Ethics Dunces: Assistant U.S. Attorney Rudy Renfer and the U.S. Department of Justice That Hired Him

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Oh perfect.

Unfortunately I don’t have a YouTube clip of someone singing, “Our laws are in the very best of hands.” This is indefensible.

An Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Rudy Renfer, was caught red-handed submitting a court filing containing fabricated quotes, misstated case law, and even fake regulatory language. Magistrate Judge Robert T. Numbers II issued an order after being alerted to made-up quotations and misstatements of case holdings in the government’s submissions. The court said it had uncovered multiple defective cites to case law and at least two invented quotations attributed to the Code of Federal Regulations: these were not mere typos.

Renfer told the court he had accidentally filed an unfinalized draft. Judge Robert Numbers, however, said both the accuracy of the brief and the Renfer’s excuse were dubious. The issue became whether a government lawyer could be trusted to explain how his brief was prepared.

Judge Numbers ordered senior leaders from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the E.D.N.C. to appear at a show cause hearing, warning that the office itself could be sanctioned unless it could prove this was a single breakdown, not the result of chronic supervision failures.

Of course it was the result of supervision failures, because the Justice Department is incompetently run, has hired too many inexperienced lawyers, and obviously isn’t training the legal staff properly, including in the matter of legal ethics.

At the show‑cause hearing, Renfer told Judge Numbers that after feeling like he had botched a draft, he “felt panicked” and had an AI bot rewrite the brief, then filed it “believing he had reviewed it.”

Give me a break. How do you “believe you had reviewed” a court document when you haven’t? I can’t even make that claim when I post a typo-filled essay on Ethics Alarms. The peril of not sufficiently reviewing something you submit to a court under the implied guarantee that it is truthful and accurate is Professionalism 101, and doing so when you have used artificial intelligence to generate content is a clear ethics violation.

Renfer said the decision to use AI was the worst of his career. Ya think? It isn’t as if these episodes of AI hallucinating cases haven’t been well-publicized, especially in legal publications. I’ve been teaching lawyers about the problem since the summer of 2024! There are websites that track these episodes, but never before has a Justice Department lawyer been so unethical and incompetent as to be caught engaging in such misconduct. Government lawyers are supposed to be governed by higher standards. This was the standard of a desperate DEI-admitted first-year law student.

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An Ethics Quote of the Week From President Trump, and an Ethics Hero Award for Steve Witherspoon (Yes, That Steve Witherspoon!)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I went to bed last night having decided that the first post here today would be about President Trump’s blunt, characteristic, in-your-face reaction to the death of Robert Mueller, who led the cynical and destructive Axis of Unethical Conduct effort to cripple Trump’s first term with a contrived, partisan plot based on false accusations that he and his campaign “colluded” with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The quote, an ethics quote because of the natural debate it fosters, an unethical quote because it intentionally breaches societal norms that dictate being respectful of the dead in the immediate aftermath of their deaths and a President should always model the best behavior for the public, and an ethical quote because it is true, was..

“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

It’s not a close call whether this was an ethical thing to state in public, which Trump did on Truth Social. It wasn’t, and isn’t for many reasons. It is gratuitously cruel to Mueller’s family for POTUS to say such a thing immediately after their loved one’s death. It accomplishes nothing but relieve Trump of some of his apparently inexhaustable back-up of bile. It makes the Trump Deranged hate him even more than they already do, which qualifies as deliberately being divisive, something else leaders should never do. And it accomplishes nothing positive. Such an act does, however, take another step in making this Ethics Alarms 2015 post look as wise and prophetic as it was.

“See? I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”

Before I sat down to compose a post that would have essentially said what I did in far fewer words above, I decided to check whether Ann Althouse, the red-pilled Madison Wisconsin retired law professor/bloggress had posted on the quote for her followers. She had, briefly. But what did I discover in the comments to her post was that the topic had provoked none other than our own Steve Witherspoon into not only doing battle with the vocal Trump Deranged and Mueller defenders (in truth defenders of the anti-Trump plot Mueller knowingly participated in) but being allowed to do so by Althouse!

