OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Waiting for Brian Kemp’s reply

Donald Trump is still accusing Brian Kemp of covering for election fraud, but Kemp has his own problems — covering up for other fraud in his state’s government — problems that are outlined in the sixth letter mailed to the governor requesting him to order an independent investigation. The purpose of that exercise of gubernatorial authority? To look into documentation I already supplied Kemp showing fraud and criminal obstruction in the University System of Georgia (USG), the office of the attorney general (AG), the state Department of Audits and Accounts (DOAA), the office of the inspector general, and, yes, all abetted by the governor’s office.

On October 31, 2016, I filed suit to enjoin Governor Nathan Deal to order a state government corruption probe — after he failed to answer correspondence that went back to October 31, 2014, requesting appointment of a special investigator. Ultimately, Governor Deal ignored seven letters outlining fraud in the university system (USG), all of which have already been summarized by  Creative Loafing in the preceding link, at which the unanswered letters can all be read in their entirety. That was back in the days when former Attorney General Sam Olens dismissed the claims he admits he never investigated as “outlandish conspiracy theories.”

Here’s what’s outlandish: The state never responded to that lawsuit, and the courts refused to hear it without explanation.

The offenses Nathan Deal ignored range from evidence tampering by the attorney general, in a failed attempt to revoke the tenure of a UGA professor who criticized the USG, to the USG chancellor’s demonstrably false claim that he had no prior knowledge of $10 million that remains unaccounted for to this day at Georgia Perimeter College (GPC). All seven letters to Deal insist that state officials should  not enjoy sovereign immunity for crimes, and that sovereign immunity protection for state officials committing felonies is not the law as written, but a fiction concocted by conflicted jurists appointed by governors Deal and now Kemp, evading the constitutional requirement for judges to be elected by the voters in Georgia.

The saga captured in the correspondence stands alarmingly tall in Georgia’s history of corruption, which is storied and, in many ways, leads the nation since colonial days. It is also an interesting historical note that Georgia’s expansion of sovereign immunity for crimes had its first tender roots in protecting state officials for crimes of sexual assault and harassment. In the process, the Georgia courts and attorneys general have overseen the most flagrant denial of constitutional due process since the 1960s — when state government officials in Georgia defied the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of segregation. Now the Georgia Supreme Court relies on Confederate law to make sure state government remains unaccountable for unconstitutional and even criminal acts.

The sixth and most recent letter to Kemp, dated November 30, 2020, focuses on the phantom case at Kennesaw State, which complained of the USG’s illegal appointment of then-Attorney General Sam Olens as president of Kennesaw State University (KSU) after Olens obstructed a criminal investigation of the USG leadership’s role in the $10 million never accounted for at GPC. Yes, the same people Olens protected from criminal investigation appointed him to the $500,000 position at KSU. Olens’ successor, Attorney General Chris Carr, has never to this day answered the documented allegations of obstruction, extortion, and bribery in the USG and attorney general’s office — a failure to respond that Carr has in common with the governors.

Here is the trail of unanswered correspondence that leads up to the sixth letter to Kemp:

February 11, 2019. Letter #1 informed Governor Kemp of the seven prior unanswered letters to Governor Deal, and of former Attorney General Sam Olens’ admission that he never investigated any of the allegations of documentation submitted to his office. The letter serves as a general guide to a pattern of fraud around the USG concealed by the attorney general, including whistleblower retaliation at the former Macon State College, where “the executive assistant to the president was fired for refusing to falsify leave reports of the president to disguise his mental incompetence and regular absence for psychiatric treatment.”

Attorney General Chris Carr has fought to keep these records under seal, though he denied it at a candidates’ forum. The Georgia Bar Association found that this knowing misrepresentation did not violate any rule of legal ethics because Carr was not acting in his capacity as attorney general when he was the incumbent campaigning for re-election. Letter #1 also documents how Georgia courts evaded the law on the books to throw out the whistleblower complaint, which is consistent with the pattern of ignoring the law on the books to confer sovereign immunity protection to state officials for criminal acts.

April 1, 2019. Letter #2 is dated the same day former GPC president Anthony Tricoli filed his motion to set aside the dismissal, on grounds of sovereign immunity, of his case documenting criminal conduct by the attorney general and USG officials — citing newly-discovered evidence that the $10 million missing from GPC was part of a fraud scheme throughout the USG to defraud the federal government with respect to billions in federal funding. Tricoli also cited the controlling law on the books, previously ignored by the attorney general and the courts in violation of constitutional due process, that state officials are not immune to a civil RICO action based on their criminal conduct.

Neither the USG nor Attorney General Chris Carr has ever responded, to this day, to the April 1, 2019 motion to set aside the judgment based on new evidence of fraud and denial of due process. Given this context, it is not surprising that Letter #2 documents a string of knowing misrepresentations to the courts by the attorney general in defense of racketeering crimes in Georgia state government. The attorney general’s knowing misrepresentations themselves constitute a RICO felony. The letter argues that evidence showing the attorney general committed felony misrepresentations with the corrupt motive to conceal his own wrongdoing calls for an independent investigation — but, as with all the letters, Governor Kemp has never responded.

