kreep g hon
<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">in runoff</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); clear: both; margin-bottom: 18px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 18px; line-height: 27px; font-family: Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> five attorneys challenging Kreep question his fitness to remain on the bench after the state Commission on Judicial Performance last year issued a “severe public censure” of the judge on grounds of 29 specific acts of misconduct. The only penalty more severe for a judge is removal from the bench.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 18px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 18px; line-height: 27px; font-family: Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Among the acts of misconduct found by the commission were Kreep’s courtroom comments about attorney’s looks or accents, making up nicknames viewed as demeaning and, as a 2012 judicial candidate</span><span style="background-color: rgb(102, 204, 204);">, improperly sending political letters opposing President Barack Obama’s re-election</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-bottom: 18px; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 18px; line-height: 27px; font-family: Georgia, "Droid Serif", serif; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">In an interview, Kreep said he believes he was targeted then, and now, because of his outspoken Christian beliefs as well as his conservative politics.</p></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-judge-censure-20170817-story.html</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b>
</b></font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b>State issues 'severe public censure' of San Diego judge, but he will keep job</b></font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By GREG MORAN</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">AUG 17, 2017 | 3:10 PM</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">| SAN DIEGO</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">State issues 'severe public censure' of San Diego judge, but he will keep job</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">San Diego Superior Court Judge Gary Kreep was charged with various ethics violations, including making inappropriate comments to lawyers, litigants and court staff. (San Diego Union-Tribune)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The state judicial discipline agency issued a "severe public censure" against San Diego Superior Court Judge Gary Kreep on Wednesday, stopping just short of removing him from the bench.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The punishment is the second most serious that the Commission on Judicial Performance can assess against a judge. Kreep came close to losing his seat on the bench, with four of the 10 commissioners voting for removal.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Kreep was elected to the bench by a narrow margin in 2012. He had spent decades as a prominent lawyer in conservative legal causes, and was perhaps best known for his work on "birther" lawsuits that challenged the citizenship of President Obama and his eligibility for office.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The commission leveled 20 charges of misconduct against Kreep, most of which related to his judicial campaign and his first year on the bench in San Diego Superior Court.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The charges alleged that Kreep made a string of inappropriate comments to lawyers, litigants and court staff while on the bench, including some aimed at female attorneys with the San Diego County Public Defender's Office and San Diego City Attorney's Office. He commented on their appearance, ethnicity and used nicknames to refer to them, among other things.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The commission also contended Kreep misrepresented his role in three organizations on his campaign website during his 2012 campaign, and violated judicial rules by engaging in political campaigning for a nonjudicial office when he solicited support and money opposing Obama's re-election.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"This decision is based largely on Judge Kreep's pervasive pattern of misconduct evidencing a lack of sensitivity to the adverse impact of his conduct on others and the public's esteem for the judiciary, and his failure to appreciate and accept the impropriety of some of his misconduct," the decision said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But the commission said that while the findings of misconduct might warrant removal, it decided not to do so in this case because most of the violations occurred early on in his tenure. Kreep's demeanor and performance have improved and he has worked to change his behavior.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kreep did not respond to a request for comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">greg.moran@sduniontribune.com</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Moran writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="font-size: small;"><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The first interesting thing about Gary Johnson is that he decided to set up his campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, just a few blocks away from the HQ of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. That’s where Gary Johnson’s main Super PAC is located as well.</b> Gary Johnson isn’t Mormon.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Salt Lake City Tribune also thought it was a little weird, so they asked about it in a story headlined<a href="http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=17232915&itype=storyID" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">"Ex-New Mexico guv bases his presidential campaign in — Utah?"</a> which begins:</font></p><blockquote img="img" chrome="chrome" bq-bottom-right.png="bq-bottom-right.png" url="url" bq-bottom-left.png="bq-bottom-left.png" bq-top-right.png="bq-top-right.png" bq-top-left.png="bq-top-left.png" background-position="background-position" right="right" bottom="bottom" left="left" top="top" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" color="color" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 25px 29px; background-image: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Republican presidential candidate has landed his national campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City, just a couple of blocks from the Utah governor's mansion. But it's not the White House contender you might think it is.