Ann carefully moderates her commenters, and seldom allows an extended back-and-forth between commenters, a policy that Ethics Alarms, obviously, does not embrace. Steve (who was frequently derided on EA along with Steve-O-in NJ by self-banned Ethics Alarms troll “A Friend”) was measured, fair, polite, balanced, ethical and relentless as he was swarmed by Trump-Deranged attackers like the “The Birds” going after Tippy Hedren in the attic. Unlike Tippy however, Steve knew what he was getting into.

He was courageous, and he was right. Meanwhile, his adversaries’ comments were weak and illogical; the main defense of Mueller was that he was a decorated Vietnam veteran. This is rationalization #21, Ethics Accounting, or “I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that,” as regular readers here know.

Here’s the full transcript of Steve’s interactions regarding Trump’s quote. I will have occasional asides in brackets.

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Ethics And Movie Thoughts Upon My Annual Viewing of “The Ten Commandments”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The only times I have written about one of my all-time favorite movies and guilty pleasures, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epics of epics “The Ten Commandments,” I concentrated just on one aspect of the movie, the most ethical and historically significant part, the striking quote put in Moses’ ( that is, Charlton Heston’s) mouth by seven credited screenwriters.

It comes in the memorable scene where the Pharoah Seti,  played by the great Sir Cedric Hardwicke, asks his adopted son and the man he had wanted to designate his successor why he had chosen to join the Hebrew slaves, and had just told the king, as Moses was confined in chains, that if he could, he would lead his people out of Egypt and against Seti, though he loved the Pharoah still. “Then why are you forcing me to destroy you?” the heart=broken old man exclaims. “What evil has done this to you?”

Moses answers:

“That evil that men should turn their brothers into beasts of burden, to be stripped of spirit, and hope, and strength – only because they are of another race, another creed. If there is a god, he did not mean this to be so!”.

Less that a year before the film went into theaters to become one of top box office hits in Hollywood history, on Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus.  On Dec. 6, 1955, the civil rights boycott of Montgomery city buses, led by Rev. Martin Luther King , began. January 1956 saw Autherine Lucy, a black woman, accepted for classes at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, the first African-American ever allowed to enroll.  On Jan. 30, the Montgomery home of Martin Luther King, Jr. was bombed. February 4 saw rioting and violence on the campus of the University of Alabama and in the streets of Tuscaloosa.  On the 22nd of that month, warrants were  issued for the arrest of the 115 leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott. A week later, courts ordered Lucy, who had been kicked out of the school, readmitted, but the school expelled her.

On many civil rights timelines, 1956 is not even mentioned. The History Channel’s civil rights movement time-line leaps from Rosa Parks in 1955 to 1957, when “Sixty Black pastors and civil rights leaders from several southern states—including Martin Luther King Jr.—meet in Atlanta, Georgia to coordinate nonviolent protests against racial discrimination and segregation.” But in 1956, audiences all over America were marveling at “The Ten Commandments,” with its anti-slavery message placed in a religious context over and over again.

This was a civil rights movie with a strong civil rights message packaged as a Bible spectacular, and it could not have been better timed. In fact, I believe it was a catalyst, and remarkably one fashioned by one of Hollywood’s most hard-line conservatives, Cecil B. DeMille, a supporter of the Hollywood blacklist and Joe McCarthy. If there was a 20th Century equivalent to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the novel credited with making previously apathetic citizens aware of the horrors of slavery, it was DeMille’s movie. It could not have been an accident. 

There is a lot of ethics to ponder in the movie, though the nearly four-hour marathon is so full of other distractions that it isn’t a mystery why most viewers miss the  ethical problems involving loyalty, gratitude, whether the ends justify the means, and the burdens of leadership. When Moses is considering giving up his royal status (and likely ascension to the throne of Egypt) to join his people, the Hebrews, as slaves, Moses is asked by Nefertiri (Ann Baxter in a scenery-chewing tour-de-force), his lover and would-be future queen, if he wouldn’t serve his people better by achieving power as an Egyptian monarch than by accepting the fate of his heritage.  I noticed today that my late wife Grace, in one of her rare forays into the comment wars, wrote in part,

