An attorney who represented the ex-husband of the woman at the center of the Eric Greitens trial has admitted that he violated a court order that forbid attorneys in the case from talking about it to reporters.
Al Watkins on Friday apologized to Judge Rex Burlison. He will have to make 100 hours of presentations to outside groups on the importance of complying with court orders and how not doing so can harm the justice system.
“I am not a wilting flower,” Watkins said after a brief hearing in Burlison’s courtroom. “I’m a zealous advocate for my client no matter what the case will be. I will continue to be a zealous advocate, but I will do so with a really heightened degree of appreciation for and sensitivity to the integrity of our judicial system and the importance of maintaining the integrity of orders of the court.”
The agreement reached between Watkins and a special prosecutor appointed by the court does not contain an admission of contempt, which requires a knowing violation of a court order. Watkins said he was never notified of Burlison’s April 10 gag order.
Burlison had moved to find Watkins in contempt for a press briefing the attorney held after an April 23 hearing in the Greitens case. During that hearing, members of Greitens’ legal team revealed that Watkins had accepted $50,000 from an undisclosed source to represent his client, the ex-husband of the woman with whom Greitens had had an affair and who accused Greitens of taking and distributing a semi-nude photo of her without her consent.
(Not complaining, but the Viking waving an ax was my Greitens smiley )
Foggy wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 7:24 am
I will restore all the smilies, but it will take a few days. It's a lot of work.
Off Topic
When I was a kid, we had to draw our own smilies, with a Big Chief tablet and a #2 pencil. Then, instead of hitting send, we had to pass them from desk to desk, trying not to get caught by the teacher! Uphill, both ways.
Foggy wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 7:24 am
I will restore all the smilies, but it will take a few days. It's a lot of work.
Off Topic
When I was a kid, we had to draw our own smilies, with a Big Chief tablet and a #2 pencil. Then, instead of hitting send, we had to pass them from desk to desk, trying not to get caught by the teacher! Uphill, both ways.
Off Topic
in the show
"He sewed his eyes shut because he is afraid to see, He tries to tell me what I put inside of me
He's got the answers to ease my curiosity, He dreamed a god up and called it Christianity"
NBC News
@NBCNews
JUST IN: FBI releases new videos that investigators say show the person suspected of planting 2 pipe bombs the night before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
That's very nice to see. That fencing was very disconcerting.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
A Marine Corps veteran charged in the Capitol riot once served as a crew chief for the presidential helicopter squadron, a highly restrictive unit that requires a top-secret security clearance, officials said Wednesday.
John Daniel Andries, 35, of Piney Point, Md., was arrested last month and charged with two felonies, including violent entry and disorderly conduct on the Capitol grounds. He pleaded not guilty, WUSA9 reported. His attorney did not immediately return a request for comment.
Andries, who enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2004, joined Marine Helicopter Squadron One in 2006, officials said. His duties included aircraft maintenance as a presidential helicopter crew chief.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
03/10/2021 03:02 pm ET Updated 9 hours ago Citizen Sleuths Launch A Slick New Website To Hunt Down Capitol Insurrectionists
Online researchers have compiled a massive trove of evidence about the Capitol attack and are organizing it on their website, Jan6evidence.com.
By Ryan J. Reilly
Some of the citizen sleuths behind the open-source effort to identify the hundreds of Donald Trump-loving rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol have launched an impressive new website that organizes the stunning amount of digital evidence collected about the Jan. 6 insurrection. The website, Jan6evidence.com, was built by a small team of volunteer software developers, using the work of open-source investigators looking into the deadly Capitol attack. The site features a color-coded timeline that reflects the time of day, and allows users to click around on a map of the Capitol and pull up any video evidence from a particular location and time frame. Users can even track an individual suspect’s movements over the course of Jan. 6.
