No, Reason, Trump’s Newsmedia Lawsuits Aren’t Frivolous and They Aren’t “Assaults On The First Amendment”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It says something, I don’t know what, that Reason, the libertarian magazine and website would choose a non-lawyer to rail against Donald Trump’s lawsuits against news organizations. Jacob Sullum exposes his ignorance when he says, repeatedly, that the suits are “plainly” and “patently” frivolous. Whatever they are, frivolous they are not. A suit is not frivolous under the legal ethics rules (3.1) unless it cannot possibly prevail if the court accepts new theories of how the law should be interpreted. Many said that Trump’s lawsuit against ABC was frivolous. As Nelson Muntz would say, “Ha ha!”

Trump filed a suit against CBS in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on October 31 in response to “60 Minutes'” deceptive editing of its Kamala Harris interview, claiming it violated that state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act and cost him “at least” $10 billion in damages. Trump filed another suit against The Des Moines Register this week claiming that the newspaper publicizing of an inaccurate—let’s say wildly inaccurate presidential poll violated Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act.

I think the Iowa suit is a stretch, and I don’t see how CBS’s “60 Minutes” cheat cost Trump $10 billion. But the Des Moines Register poll was incompetent and irresponsible (the veteran pollster responsible retired after the election) and the “60 Minutes” stunt was as blatant an example of a news organization slamming its fist on the metaphorical scale to get an election result it wanted as we have ever seen.

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As I So Sagely Predicted, Fani Willis Is Toast

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Metaphorically speaking of course.

Looking back, despite having a nightmarish year personally and in my business, Ethics Alarms has had an excellent year. The Fani Wallis scandal first broke early this year when it was revealed that she had hired her adulterous huggy-bear Nathan Wade as one of the prosecutors going after Donald Trump for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election in Georgia. This was a transparently a political prosecution that Willis had not been shy about trumpeting. She then went on a couple of junkets with Wade in which he paid for their enjoyment and entertainment. I immediately stated here that the this created a conflict of interest as well as the appearance of impropriety, and that both Willis and Wade needed to be separated from the case.

Back in May, I included the sordid tale in a CLE ethics seminar for the D.C. Bar, noting also that Willis was incompetent by endangering a high profile prosecution by risking the backlash that in fact occurred when her relationship with Wade was revealed, and also breached her duty of communication by not consulting her client the County through its leadership, regarding her plans to employ a lawyer with no previous criminal law experience because he was sharing her bed. I told the class that the only way Willis or the County could extricate itself from this mess was by separating both Wade and Willis from the case. Eventually a judge ruled that Wade indeed had to go, after which he gave an interview that called into serious question not only his integrity but also his maturity and brain function.

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The Liz Cheney Ethics Zugswang Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Now this is an ethics conflict.

It is increasingly clear that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney broke the law as well as several ethics rules while doing her utmost to incriminate President Trump during the all-Democrat/ Never-Trump Republican J-6 committee star chamber orchestrated by Nancy Pelosi. It is wrong to break the law. It is especially wrong to break the law when you are an elected official and law-maker. Such officials should not only be held to a higher standard, but should be role models for the public that elected them. It follows, then, that when they break the law—it seems that Cheney participated in the destruction of evidence as well as coaching a witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, to lie under oath while unethically meeting with her, a represented witness, without her lawyer being present—they should be treated like anyone else who breaks the law.

If elected officials are not prosecuted and held to account when they violate the law, it is the worst manifestation of the King’s Pass, the insidious and pervasive rationalization (#11 on the list) in which individuals who are famous, popular, powerful, accomplished, productive or successful are allowed to escape the earned consequences of their own misconduct when a less powerful or popular individual would face the full penalties of the law. Such episodes seriously erode public trust in our legal system and power structure. The cliche is “No one is above the law,” but except for the case of indisputable bribery or violent felonies, elected officials are seldom prosecuted, and sometimes not even for those crimes.

