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In the today’s American Monetary Association Show, Jason Hartman speaks to author and former Department of Justice attorney, Sidney Powell. Together, they dive into some of the most scandalous and outrageous cases which have based through the Department of Justice in recent decades. Step-by-step, they overview several of the cases featured in Powell’s book Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice and consider the true state of our society.

 

Takeaways

01.30 – Sidney Powell’s book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice, deals with some of the most scandalous and historic events to come out of the United States’ Department of Justice.
9.50 – Within the Merrill Lynch case, it got to the point where favourable statements were hidden for six years while four Merrill Lynch executives were sent to prison without even a listed criminal offence.
13.30 – Sometimes there are two sides to a story and you need to dig a little deeper to find out what really happened.
17.25 – You have to question when a judge says he’s never had such a fine person before him for sentencing, and then passes a sentence.
20.50 – www.pogo.org (Project on Government Oversight) has identified over 400 instances of misconduct by prosecutors in the last decade.
22.30 – Despite having a criminal conviction against his name a few days before the re-election, Ted Stevens only lost his place on the Senate by a few votes.
28.15 – The Bar associations are less than useless in these situations because they just give the same response.
32.30 – Judge Sullivan is turning around the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS and doing his best to achieve a just result.
34.40 – There are too many aspects of the IRS case that just seem conveniently timed for it to be believable.
35.10 – Many of Sidney’s articles about these issues can be found at www.Observer.com
37.10 – If the IRS is being used to target political opponents, who gave that order?
39.15 – Information about the book and how to purchase it can be found at www.LicensedtoLie.com. Tweet Sidney using the handle @SidneyPowell1 and be sure to ‘like’ Licensed to Lie on Facebook.

 

Tweetables
What does it say when an agreement has to be signed, promising to only agree with the government’s view of a case?
Do we really live in a system where you do something wrong and get promoted?
If production of actual evidence was compulsory, a lot of court cases would have very different outcomes.
A single juror is the last bastion of democracy because they alone can stop an unjust criminal conviction.

 

Transcript

Introduction:
Welcome to the American Monetary Association’s podcast, where we explore how monetary policy impacts the real lives of real people, and the action steps necessary to preserve wealth and enhance one’s lifestyle.

Jason:
Welcome to the podcast for the American Monetary Association. This is your host, Jason Hartman, and this is a service of my private foundation, the Jason Hartman Foundation. Today, we have a great interview for you so I think you’ll enjoy it, and comment on our website or our blog post. We have a lot of resources there for you and you can find that at www.AmericanMonetaryAssociation.org, or the website for the Foundation, which is www.JasonHartmanFoundation.org. Thanks so much for listening and please visit our website and enjoy our extensive blog and other resources there.

Jason:
It’s my pleasure to welcome Sidney Powell to the show; former Department of Justice attorney and author of Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. What could be more timely than that? Sidney, welcome, how are you?

Sidney:
Thank you so much, I’m fine thank you.

Jason:
It’s good to have you. Just give our listeners a sense of geography: where are you located?

Sidney:
At the moment I’m in Nashville, North Carolina.

Jason:
Ah, a beautiful place, I’ve been there. Tell us how you came to write the book. I mean you broke some amazing news; tell us about that too.

Sidney:
Yes. I wrote the book not because I wanted to, but because I felt like I had to. I call it the book I literally prayed I would not have to write. It tells the true story of prosecutorial misconduct – prosecutors’ deliberate wrongdoing at the highest and worst levels, and some of the most major, high-profile litigation of the last decade, including the Arthur Andersen case, the Merrill Lynch prosecution and the United States prosecution of United States senator Ted Stevens thereby unseating the longest serving Republican in the United States senate, changing the balance of power in the Senate and enabling the enactment of Obamacare, among other things.

Jason:
This is just unbelievable. I’m glad you wrote the book because people need to know. They need to know this for sure.

Sidney:
Yes, they do need to know, and I wrote it like a legal thriller so it’s not too full of legalese; everyone should be able to understand it. They say it reads like a John Grisham novel.

Jason:
Well I hope they make a movie out of it, or at least a documentary. A movie would be best!

Sidney:
It would make a good movie.

