Bill Essayli Has an Identity Crisis
First Assistant AUSA Bill Essayli, who continues to serve most functions of US Attorney in Los Angeles even after Judge Michael Seabright ruled he’s not lawfully the US Attorney, has an identity crisis.
And it’s not his continued attempts to use textual gimmicks to obscure that he’s not the US Attorney, as the way he adds the initials “F.A.” in his Xitter profile as if his given name is “Fucking Asshole.”
Though the defendant who first forced a ruling that Essayli was playacting, Jaime Hector Rodriguez, continues to insist that Essayli can’t just change his title in a bid to keep powers he does not lawfully possess.
The simple answer is that Mr. Essayli is exercising power he does not possess. He has transcended the land of statutes. He is wielding significant authority, but the whole point is that he lacks that authority: it was not validly conferred on him by Congress. No powers are conferred on “a FAUSA” by statute, id., because the FAUSA position is absent from the statutes, R.M. 9–10. But this FAUSA has inferior-officer powers, because he is exercising powers he has never been conferred. E.g., R.M. 9 & n.2. This is just another way for the government to cast the trick it has played in benign language: appoint an ineligible individual to a vacant office, give him a different title not set out in the statutes, and thereby avoid all statutory limits on the appointment.
Lindsey Halligan’s similar identity problem in EDVA is heating up too.
Rather, I’m talking about the identity issues that threaten to destroy his efforts to criminalize doxing in the immigration context.
In US v. Raygoza, Essayli charged three women who followed an ICE officer — believing he was headed to conduct another snatching — only to arrive at his home. They continued to livestream, and from a neighbor’s property, they both invited others to come to the neighborhood but also announced to his neighbors that he’s la migra.
Yesterday, Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli responded to Sandra Samane’s and Ashleigh Brown’s motions to dismiss (Brown is represented by the same FPDs who made a frivolous assault charge against her go away last year). It’s not so much that their arguments were rock solid; motions to dismiss are really difficult to win. Rather, it’s that in the course of two footnotes, Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli revealed grave problems with his case. The second explained why a separate motion moved to dismiss the second count of the indictment, doxing, the crime which the defendants allegedly conspired to commit.
4 Defendants failed to state the actual home address of R.H. on social media, and instead said the number of a neighbor’s home approximately 100 feet from that of R.H. Because 18 U.S.C. § 119 criminalizes making publicly available “the home address” of covered individuals, the government has moved to dismiss the substantive count (Count Two).
The definition of restricted personal information as used in the law pertains only to the alleged victims own address; the defendants here livestreamed his neighbor’s address (in detention filings in her now-dismissed assault case, Brown explained that they stayed some distance from the victim’s house so as to comply with her release conditions).
A still graver problem for Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli is that — in a filing that elsewhere focuses closely on the terms specifically defined in the doxing statute (“restricted information” and “covered persons”) and on the import of the definitions generally (which is normal in responding to a void for vagueness challenge), Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli uses his first footnote to offer a definition of doxing.
1 Doxxing is short for “dropping documents.” Vangheluwe v. Got News, LLC, 365 F. Supp. 3d 850, 858 (E.D. Mich. 2019). The practice involves “using the Internet to source out and collect someone’s personal and private information and then publicly releasing that information online.” Id. The “goal of doxxing is typically retribution, harassment or humiliation.” Id.
He’s got two problems with that footnote.
First, what the defendants did — follow a guy home unwittingly and livestream where they ended up — is entirely different from “using the Internet to source out and collect someone’s personal and private information,” which only underscores that no one alleges that the defendants specifically sought out the ICE guy’s address. They didn’t dox him, according to the definition in this footnote.