</font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;" /><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It turns out there’s a simple answer: Gary Johnson’s campaign chief, Ron Nielson, is based here. Ron Nielson runs a conservative polling firm called NSON Opinion Strategies, whose headquarters is the same three-story building on South Temple Road as Johnson’s campaign headquarters, and the same address as Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" nonprofit, which launched his bid for the presidency in late 2009.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Unfortunately, the SLT didn’t pry any further, because this is where things start to get interesting. For one thing, NSOM has a history of working with GOP right-wingers including crotchety Mormon asshole <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/david-catanese/2012/04/super-pac-poll-hatch-under-119794.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Orin Hatch</a> and ex-witch and masturbation-denier <a href="http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2010/09/tea_party_expre_2.php" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Christine O’Donnell</a>, as well as the <a href="http://reason.com/assets/db/1327339633235.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Koch’s 'Reason' magazine.</a> They also worked on a smear campaign against Harry Reid in the run up to the 2010 election, but I’ll get to that later.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The point here is that Gary Johnson’s campaign headquarters is located in Romney’s backyard, in a right-wing Republican polling firm’s office. Gary says he likes transparency and believes he should wear his backers’ labels on his jacket like a NASCAR driver. Let me help him into his coat....</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">According to </span><a href="http://wordcab.blogspot.com/2011/04/gov-gary-johnsons-documents-reveal.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">documents</a><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);"> filed with the state of Utah, the person responsible for filing the paperwork to register Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" is</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> <b>Maureen Otis</b>, a Texas attorney with deep roots in the far-right Minutemen movement, and with Republican Party voter-suppression dirty tricks.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);"> Otis’s Texas law office is listed as the mailing address for Johnson’s "Our America Initiative."</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maureen Otis has a long history with far-right anti-immigration vigilante groups. Just a few years ago, Otis served as board secretary for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which the <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2007/spring/shoot-shovel-shut-up/the-groups-a-lis" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Southern Poverty Law Center</a> described as a "nativist extremist" group that "targets individual immigrants rather than immigration policies." That Minuteman outfit collapsed after donation funds went missing, much of it paid to <b>Maureen Otis’s own private company, "American Caging," a company that specializes in <a href="http://www.americancaging.com/services.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">"caging</a> as the name implies.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Caging" was used by Bush operatives to suppress the minority vote in 2000 and 2004. Slate offered <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2007/05/raging_caging.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">this definition of vote "caging"</a>:</font></p><blockquote img="img" chrome="chrome" bq-bottom-right.png="bq-bottom-right.png" url="url" bq-bottom-left.png="bq-bottom-left.png" bq-top-right.png="bq-top-right.png" bq-top-left.png="bq-top-left.png" background-position="background-position" right="right" bottom="bottom" left="left" top="top" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" color="color" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 25px 29px; background-image: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren't living at (because they are, say, at college or at war)."</font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Maureen Otis’ clients for American Caging included nonprofits set up for Alan Keyes, a fundraiser for Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Alliance, and other assorted homophobic Christian groups.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So what does the attorney who registered Gary Johnson’s "Our America" outfit really believe, the libertarian end of the Republican spectrum that Johnson represents, or the reactionary extremism of the Minutemen and Christian homophobes she serves?</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maureen Otis answered that question herself on her own twitter feed, such as <a href="https://twitter.com/motislaw/status/210198612406304769" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">this June 5 tweet</a> following<b> Scott Walker’s win in the Wisconsin recall:</b></font></p><blockquote img="img" chrome="chrome" bq-bottom-right.png="bq-bottom-right.png" url="url" bq-bottom-left.png="bq-bottom-left.png" bq-top-right.png="bq-top-right.png" bq-top-left.png="bq-top-left.png" background-position="background-position" right="right" bottom="bottom" left="left" top="top" background-repeat="background-repeat" no-repeat="no-repeat" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" color="color" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 25px 29px; background-image: url("><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Great news for WI & start of an important trend for Repub's in the fall. Time for everyone to $$ to Romney campaign."</font></blockquote><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Maureen Otis were the only hard-right operative involved in Gary Johnson’s campaign, her confused allegiances might just seem odd. But as you’ll see, extremist right-wing operatives like Otis are all around Gary Johnson, beginning with the "Our America Initiative" nonprofit that launched his campaign.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">The lawyer who incorporated the "Our America Initiative" charter documents, an A-list GOP dirty tricks operative from Orange County named </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Jim Lacy,</b> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">also worked with and supported the same Minutemen outfits as Maureen Otis. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Like her, Jim Lacy also operates a bland-sounding direct-mail business called "slate mail" that targets Democratic voters with mailers purporting to come from fake liberal groups with names like "The John F. Kennedy Alliance" with a soothing photo of JFK on one side, and a slate of supposedly "Democratic" candidates on the other side. In reality, Republican candidates pay to have their names and faces secretly mixed in with the liberal candidates whose names and faces appear to give it a semblance of authenticity. Lacy’s slate order business is, he claims, the largest in the state of California, if not the entire country, and it wreaked so much havoc on California local elections that even Orange County residents revolted with a ballot requiring slate mailers disclose. Lacy fought to have the courts void the will of Orange County’s voters, and the courts agreed, saying that putting restrictions on how badly Lacy could deceive voters violated his First Amendment rights and constituted a form of tyranny.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So both lawyers whose names are on Gary Johnson’s main campaign group since 2009 are not only associated with right-wing extremists and violent nativist vigilantes, but more importantly, both of them specialize in fraudulent vote schemes that help their Republican Party clients win elections by deceiving Democratic Party voters.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">Lacy has been poisoning American politics since his radical-right college years when he was national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom</b><span style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">. In recent years, Lacy has been a major backer of anti-immigrant Minutemen groups, Islamophobia, and "birther" conspiracy-theory outfits smearing Obama as a foreign-born Muslim.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lacy co-founded a handful of far-right immigrant-bashing outfits with "Birther" leader Gary Kreep, Orly Taitz’s creepier half in joint lawsuits filed to "expose" Obama’s birth certificate as a fake. Both Kreep and Jim Lacy have provided legal help to Minutemen groups in San Diego, when they were at their violent peak terrorizing homeless illegal migrant workers and vandalizing their shanties.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252);">This summer, Jim Lacy opened up his <a href="http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2012/07/gary_kreep_judge_race_birther.php" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">bag of dirty tricks</a> to get Gary Kreep get elected Superior Court judge.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> How he did it is instructive: On the eve of the San Diego vote, a Lacy outfit bombarded Latinos and Democrats with robocalls claiming that the sitting judge had been releasing drug dealers into their neighborhoods. Kreep won by just over 1,000 votes, and now they might have to someday face a judge who <a href="http://usjf.net/about-2/about-executive-director-gary-kreep/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">boasts</a> of his pro bono work for the Minutemen.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Gary Kreep is just a warm-up act<b>. Jim Lacy’s much more serious partner in political dirty tricks operations over the past two decades is Citizen United’s co-founder Floyd Brown,</b> a Republican Sasquatch who gets a lot of credit for the notorious Willie Horton race-baiting ads in 1988, designed to scare whites into believing Dukakis would empty out the prisons on weekends and allow black inmates to rape and rob white women. The ad worked.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As soon as Obama’s candidacy surged ahead of Hillary in 2008, Lacy and Brown unleashed a barrage of birther-propaganda, and they haven’t let up yet.<b> Their National Campaign Fund outfit produced some of the first "birther" conspiracy commercials,</b> including <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbsihrdn-_s&e" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">"Was He Muslim?".</a> Just days after Obama’s inauguration, Lacy and Brown were running a new campaign, ImpeachObama.com already comparing his first week in office to Hitler and Stalin’s rule.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And here is where the Gary Johnson third party Libertarian campaign begins to cross paths with these Republican dirty tricksters<b>. As the first stimulus bill was being debated, Lacy and Brown announced another smear project, <a href="http://www.exposeharry.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">ExposeHarry.com</a></b>, aimed at weakening Nevada Sen. Harry Reid’s support and turning voters against him in time for the 2010 elections. To understand where Harry Reid was most vulnerable, they hired a Republican polling firm out of Salt Lake City. That polling firm, NSON Opinion Research, is the same polling outfit whose offices serve as Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party presidential campaign headquarters, and whose founder, Ron Nielson, is Gary Johnson’s campaign chief.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ron Nielson later helped create Gary Johnson’s "Our America Initiative" to launch the start of his campaign for 2012. This nonprofit was incorporated by GOP dirty trickster <b>Jim Lacy, and is represented by far-right activist, "voter caging" specialist and Mitt Romney booster Maureen Otis.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(253, 252, 252); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It might seem strange to see so many nasty, hard-right dirty tricksters running Johnson’s "principled" campaign, but the notion that Johnson is in any way "liberal" or a friend of progressives is nonsense. Johnson’s liberal creds begin and end with one plank of his platform: legalizing pot.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Johnson’s actual record as governor of New Mexico was that of a law and order authoritarian, on the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party.<b> Johnson ran on a “law and order” platform, stiffening prison sentences (while recklessly <a href="http://lubbockonline.com/stories/090299/reg_0902990098.shtml" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">privatizing the prisons</a>), along with a broader program of slashing taxes, slashing social programs, and privatizing schools. He was divisive, and his law and order policies led to some of the worst prison violence in decades.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It wasn’t until after Gary Johnson won his second term and final term as New Mexico’s governor, and turned his attention to the national stage, that he had his big epiphany about locking up marijuana smokers. Johnson’s about-face on locking up drug offenders sounded brave and newsworthy to outsiders who didn’t know his record — wow! a pot-friendly Republican governor, how cool! Johnson wanted to make the jump to the national stage, and what easier way than adopting the one popular plank in the Koch brothers’ libertarian political platform, legalizing pot, to make journalists and the public forget about all the grim libertarian policies he’d not only talked about but implemented.</font></p></div>