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Politifact Lies About the “Lie of the Year”But Everyone Knows What the Real “Lie of the Year” Was

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Wouldn’t you think an alleged ”’factchecking” organization would understand what a lie is? Well, the organization is Politifact, so it’s a trick question. It’s a Democratic Party/progressive propaganda outfit and facts are the last thing it cares about: that group of hacks is easily the most dishonest and unethical of all of these thing, much less trustworthy than second in line from the bottom, which might be Glenn Kessler and the Washington Post’s intermittently fair “The Factchecker” feature. And so it was that as the end of 2024 approaches, Politifact announced that this was its “Lie of the Year,”what Trump said on September 10:

“‘In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs.The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

“With this claim, amplified before 67 million television viewers in his debate against Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump took his anti-migrant, the U.S. border-is-out-of-control campaign agenda to a new level,” Politifact moaned.

But even if the “Their eating pets and wildlife from the parks!” story had been a deliberate lie, it obviously was neither the “Lie of the Year” in either of the two categories relevant to the choice: it wasn’t the most destructive lie, and it wasn’t the most indefensible lie. This was: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Baltimore Ravens Wide Receiver Diontae Johnson

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

It is sad but probably to be expected that so many professional athletes don’t get the ethics thingy. The latest incident: Diontae Johnson, a wide reciever for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, for refused when his coach ordered him to take the field late in the team’s Week 13 game against the Philadelphia Eagles. The Ravens are still trying to make the play-offs, but it wouldn’t matter if the game had no importance to the Ravens’ fortunes at all. Johnson is a member of the team; he draws a salary. Apparently he was angry and frustrated over his lack of playing time since the Ravens acquired him, and had been complaining to teammates for weeks. “Tough noogies,” as they used to say when I was a kid in Arlington, Mass. (An alternative was “tough bunnies.” I never understood that, any more than I knew what a “hosey” was.)

Johnson was immediately suspended.

Wait…why was this a difficult decision? It was an obvious decision. This week the Ravens announced that Johnson was told to stay away from the team as a likely disruptive influence. There was some question why the Ravens didn’t just release him, but apparently that is because they don’t want any other teams strengthening themselves during the play-off run portion of the season.

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A Federal Judge Gets Benchslapped For An Unethical Times Column

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

On May 24, 2024, while Supreme Court Justice Jackson was dreaming of playing “Medea,” The New York Times published an op-ed entitled, “A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?” by Senior Judge Michael A. Ponsor of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.  Judge Ponsor addressed the flying of an upside-down American flag and the “Appeal to Heaven” flags outside homes owned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a controversy covered thoroughly on Ethics Alarms.

The ethics verdict here was that the controversy was contrived, and that the attack on Alito was politically motivated, biased, and wrong. Judge Ponsor, however, opined that “any judge with reasonable ethical instincts would have” recognized that the flag displays were improper because they could be perceived as “a banner of allegiance on partisan issues that are or could be before the court.”

Let me inject here, “Sure, by an idiot!” “The appearance of impropriety is a reason-based standard. “Hey, this SCOTUS judge’s wife flew the same flag that began the HBO John Adams series: that must mean that her husband is in the bag for President Trump!” is not a reasonable perception.

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Introducing Rationalization #19 D: Willie’s Equivocation, or “Maybe I Did Something Wrong”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I decided to give you all a new rationalization to ponder under your Christmas tree, so say hello to “Willie’s Equivocation,” #19D on the list. I realized that this was a sneaky rationalization—by the definition that it is lie someone tells themselves to relieve them of guilt for wrongdoing—when I heard one of Kamala Harris’s campaign consultants say that “maybe they made some mistakes” that may have cost her the election. Maybe? In the run-up to election day, I remember hearing several Democrats say that Harris had run a “perfect” campaign, which is only slightly more ridiculous than saying that “maybe” there were some serious mistakes. Ya think? Nominating Harris was a mistake.

Willie is country music icon Willie Nelson, and his most famous song, “You Were Always on My Mind” says it all. I always found the song irritating, the credo of an asshole. “I was a crummy, selfish, inattentive and self-involved lover, but I was always thinking about you while I neglected you.” Great. 19D is grouped with other sub-rationalization under #19, “Nobody’s Perfect”: 19A, “I Never Said I Was Perfect,” 19B, “It Wasn’t The Best Choice,” and 19C, “It Was a Difficult Decision.” “Maybe I Did Something Wrong” might be the worst of the batch, ducking accountability by blurring the facts with doubt. Equivocation is the use of ambiguous language to conceal or avoid the truth: using “maybe” about unethical conduct when there are “no buts about it” is both cowardly and dishonest.

