JustiaGate: CEO Tim Stanley Admits Publishing “Mangled” Supreme Court Opinions – The Oyez Connection – SCOTUS Response.

On Oct. 24, 2011, in an interview with CNET, Justia CEO Tim Stanley finally spoke publicly to address JustiaGate.  This was four days after the release of my report concerning 25 US Supreme Court cases scrubbed by Justia at their “Supreme Court Center”.  Stanley admitted that the cases identified in that report had, in fact, been published in a corrupted manner.  The CNET report also indicates that the corruption of data was more widespread than we knew:

“Tim Stanley, told CNET today that some citations were mangled because of a programmer’s error…’The issue was not limited to the cases these folks are focused on.’ “

[See Dianna Cotter’s investigative report released earlier today, “JustiaGate: The Cover-Up Continues“, which dismantles Stanley’s regex defense.]

Prior to the CNET interview, the public was able to witness firsthand the progression of changes made to the 25 cases which cited Minor v. Happersett.  However, concurrently with the release of Tim Stanley’s only public comments on the matter, Justia also placed “robots.txt” code over their entire Supreme Court Center domain.  This drastic response withdrew from the Wayback Machine all previous snapshots of every Supreme Court opinion ever published by Justia, not just the 25 exposed here.

When asked about this cover up by CNET’s Senior Political Correspondent, Declan McCullagh, Stanley stated that the cases were removed,  “because they have errors in them, not to cover up this issue.”  But removal does, in fact, cover up the issue to the detriment of the public at large, and more specifically to the detriment of those who relied upon the false data.

In a separate report concerning Justia’s great influence over the online legal community (it’s impossible to hyper-link paid services such as Lexis and Westlaw) [UPDATED: Nov. 2, 2011 – Lexis does actually provide a free database for SCOTUS cases, but that service does NOT provide hyper-linked cases and Lexis versions of those cases do NOT appear in Google searches], a 21 minute audio interview with Stanley from Jan. 2007 emerged, wherein he made the following comments illustrating who the primary users of Justia are:

“The primary users of it tend to be lawyers or attorneys looking for legal information or looking for case-law, or looking for information from some of the legal blogs that are online. And the other sort of major group of users tends to be law students or other students in the college environment or high schools that are looking for information on the US Government and sort of how the court system works.“

Obviously, the legal system does not work if cases are “mangled”.  Instead of hiding the corrupted data, Justia must publicly document the damage to each case so that those who visited Justia between 2008-2011 may know the falsehoods they relied upon.

Justia’s stated mission is, “To advance the availability of legal resources for the benefit of society“.  Hiding the evidence does not benefit anyone but Justia (and Obama).  It bears repeating that those cases remained altered for approximately three years.  And now that Stanley has removed previous versions of the cases from the Wayback Machine, there is no telling how many corrupted cases were fed to the public by Justia servers thereby affecting the national dialogue on POTUS eligibility and perhaps other important issues as well.

Justia must comprehensively inform the country as to the exact damage done to our national body of Supreme Court case law.

Because of the dire implications of this legal tragedy, Tim Stanley has a duty to reveal exactly how much false data was published disguised as genuine opinions of the United States Supreme Court.  Otherwise, for those who were misled, directly or indirectly (via news, blogs, comments, etc.), Justia’s versions usurped the law which therefore became subservient to Justia’s corruption. 

Not only attorneys were affected, students were too.  And students don’t have access to expensive paid services such as Lexis and Westlaw.  Justia would have been the last stop for those students.  They had no reason to question the authenticity of the corrupted cases.  Those who relied upon Justia’s “mangled” opinions are entitled to know the depth of the deception.  Only a complete documentation will enable those affected to change their documents and/or their minds according to the genuine opinions of the US Supreme Court rather than remaining in a state of educational subservience to Justia’s failures.

Instead, Stanley has taken the opposite approach and has covered his mistakes up by removing access to them from the Wayback Machine.  This deprives affected persons from knowing if their research at Justia was accomplished by using corrupted opinions.  The entire academic community, legal or otherwise, should demand a forthright revelation from Justia.

JUSTIA’S MANIPULATION OF THE OYEZ PROJECT CREATED THE FALSE IMPRESSION OF US SUPREME COURT ENDORSEMENT.

If Tim Stanley does not thoroughly document and release all of the “mangled” information, the US Supreme Court should firmly insist that he do so.  And not simply because the Court must be vigilant that its rulings be respected, but also because Justia gives the false appearance of being endorsed by the US Supreme Court.  Justia has created this false appearance by including the following header with every published US Supreme Court opinion, “US Supreme Court Cases from Justia & Oyez”  (click image to enlarge):

Justia is one of the prime benefactors of the Oyez Project:

“The Oyez Project at Chicago-Kent is a multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work. It aims to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. “

While Oyez is listed at the US Supreme Court’s website as a source of Supreme Court information, Justia is not.

However, Justia has used its status as a prime benefactor of Oyez to piggy-back upon Oyez thereby giving the false impression that the US Supreme Court endorses Justia while it does not.

Justia’s ruse here is a sad attempt at buying a second-hand SCOTUS endorsement, and it’s another creepy example of the non-existent ethics emanating from Justia’s subversive servers.  Furthermore, Justia’s headers have implicated Oyez in the scandal, since the header implies both Justia and Oyez are responsible for having published the mangled cases.

Oyez does not publish a phone number at their site.  I left a message at the Oyez.org feedback box under the listed category of “erroneous information” which included the following query:

“Since every case published by Justia has a header which states, “US SUPREME COURT CASES BY JUSTIA & OYEZ”, Oyez is now implicated in the scandal.  I would appreciate a comment addressing both the scandal, and the header at Justia.” 

I will report back if the query is answered.

OFFICIAL US SUPREME COURT RESPONSES TO JUSTIAGATE.

I initially received a candid and pointed response concerning the alleged subversive activity by Justia from a staffer at the US Supreme Court’s Public Information Office.  But, at this time, Patricia McCabe Estrada, Deputy Public Information Officer, has asked me not to print the original response, requesting that I print “no comment” instead.  Out of respect for the Court, I have refrained from publishing the initial comment.  I have faith the US Supreme Court will request that Justia bring the hidden information documenting the full extent of the mangled cases to the attention of the public so those who erroneously relied upon Justia’s corrupted versions of US Supreme Court rulings may know the truth of the law.

If the US Supreme Court does nothing more to address this scandal, I will publish the initial comment along with all of my correspondence between myself and the Deputy Public Information Officer since that correspondence acknowledges the prior comment, and bears witness to our email discussions concerning it.

Leo Donofrio, Esq.

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Look Who Cited To Justia For Supreme Court Holding.

[UPDATE: Sat. Oct 29, 2011, 8:46 AM – Cindy Simpson weighs in on JustiaGate, top story at American Thinker.]

There’s a bogus astroturfing mantra going ’round the blogosphere which sounds something like this, “No real lawyer would ever use an online web site like Justia.”  The talking point is thoroughly debunked by a very powerful legal source.  Ever heard of Perkins Coie?  They are the law firm which defended Obama in eligibility suits before he was elected.  Ever heard of Bob Bauer?  He is a partner in Perkins Coie and was General Counsel of Obama For America 2008, then White House Counsel, and is now back in private practice as Obama’s personal attorney to lead the charge in the 2012 election.

Perkins Coie is as powerful and shrewd a law firm as has ever existed and hey, what do you know kids, their mega influential legal blog cited to Justia in an article published there on June 28, 2010, “Business Methods Patents Survive, But Not Bilski’s Patent“:

“The next key decision was Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1978)[3].  The process claims there involved a practical application (updating the value of an alarm limit for ending a chemical reaction), but the only novel feature of the process was the specific manner in which the alarm limit was calculated…

[3] http://supreme.justia.com/us/437/584/case.html“

So much for the “real lawyers don’t use online web sites like Justia” try.  Perkins Coie certainly did.  Now, post JustiaGate… not so much.

Lawyers, when going before a judge must Shepardize their cases.  This is done via two paid online services, Lexis and Westlaw.  If you cite a case without “Shepping” it, you risk not knowing whether the case has been questioned, followed or overruled.

But many lawyers are also bloggers and commentators.  They appreciate the easy access of Justia for such tasks as well as initial research for a client, superior or associate.  Justia was absolutely trusted by the legal community to return accurate judicial opinions.

The entire legal research aspect of the site was created for that very purpose.  Justia isn’t some fly by night operation.  Tim Stanley was the big man on campus championing free online research.  And Justia has been universally praised by attorneys and law schools for its free publication of Supreme Court cases and other federal legal documents.

Robert Ambrogi’s “LawSites” blog post, “Justia Does FindLaw One Better“, reported that Justia had, right out of the box, taken the place of Findlaw on the web as a predominant online legal resource in Feb. 2007:

“Look at Justia’s front page today and one is reminded of the FindLaw of old. More to the point, Justia today is becoming every bit as valuable as a legal portal as FindLaw once was.”

A Lewis and Clark Law School blog elaborated on Ambrogi’s praise as follows:

“Add in the very-Web 2.0 addition of search links to related dockets, news, blogs, and websites, and you find a fantastic one-stop source of information given very many thumbs up by the very many editors of BoleyBlogs!”

The University of Wisconsin Law School stated the following adoration of Justia in Oct. 2007:

“Justia, a relatively new legal portal, is quickly becoming an indispensable research tool.”

