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The Clarion Ledger ran an AP story that says that a former NASA official, Courtney Stadd, who has been indicted for taking a payoff to steer $9.6M in funds to Mississippi State University.

The indictment isn’t visible yet on Pacer (the AP story on the Clarion Ledger site is nearly opaque, but it appears that the indictment is in the District of Columbia.  I can’t find it there or in PACER’s party index).  I’m guessing this story may have legs.  I certainly want more details than I’ve seen so far.

The AP story says:

The indictment accuses Stadd of steering money from an earth science appropriation to Mississippi State University, which was paying him as a consultant. Stadd is also accused of lying to NASA ethics officials investigating the matter.

The article describes Stadd’s role at NASA as “the White House representative to the NASA front office.”

Stadd, who joined NASA as chief of staff in 2001 and left the agency in 2003, was President George W. Bush’s NASA transition chief in 2000. Stadd “’was centrally involved in the organization and management of NASA,’ said John Logsdon, a Smithsonian Institution space scholar.”

Stadd  set up a consulting firm called Capital Solutions that had Mississippi State’s Georesources Institute as a client; the institute paid him $85,000 “to provide technical document editing and prepare community outreach and public communications material.”  He returned to NASA as a special government employee for three months in 2008, and that same year Congress appropriated $15M for the earth science program.  The indictment says that he used his position to get $12M in funds to Mississippi, of which Mississippi State got $9.6M.

There’s a Mississippi State Press release about the project, which notes that the University of Mississippi and the Stennis Space Center have roles in the project; that may be where the rest of the $12M went.

So did this guy do all this revolving door stuff solo?  And how did that appropriation of $15M get stuck in the legislation?  My curiousity is really piqued here.

h/t to Beautimous.

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Fate Peterson, former DA, has told Jackson Free Press she’s qualified for mayor.

Posted from my iPhone.

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The lineups for Spring music festivals are starting to come out. Some of the ones I particularly watch are all about the same time– hometown Doubledecker Festival (which I’ll have to admit to slight disappointment this year about the lineup. More later about it), the festival in Lafayette, Louisiana, Memphis in May’s Beale Street Festival, the Ponderosa Stomp, and (of course) Jazz Fest (the last two in New Orleans). These festivals are all in the last weekend of April / first weekend of May.

This post is a bit about the Ponderosa Stomp and the Beale Street Festival lineups.

I look at the Memphis in May lineup (May 1st through 3rd) and see a lot that interests me, but every single one of the acts I care about is a repeater for the fest, and almost all I’ve seen in much better contexts. A lot that’s good (who can complain about Al Green?) but nothing novel. Here’s what I like a lot: Al Green, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Bar Kays, Elvis Costello, Cedric Burnside, Herbert Sumlin, George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, Los Lobos. There’s also Bonnie Raitt and Three Six Mafia.

But, seriously, do we have to import to the Mid South blues from John Mayall, Tommy Castro, and G. Love & Special Sauce? And are they paying a lot of money to bring in Steve Miller (who seems featured!) and James Taylor (about whom I summons the ghost of Lester Bangs, who marked James Taylor for death when I was an impressionable youth).

So I may go see Jerry  Lee, Al Green, or for a mind-clearing dose of funk from the Bar-Kays or P-Funk, but the logistics may keep me away.

A favorite festival of mine is April 28th and 29th (midweek during Jazz Fest in New Orleans), the Ponderosa Stomp, which this year is at the House of Blues. As always, Ponderosa Stomp host Dr. Ike (a/k/a Dr. Ike Padnos, a New Orleans anesthesiologist by day) has assembled an incredible lineup of rockabilly, soul, funk, gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, and garage rock legends and remarkable unknowns for a wild concert.

If you don’t know about the Stomp, I’m not sure how to communicate what an amazing round of music you’ll hear if you go. This year feature both usuals and first timers.  Here’s some of it:

• Dale Hawkins: rockabilly great, “Suzy Q.”
• James Burton: the guitar in “Suzy Q” and Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” One of the greatest and most influential of rock guitarists, from Shreveport. He and Hawkins have not been onstage together in forty years.
  
• Howard Tate: a great late 60s/early 70s soul singer– you know “Get It While You Can,” at least from the Janis Joplin cover– who disappeared and has come back strong. I saw a really fine show in Memphis in the last few years.
• Wanda Jackson: Rockabilly queen (“Fujiyama Mama”) and soon to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• Dan Penn: Brilliant songwriter (“The Letter,” “Do Right Woman,” “Dark End Of The Street,” “I’m Your Puppet”), and great interpreter of his own songs.
• Otis Clay (“Trying to Live My Life Without You”) backed by the Hi Rhythm Section (who played on all of the Al Green and Ann Peebles hits you know. The core of the band is the Hodges Brothers).
  