Jason:
First of all, you outlined those cases – tell us why. I always ask what would be the motivation for the prosecutors to engage in these dirty deeds? Why would they do it? In each of these cases, what do you think their motives were?

Sidney:
It’s hard for me to understand. I can’t really ascribe a particular motive to them because it’s so wrong, it’s off my radar screen. I do know that they punched their tickets to very high powered jobs and very lucrative senior positions in major international law firms, and I’m talking about drawing 7-8 figure incomes from that. One became Chief White House Council, one became General Council Deputy Director of the FBI, one became the Acting Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice and then micromanaged Stevens’ prosecution, and that wound up being so corrupt that Judge Sullivan dismissed the indictment and then they appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the Department of Justice itself and the ironically named Public Integrity Section Lawyers who had corrupted that prosecution under the direction of Mr Matthew Friedrich. Another is now Head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice – Leslie Caldwell, she’s the prosecutor who led the government’s indictment of Arthur Anderson, only to be reversed by the United States Supreme Court years later after 85,000 jobs were destroyed. The Supreme Court reduced it to nothing, stating it was shocking how little criminal culpability the jury instructions required, and the indictment did not allege criminal conduct.

Jason:
Let’s maybe go chronologically here and we’ll work our way up to Lois Lerner, who in my opinion, should be sitting in jail cooling her heels for contempt, or sanctioned at the very least. What’s the oldest case? Is it the Enron one, of the ones you mentioned?

Sidney:
Yes. The Enron prosecutions were the oldest ones – the government appointed the Enron taskforce. I think a member of the Department of Justice handpicked these prosecutors.

Jason:
Just give the high-level view of that case. It involved Enron, Arthur Andersen…

Sidney:
Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch, there were multiple cases and of course there was justifiable public outrage over the destruction of Enron, and it was a complicated scenario. There was outrage across the country because so many people lost so much money and that led to the creation of the Department of Justice taskforce that was then untethered from the Department because of Bush’s connection with Ken Lay who was Chair of Enron. This group of handpicked prosecutors got together and decided to make up crimes out of things that weren’t, they cast a net that was far too broad. Of course, there were some people at Enron who had committed crimes, but many who were indicted had not. They went about it in such a way that they really shut down any opportunity for justice to prevail, given the public outrage that fuels a feeding frenzy for scalps in the first place, and then they named over a hundred people as unindicted co-conspirators so that anyone in that realm at all had to lawyer up. They couldn’t talk to anybody else.

Jason:
“Unindicted co-conspirators”. So that means…what does that mean? Explain the legal implications of that. So in other words the Department of Justice labelled – what did you say, 100 people?

Sidney:
Over a hundred people.

Jason:
Over a hundred people. So these are people that probably worked for Merrill Lynch, Enron and Arthur Andersen, right?

Sidney:
Correct.

Jason:
Okay, and so they labelled them as unindicted co-conspirators, so they didn’t go after them.

Sidney:
The people did not know whether they were coming after them or not. They knew that there was a pall cast over them and that immediately put extreme stress on them and required them to get lawyers. It required them to invoke their rights against their system and add protections if they were called to testify because the prosecutors were also threatening to indict for perjury or obstruction of justice – anyone who testified at any time about any facts that were contrary to the taskforce’s view of the facts.

Jason:
Wow, that’s just amazing. So what effect does that have on the case? Like the fact that these people lawyer up, they take the fifth amendment – what does that do? What is the outcome that creates?

Sidney:
It made it virtually impossible to mount a defence. For example, the four Merrill Lynch executives who were literally just doing their jobs couldn’t even talk to their own in-house council about what had happened in the transaction. It took us six years to find out the truth about what she had told the Enron grand jury before the indictment, and it turned out that she had testified before the grand jury.

Jason:
Hang on a second – the transaction, what is that?

Sidney:
Yeah, the transaction was called the Enron or Nigerian Barge Transaction – in which Merrill Lynch invested $7 million. It was a power project that Enron was conducting for the country of Nigeria at the request of our state department.