The Mass Law Blog, written by Lee Gesmer of Gesmer Updegrove LLP, hyped Justia for its ability to follow federal cases via RSS feeds back in Oct. 2008:

“Assume you’re interested in Jones Day v. Blockshopper, pending in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois: Go to Justia.com and click on the link US District Courts’ civil case filings. You can search for the docket of any federal district court case to find the case in Justia.”

AUDIO INTERVIEW CONCERNING THE TECH DESIGN OF JUSTIA FROM JAN. 2007

Justia CEO Tim Stanley gave a 21 minute podcast interview to Ken Chan of “Law And Legal Research” in Jan. ’07 after Tim was awarded the Google Enterprise Search Superstar award.  In that interview, Stanley was asked who Justia was created to benefit.  Here is Stanley’s candid reply:

Stanley: The primary users of it tend to be lawyers or attorneys looking for legal information or looking for case-law, or looking for information from some of the legal blogs that are online. And the other sort of major group of users tends to be law students or other students in the college environment or high schools that are looking for information on the US Government and sort of how the court system works.

Chan: The homepage, if you will, mentions the indexing of all of the Supreme Court cases… What would you say is the primary piece of information that somebody is coming to your web site to find, or is there one?  Is it a wide basis of information or is there a particular type of information that somebody is coming to find?

Stanley:  In most cases they’re looking for a variety of types of legal information.  There is a large percentage though that are looking for Supreme Court information, and looking at particular Supreme Court cases.  And one of the nice things we’ve done using the Google Mini is we’ve indexed all the Supreme Court cases, and we have a nice sort of inter-linking among the cases, so you can go from one case, you know, quickly link over to a previous case.  And the Google algorithm when it’s indexing the cases does a very good job in terms of prioritizing the cases based on those that sort of have more value to the legal community.

Stanley tells us that the primary users are lawyers, not lay people.  Also, keep in mind that when he gave this interview in ’07, none of the cases had been sabotaged yet.  The cases were in the database with full case names, citations, and no text had been removed.

Now examine what Google says about their Google Mini plug and play search engine device:

“Unlike high-maintenance systems that require frequent tweaking and recalibrating and that overwhelm systems administrators with constant demands for attention, the Google Mini doesn’t need a tech support baby-sitter. You simply plug it in, configure it, and let it run. The Google Mini does the rest, freeing tech support personnel to fulfill their primary task – supporting their users…

No manual document tagging or search customization required. Google believes the technology itself should do the heavy lifting – not you, the administrator. To that end, Google’s search relevance technology automatically considers over 100 different factors when determining search results, eliminating the need for costly and confusing manual search customization.

Sounds marvelous, easy and totally bitchin’, and that’s what Stanley thinks too:

Chan: When you initially made the decision to install a search engine on the site, did you have another technology that you were using, or was the Google your first choice?  Where did you come from?

Stanley: … The key for us was really the simplicity of getting it up and going.  So it was extremely easy for us just to plug and play it, plug and play the Google Mini, point it to our database and immediately index it, as well as the quality of the search results.  So, the algorithm in terms of producing relevant results based on the user’s query is much higher than most of the other search engine technology we’ve used.  And if you combine that with the ease of use, or ease of set up, it was a simple decision for us…

Chan: What problems were you solving when you had to make the simple decision?

Stanley:  We needed to get about, over, I’d say somewhere around 75,000 documents indexed relatively quickly, like within a couple of weeks and make sure we had the full interface for it and sort of everything else ready to go.  And what was sort of driving that was we wanted to have a release of the Supreme Court Center by the time that the court opened last October. 

And for us, when we looked at some different alternatives, like doing some of our own programming, or using some of the other search technologies out there, the Google Mini, you know, from our standpoint was just a very simple to use easy solution.  We could just install it, index all the data, pull back the data, change the style sheets a little bit, and it just worked.  And so that was really one of the driving forces for us.  Just as important though to us was the quality of the search results, being able to pull back the relevant documents when people did searches.

Chan: You mentioned the crawling algorithms a couple of times.  Did you have to configure those or did you use the ones out of the box?  How did you do that?

Stanley: We pretty much used the ones out of the box.  We did a little bit of, sort of additional programming, in terms of getting some searches across the party names of the cases.  So there was some additional work that we did there.  And a little bit of work on the citations searches, most of which were relatively straight forward, very quick text searches.  But as far as the full text goes, the full text searching goes, that was all done with the Google Mini.  And then we pulled that result back up, pulled that back to our servers, and we repackaged it with some style sheets that combine in the citation and party name searches into one overall search result.  (Emphasis added.)

Let me break in to point out that this candid statement back in Jan. ’07 appears to disprove Stanley’s recent claim that a “Regex” error was responsible for all of the alleged sabotage.  The only tweaking of the Justia search engine undertaken by Stanley’s team concerned very “straight forward” programming pertaining to the party names and citations, but Google Mini was solely responsible – according to Stanley – for full text searching.

Therefore, Stanley’s recent comments given to CNET are further called to question, since, in some of the cases, entire sentences of the Court’s opinion were removed.  If Justia programmers didn’t mess with the full text searches, why were specific portions of the text removed?

“The ease of just getting it done and not having to worry about it was huge.”

Stanley:  The main key I think for us is, how can we optimize our engineering resources.  Because we have quite a few programmers, it’s very much a, sort of a computer programming-centric organization.  And we really want to focus on things that are unique, and that we need to program.  And to the extent that we can get plug and play elements like the Google Mini in place that will save some of our programming time, that allows us to do many more projects and go much quicker.

Chan:  That is the answer I was looking for.  If you look at any of the implementations that we’ve talked about with the Google Mini, we’ve found that it really gets down to, I need a quality competent search engine, and I don’t have a lot of time, and I don’t have a lot of resources to spend on that project because I’ve got a lot of other things that I want to work on.  And it sounds to me like that solved that problem for you.

Stanley:  Yeah, I mean absolutely.  I mean, basically, and I can’t really sort of understate this, since we’ve spent lots of time building you know, or I’ve spent lots of time with other search engines and building different search products, the ease of use of just getting it done and not having to worry about it is huge.  And then again, the other item I always come back to is that the quality of the search results is very very high.  

The JFK Magic Bullet Theory Aint Got Nothin’ On Justia’s Rogue Regex Anti-Birther Error Theory.

All of the cases were working just fine with no sabotage before, during and after this interview (for at least one full year).  Then suddenly, miraculously even for the lucky Obama, Tim Stanley’s wonderful search engine powered by Google Mini went nuts on him.  His lame excuse that a mysterious coding error was to blame for the precise sabotage of 25 cases citing Minor v. Happersett, the only US Supreme Court case to have directly construed the natural-born citizen clause in the context of a citizenship precedent (by a unanimous court) suddenly became birtherproof… by accident and with no human intervention whatsoever.

You know, I might believe this if Chris Angel worked for Justia.  Tim Stanley?  Wait for it… noz sew mutch.

Tim claims that the alleged innocent mistake is responsible for the surgical removal of the case name, “Minor v. Happersett”, along with the official citation… across all 25 cases.  We are also asked to believe that various references to The Slaughter-House Cases, Scott v. Sandford and Osborn v. Bank of United States were also innocently removed by the same error, despite the fact that those cases are all tied to the POTUS eligibility debate.

Furthermore, key sentences which discuss points of law relevant to Obama’s eligibility must have also been innocently edited out, even though Stanley stated to Chan in ’07 that Justia didn’t do any programming at all with regard to the full text of the cases.  Additionally, we must also accept that at the time of this interview, the miraculously wonderful Google Mini was banging out perfect versions of these cases up until the run up to the election in 2008… when all 25 cases suddenly expunged necessary search terms specifically tied to the POTUS eligibility issue. Timing is everything, right?

But there’s more… we must also imagine that Stanley’s crack “programming-centric” team, headquartered in the same town as the mighty Google, somehow never found out about the rogue code from 2008 until three years later when I published my first report on the Pope and Boyd cases in July 2011.  Can you believe Tim never even wrote to say thank you?  A nice picture of Stanley’s dog was called for at the very least.  Oh c’mon.  Like I’m going to beat those Silicon Valley freaks to the punch on their own damn code.  Get the flock outta here.

But there’s still more…much much more you have to swallow to buy Stanley’s rogue error theory.  You must also accept that the “Regex” error could defy astronomical odds in that the “.*” mentioned by Stanley could pick and choose erasure of the missing case components while the rest of the text was left just fine.  And that’s where Dianna Cotter’s next report will come in very handy tomorrow.  She has interviewed a university professor with a Ph.D. in computer programming who has gone on the record to say that Stanley’s theory is nuts.

Eventually, the computer programming community is going to take Stanley down for this crap.  And the legal research community will follow suit.  This story is not going away.  Just as the dual nationality issue has now over-taken the BC issue, JustiaGate is here to stay and on this point scientific minds will prevail.  The silicon whiz kidz are not going to stand by Justia.  The techy punk rockers, hackers, Google nerds… etc. all will know that Stanley’s story is BS.

OCCUPY JUSTIA!

Folks, you have the evidence you need to protect the Constitution.  And the stakes are as high as they come.  It’s really up to you out on Main Street.  If you are lazy with this, the Constitution may never recover.  Mark my words.  A full investigation needs to take place.