HuffPost was given an early look at the website by a software engineer who is helping to lead the project. The engineer said the site “is nothing without the enormous work of the open source investigators making their results available to all, and especially those helping to prepare results into a standardized format for display.” They credited the “extraordinarily careful work” of Twitter users like @K2theSky, @CoryCullington and @MasaSpalatin with making the effort possible. “Open source investigators, professional journalists, and law enforcement are all undertaking the painstaking, labor-intensive work of scrutinizing video and photos related to the attack,” the software engineer said. “Our aim is to make it much [more] efficient to review that media, so that they can most effectively investigate what happened on January 6 and why.”
Online investigators have already made major contributions to the “unprecedented” federal investigation to find and charge the hundreds of suspects who stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf. The work of online sleuths is increasingly being cited in FBI affidavits, now that federal authorities are starting to move past “low-hanging fruit” cases against the most viral insurrectionists who were immediately identified in the media after the riot. The open-source work also helped HuffPost confirm the identities of Trump fanatics caught on video assaulting police officers at the Capitol, including Robert Scott Palmer of Florida and Danny “DJ” Rodriguez of California.
Earlier this week, online sleuths associated with @capitolhunters and working with the #SeditionHunters network launched Jan6attack.com, which organizes crowdsourced information on individual suspects identified by photo and hashtag. The information previously existed in Google spreadsheets, but is now available in a more user-friendly format. While some online sleuths have grown frustrated after their tips to the Bureau don’t result in any public action for weeks or even months, the FBI has made clear that the public’s efforts really are helping. “It’s clear through the arrests we’ve already made that the public has been crucial in identifying these people, so putting these pictures out on social media has definitely helped get a further reach,” an FBI official previously told HuffPost. “The tips have been crucial.”
“This is a ridiculously helpful tool, and a great example of the maturing process that volunteer efforts have undergone since the early days,” John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, told HuffPost of Jan6evidence.com. “I’m very excited to see it out, and I’m very confident it’s going to help a lot of people who are digging on this case.” Scott-Railton said the effort also offers a lesson that Capitol insurrectionists should’ve kept in mind on Jan. 6. “Don’t piss off software developers,” he said.
Lt Root Beer of the Mighty 699th. Fogbow s titular Mama June in Fogbow's Favourite Show™ Mama June: From Not To Hot! Fogbow's Theme Song™ Edith Massey's "I Got The Evidence!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5jDHZd0JAg
GARLAND has essentially made his first working day at DOJ entirely about the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
Aside from some ceremonial stuff, he's getting briefed by FBI Director Wray on the Capitol riot investigation and meeting with DC prosecutors pursuing those cases.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
Jenny Cudd, 36, a florist and former mayoral candidate from Midland, Texas, notoriously bragged on a Facebook Live stream about storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.
In the live stream, she said that "we (broke) down Nancy Pelosi's door." She also declared that she was "proud of (her) actions" while praising and defending Trump, her fellow "patriots," and "the patriot party."
According to court documents seen by Insider, Cudd is requesting a change of trial venue "due to significant prejudice in the District of Columbia." She is now requesting for the case to be moved to western Texas so that she can have a "fair and impartial trial."
Defendants are usually required by law to be tried in the state where the crime occurred.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
As a criminal defense attorney, may I suggest a simple solution? If you don't want to be tried by "prejudiced" (read: "non-white") DC residents, perhaps try not committing crimes within the District of Columbia.
"There's no play here. There's no angle. There's no champagne room. I'm not a miracle worker, I'm a janitor. The math on this is simple. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean up." -Michael Clayton
fierceredpanda wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 11:13 am
As a criminal defense attorney, may I suggest a simple solution? If you don't want to be tried by "prejudiced" (read: "non-white") DC residents, perhaps try not committing crimes within the District of Columbia.
Even Trump’s Defense Secretary During the Capitol Riot Blames Him for Inciting It
Former Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller told VICE on Showtime he believes Trump’s speech caused the violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
One of the most senior Cabinet officials in the Trump administration, Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, has told VICE on Showtime that he believes the speech made by former President Donald Trump on the morning of January 6 was responsible for causing the mob to violently attack the Capitol later that day.
Trump installed Miller after firing his predecessor Mark Esper in the days after the election. Speaking exclusively to VICE on Showtime, Miller said, “Would anybody have marched on the Capitol, and tried to overrun the Capitol, without the president’s speech? I think it’s pretty much definitive that wouldn’t have happened.”