“Nefertiri, the witch, had bad advice for Moses. Luckily he didn’t take it. I learned early from my father, who was high in the administration of a Protestant denomination (and a PhD. philosopher), and who could have been elected a Bishop if he had played his cards right. When one day I suggested to him that he should play the right game (stay out of the Civil Rights Movement, e.g., and DON’T do things like march from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King — too controversial at the time), so that he could actually be elected Bishop and then would have the real power to make the kind of positive change he wanted to make. His answer to me was, “I’m only afraid that if I played the game well enough to be elected Bishop, by the time I got there I might have forgotten what I wanted to do with that power in the first place.” God or no God, too few people (like elected officials, e.g.) stop to think what they give up — and who they owe — to get elected, and what it does to their attitudes, ethics, and behavior when they get there. Moses saw the same handwriting on the wall. Stay an Egyptian long enough and pretty soon you’ll start liking it enough to forget your heritage and your grand plans for freeing the Jews.  The courage of Cecil B. DeMille is absolute; and despite the current inability (or because of that inability) for Hollywood to create this kind of uber-spectacular — with all its casting problems and occasional hilariousness — this classic is worth seeing more than once.”

Continue reading →

Combating Progressive Ethics Rot On Campus: How Hard Is It? THIS Hard…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

NYU canceled 13 culture, identity and faith-based graduation ceremonies last week.

This was a sane and necessary move, though NYU’s weenie administrators blamed the decision on the “current political climate” rather than making the important,unequivocal statement that all graduating students are the same in the eyes of the school, and that splitting up graduations by tribes, nationalities, races and sexual orientation is divisive, destructive and irresponsible.

Now student groups are demanding that NYU rescind the order. Good job, NYU! You did this. You indoctrinated them to think this way.

As it stands, there will be a single graduation celebration at the school’s Paulson Center.“There can’t be stoles or alumni speakers, all of these things that would typically be part of a graduation can’t be a part of that end-of-year celebration,” a member of the affected LGBTQ+ Affinity Group. “To me, that’s a pretty startling restriction of student speech.” 

That’s because you haven’t learned what restricting student speech means. Go look up the Supreme Court decisions. Show us the rulings that say a university has to promote the fragmenting of the graduating class in official group, tribe, or religious ceremonies.

Students who don’t want to celebrate their graduation with those evil whites, those bigoted straights, those mean Christians, those genocidal Jews and toxic males have organized an activism group called “Our Stories, Our Stage” to lobby the school to reinstate the events. There is also a petition with garnered 1,400 signatures, claiming that the cancellations are an attempt “to appease the current administration.”

“Whether you’re in your first or last year of your undergraduate or graduate degree, faculty, alumni, or ally, the cancellation of the affinity groups is setting a dangerous precedent for anyone associated with NYU, or other higher educational institutions,” the petition reads. “NYU has now shown it is willing to throw its students under the bus in exchange for money.”

Boy, what a damning, biased, illogical petition. Showing students that the school supports unity, comity and mutual respect among all Americans and human beings is “throw[ing] its students under the bus.”

NYU did not respond to requests for comments. My comment is that this sick and corrosive culture has been allowed to flourish on campuses for decades, and purging it is a massive if not a hopeless task.

From the Ethics Alarms “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Let me moderate that: the above comparison of Variety headlines about deceased artists (over two articles by the same writer) “speaks for itself” in that it vividly demonstrates the familiar biases and double standards warping values and analysis in the news media, progressive bubbles, and the realm of entertainment especially.

But allow me to add a few observations:

1. No artist’s political participation or views should “overshadow” his or her legacy, reputation or success in a creative field. I know I have written about this often, perhaps too often, but it seems to be a concept most people have a hard time accepting. I hold that the same principle applies just as strongly to an artist’s personal life and character. Our most brilliant comedians and comic actors, for example, with a few exceptions, were terrible human beings when they were not performing.

2. Chuck Norris was nowhere near as outspoken as Reiner regarding politics; he also was a lesser star in Hollywood’s firmament. His was a narrow genre, and one mostly favored by conservatives. Like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, his public stance on many issues was consistent with what one would expect from one of his characters. I have found that in such cases, the public opinions are frequently part of the artist’s calculated myth-making.