The Congress was complicit in not vetting the candidates.  But Justia has given them an out of epic proportions in that Justia’s bogus cases changed the national dialogue.  If Congress was fooled by Justia (and perhaps this plays into that CRS memo on eligibility which is being looked into more carefully now), they have another chance to make it right.

Protest is in the air.  The movement on the streets is supposed to be about ending secrecy and forcing the powers that be to come clean.  Tim Stanley made $37 million creating databases from our national body of case law.  Then his company took criminal liberties with that body of law, sabotaged the living hell out of it, and probably changed national history in the process too.  You want to talk about the 1% vs the 99?  Here’s a textbook example, kids.  Right on!  Power to the people.  Occupy Justia.

That being said, I can only imagine what kind of pressure Tim Stanley is under right now.  He almost certainly did not undertake this sabotage on his own initiation.  Tim Stanley is now in the very scary position of holding the evidence capable of putting Obama’s administration in true jeopardy.  If Stanley was asked, forced or paid to sabotage the cases and/or to maintain them that way after Obama became President, then high crimes were committed.  Therefore, Quo Warranto is not the only possible option on the table any longer.

Impeachment is now in play.

by Leo Donofrio, Esq.

Hat tip to Dianna Cotter for finding the Perkins Coie cite to Justia.

JustiaGate: CEO Tim Stanley Claims Innocence After Blocking Access To Wayback Machine Snapshots Of All Supreme Court Cases Published By Justia.

Yesterday, in a stunning development, Justia CEO Tim Stanley blocked Wayback Machine access to all US Supreme Court cases published by Justia.com.  This is the epitome – the textbook definition even – of hypocrisy.  As Dianna Cotter previously reported:

“Justia founder Tim Stanley has for years prided himself and his companies on principles of ‘freedom of information’.  On June 19th, 2008, Stanley addressed the Legislative Council Committee at the Oregon State Legislature with the following…

‘In the end, we both recognize the importance of providing the public with online access to our nation’s laws because such actions promote understanding, participation in and respect for our democratic institutions and legal system.’

Furthermore, commenting on a legal dispute Justia had with the State of Oregon, Stanley stated:

“We agree that public policy demands that state laws remain in the public domain. To otherwise permit the State of Oregon or any other governmental body to restrict access to the laws that govern all of us would make a mockery of the legal doctrine that all persons have presumed knowledge of the law. “

Does Tim Stanley believe that his publication of Supreme Court cases should be held to the same open standard?  Not so much.

Stanley is blocking access to Justia’s previous publications of US Supreme Court cases which are in the Public Domain.  Nothing being blocked is owned by Justia… other than the evidence our nation needs to have an open dialogue.  Stanley’s blockage makes a mockery of his prior statements concerning free legal information.  Past versions of SCOTUS cases which were – until yesterday – open to the public, exhibit with absolute clarity the changes made by Justia to these cases between the years 2006 and 2011.

Back in July when I published my initial report about the Pope and Boyd case tampering, Justia quietly fixed the cases and blocked access to prior versions at the Wayback Machine without commenting or noting the revisions.  Justia also – knowing where the bodies were buried before the rest of us – fixed the other 23 cases on their site… but they failed to block access to the Wayback Machine for those cases.  This enabled me to look back in time and see the progression of changes made by Justia to the text of 25 cases which cited “Minor v. Happersett”.  That progression is now blocked by Justia.

JUSTIA CEO TIM STANLEY SPEAKS.

Yesterday, Tim Stanley spoke to CNET.  Declan McCullagh reported the following comment by Stanley regarding Justia’s removal of cases from the Wayback Machine:

“Making the ‘Justiagate’ story more attractive–it’s now popped up on at least scores of political blogs and was WorldNetDaily’s top story today–was that Justia decided to remove some of its Web pages from the Internet Archive.

Stanley, Justia’s chief executive, said that was ‘because they have errors in them, not to cover up this issue.‘ “

Before we address Stanley’s comment, let me clarify that all (not “some”)  web pages of previously published Supreme Court cases have been removed from the Wayback Machine by Justia.  Not just the cases I have discussed…but all US Supreme Court cases are now blocked.  If you go to Justia’s page listing all Supreme Court cases by US Supreme Court Reporter volume number and click on any volume – i.e., volume 88 – it will provide links to every case in that volume.

When you plug the URL for the volume index into the Wayback Machine, you can still access a list of prior snapshots of the index.  Here is a link to a snapshot of that page in 2008.  If you then click on volume 88  (or any other volume), you get robots.txt blocking in your face.  You can double-check by plugging the URL for any current Justia SCOTUS opinion into the Wayback Machine.  This will also place robots.txt blockage in your face.

Stanley alleges that he’s removed the evidence because the pages “have errors in them, not to cover up the issue“.  But removing the pages does cover up the issue.

Stanley also alleges:

“The issue was not limited to the cases these folks are focused on. We’ve had internal discussions on how to make sure this does not happen in the future with additional visual and parsing checks.”

McCullagh’s softball technique allowed Stanley to get away without specifying whether the other cases pertained to citizenship and/or POTUS eligibility.  (McCullagh also labeled me a “conservative attorney”.  Total bunk.  I am more liberal than Obama on various social issues and more conservative than Limbaugh on fiscal and Constitutional issues.  Declan also mis-stated that my eligibility case before the Supreme Court was brought in 2009.  Not true.  It was filed with the Court before the 2008 election.  Awesome reporting, dude.)

THE DEBUNKED CODING ERROR THEORY.

The “coding error” theory was first alleged as an innocent answer to JustiaGate by Alec Rawls at his “Error Theory” blog.  He noted that the first snapshots of the Justia cases citing Minor v. Happersett contained non-clickable text.  Alec then alleged that when Justia modernized their cite by adding hyperlinks to the cases, innocent coding errors caused the cases to contain mistakes.  He then came to a naive conclusion that all of the alleged sabotage was unintentional.

The coding error excuse was mirrored by Tim Stanley in his comments to CNET:

“Justia’s chief executive, Tim Stanley, told CNET today that some citations were mangled because of a programmer’s error, not an effort to rewrite history. ‘This has nothing to do with President Obama and it is not a conspiracy,’ Stanley said. ‘When we discovered the issue, we corrected the script and the cases now render correctly.’ “

Alec posted a comment here at my blog asking me to reply to his report.  My response is embedded with his question.  Our dialogue continued here.  And Alec finally became convinced that the innocent coding error theory was bunk when he found a screenshot I posted back in July.  Alec has updated his report with a full retraction, stating:

“Justia has been deleting politically inconvenient facts from its online Supreme Court record, which as Leo points out is actually a criminal offense: misrepresenting state documents.”

The innocent code error theory was only made possible due to Justia’s Wayback Machine flush job.  Had the full timeline of snapshots remained available to public scrutiny, everyone would have been able to see that the 25 cases which cite to Minor went through not one – not two… but three revisions.

The innocent code error theory first alleged by Rawls assumed that Justia accidentally ran into coding errors when they modernized the cases.  He claimed that sloppy mistakes made by Justia programmers were responsible for every alleged sabotage across the 25 cases.

However, the Wayback Machine chronology of Justia’s pages citing Minor exhibits that all of the cases which did not originally include hyper-linked citations between 2006-2007 became properly hyper-linked prior to the first snapshot to include tampering in 2008.  The intermediate hyper-linked versions include the case name, an official citation to the first page of the case, plus a second citation to the exact page referred to by the Court.  And no text was missing from the opinions of the court as was evident later in the tampered versions of Wong Kim Ark and Pope v. Williams.

So, in 2006-2007, the cases appear at Justia with perfect citations to Minor but no hyper-links.  Then, by early 2008, the Wayback Machine showed that all of the cases were updated to include hyper-links.  Then, by November 2008 the third revision took place and all of the cases were sabotaged by stripping the case name, and removing the official citation from every case, while some sentences were also removed in a few cases along with citations to other important Supreme Court opinions which are part of the natural-born citizen issue’s judicial lineage.  Then, after I published about the tampering in July 2011, all 25 cases were revised again to fix the tampering.

That Tim Stanley only went on the record with an official comment after scrubbing the entire history of Justia’s Supreme Court case publications is very telling.  Perhaps Stanley thought we were all so focused on the date when Justia first sabotaged the cases that we might overlook the intermediate benevolent revision accomplished perfectly devoid of errors.  But since the cases were successfully hyper-linked by 2007, and remained that way through the first snapshots showing the sabotage by Nov. 2008, there was no motive for Justia to revise the case links again.  But they were revised again to include the sabotage.  And the sabotage remained in the cases until after I published about Pope and Boyd in July.

SCREENSHOTS OF THE FIRST REVISION.

Boyd. v. Nebraska, 143 U.S. 135 (1892).

Alec Rawls retracted his report when he found a screenshot I published back in July for the last snapshot of Boyd v. Nebraska before the tampering happened.  The Feb. 19, 2008 snapshot shows it was hyper-linked to an official citation – 21 Wall. 162 – as well as a secondary citation to 88 U.S 167, the specific page  in the opinion where Justice Waite’s quotation can be found.  Then on Oct 2, 2008, the first snapshot of the tampered Boyd case in the Wayback Machine appears with the case name removed along with the official citation.  By removing this data, anyone searching for Supreme Court cases citing Minor would be led to a maze of judicial confusion.

Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U.S. 815 (1971).