June 3, 2019. Letter #3 documents the disturbing complicity of Georgia courts in concealing the fraud scheme that permeates the USG, attorney general’s office, DOAA, and SACS accreditation agency to commit fraud on the federal government. In short, a major part of what was going on in the GPC and KSU cases was that the USG was falsifying its finances, cooking the books, and shifting funds from school to school, in order to falsely qualify for billions in federal aid annually. In defense of this corrupt Ponzi scheme, the courts illegally barred discovery and allowed the USG and attorney general to follow Trump’s lead and simply ignore subpoenas. Letter #3 also addressed the failure of the governor’s office to meet with victims to address the concerns about criminal impunity in the USG.

July 13, 2019. Letter #4 addressed the attorney general’s failure, since October 31, 2014, to respond to any of the documentation of corruption in state government. Despite the attorney general’s failure to respond, the courts have employed every dodge and pretext to avoid the claims that state government officials are acting as a racketeering enterprise. For example, the Georgia Court of Appeals refused to review the denial of the uncontested KSU action for bribery and extortion in a one-sentence order with no explanation. The appeals court’s contention that this one-sentence order was conclusive on all issues and barred appellate review is an unheard-of theory that amounts to judicial activism in the service of corruption. Despite the steady stream of related crimes, the court’s stonewalling represents an attempt to maintain — in the face of extensive documentation to the contrary, and even damning admissions — a fiction that no crimes were committed.

With the attorney general failing to file a single responsive pleading to allegations of financial fraud, extortion, and bribery in the USG, and with the courts denying relief with no explanation and resorting to procedural technicalities to dismiss the appeal on grounds never sought by the attorney general, Letter #4 posed the central issue:

“After more than two years, the people of Georgia deserve a response to the allegations of state agencies operating as a criminal enterprise.”

There was no answer.

September 1, 2020. Letter #5 outlines the issues the courts have failed to address and the attorney general has refused to answer in the GPC case in which the motion to set aside documented billions in USG fraud on the federal government. Those issues include the USG’s generation of a misleading self-review to disguise the fraud scheme — for which the $10 million missing from GPC was just the tip of the iceberg — with the USG reaching the self-interested conclusion there was no evidence of fraud even though two separate sets of books were kept at GPC, showing balances that differed by as much as $37 million. The letter also walks through the illegal use of that USG’s report on its own conduct in place of the independent audit required to show the USG meets federal financial requirements to qualify for federal funding. Letter #5 also details how conflicted jurists issued rulings that were pretextual and corrupt. The rulings, moreover, paid no attention to the controlling law on the books and flagrantly violated the state constitution.

You can have days of fun, opening the letters at the links above and reading all the details for yourself — something Nathan Deal and Brian Kemp apparently have never done.

Superior Court Judge Tom Campbell did hold a hearing on the injunction to bar the USG’s  quid pro quo appointment of Olens, but none of the subpoenaed USG witnesses showed up for questioning, and the Georgia Supreme Court convened before regular business hours that same morning to issue an order conferring sovereign immunity protection on the absent USG and AG officials. What a  deus ex machina — only one of many in this series that also reek of illegal  ex parte communications between the executive and judicial branches. That’s a lot of Latin for ordinary Georgians.

As letter #6 ponders: “Why so much effort to conceal the wrongdoing in the USG, and to place Olens illegally at the head of KSU? Concealing billions in USG fraud is sufficient reason.”

This is the panorama the 13 unanswered letters, seven to Deal and six to Kemp, reveals:

State officials, including judges and the attorney general implicated in criminal activity, maintain they have sovereign immunity protection when they abuse their public office to commit a related pattern of racketeering (RICO) felonies.

Two successive attorneys general have blocked hearings and discovery, ignored subpoenas and even service of process, and have made knowing misrepresentations to obstruct criminal investigations — instead of prosecuting the wrongdoers, which is their duty.

Georgia courts have refused to review the law, the factual allegations, or the evidence documenting crimes of financial fraud reaching into the billions of dollars — and have ignored the controlling constitutional provisions, statutes enacted by the legislature, and controlling legal precedents — to effectively confer a judicial pardon, not from the White House but via sovereign immunity, for criminal acts by state officials.

The judges in question, as well as Attorney General Chris Carr, were all governor-appointed, bypassing the state constitution’s mandate that they be elected by the voters.

The governors who appointed the judges, as well as the inspectors general appointed by the governors, have so far ignored 13 requests to appoint an independent investigator to look into evidence of major financial fraud in the USG.

Assuming Kemp won’t answer his sixth letter, the next one in progression, totaling seven letters, the same number Governor Deal ignored, will address involvement in foreign interference and election fraud, as well as destruction of evidence, by former Secretary of State Brian Kemp and former Attorney General Sam Olens in the days when the Georgia election center on the KSU campus was run by the USG, from 2015 to 2018.

Or, by some miracle, Kemp might answer Letter #6 and address the financial fraud, obstruction, bribery, and extortion in state government to take attention away from Donald Trump’s claims that Kemp is concealing election fraud in 2020. Now that’s irony for you. Governor Brian Kemp, please deliver the letter, the sooner the better. —CL—