The controversial Supreme Court decision on Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt garnered a lot of attention from people on all sides of the abortion debate. Attorney Ken Craycraft weighs on the legal implications and his opinion of the decision.
Read his editorial with featured in the Cincinnati Enquirer here and listen to his appearance on the Son Rise Morning Show here.
It has taken three long years (so far), but yesterday we won two important victories before the Ohio Elections Commission on the case of Smitherman v. Cincinnatians for Jobs Now. Read about that in today’s Cincinnati Enquirer, here.
In the 2013 election, several Cincinnati Labor Unions, led by Rob Richardson, Sr., donated $300,000 to a campaign to defeat Christopher Smitherman in his election campaign. The campaign ran ads on black-targeted radio stations and distributed campaign literature in African American neighborhoods smearing Council member Christopher Smitherman’s good name.
Importantly, when the dust settled from that election, Cincinnatians for Jobs Now filed no campaign finance reports showing the source of the funds and the expenditure of the monies designed to defeat Smitherman, something that Ohio Election Law requires. This is part of what is known as a “black money” effort to influence the outcome of election campaigns.
For three years, Jonathan White, who formed Cincinnatians for Jobs Now claimed he acted alone in forming and executing the massive campaign to undermine Smitherman. Amazingly, he claims that he opened a P.O. Box, but gave no one the address. Still, magically the $300,000 checks form Richardson showed up in that P.O. Box. These lies are necessary to avoid a finding that Cincinnati for Jobs Now was running an illegal Political Action Committee by the Ohio Elections Commission.
After years of delay by the Ohio Elections Commission, yesterday saw two important developments in this case:
It has been expensive and time-consuming to pry these facts from those who set out to violate Ohio law on campaign finance and to end the career of a promising politician.
The case continues before the Ohio Elections Commission. We hope to have a finding that the group and individuals ran an illegal political action committee and a referral to the County Prosecutor to pursue criminal charges against the wrong-doers.
Our “win” for five special needs school children and their parents or guardians was featured in today’s Cincinnati Enquirer. Read that story here.
In 2010 and 2011, our clients were several multi-handicapped, developmentally-disabled, special needs children in Columbia Elementary School of the Kings Local School District. Most were wheelchair-bound.
A teacher in that special needs classroom told her aides she derived a “perverse pleasure” in tormenting the kids, emotionally and physically. An aide in that classroom heroically and repeatedly reported the abusive behavior to the principal and assistant principal at Kings, and they ignored those reports. Other school personnel, including the librarian, also reported the abuse to school leaders. Again, no corrective measures were taken. Amazingly, the assistant principal walked into the classroom and personally witnessed the abuse, and did nothing about it.
The teacher then went directly to the Board of Education, which adjourned into executive session to hear her report of the abuse in order to to keep the accusations secret. Finally, the teacher submitted her resignation and threatened to report the abuse to the media, and the school board acted.
Unfortunately, their actions were to take nine depositions of the witnesses to the abuse. They then paid the abusive teacher a five-figure cash award to resign, and they gave her a glowing letter of recommendation to help convince her to leave. The District never told the parents that their children were abused.
Our firm was first contacted about obtaining public records relating to the abuse. The District refused to produce the transcripts of the depositions, trying to shield the abuse from public disclosure.
The focus of the school district and their attorneys was covering up the abusive conduct, not protecting these children — and more children that might be abused by this teacher going forward at a new school.
Next, we were retained by these five parents vindicate their rights of these children who were subject to this abuse.
After two and a half years of litigation, the case has finally settled. But unfortunately, the settlement involves money only. It was not practical to force the District to effectuate changes in procedures or management as a part of that change.
That settlement was the topic of today’s Enquirer story.
Friday of last week, the Federal Elections Commission issued a series of decisions on Complaints we prepared and filed for our client David Krikorian five years ago.
Those decisions found that former Congressman Jean Schmidt, and the Turkish Coalition of America violated federal campaign finance laws in accepting payment of her legal fees in legal proceedings against our client, and fined then respectively $2,500 and $25,000 for those violations.