The final snapshot of Rogers v. Bellei which shows the pre-tampering hyper-linked correct citation to Minor is from Feb. 19, 2008.  That snapshot for this important reference which cites Minor for citizenship precedent includes the name “Minor v. Happersett”, an official citation – 21 Wall. 162 – and the specific citation to the correct page, 88 U.S 167.  Compare that to the first tampered snapshot of Rogers from July 24, 2008 which again removes the case name and the official citation.  (Here is a collage with side by side comparison.)

Below are two more examples illustrating the pattern of revisions at Justia.  The first link for each case shows the first snapshot at the Wayback Machine where the citation to Minor is not hyper-linked back in 2006.  The second screenshot shows the final snapshot of the first revision where the cases were perfectly hyper-linked.  These two screenshots have identical citations except for the revised hyper-links.  The third screenshot shows the first Wayback Machine snapshot with the sabotage.  And the fourth link is to a collage of the three side by side.

City of Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S 55 (1980)

Sept 19, 2006 – Minor citation is correct but not hyper-linked.

Feb. 21, 2008 – Minor citation is correct and hyper-linked.

June 27, 2008 – Minor citation is tampered.

Collage of the above.

Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U.S. 1 (1944)

Nov. 13, 2006 – Minor and Slaughter-House Cases citations are correct but not hyper-linked.

March 11, 2008 – Minor and Slaughter-House Cases citations are correct and hyper-linked.

July 24, 2008 – Minor and Slaughter-House Cases citations are tampered.

Collage of the above.

The Slaughter-House Cases citations were tampered along with Minor in Snowden v. Hughes, and this is very important.  Tim Stanley’s claim that this was all an innocent code error is further strained considering that 8 of the 9 justices from Minor v. Happersett decided the Slaughter-House Cases where the Court stated:

“The phrase, “subject to its jurisdiction” was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.”

Stanley is peddling a response to JustiaGate which requires one to accept that all 25 cases were accidentally altered to remove the words “Minor v. Happersett” and the official citations to Minor, while various portions of relevant text pertaining to the eligibility issue were also removed from other cases along with the Slaughter-House Cases name and it’s official citation… along with further references to citizenship precedents such as Osborn v. Bank of United States and Scott v. Sandford (removed from US v. Wong Kim Ark) which features the following definition of natural-born citizen:

“The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.”

Sound familiar? It’s the same definition of natural-born citizen as in Minor v. Happersett.  That’s some incredibly goofy code you got there Timmy.  Your code sure seems well-educated in the POTUS eligibility cases, bro.

Come clean.  The country will appreciate and forgive you.  And you will feel better.  The truth is waiting in Mountain View, California.

by Leo Donofrio, Esq.

JUSTIA.COM SURGICALLY REMOVED “MINOR v HAPPERSETT” FROM 25 SUPREME COURT OPINIONS IN RUN UP TO ’08 ELECTION.

[UPDATE #3 8:54 AM Oct. 24, 200 – Justia.com has suddenly placed robots over their entire site.  So much for Justia’s mission, “To advance the availability of legal resources for the benefit of society.”  Here is a link to the Wayback Machine’s URL search of Roe v Wade, a case which has nothing to do with POTUS eligibility.  Here is a link to the Wayback Machine’s URL search for Minor v. Happersett.  Both searches return the following statment at the Wayback Machine: “We were unable to get the robots.txt document to display this page.”  This activity operates as an admission by Justia.  A criminal investigation is required.]

[UPDATE #2 9:14 PM Oct. 23, 2011 – JustiaGate Is Top Headline Story at World Net Daily.

[UPDATE: 5:03 PM Oct. 20, 2011 –  Dianna  Cotter’s report “JustiaGate” appears at Examiner.com]

New evidence conclusively establishes that 25 U.S. Supreme Court opinions were sabotaged then republished at Justia.com during the run up to the ’08 election.  My prior report documented the scrubbing of just two cases.  But last week, a third sabotaged case was discovered which led to a thorough examination of all US Supreme Court cases which cite “Minor v. Happersett” as they appeared on Justia.com between 2006 and the present.

Since Justia placed affirmations on each tampered opinion which state “Full Text of Case”, personnel may also be guilty of violating 18 U.S.C. 1018 by intentionally passing off tampered versions of US Supreme Court opinions as if they were official versions published by the US Supreme Court.

At this point, we do not know who committed these acts of sabotage.  Since neither Obama nor McCain meet the Supreme Court’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” in Minor v. Happersett, the deception might have been undertaken on behalf of either one.

Regardless of who you supported in 2008, or whether you agree with the assertion of Minor’s relevance, every American should be outraged that 25 Supreme Court cases were surgically sabotaged and then passed off to the public as if the tampered versions contained the “Full Text of Case”.  This is the very definition of “Orwellian” fascism.  It’s propaganda.  And there is no place for it in the United States.  The sacrifices for truth and justice which created and have sustained this nation are wantonly debased by the subversive deception emanating from Justia.com servers.

We do not know at this point if Justia personnel were behind this or if their site was hacked.  That being said, Justia’s reaction to my last report mirrored the deception of the sabotage.  Instead of addressing the proof, Justia quietly and with stealth un-scrubbed the evidence without acknowledging or addressing the issue at all.  And they placed  “.txt robots” on their URL’s for the two previously identified cases so the Wayback Machine could no longer provide historical snapshots of those cases as published at Justia.

TWO LAYERS OF SABOTAGE

In all 25 instances of tampering, the case name “Minor v. Happersett” was removed from Justia’s publication of each SCOTUS opinion which cited to it.  Anyone searching for cases citing Minor at Justia or Google were led into a maze of confusion.  In some instances, not only was the case name scrubbed, the numerical citation was also removed along with whole sentences of text.

But the deception goes deeper still.  There are three official citations for Minor. v. Happersett: 88 U.S. 162, 21 Wall. 162, and 22 L. Ed. 627.  Researchers will either search for the case by name, or by any of these three citations.  Since it is common for legal researchers to query both the name of the case and/or the official numerical citation, these opinions were tampered for both.

In Kansas v. Colorado, Kepner v. U.S., Schick v. U.S.,  and South Carolina v. U.S., the citation left behind after scrubbing was “88 U.S. 422”.  In Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization, the citation left behind was 88 U.S. 448.  Minor officially begins at 88 U.S. 162 and finishes at 88 U.S. 178.  So 88 U.S. 422, and 448 are completely bogus.  (See collage of screenshots.)  The other 20 cases cite to actual pages in Minor, but not to the official citations.  While Justia linked from the bogus citations back to the first page of Minor, anyone searching for US Supreme Court cases citing Minor by querying the official citations would have been thwarted.

This further establishes that the sabotage undertaken at Justia was surgically precise.  The reality that both candidates eligibility was questionable according to Minor v. Happersett appears to have been known and handled by somebody’s legal team.  However, Justia CEO Tim Stanley was associated with “Obama For America 2008”.  (Dianna Cotter’s article will take a closer look at Tim Stanley.)

RECAP OF PREVIOUS REPORT

On July 1, 2011 I published a report: “Justia.com Caught red Handed Hiding references To Minor v. Happersett In Published US Supreme Court Opinions“.  The article featured screenshots and links to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine which chronicled tampering with two US Supreme Court opinions, Boyd v. Nebraska and Pope v. Williams.  Both cases cite to Minor v. Happersett, the only US Supreme Court decision to directly construe the natural-born citizen clause in relation to a citizenship issue.  The Court’s unanimous opinion in Minor defines those born in the US to citizen parents as natural-born citizens:

“The Constitution does not in words say who shall be natural-born citizens.  Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.”  (Emphasis added.)

McCain clearly does not meet the definition since he was born in Panama.  And since Obama’s father was never a US citizen, the current POTUS doesn’t meet the Supreme Court’s definition of a natural-born citizen either.  Minor v. Happersett has, therefore, been the subject of an intense disinformation campaign.  Falsehoods about the case have been widely spread.  The two most flagrant are:

1) that Minor was only a voting rights case – not a citizenship case – and therefore the Court’s discussion of federal citizenship was dictum and not precedent

2) that Minor was overruled by the 19th Amendment

Both criticisms are false.   Unfortunately, many of the Supreme Court cases which cite to Minor as precedent on citizenship were scrubbed by Justia along with other cases that continued citing Minor as good law on voting rights issues well after the adoption of the 19th Amendment.  As you will see from the holding in a Supreme Court opinion from 1980, the contention that Minor was overruled by the 19th Amendment is false.

PATTERN OF JUSTIA SUBTERFUGE

The tampering exhibits a very noticeable pattern.  Below, I will include screenshots as well as links to the Wayback Machine which illustrate this pattern clearly.

In most of the cases scrubbed at Justia, the Wayback Machine evidence shows that the very first snapshots taken of Justia URL’s for these cases was in 2006, with a couple of snapshots taken in early 2007.  In all of the cases, the first snapshots exhibit that Justia originally published the cases correctly as they appear in the official US Supreme Court reporters.  However, by November 2008, all 25 opinions had been sabotaged.

Some cases scrubbed the words “Minor v. Happersett” every time they appeared, and some left it in one time, but removed it in other places.  References to The Slaughterhouse Cases, Scott v. Sandford, and Osborn v. Bank of United States (citizenship cases which prove troublesome for Obama’s eligibility) were also scrubbed along with full sentences from majority opinions (as was done in Pope v. Williams), and dissents (as was done in U.S. v. Wong Km Ark).  The scrubbing was surgically precise as to the issue of POTUS eligibility.  The Wayback Machine snapshots prove that the tampering stayed in effect through the final snapshots taken in 2010.

