Hal Turner: Chris Christie Declined to Prosecute Me
Oh, this might get interesting. (h/t Main Justice)
A subpoena has been issued for Gov.-elect Chris Christie to appear next month at the federal trial of North Bergen Internet radio host and blogger Hal Turner.
Michael Orozco, Turner’s lawyer, said in an affadavit supporting the subpoena, that Christie, as the U.S. Attorney, knew that Turner was working with the FBI, Christie gave legal advice to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force regarding Turner, and issued a “Blanket Letter of Declination,” refusing to prosecute Turner.
For his part, Christie says he has yet to receive the subpoena, but that he might not be able to testify because it would expose internal deliberations.
Christie said it would be hard to testify because of the internal deliberations and other legal issues that go into the decision-making process.
“It’s very difficult for a U.S. Attorney to testify,” he said. “We’ll see what happens during the road.”
So does the fact that Christie is talking about “internal deliberations” support Turner’s contention that Christie declined to prosecute him, even while several other prosecutors were pursuing such a prosecution?
“republican right wing hate blogger Hal Turner”.
He hasn’t even taken office yet and was subpoenaed. And over this, not something much more obvious.
This could be very interesting depending on where it leads. It could tear the scab right off of this mess.
I’m ashamed for my state….
I thought “internal deliberation” to Christie was whether or not to eat another jelly donut.
Or drive the wrong way on a one-way street?
Are we back now? Looks like it.
Wonder if Christie knows this fellow former NJ AUSA come defendant.
Funny, I was wondering the same thing… circa 2007… New York Times…
Relative to Bergrin being known by Christie, I think you have to distinguish between “knowing him professionally” and “knowing him personally”.
Bergrin practiced in Newark, where the USAtty’s office and the main federal courthouse for NJ (there are three – Newark, Trenton,
Camden) is located. Bergrin was also a long-time and prominent criminal defense attorney in Newark. Thus, it is inconceivable that Christie would not have known who Bergrin was, professionally speaking.
As to knowing Bergrin personally, I think the chances of that are much smaller. Bergrin stopped working in the USAtty’s office about 1990-91 (when Sam Alito was USAtty) when (if you accept even a little of his side of the story) he was effectively run out of the office for getting an internecine law enforcement war started in one of his prosecutions, by having one set of cops go oath-on-oath against a different department’s cops. The details of that saga are not that important and would justify a full-sized post (if not serving as the kernel for a novel) on their own, but suffice it to say that post that episode, Bergrin was pretty clearly persona non grata around the USAtty’s office. That was when he went over to defending (probably, IMHO, for lack of other employment opportunities). (Thus, it needs be mentioned, the whole “prosecutor gone bad” thing you see in the stories are so many crocodile tears. Law enforcement, particularly the USAtty, has doubtless been looking at him for the purpose of finishing him off, waiting for a misstep, for years.)
Christie, OTOH, would have just been starting out into his legal career at the time that was all going on. IIRC, he was a 1984 college grad and a 1987 or 1988 admittee. So, at that time in the normal course of lawyers’ careers, Christie would have just been emerging from “write me a memo” hell and extended living in the law library to get the chance to handle night arraignments or similar grunt work. They were almost certainly operating in different, non-intersecting spheres.
The real issue I have is “Why did this come up now?” I suspect the driving force behind this story hitting the papers now is the combination of Christie’s election and the service of the Hal Turner subpoena on him. The allegations against Bergrin are months, if not more than a year, old. I recall sending EW and others copies of the local stories relative to Bergrin as they appeared in the papers; the tabloids have had a lot of fun with them, particularly the hooker stories.
In reality, the thrust of the Hal Turner subpoena may be useful to NJ Dems to hobble Christie and the NJ Rethugs by pointing out that he declined to prosecute someone who enunciated or gave a forum to views which are not that uncommon in the wingnut base, i.e., that [liberal activist] judges who rule against gun rights should get removed from the bench by any means necessary. They then might be able to use that to further point out the political tilt of Christie’s prosecutions – with him it was all Democrats, all the time and never Republicans. Remember, the NJ Dems retain a large majority n ther Legislature – both houses. Would that they decided to do like the national Rethugs and hold up Christie from filling his admin and the bench with his nominees.
