I'm shocked! Shocked! Joe Arpaio is attempting to "manipulate the judicial system"
Oh, gawd. This is breaking this morning in Phoenix: lawyers for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio
filed a motion today to remove Federal Judge Murray Snow from an ongoing contempt of court case that was due to continue next month. Clearly Arpaio's ruse is an attempt to derail a hearing that did not begin well for him, with the sheriff's own lawyer quitting and
former deputies turning on him.
Anyone concerned about justice was not disappointed in the hearing's first phase, which concluded in late April. Some quick background: Although Joe Arpaio's 23-year career as Maricopa County Sheriff includes a long backlog of crimes and misdemeanors—falsely arresting journalists, intimidating political enemies, murdering inmates guilty of nothing, ignoring hundreds of child sex crimes—the four-day contempt hearing that began April 21 stems from a specific case and its resulting court orders.
In Melendres v. Arpaio, based on a 2007 arrest of two Mexican men in the country legally, the court found that the sheriff's office did indeed use race as a factor when carrying out traffic stops, conducting immigration patrols, detaining suspects and arresting people. In other words, the very definition of racial profiling.
As a result of that case, which was argued before US District Judge Murray Snow, a George W. Bush appointee, Arpaio was ordered to halt his immigration enforcement programs. However, being the arrogant media-seeking blowhard that he is, Arpaio bragged to the press that he'd continue the unconstitutional immigration sweeps, which he did.
By 2013, Judge Snow was near the end of his patience, and issued three court orders: Arpaio must end his immigration patrols, turn over video evidence from traffic stops, and install a court-appointed monitor to oversee compliance with the judge's orders. Arpaio did none of this and by March 2015 Judge Snow had had enough and scheduled a contempt of court hearing, to begin in late April.
When Judge Snow announced the hearing, Sheriff Arpaio tried to head it off by apologizing and admitting that he had not complied with the court orders. He even said he'd donate $100,000 to a civil rights group if Judge Snow would cancel the hearing. ACLU lawyers, victims and Judge Snow dismissed Arpaio's offer, and the proceedings began last month. During the four-day hearing we learned, as expected, that the sheriff's office willfully ignored court orders. But the sheriff also dropped this bombshell on the last day while Judge Snow himself was questioning him: one of Arpaio's lawyers had hired a private detective to investigate Judge Snow's wife!
Ka-blam!
That little ditty led to today's developments. Why investigate a judge's wife? In 2013, a supporter of Arpaio's contacted him on Facebook to say that in 2012 she and her husband overhead Judge Snow's wife at a restaurant tell a friend that she and the judge did not like the sheriff. That tip kicked off the probe, since it provided Arpaio an opportunity to demonstrate Judge Snow's bias, although in the end the investigation went nowhere and proved nothing.
There's another stinker that's about to explode, the so-called "Seattle Operation," which also involves Judge Snow. This conspiracy theory holds that Judge Snow, former Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, former AG Eric Holder and others spied on Arpaio in an attempt to gather information that could take him down. Again, paranoid Arpaio jumped at the chance to prove that others are out to get him, especially Judge Snow. So his office paid the Seattle computer guru who told Arpaio about the conspiracy to investigate the allegations, which turned out to be an empty and costly sham.
When Judge Snow learned of this development, he ordered the court-appointed monitor to look into the Seattle case even more, calling it another "attempt to construct a conspiracy involving this court." That's probably another reason Sheriff Arpaio wants the judge removed, because if the court digs deeper into the Seattle Operation, authorities are likely to find that the sheriff spent up to $1 million to investigate a fake conspiracy theory in order to discredit Judge Snow. It's all familiar Arpaio territory: investigate, intimidate, manipulate, stall stall stall.
Civil rights attorneys today are having none of Arpaio's conflict-of-interest shenanigans, which he invented himself. ACLU lawyer Cecilla Wong said the motion is little more than "an effort to manipulate the judicial system and derail the contempt proceedings." She also pointed out that all of Judge Snow's findings in the case have been upheld on appeal, so the bias charge is without merit. Gee, Arpaio is attempting to "manipulate the judicial system"—we haven't seen that before!
BTW, if you are so inclined, millionaire Joe Arpaio needs cash for his legal battles, so he's set up a Defense Fund—appealing to "patriots" suckers to help him out:
Dear Patriot,
I'm going to cut right to the chase because I really need your help.
You've been a tremendous supporter of my campaigns through the years and because of that I'm asking for your help with my legal defense fund.
You see, in the daily exercise of doing my job I am often targeted by groups that file legal actions against me for a variety of reasons.
A "variety of reasons" that are illegal, ineffective, costly, unconstitutional and immoral.