RECAP OF MY INITIAL REPORT REGARDING “BOYD v. NEBRASKA” and “POPE v. WILLIAMS.”

After I published the first report on July 1, 2011, the Boyd and Pope cases were un-scrubbed at Justia so that Minor v. Happersett was reinstated to each opinion, and the citations were corrected.  The other 23 cases, known only to the sabateur(s), were also un-scrubbed.  Perhaps they thought nobody would ever discover the depth of the operation, because they failed to place blocking robots on the other 23 cases.  This allowed us to look back into history and see the tampering unfold for each case on the Wayback timeline.

The initial report documented that Justia.com had removed the case name, “Minor v. Happersett” from its published opinions of Boyd and Pope.  The report also documented that, in the Pope opinion at Justia, full sentences discussing Minor v. Happersett were removed thereby changing – not only the citations in the case – but also the Court’s stated opinion.

Within an hour after I published that report, Justia.com had re-instated the opinions to include the missing references to Minor and the missing text without commenting or noting the revisions.  Justia then further covered the trail of deceit by placing robots on their URL’s for Boyd v. Nebraska, and Pope v. Williams, so that access to the Wayback Machine’s snapshots is no longer possible for those cases.  (Should they now scrub the robots, here are screenshots for Justia’s Boyd and Pope opinions which show the robot blocking.)

Justia’s stated mission is as follows:

“Justia’s Mission

To advance the availability of legal resources for the benefit of society.”

Justia CEO and founder, Tim Stanley, is known as a leading light advocating for freedom of legal information on the web.  Stanley was also the founder of Findlaw, which he sold to West Publishing for $37 million.  So, what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander, and therefore Stanley is the last person who should be using robots to hide previous versions of Supreme Court cases (which are in the public domain anyway).

I haven’t spoken to Tim Stanley or anyone else at Justia.  I did not think it prudent, seeing as how Justia tried to cover their tracks after my last report, to contact them prior to releasing the rest of the evidence I gathered from the Wayback Machine.  I needed to publish before they could place robots on the URL’s for the other 23 tampered opinions.

OTHER BLOGGERS ARE COMING TO THE STORY.

Other bloggers following the developments discussed herein will be contacting Justia.com in the days ahead as this story develops.  I held back on publishing this follow-up so I could enlist the help of these other bloggers and journalists who have already viewed the evidence.  Dianna Cotter, who has published articles for Accuracy In Media and Examiner.com, has documented everything, and she has worked closely with me in the days leading up to this report.  She will publish a follow-up later today at Examiner.com.

Furthermore, whoever was responsible for placing the robots on Boyd and Pope at Justia should know that Dianna Cotter and I have forwarded and discussed the information published below with writers at The Washington Times, Accuracy In Media, Free Republic and many other publications.

I have also forwarded evidence of the tampering (screenshots, Wayback Machine URLs and downloaded HTML for each Wayback snapshot) to Cindy Simpson (who published an article yesterday at American Thinker which discusses  Minor v. Happersett).  I have also shared the evidence with attorney Mario Apuzzo who is writing an analysis of Justia’s sabotage of Wong Kim Ark, a case which was subjected to multiple instances of tampering by Justia.  (I will update my report with links to the reports of Dianna Cotter and Mario Apuzzo when they are published later today.)

I reached out to people I trusted before publishing so that all of the evidence could be documented by multiple sources, media publications and attorneys.  The evidence has been viewed and documented by so many sources now that any attempt by Justia to block it, the way that it blocked the evidence of my first report, will be futile.  This tampering happened at Justia.com.  That is a fact.  The questions which need to be answered now are who ordered it and who carried out the subversive plot.

Additionally, the US Supreme Court’s Public Information Office was forwarded the evidence.  I have personally spoken with one staffer and one official there.  Dianna Cotter has also been in contact with the SCOTUS PIO.

TAMPERING WITH OFFICIAL WRITINGS IS A CRIME UNDER 18 U.S.C. 1018.

§1018. Official certificates or writings

Whoever, being a public officer or other person authorized by any law of the United States to make or give a certificate or other writing, knowingly makes and delivers as true such a certificate or writing, containing any statement which he knows to be false, in a case where the punishment thereof is not elsewhere expressly provided by law, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

The statute covers a “person” authorized by any law of the US to make or give official writings.  Justia.com is authorized – according to the federal Public Domain laws – to re-publish US Supreme Court opinions.  In every case that was tampered, the words “Full Text of Case” appear on each scrubbed opinion.  Since the cases were intentionally sabotaged by the removal of text, the affirmation at the top of each page which indicated that one is reading the “Full Text of Case” is knowingly false.  It’s the inclusion of this intentionally false statement which makes this a crime under the statute.

Each of the 25 instances of tampering carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison.  There are 25 possible counts, so the saboteur(s) could potentially face serious prison time.  And there may be other relevant criminal violations as well.

FALLOUT UPON THE REST OF THE ELECTRONIC LEGAL PUBLISHING COMMUNITY

Not only were those who consulted Justia for these cases defrauded, this behavior has also cast doubt upon the entire enterprise of electronic legal publishing.  The other bloggers I have shared the evidence with are rounding up interviews with heavyweights in the legal publishing field, including West (who has previously sued Justia CEO Tim Stanley).

Furthermore, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALLNET) have been notified and are discussing the issue with Dianna Cotter.

I imagine the American Bar Association will not be pleased and that Tim Stanley, if he is behind this, could be disbarred in California and the federal courts.

LURIA v. US

Let’s begin with Luria v. US, 231 U.S. 9 (1913).  This was the first case I found after Boyd and Pope which exhibited definite tampering.  The quote which drew my attention is this:

“Citizenship is membership in a political society, and implies a duty of allegiance on the part of the member and a duty of protection on the part of the society. These are reciprocal obligations, one being a compensation for the other. Under our Constitution, a naturalized citizen stands on an equal footing with the native citizen in all respects save that of eligibility to the Presidency. Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, 88 U. S. 165; Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U. S. 94, 112 U. S. 101; Osborn v. Bank of United States, 9 Wheat. 738, 22 U. S. 827.”

Here we have a direct citation to Minor v. Happersett as precedent by the Supreme Court… 15 years after Wong Kim Ark was decided.  Furthermore, voting is not mentioned anywhere in the opinion.  This is another important case which bears witness to Minor as authority on federal citizenship.  Last week, when I checked the current page for Luria at Justia, it contained the reference to Minor.

I then went to the Wayback Machine and plugged in the Justia URL for Luria.  It returned a calendar with nine snapshots of Luria ranging from Nov. 4, 2006 through April 13, 2010.  Mimicking the pattern for all 25 cases, the Nov. 4, 2006 snapshot is not tampered with.  All of the snapshots prior to the one for July 6, 2008 are also not scrubbed.  But the snapshot for July 6, 2008 has been tampered with.

“Minor v. Happersett” was removed along with the reference to “Osborn v. Bank of United States”, another important opinion in the lineage leading through Minor to Luria.

Compare the tampered July 6, 2008 version of the Justia snapshot for Luria with the Nov. 2006 version quoted above:

“Citizenship is membership in a political society, and implies a duty of allegiance on the part of the member and a duty of protection on the part of the society. These are reciprocal obligations, one being a compensation for the other. Under our Constitution, a naturalized citizen stands on an equal footing with the native citizen in all respects save that of eligibility to the Presidency. 88 U. S. 165; Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U. S. 94, 112 U. S. 101; 22 U. S. 827.”

Minor and Osborn are missing.  Furthermore, the remaining numerical citation does not indicate any of the three official citations for Minor, nor does the point stated in the quote appear at 88 U.S. 165.

The tampering persists in all Wayback Machine snapshots following July 6, 2008 through the final snapshot taken by the Wayback Machine on April 13, 2010.

To make the progression of the tampering with Luria v. U.S. easier to follow, I have prepared a collage of the relevant screenshots from 2006 to the present.  Additionally, here are full screenshots for each date discussed above as to the Luria tampering:

screenshot of LURIA v. U.S. on  Nov 4, 2006 – Minor and Osborn are there

screenshot of LURIA v. U.S.  on July 6, 2008 – Minor and Osborn are missing

screenshot of LURIA v. U.S. on April 13, 2010 – Minor and Osborn are still missing

LURIA as published at Justia today (October 19, 2011) – Minor and Osborn are back

CITY OF MOBILE v. BOLDEN

I have chosen to highlight City of Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980) because it cites Minor as a continuing precedent on the voting rights issue 60 years after the adoption of the 19th Amendment.  This kills the argument that Minor was overruled by the 19th Amendment.  Here is the relevant passage as it appears at Justia today un-scrubbed:

“More than 100 years ago, the Court unanimously held that “the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone. . . .” Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, 88 U. S. 178. See Lassiter v. Northampton Election Bd., 360 U.S. at 360 U. S. 50-51. It is for the States “to determine the conditions under which the right of suffrage may be exercised . . . , absent, of course, the discrimination which the Constitution condemns,” ibid.”