Scribe, if this news had come out a month earlier, do you think it would have mattered?
No.
Corzine was going to lose, anyway. That, for about 4 main reasons (in no particular order):
1. The economy of NJ is, in the eyes of NJ residents, in the crapper. The average NJ voter hasn’t been outside NJ to see that, by comparison, they’re doing pretty well. In NJ, they don’t have radio ads in heavy rotation for places offering “make extra money selling us your blood plasma”. (Seriously.) But, Corzine got the blame.
2. Christie’s selective prosecutions in Hudson County – the allegedly-corrupt pols showily arrested in July along with the alleged kidney-selling rabbi – had the desired effect of depressing the Hudson County Democratic Machine’s GOTV operation.
3. Profound dissatisfaction with the Obama admin being taken out on the Democratic candidates available on the ballot.
4. Corzine ran a campaign in which he attempted to use the OFA mailing list (all those millions of email addresses from last year – remember them) in a top-down operation. They attempted to flip a switch and get the same people who were bottom-up grassroots active last year, to suddenly become similarly active and turn out and do stuff for Corzine. This, after not just ignoring them and their issues for months but actively (or at least passively) acquiescing in the repeated bitch-slapping the Left Base to which Rahm and Obama have been devotng all their discipline time and energy. This switch-flpping-by-email-and-robocall all started around Labor Day but without any groundwork of any significance (no Camp Corzine, if you will, nor anything even remotely like it) having been laid in the months prior. In other words, they ran a conventional, media-centric campaign which opeated primarily to benefit the paid consultants (who took a cut off all the advertising) and mouthed the interest-group platitiudes, while using the OFA list as a “better” mailing list.
FWIW, I reiterate my prediction of some months ago, that Rahm will never be Speaker, because the Democras will lose the House next year. I also predicted that Obama will be impeached for being not a native born-citizen and that he is likely to lose the 2012 election. It will besome sort of record in politics in that Rahm will get two presidents he served to be impeached and lose the House twice and still manage to come out of it alive.
So what are the odds that Christie sees a jail cell before Blago?
None.
Mr. Bergrin was also notable for running the call girl ring (Ashley Dupre) that busted Elliott Spitzer.
I’ll add that this turned up concerning Mr. Bergrin, who worked to defend U.S. soldiers accused of executing suspected AQ insurgents in Iraq in 2006. See the ‘Operation Iron Triangle Triple Murder: “Kill Em All”‘ Section found here: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:SdJuzRTnVScJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Waddington+defended+
Another interesting article concerning Abu Ghraib and Mr Bergrin, who defended one of the seven service members charged with abusing prisoners.
http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/iraq/sg060304.htm
There is some other topical content in this article.
Scribe @14 and10
Thanks. Your comments were interesting and very informative.
I have been wondering just what happened with the corzine campaign .
I felt the pursuit of the christie foias up to the last minute was a sign of a foolish campaign.
Re your point at 14-3, is the Obama admin really that unpopular in nj?
Why might that be?
I’m not sure of the exact level of unpopularity, but setting aside the metric of “how unpopular”, I can suggest two sources of it as among Democrats. With Rethugs, it’s pretty clear he’s not unpopular but is hated.
First, there is the disheartened Dem base who have had to endure repeated bitchslapping on every issue as Rahm and Bam try to make Republicans out of Democrats and repeatedly adopt Republican stances of every issue. The Base people are those who turn out to do the activist stuff and would also include the public employees whose jobs, to some degree, depend on their party loyalty. They are practiced at projecting enthusiasm, which is a different thing from genuine enthusiasm. Lacking genuine enthusiasm is often fatal to effective capaigning, because the campaing won’t grow. It’s lkike getting crappy yeast and trying to make bread: won’t work.
