ASKS FOR REMOVAL OF JUDGE, VACATING OF ORDERS; EXPEDITED ORAL ARGUMENT
by Sharon Rondeau
(May 19, 2016) — Atty. Larry Klayman, who represents a former confidential informant to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) led by Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio, has filed an emergency petition to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as a result of a May 13 opinion issued by U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow finding Arpaio and several of his staff and former staff in civil contempt of court.
The underlying case, Melendres, et al v. Arpaio, et al, was filed in December 2007 and claimed that employees of the MCSO stopped and detained them based solely on the suspicion that they were in the county as illegal aliens. In December 2011, Snow issued a temporary injunction against Arpaio’s dispatching of immigration patrols to identify illegal aliens.
Complaints were lodged against Arpaio’s office for allegedly failing to uphold Snow’s injunction, after which Arpaio and his chief deputy, Gerard Sheridan, admitted that they did not follow Snow’s order precisely. Arpaio offered to pay $100,000 from his personal funds as restitution, which Snow deemed inadequate, choosing instead to conduct a civil contempt trial.
Arpaio is a six-term sheriff who is seeking a seventh term in November. At his direction, in September 2011, the “Cold Case Posse” affiliated with his office undertook a criminal investigation of Barack Hussein Obama’s long-form birth certificate and Selective Service registration form, finding and declaring both to be “computer-generated forgeries” in two press conferences the following year.
The MCSO confidential informant, Dennis Montgomery, is a former NSA and CIA contractor who Klayman contended in January “has explosive information about the sort of criminal conduct disclosed by not just Edward Snowden, but now the Wall Street Journal” concerning government spying on members of Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other parties expressing their views about last year’s Iranian nuclear agreement, as well as individuals residing in Maricopa County.
Klayman represents Montgomery in another case in which Montgomery was granted immunity by the FBI last August and in a second agreement in November.
During Melendres testimony last fall, Cold Case Posse lead investigator Mike Zullo, who assisted in the collection of Montgomery’s work product for Arpaio, said that Snow was “a victim” of the government’s breaching of tens of thousands of residents’ bank accounts and personal information. While the subject of the investigation of Obama’s birth certificate arose during the trial, Snow did not express curiosity about it, nor how his personal information might have been harvested.
In Snow’s May 13 ruling, he announced a hearing on May 31, 2016 at 9:00 a.m. to “discuss the appropriate relief” for the Melendres plaintiffs given his declaration of contempt against Arpaio and three others. Further, Snow wrote that “It will shortly thereafter enter any applicable orders and determine if it will refer any matters for criminal contempt” (page 162).
In response, Klayman wrote in his May 18, 2016 Motion:
Snow had ordered all of Montgomery’s work product “preserved” and provided to the court-ordered MCSO monitor, despite a Ninth Circuit ruling stating that the monitor’s role was to be limited to correcting “constitutional violations.”
Snow’s ruling invoked Montgomery’s research, conducted at Arpaio’s direction roughly between January 2014 and April of last year, when civil contempt hearings commenced, and characterizing it is fraudulent.
Last summer, Klayman had asked for Intervenor status on Montgomery’s behalf, which Snow denied, along with requests from Klayman and his colleague, Jonathon Moseley, to represent Montgomery in the case on a pro hac vice basis. Klayman’s new filing with the Ninth Circuit requests that the court expedite Montgomery’s appeal filed after Snow denied him intervenor status and is made under “Emergency Motion Under Circuit Rule 27-3.”
Klayman wrote in his brief that “…the Appellant is clearly entitled to the protection of legal counsel including his chosen attorneys admitted pro hac vice.”
Both Klayman and Arpaio’s attorneys had asked Snow to recuse himself from Melendres after Snow’s wife was quoted, without contradiction from Snow or his wife, as having told a fellow restaurant patron that Snow had said in 2011 that he disliked Arpaio and wished to see him voted out of office.
Snow refused, claiming that he maintained impartiality over the case.
The media and Snow himself, in his May 13 ruling, characterized the dispatching of a private investigator by Arpaio’s attorney to investigate the source of Snow’s alleged comments as an investigation of Snow and his wife.
Klayman represents Arpaio in an unrelated case challenging Barack Hussein Obama’s executive actions announced on November 20, 2014 favoring the non-removal and granting work authorization for millions of illegal aliens who have U.S.-citizen or lawful permanent resident children in the country. Thus far, the courts have ruled in favor of 26 states challenging the actions with similar arguments to Arpaio’s, with the U.S. Supreme Court scheduled to issue a ruling of its own by the end of its session in late June.
On page 64 of Snow’s opinion, Snow contended that “Mr. Montgomery committed a fraud on the MCSO.”
Continuing, he wrote:
Klayman alleged that Snow has incriminated Montgomery, who Klayman says is “an innocent bystander” in Melendres, in criminal activity. On page 26, Klayman wrote that Montgomery has been “attacked” by Snow “and the Appellees” and “has been threatened with criminal prosecution.”
Klayman asked the court to grant Montgomery’s pending request to intervene, to admit him to represent Montgomery pro hac vice, to disqualify Snow as a jurist in the case, to schedule “expedited” oral argument, and to “vacate all of Judge Snow’s prior orders.”
Attached to the brief are two exhibits:
Pray for Sheriff Arpaio.
Arpaio is a 6-term sheriff running for his 7th term.
Thanks!