Attorney Admission Quotes

May 11, Trump admitted to Lester Holt of NBC News that he was determined to fire Comey “regardless” of the recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in order to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing.” Trump isn’t the first president to attempt to obstruct justice. But he is the first to admit what he was doing on national TV, and his admissions led to the appointment of former FBI director Robert S. Mueller as a special counsel.

While whites were still the majority, they established preferences for blacks and Hispanics that took such deep root that Congress and state legislatures have been powerless to abolish them. These programs would provoke outrage if they were practiced in favor of whites, but they have been partially curbed only by state ballot initiatives and equivocal Supreme Court decisions. Demography would change this. In 2006, the state of Michigan voted to abolish racial preferences in college admissions and state contracting, but the measure passed only because whites were still a majority. Eighty-five percent of blacks and 69 percent of Hispanics voted to maintain racial preferences for themselves. When they have a voting majority nothing will prevent non-whites from reestablishing and extending preferences. Are there portents in the actions of Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president? J. Christian Adams, a white Justice Department lawyer resigned in protest when the department dropped a case of voter intimidation the previous administration had already won by default against the New Black Panther Party. In this 2008 case, fatigue-clad blacks waved billy clubs at white voters and yelled such things as “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” Mr. Adams called it “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” He believed the decision to dismiss the case reflected hostility to the rights of whites. He said some of his colleagues called selective prosecution “payback time,” adding that “citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims.” Christopher Coates, who was the head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division, agreed with this assessment. In sworn testimony before Congress, he called the dismissal of the Black Panthers case a “travesty of justice” and described a “hostile atmosphere” against “race-neutral enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. He said the department had a “deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of white voters who have been discriminated against.” How will the department behave when whites become a minority?

Visitors stream in and out of the rooms and corridors. There are families to see, questions to answer, a new admission from the ED. It’s one thing after another—randomly, it seems—bouncing from one story to the next. Mr. Gunther, headed for the NIH, leaves with his wife. She gives me a long look as they head toward the elevator. I wish her well; living with Pascal’s wager can’t be easy. Mr. Kinney, a dapper corporate attorney, is also getting out of here after a rough two weeks. His pancreas is totally destroyed, replaced by puddles of necrotic fluid, yet he refuses to accept the fact that his fondness for single-malt scotch is the reason why. His wife gives me a long look, too, then they’re gone. Jim, the Cardiology fellow, shows me the echocardiogram he just did on Mr. Warner, our guy with HIV. Nothing there, Jim says, no vegetation, no sign of endocarditis. We consider what this means, make a plan. Up on 10 Central, Mr. Mukaj’s bladder irrigation backs up painfully again but there’s nowhere else we can put him, no empty beds in the ICU or Step-Down Unit, no place where he can have his own nurse with him all the time. We bounce this around, too, decide to try this, then that, we’ll see. Mr. Harris, our patient with Marfan syndrome, a plastic aorta, and a septic hip joint, spikes a fever again. Not good. We make a plan. And so it goes, on into the evening. On days like this, doctoring feels like pinball: nonstop random events—intercepted here, altered there, prolonged or postponed by this or that, the bells and boinks sounding all around—and sometimes you can’t be sure whether you’re the guy pushing the buttons, manipulating the levers, and bumping the machine, or whether you’re inside the machine, whether you’re the pinball itself.

CIA claimed to find no evidence that “any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing” with any of the figures mentioned in “Dark Alliance,” including Ross and Blandón. The report did admit, however, that there were instances where the CIA did not, “in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.” But to that it offered the curious caveat that, under an agreement in 1982 between Reagan attorney general William French Smith and the CIA, agents were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving nonemployees, defined as paid and nonpaid “assets.” The CIA’s admissions were major.

CIA claimed to find no evidence that “any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing” with any of the figures mentioned in “Dark Alliance,” including Ross and Blandón. The report did admit, however, that there were instances where the CIA did not, “in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.” But to that it offered the curious caveat that, under an agreement in 1982 between Reagan attorney general William French Smith and the CIA, agents were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving nonemployees, defined as paid and nonpaid “assets.” The CIA’s admissions were major. They implicated the U.S. government in cocaine trafficking during the eighties, and therefore in some of the devastation of the crack epidemic. There was some attention paid to the report, but overall, the revelations came and went.

By 'Perry Mason moment,' I mean that climactic instant during a trial when you have just done something fantastic and everyone in the courtroom knows it. Your brilliant question or some stunning admission you coerced from a witness has left the opposing lawyer reeling, his mouth agape, and jurors amazed and entertained. The case is won; the rest of the trial is a formality. Your friends and colleagues are itching to congratulate you as soon as a recess is called. Only a supreme effort of will on your part, coupled with the knowledge that the judge and jurors are watching, keeps you from high-fiving everyone in sight.

Rigorous admission procedures and hefty fees allowed the “worthy” to exclude the “uncouth in manners and habits, ignorant even of the English language, jostling and crowding and vulgarizing the profession.” A year after its formation, the self-selected and overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon Protestant founders had admitted only 450 out of New York’s approximately four thousand lawyers to their ranks. Grievance and screening committees were established to exercise some control over the behavior of attorneys and judges. The association’s pioneering effort at self-regulation was swiftly and widely copied throughout the country, and Manhattanites proved instrumental in forming the American Bar Association in 1878.