Saturday, August 21, 2010

The Justice Department: The Road Not Taken

On January 15, 2010 two officers from the Justice Department interviewed me at my residence about a law enforcement matter arising out of my job termination by the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld and later litigation concerning that job action.

The officers, oddly, seemed sympathetic to Akin Gump and seemed to suggest that my employment concerns were illegitimate.

In the 1990s the U.S. Secret Service (Philip C. Leadroot, S.A.) carried out a threat investigation of me; Agent Leadroot assumed a sympathetic stance regarding my employment problems.  "Sometimes people gang up on a person in the workplace."  "You're suing Akin Gump?  That's good."

Why didn't the Justice Department officers say to me in 2010: "We sympathize with your employment problems.  You have a right to talk about your employment problems in your blog.  But we have some concerns and questions about specific statements you have made on your blog, and we'd like to ask you some things."  That was not their posture.  They seemed to question my right to publish statements about my employment problems on the Internet, my right to obsess about any subject matter, my right to have hostile feelings about Akin Gump and my right to publicly expose obvious flaws in a decade-old judicial opinion.

It was as if the Justice Department, in a case involving the murder of an abortion doctor by an anti-abortion advocate, took sides in the abortion debate, questioning the right to oppose abortion, questioning the right to point out flaws in Roe v. Wade (a decades old case), and questioning the right of a person to dedicate his time to opposing in a legal manner the right to abortion.  In such a case, the statements and writings of Chief Justice John Roberts would satisfy Justice Department criteria for carrying out a threat investigation of him.

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