Legal Pad

Jerry Brown's Secret Tapes Nowhere Near as Cool as Nixon's

Legal Pad isn’t sure whether to be offended or pleased not to have been among the reporters that AG Jerry Brown’s ex-flak, Scott Gerber, surreptitiously recorded.

Either way, the transcripts (.pdf) of those conversations between Brown and reporters, five of which have been made public by the attorney general’s office, make for some entertaining reading.

At times defensive, more often philosophical, Brown touches on his well-known family’s history, analyzes the governor’s race that he’s still not officially a part of, and mocks Hillary Clinton’s political resume.

"Didn't work with Mother Teresa," after the jump ...

“She didn’t work with Mother Theresa (sic),” a transcript of an April interview between Brown and an AP reporter reads. “She didn’t spend six months working in a Zen Buddhism. She didn’t take Linda Ronstandt (sic) to Africa. She didn’t have her own astronaut. I had Rusty Triker, an astronaut. I put him on the state energy commission.”

Later, he bristles at a reporter’s suggestion that soliciting thousands of dollars in charitable donations from businesses regulated by his office could pose the appearance of a conflict.

“The AG is enforcing environmental, labor, banking education … so you could say we regulate the entire state,” Brown says to a Los Angeles Times reporter. “… So by your logic, then, everyone is a question because the AG can sue anybody, and in fact does.”

A report (.pdf) released Monday night by the attorney general’s office concludes that Gerber acted alone when he recorded reporters’ conversations without their knowledge. Chief Assistant Attorney General Dane Gillette wrote that Gerber had been told in late 2008 by Chief Deputy Attorney General James Humes not to tape phone calls — Gillette doesn’t say what led Humes to issue the directive — but the press secretary did so anyway.

Gillette concludes, however, that Gerber didn’t break any laws because the reporters’ conversations did not constitute “confidential communications” that require a participant’s consent to recording.

Gerber, a former communications director for U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, was Brown’s third press secretary in as many years.

— Cheryl Miller
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Twitter Feeds You Democrats

Twitter loves Jerry Brown. But does Jerry Brown love Twitter?

The Associated Press reports that Twitter, which is apparently still the social media rage, is inspiring Republican rage in here in California.  Seems that when you sign up for the service — which, like Muzak in an elevator, is designed to help stamp out any brief time for actual coherent, trivia-free reflection in your waking life — it suggests a horde of quasi-famous or semi-interesting people you don't know, whose one-sentence proclamations you might want to never, ever miss.

And in California, it suggests Democratic political candidates. Only Democrats. Sayeth the AP:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is on the suggested user list and has 1.2 million followers. His likely opponent for the Democratic nomination, Attorney General Jerry Brown, also made the list and has 960,000 followers, even though he is not a declared candidate and has posted the fewest tweets of all the gubernatorial hopefuls. None of the three Republican candidates is on the list, and each has fewer than 5,000 followers.

Wait — Jerry Brown has the most verbal restraint?

Twitter's political monkeyplay is all fun and games, until that Glenn Beck guy gets ahold of it, fakes some righteous indignation and fear ("I am terrified about where this will go next," he'll say. "They're gonna force us to read the Huffington Post's RSS feed, and then They'll euthanize our grandmothers!"), and turns millions of paleo-Americans into frothing anti-Twitter crusaders, hell-bent on the destruction of the near-ubiquitous networking site and ... um ...

Never mind.  Carry on with your cheap, flagrant (and terrifying!) partisanship, Twitter.  Go, you!

— Brian McDonough

In Brown's Opinion, Governor Can Play Hardball

Legal opinions issued by the attorney general’s office are usually dishwater dull. But not the one Jerry Brown sent out today.

Brown was responding to lawmakers angered with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s threats to veto hundreds of bills by Sunday’s deadline if they don’t produce a water bill. Such a threat, they suggested in a letter to Brown, must surely amount to extortion.

Nope, Brown replied in his own letter today (.pdf). The governor’s veto is a long-recognized and powerful executive tool, the state’s top lawyer wrote. The separation of powers doctrine “counsels against” questioning the legality of the governor’s threats.

Brown goes on to cite several scholars and even quotes 19th century German President Otto van Bismark: “There are two things you don’t want to see being made – sausage and legislation.”

Brown’s closing line is the kicker, however. “Compromise in the rough-and-tumble legislative process is not achieved by doilies and tea.”

Spoken like a former, and would-be again, governor.

—  Cheryl Miller

Brown Puts Credit Agencies on Hot Seat Over Securities Crisis

Attorney General Jerry Brown today issued subpoenas to three leading credit rating agencies to find out why they slapped top-notch ratings on mortgage-backed securities that would eventually crash and burn.

"Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch put their seal of approval on high-risk mortgage-backed securities, recklessly giving stellar ratings to shaky assets that proved toxic to the entire financial system," Brown said in a prepared statement. "This investigation is meant to determine how these agencies could get it so wrong and whether they violated California law in the process."

If this type of legal crusade sounds familiar it should. At least three other states’ attorneys general have investigated the relationship between the rating agencies and the securities issuers they evaluated. And numerous pension funds have filed lawsuits, some dating back to 2007, over their losses.

