Rev. Lennox Yearwood thinks the D.C. Attorney General has it out for him. It all began last year, when Yearwood was charged with assaulting a police officer and disorderly conduct after trying to get into a September 2007 hearing featuring testimony from General David Petraeus. The assault charge was soon dropped and, according to a release from Yearwood’s attorneys, the AG’s office dumped the disorderly conduct charge this February, when Yearwood showed up in court, fully prepared to do battle. The AG promised then and there, Yearwood’s lawyers contend, to seek charges against the minister for his participation in an October 2007 protest against the war and global warming. They made good on their word. Yearwood’s next court date is May 27.

I’m still waiting to here back from both sides in this case. The AG’s office did send me a copy of the most recent charges against Yearwood–for disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly. And indeed, the document was signed March 15, just a few weeks after the minister appeared in court for the previous case and about five months after the incident in question.

Peter Nickles has now been interim attorney general for nearly three months. The controversial consigliere has yet to indicate definitively whether he plans to ditch the interim tag and submit his name for the permanent job, which would entail Nickles’ moving to the District and submitting to a bruising confirmation battle, or stand down for a yet-to-be-named new guy.

LL caught up with the man today in the general counsel’s office, fresh off a Hawaiian vacation, and asked him what the plan is.

“Whatever job search is being done is being done by the city administrator,” he says. “Whether I seek to stay or not hasn’t been decided.”

Then he threw out this out there: “I think we’re doing very important work,” he said, referring to a pair of “very serious lawsuits” recently filed against managed-care organizations Chartered Health Plan and Amerigroup and an upcoming campaign against slum landlords.

LL’s read: Not the talk of a man who sounds like he’s out the door anytime soon.

Four years ago, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans narrowly missed getting a trip to the Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Howard Dean. This time around, the rules changed and, since the primary, everyone thought Evans was in like Flynn.

Well, not so fast.

Two delegate spots are reserved for what are called PLEOs—party leaders and elected officials. This year, those spots are slotted according to a hierarchy; Council chairman gets first dibs, followed by chairman pro tempore, followed by at-large councilmembers, and so on. But you also have to be supporting the right candidate; the PLEO slots are allocated based on the results of the District’s primary. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray is a Barack Obama guy; Evans, the chair pro tempore, is a longtime Hillary Clinton guy.

Originally, the D.C. Democratic State Committee held that Obama and Clinton were entitled to one PLEO spot apiece. Well, a group of Obama activists—including D.C. for Obama’s Howard Park, Jordan Usdan of Young Lawyers for Obama, and D.C. for Democracy’s Keith Ivey—researched the rules and held that Obama supporters were entitled to both PLEO seats. Their interpretation, sources say, was upheld earlier this week through an appeal to the Democratic National Committee.

“It was a matter of math, not politics,” says Park.

LL is not going to get into the uber-complicated calculations here. (If you want a rundown, check the comments section of this blog post; “KCinDC” is Ivey.) Long story short: Jack Evans isn’t guaranteed a trip to Denver anymore.

That’s not to say it might not happen some other way. Evans could run for one of two unpledged add-on spots at the D.C. Democratic State Committee meeting tonight. No guarantees there: About two dozen party activists have already put their names forward for slots, and with a majority of committee members supporting Obama, getting a Clinton supporter elected is unlikely barring some odd vote-splitting.

Another scenario: Clinton is guaranteed one pledged at-large delegate, which is to be chosen by the state committee on May 3; Evans could still be named to that slot. The complicating factor is that those at-large spots are generally used for concerns of racial or gender balance—white males typically don’t rate.

Evans didn’t respond to a request for comment yesterday.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Kojo had a pretty interesting discussion today about the plan to let people sign away their rights and let police come search their homes for guns. The deal offers amnesty for the guns — ostensibly belonging to rascally grandsons — but not for anything else. And if the gun’s connected to crime, well, that’s that. I was pretty horrified to hear callers spouting nonsense about ‘if you’ve got something to hide, you deserve to get caught,’ and ‘crime’s so bad, we have no other choice.’ The dude from the ACLU tried to point out the problems with the plan but I don’t think it gets through to people. The whole “fear of crime” thing (what a weird, wiggly concept) seems to have finally trumped actual crime trends in determining appropriate sacrifices of our civil liberties. Most people actually believe the police have every right to enter your home, voluntary waiver or not. D.C. already wants to throw out the Second Amendment, maybe we’ll toss out the Fourth too.

