Outlandish Conspiracy Theories

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  ["title"]=>
  string(60) "OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Reconstruction of the fables"
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  string(60) "OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Reconstruction of the fables"
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  string(10) "Tony Paris"
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  string(17) "STEPHEN HUMPHREYS"
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  string(64) "Historical myths and urban legends get new lease in Georgia 2019"
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  string(64) "Historical myths and urban legends get new lease in Georgia 2019"
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  string(14128) "!!!“Maybe these maps and legends have been misunderstood.”
!!!— Michael Stipe
 

Pretty much no sentient Georgian in recent years, with the possible exception of Howard Finster, could routinely recapture the vision from this former debtors’ colony — and see through the mind’s eye what transpired to make American history out of this state’s original sins: greed and corruption.

In fact, Georgia political corruption, deep-rooted since colonial days, provided the source material for some of the original landmark opinions of the United State Supreme Court, as the new jurists staked out the law of the land for the young republic in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Take the 1810 decision in Fletcher v. Peck. It nominally stands for the bland proposition that contracts will be honored (if that sounds quaintly obvious today, try enforcing a one-sided letter of intent with the Kremlin).

But the roots of the decision are much more venal and complex — or, rather, corrupt, since the contracts in question were obtained by criminal means — and the court did not consider the issues of unconscionability, or contracts for an illegal purpose. But there I go again, letting the law get in the way of a good story.

The specific question before the court was whether contracts for resale to bona fide purchasers could be rescinded by an act of the legislature. Georgia did, however, provide the serious motive for trying to upend this cornerstone of commercial law.

The lawsuit arose from an Act of 1795, in which then-Governor George Matthews and certain members of the Georgia legislature took bribes to enact a sale of most of the Yazoo lands that now comprise Alabama and Mississippi, aptly christened “Bourbon County,” to a secret society of land speculators. The corrupt Georgia government officials sold thousands of square miles, 35 million acres — for $500,000, or less than two cents an acre — to the politically-connected companies that bribed the legislators.

In response to the public outcry at this open and obvious corruption, a whole new wave of representatives were elected in 1796. The would-be reformers passed another act rescinding the act of bribery and corruption, invalidating the ill-gotten title to those immense tracts of land.

But the new legislators did not stop at passing a new act to replace the old, tainted law.

As only UGA Law of Legislative Government Professor R. Perry Sentell, Jr. could recount, in one of my favorite law school classes: Outraged Georgians gathered at the statehouse grounds of the then-capital of Georgia, Louisville, and set up a giant magnifying glass, catching “Holy Fire from Heaven,” and concentrated it on the text of the now-disfavored statute to bring about the “Repeal by Incineration” of the “Bourbon County Act” by which the Yazoo land fraud was perpetrated.

Now that is what you would have to call a true expression of disgust. One wonders if Georgia can muster similar outrage for corruption by state officials in the Empire State of the South today.

By the time of the incineration, however, many parcels in present-day Alabama and Mississippi had already been resold — at immense profit to the land speculators — and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Fletcher v. Peck that the Georgia legislature could not rescind those contracts.

So the holding, that contracts are inviolable, was not as noble as it sounds, and the state of Georgia was literally born awash in corruption, and baptized our new nation in it.

The other important principle established by this decision, validating the sanctity of contract (while ignoring the criminal origins), was that the U.S. Supreme Court firmly established its authority to invalidate state laws. Hold that thought for when we fast forward back to 2019.

In another foreshadowing of greater foreboding, Fletcher v. Peck also hinted that Indians might not hold title to their own lands. Legal title magically resided, instead, in the government of the transplanted former European immigrants. And sure enough, Georgia was as bad as its word, reneging on a series of compacts and treaties — which were not as inviolable as the sale of lands contracted by way of bribery — to drive out the Creeks and Cherokees.

So, yet another early US Supreme Court decision — again arising out of Georgia, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia — led directly to the Trail of Tears. In that case, the Cherokees tried to use the palefaces’ own court system to get an injunction against an enactment of the Georgia legislature stripping the Cherokees of their ancestral lands.

As we can tell from real estate development in North Georgia today, the Cherokees effectively lost, in 1831, because the Supreme Court declined to hear the case on jurisdictional grounds. As Chief Justice John Marshall said at the time, the dependent Indian “wards” were in no position to dispute their white male Georgia “guardians.”

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed direction on the question of Indian autonomy in Worcester v. Georgia. In that case, Georgia authorities sought to prosecute white settlers living in Indian territory — now Gwinnett County, which some still say remains uncivilized — in violation of a statute that barred non-Indians from living there to escape the authority of the state government. In the Worcester case, the Supreme Court held that Georgia could not intermeddle in the affairs between the United States and a sovereign Indian nation. This contradicted the dependent-ward outcome of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, but President Andrew Jackson ignored the high court’s ruling and ordered the removal of the Cherokees, anyway.

Of course, this ultimate result, treating the Indians as dependents, constituted more sinister foreshadowing of the later road to Jim Crow white supremacy and the doctrine of separate but equal.

Most relevant to political battles raging today is the case of Chisolm v. Georgia, in which the new state in the newly-minted nation said it did not have to pay its debt from colonial bonds. Georgia relied on a doctrine near and dear to King George the Third’s heart: sovereign immunity.

Sovereign immunity is based on the old chestnut that the king can do no wrong (Rex non potest peccare), for which jurists calling themselves conservatives today search for authority all the way back to Lord Coke in 1608, in the time of divine right kings, and the writings of Sir William Blackstone in the 1760s, right before the American Revolution.

The king can do no wrong, translated into the shorthand of the modern vernacular, means no one can sue the state of Georgia for any reason. Because the state of Georgia says so.

Of course, that notion of divine right royalty was (until recently?) squarely rejected by the new American nation — and some argue the new U.S. Constitution also rejected the English common law doctrine of sovereign immunity along with the prohibition on royal titles.

Legal philosophy aside, the state of Georgia was addressing a more practical problem in 1792, at the inception of the American republic, only three years after the new U.S. Constitution went into effect, in 1789.

Not so ironically, the former debtors’ colony was trying to avoid its debts. Like other colonies, it had purchased goods on credit and issued bonds to pay for the war against the British.

An estate executor to one of the bondholders who lived in South Carolina was trying to collect on the IOU. Georgia maintained it did not have to pay, and it could not be sued on the debt (which, don’t forget, is essentially a contract to repay a loan, as in Fletcher v. Peck). Georgia, in fact, actually refused to appear before the court where the case was filed. (Do not doubt that you will find many of these past acts of our forefathers prophetic, as they are repeating themselves today, in ways that will have to wait for future installments of CL to explain, unless you, too, have the vision of a Howard Finster).

Some might say that this was not a principled position for the state of Georgia to take, that it could just not pay — without even having to show up in court or say the check is in the mail.

The U.S. Supreme Court said, however, in a 4-1 decision, at the time of the inception of the republic, that sovereign immunity was strictly for the birds. Georgia, in effect, had to pay its debts. Neither King George nor his laws from across the pond could protect Georgia’s founding fathers, rascals that they were, any longer.

State governments, including Georgia’s, were so offended at the notion they could be sued by any mere, paltry individual, even a landless one, that they pushed for the Eleventh Amendment to protect states from being sued in federal court. So Georgia’s lawlessness led to the first Constitutional amendment after the Bill of Rights. Arguably, the country headed back in the wrong direction — towards kinglike authority with no accountability.

And Georgia is still very busy today, trying to resurrect sovereign immunity from the common law of divine right kings. In recent years, Georgia courts have treated sovereign immunity as an immutable precept handed down in an unbroken line from the mists of prehistory. But that is a myth, as Georgia itself has treated sovereign immunity, the doctrine that prevents a citizen from seeking civil redress in the courts against the state, most wantonly.

As recently as 1990, for example, the Georgia Constitution said that whether a citizen could sue the state depended on whether Georgia had taken out liability insurance to cover the claim. In 1991, the Georgia legislature rescued the sacred relic, sovereign immunity, from this ignoble fate, at the hands of actuaries, by saying the state and state officials enjoy sovereign immunity protection unless a law passed by the legislature expressly waives the protection bound over from the 1700s.

That is where the law stands today, and what follows is what the Georgia courts have done in the last five years to expand sovereign immunity beyond anything ever envisioned even by King George and his ministers.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that sovereign immunity prevents an injunction from being issued against state agencies to require them to follow the laws the agencies are supposed to enforce. In Citizens for a Sustainable Coast v. Ga. Dept. of Natural Resources, environmentalists complained that the state agency in question was handing out beachfront development permits in violation of the law governing that process.

But the Georgia Supreme Court said the agency did not have to answer to either the citizens or the law — based on the justices’ own distortion of the English common law. The ruling — widely recognized as absurd, though no one dares tell the imperial court — holds that the state agency cannot be sued, but that state officials (it would have read king’s ministers, on a 16th-century parchment) can be sued in their individual capacities, because that was the law in medieval England.

Needless to say, this is the one — and only — part of the recent sovereign immunity expansion that other elements of state government have resisted. Only because individual state employees do not want to be sued, in place of the state, in any action on assumpsit.

The Georgia Supreme Court went on from there, accepting arguments by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (who never actually practiced law) that bills passed by the legislature cannot be challenged as unconstitutional, in another opinion inviting ridicule in Lathrop v. Deal. For this novel proposition, Georgia’s Supreme Court justices roamed all the way back to Blackstone and Coke, but ultimately relied on Georgia’s Confederate Constitution of 1861 as the original inception of the idea that laws enacted by the state legislature cannot be challenged as unconstitutional.

Then you get to my cases, in which I have been trying to hold state government officials liable for abusing their powers — to commit criminal acts in office, harming both the State and individual victims. These victims include Daniel Papp, Denise Caldon, Dezso Benedek, Todd Brandenburg (who had the bad luck to report a state ethics violation by a member of the Board of Regents), and Anthony Tricoli — all of whom have been victims of documented criminal fraud by officials of the University System of Georgia.


In Tricoli v. Watts, the Georgia Court of Appeals, after denying Tricoli notice and an opportunity to even be heard and argue his case, held that state officials enjoy sovereign immunity to commit crimes, notwithstanding any law that says otherwise. That includes a pattern of related felonies prohibited by the Georgia RICO Act. In Tricoli’s case, that series of related felonies included knowing falsifications of state agency financial reports, concealment of theft of $10 million in taxpayer dollars, fraud in accreditation, fraud in state audits, and resulting fraud on the US government with respect to federal grants.

All these counterintuitive judicial opinions go to the roots of our democracy, and also to current events, in which it is very much an open question whether not only the State and its Ministers, but also the President and his Cabinet, may be held accountable to answer in a court of law for civil actions, subpoenas, and even criminal prosecution.

Unlike the law enacting the Yazoo land fraud, court opinions cannot be repealed. Rather, they are reversed and vacated by an appellate court, if not overruled legislatively. I hope to be there to help set up the giant lens and affix its beam on the text of the legal opinions — on the solemn occasion of the Reversal and Vacation by Incineration of the sovereign immunity screeds in Sustainable Coast, Lathrop v. Deal, and Tricoli v. Watts.

Then we can leave Georgia’s new, expanded, and invincible version of sovereign impunity where it belongs, in the drifting thoughts of Lord Coke in 1608, in the dreamland of myths."
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  string(17124) "!!!::''“Maybe these [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Zc8RAY7zo|__maps and legends__] have been misunderstood.”''::
!!!::— Michael Stipe::
 

Pretty much no sentient Georgian in recent years, with the possible exception of [https://americanart.si.edu/artist/howard-finster-1543|Howard Finster], could routinely recapture the vision from this former debtors’ colony — and see through the mind’s eye what transpired to make American history out of this state’s original sins: greed and corruption.

In fact, Georgia political corruption, deep-rooted since colonial days, provided the source material for some of the original landmark opinions of the United State Supreme Court, as the new jurists staked out the law of the land for the young republic in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Take the 1810 decision in ''[https://www.oyez.org/cases/1789-1850/10us87|Fletcher v. Peck]''. It nominally stands for the bland proposition that contracts will be honored (if that sounds quaintly obvious today, try enforcing a one-sided letter of intent with the Kremlin).

But the roots of the decision are much more venal and complex — or, rather, corrupt, since the contracts in question were obtained by criminal means — and the court did not consider the issues of unconscionability, or contracts for an illegal purpose. But there I go again, letting the law get in the way of a good story.

The specific question before the court was whether contracts for resale to bona fide purchasers [https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/landmark_fletcher.html|could be rescinded] by an act of the legislature. Georgia did, however, provide the serious motive for trying to upend this cornerstone of commercial law.

The lawsuit arose from an Act of 1795, in which then-Governor George Matthews and certain members of the Georgia legislature [https://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu/topics/history/article/revolution-early-republic-1776-1800/yazoo-land-fraud|took bribes to enact a sale] of most of the Yazoo lands that now comprise Alabama and Mississippi, aptly christened “Bourbon County,” to a secret society of land speculators. The corrupt Georgia government officials sold thousands of square miles, 35 million acres — for $500,000, or less than two cents an acre — to the politically-connected companies that bribed the legislators.

In response to the public outcry at this open and obvious corruption, a whole new wave of representatives were elected in 1796. The would-be reformers passed another act rescinding the act of bribery and corruption, invalidating the ill-gotten title to those immense tracts of land.

But the new legislators did not stop at passing a new act to replace the old, tainted law.

As only UGA Law of Legislative Government Professor R. Perry Sentell, Jr. could recount, in one of my favorite law school classes: Outraged Georgians gathered at the statehouse grounds of the then-capital of Georgia, Louisville, and set up a giant magnifying glass, catching “Holy Fire from Heaven,” and concentrated it on the text of the now-disfavored statute to bring about the “[http://www.aboutnorthgeorgia.com/ang/The_Pine_Barrens_Speculation_and_Yazoo_Land_Fraud|Repeal by Incineration]” of the “Bourbon County Act” by which the Yazoo land fraud was perpetrated.

Now that is what you would have to call a true expression of disgust. One wonders if Georgia can muster similar outrage for corruption by state officials in the [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Georgia-called-the-Empire-State-of-the-South|Empire State of the South] today.

By the time of the incineration, however, many parcels in present-day Alabama and Mississippi had already been resold — at immense profit to the land speculators — and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in ''Fletcher v. Peck'''' ''that the Georgia legislature could not rescind those contracts.

So the holding, that contracts are inviolable, was not as noble as it sounds, and the state of Georgia was literally born awash in corruption, and baptized our new nation in it.

The other important principle established by this decision, validating the sanctity of contract (while ignoring the criminal origins), was that the U.S. Supreme Court firmly established its authority to invalidate state laws. Hold that thought for when we fast forward back to 2019.

In another foreshadowing of greater foreboding, Fletcher v. Peck also hinted that Indians might not hold title to their own lands. Legal title magically resided, instead, in the government of the transplanted former European immigrants. And sure enough, Georgia was as bad as its word, reneging on a series of compacts and treaties — which were not as inviolable as the sale of lands contracted by way of bribery — to drive out the Creeks and Cherokees.

So, yet another early US Supreme Court decision — again arising out of Georgia, in ''[https://www.fjc.gov/history/timeline/cherokee-nation-v.-georgia|Cherokee Nation v. Georgia]'' — led directly to the [https://cherokee.org/About-The-Nation/History/Trail-of-Tears/A-Brief-History-of-the-Trail-of-Tears|Trail of Tears]. In that case, the Cherokees tried to use the palefaces’ own court system to get an injunction against an enactment of the Georgia legislature stripping the Cherokees of their ancestral lands.

As we can tell from real estate development in North Georgia today, the Cherokees effectively lost, in 1831, because the Supreme Court declined to hear the case on jurisdictional grounds. As [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Nation_v._Georgia|Chief Justice John Marshall said at the time], the dependent Indian “wards” were in no position to dispute their white male Georgia “guardians.”

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed direction on the question of Indian autonomy in ''[https://www.oyez.org/cases/1789-1850/31us515|Worcester v. Georgia]''. In that case, Georgia authorities sought to prosecute white settlers living in Indian territory — now Gwinnett County, which some still say remains uncivilized — in violation of a statute that barred non-Indians from living there to escape the authority of the state government. In the ''Worcester'' case, the Supreme Court held that Georgia could not intermeddle in the affairs between the United States and a sovereign Indian nation. This contradicted the dependent-ward outcome of ''Cherokee Nation v. Georgia'', but President Andrew Jackson ignored the high court’s ruling and ordered the removal of the Cherokees, anyway.

Of course, this ultimate result, treating the Indians as dependents, constituted more sinister foreshadowing of the later road to [http://newsreel.org/video/the-rise-and-fall-of-jim-crow|Jim Crow] white supremacy and the doctrine of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson|separate but equal].

Most relevant to political battles raging today is the case of ''[https://www.oyez.org/cases/1789-1850/2us419|Chisolm v. Georgia]'', in which the new state in the newly-minted nation said it did not have to pay its debt from colonial bonds. Georgia relied on a doctrine near and dear to King George the Third’s heart: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sovereign_immunity|sovereign immunity].

Sovereign immunity is based on the old chestnut that the king can do no wrong (''Rex non potest peccare''), for which jurists calling themselves conservatives today [https://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2013&context=lalrev|search for authority] all the way back to Lord Coke in 1608, in the time of divine right kings, and the writings of [https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/william_blackstone_381938|Sir William Blackstone] in the 1760s, right before the American Revolution.

The king can do no wrong, translated into the shorthand of the modern vernacular, means no one can sue the state of Georgia for any reason. Because the state of Georgia says so.

Of course, that notion of divine right royalty was ([https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/30/donald-trump-evangelicals-god-1294578|until recently]?) squarely rejected by the new American nation — and some argue the new U.S. Constitution also [https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1685&context=faculty_scholarship|rejected] the English common law doctrine of sovereign immunity along with the prohibition on [https://www.heraldica.org/topics/usa/usnob.htm|royal titles].

Legal philosophy aside, the state of Georgia was addressing a more practical problem in 1792, at the inception of the American republic, only three years after the new U.S. Constitution went into effect, in 1789.

Not so ironically, the former debtors’ colony was trying to avoid its debts. Like other colonies, it had purchased goods on credit and issued bonds to pay for the war against the British.

An estate executor to one of the bondholders who lived in South Carolina was trying to collect on the IOU. Georgia maintained it did not have to pay, and it could not be sued on the debt (which, don’t forget, is essentially a contract to repay a loan, as in ''Fletcher v. Peck''). Georgia, in fact, actually [https://www.britannica.com/event/Chisholm-v-Georgia|refused to appear] before the court where the case was filed. (Do not doubt that you will find many of these past acts of our forefathers prophetic, as they are repeating themselves today, in ways that will have to wait for future installments of ''[https://creativeloafing.com/HomePage|CL]'' to explain, unless you, too, have the vision of a Howard Finster).

Some might say that this was not a principled position for the state of Georgia to take, that it could just not pay — without even having to show up in court or say the check is in the mail.

The U.S. Supreme Court said, however, in a [https://www.britannica.com/event/Chisholm-v-Georgia|4-1 decision], at the time of the inception of the republic, that sovereign immunity was strictly for the birds. Georgia, in effect, had to pay its debts. Neither King George nor his laws from across the pond could protect Georgia’s founding fathers, rascals that they were, any longer.

State governments, including Georgia’s, were so offended at the notion they could be sued by any mere, paltry individual, even a landless one, that they pushed for the [https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendments/amendment-xi|Eleventh Amendment] to protect states from being sued in federal court. So Georgia’s lawlessness led to the first Constitutional amendment after the Bill of Rights. Arguably, the country headed back in the wrong direction — towards kinglike authority with no accountability.

And Georgia is still very busy today, trying to resurrect sovereign immunity from the common law of divine right kings. In recent years, Georgia courts have treated sovereign immunity as an immutable precept handed down in an unbroken line from the mists of prehistory. But that is a myth, as Georgia itself has treated sovereign immunity, the doctrine that prevents a citizen from seeking civil redress in the courts against the state, most wantonly.

As recently as 1990, for example, the Georgia Constitution said that whether a citizen could sue the state depended on whether Georgia had taken out liability insurance to cover the claim. In 1991, the Georgia legislature rescued the sacred relic, sovereign immunity, from this ignoble fate, at the hands of actuaries, by saying the state and state officials enjoy sovereign immunity protection unless a law passed by the legislature expressly waives the protection bound over from the 1700s.

That is where the law stands today, and what follows is what the Georgia courts have done in the last five years to expand sovereign immunity beyond anything ever envisioned even by King George and his ministers.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that sovereign immunity prevents an injunction from being issued against state agencies to require them to follow the laws the agencies are supposed to enforce. In ''[https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ga-supreme-court/1658382.html|Citizens for a Sustainable Coast v. Ga. Dept. of Natural Resources]'', environmentalists complained that the state agency in question was handing out beachfront development permits in violation of the law governing that process.

But the Georgia Supreme Court said the agency did not have to answer to either the citizens or the law — based on the justices’ own distortion of the English common law. The ruling — widely recognized as absurd, though no one dares tell the imperial court — holds that the state agency cannot be sued, but that state officials (it would have read king’s ministers, on a 16th-century parchment) ''can'' be sued in their individual capacities, because that was the law in medieval England.