Worse still, the defined goal of doxing in that footnote — “retribution, harrassment[,] or humiliation” — differs from the intent requirement in the statute:
(a) In General.—Whoever knowingly makes restricted personal information about a covered person, or a member of the immediate family of that covered person, publicly available—
(1) with the intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite the commission of a crime of violence against that covered person, or a member of the immediate family of that covered person; or
(2) with the intent and knowledge that the restricted personal information will be used to threaten, intimidate, or facilitate the commission of a crime of violence against that covered person, or a member of the immediate family of that covered person,
The defendants may have doxed the ICE goon. They may well have decided to humiliate him in front of his neighbors by revealing that he is an ICE goon.
But there’s a chasm between hoping to humiliate someone who does a disfavored job and intending for someone to use that information to commit a crime of violence against them. Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli attempts to dodge that by saying the conspiracy should not incorporate the elements of the count he’s seeking to admit and also stating that they won’t argue the defendants intended a crime of violence to happen to the ICE guy.
Separately, Brown argues the indictment must be dismissed because it does not specify the “crime of violence” Brown allegedly intended to incite. (Brown Mot. 19-21.) Even assuming this argument is applicable to the conspiracy alleged in Count One and not just the substantive count the government has moved to dismiss, at trial the government does not intend to proceed on the theory that defendants conspired to release R.H.’s home address with the intent to incite the commission of a crime of violence against him, or did so with the intent and knowledge that the restricted information would be used to facilitate the commission of a crime of violence against him. Defendant’s argument with respect to this portion of the statute is thus moot.
But he never gets around to addressing the larger point. Humiliation is not a crime of violence. But it is also not a threat or even intimidation.
The problem with this is made more apparent when Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli engages in a hypothetical dismissing Brown’s attempt to say she couldn’t have doxed the victim, because his address was already public. Brown’s tack would lead to absurd results, Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli says, because if it held, then how would they criminalize someone threatening the daughter of a judge (like Trump’s doxing of Barack Obama, something Trump has done), and how would they criminalize a defendant posting a witness’ address with the intent they they be intimidated by the criminal’s mob (again, something Trump has done more than once or twice or a hundred times).
And to interpret the statute as Brown would have it would lead to absurd results. Take, for example, the hypothetical of a judge’s daughter posting a photograph on Instagram that reveals her home address: a photograph of her family standing outside her home where the mailbox is visible. A defendant who later appears before the judge would not be subject to prosecution for posting the judge’s home address on an online forum with the intent to threaten the judge due to the daughter’s prior Instagram post. Similarly, a juror, informant, or witness would be cut off from statutory protection if a defendant’s family member or gang associate followed her home and posted the address on Facebook to intimidate her, but her address was already listed in the Whitepages.
In both those cases, of course, a prosecutor could — and should have, in the case of serial criminal Donald Trump — charged that as obstruction, witness tampering.
But these hypotheticals only underscore the point: in a filing asserting that doxing is done for humiliation, Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli is dodging language that requires further intent, not just to humiliate a goon in front of his neighbors, but to threaten him.
Threatening someone with social opprobrium is not the same as threatening someone with physical violence.
Yet the former is what Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli attempts to criminalize here.
Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli wants to criminalize any effort to shame someone for doing a shameful job. And while the argument may well get beyond this effort to dismiss the indictment, he has confessed in this filing that these women didn’t commit the charged crime.
One can see the defense attorneys looking at the footnotes and realizing like the French did with von Kluck’s turn: ‘They offer us their flank, they offer us their flank!’. Of course who the judge is will also be important, both at the magistrate level and the trial level, to see whether Fake Attorney Essayli’s argument have any traction.
Thanks for linking Lindsay Halligan’s response yesterday, which I’d been meaning to look up.
I’m shocked by almost nothing that comes out of this administration anymore, but I confess being a bit surprised that Halligan opened her response by accusing the court of violating the rules of criminal procedure and the principle of party presentation by deigning to ask on what basis she continues to call herself US Attorney. If I were in her position, I might worry that such an approach would prompt EDVA judges to act to install their choice to the vacant position.
