by
Sharon Rondeau
(Jun. 8, 2015) —Hearings in the civil contempt
trial of Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio have been temporarily
suspended as U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow decides whether or not
to recuse himself from the case.
The lawsuit, Melendres, et al v. Arpaio, et
al, was filed in December 2007 and claimed that Maricopa County Sherriff's
Office (MCSO) employees had engaged in racial profiling by targeting Latinos in
neighborhood sweeps and traffic stops without reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Snow claimed the alleged practice violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against
"unreasonable searches and seizures."
In an injunction in the Melendres case
issued in December 2011, Snow opined that an individual's presence in the
country illegally did not constitute a crime prosecutable by state and local
authorities, although previously, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
agency had authorized and trained MCSO employees and others in the process of
apprehending and turning over individuals found to be in the country illegally
under the 287(g) program.
Arpaio is serving his sixth consecutive term as
sheriff and is known for his strong stance against illegal aliens in the
county. Within hours of Obama's November 20, 2014 declared executive actions allowing for millions
of illegals to be granted a stay from deportation under certain conditions,
Arpaio filed a lawsuit, claiming that if
implemented, the actions would cost the county's taxpayers millions more in
expenses.
At the time, CBS News reported that nationally,
"The number of immigrants who lack legal status has remained the
same since 2009 at 11.2 million." However, the correct figure may be 20 million or more.
While Arpaio's lawsuit was dismissed at the U.S.
District Court level by an Obama appointee, an appeal is pending. Another
lawsuit filed by 26 states
challenging the executive actions has been upheld by a U.S. District Court
judge in Texas and the majority of a three-judge panel at the Fifth Circuit
Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
In May 2013, Snow ruled in favor of the
plaintiffs in Melendres, who are defended by attorneys from the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Snow also
appointed a monitor to ensure that the MCSO complied with Snow's order to cease
racial profiling. Arpaio appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court
of Appeals, which upheld the majority of Snow's ruling but opined that the
monitor's role "must only be related
to the constitutional violations."
In March, Arpaio and his chief deputy, Gerard
(Jerry) Sheridan admitted to having failed to follow Snow's orders and offered
a settlement of $100,000 to be paid to the plaintiff class by Arpaio
personally. Snow refused the offer, and hearings in the civil contempt
matter were held on April 21-24.
Arpaio testified on April 23 and Sheridan on
April 24.
During both days of testimony, Snow launched a
pointed line of questioning which appeared to emanate from an article dated June 4, 2014 in
The Phoenix New Times referencing a confidential informant, Dennis
Montgomery. The publication has had an adversarial relationship with Arpaio since at
least 2004. Its co-founders, Jim Larkin and Mike
Lacey, have stated that they launched the newspaper in 1970 "in reaction
to the war in Vietnam."
In October 2007, the Larkin and Lacey were
arrested in the middle of the night after publishing Arpaio's home address and
the contents of subpoenas they received on their website. After spending
the night in jail, they filed suit against the MCSO.
In an article dated October 18, 2007, Larkin and
Lacey stated that their attorneys reviewed grand jury subpoenas described in a subsequent report
as "invalid" by Arizona Superior Court Judge Anna Baca. Baca's order of November 14, 2007 and an AP article dated October 24, 2007
indicated that the subpoenas did not appear to have come from the grand jury.
Then-County Attorney Andrew Thomas quickly dropped the charges against Larkin
and Lacey and fired the prosecutor who had reportedly issued the subpoenas on
his own authority.
It is unclear whether or not Arpaio was involved
in the arrests.
At the time, Larkin and Lacey asked, "Where
in America do you arrest journalists for what they write?"
On August 6, 2013, the home of former Vail Daily and then-Washington Times journalist Audrey
Hudson was raided by the Maryland State
Police, "federal agents" and a member of the U.S. Coast Guard, who
"made a pre-dawn raid of her family home Aug. 6 and took her private notes
and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act." The intrusion was made on the pretext of "a warrant to
search for unregistered firearms and a 'potato gun' suspected of belonging to
her husband."
