Larry Klayman Just Kicking Around The Idea That John Roberts Was Blackmailed, No Big Deal

Writing about Larry Klayman has become almost a Mad Libs level of easy. We could just plug in "Klayman" and "court" and "NSA" and "Obama" and come up with a story every day that is pretty close to whatever Larry Klayman is actually talking about. Today, Larry Klayman mixes it up a bit, veering into speculating that maybe -- just maybe! -- Chief Justice John Roberts was blackmailed into voting to uphold Obamacare.

Someone really needs to explain to Larry that (1) that's ridiculous and (2) as a lawyer, Larry should know a little something about slander per se. Let's lawsplain!

So slander per se is an old-timey legal doctrine that basically says that there are certain types of slander where the law assumes the statements (if actually made, and actually false) are so bad that the slanderee is automatically entitled to damages. One of the categories of slander per se is saying something false about someone's capabilities or honesty in their profession, because doing so basically implies that person is unfit for their office or job, which is pretty much exactly what Klayman is edging up to here when he was babbling on some radio show Sunday.

“But let’s take this possibility: Why did Chief Justice Roberts at the eleventh hour change his decision? He was going to side with the other justices and find that Obamacare was unconstitutional. Is it something that was dug up on him by the NSA or the CIA? Was that used against him to blackmail him?

If Larry Klayman weren't an esteemed lawyer, we would probably assume that he didn't know or understand this, and actually thought he was doing John Roberts a solid by saying "hey, maybe John Roberts really wanted to vote against Obamacare, but then the NSA found those pictures of him blowing goats and forced him to change his vote" but that is actually not a good thing to say! When you do that, you are essentially saying that John Roberts is such a goat-blower that he was easily persuaded to utterly disregard the requirements of his office and vote for Obamacare at the last minute. See? When you put it that way, it does not sound very nice!

After slandering John Roberts, Larry deftly pivoted to saying one million words about how the NSA is tapping your phone and invading your computer and so on and so on and so on. We kinda stopped paying attention after that, because that isn't nearly as interesting as speculating that the Chief Justice of the United States is susceptible to blackmail and also because we've long accepted that the NSA is reading everything we write, including this.

[ WND ]