Jason:
And I’ve got ask you something before you dive into more detail, and I appreciate the detail; it’s really quite fascinating. I have noticed over the years that Merrill Lynch, as well as Goldman Sachs, seems to be involved in so many criminal activities. Actually, I don’t know if they’re technically criminal per se, but I’ll call them criminal for layman terms. They’re just wrong. Are you saying Merrill Lynch and Enron weren’t guilty of anything, that they didn’t do anything wrong? Or Arthur Andersen with the paper shredders and so forth? That’s my belief, from the public point of view – it seemed like Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that was in business for around 150 years before that. My cousin used to work for Arthur Andersen. It seemed like they destroyed documents, it seems like Enron was pulling scams with their special purpose vehicles and such. I don’t know exactly what Merrill Lynch was doing in there but they always seem to be involved in something bad. How do you like that for throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Hey listen, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t have to live up to any big standards here. I’m not a prosecutor. It’s just my impression, anecdotally. I’ve not studied this in detail.

Sidney:
That was my impression too, frankly, until I got into the cases, and the book explains that. The reason that’s what everybody thinks is because that’s all anybody heard.

Jason:
Right, right. Of course, yeah, that was in the media and whatever the media sells is what everybody ends up believing.

Sidney:
And that’s all the government was sharing because they were hiding the evidence that showed people were innocent. For example, in the Merrill Lynch case, they have actually yellow highlighted the evidence from witnesses who had been direct participants in the alleged transaction that they said was criminal. They yellow highlighted the exculpatory statements that were favorable to the defence and they hid them for six years while four Merrill Lynch executives went to prison on an indictment that did not even state a criminal offence.

Jason:
Wow. Now I’m actually starting to feel some sympathy for Merrill Lynch. Did Enron do anything wrong, just broadly?

Sidney:
There were any number of things done wrong at Enron. Some were bad business judgments, some were overly aggressive actions – their procedures for accounting were way overly aggressive and there were people at Enron who actually stole money. Two members in particular made sweet plea agreements with the government; Ben Glisan actually plead guilty without a deal but then got one later. The young Treasurer of Enron, to soften him up when he plead guilty and refused to cooperate, they put him straight into solitary confinement for a few weeks. They really played hardball with these business people. One of our young Merrill Lynch executives was sent to a maximum security prison with the worst of the worst, and we got him completely acquitted on appeal.

Jason:
How long did he spend in prison?

Sidney:
Eight months.

Jason:
Wow, that’s amazing.

Sidney:
8 months away from his four-year old and two-year old in a maximum security federal transfer facility.

Jason:
Since I asked you the very general question of ‘Did Enron do anything wrong?’, did Merrill Lynch do anything wrong at all?

Sidney:
Yes it did. It was a civil issue only, not a criminal one. Merrill made another tactic of the task-force – after they destroyed Arthur Anderson merely by indicting it, they turned their sights on Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch agreed to a very onerous non-prosecution agreement that required, among other things, that any Merrill employee that spoke about the transaction agree only with the government’s view of the case. In other words, they couldn’t say anything contrary to the taskforce’s view of the case, or Merrill Lynch could be indicted solely within the discretion of the taskforce. And an indictment of Merrill Lynch would have destroyed it.

Jason:
How about Arthur Andersen?

Sidney:
Everybody thinks Arthur Andersen was convicted of shredding documents but it was actually charged with witness tampering. It had no legal obligation to keep any documents at the time. The documents were shredded and ask you know, accountants, lawyers, doctors are not supposed to have paper flying around. There are things we’re supposed to protect and shred. There was no subpoena at the time and so after Andersen’s 85,000 jobs were destroyed the Supreme Court reversed it completely to nothing. It was a unanimous Supreme Court reversal based on the flawed indictment and the fact that the prosecutors and the district judge in Houston took any element of criminal intent out of the jury instructions.

