— Published with Permission of RenewAmerica.com —
Larry Klayman decries judge’s action on jury selection in rancher’s trial
In the years, months, and days before the signing of the Declaration of Independence in my native city of Philadelphia, on July 4, 1776, King George III, having issued one unjust if not illegal edict after another, having unfairly prosecuted a number of key American colonialists, having severely taxed the people and having attempted to seize the firearms of the citizenry so they could not rise up and challenge his will, invidiously took the criminal justice system back to the Court of King James, depriving the colonies of their own justice system. These were among the primary reasons our Founding Father’s and their colonies broke from the Crown, waged war to reassert their hoped-for freedoms, and conceived of and created a new nation.
Thomas Jefferson, perhaps our greatest Founding Father and president, predicted at the time that Americans would periodically have to renew their freedoms and wage periodic revolutions, even spilling blood if necessary. He and his colleagues knew that the tendency of mankind is to fall back to the despotic and corrupt ways of the British monarchy, and thus there needed to be constant vigilance and sacrifice in the future to preserve their God-inspired vision.
Sure enough, 241 years after our independence, the Founding Fathers’ prophecy has come true; and given the neglect of the populace to stand up to the tyrannical politicians, judges, and lawyers who now infest our legal system, in particular, the nation has fallen into anarchy, chaos, and outright fatal, cancerous corruption.
Indeed, just before signing the Declaration of Independence, another great Founding Father and later framer of our Constitution and second president, John Adams, proclaimed that it would not matter how many times we changed our rulers or forms of government – without ethics, morality, and religion, We the People would not see a lasting liberty. He added, wisely, that the new republic was fashioned to be a nation of laws and not men, having experienced the capricious and tyrannical ways of the king and his lackey judges and the pliant solicitors (trial lawyers) who appeared before them, who not only subverted justice, but meted out and furthered injustice at nearly every turn. That is indeed why the framers inserted into our Constitution the right to be tried by a jury of one’s peers, in criminal matters in particular. They had come not to trust the whims and political inclinations, to put it most diplomatically, of the handpicked judges and “yes men” of the British Crown – who shamelessly did the king’s bidding, while the solicitors, to feather their own nest and curry favor to fill their financial coffers, rolled over to the king’s judicial tyranny.
But despite these fears, and the creation of the jury to try criminal defendants, the Constitution’s framers, while inspired by God, were not God! They made a fundamental mistake by sanctioning the political appointment of judges by the president, as well as giving them tenure to serve for life. Of course, the rationale for life tenure was that judges should be insulated from political and societal pressures and thus be free to not be accountable to moods of the populace, only to the rule of law.
However, sadly and tragically, things have not turned out that way, thanks to the inherent and evolutionary dishonesty of mankind, to which the federal judiciary is not immune.
I have been one of only a few lawyers in the last decades who will speak candidly about the corruption inherent in our legal system and in particular the federal bench, infested as well with attorneys who are too afraid to take on these judicial despots. And, why is that? Because if a lawyer asserts himself before these judicial monarchs, who have virtually unbridled power in their courtroom to make or more commonly destroy lives to advance their careers through higher judicial and other appointments by the corrupt politicians and special interests who got them their lifetime jobs, these lawyers are sanctioned with fines or referred to pliant bar authorities who themselves have been compromised by the establishment that put them in place to do their bidding.
The result, a lawyer who stands up for our founding principles against intellectually dishonest or outright corrupt judges, risks not only being punished by the judiciary, but also losing his legal license to earn a livelihood, for which he or she sacrificed so much in terms of time and expense to obtain. Thus, honest and courageous lawyers who would stand up to the corruption on the bench risk disbarment by bar associations that frequently do the bidding of the political elite in our society.
Couple that with the overwhelming tendency of most lawyers to put their own personal interests ahead of their clients’ needs and this explains why federal judges, in particular, think they can get away with almost anything – particularly since their impeachment by their establishment friends and benefactors in Congress is only a highly remote possibility. In today’s degenerative age of deceit and dishonesty, a federal judge would have to be caught red-handed taking an outright bribe, money in hand, to only possibly be impeached and convicted of this crime. Most of the time favors and perks flow to these corrupt jurists in other less tangible ways – such as promises, explicit or implicit, of appointment to a seat on a prestigious appellate court or even the Supreme Court, as a just a few examples.
This week and for many thereafter, I am in Las Vegas, Nevada, participating in any way I can in the defense of that brave rancher Cliven Bundy, who with his sons and family stood up to the tyranny of King Barack Obama, Prince Harry Reid and their Bureau of Land Management henchmen who tried, unsuccessfully for now, to take Cliven’s ranch from him and sell it off to corrupt third parties – undoubtedly expecting kickbacks in return. Cliven’s family had ranched this land for over 150 years and acquired grazing, water, and other rights to continue their American and notably western way of life.
This week, despite an effort by Cliven’s lawyers to pick a neutral jury, the federal judge presiding over the case, stepped in and apparently manipulated jury selection. The result: A jury was seated Thursday that is not representative of Cliven’s peers in the Nevada community and is stacked to try to ensure his conviction and that of his equally brave sons, the result being potential life imprisonment. It is no surprise that the judge presiding over the case was the hand-picked jurist of former Sen. Harry Reid and President Obama. Reid, after the now world famous successful standoff at the Bundy ranch, slandered and libeled Cliven, his sons and the rest of his family as “domestic terrorists.”
It is time for Cliven’s lawyers to take a strong stand against this judicial tyranny and with full respect for those few honest judges on the federal bench, oppose what happened in any legal and ethical way possible. For if this judge continues to railroad the lawyers into submission, particularly given Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ failure to step in to end this political prosecution and reign in his Obama holdover prosecutors, Cliven’s, his sons’ and in the end your freedoms will continue to be eroded by a corrupt legal system which today is little better than the one under the tyrannical hand of King George III.
I, for one, will do my part not to allow this to happen, and if necessary I will pay any price as our Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution were prepared to do. It’s time for you, the American people, also to put your collective foot down to end this judicial and government tyranny before the republic goes down for the final count. Go to www.clivenbundydefensefund.org, and support Cliven Bundy and, as importantly, your own freedoms.
