While criminal charges are hardly brought against corrupt public officials, they are immeditely trumped up against defense attorney #MarcusMumford

I have been writing on this blog since 2014 about cases where attorneys are targeted and punished by the government for their professional activities as attorneys - by monetary sanctions, by disciplinary actions, by arrests and criminal charges, as they did to attorney Russel Stookey in Georgia, John Aretakis and George Galgano in New York, and now, as the government is doing to attorney Marcus Mumford in federal court - the defense attorney for Ammon Bundy, recently acquitted of criminal charges based on his standoff in a National Wildlife Preserve, a defense attorney who was, reportedly,

• physically tackled - by 9 marshals: 6 men and 3 women;

tasered;

handcuffed;

arrested;

taken into custody, and

criminally charged  -

all for making a legal argument for his client that his client's detention by the federal government without a proper court order, after he was acquitted by the court where he was seized by U.S. Marshals, was illegal and unconstitutional.

Now, while the feds are notoriously slow and reluctant to press criminal charges against high-standing public officials involved in corruption and misconduct - think federal judges involved in sexual misconduct with their employees, for example, think corrupt judges who usually are allowed to "resign" and keep their pension, but are practically never charged with crimes - criminal charges for "contempt of court" were immediately drummed up against attorney Mumford.

By the way, even though some sources on media and social media claimed that attorney Mumford was charged with a "contempt of court", that is not so.

Attorney Mumford was charged with "failure to comply with lawful direction of a federal police officer".

Attorney Mumford's e-mails to the court sent before the criminal charges were filed are also part of the docket.

The e-mails indicate that Attorney Mumford sought videotapes of the court proceedings showing the "incidents" of October 17, 2016 and October 27, 2016 where the U.S. Marshals instigated a conflict with him, and mentions in his e-mails that the same U.S. Marshall who instigated the confrontation that led to attorney Mumford's tasering, was also yelling at a judge and disobeying a judge on different occasions - yet, contempt of court charges were not brought against U.S. Marshals.

It appears that, since attorney Mumford was not criminally charged immediately after the tasering "incident", on October 27, 2016, and was only charged on November 29, 2011, after he sought video surveillance tapes from the court, the charges are in retaliation for seeking public records to expose misconduct of government officials - in continuation of an ongoing tendency of persecution of people trying to get access to government records that I previously reported on this blog. 

The charges are, of course, all bogus, since they charge attorney Mumford with "failure to comply with lawful direction of a federal police officer" - while the essence of the charges is kept secret (and sealed in the docket), 

and while attorney Mumford was specifically demanding from the U.S. Marshals who were taking his client to produce the court order upon authority of which they were arresting his just-acquitted client in the courtroom.

Since no court order was produced, the government will have a really hard time to prove - and it has to prove each and every element of his crime beyond the reasonable doubt - that:

• a federal police officer issued an order;
• that it was directed at attorney Mumford;
• that it was "lawful", and that
• attorney Mumford knowingly, of the order and of its being lawful, did not comply with it.

As a minimum, the government will have to produce the order that was the basis of "lawful" direction by U.S. Marshals, whatever that "direction" was, and the fact that attorney Mumford actually sought from the U.S. Marshals, on behalf of his client, production of that order, and was tasered instead of given the order, should be a basis of a motion to dismiss.

Of course, no judges of the court where the "incident" occurred agreed to preside over the case, so a judge from Washington, D.C. was imported for such purposes - and, when I tried to access the order of assignment of that judge on Pacer, Pacer claimed that it "can't open PDF" - while I could open other pdf documents from the same case and using the same browser, computer and viewing session.

Attorney Mumford recently appeared for an arraignment and pled "not guilty", and his own defense attorney, Michael Levine, reportedly stated the following to the court at his client's arraignment:

“I can’t recall an incident where a defense attorney in the midst of an argument on behalf of his client is tackled and tased, twice surrounded by the force of the state,” Levine said to reporters after Friday’s hearing. “If this is what America is coming to, ladies and gentleman, we are in deep trouble.”

And we are.