Roger Feinman

[William Kelly]

The U.S. federal courts and the JFK Assassination

A New Blog by Roger Bruce Feinman, J.D. at http://liesandfallacies.blogspot.com

Excerpted from a posting scheduled for Friday evening, March 12, 2009:

To read Judge John O. Newman's Opinion for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in the case of "Robert J. Groden v. Random House, The New York Times, and Gerald Posner", you would not know that . . . Groden and Posner had new books competing with each other in the market for books observing the thirtieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination. Posner's book was entitled "Case Closed"; Groden's, "The Killing of a President." Judge Newman didn't want you to know about Groden's new book. . . . Indeed, Newman didn't mention it at all. One of several things Newman didn't want the world to know, and thought he could hide because, when he wrote his Opinion in 1995, he was writing for a limited audience of lawyers and judges, and did not contemplate the impending reach of the World Wide Web, was that Mr. Groden was competing directly with Mr. Posner to sell books during the peak gift-giving season of 1993. See, Mr. Posner had emerged quite rapidly, and with great fanfare, as the "anti- conspiracy" star of the mainstream news media, and this was a case that deeply touched the legacy of Judge Newman's beloved mentor and former employer, the late Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had headed the Warren Commission's "investigation" of President Kennedy's assassination, and who had employed Newman as his senior law clerk at the United States Supreme Court...

The Second Circuit's omission of any mention of "The Killing of a President," and its omission of any allusion to the anti-competitive intent of the ads, were deliberate and instrumental in accomplishing their goals, one of which was to evade an important issue in the case: whether the Random House advertising campaign was a deceptive and misleading attack against the nature and quality of a competitor's product (i.e., Groden's book) to promote their own (Posner's Case Closed). Hiding from their readers the existence of Groden's competing book allowed the Second Circuit court to avoid grappling with Congress's intent in the Lanham Act. It was a clever bit of legerdemain. By denying its audience the contextual setting of two authors competing to sell their new releases to the relevant market, the Court not only betrayed its preference for one side of the dispute, but also threw the permissible legal boundaries of negative comparative advertising into uncertainty. That omission, however, was merely one part of a tapestry of judicial bias, fraud, multiple misrepresentations, and deceit; which form the Second Circuit's tragic legacy to the law profession and history. For what the Court was actually trying to accomplish with their Opinion in the Groden case was to conceal their true aims: to protect the reputation of Earl Warren; to protect a federal district court judge who had seriously faltered in his responsibilities to evaluate all the evidence; and, more generally, to protect the reputation of the federal judiciary, by preventing the Random House advertising campaign from becoming the focal point of a public trial to determine whether or not John F. Kennedy was assassinated by more than one man. Barring the courthouse door to Groden and his attorney would foreclose any potential threat that they might prove to a jury in a federal court the existence of a conspiracy in the assassination. Fear and dread of the mere possibility this might ensue were Groden's lawsuit to be allowed seem to have weighed heavily in the Second Circuit Court's Opinion.

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