Needless to say, this is the one — and only — part of the recent sovereign immunity expansion that other elements of state government have [https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2019/05/15/legislation-waiving-sovereign-immunity-again-nixed-by-governors-veto-pen/|resisted]. Only because individual state employees do not want to be sued, in place of the state, in any action on assumpsit.

The Georgia Supreme Court went on from there, accepting [https://www.ajc.com/news/local/state-contends-its-laws-are-immune-court-challenges/awczOs3lh7m11AJcGIpE2H/|arguments by Georgia Attorney General] Chris Carr (who never actually practiced law) that bills passed by the legislature [https://www.gmanet.com/Advice-Knowledge/Legal-Database/2015-2017/Lathrop-v-Deal.aspx?feed=f4e1d80f-0459-41e1-baff-4694c4945b84|cannot be challenged] as unconstitutional, in another opinion inviting ridicule in ''[https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ga-supreme-court/1864799.html|Lathrop v. Deal]''. For this novel proposition, Georgia’s Supreme Court justices roamed all the way back to Blackstone and Coke, but ultimately relied on Georgia’s [http://insideradvantage.com/2017/07/10/the-ga-supreme-courts-monument-to-confederate-law/|Confederate Constitution of 1861] as the original inception of the idea that laws enacted by the state legislature cannot be challenged as unconstitutional.

Then you get to my cases, in which I have been trying to hold state government officials liable for abusing their powers — to commit criminal acts in office, harming both the State and individual victims. These victims include Daniel Papp, [https://creativeloafing.com/content-423650-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES-Another-open-letter-to-the-Governor-2|Denise Caldon], [https://creativeloafing.com/content-421389-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES---When-First-We-Practice-to-Deceive|Dezso Benedek], Todd Brandenburg (who had the bad luck to report a state ethics violation by a member of the Board of Regents), and [https://creativeloafing.com/content-425364-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES-The-adventure-of-the-disappearing-budget-surplus|Anthony Tricoli] — all of whom have been victims of documented criminal fraud by officials of the University System of Georgia.


In ''[https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ga-court-of-appeals/1730669.html|Tricoli v. Watts],'' the Georgia Court of Appeals, after denying Tricoli notice and an opportunity to even be heard and argue his case, held that state officials enjoy sovereign immunity to commit crimes, notwithstanding any law that [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zQnyo2R-xortZympMjnyrPsHfnSZuYJa/view?usp=sharing|says otherwise]. That includes a pattern of related felonies prohibited by the Georgia RICO Act. In Tricoli’s case, that series of related felonies included knowing falsifications of state agency financial reports, concealment of theft of $10 million in taxpayer dollars, fraud in accreditation, fraud in state audits, and resulting [https://drive.google.com/file/d/13KflAmaxl-tGv2lTvFnE-n9o4Lsrh8hu/view?usp=sharing|fraud on the US government] with respect to federal grants.

All these counterintuitive judicial opinions go to the roots of our democracy, and also to current events, in which it is very much an open question whether not only the State and its Ministers, but also the [https://creativeloafing.com/content-428359-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES-What-goes-around-comes-from-down-south-2|President] and his Cabinet, may be held accountable to answer in a court of law for civil actions, subpoenas, and even criminal prosecution.

Unlike the law enacting the Yazoo land fraud, court opinions cannot be repealed. Rather, they are reversed and vacated by an appellate court, if not overruled legislatively. I hope to be there to help set up the giant lens and affix its beam on the text of the legal opinions — on the solemn occasion of the Reversal and Vacation by Incineration of the sovereign immunity screeds in ''Sustainable Coast, Lathrop v. Deal'', and ''Tricoli v. Watts.''

Then we can leave Georgia’s new, expanded, and invincible version of sovereign impunity where it belongs, in the drifting thoughts of Lord Coke in 1608, in the dreamland of myths."
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  string(14720) " EDIT Yazoo Georgia Controversy Copy 3  2019-07-08T20:45:57+00:00 EDIT Yazoo-Georgia_Controversy copy 3.jpg     Historical myths and urban legends get new lease in Georgia 2019 20190  2019-07-08T20:43:57+00:00 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Reconstruction of the fables tony.paris@creativeloafing.com Tony Paris STEPHEN HUMPHREYS Stephen Humphreys 2019-07-08T20:43:57+00:00  !!!“Maybe these maps and legends have been misunderstood.”
!!!— Michael Stipe
 

Pretty much no sentient Georgian in recent years, with the possible exception of Howard Finster, could routinely recapture the vision from this former debtors’ colony — and see through the mind’s eye what transpired to make American history out of this state’s original sins: greed and corruption.

In fact, Georgia political corruption, deep-rooted since colonial days, provided the source material for some of the original landmark opinions of the United State Supreme Court, as the new jurists staked out the law of the land for the young republic in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Take the 1810 decision in Fletcher v. Peck. It nominally stands for the bland proposition that contracts will be honored (if that sounds quaintly obvious today, try enforcing a one-sided letter of intent with the Kremlin).

But the roots of the decision are much more venal and complex — or, rather, corrupt, since the contracts in question were obtained by criminal means — and the court did not consider the issues of unconscionability, or contracts for an illegal purpose. But there I go again, letting the law get in the way of a good story.

The specific question before the court was whether contracts for resale to bona fide purchasers could be rescinded by an act of the legislature. Georgia did, however, provide the serious motive for trying to upend this cornerstone of commercial law.

The lawsuit arose from an Act of 1795, in which then-Governor George Matthews and certain members of the Georgia legislature took bribes to enact a sale of most of the Yazoo lands that now comprise Alabama and Mississippi, aptly christened “Bourbon County,” to a secret society of land speculators. The corrupt Georgia government officials sold thousands of square miles, 35 million acres — for $500,000, or less than two cents an acre — to the politically-connected companies that bribed the legislators.

In response to the public outcry at this open and obvious corruption, a whole new wave of representatives were elected in 1796. The would-be reformers passed another act rescinding the act of bribery and corruption, invalidating the ill-gotten title to those immense tracts of land.

But the new legislators did not stop at passing a new act to replace the old, tainted law.

As only UGA Law of Legislative Government Professor R. Perry Sentell, Jr. could recount, in one of my favorite law school classes: Outraged Georgians gathered at the statehouse grounds of the then-capital of Georgia, Louisville, and set up a giant magnifying glass, catching “Holy Fire from Heaven,” and concentrated it on the text of the now-disfavored statute to bring about the “Repeal by Incineration” of the “Bourbon County Act” by which the Yazoo land fraud was perpetrated.

Now that is what you would have to call a true expression of disgust. One wonders if Georgia can muster similar outrage for corruption by state officials in the Empire State of the South today.

By the time of the incineration, however, many parcels in present-day Alabama and Mississippi had already been resold — at immense profit to the land speculators — and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Fletcher v. Peck that the Georgia legislature could not rescind those contracts.

So the holding, that contracts are inviolable, was not as noble as it sounds, and the state of Georgia was literally born awash in corruption, and baptized our new nation in it.

The other important principle established by this decision, validating the sanctity of contract (while ignoring the criminal origins), was that the U.S. Supreme Court firmly established its authority to invalidate state laws. Hold that thought for when we fast forward back to 2019.

In another foreshadowing of greater foreboding, Fletcher v. Peck also hinted that Indians might not hold title to their own lands. Legal title magically resided, instead, in the government of the transplanted former European immigrants. And sure enough, Georgia was as bad as its word, reneging on a series of compacts and treaties — which were not as inviolable as the sale of lands contracted by way of bribery — to drive out the Creeks and Cherokees.

So, yet another early US Supreme Court decision — again arising out of Georgia, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia — led directly to the Trail of Tears. In that case, the Cherokees tried to use the palefaces’ own court system to get an injunction against an enactment of the Georgia legislature stripping the Cherokees of their ancestral lands.

As we can tell from real estate development in North Georgia today, the Cherokees effectively lost, in 1831, because the Supreme Court declined to hear the case on jurisdictional grounds. As Chief Justice John Marshall said at the time, the dependent Indian “wards” were in no position to dispute their white male Georgia “guardians.”

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed direction on the question of Indian autonomy in Worcester v. Georgia. In that case, Georgia authorities sought to prosecute white settlers living in Indian territory — now Gwinnett County, which some still say remains uncivilized — in violation of a statute that barred non-Indians from living there to escape the authority of the state government. In the Worcester case, the Supreme Court held that Georgia could not intermeddle in the affairs between the United States and a sovereign Indian nation. This contradicted the dependent-ward outcome of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, but President Andrew Jackson ignored the high court’s ruling and ordered the removal of the Cherokees, anyway.

Of course, this ultimate result, treating the Indians as dependents, constituted more sinister foreshadowing of the later road to Jim Crow white supremacy and the doctrine of separate but equal.

Most relevant to political battles raging today is the case of Chisolm v. Georgia, in which the new state in the newly-minted nation said it did not have to pay its debt from colonial bonds. Georgia relied on a doctrine near and dear to King George the Third’s heart: sovereign immunity.

Sovereign immunity is based on the old chestnut that the king can do no wrong (Rex non potest peccare), for which jurists calling themselves conservatives today search for authority all the way back to Lord Coke in 1608, in the time of divine right kings, and the writings of Sir William Blackstone in the 1760s, right before the American Revolution.

The king can do no wrong, translated into the shorthand of the modern vernacular, means no one can sue the state of Georgia for any reason. Because the state of Georgia says so.

Of course, that notion of divine right royalty was (until recently?) squarely rejected by the new American nation — and some argue the new U.S. Constitution also rejected the English common law doctrine of sovereign immunity along with the prohibition on royal titles.

Legal philosophy aside, the state of Georgia was addressing a more practical problem in 1792, at the inception of the American republic, only three years after the new U.S. Constitution went into effect, in 1789.

Not so ironically, the former debtors’ colony was trying to avoid its debts. Like other colonies, it had purchased goods on credit and issued bonds to pay for the war against the British.

An estate executor to one of the bondholders who lived in South Carolina was trying to collect on the IOU. Georgia maintained it did not have to pay, and it could not be sued on the debt (which, don’t forget, is essentially a contract to repay a loan, as in Fletcher v. Peck). Georgia, in fact, actually refused to appear before the court where the case was filed. (Do not doubt that you will find many of these past acts of our forefathers prophetic, as they are repeating themselves today, in ways that will have to wait for future installments of CL to explain, unless you, too, have the vision of a Howard Finster).

Some might say that this was not a principled position for the state of Georgia to take, that it could just not pay — without even having to show up in court or say the check is in the mail.

The U.S. Supreme Court said, however, in a 4-1 decision, at the time of the inception of the republic, that sovereign immunity was strictly for the birds. Georgia, in effect, had to pay its debts. Neither King George nor his laws from across the pond could protect Georgia’s founding fathers, rascals that they were, any longer.

State governments, including Georgia’s, were so offended at the notion they could be sued by any mere, paltry individual, even a landless one, that they pushed for the Eleventh Amendment to protect states from being sued in federal court. So Georgia’s lawlessness led to the first Constitutional amendment after the Bill of Rights. Arguably, the country headed back in the wrong direction — towards kinglike authority with no accountability.

And Georgia is still very busy today, trying to resurrect sovereign immunity from the common law of divine right kings. In recent years, Georgia courts have treated sovereign immunity as an immutable precept handed down in an unbroken line from the mists of prehistory. But that is a myth, as Georgia itself has treated sovereign immunity, the doctrine that prevents a citizen from seeking civil redress in the courts against the state, most wantonly.

As recently as 1990, for example, the Georgia Constitution said that whether a citizen could sue the state depended on whether Georgia had taken out liability insurance to cover the claim. In 1991, the Georgia legislature rescued the sacred relic, sovereign immunity, from this ignoble fate, at the hands of actuaries, by saying the state and state officials enjoy sovereign immunity protection unless a law passed by the legislature expressly waives the protection bound over from the 1700s.

That is where the law stands today, and what follows is what the Georgia courts have done in the last five years to expand sovereign immunity beyond anything ever envisioned even by King George and his ministers.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that sovereign immunity prevents an injunction from being issued against state agencies to require them to follow the laws the agencies are supposed to enforce. In Citizens for a Sustainable Coast v. Ga. Dept. of Natural Resources, environmentalists complained that the state agency in question was handing out beachfront development permits in violation of the law governing that process.

But the Georgia Supreme Court said the agency did not have to answer to either the citizens or the law — based on the justices’ own distortion of the English common law. The ruling — widely recognized as absurd, though no one dares tell the imperial court — holds that the state agency cannot be sued, but that state officials (it would have read king’s ministers, on a 16th-century parchment) can be sued in their individual capacities, because that was the law in medieval England.

Needless to say, this is the one — and only — part of the recent sovereign immunity expansion that other elements of state government have resisted. Only because individual state employees do not want to be sued, in place of the state, in any action on assumpsit.

The Georgia Supreme Court went on from there, accepting arguments by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (who never actually practiced law) that bills passed by the legislature cannot be challenged as unconstitutional, in another opinion inviting ridicule in Lathrop v. Deal. For this novel proposition, Georgia’s Supreme Court justices roamed all the way back to Blackstone and Coke, but ultimately relied on Georgia’s Confederate Constitution of 1861 as the original inception of the idea that laws enacted by the state legislature cannot be challenged as unconstitutional.

Then you get to my cases, in which I have been trying to hold state government officials liable for abusing their powers — to commit criminal acts in office, harming both the State and individual victims. These victims include Daniel Papp, Denise Caldon, Dezso Benedek, Todd Brandenburg (who had the bad luck to report a state ethics violation by a member of the Board of Regents), and Anthony Tricoli — all of whom have been victims of documented criminal fraud by officials of the University System of Georgia.


In Tricoli v. Watts, the Georgia Court of Appeals, after denying Tricoli notice and an opportunity to even be heard and argue his case, held that state officials enjoy sovereign immunity to commit crimes, notwithstanding any law that says otherwise. That includes a pattern of related felonies prohibited by the Georgia RICO Act. In Tricoli’s case, that series of related felonies included knowing falsifications of state agency financial reports, concealment of theft of $10 million in taxpayer dollars, fraud in accreditation, fraud in state audits, and resulting fraud on the US government with respect to federal grants.

All these counterintuitive judicial opinions go to the roots of our democracy, and also to current events, in which it is very much an open question whether not only the State and its Ministers, but also the President and his Cabinet, may be held accountable to answer in a court of law for civil actions, subpoenas, and even criminal prosecution.

Unlike the law enacting the Yazoo land fraud, court opinions cannot be repealed. Rather, they are reversed and vacated by an appellate court, if not overruled legislatively. I hope to be there to help set up the giant lens and affix its beam on the text of the legal opinions — on the solemn occasion of the Reversal and Vacation by Incineration of the sovereign immunity screeds in Sustainable Coast, Lathrop v. Deal, and Tricoli v. Watts.

Then we can leave Georgia’s new, expanded, and invincible version of sovereign impunity where it belongs, in the drifting thoughts of Lord Coke in 1608, in the dreamland of myths.    Allen Johnson, (1915). Union and Democracy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company., Public Domain   0,0,2                                 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Reconstruction of the fables "
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  string(12561) "!!!!....Now the new big story is that Trump made a lot of money and buys everything for cash, he doesn’t need banks. But where did he get all of that cash? Could it be Russia? No, I built a great business and don’t need banks, but if I did they would be there ...and DeutscheBank....
!!!!— @realDonaldTrump
!!!!8:20 a.m., 20 May 2019


Do you find yourself overwhelmed and upset by the everyday onslaught of troubling news from the nation’s capital — from Jared and Ivanka’s suspicious security clearances to Deutsche Bank compliance officers being fired for reporting financial transactions between the Trump Foundation and Russia? 

Are you tired of the rush of outrageous controversies — about whether the President of the United States can be held accountable under the law — coming out of Washington every day? Maybe you are not aware that the idea of an executive who is above the law has been under development right here in Georgia for at least a decade. Or that much of the fatiguing news that is coming straight from the states — like bills criminalizing abortion in Alabama and Georgia — is explicitly directed at a Washington audience? 

There are more compelling comparisons, and heretofore unseen connections, between the political struggles going on at the state and federal levels than you imagined before. Just take the headline developments of one day in your life, like May 20, 2019:

Subpoenas are only for some people.

Subpoenas were in the news May 20, with Donald Trump fighting calls for his tax returns and Deutsche Bank records, accompanied by news that Deutsche Bank compliance officers were fired after arguing suspicious transactions, including transfers from Jared Kushner to Russians, should be reported to FINCEN (the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) as possible money laundering. Trump was also fighting a congressional subpoena to the Mazars accounting firm that did Trump’s tax returns, but a federal judge ruled on May 20 that Trump's legal position was ridiculous.

A federal judge also ruled that there was no legal basis for the White House to block the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn. Nonetheless, McGahn, was defying another congressional subpoena at the White House’s direction. By the time you read this column, there will doubtless be more examples of the Trump administration defying any oversight. 

But defying subpoenas, and also open records requests, is old hat to the state of Georgia. In 2018, when I wanted to question University System of Georgia (USG) officials under oath about their emails discussing millions of taxpayer dollars and federal funds “gone with no explanation” from Georgia Perimeter College (GPC), the Georgia senior assistant attorney general, Mac Sitton, tried to get subpoenaed witnesses informally excused by emailing the court. As if a subpoena did not constitute compulsory process, but rather some sort of social media ephemera, like SnapChat.

In the end, all that online bullying by the AG was unnecessary, because DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Daniel Coursey quashed the subpoenas for no reason — at least no reason recognized by the law. “I would rather not hear the evidence” does not count. And that is basically what this administration is saying in Washington: Subpoenas are optional for the people we are defending.

You do not have to have any reason at all. You can even make up a false reason. Then Georgia attorney general Chris Carr misrepresented to Judge Coursey that USG witnesses were not familiar with their own emails in which they discussed financial fraud at GPC.

You don’t even have to appear

Normally, privileges or other objections to providing evidence must be examined question by question. So, for example, McGahn would have to appear and make any specific objection he had to answering a particular question. Instead, he simply did not show up. 

But Fulton County Judge Susan Edlein beat McGahn to the punch in 2015 when she refused to answer any questions in mandamus proceedings about her ties to a defendant in the case over which she was presiding, former Attorney General Sam Olens. A succession of judges made the case go away by stating they could not discern what claim could possibly be raised when Edlein lied to the court in which the mandamus action was filed about protecting Olens by, for example, illegally barring amendments to the complaint against him.

Compliance with mandatory statutes is also voluntary

That brings us to another D.C./Georgia similarity, because Georgia law is clear that a complaint can be amended all the way up until the time of trial, and there is nothing a judge can do to stop it. Judge Edlein tried it anyway — twice, in fact.

And Steve Mnuchin and William Barr have used the same vein of statutory interpretation to say they do not have to follow the law requiring them to produce Trump’s tax returns. Just disregard what the statute says, and that’s the end of it. 

Georgia is way out ahead on that front, already on the record for ignoring, as an example, the statute that requires at least 30 days’ notice and a hearing before a judge can decide to toss out your case without allowing you to have a trial and present your evidence to a jury. That is exactly the law the Georgia courts ignored in 2016 to dismiss Anthony Tricoli’s case against state officials who falsified, concealed, and misrepresented state agency financial records to hide a $16 million shortage of funds at GPC.

The main reason for all this executive freedom is blanket immunity

Since executive privilege no longer applied after McGahn gave 30 hours of testimony to the Special Counsel, the White House went for a bolder stroke: Executive officials are immune. That is really an end-of-story proposition. It means “No response necessary,” no documents or appearances, nothing.

Immunity means that McGahn could not be called to testify before Congress even if there was evidence of a crime. Even if there was a conflict between McGahn’s testimony under oath and Trump’s tweets — which, in fact, there is.

Once again, Georgia is way ahead of the game. Georgia has been arguing since 2013 that Georgia state officials enjoy sovereign immunity to commit crimes with impunity. That includes perjury, bribery, evidence tampering, wire fraud, and extortion. It includes falsifying state agency financial records to conceal the theft of taxpayer money. It even includes fraud against the federal government!

Georgia has taken that position ever since I first filed civil RICO actions against state officials for committing felonies in office — lawsuits expressly authorized by the Georgia RICO Act. But we have already established that the Georgia government does not have to follow any statutes enacted by the Georgia legislature.

Look at all the other great things sovereign immunity can do in Georgia:

*Immunity prevents state agencies from being enjoined to follow the laws they are supposed to enforce (see, again, statutes optional).
*The RICO statute says you can enjoin a state agency, but the Georgia Court of Appeals said in Tricoli v. Watts that the statute does not mean what it said in OCGA 16-14-6(a & b).
*Most of all, immunity means never having to be subpoenaed. It also means that state officials cannot be put on trial, for example, for falsifying agency records to hide financial fraud involving millions of taxpayer dollars.
*Lastly, the courts have gone so far as to say that Georgia state officials, including judges, are also immune to the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. That is why Georgia does not have to fool with its own silly statutes when it finds them inconvenient.
+ 
The Constitution does not apply at all

Another neat trick Georgia accomplished, aside from dispensing with due process of law, is to say that illegal statutes cannot be reviewed for compliance with the Constitution — unless it is the Confederate Constitution of 1861. 