At-Large council candidate Dee Hunter took a step toward putting an embarrassing episode behind him today, when a Superior Court judge denied a petition for a stay-away order filed against him in January.

WRC-TV’s Tom Sherwood broke the news of the petition earlier this year. On Jan. 2, the document alleges, Hunter pushed the petitioner—a woman he had dated three times before—out of his car, then later pushed her again at a restaurant when she approached him about getting some personal items out of his home, and then, later when she went to his home to get those items, that he pushed her to the ground, cutting her lip.

Today, in front of Judge Lee Satterfield, the two hashed out each one’s version of events. Hunter arrived at court with counsel, Michael Starr of Schertler & Onorato, and three witnesses to support his version of events. The woman who filed the petition represented herself in the hearing and brought no witnesses.

The situation took place after the two had attended a Wizards game that night. On the way from Verizon Center to Alero restaurant on U Street NW, Hunter says he stopped to pick up some wine and other items and the woman accused him of smoking while out of the car, leading to a verbal altercation. Hunter stopped a second time, leading to a second verbal exchange and the woman leaving the car. The woman alleged physical contact; Hunter denied it.

Afterward, the woman came to Alero, where Hunter met some friends as previously planned. There, the woman asked him to let her in to the house so she could get her things and leave. Hunter and friends tried to convince her to stay for a drink and appetizers, but she insisted on returning to the house immediately. At this point, the woman alleged Hunter shoved her and her arm got caught up in his cost. Hunter says she struck him in the face and shoulders with her gloves while he was seated and he immediately rose to leave, at which point she grabbed on to his coat.

At that point, one of Hunter’s friends intervened to break up the altercation. The friend, Gregory Campbell, testified that he offered to get the woman’s things for her, but that she insisted on going to Hunter’s house. The woman said that he never offered to go himself. Before coming to Alero, Hunter alleges that the woman went to his nearby house, on the 2100 block of 12th Place NW, and tried to get in to retrieve her belongings, cutting a window screen and damaging a window frame.

When the woman and Campbell arrived at the house, the woman said Hunter rushed to the door and starting shaking her bag out, then shoved her to the ground when she tried to grab the bag. Hunter says he stayed in the doorway and held on to the bag because he wasn’t sure if she was going to use it to hit him. She fell, he says, when he let go of the bag after Campbell told him to while she was still pulling.

“At no time did I touch her in any way,” Hunter testified.

The testimony came down to essentially he-said, she-said. Satterfield, in his bench ruling, called the encounter a “one-time incident in which a lot of bad judgment was exercised,” but determined that no “good cause” could be found that an offense had taken place. He referred to “bad judgment on the part of Mr. Hunter not to just give her the items and be done with it.”

“I think the petitioner did not exercise particularly good judgment either,” he said.

Starr said after the hearing: “The allegations were totally false and the evidence presented in court proved that. The only crimes committed that night took place when Ms. Alexander assaulted Mr. Hunter after having tried, earlier in the evening, to break into his house.”

UPDATE, 3:45 P.M.: The woman issued the following statement:

It is unfortunate that after assaulting me three times in one night and misleading the court this morning, Mr. Hunter has chosen to demean my character and integrity. Today, I simply asked that Mr. Hunter stay away from me and asked for the court’s assistance in keeping me safe. It is sad that, instead of accepting responsibility for his actions, he has chosen a path of slander and deceit. The judge said quite clearly that Mr. Hunter used very poor judgment that night and that there was no reason not to believe the chain of events unfolded as I testified, namely that Mr. Hunter pursued a course of unprovoked violence and mistreatment.

Though I understand now why many women have no faith in the criminal justice system to protect them, my solace is that other women now know the kind of ma Hunter is and are warned to stay away from him. I can only thank God that this occurred after only a few outings. As I am a very private person, I hope that these can be my final comments on this matter, but I would encourage all women who have been mistreated by violent men to stand up for themselves as I did.