Hudson had been reporting on the claims made to her by U.S. Air
Marshals that the percentage of flights on which they traveled was lower than
that which was reported to the public in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Lacey and Larkin established a foundation whose website reposts The Phoenix New Times' work and supports causes to which the two
pledged financial support after winning $3.75 million from the
lawsuit. The Lacey and Larkin Frontera Fund states on its home page that
its founders "have dedicated the settlement money arising out of their
arrest by Sheriff Joe Arpaio to fund migrant rights organizations throughout
Arizona."
A $2 million endowment was given to the Walter Cronkite
School of Journalism at Arizona State University with the purpose of
"training journalism students in the particulars of local Hispanic issues
for both print and broadcast coverage." The fund also supports the Arizona DREAM Act
Coalition.
The Phoenix New Times includes opinion and derogatory terms in its articles.
Regarding Arpaio's April 23 testimony, PNT reported that Arpaio
"admitted there had been an investigation into Snow's wife, concerning
comments she allegedly made at a restaurant" after Snow handed a copy of
the June 4, 2014 article to Arpaio by way of the court clerk.
"In my line of work, it doesn't get much
better than a federal judge's handing your column to a public official, and
getting the accused pol to confirm the column's facts, one by one, under oath,"
wrote Stephen Lemons.
The Post & Email has previously reported
that the mainstream media largely mischaracterized the MCSO's probe
involving comments made by Snow's wife. While both Arpaio and Sheridan
testified that neither Snow nor his wife was "investigated," an
Arizona Republic editorial masquerading as
journalism misrepresented that "Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio dug
himself deeper into a hole on Thursday, admitting that he quietly had the wife
of U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow investigated."
The Phoenix New Times characterized the inquiry into Snow's
wife's statements as a "non-investigation investigation." It
also maintains that Arpaio is guilty of "abuse of power," of which he
was exonerated by the U.S. Department of Justice in August 2012.
However, in May 2012, the Department of Justice launched a civil rights lawsuit
against Arpaio's office, claiming that "since approximately 2006, MCSO and
Sheriff Arpaio have intentionally and systematically discriminated against
Latinos. They have accomplished this by stopping Latinos in their vehicles four
to nine times more often than similarly situated non-Latino drivers. In
addition, MCSO stops Latinos on the county’s roads without the required legal
justification. Also, MCSO detains and searches Latinos on the roads, in their
homes, and in their workplaces without legal justification for doing so.
Further, MCSO mistreats Latino detainees with limited English proficiency by
ignoring important requests if they are not made in English and punishing
detainees if they fail to understand orders given in English. Finally, MCSO
files baseless administrative actions, civil actions and criminal cases against
its perceived critics in an attempt to chill free speech."
This image appeared at
whitehouse.gov on April 27, 2011 but was quickly denounced as a forgery by
experts. In September of that year, the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse
commenced a criminal investigation into the image, confirming earlier opinions
that is is a "computer-generated forgery."
The DOJ's lawsuit was filed nine weeks after
Arpaio and Mike Zullo, lead investigator of the MCSO's affiliated Cold Case Posse, gave a formal press conference declaring that
Barack Hussein Obama's long-form birth certificate and Selective Service
registration form are "computer-generated forgeries," a claim that
was expounded upon further in a second press conference on July 17 of that
year.
As a result of Arpaio's sanctioning of the probe
into Obama's only proffered documentation, Zullo announced in the fall of 2013
that a second criminal investigation had been launched unrelated to the
"birth certificate" probe. The Phoenix New Times has
characterized the Cold Case Posse's investigation into Obama's documents as
"ludicrous," and the
mainstream media has failed to follow up with its own probe.
The Justice Department's action is separate from
the Melendres case, and Arpaio's office has utilized different defense
attorneys for each.