Is the constitutionality of Georgia’s new six-week law criminalizing abortion debatable? Not to worry. Georgia has already covered that, because sovereign immunity, since 2017, prevents you from challenging a state statute as unconstitutional. The Georgia Supreme Court decided that the first time Georgia passed a law to put doctors in prison for therapeutic abortions. Just to do Alabama one better, since Alabama lawmakers gave a pass for rape and incest, Georgia relies on Confederate Law to make laws criminalizing abortion inviolable. Georgia relied on the aforementioned Confederate Constitution as the deciding factor in opining that such statutes cannot be challenged as unconstitutional. And do not doubt there was a national connection when the Georgia Supreme Court justices were auditioning to replace Scalia.

Government retaliation against political enemies is fine

All this is to say, it is quite a pain to government officials when government corruption is exposed. Trump wants to investigate those pesky investigators who found out he lied about the Trump Tower meeting and the negotiations during the election campaign — in which Putin was interfering — with Putin’s government to build Trump Tower Moscow. According to Trump, Mueller and his henchmen committed treason and deserve long jail sentences.

And Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr also argued that the First Amendment does not apply in Georgia — when it comes to retaliating against anyone who wants to point out any corruption in state government.

You get to review your own conduct!

One of the neat things about immunity is the absence of any independent oversight.

You read in the news on May 20 that the people at Deutsche Bank — who fired the compliance officers who wanted to report payments to Russians to FINCEN — reviewed their own decisions about the potential money laundering.

Not to be outdone, the USG got to review itself when GPC turned up $16 million short, and $10 million was never found, even after the USG’s chief audit officer performed a self-review, not a full audit, of himself. And that was fine with Attorney General Sam Olens who saw no reason to investigate further since he did not see any criminality.

You don’t have to follow your own rules.

Just as Deutsche bank ignored its own financial compliance rules, USG did not follow any of its rules when it blamed Tricoli for the missing $16 million and reviewed itself. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) did not follow its own requirements or procedures, either, when it accepted the USG’s self-review in place of the independent audit required for SACS compliance.

So what if the result is fraud against the federal government, which makes accreditation a condition of receiving financial assistance from the US government, right down the student loan money pouring into USG coffers. Seventy percent of GPC students received federal financial aid at the time the $16 million deficit was discovered.

Lying to the people is OK if you serve in the government

Trump called McGahn a liar about Trump’s efforts to fire Mueller and obstruct the Russia investigation. Then Trump told McGahn not to appear before the Judiciary Committee to sort out who was lying. Trump lied about Trump Tower Moscow, and told Don Jr. to lie and say the meeting with Veselnitskaya was about adoptions. 

Georgia actually has a better law than the feds. Under the Georgia statute, you don’t have to be under oath to commit a crime by falsifying state records or misrepresenting any issue under state jurisdiction. Well, not to worry, the AG is ignoring that. The AG said in 2012 if GPC’s then-CBO Ron Carruth was lying about GPC finances to the school’s president and the rest of the administration, that was their problem. In other words, the AG took the option to not recognize the statute making those lies a crime, OCGA 16-10-20.

In Georgia, the powers that be are breaking down the rule of law to save the hides of state government officials like Sheletha Champion and Steve Wrigley, who concealed and misrepresented the financial condition of GPC. Granted, so far, they have gotten a better deal than General Flynn, and certainly better than Michael Cohen.

But look at Jeff Sessions. He got away with misrepresenting his meetings with Russian ambassador Kislyak. Who in Georgia is going to be able to top that?"
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  string(15357) "!!!!''....Now the new big story is that Trump made a lot of money and buys everything for cash, he doesn’t need banks. But where did he get all of that cash? Could it be Russia? No, I built a great business and don’t need banks, but if I did they would be there ...and DeutscheBank....''
!!!!— [https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1130433208250769410|@realDonaldTrump]
!!!!8:20 a.m., 20 May 2019


Do you find yourself overwhelmed and upset by the everyday onslaught of troubling news from the nation’s capital — from Jared and Ivanka’s suspicious [http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/jared-and-ivankas-security-clearance-scandal-what-we-know.html|security clearances] to Deutsche Bank compliance officers being [https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-russia-2016-money-transfer-deutsche-bank-2019-5|fired for reporting financial transactions] between the Trump Foundation and Russia? 

Are you tired of the rush of outrageous controversies — about whether the President of the United States can be held accountable under the law — coming out of Washington every day? Maybe you are not aware that the idea of an executive who is above the law has been under development right here in Georgia for at least a decade. Or that much of the fatiguing news that is coming straight from the states — like [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/alabama-georgia-abortion-bills/589504/|bills criminalizing abortion] in Alabama and Georgia — is explicitly directed at a Washington audience? 

There are more compelling comparisons, and heretofore unseen connections, between the political struggles going on at the state and federal levels than you imagined before. Just take the headline developments of one day in your life, like May 20, 2019:

Subpoenas are only for some people.

Subpoenas were in the news May 20, with Donald Trump [http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/mnuchin-refuses-to-comply-with-trump-tax-return-subpoena.html|fighting calls for his tax returns] and Deutsche Bank records, accompanied by news that Deutsche Bank compliance officers were fired after arguing suspicious transactions, including transfers from Jared Kushner to Russians, should be reported to [https://www.fincen.gov/about/mission|FINCEN] (the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) as possible money laundering. Trump was also fighting a [https://www.npr.org/2019/05/20/725126001/white-house-says-its-blocking-don-mcgahn-from-testifying-in-congress|congressional subpoena] to the Mazars accounting firm that did Trump’s tax returns, but a [https://www.lawfareblog.com/court-will-not-block-oversight-committee-subpoena-mazars|federal judge ruled] on May 20 that Trump's legal position was ridiculous.

A federal judge also ruled that there was [https://www.npr.org/2019/05/20/725126001/white-house-says-its-blocking-don-mcgahn-from-testifying-in-congress|no legal basis] for the White House to block the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn. Nonetheless, McGahn, was defying another congressional subpoena at the [https://thehill.com/homenews/house/444624-white-house-denies-subpoena-for-mcgahn-to-testify|White House’s direction]. By the time you read this column, there will doubtless be [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/05/15/white-house-says-house-judiciary-cant-investigate-trump-obstruction/3681538002/|more examples] of the Trump administration defying any oversight. 

But defying subpoenas, and also open records requests, is old hat to the state of Georgia. In 2018, when I wanted to question University System of Georgia (USG) officials [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M5Tr39y64UY4nxhuUgN37J-mzeUnjm0m/view?usp=sharing|under oath about their emails] discussing millions of taxpayer dollars and federal funds “gone with no explanation” from Georgia Perimeter College (GPC), the Georgia senior assistant attorney general, Mac Sitton, tried to get subpoenaed witnesses [https://drive.google.com/file/d/141NT4j4QTXqdghCqXuuTw7R_f_RcuUCS/view?usp=sharing|informally excused] by emailing the court. As if a subpoena did not constitute compulsory process, but rather some sort of social media ephemera, like SnapChat.

In the end, all that online bullying by the AG was unnecessary, because DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Daniel Coursey quashed the subpoenas for no reason — at least no reason recognized by the law. “I would rather not hear the evidence” [https://drive.google.com/file/d/132p_IyYk0CYHCwgeF7Zgpx4mq584w73i/view?usp=sharing|does not count]. And that is basically what this administration is saying in Washington: Subpoenas are optional for the people we are defending.

You do not have to have any reason at all. You can even make up a false reason. Then Georgia attorney general Chris Carr misrepresented to Judge Coursey that USG witnesses were not familiar with their own emails in which they discussed financial fraud at GPC.

__You don’t even have to appear__

Normally, privileges or other objections to providing evidence must be examined question by question. So, for example, McGahn would have to appear and make any specific objection he had to answering a particular question. Instead, he simply [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/us/politics/mcgahn-trump-congress.html|did not show up]. 

But Fulton County Judge Susan Edlein beat McGahn to the punch in 2015 when she refused to answer any questions in mandamus proceedings about her ties to a defendant in the [https://creativeloafing.com/content-421389-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES---When-First-We-Practice-to-Deceive|case] over which she was presiding, former Attorney General Sam Olens. A succession of judges made the case go away by stating they could not discern what claim could possibly be raised when Edlein lied to the court in which the mandamus action was filed about protecting Olens by, for example, illegally barring amendments to the complaint against him.

__Compliance with mandatory statutes is also voluntary__

That brings us to another D.C./Georgia similarity, because Georgia law is clear that a complaint can be amended all the way up until the time of trial, and there is [https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-9/chapter-11/article-3/9-11-15/|nothing] a judge can do to stop it. Judge Edlein tried it anyway — twice, in fact.

And Steve Mnuchin and William Barr have used the same vein of statutory interpretation to say they [https://www.thedailybeast.com/heres-the-law-that-requires-steven-mnuchin-to-turn-over-trumps-taxes-or-lose-his-office-and-go-to-prison|do not have to follow the law] requiring them to produce Trump’s tax returns. Just disregard what the statute says, and that’s the end of it. 

Georgia is way out ahead on that front, already on the record for ignoring, as an example, the [https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-9/chapter-11/article-7/9-11-56|statute] that requires at least 30 days’ notice and a hearing before a judge can decide to toss out your case without allowing you to have a trial and present your evidence to a jury. That is exactly the law the Georgia courts ignored in 2016 to dismiss Anthony Tricoli’s case against state officials who falsified, concealed, and misrepresented state agency financial records to hide a $16 million shortage of funds at GPC.

__The main reason for all this executive freedom is blanket immunity__

Since executive privilege no longer applied after McGahn gave 30 hours of testimony to the Special Counsel, the White House went for a bolder stroke: Executive officials are immune. That is really an end-of-story proposition. It means “No response necessary,” no documents or appearances, nothing.

Immunity means that McGahn could not be called to testify before Congress even if there was evidence of a crime. Even if there was a conflict between McGahn’s testimony under oath and Trump’s tweets — which, in fact, there is.

Once again, Georgia is way ahead of the game. Georgia has been arguing since 2013 that Georgia state officials enjoy sovereign immunity to commit crimes with impunity. That includes perjury, bribery, evidence tampering, wire fraud, and extortion. It includes falsifying state agency financial records to conceal the theft of taxpayer money. It even includes fraud against the federal government!

Georgia has taken that position ever since I first filed civil RICO actions against state officials for committing felonies in office — lawsuits expressly authorized by the Georgia RICO Act. But we have already established that the Georgia government does not have to follow any statutes enacted by the Georgia legislature.

Look at all the other great things sovereign immunity can do in Georgia:

*Immunity prevents state agencies [https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ga-supreme-court/1658382.html|from being enjoined] to follow the laws they are supposed to enforce (see, again, statutes optional).
*The RICO statute says you can enjoin a state agency, but the Georgia Court of Appeals said in Tricoli v. Watts that the statute does not mean what it said in [https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-16/chapter-14/16-14-6/|OCGA 16-14-6(a & b)].
*Most of all, immunity means never having to be subpoenaed. It also means that state officials cannot be put on trial, for example, for falsifying agency records to hide financial fraud involving millions of taxpayer dollars.
*Lastly, the courts have gone so far as to say that Georgia state officials, including judges, are also immune to the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. That is why Georgia does not have to fool with its own silly statutes when it finds them [http://https://creativeloafing.com/content-426489-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES-GEORGIA-S-FIFTY-YEAR-CYCLE|inconvenient].
+ 
__The Constitution does not apply at all__

Another neat trick Georgia accomplished, aside from dispensing with due process of law, is to say that illegal statutes cannot be reviewed for compliance with the Constitution — unless it is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Constitutional_Convention_of_1861|Confederate Constitution] of 1861. 

Is the constitutionality of Georgia’s new six-week law criminalizing abortion debatable? Not to worry. Georgia has already covered that, because sovereign immunity, since 2017, prevents you from challenging a state statute as unconstitutional. The Georgia Supreme Court decided that the first time Georgia passed a law to [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/596e5ddbe4b05561da5a5b3e|put doctors in prison] for therapeutic abortions. Just to do Alabama one better, since Alabama lawmakers gave a pass for rape and incest, Georgia relies on Confederate Law to make laws criminalizing abortion [http://insideradvantage.com/2017/07/10/the-ga-supreme-courts-monument-to-confederate-law/|inviolable]. Georgia relied on the aforementioned Confederate Constitution as the deciding factor in opining that such statutes cannot be challenged as unconstitutional. And do not doubt there was a national connection when the Georgia Supreme Court justices were [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AljO4hInQPwzfLdVKVhaFq868Dy3z8Uu/view?usp=sharing|auditioning] to replace Scalia.

__Government retaliation against political enemies is fine__

All this is to say, it is quite a pain to government officials when government corruption is exposed. Trump wants to investigate those pesky investigators who found out he lied about the Trump Tower meeting and the negotiations during the election campaign — in which Putin was interfering — with Putin’s government to build Trump Tower Moscow. According to Trump, Mueller and his henchmen [https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-calls-2016-campaign-spying-treason-warns-of-long-jail-sentences|committed treason] and deserve long jail sentences.

And Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr also argued that the First Amendment does not apply in Georgia — when it comes to retaliating against anyone who wants to point out any corruption in state government.

__You get to review your own conduct!__

One of the neat things about immunity is the absence of any independent oversight.

You read in the news on May 20 that the people at Deutsche Bank — who fired the compliance officers who wanted to report payments to Russians to FINCEN — reviewed their own decisions about the potential money laundering.

Not to be outdone, the USG got to review itself when GPC turned up $16 million short, and $10 million was never found, even after the USG’s chief audit officer performed a self-review, not a full audit, of himself. And that was fine with Attorney General Sam Olens who saw no reason to investigate further since he did not see any criminality.

__You don’t have to follow your own rules.__

Just as Deutsche bank ignored its own financial compliance rules, USG did not follow any of its rules when it blamed Tricoli for the missing $16 million and reviewed itself. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) did not follow its own requirements or procedures, either, when it accepted the USG’s self-review in place of the independent audit required for SACS compliance.

So what if the result is fraud against the federal government, which makes accreditation a condition of receiving financial assistance from the US government, right down the student loan money pouring into USG coffers. Seventy percent of GPC students received federal financial aid at the time the $16 million deficit was discovered.

__Lying to the people is OK if you serve in the government__

Trump called McGahn a liar about Trump’s efforts to fire Mueller and obstruct the Russia investigation. Then Trump told McGahn not to appear before the Judiciary Committee to sort out who was lying. Trump lied about Trump Tower Moscow, and told Don Jr. [https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jun/07/president-trumps-lawyers/was-initial-trump-statement-ny-times-accurate-lawy/|to lie] and say the meeting with Veselnitskaya was about adoptions. 

Georgia actually has a better law than the feds. Under the Georgia statute, you [https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-16/chapter-10/article-2/16-10-20|don’t have to be under oath] to commit a crime by falsifying state records or misrepresenting any issue under state jurisdiction. Well, not to worry, the AG is ignoring that. The AG said in 2012 if GPC’s then-CBO Ron Carruth was lying about GPC finances to the school’s president and the rest of the administration, that was their problem. In other words, the AG took the option to [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q7q07YHq5F-JcpFVkUMxMXeIFewgllnJ/view?usp=sharing|not recognize the statute] making those lies a crime, OCGA 16-10-20.

In Georgia, the powers that be are breaking down the rule of law to save the hides of state government officials like Sheletha Champion and Steve Wrigley, who concealed and misrepresented the financial condition of GPC. Granted, so far, they have gotten a better deal than General Flynn, and certainly better than Michael Cohen.

But look at Jeff Sessions. He got away with misrepresenting his meetings with Russian ambassador Kislyak. Who in Georgia is going to be able to top that?"
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  string(13033) " ##OCT June Capitol  2019-06-05T18:43:02+00:00 ##OCT June capitol.jpg     The news you are tired of hearing from Washington is not even reported in Georgia 18512  2019-06-05T17:40:18+00:00 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: What goes around comes from down south tony.paris@creativeloafing.com Tony Paris Stephen Humphreys   2019-06-05T17:40:18+00:00  !!!!....Now the new big story is that Trump made a lot of money and buys everything for cash, he doesn’t need banks. But where did he get all of that cash? Could it be Russia? No, I built a great business and don’t need banks, but if I did they would be there ...and DeutscheBank....
!!!!— @realDonaldTrump
!!!!8:20 a.m., 20 May 2019


Do you find yourself overwhelmed and upset by the everyday onslaught of troubling news from the nation’s capital — from Jared and Ivanka’s suspicious security clearances to Deutsche Bank compliance officers being fired for reporting financial transactions between the Trump Foundation and Russia? 

Are you tired of the rush of outrageous controversies — about whether the President of the United States can be held accountable under the law — coming out of Washington every day? Maybe you are not aware that the idea of an executive who is above the law has been under development right here in Georgia for at least a decade. Or that much of the fatiguing news that is coming straight from the states — like bills criminalizing abortion in Alabama and Georgia — is explicitly directed at a Washington audience? 

There are more compelling comparisons, and heretofore unseen connections, between the political struggles going on at the state and federal levels than you imagined before. Just take the headline developments of one day in your life, like May 20, 2019:

Subpoenas are only for some people.

Subpoenas were in the news May 20, with Donald Trump fighting calls for his tax returns and Deutsche Bank records, accompanied by news that Deutsche Bank compliance officers were fired after arguing suspicious transactions, including transfers from Jared Kushner to Russians, should be reported to FINCEN (the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) as possible money laundering. Trump was also fighting a congressional subpoena to the Mazars accounting firm that did Trump’s tax returns, but a federal judge ruled on May 20 that Trump's legal position was ridiculous.

A federal judge also ruled that there was no legal basis for the White House to block the testimony of former White House counsel Don McGahn. Nonetheless, McGahn, was defying another congressional subpoena at the White House’s direction. By the time you read this column, there will doubtless be more examples of the Trump administration defying any oversight. 

But defying subpoenas, and also open records requests, is old hat to the state of Georgia. In 2018, when I wanted to question University System of Georgia (USG) officials under oath about their emails discussing millions of taxpayer dollars and federal funds “gone with no explanation” from Georgia Perimeter College (GPC), the Georgia senior assistant attorney general, Mac Sitton, tried to get subpoenaed witnesses informally excused by emailing the court. As if a subpoena did not constitute compulsory process, but rather some sort of social media ephemera, like SnapChat.

In the end, all that online bullying by the AG was unnecessary, because DeKalb County Superior Court Judge Daniel Coursey quashed the subpoenas for no reason — at least no reason recognized by the law. “I would rather not hear the evidence” does not count. And that is basically what this administration is saying in Washington: Subpoenas are optional for the people we are defending.

You do not have to have any reason at all. You can even make up a false reason. Then Georgia attorney general Chris Carr misrepresented to Judge Coursey that USG witnesses were not familiar with their own emails in which they discussed financial fraud at GPC.

You don’t even have to appear

Normally, privileges or other objections to providing evidence must be examined question by question. So, for example, McGahn would have to appear and make any specific objection he had to answering a particular question. Instead, he simply did not show up. 

But Fulton County Judge Susan Edlein beat McGahn to the punch in 2015 when she refused to answer any questions in mandamus proceedings about her ties to a defendant in the case over which she was presiding, former Attorney General Sam Olens. A succession of judges made the case go away by stating they could not discern what claim could possibly be raised when Edlein lied to the court in which the mandamus action was filed about protecting Olens by, for example, illegally barring amendments to the complaint against him.

Compliance with mandatory statutes is also voluntary

That brings us to another D.C./Georgia similarity, because Georgia law is clear that a complaint can be amended all the way up until the time of trial, and there is nothing a judge can do to stop it. Judge Edlein tried it anyway — twice, in fact.

And Steve Mnuchin and William Barr have used the same vein of statutory interpretation to say they do not have to follow the law requiring them to produce Trump’s tax returns. Just disregard what the statute says, and that’s the end of it. 

Georgia is way out ahead on that front, already on the record for ignoring, as an example, the statute that requires at least 30 days’ notice and a hearing before a judge can decide to toss out your case without allowing you to have a trial and present your evidence to a jury. That is exactly the law the Georgia courts ignored in 2016 to dismiss Anthony Tricoli’s case against state officials who falsified, concealed, and misrepresented state agency financial records to hide a $16 million shortage of funds at GPC.

The main reason for all this executive freedom is blanket immunity

Since executive privilege no longer applied after McGahn gave 30 hours of testimony to the Special Counsel, the White House went for a bolder stroke: Executive officials are immune. That is really an end-of-story proposition. It means “No response necessary,” no documents or appearances, nothing.

Immunity means that McGahn could not be called to testify before Congress even if there was evidence of a crime. Even if there was a conflict between McGahn’s testimony under oath and Trump’s tweets — which, in fact, there is.