The second part of Oama’s unpopularity among Dems remains the deep-seated antipathy many working-class (and other class) whites have toward him as a black man. Over a year ago (“BP”, i.e., Before Palin) I remember predicting that the Rethugs were almost sure to lose and that their strategy given the then-looming but as yet not realized economic catastrophe would be twofold: first, to go into full crazy mode (much easier when in opposition) and try to make the country ungovernable (much as their militia-nurturing behavior did ack in the pre-94 Clinton days). Second, they would then turn around and propagandize that “see, we told you so. We said everything would go to hell when the n*ggers took over and everything did.”
In regards of the second, that was precisely the point behind Limbaugh (Even pre-inauguration) declaring he wants Obama to fail.
Let no one kid you: there’s a lot of anti-black racism in Jersey and that reaches its expression in a lot of places, one of which is the voting booth.
Thus, IMHO, Obama should have recognized (and I said so at the time) that while reaching across the aisle was a productive and useful policy, it both had its limits and was bound to meet vigorous, if not violent, opposition from Rethuings and their base.
Thus, he was right to have reached across the aisle. There was an odd chance of peeling of a Rethug vote here and there. But, the first time the Rethugs decided to go ino their obstructionist mode, he should have said “I reached across the aisle to join with you in partnership to work for the good of trhe country and, more importantly, its people. Instead, you decided to spit in my face, Ok. Fuck you.”
He had and has the majorities (which he could have used more aggressively, had he not stepped on his own dick when he ratified Lieberman’s campaigning against him by allowing him to retain both seniority and a committee chair – that ratification gave other ConservaDems the license to go wandering of the reservation and undercut any semblence of party discipline, at least on the Right) to push through any legislation without giving in to any Republican amendments. He undecut himself and wound up blowing EFCA out of the water weeks into the administration, to LAbor’s eernal gratitiude. The HCR debacle has sucked up all the air of Washington and, had he planned the bill to meet the requirements of the Democrats and their voters, instead of the insurancecompanies, he would have had Base support and could have been done with it by August 1, as originally promised. Instead, he and Rahm pimped themselves out ot the insurance companies and we are still waiting on Lieberman and his friends.
He could have been more aggressive in putting his people in place. There have been at least one (And I think two) Senatre recesses long enough to trigger the constitutional provision that would facilitate recess appointing everyone and anyone he wanted. But, he still has a quarter or so of his appointments not in place, and scads of Bushbots carrying out Deadeye Cheney’s whims.
And don’t get me started on the multiple ways he’s whored the government out to the Banksters.
Conciliation and forgiveness are great and vital to a healthy person and a healthy country.
But,conciliation is only effective when the loser comes to the winner to offer their acknowledgement of defeat. You can be a magnanimous winner, but Obama acted moe like he’d lost in going to conciliate with the Rethugs.
Forgiveness, as I stated back when the question of how to deal with Lieberman was still a live one, is only real when the person who did wrong comes to ask forgiveness and is genuinely remorseful for their wrongdoing. Otherwise, the person “forgiving” really winds up ratifying the bad behavior and getting more of it because the wrongoer neither pays a penalty nor admits that what hedid was wrong. Anyone who’s trained a dog or raised a rambunctious child could tell you that. Obama, stupidly or intentionally (I don’t know which, nor do I care nor does it really matter), ratified bad behavior and made things orders of magnitude more difficult for himself.
Do I have sympathy for him? No. He’s the President of the United States and has the best of everyone and everything available to him. He’s got scads of really difficult problems to address, but so far he’s showing me he’s mnore interested in making everyone (particularly the money people) happy than in actually resolving anything.
Thanks scribe for this detailed view of nj politics.
My personal concern for the success of the Obama presidency lies in
My sense that Obama is a cold fish who cannot
Relate and cannot emotionally connect with
“ordinary” Americans.
His specialty has always been wowing the
Rich and powerful in private meetings.