You may read those decisions here, here, here and here.
These decisions — which sat on the desks of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. for an inexcusable years and years — capped a tremendous and frequently disappointing journey through the halls of power of Washington and the highest Court in the land.
In the end, we overcame a system of justice that is carefully designed to protect the wealthy, the powerful, and the well-connected, veiled in secrecy, and hidebound by bureaucratic inaction– although not in the manner that the proper administration of justice would provide.
Our firm — through the fine research and writing, and tremendous patience and persistence — saw through to a successful end a complex, tortured and unfair series of legal processes to the advantage of our client.
This journey, perhaps better than any story we can tell, describes the commitment we hold to “making a difference” for our client in each and every assignment.
We originally were retained to represent former and future Congressional candidate David Krikorian in the defense of several “false claims” allegations brought by Congressman Jean Schmidt before the Ohio Elections Commission (“OEC”). She claimed that in the course of the 2010 Congressional campaign, David Krikorian made certain false statements about her, essentially that she was on the payroll of the Turkish lobby in America.
Ironically, through the course of these proceedings and otherwise, she herself proved the basic premise of these allegations.
But tangential to those proceedings, we became curious that Jean Schmidt appears to have unlimited access to “free” legal services from two expensive attorneys from Washington, D.C. and a second in Columbus, Ohio.
Our lead counsel in representing Krikorian was famous Los Angeles attorney Mark Garagos, who was simply fun to work with, and inspired in his legal strategy.
That original OEC action then led to an appeal, a First Amendment challenge to the jurisdiction of the Ohio Elections Commission, and then a defamation case brought by Schmidt. These were incredibly expensive proceedings that came at us in waves from the Schmidt camp.
The legal actions were unprecedented in that they made no economic sense, and were outside the scope of our experience with clients who have to make practical decisions about proceeding with litigation in the face of daunting obstacles of time, expense, and the difficulty of legal recovery.
As the matter progressed over a period of years — with depositions across the country, two days of trial before the Ohio Elections Commission and endless motions — it dawned on us that something was terribly wrong here, that Jean Schmidt was pursuing this matter because she was accepting an illegal gratuity as a Congressman and as a candidate.
Garagos had the ground-breaking idea to take the deposition of Jean Schmidt’s attorney, Bruce Fein. In all our years of litigation, it never occurred to us to take the deposition of the opposing attorney. Schmidt’s attorneys opposed the motion, but the OEC ruled that it would proceed.
In that deposition, we asked Schmidt’s attorney “who was paying all these legal fees?” and he admitted that at the commencement of the relationship he met personally with her and her Chief of Staff and told them both that the Turkish Coalition of America (“TCA”) would foot the whole legal bill for the proceedings.
[This sworn testimony would prove key thereafter, as Schmidt steadfastly denied through multiple proceedings thereafter that she had no idea how her legal bills were being paid, over a period of years, but only that she was never invoiced for the work.]
We estimated — correctly as it turns out — that Schmidt had received more than $500,000 in legal fees from the TCA.
Our firm then began to research whether it was legal and appropriate for a sitting member of Congress to accept the payment of her legal fees, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, from a lobbying group in D.C., dedicated to influencing legislation before Congress and policy in the administration.
The rules were complex, but the answer was pretty clearly “no” for a host of reasons:
Thus, following the key depositions, we waited for the Congressman to file her federal financial disclosure forms for 2011, and then filed Complaints with the Office of Congressional Ethics and the Public Integrity section of the U.S. Attorney’s office.
After waiting more than a year, we learned that the Office of Congressional Ethics had properly examined the gift and referred the matter for further action to the House Ethics Committee.
But in a curious move, the House Ethics Committee ruled that the gift was illegal, and had to be paid back, but found that because Schmidt did not know who was paying her fees (in direct conflict with her own lawyer’s sworn testimony) that she would not be disciplined by the House. It was, very simply a whitewash.