Once again, Georgia is way ahead of the game. Georgia has been arguing since 2013 that Georgia state officials enjoy sovereign immunity to commit crimes with impunity. That includes perjury, bribery, evidence tampering, wire fraud, and extortion. It includes falsifying state agency financial records to conceal the theft of taxpayer money. It even includes fraud against the federal government!

Georgia has taken that position ever since I first filed civil RICO actions against state officials for committing felonies in office — lawsuits expressly authorized by the Georgia RICO Act. But we have already established that the Georgia government does not have to follow any statutes enacted by the Georgia legislature.

Look at all the other great things sovereign immunity can do in Georgia:

*Immunity prevents state agencies from being enjoined to follow the laws they are supposed to enforce (see, again, statutes optional).
*The RICO statute says you can enjoin a state agency, but the Georgia Court of Appeals said in Tricoli v. Watts that the statute does not mean what it said in OCGA 16-14-6(a & b).
*Most of all, immunity means never having to be subpoenaed. It also means that state officials cannot be put on trial, for example, for falsifying agency records to hide financial fraud involving millions of taxpayer dollars.
*Lastly, the courts have gone so far as to say that Georgia state officials, including judges, are also immune to the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. That is why Georgia does not have to fool with its own silly statutes when it finds them inconvenient.
+ 
The Constitution does not apply at all

Another neat trick Georgia accomplished, aside from dispensing with due process of law, is to say that illegal statutes cannot be reviewed for compliance with the Constitution — unless it is the Confederate Constitution of 1861. 

Is the constitutionality of Georgia’s new six-week law criminalizing abortion debatable? Not to worry. Georgia has already covered that, because sovereign immunity, since 2017, prevents you from challenging a state statute as unconstitutional. The Georgia Supreme Court decided that the first time Georgia passed a law to put doctors in prison for therapeutic abortions. Just to do Alabama one better, since Alabama lawmakers gave a pass for rape and incest, Georgia relies on Confederate Law to make laws criminalizing abortion inviolable. Georgia relied on the aforementioned Confederate Constitution as the deciding factor in opining that such statutes cannot be challenged as unconstitutional. And do not doubt there was a national connection when the Georgia Supreme Court justices were auditioning to replace Scalia.

Government retaliation against political enemies is fine

All this is to say, it is quite a pain to government officials when government corruption is exposed. Trump wants to investigate those pesky investigators who found out he lied about the Trump Tower meeting and the negotiations during the election campaign — in which Putin was interfering — with Putin’s government to build Trump Tower Moscow. According to Trump, Mueller and his henchmen committed treason and deserve long jail sentences.

And Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr also argued that the First Amendment does not apply in Georgia — when it comes to retaliating against anyone who wants to point out any corruption in state government.

You get to review your own conduct!

One of the neat things about immunity is the absence of any independent oversight.

You read in the news on May 20 that the people at Deutsche Bank — who fired the compliance officers who wanted to report payments to Russians to FINCEN — reviewed their own decisions about the potential money laundering.

Not to be outdone, the USG got to review itself when GPC turned up $16 million short, and $10 million was never found, even after the USG’s chief audit officer performed a self-review, not a full audit, of himself. And that was fine with Attorney General Sam Olens who saw no reason to investigate further since he did not see any criminality.

You don’t have to follow your own rules.

Just as Deutsche bank ignored its own financial compliance rules, USG did not follow any of its rules when it blamed Tricoli for the missing $16 million and reviewed itself. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) did not follow its own requirements or procedures, either, when it accepted the USG’s self-review in place of the independent audit required for SACS compliance.

So what if the result is fraud against the federal government, which makes accreditation a condition of receiving financial assistance from the US government, right down the student loan money pouring into USG coffers. Seventy percent of GPC students received federal financial aid at the time the $16 million deficit was discovered.

Lying to the people is OK if you serve in the government

Trump called McGahn a liar about Trump’s efforts to fire Mueller and obstruct the Russia investigation. Then Trump told McGahn not to appear before the Judiciary Committee to sort out who was lying. Trump lied about Trump Tower Moscow, and told Don Jr. to lie and say the meeting with Veselnitskaya was about adoptions. 

Georgia actually has a better law than the feds. Under the Georgia statute, you don’t have to be under oath to commit a crime by falsifying state records or misrepresenting any issue under state jurisdiction. Well, not to worry, the AG is ignoring that. The AG said in 2012 if GPC’s then-CBO Ron Carruth was lying about GPC finances to the school’s president and the rest of the administration, that was their problem. In other words, the AG took the option to not recognize the statute making those lies a crime, OCGA 16-10-20.

In Georgia, the powers that be are breaking down the rule of law to save the hides of state government officials like Sheletha Champion and Steve Wrigley, who concealed and misrepresented the financial condition of GPC. Granted, so far, they have gotten a better deal than General Flynn, and certainly better than Michael Cohen.

But look at Jeff Sessions. He got away with misrepresenting his meetings with Russian ambassador Kislyak. Who in Georgia is going to be able to top that?    Pixabay   0,0,2                                 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: What goes around comes from down south "
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  string(58) "OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: GEORGIA'S FIFTY YEAR CYCLE"
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  string(90) "According to your state government: the US Constitution does not apply to Georgia—again!"
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  string(90) "According to your state government: the US Constitution does not apply to Georgia—again!"
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  string(10326) "!!!Whatever springes the State may set for those who are endeavoring to assert rights that the State confers, the assertion of Federal rights…is not to be defeated under the name of local practice.
!!!— Chief Justice Earl Warren in Wright v. Georgia, 1963
What would you say if state government officials falsified the financial reports of a state college to conceal the transfer of $10 million for unknown purposes, and then colluded in secret to gang up on you to publicly accuse you of being responsible for the $10 million shortfall on the ledger sheet? Take a minute to imagine yourself in that place.

And add to that scenario you were fired from your job in the University System of Georgia (USG) and you appealed your case to the Board of Regents, but they ignored you and denied you a hearing?

Imagine the Attorney General did not conduct an investigation into the $10 million discrepancy but let the USG officials who concealed the misappropriation of funds issue a report clearing themselves—and leaving you holding the bag. Are you starting to feel like you’re living in an Alfred Hitchcock movie?

So you turn to the courts and they say: Don’t look at us. State officials have sovereign immunity protection to falsify state financial reports to conceal wherever the $10 million went and blame you for it.

You argue that state officials could not possibly be immune for criminal acts of falsifying state agency financial reports to hide the theft of taxpayer money—and holding you responsible—and that is not what the law on the books says, at all.

But the courts rule against you. In their orders, they do not mention the laws and case precedents that support your legal position that the state officials can be held accountable. The courts say it does not matter even if the state officials stole the money — because they have sovereign immunity. You cannot sue them and the Attorney General is not going to prosecute them. In fact, Sam Olens and now Chris Carr are defending the state officials who falsified the financial reports, and defending themselves for blocking any investigation of what is happening to you.

Franz Kafka could not have dreamed up a worse scenario in The Trial. Dreyfus could not have received more unfair treatment when he was scapegoated for the failure of the French government. But this is exactly what the USG, Attorney General, and Georgia courts did to Anthony Tricoli.

Tricoli is not alone. The same has happened to Dezso Benedek and others in the last ten years. Notably, there are people alive in Georgia today who can remember similar treatment by a failed justice system in Georgia in a time we thought had long gone by.

Fifty years before Tricoli was denied due process in 2012, African Americans seeking redress in the courts got the same run-around, in which both Georgia law and the US Constitution were equally elusive. The US Supreme Court had to intervene.

In Wright v. Georgia, black kids playing basketball in a public park were ordered to leave by police officers. Georgia courts upheld the police, even though they could identify no law that prevented blacks from playing basketball. Georgia defended its actions all the way to the US Supreme Court, which said no, Georgia courts could not make up their own law to protect the established order and create an extra-legal hierarchy.

Birmingham police ordered Fred Shuttlesworth off the sidewalk in front of Newberry’s Department store. When Shuttleworth responded by actually entering the store, police arrested him under an ordinance prohibiting anyone from blocking a public sidewalk. Alabama courts all ruled against Shuttleworth, even though it was undisputed that Shuttlesworth could not block the sidewalk—that he was not on at the time he was arrested--by himself. Birmingham and Alabama authorities defended their position all the way to the US Supreme Court by saying there was another law giving police officers authority to direct traffic.

The US Supreme Court said in 1962 that Birmingham could not swap a law that applied to traffic in the streets to Shuttlesworth standing on a sidewalk he was not blocking. The high court said this bait and switch of legal pretexts denied fundamental constitutional due process of law.

In 1958, the US Supreme Court said that Alabama could not deny the NAACP access to the courts--based on a procedural requirement that had never been applied to white litigants—and thus could not foreclose the constitutional right of freedom of association.

Now we are back full circle again, with the Attorney General of Georgia arguing that these evasions of the law that deny due process are quite all right again in 2019. So far, as in the 1960s, the courts of Georgia have agreed.

And, as in the 1960s, that has required ignoring the written law, making up non-existent law, and substituting law that does not apply for the law that does.

The Georgia Constitution says sovereign immunity can be waived by a legislative act expressly authorizing a civil action against the state.

The Georgia RICO Act defines a criminal RICO enterprise to include “governmental entities.”

When Georgia Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell argued that he and fellow state government employees could not be held liable in a civil RICO action for stealing campaign funds, the Georgia Supreme Court said the definition of a RICO enterprise to include the government meant that the civil RICO action against Caldwell, as a state government official, was expressly authorized by statute.

Moreover, using the definition of RICO enterprise that includes the government, the statute also says that government employees can violate the act and be held liable for damages by the people they harm.

The statute says that this protects the state itself from harm, and that state agencies can be enjoined from unlawful conduct under the RICO Act.

In other words, the state does not have sovereign immunity protection from a civil RICO action, under the law as it is written.

That is consistent with another provision of the Georgia Constitution that says the sovereign immunity of state employees may be waived under the law where they act with actual malice and actual intent to cause harm.

That corresponds to the criminal intent required under the RICO statute.

Georgia courts have ignored the language of the RICO statute and the controlling Georgia Supreme Court authority to give sovereign immunity protection to state officials who, according to the doctored state records, committed felonies. Ignoring the law written in the books, for example, Judge Gary Andrews opined that it was an “imaginative theory” that “the state itself” could be held accountable—but that was all it was, “pure imagination.” That is just as ethereal as any legal theory Georgia relied on in the 1960s to protect the status quo.

The courts have also pulled the Shuttlesworth Switch, applying mere negligence standards under the Georgia Tort Claims Act to say, for example, that state officials who knowingly falsify state financial reports to hide the theft of taxpayer money are immune for performing “financial oversight” activities.

Only one judge in the entire state of Georgia, Court of Appeals Judge Yvette Miller, has taken the position that state officials are not immune for criminal RICO predicate acts and that Tricoli could not be denied a hearing he was entitled to under due process of law.

Fifty years ago, the US Supreme Court had to tell the Attorney General and courts of Georgia that they actually had to follow the law. The decisions in which they did not were overturned for denial of constitutional due process.

Now the Attorney General of Georgia, Chris Carr, has done the segregationists one better. He says the First Amendment does not apply to Georgia.

Because I have persisted in arguing that Georgia state officials do not have sovereign immunity protection for committing crimes against the public, the Attorney General moved for sanctions against me—seeking an order requiring me to pay the state’s legal fees.

Why? Because I followed the legal process and filed a motion to set aside the orders in which the law was ignored and due process denied. I will tell the full story of how that happened in the next installment.  Suffice it to say, for now, that retaliating against an attorney who comes to court supported by recognized legal authority violates the Right to Petition in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

So what is the conclusion to this horror movie?

Sovereign immunity means no accountability in civil court. That leaves criminal prosecution as the only remedy. But what if it is the Attorney General who blocked the investigation in the first place, and joined the USG in denying you a hearing?

What about the Kalberman whistleblower case where the Attorney General was fined for hiding evidence?

What about the Tricoli case where Sam Olens overlooked evidence of crimes and actually obstructed a criminal investigation into the USG (and then the USG appointed Olens to a $500,000 a year job for which he was not qualified)?

What about the Benedek case where the Attorney General was caught—again—concealing evidence, improperly influencing witnesses, and suborning perjury?

If the Attorney General is defending the criminals, and even committing the crimes, that means state officials can commit criminal acts with impunity if they also have sovereign immunity protection from a civil suit by Tricoli or Benedek.

To complete the thought experiment, now you have some small idea how Wright and Shuttlesworth must have felt when they were denied justice under the laws as written, and the US Constitution, in the Georgia of the 1960s.

Back then, Georgia’s legal establishment attempted to nullify the Constitution to maintain an evil system of segregation and discrimination. Today, Georgia’s mandarins seek to undermine the rule of law to protect state government officials who have committed felonies and create a safe space for criminal conspiracies against the public interest.

Can they evade Georgia law and the US Constitution to do that? Fifty years later, we are about to find out again."
  ["tracker_field_contentWikiPage_raw"]=>
  string(11864) "!!!''Whatever springes the State may set for those who are endeavoring to assert rights that the State confers, the assertion of Federal rights…is not to be defeated under the name of local practice.''
!!!''— ''Chief Justice Earl Warren in ''Wright v. Georgia'', 1963
What would you say if state government officials falsified the financial reports of a state college to conceal the transfer of $10 million for unknown purposes, and then colluded in secret to gang up on you to publicly accuse you of being responsible for the $10 million shortfall on the ledger sheet? Take a minute to imagine yourself in that place.

And add to that scenario you were fired from your job in the University System of Georgia (USG) and you appealed your case to the Board of Regents, but they ignored you and denied you a hearing?

Imagine the Attorney General did not conduct an investigation into the $10 million discrepancy but let the USG officials who concealed the misappropriation of funds issue a report clearing themselves—and leaving you holding the bag. Are you starting to feel like you’re living in an Alfred Hitchcock movie?

So you turn to the courts and they say: Don’t look at us. State officials have sovereign immunity protection to falsify state financial reports to conceal wherever the $10 million went and blame you for it.

You argue that state officials could not possibly be immune for criminal acts of falsifying state agency financial reports to hide the theft of taxpayer money—and holding you responsible—and that is not what the law on the books says, at all.

But the courts rule against you. In their orders, they do not mention the laws and case precedents that support your legal position that the state officials can be held accountable. The courts say it does not matter even if the state officials stole the money ''— ''because they have sovereign immunity. You cannot sue them and the Attorney General is not going to prosecute them. In fact, Sam Olens and now Chris Carr are defending the state officials who falsified the financial reports, and defending themselves for blocking any investigation of what is happening to you.

Franz Kafka could not have dreamed up a worse scenario in ''[https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Trial-novel-by-Kafka|The Trial]''. Dreyfus could not have received more unfair treatment when he was [https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-dreyfus-affair|scapegoated] for the failure of the French government. But this is exactly what the USG, Attorney General, and Georgia courts did to [https://creativeloafing.com/content-425364-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES-The-adventure-of-the-disappearing-budget-surplus|Anthony Tricoli].

Tricoli is not alone. The [https://creativeloafing.com/content-421389-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES---When-First-We-Practice-to-Deceive|same has happened] to Dezso Benedek and others in the last ten years. Notably, there are people alive in Georgia today who can remember similar treatment by a failed justice system in Georgia in a time we thought had long gone by.

Fifty years before Tricoli was denied due process in 2012, African Americans seeking redress in the courts got the same run-around, in which both Georgia law and the US Constitution were equally elusive. The US Supreme Court had to intervene.

In ''[https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/373/284/|Wright v. Georgia]'', black kids playing basketball in a public park were ordered to leave by police officers. Georgia courts upheld the police, even though they could identify no law that prevented blacks from playing basketball. Georgia defended its actions all the way to the US Supreme Court, which said no, [https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/373/284/|Georgia courts could not make up their own] law to protect the established order and create an extra-legal hierarchy.

Birmingham police ordered Fred Shuttlesworth off the sidewalk in front of Newberry’s Department store. When Shuttleworth responded by actually entering the store, police arrested him under an ordinance prohibiting anyone from blocking a public sidewalk. Alabama courts all ruled against Shuttleworth, even though it was undisputed that Shuttlesworth could not block the sidewalk—that he was not on at the time he was arrested--by himself. Birmingham and Alabama authorities defended their position all the way to the US Supreme Court by saying there was another law giving police officers authority to direct traffic.

The US Supreme Court said in 1962 that Birmingham could not swap a law that applied to traffic in the streets to Shuttlesworth standing on a sidewalk he was not blocking. The high court said this [https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/382/87/#tab-opinion-1945891|bait and switch of legal pretexts denied fundamental constitutional due process of law.]

In 1958, the US Supreme Court said that Alabama [http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1494|could not deny the NAACP access to the courts]--based on a procedural requirement that had never been applied to white litigants—and thus could not foreclose the constitutional right of freedom of association.

Now we are back full circle again, with the Attorney General of Georgia arguing that these evasions of the law that deny due process are quite all right again in 2019. So far, as in the 1960s, the courts of Georgia have agreed.

And, as in the 1960s, that has required ignoring the written law, making up non-existent law, and substituting law that does not apply for the law that does.

The Georgia Constitution [https://drive.google.com/file/d/13I3cUBmNvmACxhXp3LGGGq0kmw7OGq_5/view|says] sovereign immunity can be waived by a legislative act expressly authorizing a civil action against the state.

The Georgia RICO Act [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zQnyo2R-xortZympMjnyrPsHfnSZuYJa/view|defines ]a criminal RICO enterprise to include “governmental entities.”

When Georgia Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell argued that he and fellow state government employees could not be held liable in a civil RICO action for stealing campaign funds, the Georgia Supreme Court [https://drive.google.com/file/d/16ebC7vM3BLN2ZPAtceH9l3fPFmf0m2hv/view|said] the definition of a RICO enterprise to include the government meant that the civil RICO action against Caldwell, as a state government official, was expressly authorized by statute.

Moreover, using the definition of RICO enterprise that includes the government, the statute also [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mKdc3SdzW2aPw4LcxBDDMO9rCBh2NW1t/view|says] that government employees can violate the act and be [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PnLMzTn3Vh74XoJco8Fx9FtcJj6XHprk/view?usp=sharing|held liable] for damages by the people they harm.

The statute says that this protects the state itself from harm, and that state agencies can be enjoined from unlawful conduct under the RICO Act.

In other words, the state does not have sovereign immunity protection from a civil RICO action, under the law as it is written.

That is consistent with another provision of the Georgia Constitution that [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dcLJ0QP_KDwPOmB7kjfq8wbDKJIBJmVN/view?usp=sharing|says] the sovereign immunity of state employees may be waived under the law where they act with actual malice and actual intent to cause harm.

That corresponds to the criminal intent required under the RICO statute.

Georgia courts have ignored the language of the RICO statute and the controlling Georgia Supreme Court authority to give sovereign immunity protection to state officials who, according to the doctored state records, committed felonies. Ignoring the law written in the books, for example, Judge Gary Andrews opined that it was an “imaginative theory” that “the state itself” could be held accountable—but that was all it was, “pure imagination.” That is just as ethereal as any legal theory Georgia relied on in the 1960s to protect the status quo.

The courts have also pulled the Shuttlesworth Switch, applying mere negligence standards under the Georgia Tort Claims Act to say, for example, that state officials who knowingly falsify state financial reports to hide the theft of taxpayer money are immune for performing “financial oversight” activities.

Only one judge in the entire state of Georgia, Court of Appeals Judge Yvette Miller, has taken the position that state officials are not immune for criminal RICO predicate acts and that Tricoli could not be denied a hearing he was entitled to under due process of law.

Fifty years ago, the US Supreme Court had to tell the Attorney General and courts of Georgia that they actually had to follow the law. The decisions in which they did not were overturned for denial of constitutional due process.

Now the Attorney General of Georgia, Chris Carr, has done the segregationists one better. He says [https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/187/shuttlesworth-v-birmingham|the First Amendment does not apply to Georgia].

Because I have persisted in arguing that Georgia state officials do not have sovereign immunity protection for committing crimes against the public, the Attorney General moved for sanctions against me—seeking an order requiring me to pay the state’s legal fees.

Why? Because I followed the [https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-9/chapter-11/article-7/9-11-60|legal process] and filed a motion to set aside the orders in which the law was ignored and due process denied. I will tell the full story of how that happened in the next installment.  Suffice it to say, for now, that retaliating against an attorney who comes to court supported by recognized legal authority [https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-21_p8k0.pdf|violates the Right to Petition] in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

So what is the conclusion to this horror movie?

Sovereign immunity means no accountability in civil court. That leaves criminal prosecution as the only remedy. But what if it is the Attorney General who blocked the investigation in the first place, and joined the USG in denying you a hearing?

What about the Kalberman [https://www.ajc.com/news/stateregional-govtpolitics/judge-sanctions-georgia-ethics-chief-office/bofPfKrw8UfHzbonnCuZbN/|whistleblower case] where the Attorney General was fined for hiding evidence?

