CLEVELAND, OH – President Donald Trump privately and as president loves him some Jones Day attorneys. So does Russian President Vladmir Putin. They work for the Trump administration in Washington, D.C. They work for Putin’s Russian Federation from their 12th offices at 6 Gasheka Street in Moscow. Zip code 125047. Russian attorney Vladmir Lechtman is the partner-in-charge.
The Russian Federation has an office in the same building as Jones Day just 4 floors up and a 15-minute walk to old KGB headquarters. It’s a 30 minute walk to the Kremlin. Access is important in a nation where Russia’s officials can enter legal offices and remove files when they’re not involved in a case. There’s a Starbuck’s and a steak house in the atrium where they can all co-mingle and kibbutz over secrets and deals; and talk about the next mega-corporate conference in St. Petersburg with Vlad. Forget the Logan Act in Russia. Who’s investigating and forget the U.S’s misprision of felony law found in Title 18 of the United States Code and Section 4? It’s only written in plain English.
“Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
Imagine Diebold of Canton with an office in that same Moscow building in 2002 at the same time they were selling electronic voting equipment to this nation’s elections boards and secretaries of state. Now imagine Diebold being investigated by the USDOJ for bribing Russian governnment officials to place their ATM’s in the Communist government’s banks; and no USDOJ official thinks to investigate whether or not ex-chairman Walden O’Dell gave the Putin administration their voting equipment’s schematics to avoid being investigated by Russia’s authorities for bribing their’s in violation of their Federal Law found in Fz-223 of their governing code? Again. Who’s investigating?
Why didn’t Walden O’Dell get a 15 year prison term in Russia after paying over $1.3 million in bribes to Russian government officials to put Diebold’s ATM’s in the government’s banks? Why wasn’t he investigated for not registering as a foreign agent pursuant to the Foreign Agent’s Registration Act?
This is the type of investigation / non-investigation double-play former Jones Day partner Justin Herdman is headed to Washington, D.C. and a job as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Washington to implement for Trump. He’s now the U.S. Attorney over 40 counties in the Northern District of Ohio. Herdman’s list of prosecuted cases over the past three years looks like that of a local police blotter. No anti-trust. No Foreign Agent Registration Act. No Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. No Espionage Act. No Logan Act. No RICO.
Herdman’s Wikipedia page lists his prosecution of five “activists” who were terrorized into a conversation by an FBI informant into saying they would blow up the Cuyahoga Valley bridge. The unemployed potheads didn’t even own a car or have the money to buy the parts for the fake bomb.
What Herdman’s biography doesn’t say about that terrorism investigation and his others is that they were all fake terrorists under the FBI’s control. Even Demetrius Pitts. Trump didn’t bother to tweet Herdman’s arrest of the Cleveland man FBI agents found making comments on social media they turned into an investigation and entrapping conversations. Pitts doesn’t fit any aspect of the “Muslim” description of the Al Qaida supporter FBI agents under Herdman’s supervision painted him as in front of U.S. District Court Judge Solomon Oliver.
Oliver sentenced the 50-year-old mentally-challenged man to 14 years of “supervised release” instead of the prison term Herdman wanted this February because he new the man was never a threat to the nation; and that he’d been entrapped into making all the statements he was led to say. He knew the impoverished Pitts didn’t know his rights, how to fight and wasn’t going to be fought for by the federal public defender who convinced him to take a plea deal. The only “Muslim” terrorists Herdman found where American Christian converts he found on social media.
Herdman will be a perfect fit for a federal prosecutorial district where a distraction from substance is now needed to protect the nation’s “Mob Boss in Chief” and his family from being prosecuted “after” he and they leave the White House. Herdman may return to Jones Day as the head of its white collar crime division to protect Trump and his family from being investigated on the outside like he’s done in Ohio on the inside.
It was Herdman’s district in Cleveland where the Republican National Convention and Russian collusion occurred in 2016. The conversations between retired U.S. Army Lt. General Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak occurred in Cleveland blocks away from Jones Day’s office at 901 Lakeside Avenue where the old Cleveland Press location existed when I wrote for the newspaper as a reporterin 1981. At that time in 2016 Kisylak’s government was and remains now a Jones Day client; and Herdman was one of the firm’s partners.
Cleveland and the Northern District of Ohio was a natural place for the Russian collusion investigation to begin since nine of the state’s major corporations have Moscow offices, are Jones Day clients and do business with the Russian Federation. Ward Timken of Timken Steel in Canton’s wife chairs the Ohio Republican Party of which Herdman as a Republican would be a member in order to receive an appointment from a Republican president. Jones Day represents Timken and represented Diebold while O’Dell was being investigated by former U.S. Attorney Steve Dettelbach.
Timken thumbed his nose at ex-President Barack Obama’s executive order to stop doing business with Russia when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014. His Canton, Ohio company’s steel supplied the Russian Federation’s railroad cars with the wheels and bearings they needed to transport attack vehicles into the neighboring nation.
With Ohio corporation’s like Parker Hannifin shipping its aeronautical products to Russia, there’s no published report of the missile pins Warren Precision Products manufactured for them at a rate of 3000 a month being investigated by Herdman to learn if the weapons products are for us or them. Like Trump, Parker Hannifin is a Jones Day client. So is the firm of Brown Gibbons Lang that handled Pete & Pete’s acquisition of Boyas Excavating.
As Ohio is gripped in a Co-Vid 19 epidemic, Herdman’s had federal environmental laws to enforce he hasn’t that could have protected the immune systems of the Americans in the northern district he served. His old firm’s clients deal came from cash earned in part by an illegal construction and demolition debris landfill behind East Cleveland homes on Noble Road; and in between Collinwood High School and the old Christ the King Catholic church where Apex Charter School exists across the street from the Helen S. Brown apartment senior apartment building.
The pollution his law firm’s vicarious clients dumped five-stories high spewed toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene gases, glass particles and more immune depleting particles into the air that the mouths, nostrils, airways and lungs of the humans who breathed it.
Barbara Garner died of lung cancer with the construction and demolition debris dump in her backyard that came from violations of federal EPA laws while Herdman was investigating fake terrorists and petty crimes he should have left to municipal police.
Herdman will be a perfect fit for the Trump administration. I look forward to watching him “work” in D.C. Maybe his next terror target will be the constitutional rights violating Mayor Muriel Bowser or the Muslim members of Congress. He probably can’t wait to meet Jared and Ivanka.