• Lazy Lester: A blues artist for the Louisiana-oriented Excello label, who recorded “Ponderosa Stomp” and gave the Stomp its name.
• Cyril Jordan and Roy Loney of the Flamin’ Groovies: This was a sixties San Francisco band that was a precursor to power pop. Loney left the band about 1970 and he and Jordan have not played together onstage since.

Here’s some James Burton…

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About a month ago, the law firm Ungarino & Eckert was slapped pretty hard by a district judge in the Western District of Louisiana for improperly removing cases. The district court stated: “This case is but one in a long line of fraudulent and improper removals that Ungarino & Eckert, and more specifically Matthew Ungarino, have filed in this and other districts.” The law firm was given some time to think about it and respond why, in addition to paying the attorneys fees for the frivolous removal, it shouldn’t also pay $25,000 and be barred from practice in the Western District federal court. The firm was required to serve the order on its client. In addition to being picked up by me, the court’s opinion was picked up by the ABA Journal, and apparently provoked an outburst of gleeful emailing in the plaintiff’s bar:

“Our listserv has been very busy with Mr. Ungarino,” says John deGravelles, a former president of the now-renamed Louisiana Association for Justice, the trial lawyers’ group. “They’re venting about him and asking why it took so long after all those cases listed in the judge’s opinion.”

The word is that there was a similar outburst in Mississippi.

Ungarino has now responded to the judge’s opinion. Their response– it’s here– has also been picked up by the ABA Journal. They’ve hired a former state bar president as counsel. They’ve hired a couple of law professors, one to give the firm a mandatory all-hands-on CLE about ethics, and another to give the firm a mandatory all-hands-on CLE about removal. They really, really grovellingly hope not to be disbarred from practice in that court (They love practicing there–Hit me again, sir!), would just as soon not pay more than the plaintiff’s attorneys fees (which they don’t contest), and they throw out some numbers about how very few of their removals get bounced back to state court, those mostly about the jurisdictional amount, but mostly they put the reader into a deeply bored sleep with the incredibly long-winded and unconvincing details about how they really, really tried to get the citizenship of the corporate defendants (and their very existence) right, but it was hard, too hard. They note that they “have suffered both personally and professionally since the issuance of this Court’s Memorandum Ruling…”

National ethics expert Stephen Gillers had noted in that first ABA article that the proposed $25,000 sanction seemed pretty low to him. I’m thinking there may be a bit more suffering to go.

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This just in from Jim Craig’s World: WAPT is reporting that: “Mayor To Be Retried May 11th. Jackson Mayor Frank Melton will be retried May 11 on federal charges in connection with a 2006 sledgehammer attack on a Ridgeway Street duplex.”

More in a bit.

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Yesterday, I noted that Judge DeLaughter had picked Tom Durkin of Chicago as his defense lawyer and linked and quoted some biographical information. The Chicago Tribune ran with Holbook Mohr’s AP story about DeLaughter’s hire of Tom Durkin. He’s the only one who got a direct comment: ”We look forward to vigorously defending Judge DeLaughter and his outstanding reputation,’ Durkin said by telephone Wednesday.”

Jerry Mitchell in the Clarion Ledger lays it on relatively thickly, with this headline: “Lawyer defending DeLaughter ironic pick: White supremacist defender now helping former prosecutor;” followed by this lede:

A prominent Chicago defense lawyer who represented a white supremacist in the killing of a federal judge is now representing a Hinds County judge who successfully prosecuted a white supremacist.

Mitchell’s approach is brings to my mind the notion “if all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.” There’s a lot more to DeLaughter’s lawyer than that one case, and it would have looked just as weird to headline that “Delaughter Picks Hamas Lawyer.”

Meanwhile at the level of excruciating details, Judge Alexander entered the routine orders admitting Durkin and allowing Speetjen to withdraw, substituting in Larry Little, and Little moved for more time to file pretrial motions. The games begin!

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Today, Judge Yerger decided to state Eaton v. Frisby while he dealt with the impact of behind-the-scenes contact between Ed Peters and Judge DeLaughter.

Eaton has been the subject of a whole series of posts (read here, in reverse order). It’s a case that was before Judge DeLaughter involving alleged theft of trade secrets.  The original lawyer for Eaton, Mike Allred, made a contract to pay a fact witness and then did not disclose it in discovery. Through a long series of not-entirely-visible proceedings (the case is largely under seal), Frisby found out about the contract and then sought sanctions. There were very baroque proceedings involving side litigation about sanctions for this violation of both the law and the discovery rules, much before a special master, the upshot being that someone on the Eaton side secretly hired Peters to try to work his magic with DeLaughter. This surfaced because Peters accidently sent an email to a secretary at the law firm representing Frisby.

