Friday, January 8, 2010

A Couple of W's Lawyers Come a Cropper

According to the Associated Press John Michael Farren, former Bush deputy White House counsel, and a major figure in both President Bush administrations was charged with attempted murder a day after his wife served him with divorce papers.  According to the AP report:


"Fifty-seven-year-old John Michael Farren was arraigned on charges of strangulation and attempted murder and ordered held on $2 million bail.  His wife, Mary Farren, was beaten so severely Wednesday night at their New Canaan home that she was at points knocked unconscious and lost vision, police said. She managed to sound an alarm and flee the house with her two children.  Farren was general counsel at Xerox Corp. in 2007 when he was named deputy White House counsel during Bush’s second term. He was previously undersecretary for international trade in the Commerce Department under Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush; deputy manager for the elder Bush’s 1992 re-election campaign; and deputy director for his transition team in 1989."

This is the second Bush lawyer to take the big fall, remember the Brooks Brothers riot in Florida during the 2000 election, where the white guys went down to Florida and created melees at elections boards in an effort to stop the Florida recount? 


One of the attorneys involved in that mischief, in fact an organizer of the effort, was Manhatten republican, Thomas Spargo who according to a report in the Village Voice ended up on the bench, there.  Let the Voice relate what happened to Spargo since:  "Justice Thomas Spargo, an election law specialist who worked for President George W. Bush during the infamous Florida recount, was shaking down the lawyer to get money to pay off legal defense fees arising from previous misconduct charges. According to evidence presented in a three-day trial this week, on Dec. 19, 2003, Spargo directly told an attorney in a telephone conversation that he and another judge close to him had been assigned to handle cases in Ulster County, including the attorney's personal divorce case. Spargo asked for $10,000, which, according to the The New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, was going to be used to defend himself against misconduct charges for which he was being investigated. (At one time the judge complained that the fees were costing him $140,000.)"  Oh, Spargo, he went to jail. 

Nice suit, though.

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