Bondi, Blanche and Halligan continue Trump’s campaign of ignoring the mandatory way to contest a lower court ruling they disagree with: to appeal it to the appellate bench. As they do with Congress, they contend that no one and no institution has authority to disagree with or constrain their conduct, or to deem it invalid. Their arguments are frivolous and should be sanctioned.
In reality, the trial court would have committed reversible error had it not demanded that Halligan and the DoJ explain by what authority she continues to claim the status of the US Attorney for the EDVA, using whatever name the DoJ invents for her.
If she claims to act as, but is not, the USA, nothing she does and nothing done at her direction is valid. Not challenging her and the DoJ would be tantamount to accepting her claim. That’s especially true given how many other times this DoJ has been trying this gambit.
Why could she not be prosecuted for impersonating a federal officer? And, why could she and those who assist her in the impersonation not be prosecuted for conspiracy, with DJT appearing in the indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator? (Maybe Bondi and some of her DOJ minions could be indicted as co-conspirators or at least named as unindicted co-conspirators, then permitting them to be indicted later after Trump is no longer President.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/912
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1470-false-personation-elements-offenses
Why? For starters, those crimes are usually prosecuted, if at all, by the DoJ.
“Threatening someone with social opprobrium is not the same as threatening someone with physical violence.”
But of course this is part of the whole, wherein “social opprobrium” equals in TrumpWorld, a threat of physical violence. Except when They Do It.
I disagree — when they threaten social opprobrium, they are siccing the MAGA mob on their target. They intend violence, but they use DARVO to shield themselves from accountability.
I agree with BG’s comment, before yours happened, and I think you do too. Had just swung back around to feed the affirmation to Marcy’s spot on take so here I am.
I know how these days go, wife and I were sick the wknd, now very stuck on the couch with the sick toddler I was backrubbing back to sleep every 15-20 all nite long. Looks like I will catch up on Ed’s scotus posts instead of heating up the garage and squeezing the minivan in to tear into my first transmission job ever: hopefully just solenoid B.
Take care all! Lots of clear thoughts and love thru it all!
The MAGAS know , somewhere deep inside, that if anybody deserves a violent retribution, whether physical or political, it is them. And that is judging by the most conventional of standards.
“Opprobrium is the religion of the masses. “
If that doesn’t satisfy the public’s need for endorphins, perhaps stonings, quarterings, or drownings might work.
In fact, this seems to be Trump’s latest justification for the killing of Renee Good:
‘Asked by a reporter if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case, Mr. Trump said: “It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement.”’ (Grabbed from NYT, but widely reported.)
Channeling Jonathan Ross, apparently, “f***ing b***h….”
Revealing that he hasn’t seen/heard the videos, or anything else but what Miller wants him to see/hear.
I wondered if Trump watched all the videos. And I think yes, many times. He loves television. He loves a dramatic televised moment. He wouldn’t be able to resist.
1. Isn’t this what a sur-reply is for? “Your Honor, his footnote is absolutely correct and proves our point”
2. If judges decide they have had enough with these false AUSAs, what’s the next step beyond a judge’s order to remove the false attorney from filings? Who and how can they sanction, or will they start dismissing cases or what? A judge wagging a finger and saying shame hasn’t proven effective, even if it is “domestic terrorism” when by private citizens.
For starters, the federal courts can withdraw the presumption of regularity with regard to any statement or filing from this DoJ. Its abuses are intentional and systemic.
Excellent masterful analysis and observation of Bill Essayli failing essays of self wrought genuflection Marcy!
A clinical snark pile on of his title and MAGA-wide calling card identity behavior: Fucked Amygdalas to no end.
DOJ is “investigating” lots of public officials who complain about the Trump administration. Can your false attorneys be investigated for impersonating a public official, perhaps? Might some state’s law be broad enough to cover these actions of a purported federal official?
