A San Francisco judge on Wednesday ordered a Berkeley Antifa organizer to pay Judicial Watch $22,000 in legal fees and $4,000 in litigation costs, while her co-plaintiffs were ordered to pay $1,000 each to the conservative legal watchdog.
Judge Vince Chhabria, an Obama appointee, called Yvette Felarca‘s lawsuit against Berkeley Unified – in which Judicial Watch was named as a party – “frivolous” and “unreasonable.”
Felarca is a prominent figure in By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), a group founded by the Marxist Revolutionary Workers League that protests conservative speaking engagements. In 2016, Felarca and two of her allies were arrested and charged with several crimes, including felony assault, for inciting a riot in Sacramento. Earlier this year, Felarca was ordered to stand trial for assault.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, Northern District of California, who had previously ruled that Felarca’s lawsuit was “entirely frivolous,” wrote in his ruling awarding legal fees to Judicial Watch that Felarca and her co-plaintiffs’ First Amendment claims were “premised on the obviously baseless assumption” that the First Amendment condemns the speech of some while condoning the ideological missions of others. –Judicial Watch
Chhabria also said that “The plaintiffs also mischaracterized the documents under review” and had “failed to grapple with the role Ms. Felarca played in making herself a topic of public discourse through her physical conduct at public rallies and her voluntary appearance on Fox News.”
Fox News‘s Tucker Carlson took Felarca to town in 2017 over her definition of a “fascist” – challenging her to explain what she thinks should be done to people she disagrees with.
In 2017, Judicial Watch filed a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request seeking public records information about Felarca’s Antifa activism and its effect within the Berkeley Unified School District. In her lawsuit aimed at keeping the Berkeley school district from furnishing the records, Felarca alleged that Judicial Watch was misusing the law for political means and the district should refuse to provide the information.
In January 2018, a separate judge ordered Felarca to pay more than $11,000 in attorney and court fees for her frivolous attempt to get a restraining order against Troy Worden, the former head of the University of California (UC) Berkeley College Republicans. –Judicial Watch
Embarrassingly, Judge Chhabria also pointed out that “a significant portion of the documents the plaintiffs initially sued to protect from disclosure had been publicly disclosed months earlier in another suit brought by Ms. Felarca against BUSD, where she was represented by the same counsel. (See generally Felarca v. Berkeley Unified School District, No. 3:16-cv-06184-RS). The plaintiffs, therefore, had no reasonable argument to protect those documents from disclosure.”
In other words, Chhabria has a really crappy lawyer.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2EoavZ4 Tyler Durden