Recalling the events of that day, Miller said he wasn’t sure whether Trump was aware that his speech might have such extreme consequences, but he was certain the attack wouldn’t have happened without them. Listening to the remarks that morning, he said he found some of the comments “concerning” and that they set off alarm bells.
“It seems cause-and-effect,” Miller said, referring to Trump’s speech and the violent riot that left five people dead. “The question is, did he know he was enraging people to do that? I don’t know.”
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Jenny Cudd, 36, a florist and former mayoral candidate from Midland, Texas, notoriously bragged on a Facebook Live stream about storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.
In the live stream, she said that "we (broke) down Nancy Pelosi's door." She also declared that she was "proud of (her) actions" while praising and defending Trump, her fellow "patriots," and "the patriot party."
According to court documents seen by Insider, Cudd is requesting a change of trial venue "due to significant prejudice in the District of Columbia." She is now requesting for the case to be moved to western Texas so that she can have a "fair and impartial trial."
Defendants are usually required by law to be tried in the state where the crime occurred.
First she asks to be allowed to go to Mexico ... which the judge allowed, and now this.
Cudd is set to stand trial at the US District Courthouse in Washington, DC, which according to the Washington Post, draws from a DC jury pool of some 330,000 people who voted for Biden over Trump.
In comparison, the Midland-Odessa division in West Texas where Cudd is attempting to have her case moved voted primarily for Trump, handing the former president 77% of the vote versus 22% in favor of Biden.
"Pretrial publicity and community prejudice in Washington DC is so likely to have affected the jury pool that the entire panel must be presumed as tainted," said Cudd's attorney Marina Medvin in the application, citing as well a "lack of political diversity" amongst potential jurors.
"The facts of this case center around Donald Trump and his supporters. The evidence, in this case, is emotionally political in every respect," Medvin wrote, adding that the jury would be "the most politically prejudiced jury in the entire country."
Cudd has, on multiple occasions, claimed that she is a victim of "cancel culture." This was echoed by her lawyer, Medvin, who said that potential jurors would face "social pressure" to "punish Cudd for being politically incorrect" and that any verdict "could be readily based on pretrial media affiliation of Ms. Cudd with 'white supremacy.'"
Medvin cited as well the possibility that media coverage could affect the trial after it was widely reported that a judge had granted Cudd's request last month to travel to Mexico for a "bonding retreat."
"The jungle is no place for a cellist."
From "Take the Money and Run"
First she asks to be allowed to go to Mexico ... which the judge allowed, and now this.
Cudd is set to stand trial at the US District Courthouse in Washington, DC, which according to the Washington Post, draws from a DC jury pool of some 330,000 people who voted for Biden over Trump.
In comparison, the Midland-Odessa division in West Texas where Cudd is attempting to have her case moved voted primarily for Trump, handing the former president 77% of the vote versus 22% in favor of Biden.
"Pretrial publicity and community prejudice in Washington DC is so likely to have affected the jury pool that the entire panel must be presumed as tainted," said Cudd's attorney Marina Medvin in the application, citing as well a "lack of political diversity" amongst potential jurors.
"The facts of this case center around Donald Trump and his supporters. The evidence, in this case, is emotionally political in every respect," Medvin wrote, adding that the jury would be "the most politically prejudiced jury in the entire country."
Cudd has, on multiple occasions, claimed that she is a victim of "cancel culture." This was echoed by her lawyer, Medvin, who said that potential jurors would face "social pressure" to "punish Cudd for being politically incorrect" and that any verdict "could be readily based on pretrial media affiliation of Ms. Cudd with 'white supremacy.'"
Medvin cited as well the possibility that media coverage could affect the trial after it was widely reported that a judge had granted Cudd's request last month to travel to Mexico for a "bonding retreat."
A question for the IAALs (and especially the IAACrLs) here - Is there even any possibility of this case being transferred away from Washington DC? I'd think not, but an opinion from the professionals would be good.