What about the Tricoli case where Sam Olens overlooked evidence of crimes and actually obstructed a criminal investigation into the USG (and then the USG appointed Olens to a $500,000 a year job [https://www.11alive.com/article/article/news/local/despite-protests-ag-sam-olens-named-ksu-president/85-334829312|for which he was not qualified])?

What about the Benedek case where the Attorney General was caught—again—concealing evidence, improperly influencing witnesses, and suborning perjury?

If the Attorney General is defending the criminals, and even committing the crimes, that means state officials can commit criminal acts with impunity if they also have sovereign immunity protection from a civil suit by Tricoli or Benedek.

To complete the thought experiment, now you have some small idea how Wright and Shuttlesworth must have felt when they were denied justice under the laws as written, and the US Constitution, in the Georgia of the 1960s.

Back then, Georgia’s legal establishment attempted to nullify the Constitution to maintain an evil system of segregation and discrimination. Today, Georgia’s mandarins seek to undermine the rule of law to protect state government officials who have committed felonies and create a safe space for criminal conspiracies against the public interest.

Can they evade Georgia law and the US Constitution to do that? Fifty years later, we are about to find out again."
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  string(11190) " OTC  2019-05-04T14:42:45+00:00 OTC.jpg   Keep up the good research, there is need to know the history of such means of implementing the Federal or State Law.
The next step is to compare history with present day application of the law.  One will simply discover that old attitudes
have not changed but taken on a new enigmatic form that is just lethal and dangerous!   In response, I ask the question.
When Giants Keep On Coming, what do you do?  According to your state government: the US Constitution does not apply to Georgia—again! 17163  2019-05-04T13:51:24+00:00 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: GEORGIA'S FIFTY YEAR CYCLE tony.paris@creativeloafing.com Tony Paris Stephen Humphreys Stephen Humphreys 2019-05-04T13:51:24+00:00  !!!Whatever springes the State may set for those who are endeavoring to assert rights that the State confers, the assertion of Federal rights…is not to be defeated under the name of local practice.
!!!— Chief Justice Earl Warren in Wright v. Georgia, 1963
What would you say if state government officials falsified the financial reports of a state college to conceal the transfer of $10 million for unknown purposes, and then colluded in secret to gang up on you to publicly accuse you of being responsible for the $10 million shortfall on the ledger sheet? Take a minute to imagine yourself in that place.

And add to that scenario you were fired from your job in the University System of Georgia (USG) and you appealed your case to the Board of Regents, but they ignored you and denied you a hearing?

Imagine the Attorney General did not conduct an investigation into the $10 million discrepancy but let the USG officials who concealed the misappropriation of funds issue a report clearing themselves—and leaving you holding the bag. Are you starting to feel like you’re living in an Alfred Hitchcock movie?

So you turn to the courts and they say: Don’t look at us. State officials have sovereign immunity protection to falsify state financial reports to conceal wherever the $10 million went and blame you for it.

You argue that state officials could not possibly be immune for criminal acts of falsifying state agency financial reports to hide the theft of taxpayer money—and holding you responsible—and that is not what the law on the books says, at all.

But the courts rule against you. In their orders, they do not mention the laws and case precedents that support your legal position that the state officials can be held accountable. The courts say it does not matter even if the state officials stole the money — because they have sovereign immunity. You cannot sue them and the Attorney General is not going to prosecute them. In fact, Sam Olens and now Chris Carr are defending the state officials who falsified the financial reports, and defending themselves for blocking any investigation of what is happening to you.

Franz Kafka could not have dreamed up a worse scenario in The Trial. Dreyfus could not have received more unfair treatment when he was scapegoated for the failure of the French government. But this is exactly what the USG, Attorney General, and Georgia courts did to Anthony Tricoli.

Tricoli is not alone. The same has happened to Dezso Benedek and others in the last ten years. Notably, there are people alive in Georgia today who can remember similar treatment by a failed justice system in Georgia in a time we thought had long gone by.

Fifty years before Tricoli was denied due process in 2012, African Americans seeking redress in the courts got the same run-around, in which both Georgia law and the US Constitution were equally elusive. The US Supreme Court had to intervene.

In Wright v. Georgia, black kids playing basketball in a public park were ordered to leave by police officers. Georgia courts upheld the police, even though they could identify no law that prevented blacks from playing basketball. Georgia defended its actions all the way to the US Supreme Court, which said no, Georgia courts could not make up their own law to protect the established order and create an extra-legal hierarchy.

Birmingham police ordered Fred Shuttlesworth off the sidewalk in front of Newberry’s Department store. When Shuttleworth responded by actually entering the store, police arrested him under an ordinance prohibiting anyone from blocking a public sidewalk. Alabama courts all ruled against Shuttleworth, even though it was undisputed that Shuttlesworth could not block the sidewalk—that he was not on at the time he was arrested--by himself. Birmingham and Alabama authorities defended their position all the way to the US Supreme Court by saying there was another law giving police officers authority to direct traffic.

The US Supreme Court said in 1962 that Birmingham could not swap a law that applied to traffic in the streets to Shuttlesworth standing on a sidewalk he was not blocking. The high court said this bait and switch of legal pretexts denied fundamental constitutional due process of law.

In 1958, the US Supreme Court said that Alabama could not deny the NAACP access to the courts--based on a procedural requirement that had never been applied to white litigants—and thus could not foreclose the constitutional right of freedom of association.

Now we are back full circle again, with the Attorney General of Georgia arguing that these evasions of the law that deny due process are quite all right again in 2019. So far, as in the 1960s, the courts of Georgia have agreed.

And, as in the 1960s, that has required ignoring the written law, making up non-existent law, and substituting law that does not apply for the law that does.

The Georgia Constitution says sovereign immunity can be waived by a legislative act expressly authorizing a civil action against the state.

The Georgia RICO Act defines a criminal RICO enterprise to include “governmental entities.”

When Georgia Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell argued that he and fellow state government employees could not be held liable in a civil RICO action for stealing campaign funds, the Georgia Supreme Court said the definition of a RICO enterprise to include the government meant that the civil RICO action against Caldwell, as a state government official, was expressly authorized by statute.

Moreover, using the definition of RICO enterprise that includes the government, the statute also says that government employees can violate the act and be held liable for damages by the people they harm.

The statute says that this protects the state itself from harm, and that state agencies can be enjoined from unlawful conduct under the RICO Act.

In other words, the state does not have sovereign immunity protection from a civil RICO action, under the law as it is written.

That is consistent with another provision of the Georgia Constitution that says the sovereign immunity of state employees may be waived under the law where they act with actual malice and actual intent to cause harm.

That corresponds to the criminal intent required under the RICO statute.

Georgia courts have ignored the language of the RICO statute and the controlling Georgia Supreme Court authority to give sovereign immunity protection to state officials who, according to the doctored state records, committed felonies. Ignoring the law written in the books, for example, Judge Gary Andrews opined that it was an “imaginative theory” that “the state itself” could be held accountable—but that was all it was, “pure imagination.” That is just as ethereal as any legal theory Georgia relied on in the 1960s to protect the status quo.

The courts have also pulled the Shuttlesworth Switch, applying mere negligence standards under the Georgia Tort Claims Act to say, for example, that state officials who knowingly falsify state financial reports to hide the theft of taxpayer money are immune for performing “financial oversight” activities.

Only one judge in the entire state of Georgia, Court of Appeals Judge Yvette Miller, has taken the position that state officials are not immune for criminal RICO predicate acts and that Tricoli could not be denied a hearing he was entitled to under due process of law.

Fifty years ago, the US Supreme Court had to tell the Attorney General and courts of Georgia that they actually had to follow the law. The decisions in which they did not were overturned for denial of constitutional due process.

Now the Attorney General of Georgia, Chris Carr, has done the segregationists one better. He says the First Amendment does not apply to Georgia.

Because I have persisted in arguing that Georgia state officials do not have sovereign immunity protection for committing crimes against the public, the Attorney General moved for sanctions against me—seeking an order requiring me to pay the state’s legal fees.

Why? Because I followed the legal process and filed a motion to set aside the orders in which the law was ignored and due process denied. I will tell the full story of how that happened in the next installment.  Suffice it to say, for now, that retaliating against an attorney who comes to court supported by recognized legal authority violates the Right to Petition in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

So what is the conclusion to this horror movie?

Sovereign immunity means no accountability in civil court. That leaves criminal prosecution as the only remedy. But what if it is the Attorney General who blocked the investigation in the first place, and joined the USG in denying you a hearing?

What about the Kalberman whistleblower case where the Attorney General was fined for hiding evidence?

What about the Tricoli case where Sam Olens overlooked evidence of crimes and actually obstructed a criminal investigation into the USG (and then the USG appointed Olens to a $500,000 a year job for which he was not qualified)?

What about the Benedek case where the Attorney General was caught—again—concealing evidence, improperly influencing witnesses, and suborning perjury?

If the Attorney General is defending the criminals, and even committing the crimes, that means state officials can commit criminal acts with impunity if they also have sovereign immunity protection from a civil suit by Tricoli or Benedek.

To complete the thought experiment, now you have some small idea how Wright and Shuttlesworth must have felt when they were denied justice under the laws as written, and the US Constitution, in the Georgia of the 1960s.

Back then, Georgia’s legal establishment attempted to nullify the Constitution to maintain an evil system of segregation and discrimination. Today, Georgia’s mandarins seek to undermine the rule of law to protect state government officials who have committed felonies and create a safe space for criminal conspiracies against the public interest.

Can they evade Georgia law and the US Constitution to do that? Fifty years later, we are about to find out again.    Detail from Wikipedia   0,0,11                                 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: GEORGIA'S FIFTY YEAR CYCLE "
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  string(9541) "!!!“I am concerned and frankly angry … reserves are down almost $4.5 million and overall Auxiliary reserves are down by $3.2 million … It appears that any funds Auxiliary Services had to make a significant contribution to our institution are gone with no explanation.”
!!!— Keith Chapman
!!!Chief Officer for Auxiliary Reserves, Georgia Perimeter College
 


It did not take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that something was seriously wrong with the financial reporting at Georgia Perimeter College (GPC) in 2012. It is less obvious how it was missed, or buried, by the University System of Georgia (USG) — leaving approximately $10 million unaccounted-for today — and why no one in the USG or Attorney General’s office is looking into where the money went.

The USG is the state government entity that oversees Georgia’s 26 public colleges and universities, including their budgets and finances. It used to include both Georgia Perimeter College and Georgia State University until a merger helped keep a financial scandal — that affected both schools in 2012 — below the radar.

The USG has its own department of finance and team of auditors who administer $10 billion in annual spending and financial reporting — 1000 times the amount unaccounted for at GPC — and are supposed to prevent such scandals, not hide them from the public.

Here is what the USG should have known — from state records that I made public by filing them into court — about the financial scandal at GPC in 2012:

A large reserve fund was built up by former GPC President Anthony Tricoli from 2006 to 2009, $20 million at its height. Those reserves were secretly depleted starting in 2009. During the period from 2009 to 2012, GPC Vice President of Financial Affairs Ron Carruth continued to report sanguine surpluses even as he was withdrawing all the funds from the reserves — for purposes that are still not fully known, seven years later.

In 2011, for example, Carruth reported to the school’s faculty senate that revenues at GPC were running $37 million ahead of spending. At the same time, internal documents never shared outside Carruth’s office show that Carruth was asking budget director Mark Gerspacher to take $1,500,000 out of the school’s reserves to pay the bills, which would not be necessary if revenues exceeded spending.

Carruth continued to make these knowingly false reports of a rosy financial picture to the GPC administration straight through the end of April 2012, when the USG announced, out of the blue, a $16 to $25 million deficit at GPC.

In January of 2012, three months before that dire deficit announcement, Keith Chapman, the manager in charge of GPC’s reserve fund, shot off a sizzling email asking why approximately $8 million was “gone with no explanation” from the auxiliary reserves.

An even more important question is why this information was never shared with the faculty senate, the executive committee, or the president’s cabinet, consisting of the top school officials. Why was it never reported to GPC President Anthony Tricoli, as required by GPC Policy 302?

The knowing falsification of the state agency financial reports, including misrepresentations by omission, is a felony under OCGA 16-10-20.

We do know that there was a trail of more emails, orchestrated by Carruth's Assistant VP of Finance, Sheletha Champion, among members of Carruth’s staff after Chapman’s January warning bell.

In March of 2012, even as Carruth continued to report healthy budget surpluses, Champion wrote an email to USG financial oversight officials documenting a $12.8 million negative balance at GPC. After firing Tricoli in May of 2012, the USG claimed it had no prior knowledge of the GPC arrears, contrary to Champion’s email.

The USG, led by then-Chancellor Hank Huckaby, held a budget hearing with GPC the same month, March of 2012, attended by both Carruth and Champion. No one mentioned $8 million gone with no explanation since January, or a $12.8 million deficit, or a $16 million deficit, or a deficit in any amount at GPC.

Two months after the budget hearing, Carruth went to Tricoli’s office that morning and admitted there was actually a small problem, maybe a million-dollar shortfall, which was exceedingly strange since it directly contradicted Carruth’s prior reports of copious surpluses.

Tricoli called Huckaby the same day, and asked for audit assistance from the USG. Huckaby sent some of the same USG finance personnel who had already received the $12.8 million deficit report from Champion the month before. The next day, these USG finance officials announced they had discovered an $8 to $16 million deficit at GPC.

The USG finance officers claimed they discovered this deficit by poring over GPC’s books overnight. Yet the figures they supposedly calculated the night of April 25 corresponded exactly to the $12.8 million deficit report Champion sent the USG over a month before.

The very next day, April 26, Wrigley falsely informed the Board of Regents that the USG had just learned of this unfortunate development (the same one the USG learned about in March and withheld from the GPC administration). Huckaby went Wrigley one better and demanded Tricoli’s immediate resignation.

Then-Attorney General Sam Olens never investigated these discrepancies, but instead ended up defending Carruth, Champion, Wrigley, and the other USG officials who concealed their knowledge of the deficit in violation of OCGA 16-10-20. Olens argued that Tricoli, instead of accepting reports from his VP of finance and USG financial officials, could have gone and looked at the accounting worksheets himself to determine that they were lying to him.

Olens also nixed a criminal investigation, called off an outside audit, allowed the USG to review itself, and took no further action — even when USG, in its final report, still could not account for $10 million by September 2012.

After shutting the lid on what happened to the money, Olens received the Charles Weltner Award for open government from the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.

The USG appointed Olens to a $500,000-a-year job as president of Kennesaw State University, which had its own financial scandals, including a fraudulent USG audit used to oust the former president, Dan Papp, to make way for Olens to be appointed.

When Tricoli refused to resign back in 2012, alleging criminal fraud, Huckaby had one more trick up his sleeve. He offered Tricoli an alternate position in the USG central office if Tricoli would leave GPC quietly. Before Tricoli could respond, Huckaby announced to the Atlanta Journal Constitution that Tricoli had already been transferred to the USG central office.

The day after announcing Tricoli’s new position, Huckaby submitted to the Board of Regents — without Tricoli’s knowledge — an interim president for GPC, Rob Watts, one of the USG officials who had been in regular contact (which the USG denies) with Carruth and Champion.

A day after Watts was appointed, Huckaby presented Tricoli (who still did not know he had been replaced as GPC president) with a termination letter — on the pretext that the Board of Regents did not reappoint Tricoli, when in fact Huckaby never submitted Tricoli's name to the Board of Regents for reappointment, submitting Watts' name instead. The alternate USG position Huckaby announced in the media vanished into thin air. On the very same day Tricoli was fired from two jobs at once, the USG announced a plan to conduct its own review of the financial crisis at GPC (the same review that never accounted for $10 million).

Before this after-the-fact investigation started, more negative AJC stories followed hard upon this reassignment ruse, based on information from the USG telling the AJC that Tricoli “dipped into the reserves.” Internal documents show USG officials discussing misleading the AJC. Tricoli, who had just won a national award as the best college president in America, was never able to get another job in higher education.

Huckaby, after pulling this bait-and-switch scheme supported by a phony USG report — the same MO used to ruin Papp — retired and was named Georgian of the Year by Georgia Trend magazine.

Tricoli got no help from the courts, either. Judge Coursey said Tricoli lost all his contract rights when he was tricked into resigning. Coursey added that Tricoli’s claims under the RICO Act for knowing falsification of state agency finances, a felony under OCGA 16-10-20, were immunized because state officials who knowingly falsified GPC’s finances were performing their assigned “financial oversight activities.”

Interestingly, no one seems curious about what happened to that $10 million in taxpayer money. Attorney General Sam Olens never conducted a criminal investigation despite allegations and evidence of fraud. The USG concluded after its own review that there was no way to know what happened to the money. Governor Deal had no interest in an independent investigation, and Governor Kemp is thinking about it, but has not officially responded. As the fight continues on appeal, Tricoli maintains that, contrary to the ruling of Judge Dan Coursey in DeKalb Superior Court, intentional falsification of state financial reports to conceal the theft of taxpayer money does not qualify as “financial oversight,” and that state officials are not immune for their criminal conduct."
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  string(10966) "!!!''“I am concerned and frankly angry … reserves are down almost $4.5 million and overall Auxiliary reserves are down by $3.2 million … It appears that any funds Auxiliary Services had to make a significant contribution to our institution are gone with no explanation.”''
!!!— ''[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M5Tr39y64UY4nxhuUgN37J-mzeUnjm0m/view|Keith Chapman]''
!!!''Chief Officer for Auxiliary Reserves, Georgia Perimeter College''
 

{img fileId="16408" stylebox="float: right; margin-left: 25px;" desc="desc" width="300px"}
It did not take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that something was seriously wrong with the financial reporting at Georgia Perimeter College (GPC) in 2012. It is less obvious how it was missed, or buried, by the University System of Georgia (USG) — leaving approximately $10 million unaccounted-for today — and why no one in the USG or Attorney General’s office is looking into where the money went.

The USG is the state government entity that oversees Georgia’s 26 public colleges and universities, including their budgets and finances. It used to include both Georgia Perimeter College and Georgia State University until a merger helped keep a financial scandal — that affected both schools in 2012 — below the radar.

The USG has its own department of finance and team of auditors who administer $10 billion in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_System_of_Georgia|annual spending] and financial reporting — 1000 times the amount unaccounted for at GPC — and are supposed to prevent such scandals, not hide them from the public.

Here is what the USG should have known — from state records that I made public by filing them into court — about the financial scandal at GPC in 2012:

A large reserve fund was built up by former GPC President Anthony Tricoli from 2006 to 2009, $20 million at its height. Those reserves were secretly depleted starting in 2009. During the period from 2009 to 2012, GPC Vice President of Financial Affairs Ron Carruth continued to report sanguine surpluses even as he was withdrawing ''all the funds'' from the reserves — for purposes that are still not fully known, seven years later.

In 2011, for example, Carruth reported to the school’s faculty senate that revenues at GPC were running $37 million ahead of spending. At the same time, internal documents never shared outside Carruth’s office show that Carruth was asking budget director Mark Gerspacher to take $1,500,000 out of the school’s reserves to pay the bills, which would not be necessary [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GUNpS8R3JzjgHRWJrDePBXJwBqUDopYz/view|if revenues exceeded spending].

Carruth continued to make these knowingly false reports of a rosy financial picture to the GPC administration straight through the end of April 2012, when the USG announced, out of the blue, a $16 to $25 million deficit at GPC.

In January of 2012, three months before that dire deficit announcement, Keith Chapman, the manager in charge of GPC’s reserve fund, shot off a sizzling email asking why approximately $8 million was “gone with no explanation” from the auxiliary reserves.

An even more important question is why this information was ''never'' shared with the faculty senate, the executive committee, or the president’s cabinet, consisting of the top school officials. Why was it never reported to GPC President Anthony Tricoli, as required by [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V0x_irIzZvxEBUuErI7HqvLMJSnToolG/view|GPC Policy 302]?

The knowing falsification of the state agency financial reports, including misrepresentations by omission, is a felony under [https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-16/chapter-10/article-2/16-10-20|OCGA 16-10-20].

We do know that there was a trail of more emails, orchestrated by Carruth's Assistant VP of Finance, Sheletha Champion, among members of Carruth’s staff after Chapman’s January warning bell.

In March of 2012, even as Carruth continued to report healthy budget surpluses, Champion wrote an email to USG financial oversight officials documenting a __''$12.8 million negative balance''__ at GPC. After firing Tricoli in May of 2012, the USG claimed it had no prior knowledge of the GPC arrears, contrary to Champion’s email.

The USG, led by then-Chancellor Hank Huckaby, held a budget hearing with GPC the same month, March of 2012, attended by both Carruth and Champion. No one mentioned $8 million gone with no explanation since January, or a $12.8 million deficit, or a $16 million deficit, or a deficit in any amount at GPC.

Two months after the budget hearing, Carruth went to Tricoli’s office that morning and admitted there was actually a small problem, maybe a million-dollar shortfall, which was exceedingly strange since it directly contradicted Carruth’s prior reports of copious surpluses.

Tricoli called Huckaby the same day, and asked for audit assistance from the USG. Huckaby sent some of the same USG finance personnel who had already received the $12.8 million deficit report from Champion the month before. The next day, these USG finance officials announced they had discovered an $8 to $16 million deficit at GPC.