Notice that the citation gives a reference to one of the three official citations I discussed above, “21 Wall. 162”, followed by a citation to the exact page where the quote is found in another official US Supreme Court reporter.  Since the case has been un-scrubbed, researchers will find this reference to Minor by searching either for the Minor case name or its official citations.  However, back in 2008 when the cases were sabotaged (and through 2010 until whenever the cases were fixed), such research was likely to have failed by design of the saboteur(s).

Moreover, the favored argument of Obama supporters – that Minor is only a voting rights case which was overruled by the 19th Amendment – is not only proved false by the Supreme Court’s recognition of Minor’s citizenship precedent in Luria v. U.S., but the City of  Mobile case also exhibits that Minor is still precedent in that the Constitution does not provide anyone a right to vote.  So there is no conflict between Minor and the 19th Amendment, which protects against discrimination on the basis of sex once the right to vote is granted by the states.

The first snapshot for City of Mobile v. Bolden in the Wayback Machine is from Sept. 19 2006 and Minor is in the case.  The case remains un-scrubbed on the Wayback timeline until June 27, 2008 when “Minor v. Happersett” is first shown to have been scrubbed.  Minor remains missing from subsequent snapshots taken of the case through the final snapshot taken on Nov. 8, 2010.

It appears that the 25 scrubbed cases were un-scrubbed after I published my first report on July 1, 2011.  And Minor is now back in Justia’s current published opinion for City of Mobile v. Bolden.  Below are screenshot links for each relevant date:

screenshot – CITY OF MOBILE v. BOLDEN on  Sept. 19, 2006 – Minor is in

screenshot – CITY OF MOBILE v. BOLDEN on June 27, 2008 – Minor is missing

screenshot – CITY OF MOBILE v. BOLDEN on Nov. 8, 2010 – Minor is still missing

CITY OF MOBILE v. BOLDEN at current page at Justia – Minor is back

The Mystery of In Re Lockwood 154 U.S. 116 (1894).

A crucial US Supreme Court decision which has miraculously been absent from the national dialogue on Presidential eligibility is Ex Parte Lockwood, 154 U.S. 116 (1894), an essential case which confirms Minor v. Happersett as precedent on the definition of federal citizenship:

“In Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162, this court held that the word ‘citizen’ is often used to convey the idea of membership in a nation, and, in that sense, women, if born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction of the United States, have always been considered citizens of the United States, as much so before the adoption of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution as since;”  (Emphasis added.)

Lockwood directly cites Minor as precedent on the definition of federal citizenship, yet I can find no hits in Google searches which discuss this case in relation to Obama’s eligibility.  Furthermore, If you visit Cornell’s page for Lockwood, the opinion is cut off right after “Minor v”.  It never gets to Happersett and what comes after.  The Cornell page is filled with gibberish from some other case.

The Lockwood opinion is also mangled at the Wiki Source page which doesn’t mention Minor at all.  And as of Oct. 18, 2011, the version on Lexis has “Minor” mis-spelled as “Miner” in the body of the Lockwood opinion hosted there.

What about “In Re Lockwood” at Justia?  The current URL for the full Lockwood case at Justia returns no snapshots at the Waybackmachine.  This is unusual in that “In Re Lockwood” is the only case which has no Wayback Machine history for Justia’s publication of a case.  However, when you search at the Wayback Machine using the Justia URL linking to their preview of Lockwood (Justia always has one URL for the preview and one for the full case), 7 hits are returned.

It appears Justia originally published the case as “Ex Parte Lockwood” back in August 2007, and both the preview and the “Full Text”  referred to Minor at that time.

Then, in May 2008, Justia suddenly changed the name of the case from “Ex Parte Lockwood” to “In Re Lockwood” which is how it is published by Justia today.  Both titles are technically correct since the official US Supreme Court reporter states the name of the case exactly as, “Ex parte: In Re BELVA A. LOCKWOOD.”

Regardless, as you will see below, the timing of Justia’s renaming the case on its server is very suspicious.  While the August 2007 preview of the case at Justia mentions Minor, the revised May 2008 revision of the preview for Lockwood strips Minor therefrom.  Furthermore, Justia’s publication of the case as “In Re Lockwood” is the only instance where no snapshot history exists in the Wayback Machine for the full case URL.  We can see that the preview was scrubbed of Minor and that Justia changed their caption of the case from “Ex Parte Lockwood” to “In Re Lockwood” by May 2008, but we can’t see a snapshot of the full case going back to that time, so I do not count Lockwood in with the 25 cases which are proved to have been sabotaged.

Regardless, Lockwood is the holy grail of cases which stand in support of Minor on the definition of federal citizenship because the Supreme Court stated the words, “this court held” in relation to Minor’s definition of federal citizenship.  And Lockwood is the only case which appears to have been tampered with at sites other than Justia.

MORE SCRUBBED CASES

I will conclude with somewhat of a document dump.  For the remaining cases, I have provided the following:

– the case name

– a link to the current page at Justia

– a link to the first snapshot in the Wayback Machine which exhibits the tampering, and a screenshot of the same

Besides screenshots and links to Wayback Machine snapshots, I have saved the actual HTML for each relevant snapshot as well.  Evidence has been circulated, copied and stored by many others.  And the story is going to be explored until the truth is found.

Please contact your Congressional representatives and make sure they have no plausible deniability.  This is a very serious moment in our national history.  Please help document the sabotage of U.S. law.  Without truth in the law, there is no law.

Baldwin v. Fish & Game Comm’m of Montana, 436 U.S 371 (1978) 

current live page at Justia ( “v. Happersett” reinstated, but “Minor” is still missing) 

Oct. 30, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937)

current live page at Justia

Nov. 18, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

US v. CLASSIC, 313 U.S. 299 (1941)

current live page at Justia

April 30, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Colgate v. Harvey, 296 U.S. 404 (1935)

current live page at Justia

Nov. 18, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor (and Slaughterhouse Cases) removed – SCREENSHOT

Coyle v. Smith, 221 U.S. 559 (1911)

current live page at Justia

August 8, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Hague v. Committee For Industrial Organization, 307 U.S. 496 (1939)

current live page at Justia

June 29, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Hamilton v. Regents, 293 U.S. 245 (1934)

current live page at Justia

May 1, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Harris v. Mcrae, 448 U.S. 297 (1980)

current live page at Justia

July 25, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Kansas v. Colorado, 206 U.S 47 (1907)

current live page at Justia

Dec. 5, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Kepner v. U.S., 195 U.S. 100 (1904)

current live page at Justia

May 7, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Kramer v. Union Free Sch. Dist., 395 U.S. 621 (1969)

current live page at Justia

June 2, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Lynch v. Overholser, 369 U.S. 705 (1962)

current live page at Justia

Nov. 19, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

N.Y. Ex Rel. Bryant v. Zimmerman, 278 U.S. 63 (1928)

current live page at Justia

June 3, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed (Slaughterhouse Cases removed as well) – SCREENSHOT

Rodriguez v. Popular Democratic Party, 457 U.S. 1 (1982)

current live page at Justia

Oct. 2, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Rogers v. Bellei, 401 U.S. 816 (1971)

current live page at Justia

July 24, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Schick v. U.S., 195 U.S. 65 (1904)

current live page at Justia

Oct. 13, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

Snowden v. Hughes, 321 U.S. 1 (1944)

current live page at Justia

July 24, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed (Slaughterhouse Cases removed as well) – SCREENSHOT

South Carolina v. US, 199 U.S. 437 (1905)

current live page at Justia

July 6, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

In Re Summers, 325 U.S. 561 (1945)

current live page at Justia

July 4, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark,169 U.S. 649 (1898)

current live page at Justia

June 19, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed –SCREENSHOT 1, SCREENSHOT 2, SCREENSHOT 3

Williams v. Rhodes, 393 U.S. 23 (1968)

current live page at Justia ( “v. Happersett” reinstated, but “Minor” still missing)

July 25, 2008 – first Wayback snapshot with Minor removed – SCREENSHOT

by Leo Donofrio, Esq.

Oct. 20, 2011

Multiple Instances Of Historical Scholarship Conclusively Establish The Supreme Court’s Holding In Minor v. Happersett As Standing Precedent On Citizenship – Obama Not Eligible.

Recently, the New York State Board of Elections was caught trying to amend the US Constitution with an eraser by listing POTUS eligibility as available to any person “born a citizen”.  (Please review Pixel Patriot’s excellent analysis on this issue, “New York State BOE Web Site Cover Up“.)  The Constitution states that only a “natural born Citizen” may be president, a much more stringent requirement than simply being “born a citizen”.  This effort in New York is part of a much larger effort nationwide to falsely revise history (in this case by scrubbing the very words of our Constitution).  The tactic contributes to an insidious pattern of behavior being perpetrated just so Obama will be allowed to occupy the White House despite US Supreme Court precedent which states directly that he is not eligible.  (This report assumes Obama was born in Hawaii.)

Other instances of gross intellectual dishonesty documented at this blog include the recent attempt by Justia.com to rewrite American history by scrubbing links in subsequent cases which establish that Minor v. Happersett has been cited multiple times as precedent on citizenship issues as well as voting rights.

Another instance of this misleading practice was the revision of a Michigan Law Review article by well-known legal scholar, Professor Lawrence Solum, wherein his original analysis – that only a person born in the US of citizen parents was beyond question eligible for POTUS – was scrubbed to include as eligible those born of only one citizen parent.

