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Winds of Change
[UPDATE: U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was asked to resign as of 1:45 p.m. CST. He was ousted by the President. Read more here.] Although many speculate that Balch & Bingham’s top connection in Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be replaced, other moves are coming that could impact the embattled law firm. Congressman Adam Schiff will become the new Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and declared this morning that he will enforce oversight that the current Congress “abdicated.” Just up the the Golden State Freeway from CDLU’s home office in East Los Angeles, we visited with…
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Balch & Bingham Doesn’t Give a Damn; Re-hires Irving Jones, Jr.
“Lord have mercy!” declared one of the residents in North Birmingham when we told her the news. On Monday, our sources at Balch & Bingham gave us a heads up that Balch & Bingham had re-hired Irving Jones, Jr. the attorney who helped ghost-write letters for convicted felon and Balch-made millionaire Joel I. Gilbert. Jones also infiltrated GASP meetings and monitored the environmental group’s social media feeds. We wrote about his court testimony as reported by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John Archibald: Gilbert also asked Jones to draft a confidentiality agreement relating to Oliver Robinson. Four days before Oliver Robinson was to speak to…
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Living Well: Smitherman’s Bags of Cash
With the headline “Lawmakers raise millions while running unopposed,” Kyle Whitmire of AL.com reports: Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, raised $240,161, with about $110,000 coming after no one qualified to run against him. Under Alabama law, officials can use leftover campaign funds for any expenses reasonably related to the office. So what’s reasonable? That’s largely subject to interpretation and lawmakers often have imaginations as big as their campaign accounts. Plane tickets, car leases, new tires for a truck, dinners in Montgomery, dinners out of state, cell phones, laptops — the list is long. The point of all this is, special interest…
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Is Ruining a Rival Ruining Balch?
[This post originally appeared exactly one year ago today on November 1, 2017. A Catch-22, any move made by Judge Smitherman or Balch on the 44 retaliatory orders will only solidify Newsome’s civil RICO suit. Now, today, Balch partners need to address the strategic failure of “ruining a rival.”] Schuyler Allen Baker, Jr., a Balch & Bingham partner who filed the amended motion for summary judgment in the Newsome Conspiracy Case, declared that Balch was justified in interfering in Newsome’s business and livelihood because the Alabama Supreme Court allowed “ruining a rival” in a 1961 decision. But that is untrue.…