This morning, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty held a press conference to announce the filing of the District’s final brief [PDF] in the Supreme Court gun case, D.C. v. Heller. Oral arguments are scheduled for March 18. Interim Attoney General Peter Nickles declared the brief, written by the city in conjunction with lawyers from three private firms working pro bono, to be the “gold standard” in its quality and thoroughness. “I’m feeling very good about the current situation,” he said.

What’s new in this thing? Nothing major, Nickles said, though he did say that he and his colleagues were “quite surprised” by the brief filed by federal Solicitor General Paul D. Clement that argued that some gun regulation was appropriate even under an individual-rights reading of the Second Amendment. Nickles said the revised brief pursues that line of argument more thoroughly.

So did Fenty, for that matter, in his opening statement, where he compared the District’s handgun ban to a familiar con-law conceit: Just as the first amendment doesn’t protect your right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, so is the second amendment subject to reasonable restraint, he argued.

However, Walter Dellinger (pictured), the big-time Supreme Court lawyer who will argue the case before the court, emphasized in his remarks the primary argument that the District’s been pursuing all along—that the Second Amendment does not preserve an individual right to bear arms, but rather was meant by the founders to apply to state militias narrowly defined. “To the extent that states choose not to have a militia,” Dellinger said, “to that extent states don’t have Second Amendment rights.”

LL asked Dellinger the obvious question: With four votes likely to be predisposed against any sort of state-militia argument, how confident are you that there’s five votes on the court that will buy it? Dellinger gave a somewhat contradictory response: “I never speculate about individual justices,” he said, adding, “I don’t put any member [of the court] off the table.” The District’s argument, he said, would be rooted in “first principles” rather than any tactical considerations to capture individual votes. At the same time, Dellinger said the ultimate goal is to preserve the District handgun ban, not to win any sweeping constitutional victories. “We are looking for the argument on the basis of which the law can be sustained by the Supreme Court,” he said.

Nickles was asked if there was a “Plan B” if the court affirms the appeals court’s ruling. Said Nickles, “If the case is affirmed, then the city council and the mayor will have to sit down and determine what kind of regulations would be appropriate…already starting to think about that.”

If you thought the stakes in District of Columbia v. Heller couldn’t be higher than a last-stand defense of cities and states to keep dangerous weapons off the streets/last-stand defense of the rights of American individuals to keep and bear arms, you’re missing the potential impact on the D.C. taxpayer.

Deep in Tony Mauro’s rundown of the legal machinations behind the Heller case in this week’s Legal Times is this tidbit:

…[Chief pro-gun-rights lawyer Alan] Gura estimates his billable hours at more than $1 million, which he hopes to extract from the D.C. government if he wins.

The rest of the article’s sure worth a read—Mauro’s the best reporter in town no one’s ever heard of. Good stuff in there about controversy in the federal Solicitor General’s Office and exactly how Dick Cheney’s wrapped up in all this. And there’s plenty of controversy in Gura’s camp about who will get to argue how much of the 30-minute oral argument scheduled for March 18.

Only problem: Legal Times has a Web firewall. So either register, try bugmenot.com, or high-tail it to the waiting room of the law firm of your choice.

Obama is great for just being Obama, says Marc Fisher. “Win or lose,” the senator from Illinois has changed the way Americans view race, he writes in his most recent column. “It’s one thing to believe in a picture we’d like to be true — a society moving toward a colorblind ideal — and something entirely different to live each day with a personification of that ideal.” And which generation has advanced this new way of thinking? Not today’s youth, but the youth of yesteryear. That’s right: Boomers! They always get credit for everything.

While the District hopes to stop handguns from coming in, Mayor Ray Nagin from New Orleans is …

Logic schmogic. Maybe Roger Clemens and his former trainer are both telling the truth (check out the second photo), even though they are saying diametrically opposite things.

Do not slip while running in Adams Morgan. In some places, it’s a long way down.

This week’s Loose Lips concerns the fate of litigation that the District’s attorney general threatened against the paint industry last summer. Such a lawsuit would have been aimed at getting the industry to clean up properties contaminated with lead paint.

An interesting detail that came to LL’s attention after his deadline:

After Linda Singer quit as attorney general in December, her nemesis-of-sorts—mayoral counsel Peter Nickles—fired her top aide, Special Counsel Alan Morrison, who was best known for being the guy in charge of pressing the Heller gun case before the Supreme Court. Besides being the point man on Heller, though, Morrison had been involved in various initiatives in Singer’s office, including the possible lead-paint lawsuit

Anyway, after Nickles sent Morrison packing, he announced that the Heller case would be argued by Walter Dellinger (pictured), another constitutional-law giant already working on the case.