The USG finance officers claimed they discovered this deficit by poring over GPC’s books overnight. Yet the figures they supposedly calculated the night of April 25 corresponded exactly to the $12.8 million deficit report Champion sent the USG over a month before.

The very next day, April 26, Wrigley falsely informed the Board of Regents that the USG had just learned of this unfortunate development (the same one the USG learned about in March and withheld from the GPC administration). Huckaby went Wrigley one better and demanded Tricoli’s immediate resignation.

Then-Attorney General Sam Olens [https://www.cbs46.com/news/allegations-of-public-corruption-not-investigated-by-ga-attorney-general/article_073ff831-c3f2-5f48-98ee-ccf397eecb8d.html|never investigated] these discrepancies, but instead ended up defending Carruth, Champion, Wrigley, and the other USG officials who concealed their knowledge of the deficit in violation of OCGA 16-10-20. Olens argued that Tricoli, instead of accepting reports from his VP of finance and USG financial officials, could have gone and looked at the accounting worksheets himself to determine that they were lying to him.

Olens also nixed a criminal investigation, called off an outside audit, allowed the USG to review itself, and took no further action — even when USG, in its final report, still could not account for $10 million by September 2012.

After shutting the lid on what happened to the money, Olens received the [https://gfaf.org/events/weltner-awards/past-weltner-awards/|Charles Weltner Award] for open government from the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.

The USG [https://www.ajc.com/news/local-education/sam-olens-named-kennesaw-state-university-president/GjtASynzfeHYKNLj569ovN/|appointed Olens] to a $500,000-a-year job as president of Kennesaw State University, which had its own financial scandals, including a fraudulent USG audit used to oust the former president, Dan Papp, to make way for Olens to be appointed.

When Tricoli refused to resign back in 2012, alleging criminal fraud, Huckaby had one more trick up his sleeve. He offered Tricoli an alternate position in the USG central office if Tricoli would leave GPC quietly. Before Tricoli could respond, Huckaby announced to the ''Atlanta Journal Constitution ''that Tricoli had already been transferred to the USG central office.

The day after announcing Tricoli’s new position, Huckaby submitted to the Board of Regents — without Tricoli’s knowledge — an interim president for GPC, Rob Watts, one of the USG officials who had been in regular contact (which the USG denies) with Carruth and Champion.

A day after Watts was appointed, Huckaby presented Tricoli (who still did not know he had been replaced as GPC president) with a termination letter — on the pretext that the Board of Regents did not reappoint Tricoli, when in fact Huckaby never submitted Tricoli's name to the Board of Regents for reappointment, submitting Watts' name instead. The alternate USG position Huckaby announced in the media vanished into thin air. On the very same day Tricoli was fired from two jobs at once, the USG announced a plan to conduct its own review of the financial crisis at GPC (the same review that never accounted for $10 million).

Before this after-the-fact investigation started, more negative'' AJC'' stories followed hard upon this reassignment ruse, based on information from the USG telling the ''AJC'' that Tricoli “[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FT6QM5DpBYGy_86mr2Xwzl-l4qVHD5xW/view|dipped into the reserves].” Internal documents show USG officials discussing misleading the ''AJC.'' Tricoli, who had just won a national award as the best college president in America, was never able to get another job in higher education.

Huckaby, after pulling this bait-and-switch scheme supported by a phony USG report — the same MO used to ruin Papp — retired and was named [https://www.georgiatrend.com/2014/12/31/georgian-of-the-year-higher-education-higher-stakes/|Georgian of the Year] by ''Georgia Trend'' magazine.

Tricoli got no help from the courts, either. Judge Coursey said Tricoli lost all his contract rights when he was tricked into resigning. Coursey added that Tricoli’s claims under the RICO Act for knowing falsification of state agency finances, a felony under OCGA 16-10-20, were immunized because state officials who knowingly falsified GPC’s finances were performing their assigned “financial oversight activities.”

Interestingly, no one seems curious about what happened to that $10 million in taxpayer money. Attorney General Sam Olens [https://www.cbs46.com/news/allegations-of-public-corruption-not-investigated-by-ga-attorney-general/article_073ff831-c3f2-5f48-98ee-ccf397eecb8d.html|never conducted a criminal investigation] despite allegations and [https://drive.google.com/file/d/12M7t1l63J5hQTFMMe95D0PJnx1lQfreW/view|evidence of fraud]. The USG concluded after its own review that there was no way to know what happened to the money. Governor Deal had [https://creativeloafing.com/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=15288&display=y|no interest] in an independent investigation, and Governor Kemp is thinking about it, but [https://creativeloafing.com/content-423650-OUTLANDISH-CONSPIRACY-THEORIES-Another-open-letter-to-the-Governor-2|has not officially responded]. As the fight continues on appeal, Tricoli maintains that, contrary to the ruling of Judge Dan Coursey in DeKalb Superior Court, intentional falsification of state financial reports to conceal the theft of taxpayer money does ''not'' qualify as “financial oversight,” and that state officials are ''not'' immune for their criminal conduct."
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  string(10414) " Graphic 2 Copy 2a 2  2019-04-10T17:19:49+00:00 Graphic 2 copy 2a 2.jpg   For anyone interested in a more detailed account of the fraud that occurred at GPC, here is a link to some further reading: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h4tiVGI_vJEshnHfqgCMHM6Eb_comGXb/view?usp=sharing Here is a more detailed account of the Tricoli story, showing fraud by the Board of Regents and Attorney General:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h4tiVGI_vJEshnHfqgCMHM6Eb_comGXb/view?usp=sharing  The sordid origins of the scapegoating of Anthony Tricoli 16308  2019-04-10T14:42:03+00:00 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES:  The adventure of the disappearing budget surplus tony.paris@creativeloafing.com Tony Paris Stephen Humphreys  2019-04-10T14:42:03+00:00  !!!“I am concerned and frankly angry … reserves are down almost $4.5 million and overall Auxiliary reserves are down by $3.2 million … It appears that any funds Auxiliary Services had to make a significant contribution to our institution are gone with no explanation.”
!!!— Keith Chapman
!!!Chief Officer for Auxiliary Reserves, Georgia Perimeter College
 


It did not take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that something was seriously wrong with the financial reporting at Georgia Perimeter College (GPC) in 2012. It is less obvious how it was missed, or buried, by the University System of Georgia (USG) — leaving approximately $10 million unaccounted-for today — and why no one in the USG or Attorney General’s office is looking into where the money went.

The USG is the state government entity that oversees Georgia’s 26 public colleges and universities, including their budgets and finances. It used to include both Georgia Perimeter College and Georgia State University until a merger helped keep a financial scandal — that affected both schools in 2012 — below the radar.

The USG has its own department of finance and team of auditors who administer $10 billion in annual spending and financial reporting — 1000 times the amount unaccounted for at GPC — and are supposed to prevent such scandals, not hide them from the public.

Here is what the USG should have known — from state records that I made public by filing them into court — about the financial scandal at GPC in 2012:

A large reserve fund was built up by former GPC President Anthony Tricoli from 2006 to 2009, $20 million at its height. Those reserves were secretly depleted starting in 2009. During the period from 2009 to 2012, GPC Vice President of Financial Affairs Ron Carruth continued to report sanguine surpluses even as he was withdrawing all the funds from the reserves — for purposes that are still not fully known, seven years later.

In 2011, for example, Carruth reported to the school’s faculty senate that revenues at GPC were running $37 million ahead of spending. At the same time, internal documents never shared outside Carruth’s office show that Carruth was asking budget director Mark Gerspacher to take $1,500,000 out of the school’s reserves to pay the bills, which would not be necessary if revenues exceeded spending.

Carruth continued to make these knowingly false reports of a rosy financial picture to the GPC administration straight through the end of April 2012, when the USG announced, out of the blue, a $16 to $25 million deficit at GPC.

In January of 2012, three months before that dire deficit announcement, Keith Chapman, the manager in charge of GPC’s reserve fund, shot off a sizzling email asking why approximately $8 million was “gone with no explanation” from the auxiliary reserves.

An even more important question is why this information was never shared with the faculty senate, the executive committee, or the president’s cabinet, consisting of the top school officials. Why was it never reported to GPC President Anthony Tricoli, as required by GPC Policy 302?

The knowing falsification of the state agency financial reports, including misrepresentations by omission, is a felony under OCGA 16-10-20.

We do know that there was a trail of more emails, orchestrated by Carruth's Assistant VP of Finance, Sheletha Champion, among members of Carruth’s staff after Chapman’s January warning bell.

In March of 2012, even as Carruth continued to report healthy budget surpluses, Champion wrote an email to USG financial oversight officials documenting a $12.8 million negative balance at GPC. After firing Tricoli in May of 2012, the USG claimed it had no prior knowledge of the GPC arrears, contrary to Champion’s email.

The USG, led by then-Chancellor Hank Huckaby, held a budget hearing with GPC the same month, March of 2012, attended by both Carruth and Champion. No one mentioned $8 million gone with no explanation since January, or a $12.8 million deficit, or a $16 million deficit, or a deficit in any amount at GPC.

Two months after the budget hearing, Carruth went to Tricoli’s office that morning and admitted there was actually a small problem, maybe a million-dollar shortfall, which was exceedingly strange since it directly contradicted Carruth’s prior reports of copious surpluses.

Tricoli called Huckaby the same day, and asked for audit assistance from the USG. Huckaby sent some of the same USG finance personnel who had already received the $12.8 million deficit report from Champion the month before. The next day, these USG finance officials announced they had discovered an $8 to $16 million deficit at GPC.

The USG finance officers claimed they discovered this deficit by poring over GPC’s books overnight. Yet the figures they supposedly calculated the night of April 25 corresponded exactly to the $12.8 million deficit report Champion sent the USG over a month before.

The very next day, April 26, Wrigley falsely informed the Board of Regents that the USG had just learned of this unfortunate development (the same one the USG learned about in March and withheld from the GPC administration). Huckaby went Wrigley one better and demanded Tricoli’s immediate resignation.

Then-Attorney General Sam Olens never investigated these discrepancies, but instead ended up defending Carruth, Champion, Wrigley, and the other USG officials who concealed their knowledge of the deficit in violation of OCGA 16-10-20. Olens argued that Tricoli, instead of accepting reports from his VP of finance and USG financial officials, could have gone and looked at the accounting worksheets himself to determine that they were lying to him.

Olens also nixed a criminal investigation, called off an outside audit, allowed the USG to review itself, and took no further action — even when USG, in its final report, still could not account for $10 million by September 2012.

After shutting the lid on what happened to the money, Olens received the Charles Weltner Award for open government from the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.

The USG appointed Olens to a $500,000-a-year job as president of Kennesaw State University, which had its own financial scandals, including a fraudulent USG audit used to oust the former president, Dan Papp, to make way for Olens to be appointed.

When Tricoli refused to resign back in 2012, alleging criminal fraud, Huckaby had one more trick up his sleeve. He offered Tricoli an alternate position in the USG central office if Tricoli would leave GPC quietly. Before Tricoli could respond, Huckaby announced to the Atlanta Journal Constitution that Tricoli had already been transferred to the USG central office.

The day after announcing Tricoli’s new position, Huckaby submitted to the Board of Regents — without Tricoli’s knowledge — an interim president for GPC, Rob Watts, one of the USG officials who had been in regular contact (which the USG denies) with Carruth and Champion.

A day after Watts was appointed, Huckaby presented Tricoli (who still did not know he had been replaced as GPC president) with a termination letter — on the pretext that the Board of Regents did not reappoint Tricoli, when in fact Huckaby never submitted Tricoli's name to the Board of Regents for reappointment, submitting Watts' name instead. The alternate USG position Huckaby announced in the media vanished into thin air. On the very same day Tricoli was fired from two jobs at once, the USG announced a plan to conduct its own review of the financial crisis at GPC (the same review that never accounted for $10 million).

Before this after-the-fact investigation started, more negative AJC stories followed hard upon this reassignment ruse, based on information from the USG telling the AJC that Tricoli “dipped into the reserves.” Internal documents show USG officials discussing misleading the AJC. Tricoli, who had just won a national award as the best college president in America, was never able to get another job in higher education.

Huckaby, after pulling this bait-and-switch scheme supported by a phony USG report — the same MO used to ruin Papp — retired and was named Georgian of the Year by Georgia Trend magazine.

Tricoli got no help from the courts, either. Judge Coursey said Tricoli lost all his contract rights when he was tricked into resigning. Coursey added that Tricoli’s claims under the RICO Act for knowing falsification of state agency finances, a felony under OCGA 16-10-20, were immunized because state officials who knowingly falsified GPC’s finances were performing their assigned “financial oversight activities.”

Interestingly, no one seems curious about what happened to that $10 million in taxpayer money. Attorney General Sam Olens never conducted a criminal investigation despite allegations and evidence of fraud. The USG concluded after its own review that there was no way to know what happened to the money. Governor Deal had no interest in an independent investigation, and Governor Kemp is thinking about it, but has not officially responded. As the fight continues on appeal, Tricoli maintains that, contrary to the ruling of Judge Dan Coursey in DeKalb Superior Court, intentional falsification of state financial reports to conceal the theft of taxpayer money does not qualify as “financial oversight,” and that state officials are not immune for their criminal conduct.    File   0,0,11                                 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES:  The adventure of the disappearing budget surplus "
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They always say you should write your representatives. I have now written eight letters to the governor’s office, calling attention to the probable theft of $9 million from Georgia Perimeter College through an outside contractor in 2012, which was never investigated, as former Attorney General Sam Olens admitted.


I cannot say I ever got much in return for the expenditure of time, paper, and ink. I wrote seven letters to Governor Nathan Deal calling his attention to corruption in the University System of Georgia (USG). Impertinent wags have scoffed that he was already aware of funds overflowing from state coffers. That does not mean it should be ignored.

I wrote the first of seven letters to Governor Deal in 2014, on October 31 to be exact — the same date, better known as Halloween, that Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church in 1517 — but, in any case, historical parallels notwithstanding, Governor Deal never answered one of them.

Will I stand lonely by my mailbox again? I have written my first follow-up letter to Georgia’s new governor, Brian Kemp. It should have arrived, in fact, just in time for Valentine’s Day 2019.

I am asking Governor Kemp the same thing I asked Governor Deal — to use his authority as governor, under a statute the legislature saw fit to pass, to appoint an independent investigator to look into the government corruption I have called to his attention.

OCGA 45-15-18 gives the governor the authority to appoint a special attorney general to investigate crimes that have been reported, in the event that the attorney general elected to do the job cannot, or will not, investigate and prosecute.

It is a pretty good bet that current attorney general Chris Carr is not going to investigate any of these crimes any more than his predecessor, Sam Olens, did. That is because Carr is currently defending the alleged criminals in court, instead of investigating and prosecuting them, just like Olens before him.

Carr, who claims state officials who may have stolen $9 million from Georgia Perimeter College have sovereign immunity protection to do so, has gone so far as to argue that I have no First Amendment right to petition under the U.S. Constitution, to bring these claims in court without being subject to state government retaliation in the form of sanctions intended to discourage any attorney from ever insisting on the law as it is actually written in the face of this sovereign immunity juggernaut.

Carr is also stonewalling a complaint that the University System will not, in response to repeated Open Records requests dating since 2012, turn over records showing that state officials committed felonies in the handling of taxpayer money.

Most importantly, Carr’s attorney general’s office, like Olens’, has been involved up to its neck in the alleged crimes by way of evidence tampering, obstruction, influencing of witnesses, and subornation of perjury — in addition to the willful, criminal violations of the Open Records Act.

So it appears safe to say that Carr is not going to investigate the alleged crimes or documentation from state records that the USG is withholding, either, which leaves Governor Kemp free to appoint an alternative investigator.

Ironically, former AG Sam Olens is the only state official who has ever answered one of my letters. That is only because an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter asked him about my first October 31, 2014 letter, which detailed a number of alleged crimes by USG officials that Olens was defending on grounds of sovereign immunity — meaning they can’t be sued even if they committed the crimes, and even if there is evidence to prove it.

Well, I reasoned, if state officials who commit felonies cannot be sued in civil court by the individual citizens they harm in the process, because state officials have sovereign immunity protection, that is all the more reason they should be criminally investigated and prosecuted by the state if the charges bear up.

But Olens told the reporter the claims in my letter were “frivolous” because there was  any of these alleged crimes were committed and that my request for an independent investigation was just an “attention-seeking gimmick.” That was problematic because the evidence Olens denied was sitting on his desk. I sent it to him but he said he . In fact, state records show that Olens blocked criminal investigations and blocked hearings required by USG policy just before the USG appointed Olens to a $500,000 a year job, despite concerns about his eligibility, as president of Kennesaw State University.

That was right after KSU President Dan Papp was ousted via a fraudulent “audit” issued by the USG to cover its own illegal tracks [auditors said he improperly received more than $577,000 in retirement pay.

Skulking around behind the scenes like that is one thing, but denying the existence of palpable evidence by denigrating it in the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is another issue. In Georgia, making a knowingly false claim on a matter under state jurisdiction is a felony. Concealing evidence of crimes amounts, in turn, to the crime of evidence tampering, and impeding an investigation on false grounds is obstruction of justice.

Maybe Governor Kemp will appoint an independent investigator, as I have been asking since 2014. My February 11, 2019 letter to Kemp is mainly a recap. Here is a montage of the greatest hits enclosed:

 — The initial letter outlines five separate civil lawsuits based on criminal conduct by state officials that are being defended on grounds of sovereign immunity; points out AG conflicts; criminal obstruction; and requests appointment of an independent investigator. One of the cases involves an X-ray tech at Medical College of Georgia being fired, allegedly in retaliation for reporting conflicts of interest by a member of the Board of Regents. The alternative reason given for firing the state worker was he supposedly said a patient had smelly feet.

 — This letter points out that AG Olens dismissed allegations as frivolous and nonsensical in the AJC, even though it was undisputed that financial records at Georgia Perimeter College were falsified; and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. State records show that GPC VP of Finance Ron Carruth reported a $37 million surplus at the same time he was secretly drawing money from reserve funds to pay the bills.

 — This letter asking why Governor Deal has not answered the previous two letters, points out that Olens has contradicted himself by claiming the allegations in the original letter have been thoroughly investigated after first insisting that they were not investigated, and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. How can a crime be investigated and not investigated, too? We won’t know till we put that man under oath.

 — This letter provides details from emails among state officials documenting active  prepared by state officials concerning $14 million that remains unaccounted for, while the report alluded to in the emails has never been produced in response to Open Records requests; and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. If a $14 million deficit was reported to the USG in March, why did Steve Wrigley [current USG chancellor] tell the Board of Regents in May that the USG had known about it for less than a week?

 — This letter calls Governor Deal’s attention to Olens’ attempt, based on knowingly false representations to a federal judge, to get a court order barring further challenges to his obstruction of investigation into the allegations (which Olens calls “outlandish conspiracy theories”); and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. Olens told the federal judge I had defied two court orders, but Olens forgot to tell the federal judge the orders in question had been reversed and vacated. So Olens asked the federal judge to punish me for violating orders that did not exist. Lewis Carroll could have used that one in Alice in Wonderland, not to mention Franz Kafka in The Trial.

 — This letter apprises Governor Deal that we uncovered evidence showing Olens blocked a criminal investigation and a hearing required by Board of Regents policy into the reasons for concealing the fact that $14 million was missing from Georgia Perimeter College reserves in March of 2012, includes a detailed timeline showing deliberate falsifications of state agency finances, and requests appointment of an independent investigator. Instead of investigating claims of financial fraud in the USG, Olens asked the USG to do its own review of itself and alert him if they found they had committed any fraud.

 — The last letter to Deal details obstruction, evidence tampering, and First Amendment retaliation by AG Chris Carr, and requests appointment of an independent investigator. This letter recounts one of the many instances in which Carr insisted that state officials have sovereign immunity protection to commit strings of felonies with impunity, and that I must be crazy to argue otherwise, since no reasonable person would ever agree with me. This is also one of the many places where Chris Carr ignores the opinion of the Georgia Supreme Court on this very subject, in Caldwell v. State, which states the opposite of Carr’s position and agrees with me. In that case, former Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell argued that a civil RICO action could not be brought against him because he was a state official. The Georgia Supreme Court analyzed the language of the RICO statute and held that it expressly authorized a civil RICO action against a state official.

These letters provide a strong factual foundation for the ongoing fight to hold state officials accountable for committing crimes in office, while AGs Sam Olens and Chris Carr have fought to give criminals in state government sovereign immunity protection. The language of the RICO statute, expressly authorizing a lawsuit against state officials, has not changed. Neither has the decision in Caldwell v. State, which the state is now ignoring, just like the letters. After Governor Deal did not answer the first letter, back in 2014; the media has also ignored the next seven.

