Dear Colleagues,
See url: http://cryptome.org/2015/03/klayman-v-clintons-pb-post-15-0326.pdf
You may remember, a few weeks ago, I wrote a wee story about the above case,
which I found rather intriguing...if not illuminating. It is a case brought
by a man called Klayman who is accusing the Clintons and their non-profit
philanthropic organisation of racketeering and using the organisation for
functions outside of its remit. Hilary Clinton is also accused of using the
insecure servers of the organisation to hide emails when she was in her job
as US Foreign Secretary, from requests under the prying eyes of the Freedom
Of Information Act.
Klayman himself has got a reputation for bringing law suits against
politicians and civil servants which have brought them down and has used an
organisation called Judicial Watch,
see url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Watch
and now Freedom Watch. See url: http://www.freedomwatchusa.org/ (sorry
about the music... J).
He is particularly known for bringing suits against the Clintons, though you
will see from Wikipedia that he has brought cases against a number of
prominent officials and politicians.
Anyway, having not seen any further developments in the case since I
returned from holiday, I wondered how the case was progressing and started
to do more research, and came across the following, again in Wikipedia.
See url:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation
Apparently, the law is also used to attack opponents or people or
organisations with which one disagrees and try and get them to shut up, or
cost them a lot of money in time and resources, and this is called a SLAPP
suit (strategic lawsuit against public participation), which can affect the
rights of free speech of the individual defendants. It is used by some
organisations and people quite a lot, who have discovered how useful it can
be in a war of attrition against their perceived opponents, and some of the
courts and jurisdictions have become wise to its misuse. It is based on the
Magna Carta "right to petition" the sovereign for redress, and is contained
in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution.
Klayman appears to be a bit of a character and knows his stuff and has been
banned from appearing in some courts due to his behaviour and misuse of
legal processes. Some sources refer to him as mad, or crazy, others as a
right wing nutter. He calls himself a Jewish Christian. This may or may
not be true, but nevertheless the man has been a thorn in the flesh to quite
a number of the "big yins" in the past, and has had, according to the
Wikipedia article, a number of successes.
He has achieved quite a bit of publicity over the Clintons and of course,
Hilary Clinton has now announced her candidature for the post of President
of the United States...so it will be interesting to see if this case
proceeds with a big bang, or gets thrown out of court with no more than a
whisper... J. He has also had a number of successes and I am sure you have
all heard about the challenge to whether Obama had the legal right to become
the US President.
With this further knowledge I have gained, I am going to read his case again
to see if it helps me understand what he is up to, the limits of such a tool
and what the Clintons do about it. A number of allegations complain of
racketeering, through the Clintons using their philanthropic organisation
outside of the purposes for which it was set up. Yet there are on cryptome
some tax returns for previous years which don't seem to tally with the
accusations of Klayman. Over time, I am going to look into this a little
bit further.
ATB
Dougie.
P.S. "One learns something new every day"... J.