Jason:
Wow, that’s amazing. It’s really a different story. I call Wall Street the modern version of organized crime somewhat frequently, and I still think that, but maybe it is time for another look at this case and some of these other cases because there’s a really interesting documentary that re-framed it – and I had the director of this documentary on my show. It’s called ‘Hot Coffee’ and it really re-framed this Stella McDonald coffee spill case. McDonald’s just completely vilified this poor old lady. It seemed like this ridiculous jury verdict and immediately I and everyone else had the knee-jerk reaction of ‘Oh, we need a reform, this is absurd that these companies can be liable for this kind of stuff blah blah blah’ but there are two sides to that story too, so maybe there are two sides to this one as well and I’m open to hearing it. I don’t want to spend all our time on this one, though, because there are a few others and we’ve really got to get to Lois Lerner as well. Any other comments about Enron, Arthur Andersen, Merrill Lynch; that case, if you would.

Sidney:
One of the things I’m encouraging people to do is to wait to form judgments until we know more of the facts, because it is so easy to jump to a conclusion with respect to anything. I was guilty of it myself in this, and the book reveals that as it goes along. There was so much out there that the government hid and then the prosecutors that hid it rose to extremely powerful positions and have basically been running our government for the last six years, and nothing has been done to them. They’ve not only not been punished or called to account for their wrongdoing in anyway; they were all promoted.

Jason:
Of course, that’s what happens in our system. You do something wrong, you get promoted.

Sidney:
Apparently.

Jason:
Next case, if you will.

Sidney:
Andersen was the first conviction above a taskforce, and then the four Merrill Lynch defendants. The Merrill Lynch defendants from the barge case were sent to prison by the judge, who literally said ‘I realize you were just doing your jobs’, but he refused to dismiss the indictment, even though it was something that had never been charged as a criminal offence in the history of our country. It was a completely unprecedented application of the statutes to facts like were in this case. The four Merrill Lynch executives went to prison while the prosecutors had actually yellow highlighted and hidden the evidence that showed they were innocent.

Jason:
Unbelievable. That’s just insane. This is so terrifyingly scary that you could be – and this could happen to any of us, okay. You may think you live this pristine life, and believe me, there are so many laws, everybody’s breaking laws nowadays. Even if you don’t speed in your car, you’re breaking a law, trust me. The government has a law that you are breaking. Some – I’ll say ‘ambitious’, in a snarky way – district attorney, or someone at the DoJ, they could just have it out for you, or they could be trying to win re-election, or they could be trying to further their career in some way, and they’ll just go and ruin your life and maybe take away your freedom or even your life.

Sidney:
Yes. The fifth circuit court of appeals reversed the conviction of twelve out of fourteen counts of the Merrill Lynch convictions because the indictment was fatally flawed and defendants’ conduct was not criminal, but we couldn’t even get them bail pending appeal, so they served in prison while their appeals were pending, only to be told by the court that there was no criminal offence charged. That shattered all of their lives, but the government was undeterred by the reversal. They decided they would just write out the portions of the indictment that the fifth circuit had specifically criticized, so they wrote those out and were going to drag the defendants through a second trial. These men – my client, for example, was in litigation for almost ten years; the entire teenage years of both his children, and going back to your comment about people leading pristine lives: Dan Bailey was one of the Merrill Lynch executives indicted and sent to prison. The judge, as he sentenced him, told him he’d never had such a fine person stand before him for sentencing.

Jason:
And the judge had to do it though, right? Because that’s the law.

Sidney:
Well no, he didn’t have to do it. He should have dismissed the indictment because we made the same arguments to him that the Court of Appeals reversed on – the indictment did not state a crime.

Jason:
But sometimes the judge is tied, right? They have to do things even if the judge doesn’t agree with it, just because of the way the law is, right?

Sidney:
No.

Jason:
No, okay.

Sidney:
If he had applied the law correctly, he would have dismissed the indictment and there would never have been a trial in the first place.

Jason:
Why would he even say that then? Why would he say that he’d never had such a fine person there? It sounds like he didn’t want to convict him – or sentence him, I mean.

Sidney:
He didn’t want to have to send him to prison, but when he refused to dismiss the indictment and allowed it to go to trial, that was the consequence.

Jason:
Wow, amazing.

Sidney:
He didn’t do his job in any way, shape or form. The trail was a total farce and I’ve never seen a trial so infected with errors as the Merrill Lynch trial was from the indictment through the jury instructions.

Jason:
It’s amazing though. I mean, all these bigwigs at Merrill Lynch must have had the world’s best attorneys defending them, right?