In his April 24, 2015 article, Lemons stated that
during his testimony the day prior, Arpaio "admitted" that "he
had been using a confidential informant in Seattle, Dennis Montgomery, and
paying him from RICO and confidential-informant funds to do an investigation of
a vaguely defined conspiracy theory involving the U.S. Department of Justice
and various judges, including Snow himself."
Lemons reported Sheridan as having asserted
during his April 24 testimony that the information provided by Montgomery was
presented to then-Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne. The exact quote
from Sheridan's testimony is, "We went to the Arizona Attorney General
with this information" (p. 143).
On May 22, Arpaio's defense
attorneys filed a motion in which they wrote,
"Defendant Arpaio and Chief Deputy Gerard Sheridan respectfully request
the transfer of this case to a different judge, immediately, as provided by 28
U.S. Code § 144, and the disqualification or recusal of Judge Snow in further
related proceedings concerning Defendant Arpaio and Chief Deputy Gerard
Sheridan."
On June 4 of last year, the PNT described the confidential
informant hired by the MCSO, Dennis Montgomery, as a "scammer,"
relying on a widely-disseminated December 22, 2009 Playboy article by Aram Roston which may be available
only by subscription. [Editor's Note: Embedded links in various articles
based on Playboy's appearing to reference the specific article consistently
lead to Playboy's home page. The Post & Email was, however, able to
find the article linked from seattleweekly.com.]
Roston wrote that on December 21, 2003, law
enforcement was deployed heavily in New York City in preparation for what could
be a "spectacular attack," according to The New York Times, following
heightened terror-attack alerts issued by the Department of Homeland
Security. Roston further reported:
But there were no real intercepts, no new
informants, no increase in chatter. And the suspicious package turned out to
contain a stuffed snowman. This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam.
Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues
to this date, there is one unlikely character.
The man’s name is Dennis Montgomery, a
self-proclaimed scientist who said he could predict terrorist attacks.
Operating with a small software development company, he apparently convinced
the Bush White House, the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies that Al
Jazeera—the Qatari-owned TV network—was unwittingly transmitting target data to
Al Qaeda sleepers.
Roston also reported that Montgomery, whose
business partner was Warren Trepp of eTreppid, was given a "top-secret
clearance from the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office" in 2004.
After Trepp and Montgomery parted ways in early 2006, each filed a lawsuit against the
other. According to Roston:
Trepp obviously believed Montgomery’s technology
was real because he pursued the lawsuit with a vengeance. Montgomery, on the
other hand, accused Trepp of trying to steal his inventions. Montgomery claimed
he needed to bring the U.S. intelligence establishment into the case. He went
so far as to name the Department of Defense as a defendant.
Eventually Director of National Intelligence
John Negroponte weighed in. What secrets—what embarrassments—could be exposed
if Montgomery and Trepp were to depose intelligence and military officials?
Negroponte issued a declaration that warned of “serious, and in some cases
exceptionally grave, damage to the national security of the United States.” He
invoked the state secrets privilege. The judge in the case issued a protective
order; the secrets of eTreppid’s government business would remain untold.
The transcript of a December 19, 2009 interview Roston conducted with NPR titled "The Man
Who Conned the Pentagon" is still available.
Montgomery has sued New York Times
journalist and author James Risen over several chapters in his book, "Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and
Endless War" published in October of last year, which allege that
Montgomery defrauded the federal government with his proffered docoding
technologies. The lawsuit states that "Plaintiff Montgomery is
illegally used as a whipping boy by Defendants in this regard to sensationalize
and sell more books for a great profit."
Dennis Montgomery was just another
overweight gambler in the casinos of Reno, Nev., until he claimed to have
developed a technology that could decode secret messages embedded in the
videotapes of Osama bin Laden that were broadcast on the Al Jazeera news
network. On the basis of that claim, he won millions of dollars in government
contracts. Mr. Risen says that around Christmas of 2003, Mr. Montgomery
influenced the Bush administration to seriously consider shooting down civilian
airliners. After French government investigators concluded that Mr.