New York Penal Law Section 190.25
Criminal impersonation in the second degree
A person is guilty of criminal impersonation in the second degree when he:
[snip]
3.(a) Pretends to be a public servant, or wears or displays without authority any uniform, badge, insignia or facsimile thereof by which such public servant is lawfully distinguished, or falsely expresses by his words or actions that he is a public servant or is acting with approval or authority of a public agency or department; and
(b)so acts with intent to induce another to submit to such pretended official authority, to solicit funds or to otherwise cause another to act in reliance upon that pretense;
Shouldn’t the State of New York act to protect its citizens (Letitia James, e.g.) by charging Lindsey Halligan? Or, at the least, “investigate” her? Why not? We’ve seen a lot worse, haven’t we?
New York state’s legal system is odd in several ways. It calls its top appellate court the Court of Appeals, but its trial court the Supreme Court. For another, the state AG has no criminal jurisdiction.
O/T: Federal judges seek to appoint U.S. attorney in Seattle [Seattle Times, paywalled]
“Federal judges in the Western District of Washington plan to appoint a new U.S. attorney when the term of acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd expires next month, setting in motion a potential clash with the Trump administration and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Floyd, a controversial and tough-minded immigration judge, was appointed acting U.S. attorney in October, amid outcries by immigration officials and without consulting the state’s senior senator, Patty Murray. …
A similar controversy arose around the appointment of Pete Serrano as U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Washington in Spokane. Serrano’s confirmation was considered unlikely due to strong opposition from Murray, who argued that he was unqualified and vowed to block him.
Bondi employed a controversial workaround by appointing Serrano in the role of “first assistant U.S. attorney.” Serrano continues to lead the office in that role today.
Murray criticized the move as an “end run around the Constitution,” warning that it could undermine the office’s legitimacy….”
Just as the Founders envisioned: advise and consent for red states, talk to the hand for blue ones.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/federal-judges-seek-to-appoint-u-s-attorney-in-seattle/
Fucking Asshole Bill Essayli belongs in your pantheon of nicknames along with Big Dick Toilet Salesman. I do hope to hear and see you persist with his new name.
Big Dick Toilet Salesman is now USAmerican Ambassador to NATO, a perch from which he can happily piss on everyone in the EU.
Skewing a bit off target, but seeing the FA in his title reminded me of the song by the British band Sweet 50+ years ago.
“Sweet FA.”
I did a search for sweet FA and what comes up, but that the term sweet FA is British slang for useless, or nothing at all.
It’s kind of oddly appropriate for a fake, inappropriate US Attorney.
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/sweet-FA#
I remember in a mystery set in Australia, they used the phrase “Sweet Fairy Ann” (in connection with a road, IIRC). I’ve always suspected that they meant something else.
Sweet Fanny Adams = Sweet Fuck All.
I happen to be reading Anthony Rogers’ ‘185: The Malta Squadron,’ which is an edition of an informal diary kept by RAF fighter pilots during World War II. Rogers in his editorial notes is less prudish than Britannica.
The pilots used it when they were scrambled for an interception but couldn’t find any enemy planes.
(When I saw Essayli’s title here, I had to think for a bit before I figured out it was First Assistant. All I could come up with at first was Football Association.)
If we can rely on Robert Hendrickson, sweet Fanny Adams is an unusual example of a euphemism that preceded its impolite congener.
In ‘The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins,’ he says: ‘Fanny Adams was murdered and mutilated in 1812, her body cut into pieces and thrown into the River Wey at Alton in Hampshire. Her murderer, one Fred Baker, was publicly hanged in Winchester. Young Fanny Adams’s name, given wide currency, was adopted by sailors to indicate a particularly distasteful meal, since Fanny Adams had been disposed of in a kettle. In fact, when kettles came into use in the British navy they were dubbed Fannys as were tins or cans of meat. There is no doubt that Fanny Adams is the basis of the military expression sweet Fanny Adams, meaning something worthless or nothing at all.’