Sidney:
They did. It didn’t matter. When you have a judge that’s determined to ensure your conviction and prosecutors who hide the evidence that show you’re innocent, anybody can be sent to prison. Noone in this country is safe from this kind of misconduct by the government, and the only person who can stand between the prosecutors and the jail cell is a good federal judge. If you have one that just sits there and watches the parade go by, it’s not going to do the right thing.

Jason:
So one of the things you talk about in your book is the dangerous fuel of public outrage. This is kind of where the media turns us all into lynch mobs, right? We just want to bring people to justice so bad that we become blinded, and the courts become blinded. How much pressure do these judges and prosecutors feel to just nail somebody? Maybe it’s not even the right person.

Sidney:
The prosecutors were selected for the purpose of doing that. That was their whole mission – to see how many scalps they could rack up and see what kind of crimes they could create, basically, on behalf of the Enron taskforce. They went in with the mindset that’s totally contrary to the way I was raised in the Department of Justice. There’s an old Supreme Court case that talks about how a prosecutor is supposed to seek justice, not convictions, and while he is at liberty to strike bare blows, he cannot strike foul ones. They violated every aspect of that mantra.

Jason:
Before we get to Lois Lerner, can we do anything about this?

Sidney:
Yeah, there are a number of things that can be done. Several years ago, after the Ted Stevens conviction was thrown out, Judge Sullivan named a special prosecutor to investigate the Department of Justice. He came out with a mammoth report (about 500 pages long) – a lot of the evidence he found was systematic and pervasive intentional misconduct within the Department of Justice. There’s a non-profit organization called POGO (Project on Government Oversight) www.pogo.org, and it has also, by virtue of the Freedom of Information Act, identified over 400 instances of prosecutorial misconduct in the last decade, that has been intentional or reckless. Eric Holder refuses to even release the names of the prosecutors who engaged in misconduct that the Department itself has identified as intentional or reckless.

Jason:
Okay, tell us a little bit about the Ted Stevens story. Give us the background on that.

Sidney:
Senator Stevens was indicted by one of the former Enron taskforce prosecutors, Matthew Friedrich, at his insistence when he became Acting Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the Department. In that case, they also hid evidence that seriously impeached the government’s main witness, with whom they had made a very sweet deal and basically controlled anything and everything he would want to say or they would need him to say. Among the evidence they hid was the fact that he had engaged in sex trafficking with a minor and engaged in subornation of perjury – rather crucial things that should have been disclosed to the defence in that case. They had also made up a story to explain a note that Senator Stevens had written, on which his entire defence was based. The Senator was convicted a few days before the election for his Senate seat, that was one of the most hotly contested races in the country at the time. He lost the election by only a few votes, despite the criminal conviction, because Ted Stevens was loved in Alaska. The airport was even named for him, and everybody loved Ted Stevens. He was a World War Two hero, he was former US Attorney, he had just done all kinds of good things for the state of Alaska. So he only lost by a few votes, but that changes the balance of power in the United States Senate. An unusual thing happened – a young FBI who was assigned to the case broke ranks from his fellow agents and blew the whistle on prosecutorial misconduct that he had witness. That happened in December after the conviction in late October-early November. There had already been any number of instances where the defendants and the judge had caught the government in one lie after the other, having failed to disclose this or that. They sent a witness back to Alaska to keep him off the witness stand – they found out later it was because he had not done well in his mock cross-examination. They claimed it was because he wasn’t feeling well. He was under the weather, but the defence had also subpoenaed him and they sent him back without letting the defence know. So a number of things had been discovered throughout the trial. The FBI agent blowing the whistle just blew it wide open and Judge Sullivan and the District of Columbia was absolutely livid. The defence had been filing motion after motion, so that led to a new set of prosecutors being appointed. Judge Sullivan held the original prosecutors in contempt of court. That triggered a requirement within the Justice Department that new prosecutors be assigned to the case. It only took those new prosecutors a couple of weeks to find the evidence that the original team had hidden, and that led to Eric Holder rushing in as the newly appointed Attorney General. I think he’d only been in office 3-4 weeks at the time. He rushed in to dismiss the indictment in the interest of justice, and announced that he was going to clean up the Department and send in the message throughout the Department that violations wouldn’t be tolerated. We were still in the Merrill Lynch litigation at the time and hadn’t even discovered the yellow highlighted evidence yet, but I still had a strong sense that the government was hiding things. Nothing made any sense. They’d only given us a few line summaries of the testimony of these crucial witnesses, and we knew there had to be more out there in terms of notes or the FBI reports of their transactions or their grand jury testimony or their SEC testimony. They wouldn’t give us any of that so we kept pounding for it. After Stevens’ debacle and the dismissal of that indictment, the third team of prosecutors assigned to the Merrill case were trying to retry the defendants did give us a few little things. In March of 2010, they gave us a disk and that disk, unbeknownst to them (they apparently didn’t review it before they gave it to us) contained the yellow highlighting of the evidence that directly contradicted the government’s entire case against the Merrill defendants. So they produced that only by accident and didn’t even realize they’d done it.