The citizenship issue decided in Minor v. Happersett has been documented as precedent by multiple sources of legal scholarship.  (See also my previous two reports analyzing Minor v. Happersett, here and here.) Below, I have assembled multiple quotations from various published literature which cogently establish that the Supreme Court issued two holdings in Minor; one on citizenship and the other on voting rights.  That the citizenship issue is precedent, and not dictum, has never been questioned in our national history until now, just as the very words of the Constitution are being scrubbed.  My research indicates unequivocally that for over a century before the appearance of Obama, Minor was recognized and cited as precedent on the definition of federal citizenship.

We turn now to an esteemed legal scholar and Government attorney who specialized in citizenship law.  He will provide unquestionable clarity on the issue of why Minor v. Happersett is precedent on citizenship as well as voting rights.

FREDERICK VAN DYNE, ASSISTANT SOLICITOR US DEPARTMENT OF STATE

The source in question is Frederick Van Dyne who, while holding the office of Assistant Solicitor for the US Department of State, published analysis that the citizenship decision in Minor v. Happersett was precedent.

Van Dyne argued that persons born of foreign parents on US soil were “native-born citizens” of the US prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the adoption of the 14th Amendment.  But Van Dyne, while discussing the holding in the New York case of Lynch v. Clark (not binding on the Federal Courts), failed to endorse that case’s opinion that all native-born citizens of foreign parentage were natural-born citizens.  In his famous treatise, “Citizenship of the United States” (Lawyers Co-Operative Publishing Co., 1904), Van Dyne only went so far as to state that such persons were “native-born citizens”.   (See Van Dyne’s treatise at pgs. 6-7.)

Where the US Supreme Court in Minor differs from Obama eligibility propaganda is that the former regards being “native-born” as just one element necessary to meeting the natural-born citizen standard of POTUS eligibility, whereas the latter incorrectly argue that it is the only element.  As you will see below, Van Dyne directly recognized that the US Supreme Court’s decision in Minor was precedent on citizenship, and that the holding therein defined natural-born citizens as those born in the US of citizen parents.

In the following passage, Van Dyne argues that previous American cases recognized that persons born on US soil were US citizens regardless of the citizenship of the parents.  However, Van Dyne also points out that a statement by the Supreme Court in the Slaughter-House Cases appears to contradict this theory.  But Van Dyne’s analysis stresses that the contradictory statement in the Slaughter-House Cases  is dictum.  

He then refers to the “decision” in Minor v. Happersett on citizenship in order to counter the “dictum” from the Slaughter-House Cases.  Van Dyne clearly recognized the Minor Court’s decision on citizenship as precedent which outweighs the dictum of the Slaughter-House Cases.  In doing so, Van Dyne quotes (see pgs. 12-13) the Minor Court’s definition of a natural-born citizen as one born in the US to citizen parents:

Very rarely, whilst doing research, does one come upon historical evidence that so perfectly establishes the point in question.  Examine the last paragraph again:

“The decision in this case was that a woman born of citizen parents within the United States was a citizen of the United States, although not entitled to vote, the elective franchise not being essential to citizenship.”  (Emphasis added.)

The “decision” in Minor is twofold:

1) woman are equal citizens to men;

2) voting is not a right of citizenship.

The first point is still good law.  This may seem obvious now, but in 1875 it wasn’t.  Virginia Minor did not accept that citizenship without voting rights was equal citizenship.  She argued that women were being treated as “halfway citizens” and she directly petitioned the Court for a determination which stated that women were equal citizens to men.

The Court in Minor, referring directly to Article 2 Section 1, and specifically avoiding the 14th Amendment, held that women, if born in the US to citizen parents, were citizens and that their citizenship was equal to men.  The Court further stated that this “class” of persons were “natives, or natural-born citizens”.

The Court also held that while women were equal citizens to men, the Constitution did not provide a right to vote to anyone, male or female.  This part of the holding was later erased by the 19th Amendment, but the citizenship determination remains as good law today.  Therefore, the Court’s decision in Minor operates against Obama being eligible, since his father was never a US citizen.

Van Dyne examines the Slaughter-House dictum carefully since it is a statement made by the highest court in the nation which contrasts his view that all persons born on US soil are native-born citizens.  In classifying the Slaughter-House statement as dictum, Van Dyne notes that determining the citizenship of persons born on US soil to alien parents was not an issue before the court in that case.  He then points to the “decision” on citizenship from Minor to contrast the Slaughter-House dictum, and in doing so Van Dyne makes clear that Virginia Minor’s citizenship was an issue directly before the Court in Minor.

Note the following crucial passage from Justice Waite’s opinion again, paying particular attention to the punchline:

“[T]he Constitution…provides that ‘no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President’…The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners. Some authorities go further and include as citizens children born within the jurisdiction without reference to the citizenship of their [88 U.S. 162, 168]   parents. As to this class there have been doubts, but never as to the first. For the purposes of this case it is not necessary to solve these doubts. It is sufficient for everything we have now to consider that all children born of citizen parents within the jurisdiction are themselves citizens. The words ‘all children’ are certainly as comprehensive, when used in this connection, as ‘all persons,’ and if females are included in the last they must be in the first. That they are included in the last is not denied. In fact the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.”  (Emphasis added.)

Current propaganda attempting to sanitize Obama in light of the Supreme Court’s precedent in Minor mis-directs that Minor’s citizenship was not an issue directly before the Court.  But in the passage above, the Court’s unanimous opinion clearly states that “the whole argument of the plaintiffs proceeds upon that idea.”  So, squarely before the Court was the issue of whether women were equal citizens.

Also consider the name of Van Dyne’s treatise, “Citizenship In The United States”.  As to the soundness of Van Dyne’s treatise, the following review appears in The American Journal Of International Law:

“The author of this work now occupies an important post in the American Consular Service.  Three years ago, while holding the position of assistant solicitor of the Department of State, he published a work on citizenship of the United States, a work which was at the time highly commended by competent critics and which those who have since used it have found to be an excellent manual.”

Van Dyne stressed that the decision in Minor contradicted the earlier dictum in the Slaughter-House Cases.  And Van Dyne specifically quoted the natural-born citizen definition from Minor (taking no issue with it) just before announcing the Court’s “decision” that women born in the US to citizen parents were citizens.

Again, the 14th Amendment was not necessary in determining Virginia Minor’s citizenship since the Court was able to rely upon a direct construction of Article 2 Section 1 instead.  The Court held that Minor was in the “class” of persons who were designated as natural-born citizens, whereas those whose citizenship faced doubt due to alien parentage required help from the 14th Amendment.

And such help came in 1898 when the Supreme Court held that Wong Kim Ark was a US citizen under the 14th Amendment.  Since Minor was a natural-born citizen, the 14th Amendment need not be construed.  But Wong Kim Ark was not in the class of natural-born citizens (previously defined in Minor), and therefore the Supreme Court was forced to directly construe the 14th Amendment to resolve citizenship doubts pertaining to the “class” of persons born in the US to alien parents.

It is crucially important to recognize that Wong Kim Ark’s citizenship could not be established without the 14th Amendment since he was not a natural-born citizen.  If he had been in that class, the Court would have established his citizenship under Article 2 Section 1 as the court had previously done for Virginia Minor.

THE MINORS’ HALFWAY CITIZENSHIP ISSUE

Virginia Minor’s briefs (prepared by her husband, attorney Francis Minor) refused to blindly accept lower court holdings which stated that women were equal citizens to men.  The Minors argued that if women were not allowed to vote, then their citizenship was not equal to men.  The exact wording of Minor’s argument stated (see pg. 59):

“There can be no division of citizenship, either of its rights or its duties.  There can be no half way citizenship.  Woman, as a citizen of the United States, is entitled to all the benefits of that position, and liable to all its obligations, or to none.”

Justice Waite spent so much time analyzing Minor’s citizenship – and federal citizenship in general –  because Virginia Minor directly petitioned the Court to do so.  Her “whole argument” depended on it.  And since her citizenship was an issue before the Court, it issued a “decision” that she was a citizen, whereas the Court’s citizenship statement in the Slaughter-House Cases was dictum since no citizenship issue was before the Court in that case.  And here we have – literally – a textbook example illustrating the difference between dictum and precedent.

The citizenship of Minor, and of all women, is so ingrained in the history of Minor v. Happersett, that multiple sources besides Van Dyne have also documented the citizenship precedent set by the Supreme Court therein.  For example, please review “Inventing Citizens, Imagining Gender Justice: The Suffrage Rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor”, Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 93, No. 4, November 2007, pp. 375-402, by Angela G. Ray & Cindy Koenig Richard.  Note the title, “Inventing Citizens”.  Indeed, the entire case, as stressed by Justice Waite, revolves around the issue of citizenship.  Here are some relevant quotes from this peer-reviewed article:

“In this milieu, woman’s rights activists, seeking to fulfill revolutionary promises for themselves, pressed the courts to define the privileges of citizenship as applying to all citizens regardless of sex… The Minor decision… acknowledged women’s status as citizens but denied that citizenship entailed voting rights…” (PDF at pg. 2).

“This essay demonstrates the ingenuity, the complexity, and the challenges of litigating a nineteenth-century test case that sought to expand the legal definition and performative parameters of citizenship.” (PDF at pg. 3).