3. As I have noted before, I love many of Reiner’s films and regard him as, if anything, an under-rated director. He also made some of the most idiotic statements about political matters that I have ever heard or read, including from brain-damaged social media users. (Riener’s Ethics Alarms dossier is embarrassing. EA has never mentioned Norris except with this post.) That doesn’t change my assessment of his achievements as an artist any more than the certifiably demented pronouncements and rants by Robert DiNiro, Bette Midler, and Morgan Freeman (among many others) cause me to enjoy their talents less.

4. The fact that so many progressives seem unable to function this way is, in a word, sad. It also is strong evidence that the left side of the ideological divide is emotionally ill.

_______

Pointer: Chris Martz

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Jump Ball” (or “Brilliant Guest Post by Ryan Harkins”)….

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Yesterday, in near shock that a good and once wise friend posted on Facebook the head-exploding meme by a simple-minded activist named Jenny Carter, above, I challenged Ethics Alarms readers to perform the thorough defenestration of that smug brain-garbage it deserves. I had neither the time nor energy. Responding to my metaphorical Bat Signal, erudite veteran commenter Ryan Harkins came through like a champ, authoring the masterpiece below, a Comment of the Day if there ever was one. Here is his rebuttal, really a guest post in length and quality, in response to the post, “Ethics Jump Ball”:

Dear Jenny,

You can make strawmen of our principles all you want, and argue all day against them, but all that will gain you is a smug feeling and “likes” from your friends, and make absolutely no inroads with the MAGA crowd whatsoever.  But I know that your entire intent is to make me waste my time answering you.  So, perhaps foolishly, I will oblige.

To begin, a little groundwork.  A dilemma is only a dilemma if you really only have the two options.  If there is any other alternative, such argumentation falls apart.  Second, if you are going to address our principles, maybe you should determine what those principles actually are.  For example, being pro-Second Amendment is not about shooting people.  It is about the right to bear arms against, especially, an overbearing, tyrannical government.  Being pro-life does not mean that you believe that no one should die, ever.  Third, in any given situation, there may be more than one principle in play, and to ignore that to score rhetorical points is arguing in bad faith. 

So let’s get into it.

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Ethics Jump Ball…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

A Facebook friend posted the above dishonest, fallacy and false-fact riddled meme as if it was discovered truth. I broke my recent rule of not responding to such garbage by saying, as nicely as I could, “You know, re-posting illogical appeals to emotion like this doesn’t help.” I almost wrote, “I know you’re smarter than this. Why did you post it?” I then listed a few of the logical and factual disconnects in the screed, but didn’t have the energy to be thorough.

I’m hoping one of you does. I think I count 14 factual and logical fallacies, but there may be more. This is how social media makes the public dumber and makes productive discourse impossible.

Another challenge: which is the most ludicrous of those statements? My vote, I think, goes to “If people being executed in the street is fine, it was never about pro-life.” It’s hard to make dumber statement than that.

Most Inexcusably Incoherent Statement In A Report: The Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The sentence:

“The correct ask in this report is not the ask of an institution being condemned. It is the ask of an institution being held to its own standard by people who still believe it can meet it.”

That authentic frontier gibberish—I’m still not sure what it means, and I’ve read it a dozen times—is in “A Narrowing Gate, Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and its Peers | 1967-2025,” a report by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance. The report found that that Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard University has dropped to about 7% in 2025, its lowest level since before World War II and the lowest among Ivy League schools with reliable data.

I was going to write about the report itself, but if Jewish alumni of Harvard end up writing like that, maybe its a good thing not as many Jewish students are attending Harvard.

This is the Executive Summary. The report seems to be implying that anti-Semitism at Harvard has to be the reason for the unexplained drop, because none of the other possible factors it identifies explain it. Apparently Jewish applications to the school haven’t fallen off sufficiently to cause a 50% reduction, though I don’t know why. On national television Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay told a Congressional committee that she considered anti-Jewish demonstrations in Harvard Yard to be acceptable free speech, and was unable to articulate a basic truth, which is that anti-Semitic demonstrations on a college campus constitute unethical and intolerable conduct that creates a hostile environment for Jewish students. Gay’s eventually firing for scholarly misconduct (not mealy-mouthed acceptance of campus enmity toward a minority) could not have provided aspiring Jewish applicants much confidence.