We then filed a Complaint with the IRS over the unclaimed income. They also saw nothing untoward. Another whitewash.
As a result of the tortured and unconstitutional proceeding before the Ohio Elections Commission, Finney Law Firm attorneys then decided to challenge the false claims statute in Federal Court. That commenced in two other actions in 2011 and 2012,
We lost those twin law suits in the U.S. District Court, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and en banc before the Sixth Circuit. Ultimately, not a single trial or appellate Judge saw any merit to our arguments.
But then in January of 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted our case for review, and the tide quickly turned. We had oral argument in April of 2014 and a decision by June of that year.
In a Clarence Thomas-authored opinion, we won 9-0, sending the cases back to the trial Courts in Cincinnati. It then took two more yeas of hearing and appeals, but we have prevailed in those actions and the OEC False Claims statute has been struck down as unconstitutional, a tremendous victory for justice against an entrenched bureaucracy in Columbus.
That left one more decision, a decision that curiously sat for years, and years and years in Washington. For normal people, what in God’s name takes five years — five years — to decide. Month after month and year after year, the FEC, shrouded in secrecy, sat and sat and sat on the Complaint that alleged that the $650,000 gift violated federal campaign finance laws.
Last week’s letter to our client from the FEC ended that waiting. They concluded that Schmidt deserved more than a $2,500 penalty but because her campaign committee had no money and she was no longer a candidate for federal office the pithy sanctions was appropriate. They fined the TCA more, but not nearly enough.
To understand the hubris that would lead to this type of abusive conduct by a member of Congress, one needs to understand two things: (i) members of Congress simply never (almost never) lose their seats, with reelection rates reliably above 95% (read here) and (ii) they know that the House Ethics Committee and federal prosecutors won’t lay a glove on them.
Thus, it was sweet justice in May of 2012 when the voters resoundingly turned Schmidt out of office, in part because of her record of corruption as revealed by the House Ethics Committee and media reports of her mendacity. Chris Finney even gave a series of speeches to expose the incredible tale. (see here, here, here and here).
We would have preferred that the path of justice in this matter had taken several different turns — that prosecutors would have recognized the multiple felonies committed by these actors in giving and receiving the illegal gift. The House Ethics Committee, the U.S. Attorneys’ office, the IRS, and ultimately the FEC failed in discharging their duties to punish these overt and incontrovertible misdeeds.
But the voters had the final say, and the slow, weak and intellectually dishonest bureaucrats, in a strange way, both exposed Jean Schmidt’s corruption, and their own inability to administer justice.
Read more here>> Enquirer: FEC settles Jean Schmidt ethics case
Now updated to include more links:
Our firm is pleased to serve as local counsel in the class action against the Internal Revenue Service for the targeting of Tea Party and other liberty groups for extra scrutiny and delayed 501-C-3 and C-4 tax exemption applications.
Last week, the IRS finally provided the list of groups it targeted. That development is featured in today’s Washington Times. You may read that here. You may recall that the production of that list was hotly contested by the IRS, and produced only
The list has grown considerably from the groups the IRS Inspector General originally claimed were targeted of 298 to 426 in the latest IRS filing, that that fails to include some 40 groups who opted out of the litigation. In all, that means more than 462 groups nationwide were subject to enhanced IRS scrutiny and prolonged delays in processing their tax exemption applications.
That litigation is ably led by Eddie Greim of Graves Garrett from Kansas City.
Fox News Channel has a great story as well here.
The Hill has it here.
Newsmax has it here.
That case is pending before U.S. District Court Judge Michael Barrett of the Southern District of Ohio. District Court Judge Susan Dlott recently recused herself after more than two years presiding over the case.
The US EPA uses its broad powers under the Clean Water Act to designate, essentially, any soil that is merely wet as “waters of the United States” and thus subject to its regulatory reach.
They then enhanced their enormous procedural advantage by preventing property owners from challenging that designation unless (i) the landowner filed for and was denied a permit or (ii) if the owner was sanctioned ($37,500 per day in potential penalties) for proceeding without a permit. The hurdles the agency erected to challenging its regulatory reach was really shameless.
