Reply #11: Credit to whom credit is due. And I think it is due to Jon Eisenberg

[JDPriestly]

and his team (not sure if he handled this District Court case to the end). Please give credit to the good lawyers who tirelessly defend our rights -- yours and mine.

Here are excerpts from an Jon Eisenberg's statements in an interview published in California Lawyer's 2009 SuperLawyer edition:

President Bush has freely admitted that his administration committed warrantless electronic surveillance, violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. That's a felony, according to title 50, section 1809 of the United States Code. So President Bush is a felon. It's that simple.

Will he ever be brought to justice? Evidently not by a criminal prosecution, in which the Obama administration seems to have little interest. I'm doing my best to see that he's held to account under FISA's civil liability provision, section 1810 of title 50.

. . . .

During the Al-Haramain case you wrote a response to a government brief that you were not allowed to see. How does one go about doing that?

It was quite a challenge. It wasn't just that we had to speculate as to what might be in the secret DOJ brief; the conditions under which we wrote our secret response were onerous, approaching the bizarre: We were required to write the brief under guard in the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco; we were forbidden from preparing any notes for the brief-writing session; the DOJ retained sole possession of the brief we produced; and the DOJ has refused to allow us to review the brief since we wrote it. Litigation doesn't get any weirder than that.

. . . .

Lots more at
http://www.superlawyers.com/california-northern/article/QandA-with-Jon-B-Eisenberg/e098c6f7-cb78-482c-b0b2-07107af5f499.html

Please check out the interview. And remember, when you are thanking the troops and the local police that it's lawyers like Jon Eisenberg who guard your freedom. Thank them too.

On top of being a great, great lawyer, Jon Eisenberg is a good man as you will learn from the article. A man who has such loving things to say about his wife after a long marriage is a good man, sight unseen.