.
.
.
“First they came for the Fringers, and I said nothing,
for I was not a Fringer but an Ankle-Biter…”
Did you freaking see this on The Voice of OC this morning? “Fullerton City Officials Target Local Bloggers in Lawsuit, Want to Search Private Computers.” Our friends at the blog “Friends For Fullerton’s Future,” founded years ago by Tony Bushala, Travis Kiger and others, defunct for a while, and more recently restarted by other worthies, has been doing such a good job exposing corruption and malfeasance in their town’s government and police force that they are now being hardcore threatened, as you can read in Spencer Custodio’s fine article.
But, Why “Fringers,” you ask? One frequent target and critic of Bushala’s original blog back around 2008-11 was the klepto-scribe Matt Cunningham, who, just as he dubbed us a “venomous, grandiose, self-important gaggle of ankle-biters,” habitually dismissed FFFF as “the fringe” – a term they gleefully embraced, calling themselves Fringers and their annual award ceremony “The Fringies.”
David Zenger makes a good point on the comments section of Spencer’s story – this attack on the free press had to have been approved by at least three Fullerton councilmembers – and blogger Josh Ferguson should get an injunction to get hold of the councilmembers’ and City Manager’s electronic devices to see how this obvious Brown Act violation occurred.
Meanwhile Ryan Cantor warns me, in an effort to get my interest (except He already had me at “local bloggers threatened by local governnment”) – that “If Fullerton can do this to FFFF, Anaheim can easily come after YOU to see how you obtained the secret appraisal numbers for the Angels Stadium property!” Well, of course – we are all in this together – I long ago absorbed the lesson and spirit of Martin Niemöller.
This harassment from their city’s government has been building for a while, from a low simmer, which is one reason we started “cross-posting” from that blog a few weeks ago, in a show of support. If there’s anything else we can do to help they should let us know. For now here’s this week’s Fringer piece, appropriately Kelly Thomas-related. That’s “appropriate” because if it weren’t for the FFFF blog most of us, most of America, wouldn’t have ever heard of the outrageous and horrific 2011 murder of this frail homeless guy by six big Fullerton cops. – Vern.
Posted Oct. 20, 2019 by “Irving Washington”
You have got to be kidding me.
Friday’s edition of the Orange County Register has a puff piece on how much progress Fullerton’s Police Department made in dealing with the homeless population. I can’t comment on the quality of the article, however, because I was unable to make it past this quote from Bob Dunn in the very first paragraph:
“Eight years have passed since the fatal beating of a homeless, schizophrenic Kelly Thomas by Fullerton police, but the tragedy remains a “deep wound” in the department’s psyche, says the city’s new police chief.”
Since our Police Chief is apparently unfamiliar with the meaning of the word “perspective”, allow me to provide some.
Kelly Thomas was a troubled individual, but he was a human being, and on July 5, 2011 he was essentially tortured to death in full view of hundreds of witnesses, all while apologizing and begging for his father. THAT is tragedy of Kelly Thomas, not the psychic boo boos the Police Department may have suffered…
As much as I like the idea of starting a blog, I was long gone from Fullerton by the time FFFF started in 2008.
As i understand it, Tony and Travis were the masterminds of that enterprise and deserve credit for taking on the befuddled, bemused, bedumbed physician from crackerville, Richard “Dick” Jones.
I just don’t understand this.
This lawsuit just gives FFFF legitimacy. Having Fullerton’s City Attorney running around screaming “CRIMINALS” is just going to galvanize those in favor of free speech and might very well and up with the taxpayer settling a defamation suit.
This is straight up retaliation for investigative reporting. I’m largely retired from this field, but the idea that we’re going to tolerate secret lawsuits aimed at gadflies is just repugnant.
“This is straight up retaliation for investigative reporting.”
But by whom? Who were the councilmembers who voted for this retaliation? How and why are they cloaca’d in secrecy?
Great question.
I don’t think that it’s true that three council members had to vote for this. The Council is a legislative body; lots of executive power is passed on to the City Manager, advised by the City Attorney. It’s similar to how the law enforcement power is delegated to the Chief of Police.
As for the underlying case: as I recall FFFF should be protected if they innocently and at arm’s length received material from a third party — even if it turns out that that material was obtained illegally. (They might be sued to take the piece down, it that is not PRIOR restraint and doesn’t justify a compuier search. If they conspired to procure stolen material, that’s bad — and yes it could justify imaging a personal computer.