Fun fact: Dellinger, according to press reports, has argued on behalf of the National Paint and Coatings Association on lead-paint matters. Back in 2000, states including Rhode Island and Maryland attempted to pass laws that would make it easier to proceed with lawsuits against lead-paint manufacturers. Dellinger testified before legislatures that such laws would be unconstitutional (which, in all fairness, they probably were).

LL doesn’t mean to imply foul play here. He will call it, say, an evocative coincidence.

A Jimmy Carter expert says he doubts Carter ever made the anti-Semitic remarks that Marvin Mandel attributes to the former president in “All About Abe,” a new and occasionally brutal documentary about Abe Pollin.

Allegations against Carter provide the film’s biggest bombshells. Mandel, the now-87-year-old former governor of Maryland and longtime friend of Pollin, says Carter “tried to keep me from being chairman of the National Governors’ Conference. He actually said on the telephone…‘We can’t elect a Jew the head of the National Governors’ Conference.’”

Mandel and Pollin go on to spew a lot of anti-Carter gibberish in the movie. Pollin asserts, for example, that Carter rigged the Justice Department to make sure Mandel was indicted and convicted, and downplays the extent of Mandel’s corruptness, saying he only took “[s]hirts, couple of suits, very small stuff” from political pals.

Pollin’s charges are quite disprovable: Mandel was indicted on mail fraud and racketeering charges in November 1975; Carter took office in January 1977. And the trial record indicates that Mandel took hundreds of thousands of dollars in goods, services and cash from cronies before doing their bidding.

The slime from the quote attributed to Carter by Mandel in Pollin’s doc, however, isn’t as easy to wipe off.

But Albert Nason, an archivist at the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, a branch of the National Archives, says he’s suspicious of the accuracy of Mandel’s memories.

“I don’t know if Carter had anything at all to say about who would head up the Governors’ Conference,” says Nason, who has been with the library for 21 years. “But look back to that time: Here’s Carter coming in in 1976, he’s setting up the administration — the first thing he’s going to do is appoint a governor who is under indictment? This is after Watergate. He wanted to pursue a transparent image. If he were to push Mandel while Mandel was under indictment, that would be against everything he was running for.”

“I just can’t see Carter coming out with something so blatantly anti-Semitic as ['We can't elect a Jew...],” Nason adds. “Nothing else in his life would indicate that.”

Sonuvabitch! Just walked past my car on the way to the office and I’ve been booted.

I got an expired-meter ticket about two weeks ago which I haven’t paid just yet, but I’m thinking, That sure as hell isn’t enough to get me the boot!

So I logged on to the city’s online ticketing system and punched in my plate. This is what I got:

The following tickets issued to this vehicle plate are due:

Ticket Number Issue Date Violation Location Amount
370199314 10/22/2007 P173 2300 BLOCK 15TH ST NW EAST SIDE $60.00
370709931 10/24/2007 P039 0500 BLOCK E ST NW SOUTH SIDE $50.00
370728256 10/22/2007 P173 2300 BLOCK 15TH ST NW EAST SIDE $60.00
371249830 11/19/2007 P173 1400 BLOCK BELMONT ST NW NORTH SIDE $60.00
372899295 11/27/2007 P173 1300 BLOCK W ST NW SOUTH SIDE $60.00
373726404 12/14/2007 P039 0500 BLOCK 11TH ST NW EAST SIDE $25.00

GODDAMMIT! OK, I remember the last one. But swear to God I never saw any of those other five tickets. One or two tickets I could see getting blown away by the wind or stolen by some asshole, but FIVE? Plus, one of those seems to be a duplicate—can I really get ticketed on the same day on the same block. And I know which block that is! The east side of the 2300 block of 15th doesn’t have street sweeping restrictions! It’s on the goddamned hill next to Meridian Hill Park!!!

Christ!

Anyway, now I gotta decide whether I wanna spend almost $400 paying for tickets and late fees I never knew I had or going down to C Street and hoping the line for hearings isn’t too ridiculous.