This is one of the cases the Judicial Performance Committee cited in having DeLaughter suspended from the bench.

So today was one in a series of hearings about what to do with that. Jimmie Gates reports in the Clarion Ledger:

Alan Perry, one of Frisby’s attorneys, argued today that the lawsuit should be stayed because of former Hinds County District Attorney Ed Peters’ alleged attempt to corrupt the court and that a federal criminal case against the engineers have hampered the defense.

“We have been done wrong and we are asking for justice,” Perry told Hinds County Circuit Judge Swan Yerger. …

Yerger eventually ruled today that actions in the Eaton Corp.’s lawsuit should be halted until it could be determined what role, if any, Peters, a former Eaton attorney, had on DeLaughter’s decisions.

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So tomorrow they’ll meet about whether Melton will be retried. Kingfish says GO FOR IT, and Mayor Melton announces for reelection, with his lawyer by his side. The circus is still in town!

I’m very tempted to use this for the blog’s first ever poll: Should the feds retry Mayor Melton?

Lotus noted the reelection announcement in comments.

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It’s all becoming clearer. Larry Little has just moved to admit Thomas Anthony Durkin as co-counsel for Judge DeLaughter. Here’s the motion.

Durkin is a prominent criminal defense lawyer in Chicago and a former assistant US attorney there.

He’s done Gitmo cases. Here’s something about him from a New Yorker piece:

Tom Durkin, the Chicago attorney—he defended Matt Hale, the self-proclaimed Pontifex Maximus of the World Church of the Creator—said that he “wouldn’t have missed this party for the world.” Over the past four years, Durkin has made seven trips to Guantánamo. Initially, he was hesitant to get involved with the defense project, which was assembled by the A.C.L.U. He recalled, “I said to them, ‘Let me speak to my managing partner and get back to you.’” He was referring to his wife, Janis Roberts, who stood beside him. “We have six kids who had to eat and go to college,” she pointed out. “He said, ‘I want to do this.’ And, in hindsight, I know we did the right thing.”

Here’s a biography of him from an ACLU site:

Thomas Anthony Durkin has been practicing criminal law in Chicago for almost thirty-five years and has a wealth of experience defending clients in complex cases, including cases involving classified evidence and allegations related to terrorism. For example, Mr. Durkin represented Dr. Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who was charged with providing material support to the Specially Designated Terrorist Organization, Hamas. That case required extensive pre-trial litigation regarding application of the Classified Information Procedures Act. Mr. Durkin also served as lead trial counsel for Matthew Hale, the self proclaimed Pontifex Maximus of the World Church of the Creator, an avowed white supremacist organization, on widely publicized charges that Hale solicited the murder of U.S. District Court Judge Joan H. Lefkow. The FBI designated Mr. Hale’s case as a “domestic terrorism” case, resulting in the Attorney General’s decision to impose Special Administrative Measures that restricted Mr. Hale’s ability to assist in his own defense. Mr. Durkin successfully challenged several of these restrictions on Sixth Amendment grounds. In the civil arena, Mr. Durkin challenged the constitutionality of the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act on behalf of the Global Relief Foundation, Inc., an Islamic charity whose assets were blocked after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mr. Durkin is also lead counsel for two men currently imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Walid Mohammad Haj Mohammad Ali (ISN 081) and Abdul Raham Houari (ISN 070). He presently serves on the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyer (NACDL)’s Select Committee on Military Tribunals and Terrorism.

Mr. Durkin, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, also has considerable experience with the death penalty. Not only has he represented defendants in capital cases, he currently serves as Chairman of the Expert Panel for Capital Appointments for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana. Mr. Durkin also serves as a liaison to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit’s Judicial Council Committee to Study the Appointment of Counsel for Indigent Habeas Corpus Petitioners under a Sentence of Death. Mr. Durkin is currently listed in the Illinois “Super Lawyers” Magazine indicating he is rated among the top 5% of Illinois lawyers.

Here’s his profile on his firm web page.

This looks interesting.

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Larry Little, an Oxford lawyer who was district attorney here, I think for 2+ terms 80s, possibly early 90s, after Ken Coleman and before Jim Hood (and who successfully prosecuted the Hodgkin case, taking the lead himself and doing a good job of it), has entered an appearance for Judge DeLaughter. Larry is the municipal court judge here in Oxford. I think he went to Mississippi College Law School, practiced in Jackson some in the 80s and perhaps late 70s, and is a nice guy. He was local counsel for one of the Beef Plant defendants. I’ll have to say I was slightly surprised by this. Here’s the document.

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