I don’t think they.conspired to steal documents. I’m even more confident than that that Vern did not.conspird to steak any legally protected docs from Anaheim.
*We have no dog in this fight, except to say……”very difficult to make comments on that site!” Hate to go over old ground here….except to say that between the Kelly event in Fullerton and Ferguson, Missouri…….these events launched “unplausible deniability”, “Lack of Judicial Oversight”, “Stonewalling on a National Level”, “Refusals to resign in the face of wrong doing or bad conduct”,?”Refusals to fire offending sworn officers!” “Lack of a viable Internal Affairs Department for each agency!? Lack of appropriate FBI Consent Decrees for local jurisdictions that need it! But then every brother in law needs a job….we suppose! Our only question is: All State DOJ’s all need to step up….as they did not in Florida starting with the Travon Martin case! When individual Agencies and PD’s do not or cannot adequately police themselves – outside oversight is always required.
“Joe Sipowicz” writes about the “ponderous” Fullerton press release announcing this suit, “written in the high dudgeon of a bureaucrat whom you suspect already realizes that diverting attention from his own bungling by blaming somebody else, may be harder to pull off than he had hoped.”
https://www.fullertonsfuture.org/2019/transparency-101/
On a note sounded in comments above, Sipowicz continues:
“…as further proof (if we needed any), let us pause for a moment to consider the following snippet from [City Manager Ken] Domer’s press release:
“‘Based on evidence uncovered in our internal investigation and direction from the City Council, the City Attorney’s Office has now filed a complaint in Superior Court seeking a temporary restraining order against the involved Blog and its contributors.’
“Say what? Direction from the City Council? When O’ when did that ever occur? The issue of whether or not to take FFFF to court has never been publicly agendized and never voted on by the City Council. The subject has never been discussed by our marble-mouthed City Attorney, Dick Jones reporting out of Closed Session.
“Domer says he has a ‘philosophy’ of transparent access to information. His actions give us a crystal-clear view of what that philosophy really is: stall, hide, deceive, misrepresent, and ass-cover.”
Sometimes a City Manager, when deciding on a policy, may confer with one or more members of the City Council (presumably ones expected to reflect the Likely majority opinion among members) to determine whether there would be support for a certain decision. That’s the best-case scenario for what “received direction from Council” might mean. This is, again, ok when a decision is entirely within the CM’s purview, I.e., it would not require another ordinance or resolution to effectuate.
And Spencer reports that yesterday OC Superior Court Judge Thomas Delaney “partially granted” Fullerton’s Temporary Restraining Order on the blog.
https://voiceofoc.org/2019/10/oc-judge-orders-fullerton-blog-and-resident-to-stop-publishing-secret-city-hall-documents/
Judge Delaney ordered the blog, and blogger Joshua Ferguson, to stop publishing any confidential documents they may have, and neither may they delete those documents OR pass them on to anyone else. (Damn.) But Delaney stopped short of granting Fullerton’s request to appoint a “third party forensic expert” to search Joshua’s and FFFF’s computers, citing First Amendment concerns. (Sounds like 4th as well.)
There’ll be a Nov 21 preliminary injunction hearing, we’ll see if we can make that one.
That sounds like a fair ruling for a TRO — it preserves action within the legitimate reach of the City (potentially allowing it to determine who violated a law (if that happened) to obtain the documents, while smacking down the overreach of immediately seizing and copying the contents of Ferguson’s and other people’s computers. (Note: generally, their computers don’t have to be carted away; there is just an image taken of their contents.
Just to be more clear:
(1) Fullerton employee or associate of theirs has the paper on their desk or document on their desktop and decides on their own to send it to FFFF = FFFF can publish and is 100% ok
(2) Fullerton employee is not authorized to enter Dropbox and obtain this document for their own purposes, then sends it to FFFF without having first been encouraged to get it from Dropbox = situation is murky: FFFF is probably legally ok but could be forced to preserve evidence and maybe even endure a limited search to find out who committed that crime. But the latter would be quite extreme, need not be done at TRO speed, and might well be defeated in court, and so the limited TRO is appropriate.
(3) FFFF asked Fullerton employee (or third party, based on tip-off from Fullerton employee or their associate) to enter Dropbox to get the document for them = FFFF conspired to commit a crime and is 0% ok. Limited TRO is appropriate, but it will eventually becomes a full search (with an imaged drive) and barring some amazing defense it’s a big problem.
I hope that that’s more clear.
*Yeah, just all goes to prove…..”You can indict a Ham Sandwich!”