-Stop right there, Stop right there. Nathan, you are -coming prety close to reading yourself out of the -left. You will end up with Sidney Hook and the HUAC -liberals.
I actually don't really care if I'm "read out of the left." Folks have done that many times to me, just as liberals will eject me from reasonable company for my views. As they say, I don't need no fucking badge to have my opinion.
-The wickedness of a client is totally fucking -irrelevant. My First Amendment teacher, David -Goldberger, who, btw, would never describe himself asa
-leftist, made his legal bones defending the Nazis in -Skokie.
And the Nazis and the Jews defending them were smart to have the combination, since it emphasized the distinction between the legal advocacy and the political advocacy. It is precisely because Stewart aligned her politics with her client that the issue of "material support" could arise. To the extent that lawyers take advantage of their legal position -- including access to their client that would not be granted a non-lawyer -- the more you have to deal with the issue that a lawyer is not engaged in merely legal tactics but is helping to further their client's illegal goals, the more the lawyer's privilege should be respected.
This issue comes up in corporate cases quite often as well and I think lawyers who are on-payroll counsel should not be treated in the same way as lawyers hired solely for when an executive faces criminal trial. A lawyer on payroll is tied up with the goals of a corporation, so their acts are not merely as lawyers but as partisans of the firm, so their actions should be judged in those terms with their legal "advice" treated as part of the same illegal acts as those who act on that advice. Similarly, their actions and work produce should be given far less deference.
-You KNOW that violating gag orders is small change -legally. You KNOW the trivial or nonexistent legal -penalties that attach in normal cases, sometimes -involving murderous scumbugs, Mafia leaders, etc. -What is your excuse for supporting traeting this as -seditiosu conspiracy and defrauding the government? -What the hell is a liberal, much less a leftist, doing -supporting the idea that ANYONE should be convicted of -seditious conspiracy? What is happening to you, Nathan?
I don't like seditious conspiracy and have said so, but this was more than that. Stewart took advantage of her privileged access to the Shiek to help him convey messages to his followers. Speaking of Nazis, if the lawyers you talked about above were breaking gag orders to direct Nazi grunts to kill blacks in the South, I'd be pretty sympathetic to a jury convicting them.
Conspiracy trials before violent acts have happened are illegitimate. After the violence has happened, helping the perpetrators of that violence is more than seditious conspiracy; it's furthering an ongoing criminal act.
That's a pretty clear distinction in my mind. We can have a debate on how much Lynne Stewart did further that ongoing criminal act, which is no doubt what the jury debated, but the distinction is pretty clear for me.
But as I said, if the Left wants to make this case a purity test, so be it. For too many people on the left, no debate is allowed, which just furthers the caricature that all leftists are intolerant of dissent.
Nathan Newman