Montgomery’s operation was a hoax, Mr. Risen reports, the C.I.A. quietly
dropped him. Mr. Montgomery then moved on to the United States Special
Operations Command, which paid his company $9.6 million for a facial
recognition technology that supposedly could identify terrorists observed by
cameras attached to drones. Mr. Montgomery’s company eventually collapsed in a
welter of debts and legal claims.
Risen, who reported on "the Bush
administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping," was himself a target of the U.S. Department
of Justice. In an August 2014 editorial published at The New York Times,
columnist Maureen Dowd wrote:
The Justice Department is trying to
scuttle the reporters’ privilege — ignoring the chilling effect that is having
on truth emerging in a jittery post-9/11 world prone to egregious government
excesses.
Attorney General Eric Holder wants to
force Risen to testify and reveal the identity of his confidential source on a
story he had in his 2006 book concerning a bungled C.I.A. operation during the
Clinton administration in which agents might have inadvertently helped Iran
develop its nuclear weapon program. The tale made the C.I.A. look silly, which
may have been more of a sore point than a threat to national security.
Former Attorney General
Eric Holder collected journalists' phone records and named Fox News reporter
James Rosen as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a case brought
against a State Department employee for leaking classified information. Holder says
he now regrets his action against Rosen.
A young reporter writing on Risen's plight decried the Obama regime's
"attempting to make journalism illegal." Last summer, The
Columbia Journalism Review reported:
Ten months after the Committee to Protect
Journalists issued its scathing report “The Obama Administration
and the Press,”
journalists and potential whistleblowers continue to face unprecedented
surveillance and legal jeopardy. The report, authored by Leonard Downie Jr.,
former executive editor of The Washington Post, remains grimly up to
date as it describes “the fearful atmosphere surrounding contacts between
American journalists and government sources.
The US Department of Justice seems determined to
intensify that fearful atmosphere—in part by threatening to jail New York
Times reporter James Risen, who refuses to name any source for the
disclosure in his 2006 book State of War that the CIA bungled a dumb and
dangerous operation with nuclear weapons blueprints in Iran.
Risen's Wikipedia page reports that he is
himself a victim of CIA
surveillance. In January, The New York Times reported that Risen's subpoena
to testify at the trial of a former CIA agent had been quashed. Before
Attorney General Eric Holder left office, he reportedly recommended
"revisions to Justice Department’s guidelines that offer journalists more
protections when prosecutors want to review their phone records, emails or
notes."
An article published on June 3 in The Phoenix
New Times claimed that Montgomery's work
"was an attempt to influence the court, to compromise it, to conflict
it," which is contradicted by Sheridan and Arpaio's testimony referring to
alleged breaches of Maricopa County residents' bank accounts and the email
accounts of federal judges, to include Snow.
18 USC § 4 states:
Whoever, having knowledge of the actual
commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and
does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person
in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under
this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
While being characterized by the PNT as "a criminal enterprise," it took action
to report evidence of illegal activity to the authorities. Sheridan
testified that in addition to Horne, the information from Montgomery had been
presented to "a member of the FISA court in Washington, D.C." who
"confirmed that these were typical wiretap numbers." Sheridan
included in his testiomony that "the sheriff and I were concerned about
the CIA wiretapping our phones."
According to Roston, Montgomery worked with the
CIA, which forwarded the information Montgomery provided to the George W. Bush
White House.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the FBI
raid of a former eTreppid software developer's home in search of valuable
source codes was unconstitutional and that the judge who granted the search
warrant was "misled" by an agent, allowing the FBI to become involved
in a case that should remain in civil court.
The codes, critical for software used by
the U.S. military in the war on terror, are worth millions and are at the heart
of a battle between developer Dennis Montgomery, eTreppid owner Warren Trepp
and his friendship with Gov. Jim Gibbons...