Jason:
Wow, that’s just unbelievable. Can these prosecutors be prosecuted for –

Sidney:
For obstruction of justice?

Jason:
Yeah, for going on these witch hunts. Does that ever happen, though? It probably can happen.

Sidney:
It can happen, and I know of one time that it happened but it is extremely rare. One of the reasons I had to write the book was because we couldn’t get the Department of Justice to do anything about this. My client still stands convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for expressing his personal understanding of a telephone call he wasn’t on, even though Andrew Weissman, the prosecutor in the Grand Jury had told him to share his personal understanding, whether it was accurate or not. Even though, as it turns out, his personal understanding was absolutely true and had been yellow highlighted by the government by the actual participants in the call.

Jason:
Unbelievable. OKay, so prosecution is rare, if ever. It’s so rare, it’s negligible. But what about civil liability? If one of these prosecutors goes after you, you can’t sue the judge (they’re pretty much immune), but can you sue the prosecutor?

Sidney:
That is extremely difficult also. There is a little bit of precedent for that, but again, it is so rare as to be negligible and the standard’s so hard to meet as to be negligible.

Jason:
What’s the standard? Why is it so hard?

Sidney:
I don’t remember the precise wording of it, but it requires a significant level of proof and the courts are just not interpreting it with any sort of leniency at all. The Bar associations are doing nothing. Bill Hodes, one of the leading ethics experts in the country and I filed grievances against Andrew Weissman, who became General Council to the FBI, Kathryn Ruemmler who became Chief White House Counsellor and Matthew Friedrich who became the person who micro-managed the Stevens prosecution. We filed grievances against those with their respective Bar associations because after we found the yellow highlighting, the Fifth Circuit did hold that the prosecutors had plainly suppressed evidence favorable to the defence. There’s an ethical rule 3.8 which is a special rule governing prosecutors that says that it’s a serious ethical violation. Well, the Department of Justice defended Weissman and they said, like the Fifth Circuit, that it will refuse to reverse the convictions of my client on the perjury and obstruction charges that were ridiculous. They’ve said there will be no new trial or anything. In fact, we couldn’t even get a hearing on the motion for a new trial because of the yellow highlighting.

Jason:
You were talking about what we can do about it. Did you cover all those things? You mentioned POGO. Maybe just quickly mention one or two more, and then I want to talk about Lois Lerner.

Sidney:
Yes, well there was legislation proposed in Congress called the ‘Fairness in Disclosure of Evidence Act’, and there’s going to be a new act introduced called the ‘Prosecutorial Integrity Act’ that’s designed to put some teeth in the rules that require prosecutors to disclose evidence favorable to the defence and to set some timelines for that. The Fairness in Disclosure of Evidence Act was widely supported from the ACLU through the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers to the Chamber of Commerce. Everybody supported it. It died in Committee because it was deposed by the (now ironically named) Department of Justice. So now the Prosecutorial Integrity Act will be introduced and we will try again to get that legislation passed, and hopefully there will be more impetus to pass it, particularly with the book out and people reading it and listening to radio shows like this. Also, judges can enter Brady Compliance Orders – district court judges in the state and federal system could do that tomorrow and require prosecutors to produce the actual evidence. Summaries should rarely ever be allowed. They shouldn’t have been allowed in our case. If we had gotten the actual documents, this wouldn’t have happened.

