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Lawyer for Defense Secretary Nominee
Threatens to Sue Sexual Assault Accuser
The Arlington-based lawyer for defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth is being called out for what appears to be a threat he made to a whistleblower.
Tim Parlatore told CNN that he might sue a woman who accused Hegseth of sexual assault if the Senate declines to confirm him as defense secretary.
Referring to a nondisclosure agreement Hegseth obtained from a woman who believes she was drugged and sexually assaulted, Parlatore said in an interview, “Quite frankly, with the violation of the agreement, if he is not confirmed as secretary of defense, we may still bring a civil extortion claim against her.”
A Monterey, Calif., police report says that in 2017 a woman said she met Hegseth at a party after a political event but that her memory is unclear, other than that she woke up in a hotel room with Hegseth.
She told police Hegseth took her phone and prevented her from leaving. She said she thinks Hegseth raped and possibly drugged her. No charges were filed in the case.
Hegseth denies the allegations. He says he had a consensual affair with a woman but paid her to sign a nondisclosure agreement to resolve any potential disputes.
Parlatore told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that if that “causes him to lose his future employment opportunities, then yes, that is something that is worth bringing a lawsuit against.”
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Parlatore appeared to be “threatening or intimidating a potential witness.” He called the apparent threat “reprehensible.”
As a backlash against Hegseth grows in Congress, President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly considering Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as an alternative.
For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.
Biden Administration Asks Supreme Court
To Reject Oil Companies’ Climate Change Case
The Biden administration is urging the Supreme Court to allow local governments to continue suing oil companies they accuse of deceiving the public about their fuels contributing to climate change.
The oil companies and Republican state attorneys general are trying to block the lawsuits.
The leading case is a petition to the Supreme Court by oil companies that lost a lawsuit to the city of Honolulu. Hawaiian officials accused the companies of violating state laws against nuisance, failure to warn consumers and trespass.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed a brief last week asking the Supreme Court to side with Hawaii.
She wrote that the “state law claims rested on the same theory of liability: that petitioners have known for decades that greenhouse gas emissions from the use of their fossil fuel products would contribute to climate change; that instead of warning consumers about those consequences, [the oil companies] engaged in deceptive marketing by concealing and mis-presenting the dangers of using their fossil fuel products.”
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Supreme Court Allows School Policy
That Whites and Asians Say is Biased
The Supreme Court declined last week to hear a case to decide whether three elite Boston public schools violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by trying to ensure racial diversity with an admissions policy based on zip codes of applicants.
By refusing to review the case, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision saying there is no evidence of an intent to discriminate in the admissions policy.
The dispute bears strong similarities to a case in Alexandria, Va., in which the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology revamped its admissions policy in 2020.
The new policy dropped standardized test requirements and put a higher emphasis on “experience factors.” They included applicants’ household income and whether they come from middle schools that were historically underrepresented at the high school.
Parents of Asian American students sued, saying the policy had a disparate impact that excluded some of their children from the school.
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Letters to the Editor
D.C. in Brief
Judge Drops Contempt Charge
For Attorney’s Schedule Snafu
A judge in Alexandria last week dropped a contempt of court charge against a public defender in her third trimester of a pregnancy after deciding a scheduling mishap caused her to miss a hearing.
Otherwise, Sameera Ali faced up to 10 days in jail and a $250 fine.
She is a private attorney who sometimes accepts public defender cases referred to her by the court. She missed a hearing while representing a teenager charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.
She had told a court clerk who asked her to represent the teenager on Nov. 8 that she could take the case only if it could be rescheduled from Nov. 19. She said she had a conflicting court appointment in Fairfax County the same day.
Instead, the clerk called her the day before the Nov. 19 hearing and told her it could not be rescheduled.
When she missed the hearing, Judge Thomas K. Cullen of the Alexandria Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court filed a civil contempt charge against her.
At the contempt hearing last week, Cullen explained that he was trying to comply with a Virginia law that required preliminary hearings for juveniles within 21 days after being arrested. The teenaged defendant was arrested Nov. 1.
After expressing frustration with Ali’s schedule conflict, he said, “It does not appear to me that this was willful, so I’m dismissing the ‘show cause.’ It appears to the court that there were a series of errors.”
The case attracted the attention of Northern Virginia attorneys who warned about a chilling effect on indigent clients’ Sixth Amendment right to representation by counsel.
Biden Threatens to Veto Bill
To Add More Federal Judges
Congress approved a bill last week to add 66 new federal judgeships across the nation but might have acted too late to avoid a veto.
President Joe Biden initially supported the bill when the Senate approved it in August. At the time, Kamala Harris was leading in some polls, meaning Democrats were most likely to be empowered to nominate the new judges next year.
Then Donald Trump won the election, meaning the appointments will shift to Republicans.
Biden’s veto threat appears to be timed to prevent Trump from gaining the right to make the appointments.
In the first major expansion of the federal judiciary in more than three decades, 25 federal court districts would get more judges under the Judges Act.
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That way, DC residents like Keith King (pictured above) can get the legal representation they need to win their cases. As Mr. King put it, if it wasn’t for his Legal Aid lawyer, “I would have been homeless again.”
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