But if Brown is simply jumping on the bandwagon, there’s plenty of room, said Nanci Nishimura, a partner with Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, the Peninsula firm that’s handling plenty of credit rating-related litigation these days.

“All the smoke hasn’t even come out of this volcano yet,” Nishimura said. “It’s about time the state started taking notice and started doing something about this.”

Representatives of the three rating agencies either declined to comment or said their companies would cooperate with Brown’s investigation.

Brown has given the agencies until Oct. 19 to respond to his request for information.

— Cheryl Miller
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Jerry Brown Takes On House-Hating Pleasanton

Attorney General Jerry Brown isn’t shy about diving into disputes involving land-use decisions and greenhouse gas emissions. Just ask San Bernardino County. 

But Brown put a new twist on things Wednesday when he announced that he’s joining a lawsuit challenging the city of Pleasanton’s cap on residential housing.

He’s against housing, he’s for housing … It’s so confusing! Relief, after the jump.

AG's Prop 8 Man Calls it Quits

The attorney who led Jerry Brown’s efforts to overturn Proposition 8 is swapping government shops.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Christopher Krueger is taking a new job as chief deputy legal affairs secretary in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration, a spokeswoman for the governor confirmed. He starts Wednesday and will replace Louis Mauro, who was appointed to the Sacramento County Superior Court bench by Schwarzenegger last week.

Krueger said the move has been in the works for weeks and that top brass at the AG’s office knew about it.

“The timing of my departure was driven by the timing of Mr. Mauro's appointment,” Krueger said in an email. “I informed the Governor's Office of my interest in replacing Mr. Mauro sometime last fall. I waited to announce my departure from this office until Thursday [March 26] because I was waiting for Mr. Mauro's appointment to be announced first.”

Remember that time Jerry threw him under a bus? Good times, after the jump.

Jerry Brown on Prop 8 Arguments: 'A-Whoops.'

Speaking by phone to Proposition 8 opponents Monday night, Attorney General Jerry Brown offered a rather blunt assessment of his office’s performance during the recent Supreme Court hearing on the gay-marriage ban.

“Our presentation wasn’t all that I wanted,” Brown said in a teleconference arranged by Courage Campaign, a left-leaning online political network. “I must say I had thought about making the argument myself. But the tradition is that the lawyers in the government section do this and they’re the ones — boy, they worked hard. They really practiced.”

Senior Assistant Attorney General Christopher Krueger, as you might remember, had a tough time selling the justices on the argument that Prop 8 wasn’t a constitutional revision but rather an improper infringement of an inalienable right.

“Boy, when I saw the judges there, they certainly were on the attack, and our man didn’t fight back as well as I would want,” Brown told the teleconference listeners.

JB, not pulling punches, post-jump:

Would-Be A.G.'s Bill Swipes at Jerry Brown

Attorney general candidate Tom Harman has taken a slap at the man he would replace with a piece of legislation that would automatically grant initiative proponents the right to defend any legal challenge to their ballot measures.

Harman’s Senate Bill is clearly aimed at incumbent Attorney General Jerry Brown, who initially said that as California’s top lawyer he would defend Proposition 8 from post-election lawsuits even thought he personally opposed the measure. Now, however, Brown is asking the state Supreme Court to find the gay marriage ban unconstitutional.

This is totally not at all about currying favor with his base. After the jump.

Brown Talks Prison Chaos, Political Future

The courts need to stay out of the prison management business and leave it to the state, Attorney General Jerry Brown told an audience of newspaper publishers today.

Hours before his attorneys were scheduled to tussle with prison receiver J. Clark Kelso in front of the Ninth Circuit, Brown said the governor and the Department of Corrections can do an adequate job of caring for inmates.

“You can’t have federal judges in the framework of plaintiff and defendant running a system as complicated … as the prison system,” Brown told a Sacramento gathering of the California Newspaper Association.

The AG was clearly teeing off on a three-judge federal panel that’s preparing to order the release of 55,000 inmates due to overcrowding. He’s also hacked at Senior Judge Thelton Henderson, who’s ready to punish the governor and controller for not forking over big money to Kelso for pricey prison medical care improvements. (The Ninth Circuit stayed Henderson’s contempt order pending today’s hearing in San Francisco).

Court control of prisons, Brown said, “is not a management methodology that works.”

Prison, schmison ... let's take potshots at Gavin Newsom and Gray Davis! After the jump:

Oh, Everybody Lies About Their Love of Malathion ...

While Attorney General Jerry Brown is busy these days sparring with the governor and ensuring his employees are furlough-free, he apparently found time to update his Facebook page with a list of 25 things you might not know about him. (A hat tip to Josh Richman's Political Blogger for alerting us to this). Among them: Brown was a high school cheerleader. And a boxer who could definitely land a punch. He likes arugula (just like the president) and broccoli but not shopping, fruit flies or Malathion. And if you're looking for any hints about Brown's political aspirations, he helpfully notes at No. 24 that "the first time" he became governor he followed an actor (Ronald Reagan). And Gavin Newsom says Brown is an old page from California's past. Where's his Top 25 list?

— Cheryl Miller