U.S. District Judge Philip Pro's order
affirmed U.S. Magistrate Valerie Cooke's November ruling that Reno FBI special
agent Michael West violated Montgomery's constitutional rights by giving the
court inaccurate information to obtain a warrant to search his house in March
2006.
Pro told the U.S. attorney's staff to
return the hard drives taken in the March 1, 2006, raid at Montgomery's south
Reno home...
When Montgomery refused to turn over the
source codes to eTreppid, Flynn said in court documents that Gibbons and Trepp
directed FBI officials in Reno to raid Montgomery's home to get them back...
T
he MCSO has not revealed further details as to
the exact focus of Montgomery's work on its behalf. On April 23, Snow
suggested that activity by "the DOJ" was part of Montgomery's probe,
while Arpaio rejoined that information Montgomery provided "seemed to
indicate that someone was penetrating in the e-mails of our local attorneys and
others, judges, that type of thing, which we can't prove."
In questioning Sheridan, Snow continued to
invoke the U.S. Department of Justice (page 185 of transcript):
You know, with all due respect, we did
hear the sheriff say yesterday that he -- some pretty critical comments about
the Department of Justice. Do you remember those?
Maybe I misremember. I'll scratch that.
Let me ask you this: If in fact the
sheriff thought there might have been some improper collusion between me and
the Department of Justice, can you blame him if he wanted to investigate that
further?
Has Judge G. Murray Snow
made assumptions about the Montgomery/MCSO investigation?
Neither Arpaio nor Sheridan implicated the
Department of Justice in his testimony in regard to any
"collusion." On April 23, Snow and Arpaio exchanged the
following (pp. 141-143):
Q. Who else was named by Mr. Montgomery
as being targets of this DOJ investigation?
A. I believe the -- our local law firm,
the attorneys working for us on the Department of Justice lawsuit.
Q. Who else?
A. You mean other judges around -- I
don't remember.
Q. Anybody that Mr. Montgomery said that
-- that the DOJ was bugging their phones, or otherwise intruding into their
private communications.
A. Well, I know I was.
Q. You were one. Your law firm was one.
A. Jerry Sheridan, I believe. And there's
other local officials.
Q. And I was?
A. You -- yes.
Q. Did you keep any of the materials that
Mr. Montgomery has provided you?
A. I don't have them.
Q. Who does?
A. I believe Zullo does.
Q. And is he subject to your control --
A. Yes.
Q. -- as a member of your posse?
A. Yes.
Q. I'm going to direct you that you tell
Mr. Zullo that he keep all those documents. All right?
A. He what?
Q. He keep and maintain all of those
documents.
A. Yes.
Q. I'm going to direct you that nothing
pertaining to any of this investigation be destroyed, including confidential
informant numbers. Do you understand that direction?
A. Yes.
Q. Who else was aware of these
investigations within the MCSO?
A. I'm not sure. Because of the
sensitivity, we were trying to keep it quiet.
Q. Now, I think in addition to the
investigation that may have involved me and my phone or any contact or tapping
by the Department of Justice, you indicated that there were investigations made
into members of my family. Did you indicate that?
A. That had nothing to do with
Montgomery.
Q. What did it have to do with?
A. I believe there was a, as I say,
e-mail that came to me.
Q. And do you still have that e-mail?
A. We may have it, yes.
Q. I'm going to direct you to keep that
e-mail. What did the e-mail say, to the best of your recollection?
Snow then ordered that all of the materials
provided by Montgomery be given to the monitor, Robert Warshaw, whose several
companies garner millions from "policing" police departments,
predominantly in larger cities such as Oakland, CA; Detroit, MI; and Niagara
Falls, NY.
The media has not raised the issue of whether or
not the Fourth Amendment rights of account-holders, judges, the MCSO and their
attorneys, whose bank accounts, phone lines and email accounts were reportedly
breached by a government entity, were violated.
The article was reprinted with permission from Sharon Rondeau, The Post & Email
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