone for a crime from 2005, obviously discovered not in the course of his so called investigation, but identified prior by DOJ and apparently ignored.
I will agree that the entire subject of the constitutionality of the Special Counsel should be reviewed. Personally, I seriously question whether any special prosecutor not subject to the identical conditions of every other Art II prosecutor is permissible. I am not sure that even Congressional approval cures the Separation of Powers issue of the President being head of the entire Executive Branch. That issue of course is for another day.
My own particular objection is not even a constitutional one. That’s Calebresi’s argument I linked to.
As to my objection, obviously the first defense of the DOJ to it will be that the jurisdiction of a Special Counsel is limited to a particular matter or matters, so therefore he does not amount to a de facto US Attorney because unlike a real US Attorney he does not have the authority to look at any and all federal crime in his judicial district. They may win on that point.
But Mueller’s case in particular is somewhat weak for them on that argument. A mandate to investigate all ‘links’ between a large number of people associated with a winning presidential campaign and the Russian government is an extremely broad jurisdiction and not even tied to any identified crime. Even more than that, that point is described as merely included within “the investigation confirmed by” Comey in March 2017, which was a counterintelligence investigation. Jurisdiction of a special counsel to conduct an unlimited counterintelligence investigation against Russia is breathtakingly broad. And unlike a normal US Attorney, Mueller is not limited to a specific judicial district - he may roam the entire country. And furthermore, the second prong of “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” appears to be interpreted by Mueller not limited to process crimes like obstruction and perjury. In other words, whatever comes across the transom.
Judge Ellis was trying to clarify a point related to this issue by trying to get Special Counsel lawyer Dreeben to admit that the basis of jurisdiction for indicting Manafort on old bank fraud and tax filing charges is to put pressure on him to give evidence on something that does come directly with the mandate. (Of course, having clarified that doesn’t mean Judge Ellis won’t rule in the government’s favor.)
I heard Rosenstein touch on the subject the other day, and he offered what I take to be their fall-back defense of the legality of appointing a special counsel: that it would come from the same source as the AG’s authority to appoint a temporary US Attorney (28 U.S.C. § 546). But that argument is much weaker than their first defense.
Hopefully the defendants will get some traction on this issue.
Ultimately I think the special counsel regulation will have to be changed to provide that instead of taking someone off the street, not a government employee to be a special counsel, they must select from the sitting US Attorneys someone who does not have the conflict at issue and that US Attorney will be given the special counsel assignment.
Because even if they didn’t have the poorly-worded drafting of the regulation that exposes them to my charge that they have created a de facto US Attorney, there is still the subtantive problem of taking someone off the street (”The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government”), giving him prosecutorial authority over federal crimes and yet legally prohibiting the DOJ from exercising day-to-day supervision over that person brought in off the street.
Interestingly, Comey side-stepped this problem when he appointed as special counsel in the Valerie Plame matter a sitting US Attorney instead of relying on the 1999 DOJ special counsel regulations.
And it looks like Sessions will be going that route as well if he decides to assign sitting US Attorney Huber the task of prosecuting crimes identified from matters in the upcoming OIG reports.
Not being a federal attorney I dont know what the remedy is if Mueller tries to proceed against manafort on a case from 2005 which obviously didnt arise from his current investigation. In state court it would be thrown out for precomplaint delay. Moreover, I also dont know what recourse exists for mueller go off the deep end on alleged crimes that have nothing to do with the collusion investigation. And I wish I knew the remedy for mueller being appointed without specification of a crime to be investigated as I am led to believe the DOJ regs require.
Personally I hope the courts really come down on mueller for this roughshod investigation of his. This type of fishing expedition is what give prosecutors a bad name. And in his case he apparently has yet to turn up any evidence for which he was initially employed.
On practical, legal and ethical grounds mueller should be ground to a halt. But then I recall what this dirtbag was like when he headed the FBI. A more incompetent, political hack you could not find. In my view he has a long storied record of corruption and incompetence.
That’s a great idea. Hang up the phone and the caller hears F-U.”
And when they dismiss it, Reed Smith will show up in court with the next Defendant. They’ve got another dozen in reserve, remember.
When a witness is caught in a bald-faced lie his testimony is often completely disregarded, even to the point that the judge says his testimony may be stricken. Now the prosecutor, you know that guy with an impeccable record, unassailable, confabulates an entire case and prosection from thin air, and the judge does not throw this and all cases he brings out of court. What does the ABA think about this type of behavior?
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