I still don't know if my Valentine’s letter to Governor Kemp will finally get a candid response, admitting that the USG and the AG have been working in tandem as a criminal enterprise, to protect state officials for committing felony RICO predicate acts — such as falsifying the financial reports of a state agency to conceal the theft of $9 million in taxpayer money."
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They always say you should write your representatives. I have now written eight letters to the governor’s office, calling attention to the probable theft of $9 million from Georgia Perimeter College through an outside contractor in 2012, which was [https://www.cbs46.com/news/allegations-of-public-corruption-not-investigated-by-ga-attorney-general/article_073ff831-c3f2-5f48-98ee-ccf397eecb8d.html|never investigated], as former Attorney General Sam Olens admitted.


I cannot say I ever got much in return for the expenditure of time, paper, and ink. I wrote seven letters to Governor Nathan Deal calling his attention to corruption in the University System of Georgia (USG). Impertinent wags have scoffed that he was already aware of funds overflowing from state coffers. That does not mean it should be ignored.

I wrote the first of seven letters to Governor Deal in 2014, on October 31 to be exact — the same date, better known as Halloween, that Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church in 1517 — but, in any case, historical parallels notwithstanding, Governor Deal never answered one of them.

Will I stand lonely by my mailbox again? I have written my [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FV3aIVT8eMr_lYCO44Zv6fjLvsePHNew/view?usp=sharing|first follow-up letter to Georgia’s new governor], Brian Kemp. It should have arrived, in fact, just in time for Valentine’s Day 2019.

I am asking Governor Kemp the same thing I asked Governor Deal — to use his authority as governor, under a statute the legislature saw fit to pass, to appoint an independent investigator to look into the government corruption I have called to his attention.

[https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-45/chapter-15/article-1/45-15-18/|OCGA 45-15-18] gives the governor the authority to appoint a special attorney general to investigate crimes that have been reported, in the event that the attorney general elected to do the job cannot, or will not, investigate and prosecute.

It is a pretty good bet that current attorney general Chris Carr is not going to investigate any of these crimes any more than his predecessor, Sam Olens, did. That is because Carr is currently defending the alleged criminals in court, instead of investigating and prosecuting them, just like Olens before him.

Carr, who claims state officials who may have stolen $9 million from Georgia Perimeter College have sovereign immunity protection to do so, has gone so far as to argue that I have no First Amendment right to petition under the U.S. Constitution, to bring these claims in court without being subject to state government retaliation in the form of sanctions intended to discourage any attorney from ever insisting on the law as it is actually written in the face of this sovereign immunity juggernaut.

Carr is also [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kp7PKCGkVFgCxZu6-mRnhSp-VCW1B0yk/view?usp=sharing|stonewalling a complaint] that the University System will not, in response to repeated Open Records requests dating since 2012, turn over records showing that state officials committed felonies in the handling of taxpayer money.

Most importantly, Carr’s attorney general’s office, like Olens’, has been involved up to its neck in the alleged crimes by way of evidence tampering, obstruction, influencing of witnesses, and subornation of perjury — in addition to the willful, criminal violations of the Open Records Act.

So it appears safe to say that Carr is not going to investigate the alleged crimes or documentation from state records that the USG is withholding, either, which leaves Governor Kemp free to appoint an alternative investigator.

Ironically, former AG Sam Olens is the only state official who has ever answered one of my letters. That is only because an ''Atlanta Journal-Constitution ''reporter asked him about my first October 31, 2014 letter, which detailed a number of alleged crimes by USG officials that Olens was defending on grounds of sovereign immunity — meaning they can’t be sued even if they committed the crimes, and even if there is evidence to prove it.

Well, I reasoned, if state officials who commit felonies cannot be sued in civil court by the individual citizens they harm in the process, because state officials have sovereign immunity protection, that is all the more reason they should be criminally investigated and prosecuted by the state if the charges bear up.

But Olens told the reporter the claims in my letter were “frivolous” because there was {FILE( fileId="15279")}no evidence{FILE} any of these alleged crimes were committed and that my request for an independent investigation was just an “attention-seeking gimmick.” That was problematic because the evidence Olens denied was sitting on his desk. I sent it to him but he said he {FILE( fileId="15281")}never investigated it{FILE}. In fact, state records show that Olens blocked criminal investigations and blocked hearings required by USG policy just before the USG appointed Olens to a $500,000 a year job, despite concerns about his eligibility, as president of Kennesaw State University.

That was right after KSU President Dan Papp was ousted via a fraudulent “audit” issued by the USG to cover its own illegal tracks [[auditors said he improperly received more than [https://www.ajc.com/news/local-education/judge-tosses-injunction-against-olens-appointment-attorney-may-appeal/gVJJn7FPNFcYDvRwdnZtBK/|$577,000 in retirement pay].

Skulking around behind the scenes like that is one thing, but denying the existence of palpable evidence by denigrating it in the pages of the ''Atlanta Journal-Constitution'' is another issue. In Georgia, making a knowingly false claim on a matter under state jurisdiction is a [https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-16/chapter-10/article-2/16-10-20|felony]. Concealing evidence of crimes amounts, in turn, to the crime of evidence tampering, and impeding an investigation on false grounds is obstruction of justice.

Maybe Governor Kemp will appoint an independent investigator, as I have been asking since 2014. My February 11, 2019 letter to Kemp is mainly a recap. Here is a montage of the greatest hits enclosed:

{FILE( fileId="15288" browserdisplay="y")}October 31, 2014{FILE} — The initial letter outlines five separate civil lawsuits based on criminal conduct by state officials that are being defended on grounds of sovereign immunity; points out AG conflicts; criminal obstruction; and requests appointment of an independent investigator. One of the cases involves an X-ray tech at Medical College of Georgia being fired, allegedly in retaliation for reporting conflicts of interest by a member of the Board of Regents. The alternative reason given for firing the state worker was he supposedly said a patient had smelly feet.

{FILE( fileId="15287" browserdisplay="y")}January 12, 2015{FILE} — This letter points out that AG Olens dismissed allegations as frivolous and nonsensical in the ''AJC'', even though it was undisputed that financial records at Georgia Perimeter College were falsified; and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. State records show that GPC VP of Finance Ron Carruth reported a $37 million surplus at the same time he was secretly drawing money from reserve funds to pay the bills.

{FILE( fileId="15286" browserdisplay="y")}April 14, 2015{FILE} — This letter asking why Governor Deal has not answered the previous two letters, points out that Olens has contradicted himself by claiming the allegations in the original letter have been thoroughly investigated after first insisting that they were not investigated, and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. How can a crime be investigated and not investigated, too? We won’t know till we put that man under oath.

{FILE( fileId="15285" browserdisplay="y")}March 7, 2016{FILE} — This letter provides details from emails among state officials documenting active {FILE( fileId="15289" browserdisplay="y")}concealment of a report{FILE} prepared by state officials concerning $14 million that remains unaccounted for, while the report alluded to in the emails has never been produced in response to Open Records requests; and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. If a $14 million deficit was reported to the USG in March, why did Steve Wrigley [[current USG chancellor] tell the Board of Regents in May that the USG had known about it for less than a week?

{FILE( fileId="15284" browserdisplay="y")}September 13, 2016{FILE} — This letter calls Governor Deal’s attention to Olens’ attempt, based on knowingly false representations to a federal judge, to get a court order barring further challenges to his obstruction of investigation into the allegations (which Olens calls “outlandish conspiracy theories”); and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. Olens told the federal judge I had defied two court orders, but Olens forgot to tell the federal judge the orders in question had been reversed and vacated. So Olens asked the federal judge to punish me for violating orders that did not exist. Lewis Carroll could have used that one in ''Alice in Wonderland'', not to mention Franz Kafka in ''The Trial''.

{FILE( fileId="15282" browserdisplay="y")}January 29, 2018{FILE} — This letter apprises Governor Deal that we uncovered evidence showing Olens blocked a criminal investigation and a hearing required by Board of Regents policy into the reasons for concealing the fact that $14 million was missing from Georgia Perimeter College reserves in March of 2012, includes a detailed timeline showing deliberate falsifications of state agency finances, and requests appointment of an independent investigator. Instead of investigating claims of financial fraud in the USG, Olens asked the USG to do its own review of itself and alert him if they found they had committed any fraud.

{FILE( fileId="15283" browserdisplay="y")}July 4, 2018{FILE} — The last letter to Deal details obstruction, evidence tampering, and First Amendment retaliation by AG Chris Carr, and requests appointment of an independent investigator. This letter recounts one of the many instances in which Carr insisted that state officials have sovereign immunity protection to commit strings of felonies with impunity, and that I must be crazy to argue otherwise, since no reasonable person would ever agree with me. This is also one of the many places where Chris Carr ignores the opinion of the Georgia Supreme Court on this very subject, in ''[https://law.justia.com/cases/georgia/supreme-court/1984/41044-1.html|Caldwell v. State]'', which states the opposite of Carr’s position and agrees with me. In that case, former Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell argued that a civil RICO action could not be brought against him because he was a state official. The Georgia Supreme Court analyzed the language of the RICO statute and held that it expressly authorized a civil RICO action against a state official.

These letters provide a strong factual foundation for the ongoing fight to hold state officials accountable for committing crimes in office, while AGs Sam Olens and Chris Carr have fought to give criminals in state government sovereign immunity protection. The language of the RICO statute, expressly authorizing a lawsuit against state officials, has not changed. Neither has the decision in ''Caldwell v. State'', which the state is now ignoring, just like the letters. After Governor Deal did not answer the first letter, back in 2014; the media has also ignored the next seven.

I still don't know if my Valentine’s letter to Governor Kemp will finally get a candid response, admitting that the USG and the AG have been working in tandem as a criminal enterprise, to protect state officials for committing felony RICO predicate acts — such as falsifying the financial reports of a state agency to conceal the theft of $9 million in taxpayer money."
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  string(11257) " ##HUMPH #5 Art 2  2019-03-23T16:36:32+00:00 ##HUMPH #5 art_2.jpg   So have you heard back from Kemp? humphrey humphreys humphries Hiding facts in plain sight 15298  2019-03-20T18:36:09+00:00 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Another open letter to the Governor tony.paris@creativeloafing.com Tony Paris Stephen Humphreys Stephen Humphreys 2019-03-20T18:36:09+00:00  
 


They always say you should write your representatives. I have now written eight letters to the governor’s office, calling attention to the probable theft of $9 million from Georgia Perimeter College through an outside contractor in 2012, which was never investigated, as former Attorney General Sam Olens admitted.


I cannot say I ever got much in return for the expenditure of time, paper, and ink. I wrote seven letters to Governor Nathan Deal calling his attention to corruption in the University System of Georgia (USG). Impertinent wags have scoffed that he was already aware of funds overflowing from state coffers. That does not mean it should be ignored.

I wrote the first of seven letters to Governor Deal in 2014, on October 31 to be exact — the same date, better known as Halloween, that Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of the church in 1517 — but, in any case, historical parallels notwithstanding, Governor Deal never answered one of them.

Will I stand lonely by my mailbox again? I have written my first follow-up letter to Georgia’s new governor, Brian Kemp. It should have arrived, in fact, just in time for Valentine’s Day 2019.

I am asking Governor Kemp the same thing I asked Governor Deal — to use his authority as governor, under a statute the legislature saw fit to pass, to appoint an independent investigator to look into the government corruption I have called to his attention.

OCGA 45-15-18 gives the governor the authority to appoint a special attorney general to investigate crimes that have been reported, in the event that the attorney general elected to do the job cannot, or will not, investigate and prosecute.

It is a pretty good bet that current attorney general Chris Carr is not going to investigate any of these crimes any more than his predecessor, Sam Olens, did. That is because Carr is currently defending the alleged criminals in court, instead of investigating and prosecuting them, just like Olens before him.

Carr, who claims state officials who may have stolen $9 million from Georgia Perimeter College have sovereign immunity protection to do so, has gone so far as to argue that I have no First Amendment right to petition under the U.S. Constitution, to bring these claims in court without being subject to state government retaliation in the form of sanctions intended to discourage any attorney from ever insisting on the law as it is actually written in the face of this sovereign immunity juggernaut.

Carr is also stonewalling a complaint that the University System will not, in response to repeated Open Records requests dating since 2012, turn over records showing that state officials committed felonies in the handling of taxpayer money.

Most importantly, Carr’s attorney general’s office, like Olens’, has been involved up to its neck in the alleged crimes by way of evidence tampering, obstruction, influencing of witnesses, and subornation of perjury — in addition to the willful, criminal violations of the Open Records Act.

So it appears safe to say that Carr is not going to investigate the alleged crimes or documentation from state records that the USG is withholding, either, which leaves Governor Kemp free to appoint an alternative investigator.

Ironically, former AG Sam Olens is the only state official who has ever answered one of my letters. That is only because an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter asked him about my first October 31, 2014 letter, which detailed a number of alleged crimes by USG officials that Olens was defending on grounds of sovereign immunity — meaning they can’t be sued even if they committed the crimes, and even if there is evidence to prove it.

Well, I reasoned, if state officials who commit felonies cannot be sued in civil court by the individual citizens they harm in the process, because state officials have sovereign immunity protection, that is all the more reason they should be criminally investigated and prosecuted by the state if the charges bear up.

But Olens told the reporter the claims in my letter were “frivolous” because there was  any of these alleged crimes were committed and that my request for an independent investigation was just an “attention-seeking gimmick.” That was problematic because the evidence Olens denied was sitting on his desk. I sent it to him but he said he . In fact, state records show that Olens blocked criminal investigations and blocked hearings required by USG policy just before the USG appointed Olens to a $500,000 a year job, despite concerns about his eligibility, as president of Kennesaw State University.

That was right after KSU President Dan Papp was ousted via a fraudulent “audit” issued by the USG to cover its own illegal tracks [auditors said he improperly received more than $577,000 in retirement pay.

Skulking around behind the scenes like that is one thing, but denying the existence of palpable evidence by denigrating it in the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is another issue. In Georgia, making a knowingly false claim on a matter under state jurisdiction is a felony. Concealing evidence of crimes amounts, in turn, to the crime of evidence tampering, and impeding an investigation on false grounds is obstruction of justice.

Maybe Governor Kemp will appoint an independent investigator, as I have been asking since 2014. My February 11, 2019 letter to Kemp is mainly a recap. Here is a montage of the greatest hits enclosed:

 — The initial letter outlines five separate civil lawsuits based on criminal conduct by state officials that are being defended on grounds of sovereign immunity; points out AG conflicts; criminal obstruction; and requests appointment of an independent investigator. One of the cases involves an X-ray tech at Medical College of Georgia being fired, allegedly in retaliation for reporting conflicts of interest by a member of the Board of Regents. The alternative reason given for firing the state worker was he supposedly said a patient had smelly feet.

 — This letter points out that AG Olens dismissed allegations as frivolous and nonsensical in the AJC, even though it was undisputed that financial records at Georgia Perimeter College were falsified; and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. State records show that GPC VP of Finance Ron Carruth reported a $37 million surplus at the same time he was secretly drawing money from reserve funds to pay the bills.

 — This letter asking why Governor Deal has not answered the previous two letters, points out that Olens has contradicted himself by claiming the allegations in the original letter have been thoroughly investigated after first insisting that they were not investigated, and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. How can a crime be investigated and not investigated, too? We won’t know till we put that man under oath.

 — This letter provides details from emails among state officials documenting active  prepared by state officials concerning $14 million that remains unaccounted for, while the report alluded to in the emails has never been produced in response to Open Records requests; and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. If a $14 million deficit was reported to the USG in March, why did Steve Wrigley [current USG chancellor] tell the Board of Regents in May that the USG had known about it for less than a week?

 — This letter calls Governor Deal’s attention to Olens’ attempt, based on knowingly false representations to a federal judge, to get a court order barring further challenges to his obstruction of investigation into the allegations (which Olens calls “outlandish conspiracy theories”); and requests the appointment of an independent investigator. Olens told the federal judge I had defied two court orders, but Olens forgot to tell the federal judge the orders in question had been reversed and vacated. So Olens asked the federal judge to punish me for violating orders that did not exist. Lewis Carroll could have used that one in Alice in Wonderland, not to mention Franz Kafka in The Trial.

 — This letter apprises Governor Deal that we uncovered evidence showing Olens blocked a criminal investigation and a hearing required by Board of Regents policy into the reasons for concealing the fact that $14 million was missing from Georgia Perimeter College reserves in March of 2012, includes a detailed timeline showing deliberate falsifications of state agency finances, and requests appointment of an independent investigator. Instead of investigating claims of financial fraud in the USG, Olens asked the USG to do its own review of itself and alert him if they found they had committed any fraud.

 — The last letter to Deal details obstruction, evidence tampering, and First Amendment retaliation by AG Chris Carr, and requests appointment of an independent investigator. This letter recounts one of the many instances in which Carr insisted that state officials have sovereign immunity protection to commit strings of felonies with impunity, and that I must be crazy to argue otherwise, since no reasonable person would ever agree with me. This is also one of the many places where Chris Carr ignores the opinion of the Georgia Supreme Court on this very subject, in Caldwell v. State, which states the opposite of Carr’s position and agrees with me. In that case, former Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell argued that a civil RICO action could not be brought against him because he was a state official. The Georgia Supreme Court analyzed the language of the RICO statute and held that it expressly authorized a civil RICO action against a state official.

These letters provide a strong factual foundation for the ongoing fight to hold state officials accountable for committing crimes in office, while AGs Sam Olens and Chris Carr have fought to give criminals in state government sovereign immunity protection. The language of the RICO statute, expressly authorizing a lawsuit against state officials, has not changed. Neither has the decision in Caldwell v. State, which the state is now ignoring, just like the letters. After Governor Deal did not answer the first letter, back in 2014; the media has also ignored the next seven.

I still don't know if my Valentine’s letter to Governor Kemp will finally get a candid response, admitting that the USG and the AG have been working in tandem as a criminal enterprise, to protect state officials for committing felony RICO predicate acts — such as falsifying the financial reports of a state agency to conceal the theft of $9 million in taxpayer money.    CL STAFF   0,0,11    humphrey humphreys humphries                             OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Another open letter to the Governor "
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  string(10194) "“Since the only alleged contact and interaction between Davis and Standifer occurred during the traffic stop … the sexual assault “arose from the performance of Standifer’s official duties as a patrol officer.”

— Judge Debra Bernes, Georgia Court of Appeals


The Me Too Movement is not about to touch state government employees in Georgia, where, under the current state of the law state officials are safe from lawsuits for sexual harassment and abuse, even rape.


Yes, you may have been thinking all of America is having a #MeToo moment with a movement that is bringing down those who have abused their positions of power to terrorize the opposite sex (and those of the same sex, in some cases). In the last couple of years, the movement seemed to be reaching into every domain — corporate America, Hollywood, Fox News, the federal government, and even into the impregnable bastion of the U.S. Supreme Court that sets the rules. 

Unbeknownst to most Georgians, however, the state has spent decades bolstering immunity to claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault against state officials. We are about to see if that wall of protection is going to break, or if Georgia can once again withstand the tides of public opinion that, in the rest of the country, are moving progressively forward.

The king can do no wrong

When I was first faced with the prospect of suing the state, it was because former University of Georgia President Michael Adams had enlisted Georgia’s then-attorney general in an effort to destroy Professor Dezso Benedek, Adams’ most vocal critic on the UGA faculty. The attack on the professor failed miserably when I was able to prove in an evidentiary hearing that Adams and the attorney general had fabricated false charges against the professor, attempted to manufacture fake evidence, and put witnesses on the stand to give perjured testimony.

As bad as this sounds, it was not legally obvious at the time how to hold these officials with powerful positions in state government accountable for their abuse of that power.

I learned that it was not going to be easy to surmount the protective wall the state of Georgia had been building for itself since the early 1990s, largely in the domain of sexual harassment, at the same time Anita Hill was being vilified by a Senate committee for making sexual harassment claims against Clarence Thomas. There was going to be a little problem with a doctrine from the days of divine right kings, sovereign immunity, that is making a comeback in Georgia.

This idea that the king can do no wrong is preventing state officials from being held accountable even for heinous wrongdoing in Georgia today — from sexual assault to theft of taxpayer money.

In the beginning, there was sexual molestation immunity

That wall of sovereign immunity protecting the state from claims of sexual abuse has been built brick by brick and remains in place today, even as #MeToo gains ground everywhere else. The leading sovereign immunity case — meaning the one most often quoted by the Attorney General and the courts, Davis v Standifer — held that a state trooper could not be sued for sexually molesting a female motorist during a traffic stop. That case is the legal cornerstone of sovereign immunity for sexual abuse, harassment, and many other wrongdoings in Georgia.

The main issue in the Standifer case was whether the trooper was acting within the scope of his official duties as a state employee. One might imagine allegations of a state trooper abusing the power relation during a traffic stop to put his hand up the dress of a female motorist and touch her private parts fell outside the scope of the trooper’s official duties. After all, Officer Standifer was not employed by the state as a gynecologist.

The Georgia Court of Appeals reasoned otherwise, that the trooper was on duty, in uniform, and that performing traffic stops is what state troopers do. Therefore, he was immune from suit. Case closed.

Are we to assume, by that reasoning, the state trooper would have been acting in the course of performing his official duties, and therefore immune from any lawsuit, if his actions had been even more extreme? As long as a state trooper is wearing a badge, does it serve as a shield of sovereign immunity?