Your input is appreciated.

Consumer advocate and presidential spoiler Ralph Nader has posted a letter to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty demanding the firing of his general counsel and acting attorney general, Peter Nickles.

Nickles has been in the news of late thanks to the resignation of former attorney general Linda Singer, who allegedly had difficulty running her office without Nickles’ interference.

The letter, signed by Nader and associate Robert Weissman alleges that Nickles “on several occasions engaged in extracurricular activities beyond his job description — and exceeding his authority.”

Even more seriously, he blocked numerous ideas from your Attorney General Linda Singer and her associates to initiate aggressive litigation strategies to hold corporations accountable for harming District residents and depriving the District government of tax revenues. Perhaps Mr. Nickles’ experience as a career corporate litigator with Covington & Burling actually interfered with his “good judgment” in these cases.

Nickles was back in the news today for firing Alan Morrison, whom Singer had tapped to argue the District’s case before the Supreme Court on the handgun ban. That seems to have been the proximate reason for the letter.

Full letter after the jump.

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An MPD officer shot and killed a D.C. family’s dog on Christmas Eve, Fox 5 is reporting. Stories about pets who are shot to death seemingly write themselves. Still, Fox 5 has outdone itself by managing to recover possibly the most sympathetic accompanying photograph ever:

This shooting victim isn’t just adorable doggy; he’s an adorably patriotic doggy. An internal investigation into the incident is pending: The officer claims Scooby lunged, while the dog’s owner says Scooby was sitting still. Now, I’m no police investigator, but the only photograph of Scooby I’ve ever seen is of him sitting still, lovin’ the U.S. of A. I rest my case.

Peter Nickles, general counsel for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, usually relishes a low-key, behind-the-scenes approach in his dealings as the mayor’s consigliere. But this week Nickles has had to deal with a lot more attention than he’s used to in the wake of Attorney General Linda Singer’s resignation on Monday.

He’s kept pretty quiet since then. LL caught up with Nickles in his Wilson Building office today on his way out to lunch and had a brief conversation with the man about the proper roles of the attorney general and the general counsel.

“I think among adults, the distinction is pretty clear,” Nickles said. That distinction, he explained, lies in which legal matters lie in the realm of policy and which matters have more to do with enforcement.

“It’s always been clear in matters of policy,” said Nickles. “Policy has to be vetted with the mayor and the senior staff….We need vigorous discussion.”

Matters of law enforcement, Nickles said, need to be dealt with more independence from the mayor. “You don’t pull your punches on law enforcement,” he said.

“Good lawyers understand the distinction,” he said.

Nickles went on to explain that the division of labor is inherently fuzzy in an administration with an attorney general appointed by the mayor. An elected attorney general, he said, wouldn’t have the same turf problems: “They run on a platform…and those guys don’t consult on anything,” he said, citing former New York AG and now Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Nickles expressed tentative support for the District electing its attorneys general, but that would require Congress to amend the Home Rule Act, and Nickles discounted the chances of that happening any time soon. “If we ever have Congress move into the 20th century, we’d have a little bit of home rule,” he says.

District Attorney General Linda Singer has resigned, the Washington Post is reporting.

The Post, unsurprisingly, attributes Singer’s decision to frustration over her role vis-a-vis Fenty General Counsel Peter Nickles, a longtime family friend whose office is just around the hall from Fenty’s bullpen on the third floor of the Wilson Building. Nickles has been heavily involved in just about every major executive branch legal maneuver since the beginning of the Fenty term, including negotiating several major court settlements and the sale of Greater Southeast Community Hospital.

Singer, on the other hand, seemed to have been relegated to comparatively penny-ante affairs. A glimpse at her office’s press page reveals a whole lot of scofflaw-property shutdowns and consumer-affairs business. That’s not without certain exceptions: Singer, for instance, has served as the District’s point person on preserving the handgun ban before the Supreme Court.

Nickles, unsurprisingly, has been named interim AG.

Big question: Does this mean Nickles will actually be moving to the District? A bit of controversy erupted when Nickles declined to move from his suburban Virginia home into the District after being named general counsel. The city argued that Nickles’ position was required to be D.C.-domiciled under the law, but the AG’s spot certainly is.

Singer’ resignation letter, in full, after the jump.

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