Of course, both of those obstacles to standing created an impossible choice whereby the owner either exposed himself to crippling fines or waited through an interminably long process.
Fortunately, last week the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the property owner does not need to mount these bureaucratic hurdles in order to challenge an over-reach of a designation of a “water of the United States.”
Chief Justice John Roberts authored the decision that found that Plaintiffs “need not assume such risks while waiting for [the Environmental Protection Agency] to drop the hammer in order to have their day in court.”.
Read more here and here. Read the decision in Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. here and read the Scotusblog.com page on the case here.
Our firm is pleased to “make a difference” for our clients, including in challenging abuse of power by government officials. Some people fail to understand the pernicious nature of the abuse of power and the impact it can have on our republic.
Thus, we were bolstered in our belief that abuse of power is pervasive, and persistent in this article from today’s Yahoo! News detailing how 41 Secret Service agents — you read that right, 41! — were disciplined for targeting congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah with illegal searches of their database, and release of damaging information to media.
Our firm is proud to have an active but small practice area devoted to public interest law. People frequently ask “what is public interest law?”
For our firm it is assuring that government actors — legislators, school boards, county commissioners, City Council members, as well as administrators — Mayors, City Managers, zoning officials, the IRS, and others — stay within the bounds of their constitutional and statutory authority. When they exceed those bounds, many times there is a cause of action and Judge who will stop them in their tracks. We are glad to represent plaintiffs in those actions.
There is no better example of this practice area than the U.S. House of Representatives’ suit against the Obama administration for spending $5 billion per year on the Affordable Care Act a/k/a ObamaCare without express authorization from Congress to spend the money. This is indicative of an administration raging out of control.
The House of Representatives under then-Speaker John Boehner authorized and pursued the suit. Liberal pundits across the nation argued that the House lacked standing to sue, and that it was a foolish waste of money. Both turned out to be untrue.
Today, U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collier ruled that the administration’s spending of those funds was unconstitutional and that it had to stop. Read more about that decision here. Read the whole decision here.
This is an important decision with broad-ranging implications for reining in the Presidency and out-of-control federal agencies.
The way Ohio Public Records law is written, a member of the public aggrieved by the failure of a public agency to produce requested documents as required by law may sue that public agency for those records, and if he prevails, receive an award of attorneys fees.
Unfortunately, a pair of decisions of the Ohio Supreme Court in January of 2015 effectively gutted Ohio Public Records law by holding that attorneys fees would not be awarded if the agency produced the disputed records before the conclusion of the litigation. You may read those decisions in State ex rel. DiFranco v. South Euclid here and here.
Thus, the Supreme Court has empowered recalcitrant public agencies to ignore and play games with public records requests.
In response, the Ohio legislature is finally grappling with the issue. As today’s Enquirer reports, Senate President Keith Faber is considering a proposal to make quicker and easier Ohio Public Records complaints through the Ohio Court of Claims. Read about that here.
The new process contemplates resolution in 75 days or fewer. Presently, public records cases take two years or longer to resolve through the Ohio courts.
The proposal does not reinstate the attorneys fee awards taken from members of the public by the Ohio Supreme Court, but it should make proceeding pro se more practical.
All residential and commercial users of electric generation service from Duke Energy Corp. and/or Cinergy Corp. from January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2008 are eligible for a rebate under a class action effectuated in the case Williams v. Duke Energy. For residential users, the rebate will range from $40 to $400. For commercial users the rebate is unlimited in size.
As described to me by one of the attorneys for the Plaintiffs, the settlement — nearly $81 million in all — means “real money,” especially for larger commercial users. Your business should not miss this opportunity, and it is even worthwhile for residential users to avail themselves of this windfall.
The on-line form is quick and simple. It should take fewer than five minutes to complete. We strongly recommend that all of our eligible clients log onto http://dukeclassaction.com and complete the form. I just did it for my own residence, and it was super-quick and super-simple.