Pest Control

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I’ve been handed a fair number of subpoenas that I just ignored. Most of them because they were improperly (not legally) served. One poor process server in Florida made the mistake of taking my hand and pushing the subpoena into it, then start to walk away; he got about two steps when I grabbed him by the back of his pants and stuffed the papers into his butt crack. The police officer he called said if it had been him he would have shoved it all the way up.

So I’m not insensitive to people who would like to ignore their subpoenas. But this other guy in Florida, who was just served an impeccably proper subpoena and seems intent to ignore it, is way outside the pale of sensitivity.

This wasn’t a subpoena served by some knucklehead in loose-fitting pants. These were elected knuckleheads, representatives of the American people, who want him to tell the people why he felt it was a good idea to overthrow an election he knew, months in advance, he would lose.

Who also want to know why he put so much of the money he raised from suckered citizens not into legitimate legal challenges, but into his own pocket; why he purposely and maliciously disseminated false allegations of election fraud, including to the nation’s courts; why he attempted his own election fraud by pressuring state officials and legislators to change the results of their state counts; what he did to encourage those folks to submit false electoral certificates to Congress; and why, when all that failed, he called an armed mob to the Capitol to see if they might persuade those representatives to simply not count the embarrassing electoral votes, with just the teensiest hint that unless the politicians complied they’d all be measured for extra-long turtlenecks.

The subpoena commands — subpoenas don’t ask — that he testify at a January 6th Committee deposition on 14 November, and that he stay there answering questions until they say he can go.

Of course he won’t do that. If he did he’d take the Fifth, the same right he says only mob bosses take. Why not? He was a mob boss on 6 January.

He’ll ignore it. Won’t go.

And then this is what I think should happen to him: he should be arrested and taken, kicking and screaming, blowing farts — whatever else big boys like him do when they are physically compelled to change geographic location — to the scene of the crime, to the U.S. Capitol Building he defiled.

By law, the House of Representatives has the inherent power, if not the courage or will, to arrest a recalcitrant witness and try him for contempt. Found guilty, they can jail him.

I think they should send their Sergeant at Arms himself, south to make the arrest. William Walker is former commanding general of the District of Columbia Army and Air Force National Guard. The fellow he’d arrest likes being in the company of generals; puffs him up. He might even be inclined to go peacefully.

If he isn’t, and if I were Walker, this is what I’d tell the criminal standing before me:

I understand you don’t want to come with us, and you need to understand that if you don’t come with us, without resistance, you will be drugged, and an animal your size comes under considerable danger from a drug dart. Fall the wrong way and your own weight can crush your larynx.

I saw a hippopotamus drugged like that once, and its weight choked off its airway and it died, and you might go that way too, the only difference being you won’t be mourned.

Maybe then he’d be smart and go with them.

Me, I hope he takes the dart.