On the ABC $16 Million Libel Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

ABC News agreed last week to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s libel case over George Stephanopoulos’s “This Week” broadcast in March, in which he repeatedly said, while interviewing Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, that Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape.” He had, in fact, been found liable for sexual assault but not rape, and this had been well-publicized at the time.

Trump sued ABC, and I assumed it was a nuisance suit made for effect rather than in expectation of winning. In fact, I regarded it as this close to being frivolous. That it wasn’t was proven by the settlement.

News media fans (I am not one) and journalism advocates are apoplectic over the settlement, believing that it weakens the “power of the press” to distort, lie and manipulate public opinion as the news media has been doing increasingly and shamelessly in one direction on the ideological scale for more than two decades. Good. The news media is careless, reckless, arrogant and unprofessional, as well as unaccountable. If the ABC defeat makes them a little bit more wary and careful to be sure of their facts, it is to everyone’s benefit, including journalists.

It couldn’t have happened to a better target than Stephanopoulos. He is a partisan hack, and never should have been allowed to pretend to be a journalist after serving as one of Bill Clinton’s henchmen. The Times v. Sullivan case requires that a journalist must demonstrate actual malice toward a public figure before a defamation suit gets past the First Amendment, and in most cases miscreants like George are saved by their own incompetence. I was certain that he would be saved this time— ah, rape, sexual assault, tomato-tomahto, who cares, what’s the difference. Of course, everyone knows except maybe Ethics Alarms vigilante press defender “A Friend” that Stephanopoulos and about 90% of his colleagues are hostile to Donald Trump, but general antipathy is usually not enough to show malice.

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Justice Jackson’s Broadway Adventure: Double Ethics Standards…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Here come de judge!”

Above are some examples of SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson making a spectacle of herself in her Broadway turn last weekend in the musical “& Juliet,” a LGBTQ adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet.” Jackson portrayed Queen Mab, described as a “she/her” character on a production poster, in two scenes written especially for her. “I just also think it’s very important to remind people that justices are human beings, that we have dreams, and that we are public servants,” Jackson told“CBS Mornings” prior to the performance. One of her dreams was apparently to be an actress, long ago. (She made the right choice going into law.)

Except that judges, and especially Supreme Court justices, don’t have the option of doing whatever they feel like or dream about, as least if they are conservative justices. All of the criticism of the Roberts Court in the past few years has been over alleged ethical violations by the Justices making up the 6-3 conservative majority. The Justices appointed by Democrats Obama and Biden are, of course, as pure as Ivory Soap. And yet…

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Week Before Christmas Ethics Sugarplums, 12/17/24

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Just when I thought my holidays couldn’t get any more depressing than they already are, I lost my wallet yesterday and I have no idea how or where. I’m currently without a driver’s license, my credit cards, my insurance cards, and other stuff I need but can’t remember I’m sure. I feel like George Bailey when he goes to Martini’s bar on Christmas Eve to try to pull himself out of his panic and depression and a stranger punches him in the mouth after he begs God to help him find the path out of his dilemma.

On the bright side, nobody has punched me in the mouth. Yet.

The 1992 miniseries Turner Movie Classics produced about MGM has several ethically-inspiring stories. I recently saw it again, and an anecdote that slipped right by me before I started my ethics business impressed me this time. (If you don’t have a hammer, sometimes even a nail won’t look like a nail.) The studio was being torn in the late Forties by an ideological battle between founder and CEO Louie B. Mayer and Dore Schary, who was the head of production. Schary was pushing films with political messages, while Mayer believed that MGM should avoid politics and stick to pure entertainment. (Sound familiar?). Schary had greenlighted a big budget anti-war film, an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” which Mayer vehemently opposed. The film’s director, John Huston, went to Mayer and said that while he believed in the film, he would pull out if Mayer insisted.

According to Huston, Mayer excoriated him for his willingness to quit a creative endeavor because of anyone’s opposition to it. “I’m ashamed of you,” he supposedly said. “In this business, you have to be willing to fight for what you believe in. I don’t want us to do the picture, but if you believe in it, then fight for it.”

So Huston left the meeting and gathered a mob of actors and writers and tried to take over the executive offices.

Okay, I made that last part up….

In other news…

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