Jason:
That could be a good step in the right direction.

Sidney:
Yeah, that’s an immediate step in the right direction, and I also want to encourage people not to shirk their jury duty. Everybody thinks it’s such a pain, and it does take time out of your life, but a single juror is the last bastion of democracy because a single juror can stop an unjust criminal conviction.

Jason:
That’s a great saying, by the way. A single juror – just you, one person – is the last bastion of democracy. It reminds me of the great quote by Ayn Rand when she’s talking about group rights and the concept of if a group has any rights. Nowadays we have all these groups and they want rights, but the smallest minority on earth is the individual – there’s no such thing as group rights, only individual rights.

Sidney:
Yeah, and you know John Galt comes out in theaters tomorrow.

Jason:
Oh, the third one is already out.

Sidney:
Part three comes out tomorrow.

Jason:
That’s great, I have a couple of friends that were involved in the production of that movie; I’m sure it’ll be awesome. Let’s talk about the IRS scandal really quickly. We’ve definitely taken a deep dive into this stuff, but this is just disgusting what is going on with Lois Lerner and her Blackberry, and you broke that story so tell us more about it.

Sidney:
Yeah, Judge Emmet Sullivan, one of the heroes in the book Licensed to Lie is the judge who is presiding over the judicial Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS, pursuant to which they’ve requested the same email that Congress has been trying to get. Judge Sullivan was the one who appointed the special prosecutor in the Stevens case to investigate the Department of Justice, so he is not going to sit and watch the parade go by. He is a judge of great integrity and courage and he is very interested in doing what’s right and fair. When the first points were filed in response to his order, he had also appointed a special magistrate to assist the parties in finding the emails from other sources – that magistrate judge is an expert in electronic discovery. They are working on it. Judge Sullivan wasn’t satisfied with the first ones that the IRS provided in response to his questions about where the emails were and what happened to this computer and first it was one, then it was 7, then it was almost 20. Just last week they came out with another 5 that had crashed. Basically the answer is that if Congress wants the emails, that person’s computer crashed.

Jason:
Unbelievable. If I did that in the case, I would get fined and sanctioned. Congress can’t even get the emails – that’s amazing!

Sidney:
It is extraordinary.

Jason:
How do these people get away with this crap? It’s disgusting.

Sidney:
I don’t think they’re going to get away with it much longer with Judge Sullivan on it.

Jason:
I hope not.

Sidney:
After the first declarations were filed and he wasn’t satisfied with those answers, he requested second declarations, and he specifically asked about a Blackberry because they’d said nothing about it. When the government filed the second set of declarations, you had to read them very carefully and put the pieces together, but they disclosed that Lois Lerner actually had two Blackberry phones. They described one by serial number and the other by date. So I sat down with the two declarations, ran a timeline, kept track of the numbers and realized that they were admitting that they had destroyed Lois Lerner’s Blackberry that would have had the emails on it from the time that Congress was requesting. She turned it in for destruction and got a new one on Valentine’s Day 2012, which was when Congress had really focused on her. They’d already talked to her and the IRS destroyed it in June of 2012. Her computer had crashed in, I think, April 2011.

Jason:
Her computer had conveniently and allegedly crashed.

Sidney:
Right, and that was just a few days after she got the request from Congress for the emails.

Jason:
Here’s what’s funny about this whole case. Certainly, you would expect that the IRS backs up their computers, for God’s sake, right?

Sidney:
Right. They also terminated their long-standing contract for document back-up.

Jason:
How convenient. All of this coalescing is just such a convenient series of events here.

Sidney:
Yes, and I’ve got a number of articles on this topic as it developed at www.Observer.com. A lot of those have gone viral and been widely reported and used by other media as well.

Jason:
Here’s a snarky idea as to where to get Lois Lerner’s data and her emails from. Why don’t we just go to the NSA? Don’t they have everything?

Sidney:
Right! Several people have suggested that!

Jason:
Oh, I thought that was an original idea. Darn it!

Sidney:
Sorry, no. Several people have suggested that if you read the comments to the articles on www.Observer.com. You’ll see lots of comments to that effect.