“On March 29, the Court’s unanimous decision in Minor v. Happersett, written by first-term Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, accepted that women were citizens but disconnected citizenship from the franchise, supported the authority of states to deny voting rights, and ensured the necessity of a federal amendment for women’s enfranchisement.  The Minors’ rhetoric addressed not only judicial authorities but also women citizens.  The arguments that they espoused and performed asked how citizenship should be conceptualized and how it should be enacted.” (PDF at pg. 7).

“For the Minors, citizenship could not be partial, and any exclusions from federal citizenship rights had to be made explicit in federal law. The Minors insisted that the definition of citizenship required that its privileges be applied equally and fully. In 1869 Virginia Minor told the Missouri Woman Suffrage Association that if women ‘are entitled to two or three privileges [of citizenship], we are entitled to all.’ The Minors’ argument to the U.S. Supreme Court elaborated this point: ‘There can be no half-way citizenship. Woman, as a citizen of the United States, is entitled to all the benefits of that position, and liable to all its obligations, or to none.’ ”  (PDF at pg. 8).

“Inventing Citizens” was published in 2007, one year before Obama’s dual nationality at birth problem first came to the general public’s attention via the case I brought against the NJ Secretary of State – Donofrio v. Wells – which was referred to the full court by Justice Clarence Thomas.  There does not appear to be even one source which alleges that the citizenship issue from Minor was dictum prior to October 2008.  But there are numerous sources which document the citizenship issue as precedent.

For example, the Oxford Companion To The Supreme Court Of The United States (2d edition, 2005) has this to say about Minor v. Happersett:

“It is notable for its narrow definition of citizenship ‘as conveying the idea of membership of a nation, nothing more’… and for its firm, unanimous rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment as a source either of a substantive federal suffrage right or of a federal limit on state control of the franchise.”  (Image of text.)

The Oxford Companion makes clear that as late as 2005, Minor is “notable” for both its definition of citizenship and voting rights.  Both were precedent until the 19th Amendment nullified the voting rights issue, whereas the citizenship precedent still stands today.

In “The Boundaries of Her Body: The Troubling History of Woman’s Rights In America”, by Debran Rowland (Sphinx Publishing, 2004), it states that the Supreme Court “held” that women were citizens:

” ‘There is no doubt that woman may be citizens’, the Court held. ” (See pg. 24.)

In “The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia”, by Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, Andrew Cayton (Indiana University Press, 2007), the Supreme Court’s citizenship holding was also acknowledged:

“On March 29, 1875, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that states did not violate the Constitution when they denied women the right to vote.  Women were citizens of the United States the court found, but voting was not a right of citizenship.”  (See pg. 1593.)

The tandem issues of citizenship and voting rights were again noted in, “Race, Class and Gender in the United States: an Integrated Study”, by Paula S. Rothenburg (Worth Publishers, 6th Edition, 2004):

“In this case the court held that although women were citizens, the right to vote was not a privilege or immunity of national citizenship before adoption of the 14th Amendment, nor did the amendment add suffrage to the privileges and immunities of national citizenship.” (See pg. 485.) (Emphasis added.)

In “American Citizens and Their Government”, by Kenneth Wallace Colegrove (Abbington Press, 1921), the author noted that the Supreme Court “decided” women were citizens:

“The court decided that while Mrs. Minor was clearly a citizen of the United States, she was not entitled to vote because the right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship.” (See pg. 64.)

Until Obama came along, Minor v. Happersett was always viewed as the precedent ruling that women were equal citizens to men.  I have not seen any resources that pre-date Obama’s 2008 election campaign which state that the Supreme Court’s analysis of Virginia Minor’s citizenship was dictum and not precedent.

The Supreme Court’s analysis in Minor elicited a specific definition of the class of natural-born citizens in order to avoid a tricky interpretation of the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s nebulous phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. Therefore, according to the Supreme Court’s definition, Obama is not eligible to be President since the class of natural-born citizens was held to be those born in the US to parents who are citizens.  His father was never a US citizen, nor was he ever permanently domiciled here.

That Virginia Minor was not running for President makes no difference at all.  By directly construing Article 2 Section 1 in determining that Minor was a citizen prior to the adoption of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court held that persons born in the US to parents who are citizens are “natives or natural-born citizens.”  These are referred to as a “class” of persons separate from the class of persons born to alien parents.  The Court in Minor acknowledged that, despite existing doubts, the class born to non-citizen parents might be citizens.  But they weren’t natural-born.

This was confirmed in 1898 by the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark, wherein the Court determined that a child born in the US of alien parents (permanently domiciled here) was a US citizen, but that such a person’s citizenship is determined by operation of the 14th Amendment.

Had Wong Kim Ark been a natural-born citizen like Virginia Minor, the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark could have avoided the 14th Amendment as did the Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett.

In construing Article 2 Section 1, the Court in Minor exercised proper judicial restraint by not reaching further than necessary to make an expansive landmark interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

The Minor opinion acknowledged that the decision might seem unfair and that the law itself might be unfair, but the Court recognized that their duty was to uphold the law as written, and further stated that if the law was unfair it should be changed.  By exercising such restraint, the Court gave birth to a standing definition which conclusively determined the class of natural-born citizens.

OTHER AUTHORITIES ARE RENDERED MOOT BY THE US SUPREME COURT’S DECISION IN MINOR.

In conclusion, I must point out that the holding/definition of a natural-born citizen issued by the Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett does not mention the Law of Nations or Vattel.  I realize there has been a great deal of scholarship unearthed by both sides of this argument.  But in Minor we have direct Supreme Court precedent for this issue which renders other sources moot.

Vattel does not make national law.  The US Supreme Court and the Congress make national law.  Unless the Supreme Court overrules the citizenship precedent stated in Minor v. Happersett, or the Constitution is amended, the case stands as governing national law.  This is due to the separation of powers determined by the Constitution itself.  It’s important to focus on the Supreme Court’s holding as opposed to allowing the precedent set therein to be hijacked by those who seek to define this definition as “Vattelist” or “foreign”.  The US Supreme Court in Minor failed to mention Vattel, so despite any influence he might have had on the framers, the definition stated is to be referred to as the US Supreme Court definition of natural-born citizen, and by no other name.

FUTURE CERT AND PROPHECY?

I have been asked many times over the last three years whether I believe this issue will ever reach a decision on the merits in any federal court.  For a long time, I thought the answer was an emphatic “never” since the Supreme Court was twice handed the issue on a silver platter.  Both Donofrio v. Wells, and the petition I prepared in Wrotnowski v. Bysiewicz were referred to the full Court for conference.  Nobody knows how many votes, if any, were in favor of reviewing the eligibility of Obama.  Regardless, certiorari was refused in both cases.

However, with a recent trial balloon thrown out by the Governor of North Carolina regarding a possible suspension of elections in 2012, the game has changed drastically.

The economy all over the world is scary.  Protests are circling the nation.  The UN is increasing its interference with national sovereignty.  And all currencies could go belly up as the Ponzi scheme of Fiat paper and fractional reserve banking threatens to make the Great Depression seem not so great.  And there is a very strong possibility Obama could lose this election.  I am very concerned that he will not leave office quietly if the people do not invite him to return and that suspension of the 2012 election might be attempted.  This could happen through a national emergency and subsequent martial law.

If Obama were to lose the election and graciously move on, the issue of his eligibility will probably fade away.  However, if Obama attempts to suspend the election or otherwise retain the White House after losing in 2012, then the eligibility issue has an exponentially greater chance of being litigated before the DC District Court by Writ of Quo Warranto, and finally ending up in the US Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, I truly believe we are headed for a national moment of intense Constitutional conflict.  There are provisions of the Patriot Act and various Executive orders which allow for martial law scenarios to unfold.  If there is an emergency (real or imagined), the Obama might invoke such laws to declare martial law, suspend elections, and incarcerate alleged enemies of the state.

If a truly eligible President were operating under any of those dangerous powers, it might be difficult to impeach him.  Should Obama avail himself of such draconian measures, the only argument available to remove him may be that he was never eligible to be POTUS.  Such a determination would render his entire administration void, which is very different from impeachment.  This is why, should the issue ever reach the Supreme Court, it becomes imperative that Justices Kagan and Sotomayor recuse themselves.  Their appointments could be nullified if Obama’s administration is voided which would cause them to have a personal stake in the outcome.  (For a more thorough explanation as to the fallout of voiding a government office, as opposed to removal via impeachment or expulsion, see my previous report on Quo Warranto and comments thereto specifically noting precedent in the Senate.)

Furthermore, I believe there is an unseen force which is already in place, waiting for its moment to take this nation and cash in the change promised by dear leader.  You can feel the rhetoric surfacing against those who have worked hard to achieve success and wealth.  When you hear the consistent mantra that no person is “better” than any other person sung by the masses as they surround your home, you will know that glorious American ideals of success through hard work are being sacrificed on the altar of redistribution of wealth.

Just ask 789 Chrysler dealers where their franchises went.  Their private property was taken and given to others.   And a foreign corporation from a socialist nation was gifted an American institution at the cost of $23 billion to the US taxpayer.  Fiat paid nothing for Chrysler, not one dime.  This was done at the insistence of Obama who demanded that no American company was capable of turning Chrysler around.  I didn’t see one single protestor on that one.

I pray that Chrysler is not a blueprint of things to come… to your door, and inside your house.

by Leo Donofrio, Esq.

Copyright 2011