We also learn from the report that Jewish alumni had to gather the data for the report because Harvard no longer compiles data on Jewish students.

All of that is interesting, but when I read that statement, I lost interest in examining the report further, and lost any confidence in the people who prepared it. Maybe it’s a hangover from listening to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for four years and Donald Trump for a decade, but if someone can’t communicate clearly, I can’t have confidence that they are thinking clearly either.

The Women’s History Museum Mess

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ugh. I won’t call it an ethics train wreck, because this is really another subset of the nation’s victim-mongering/tribal/white male vilification problem as well as the already running “DEI Ethics Train Wreck” and the “Trans Activism Ethics Train Wreck.”

Of course we have to have a Women’s History Museum. There are four historically “marginalized” groups, and women are the largest and longest suffering of them all. D.C. already has huge museum dedicated to African Americans, and there is a Smithsonian museum called the National Museum of the American Indian. Women have every right to feel snubbed in the current obsession with group identification. You know an LGBTQ+ museum on the Mall will be next: how could it not be?

Conservatives who argue, as one did in the comments to a recent online item about the museum, “[The museum] continues to foment the balkanization of America. The accomplishments of women are just that: accomplishments. Their fruits are enjoyed by all, not just by those of the gender/race/religion, etc of the person who made the accomplishment” are trying to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped and won the Kentucky Derby. This is “National Women’s Month.” The Democrats had a national convention celebrating “The Year of the Woman” (with Bill Clinton as a keynote speaker, but never mind…). Half of the arguments for voting for Hillary and Kamala was their lady-parts. We’re stuck with U.S. women seeing themselves as a special, separate, aggrieved and superior group for the foreseeable future, probably forever.

But there is a problem: the party that at least pretends to be the “party of women” can’t figure out what a woman is. This week House Democrats blocked legislation to establish the “Women’s History Museum” because of an amendment attached by Republicans stating, “The Museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women in the United States.”

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California Apparently Doesn’t Believe in Following the Constitution

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is unethical. I wonder how the state got that way, and if anything can be done about it?

ITEM: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals pointed out to the state that its obviously First Amendment-violating ban on firearms advertising was illegal, and now California must pay more than $1.3 million in legal fees to the plaintiffs. The law was virtue-signalling to California’s gun-phobics; I doubt any honest Constitutional law expert anywhere thought it could pass judicial scrutiny.

Assembly Bill 2571 (AB 2571) prohibited “firearms industry members” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) from advertising, marketing or promoting any firearms or “firearms-related products,” in a manner that is “designed, intended, or reasonably appears to be attractive to minors.” Wow, how about that statutory drafting?

Safari Club International and the other plaintiffs filed suit arguing that the statute violated the First Amendment by restricting commercial speech. They also argued that the law was unconstitutionally vague (Ya think?), a Due Process violation, and that it discriminated against a legal industry and makers of legal products. The rulings agreeing with them are here and here.

ITEM: Voters in California, according to a poll conducted by the Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, support a proposed “wealth tax” on billionaires with 50% of California voters in favor of the measure and only 28% objecting to it. The concept comes from the Marxist brain of Bernie Sanders, who insists that people who resent other American having more money than they do should be able to just take it.

This scheme probably violates state and federal laws as well as the Constitution. The 5th and 14th Amendments block uncompensated “takings.” California’s 0.4% cap on personal property tax would seem to be a problem. The law also looks like an illegal bill of attainder, targeting specific individuals.

The California Communists who are pushing this bill seem to believe that the state’s billionaires will just be good little proles and hand the cash over. Gavin Newsom, who has no discernible principles, thinks the proposed law will make him look bad when he runs for President, so he says he’s against it.

Maybe all the billionaires, millionaires, entrepreneurs, companies and American citizens will abandon the Golden State to the illegal immigrants, shop-lifters, assorted criminals and censors, leaving California to emulate the dystopian Manhattan of John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York.” Surely there must be a less draconian remedy, but I have no idea what it is.