Wingnut lawyer Larry Klayman had a brief glimpse of success in December when a federal judge granted his motion for a preliminary injunction against part of the federal government's NSA spying program and then stayed the order pending appeal. But that success has not blown Larry off his losing path. In fact, in the four months since that ruling, his record of failure is quite impressive. He has lost at least six legal actions. He was outsmarted by birther lunatic Orly Taitz. And he apparently managed to turn what would have been a two-day hearing with the District of Columbia Bar Board on Professional Responsibility into a four-day hearing.
Larry's most recent legal failure came last week when a federal judge in Washington, DC dismissed a defamation lawsuit against the Imam behind the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (which is actually an Islamic community center near Ground Zero) and the Imam's lawyer. Klayman filed the lawsuit along with client/co-plaintiff Vincent Forras, a volunteer firefighter who claims to have worked on the pile at Ground Zero. The lawsuit alleged that the defendants had issued a "de facto Fatwah" against Klayman and Forras by characterizing them as anti-Muslim bigots in court papers filed in a previous lawsuit in New York in which Forras and Klayman were trying to stop the construction of the Muslim community center near Ground Zero by claiming it would be a nuisance, a terror risk, and inflict emotional and physical pain on the people in the neighborhood, a position which Klayman and Forras claim has nothing to do with anti-Muslim bigotry. They lost that lawsuit too.
In dismissing the defamation case under the District of Columbia's anti-SLAPP statute, the judge kept the case open to consider the defendants' motion asking the court to order Klayman and Forras to pay some or all of the attorney fees incurred in defending against this lawsuit. Anti-SLAPP laws expedite dismissal of lawsuits filed to suppress public speech on issues of public interest that people like Larry Klayman use to try to silence their critics. In a bit of judicial deliciousness, one of the cases the judge cited in support of her use of the anti-SLAPP statute to dismiss the case was another case that Klayman lost, Farah v Esquire, in which Klayman represented birthers Jerome Corsi and Joseph Farah in a defamation lawsuit against Esquire Magazine over a satirical article it posted about Corsi's ridiculous and ill-timed book Where's the Birth Certificate?
Other recent legal losses for Klayman: In January, his lawsuit against the Ohio magistrate who presided over his child custody case (see Wonkette's piece on the sordid details of this absurd lawsuit) was dismissed, in part because he filed it in the wrong court, a fatal defect that was blatantly obvious and probably would have kept a competent, ethical lawyer from filing the lawsuit in the first place. In February, a federal court in Florida dismissed a lawsuit Klayman had filed against the lawyers who represented him in his custody case because Klayman had not served the defendants more than a year after he filed the case. In March, a Florida appeals court and the Supreme Court of Alabama both affirmed lower court decisions dismissing two of Klayman's birther lawsuits left over from the 2012 election, which I'm sure was a relief to President Obama, who must have been sweating bullets over those cases. In April, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear Klayman's expedited appeal of his spying case, in which he was trying to leapfrog over the Court of Appeals and go directly to the Supreme Court.
Then there was the incident where he got outsmarted by Orly Taitz. Klayman is currently suing Judicial Watch (again) for defamation based on a 2012 post on Taitz's web site in which she said that she was told by a Judicial Watch employee that Klayman had been convicted of of a crime related to non-payment of child support. In fact, Klayman had been indicted but not convicted. (While that indictment was dismissed when Klayman paid over $70K in back child support, he has a long history of being a deadbeat dad, presented in detail in documents filed by the defendants in this lawsuit.) Klayman sued Judicial Watch--but not Taitz--over this incident and made a clownish and unsuccessful attempt to depose her as she is the key witness in his case. He first issued a subpoena out of the wrong court, which Taitz ignored. He then filed two improper motions in the wrong court to compel her deposition. When those were both denied, he filed a motion in the correct court to compel her compliance with the subpoena that was issued in the wrong court. His motion was denied. Taitz--being an expert in filing the wrong documents in the wrong courts and issuing unenforceable subpoenas--did not respond to any of Klayman's judicial litter and the court's deadline for depositions in this case is long passed. So, Larry Klayman failed to depose Taitz, who won this battle by not responding to his defective papers, which, realistically, will almost always yield better results for her than her incompetent lawyering will. The case is set for trial next month. With Orly Taitz as his star witness, I think he will lose.
And the coup de grâce of Klayman's current losing streak is his upcoming hearing in front of the District of Columbia Bar Board on Professional Responsibility. According to the Legal Profession Blog, he is facing a complaint that "alleges three instances of violations of District of Columbia Rule of Professional Conduct 1.9 in representing interests materially adverse to Judicial Watch in the same or substantially related matters." Klayman left Judicial Watch in 2003. In subsequent years, he represented some former Judicial Watch clients and donors in legal actions against the organization. In a 2008 lawsuit, a federal judge ruled that Klayman's representation of a former Judicial Watch client in a lawsuit against Judicial Watch violated rule 1.9 and ordered him removed from the case. During the January deposition of Judicial Watch President Thomas Fitton for Klayman's current lawsuit against Judicial Watch, when Klayman mentioned a woman named Louise Benson--a former Judicial Watch donor who Klayman represented in a 2005 lawsuit against the organization--Fitton said:
[...] I consider this to be harassing related -- harassment related to that bar investigation and that pending hearing. And I'm a witness there, and you're just seeking discovery improperly for that separate proceeding and harassing me and trying to intimidate me for participating, potentially, in that proceeding. And I'm going to send a copy of this deposition to the bar to alert them to this misconduct.
Klayman's Bar hearing was originally scheduled to run for two days starting on April 7. However, the week before the hearing it was rescheduled and expanded from two to four days beginning June 23.
Larry Klayman is definitely not winning.
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Update: As I was composing this post, Larry Klayman issued a press release stating that he will be representing Cliven Bundy in his anti-government crusade. This will not turn out well for either of these two miscreants.