Jason:
Darn, I can’t be original as hard as I try.

Sidney:
The government did admit to Judicial Watch a week or two ago that there is a massive government back-up system, but they claim it would be too hard to go and find the emails there, so that’s why they sent their warrant.

Jason:
Unbelievable.

Sidney:
They just lie because it’s difficult and then obstruct justice because it’s too hard to go and find them.

Jason:
Sure, of course. Okay, so what else do we need to know about the IRS? Basically just give the listeners the overall view. I’m sorry we didn’t do that first. The case is about the IRS targeting or not approving tax exempt status of like tea party groups, right?

Sidney:
Yes, the use of IRS for political purposes to harass conservative groups, especially before Obama’s re-election in 2012, and there’s the Inspector General for Treasury who’s the watchdog over the IRS even confirmed in his report that improper political targeting had occurred, and Lois Lerner’s activities were totally inappropriate.

Jason:
We all saw the testimony of some people in these groups that couldn’t get their political group approved or their political action committee, or their non-profit group. This is unbelievable that the Obama administration is using the IRS as a weapon to target political opponents.

Sidney:
It’s an outrage.

Jason:
Outrage is an understatement. That is disgusting. Did that come from Obama himself? It must have, or he must have known about it.

Sidney:
It definitely has to go into the White House, or their wouldn’t be such an extraordinary effort to refrain from producing the paper and all these ridiculous mysterious computer crashes that defy logic, reason or reality. These are basically intellectually insulting to even 10 or 15 year olds in this country who know that computer don’t crash like that.

Jason:
Even if they do crash, the data can still be recovered most of the time. The only thing that really makes it so that you can’t recover the data – from what I understand – is a fire.

Sidney:
Or drilling a hole in the hard drive.

Jason:
Yeah, a complete physical destruction of it.

Sidney:
Yeah, in fact, Lois Lerner’s hard drive was just scratched, according to the initial report, and supposedly one person had testified to Congress that he suggested it be sent to an outside vendor to recover the emails. The IRS didn’t do that and instead, they completely physically shredded it. They did the same with the Blackberry: they wiped it and then they physically destroyed it.

Jason:
Unbelievable. This is just disgusting.

Sidney:
If any of us did that, we’d be under the jail for not being able to produce your material for an audit because your computer crashed and for shredding your computer.

Jason:
And conveniently they didn’t lose any audit or taxpayer files. They can still go after the taxpayers!

Sidney:
Right. It’s just amazing that only the email traffic between the folks in the White House and around the political targeting of the conservative groups seems to have been lost. Meanwhile, there was an IRS person who made over 165 visits to the White House in person, during the same time frame.

Jason:
Unbelievable. Okay, just wrap this up for us. We’ve been going a little long here. Any closing comments on anything? Give out your website and tell people where they can find the book.

Sidney:
Yes, read Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice. The website is www.LicensedtoLie.com. The book is definitely available on Amazon, as well as from various bookstores. I tweet with the handle @SidneyPowell1 and like Licensed to Lie on Facebook. Tell your friends! It’s on Kindle and Nook, so it’s available in every form.

Jason:
I really hope that they make a movie out of your book because number one, I think it’ll be fascinating, but number two, that’s the only way the mainstream culture will ever know any of this stuff.

Sidney:
That’s true. It would reach a much wider audience if it goes to that form.

Jason:
Very very important topic and very interesting. Sidney Powell, thank you so much for joining us.

Sidney:
Thank you very much. Oh, and remind people as well to go to www.Observer.com to read the assorted articles, including one about the White House and those emails.

Jason:
Good stuff. Sidney Powell, thank you.

Sidney:
Thank you.

Outro:
The American Monetary Association is a non-profit venture, funded by the Jason Hartman Foundation, which is dedicated to educating people about the practical effects of monetary policy and government actions in inflation, deflation and personal freedom. Our goal is to help people prosper in the midst of uncertain economic times. This show is produced by the Jason Hartman Foundation, all rights reserved. For publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com or email media@hartmanmedia.com. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate professional if you require individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of the Jason Hartman Foundation exclusively.