No king can be held accountable in a court of law

Sovereign immunity does not just mean that you can’t win your case. It means you cannot get in the courthouse door. In my case, you don’t get the court hearing used to protect Professor Benedek from the tyranny of the bureaucracy. Even if you have the cold, hard evidence to prove your case, you never get to present it to a jury. 

Where did this sovereign-immunity bar to justice come from? It comes from long-ago sources like the writings of Lord Coke in 1608. But in 1991, Georgia had a simpler doctrine: the state’s immunity was waived where the state had liability insurance to cover the claim. This eliminated the threat from large lawsuits draining the treasury, but led to manifest injustice where the state had no insurance coverage.

In 1991, Georgia changed its constitution to do away with the provision that sovereign immunity was waived where the state had insurance coverage. The constitution was rewritten to say that the state enjoyed sovereign immunity unless a statute enacted by the legislature waived the protection by authorizing a lawsuit against the state.

Around the same time the Georgia Constitution was amended, Georgia passed a law waiving sovereign immunity to provide an avenue for bringing tort claims against the state — by people like Davis, the female motorist who was allegedly stopped and sexually molested. But the Georgia Tort Claims Act (GTCA) contained some limitations and exceptions to the waiver of sovereign immunity. When it comes to claims of sexual abuse, the Georgia judiciary quickly used those exceptions to swallow the rule and bar any claims against the state.

Expanding sovereign immunity for rape

Most Georgians would be surprised to learn that a state official cannot be sued under state law for sexual molestation, rape, or a determined campaign of sexual harassment. That is the law on the books in Georgia in 2019.

The state trooper on-duty sexual molestation case was decided in 2005 — before the founding of #MeToo, but certainly not back in the dark ages, either.

But this sovereign immunity protection for sexual peccadillos doesn’t stop with a little hand up the skirt. In Santamorena v. Georgia Military College, the Georgia courts used the same course-of-official-duties rationale to hold that a college and its dean could not be sued for the rape of a female college student in 1999.

Here the judiciary added an extra twist of legal reasoning, that the GTCA says state officials enjoy sovereign immunity from claims for assault. The judges then debated whether rape was immunized because it is impossible to rape a woman without committing the lesser included offense of assaulting her. (That assault exception logic was later extended to immunize state officials for the murder of a prison inmate, Southerland v. Georgia Dept. of Corrections).

It does not seem to strike Georgia jurists as ironic that they are using the course-of-official-duties rationale to protect state employees who are arguably doing the opposite of what their official duties require. They are immunized to endanger instead of protect the public.

Rendering the Georgia Constitution meaningless in sexual harassment cases

Even in more medieval times, one loophole in the sovereign immunity protection of the king’s officers was that acts done with actual malice and actual intent to harm were not protected. That exception to sovereign immunity was included in the rewrite of the Georgia Constitution in 1991.

When it comes to sexual harassment, the Georgia Supreme Court quickly wrote that protection for citizens out of existence. In Ridley v Johns, the justices held that actual malice and intent to harm described in the constitution did not figure into the GTCA. The consequences for women became serious when the high court granted immunity to a state office supervisor alleged to have conducted a concerted campaign of sexual harassment against a female subordinate for over a year — and threatened to kill her dog and stuff it in her mailbox when she reported him.

He could not be sued because he was immune. That case was decided in 2001, a decade after the Anita Hill hearings.

The trend set by a series of similar decisions is clear. The Georgia judiciary has turned the GTCA, a law meant to allow redress against the state, into an ingenious tool to bar certain unwanted claims such as sexual harassment and sexual assault, if not a heavy blunt instrument to beat down any Georgia citizen challenging the power of the state. It became equally clear that some ingenious lawyer was going to have to devise a way to circumvent this perverse logic.

Felonies are not official duties under the RICO statute

That is why, when I sued the state for UGA trying to destroy Dezso Benedek with knowingly false charges, in violation of criminal statutes for evidence tampering and perjury, I did not sue under the toothless GTCA.

Instead, I brought the first-ever claims against the state under the RICO statute, which expressly authorizes lawsuits for damages and injunctive relief for criminal acts committed through state “governmental entities” by state employees — and for acts committed with malice and intent to harm Georgia citizens — with criminal intent, that is — just like the Georgia Constitution says.

Guess what? The state of Georgia has entered a new phase, in which immunity for sexual harassment won’t be the only fringe benefit for state officials. The state establishment is now striving to expand the doctrine to lay claim to sovereign immunity even for state officials who abuse their positions of public trust to commit a string of related felonies — whether falsifying state records with impunity, or stealing taxpayer money without accountability."
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— Judge Debra Bernes, Georgia Court of Appeals

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The Me Too Movement is not about to touch state government employees in Georgia, where, under the current state of the law state officials are safe from lawsuits for sexual harassment and abuse, even rape.


Yes, you may have been thinking all of America is having a #MeToo moment with a movement that is bringing down those who have abused their positions of power to terrorize the opposite sex (and those of the same sex, in some cases). In the last couple of years, the movement seemed to be reaching into every domain — corporate America, Hollywood, Fox News, the federal government, and even into the impregnable bastion of the U.S. Supreme Court that sets the rules. 

Unbeknownst to most Georgians, however, the state has spent decades bolstering immunity to claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault against state officials. We are about to see if that wall of protection is going to break, or if Georgia can once again withstand the tides of public opinion that, in the rest of the country, are moving progressively forward.

__The king can do no wrong__

When I was first faced with the prospect of suing the state, it was because former University of Georgia President Michael Adams had enlisted Georgia’s then-attorney general in an effort to destroy Professor Dezso Benedek, Adams’ most vocal critic on the UGA faculty. The attack on the professor failed miserably when I was able to prove in an evidentiary hearing that Adams and the attorney general had fabricated false charges against the professor, attempted to manufacture fake evidence, and put witnesses on the stand to give perjured testimony.

As bad as this sounds, it was not legally obvious at the time how to hold these officials with powerful positions in state government accountable for their abuse of that power.

I learned that it was not going to be easy to surmount the protective wall the state of Georgia had been building for itself since the early 1990s, largely in the domain of sexual harassment, at the same time Anita Hill was being vilified by a Senate committee for making sexual harassment claims against Clarence Thomas. There was going to be a little problem with a doctrine from the days of divine right kings, [http://gwmac.com/dirty-dozen-georgia-sovereign-immunity-cases/|sovereign immunity], that is making a comeback in Georgia.

This idea that the king can do no wrong is preventing state officials from being held accountable even for heinous wrongdoing in Georgia today — from sexual assault to theft of taxpayer money.

__In the beginning, there was sexual molestation immunity__

That wall of sovereign immunity protecting the state from claims of sexual abuse has been built brick by brick and remains in place today, even as #MeToo gains ground everywhere else. The leading sovereign immunity case — meaning the one most often quoted by the Attorney General and the courts, ''Davis v Standifer'' — held that a state trooper could not be sued for sexually molesting a female motorist during a traffic stop. That case is the legal cornerstone of sovereign immunity for sexual abuse, harassment, and many other wrongdoings in Georgia.

The main issue in the ''Standifer'' case was whether the trooper was acting within the scope of his official duties as a state employee. One might imagine allegations of a state trooper abusing the power relation during a traffic stop to put his hand up the dress of a female motorist and touch her private parts fell outside the scope of the trooper’s official duties. After all, Officer Standifer was not employed by the state as a gynecologist.

The Georgia Court of Appeals reasoned otherwise, that the trooper was on duty, in uniform, and that performing traffic stops is what state troopers do. Therefore, he was immune from suit. Case closed.

Are we to assume, by that reasoning, the state trooper would have been acting in the course of performing his official duties, and therefore immune from any lawsuit, if his actions had been even more extreme? As long as a state trooper is wearing a badge, does it serve as a shield of sovereign immunity?

__No king can be held accountable in a court of law__

Sovereign immunity does not just mean that you can’t win your case. It means you cannot get in the courthouse door. In my case, you don’t get the court hearing used to protect Professor Benedek from the tyranny of the bureaucracy. Even if you have the cold, hard evidence to prove your case, you never get to present it to a jury. 

Where did this sovereign-immunity bar to justice come from? It comes from long-ago sources like the writings of Lord Coke in 1608. But in 1991, Georgia had a simpler doctrine: the state’s immunity was waived where the state had liability insurance to cover the claim. This eliminated the threat from large lawsuits draining the treasury, but led to manifest injustice where the state had no insurance coverage.

In 1991, Georgia changed its constitution to do away with the provision that sovereign immunity was waived where the state had insurance coverage. The constitution was rewritten to say that the state enjoyed sovereign immunity unless a statute enacted by the legislature waived the protection by authorizing a lawsuit against the state.

Around the same time the Georgia Constitution was amended, Georgia passed a law waiving sovereign immunity to provide an avenue for bringing tort claims against the state — by people like Davis, the female motorist who was allegedly stopped and sexually molested. But the Georgia Tort Claims Act (GTCA) contained some limitations and exceptions to the waiver of sovereign immunity. When it comes to claims of sexual abuse, the Georgia judiciary quickly used those exceptions to swallow the rule and bar any claims against the state.

__Expanding sovereign immunity for rape__

Most Georgians would be surprised to learn that a state official cannot be sued under state law for sexual molestation, rape, or a determined campaign of sexual harassment. That is the law on the books in Georgia in 2019.

The state trooper on-duty sexual molestation case was decided in 2005 — before the founding of #MeToo, but certainly not back in the dark ages, either.

But this sovereign immunity protection for sexual peccadillos doesn’t stop with a little hand up the skirt. In ''Santamorena v. Georgia Military College'', the Georgia courts used the same course-of-official-duties rationale to hold that a college and its dean could not be sued for the rape of a female college student in 1999.

Here the judiciary added an extra twist of legal reasoning, that the GTCA says state officials enjoy sovereign immunity from claims for assault. The judges then debated whether rape was immunized because it is impossible to rape a woman without committing the lesser included offense of assaulting her. (That assault exception logic was later extended to immunize state officials for the murder of a prison inmate, ''Southerland v. Georgia Dept. of Corrections'').

It does not seem to strike Georgia jurists as ironic that they are using the course-of-official-duties rationale to protect state employees who are arguably doing the opposite of what their official duties require. They are immunized to endanger instead of protect the public.

__Rendering the Georgia Constitution meaningless in sexual harassment cases__

Even in more medieval times, one loophole in the sovereign immunity protection of the king’s officers was that acts done with actual malice and actual intent to harm were not protected. That exception to sovereign immunity was included in the rewrite of the Georgia Constitution in 1991.

When it comes to sexual harassment, the Georgia Supreme Court quickly wrote that protection for citizens out of existence. In ''Ridley v Johns'', the justices held that actual malice and intent to harm described in the constitution did not figure into the GTCA. The consequences for women became serious when the high court granted immunity to a state office supervisor alleged to have conducted a concerted campaign of sexual harassment against a female subordinate for over a year — and threatened to kill her dog and stuff it in her mailbox when she reported him.

He could not be sued because he was immune. That case was decided in 2001, a decade after the Anita Hill hearings.

The trend set by a series of similar decisions is clear. The Georgia judiciary has turned the GTCA, a law meant to allow redress against the state, into an ingenious tool to bar certain unwanted claims such as sexual harassment and sexual assault, if not a heavy blunt instrument to beat down any Georgia citizen challenging the power of the state. It became equally clear that some ingenious lawyer was going to have to devise a way to circumvent this perverse logic.

__Felonies are not official duties under the RICO statute__

That is why, when I sued the state for UGA trying to destroy Dezso Benedek with knowingly false charges, in violation of criminal statutes for evidence tampering and perjury, I did not sue under the toothless GTCA.

Instead, I brought the first-ever claims against the state under the RICO statute, which expressly authorizes lawsuits for damages and injunctive relief for criminal acts committed through state “governmental entities” by state employees — and for acts committed with malice and intent to harm Georgia citizens — with criminal intent, that is — just like the Georgia Constitution says.

Guess what? The state of Georgia has entered a new phase, in which immunity for sexual harassment won’t be the only fringe benefit for state officials. The state establishment is now striving to expand the doctrine to lay claim to sovereign immunity even for state officials who abuse their positions of public trust to commit a string of related felonies — whether falsifying state records with impunity, or stealing taxpayer money without accountability."
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  string(11455) " SI 2 Copy 2  2019-03-04T17:52:10+00:00 SI 2 copy 2.jpg   This is stunning...almost incredible (if not for the info source).
The very idea that it would fly in any appeals court is outlandish.
Worse, the extrapolation of this allowance (as hinted in the latter part of the article) is an open door to police murder ! This would be incredible if not for the info source.
The very idea that this would fly in any appeals court IS incredible.
Worse, as suggested in the latter part of the article, is that it's an open door to police murder. Were it not for the source this would be unbelievable.
That idea that an appellate court judge would allow this is beyond the pale.
Worse, as the author hints in the later part of the article, it virtually invites that someone, somewhere, sometime will get away with murder. humphrey humphreys humphries Sovereign immunity offers impunity for state officials 14409  2019-03-04T16:53:22+00:00 OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Georgia’s Me Neither Moment jim.harris@creativeloafing.com Jim Harris Stephen Humphreys Stephen Humphreys 2019-03-04T16:53:22+00:00  “Since the only alleged contact and interaction between Davis and Standifer occurred during the traffic stop … the sexual assault “arose from the performance of Standifer’s official duties as a patrol officer.”

— Judge Debra Bernes, Georgia Court of Appeals


The Me Too Movement is not about to touch state government employees in Georgia, where, under the current state of the law state officials are safe from lawsuits for sexual harassment and abuse, even rape.


Yes, you may have been thinking all of America is having a #MeToo moment with a movement that is bringing down those who have abused their positions of power to terrorize the opposite sex (and those of the same sex, in some cases). In the last couple of years, the movement seemed to be reaching into every domain — corporate America, Hollywood, Fox News, the federal government, and even into the impregnable bastion of the U.S. Supreme Court that sets the rules. 

Unbeknownst to most Georgians, however, the state has spent decades bolstering immunity to claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault against state officials. We are about to see if that wall of protection is going to break, or if Georgia can once again withstand the tides of public opinion that, in the rest of the country, are moving progressively forward.

The king can do no wrong

When I was first faced with the prospect of suing the state, it was because former University of Georgia President Michael Adams had enlisted Georgia’s then-attorney general in an effort to destroy Professor Dezso Benedek, Adams’ most vocal critic on the UGA faculty. The attack on the professor failed miserably when I was able to prove in an evidentiary hearing that Adams and the attorney general had fabricated false charges against the professor, attempted to manufacture fake evidence, and put witnesses on the stand to give perjured testimony.

As bad as this sounds, it was not legally obvious at the time how to hold these officials with powerful positions in state government accountable for their abuse of that power.

I learned that it was not going to be easy to surmount the protective wall the state of Georgia had been building for itself since the early 1990s, largely in the domain of sexual harassment, at the same time Anita Hill was being vilified by a Senate committee for making sexual harassment claims against Clarence Thomas. There was going to be a little problem with a doctrine from the days of divine right kings, sovereign immunity, that is making a comeback in Georgia.

This idea that the king can do no wrong is preventing state officials from being held accountable even for heinous wrongdoing in Georgia today — from sexual assault to theft of taxpayer money.

In the beginning, there was sexual molestation immunity

That wall of sovereign immunity protecting the state from claims of sexual abuse has been built brick by brick and remains in place today, even as #MeToo gains ground everywhere else. The leading sovereign immunity case — meaning the one most often quoted by the Attorney General and the courts, Davis v Standifer — held that a state trooper could not be sued for sexually molesting a female motorist during a traffic stop. That case is the legal cornerstone of sovereign immunity for sexual abuse, harassment, and many other wrongdoings in Georgia.

The main issue in the Standifer case was whether the trooper was acting within the scope of his official duties as a state employee. One might imagine allegations of a state trooper abusing the power relation during a traffic stop to put his hand up the dress of a female motorist and touch her private parts fell outside the scope of the trooper’s official duties. After all, Officer Standifer was not employed by the state as a gynecologist.

The Georgia Court of Appeals reasoned otherwise, that the trooper was on duty, in uniform, and that performing traffic stops is what state troopers do. Therefore, he was immune from suit. Case closed.

Are we to assume, by that reasoning, the state trooper would have been acting in the course of performing his official duties, and therefore immune from any lawsuit, if his actions had been even more extreme? As long as a state trooper is wearing a badge, does it serve as a shield of sovereign immunity?

No king can be held accountable in a court of law

Sovereign immunity does not just mean that you can’t win your case. It means you cannot get in the courthouse door. In my case, you don’t get the court hearing used to protect Professor Benedek from the tyranny of the bureaucracy. Even if you have the cold, hard evidence to prove your case, you never get to present it to a jury. 

Where did this sovereign-immunity bar to justice come from? It comes from long-ago sources like the writings of Lord Coke in 1608. But in 1991, Georgia had a simpler doctrine: the state’s immunity was waived where the state had liability insurance to cover the claim. This eliminated the threat from large lawsuits draining the treasury, but led to manifest injustice where the state had no insurance coverage.

In 1991, Georgia changed its constitution to do away with the provision that sovereign immunity was waived where the state had insurance coverage. The constitution was rewritten to say that the state enjoyed sovereign immunity unless a statute enacted by the legislature waived the protection by authorizing a lawsuit against the state.

Around the same time the Georgia Constitution was amended, Georgia passed a law waiving sovereign immunity to provide an avenue for bringing tort claims against the state — by people like Davis, the female motorist who was allegedly stopped and sexually molested. But the Georgia Tort Claims Act (GTCA) contained some limitations and exceptions to the waiver of sovereign immunity. When it comes to claims of sexual abuse, the Georgia judiciary quickly used those exceptions to swallow the rule and bar any claims against the state.

Expanding sovereign immunity for rape

Most Georgians would be surprised to learn that a state official cannot be sued under state law for sexual molestation, rape, or a determined campaign of sexual harassment. That is the law on the books in Georgia in 2019.

The state trooper on-duty sexual molestation case was decided in 2005 — before the founding of #MeToo, but certainly not back in the dark ages, either.

But this sovereign immunity protection for sexual peccadillos doesn’t stop with a little hand up the skirt. In Santamorena v. Georgia Military College, the Georgia courts used the same course-of-official-duties rationale to hold that a college and its dean could not be sued for the rape of a female college student in 1999.

Here the judiciary added an extra twist of legal reasoning, that the GTCA says state officials enjoy sovereign immunity from claims for assault. The judges then debated whether rape was immunized because it is impossible to rape a woman without committing the lesser included offense of assaulting her. (That assault exception logic was later extended to immunize state officials for the murder of a prison inmate, Southerland v. Georgia Dept. of Corrections).

It does not seem to strike Georgia jurists as ironic that they are using the course-of-official-duties rationale to protect state employees who are arguably doing the opposite of what their official duties require. They are immunized to endanger instead of protect the public.

Rendering the Georgia Constitution meaningless in sexual harassment cases

Even in more medieval times, one loophole in the sovereign immunity protection of the king’s officers was that acts done with actual malice and actual intent to harm were not protected. That exception to sovereign immunity was included in the rewrite of the Georgia Constitution in 1991.

When it comes to sexual harassment, the Georgia Supreme Court quickly wrote that protection for citizens out of existence. In Ridley v Johns, the justices held that actual malice and intent to harm described in the constitution did not figure into the GTCA. The consequences for women became serious when the high court granted immunity to a state office supervisor alleged to have conducted a concerted campaign of sexual harassment against a female subordinate for over a year — and threatened to kill her dog and stuff it in her mailbox when she reported him.

He could not be sued because he was immune. That case was decided in 2001, a decade after the Anita Hill hearings.

The trend set by a series of similar decisions is clear. The Georgia judiciary has turned the GTCA, a law meant to allow redress against the state, into an ingenious tool to bar certain unwanted claims such as sexual harassment and sexual assault, if not a heavy blunt instrument to beat down any Georgia citizen challenging the power of the state. It became equally clear that some ingenious lawyer was going to have to devise a way to circumvent this perverse logic.

Felonies are not official duties under the RICO statute

That is why, when I sued the state for UGA trying to destroy Dezso Benedek with knowingly false charges, in violation of criminal statutes for evidence tampering and perjury, I did not sue under the toothless GTCA.

Instead, I brought the first-ever claims against the state under the RICO statute, which expressly authorizes lawsuits for damages and injunctive relief for criminal acts committed through state “governmental entities” by state employees — and for acts committed with malice and intent to harm Georgia citizens — with criminal intent, that is — just like the Georgia Constitution says.

Guess what? The state of Georgia has entered a new phase, in which immunity for sexual harassment won’t be the only fringe benefit for state officials. The state establishment is now striving to expand the doctrine to lay claim to sovereign immunity even for state officials who abuse their positions of public trust to commit a string of related felonies — whether falsifying state records with impunity, or stealing taxpayer money without accountability.    Detail from Wikipedia   0,0,11    humphrey humphreys humphries                             OUTLANDISH CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Georgia’s Me Neither Moment "
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