Coughlin Stoia and the Angelides Commission (Updated)

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

Buried at the end of a WSJ story today are more revelations about the close ties between a San Diego law firm and former California Treasurer Phil Angelides, who chairs the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins’ filed suit in July 2006 against UnitedHealth Group on behalf of CalPERS, the giant California pension fund.

A month later, Coughlin Stoia and its attorneys contributed $107,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of Phil Angelides, who was a member of Calpers’s board.

Asked whether the donations were related to the hiring of the law firm, a spokeswoman for Mr. Angelides declined to say, but said that Mr. Angelides “was one of a number of members of the Calpers board and he had tens of thousands of donations during the eight years he was treasurer.”

The UnitedHealth suit was settled in August for $925 million. Calpers’s share of that came to $3.2 million.

The legal fee was $65 million. Most of it went to Coughlin Stoia.

Angelides received about $250,000 in total contributions for his failed gubernatorial campaign in 2006 from Coughlin Stoia lawyers:

  • Byron Georgiou, a commissioner on the Angelides panel, is of counsel to Coughlin Stoia, serving as the “primary liaison” with a number of the firm’s main institutional clients.
  • Georgiou, who’s based in Las Vegas, gave $44,600 to Angelides for Governor, according to campaign finance records.
  • Nearly half of that came after Coughlin Stoia was picked to represent CalPERS in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.

Christopher Seefer, a Coughlin Stoia partner, was appointed by Angelides to serve as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s assistant director and deputy general counsel.

Coughlin Stoia was formed in 2004 when the high-profile securities-litigation firm Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach split up.

Bill Lerach was sentenced to two years in prison for paying cash kickbacks to plaintiffs in an effort to gain control of big lawsuits and win larger fees in 150 cases over 20 years. His partner in crime, Melvyn Weiss, got two and a half years.

The James S. Copley "Library"

Kudos to David Copley for selling the private $15 million rare book and manuscript collection his parents amassed.

The James S. Copley Library served virtually no one in San Diego.

It was a world-class collection locked away inside the headquarters of the Copley Press, the private company that published The San Diego Union-Tribune and other newspapers.

It could have and should have been used to inspire and educate future newspaper readers.

That, apparently, wasn’t in keeping with the spirit of David’s mother, Helen Copley, who commissioned the library as a  monument for her late husband.

Only now is it becoming clear just how incredible a collection it was:

  • One of a few surviving broadside Declarations of Independence printed in the weeks after July 4, 1776 (estimated value $600,000-$800,000)
  • A significant collection of papers and correspondence belonging to Henry Strachey, Secretary to the British Commission for Restoring Peace in America (est. $700,000/1.2 million)
  • Abraham Lincoln instructing General McClellan to either attack Richmond or come back to defend Washington (est. $500/700,000)
  • A listing by Father Junipero Serra on March 1, 1777 of all of the missions he founded in Alta California (est. $250/350,000)
  • Walt Whitman writing his mother in 1864 about Grant, Lee and the Battle of the Wilderness (est.
    $18/25,000)
  • Mark Twain’s unpublished manuscript, “A Family Sketch”; an intimate and introspective memoir of his family and his own boyhood days (est. $120/160,000)
  • Albert Einstein’s autograph speech delivered to the California Institute Associates on 25 January 1932 (est.
    $40/60,000)

Here’s hoping that the future owners of this incredible collection are more public-minded.

Where's Alan?

The nomination of Alan D. Bersin, a former U.S. Attorney and schools chief in San Diego, seems to have gotten hung up in the Senate.

President Obama nominated Bersin to be Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection back on Sept. 29th.  There’s been no action since then.

Bersin’s nomination was received by the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Customs.

Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, the committee chairman, apparently sees no urgency in scheduling a hearing for the head of an agency with a priority mission of preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States. 

Meanwhile, Bersin continues to serve as DHS Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Special Representative for Border Affairs. He held virtually the same job in the Clinton administration while serving as U.S. Attorney for San Diego.

Before joining DHS, Bersin was California’s education secretary.

How Ex-SD Imam Will Be Marked For Death

The LATimes follows up today with an excellent story on how the bullseye will be planted on Anwar Awlaki, the former San Diego imam who U.S. counterterrorism officials believe has joined al Qaida’s forces in Yemen.

First, ABC News and then The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration is considering whether to order a Predator strike on Awlaki, a case that’s complicated by the fact that he’s a U.S. citizen.

The LATimes’ Greg Miller provides more detail on the process of how the CIA marks suspected terrorists for death in its “targeted killing” program:

  • Memos proposing new targets are drafted by analysts in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center.
  • CTC analysts typically submit several new names each month to high-level officials, including the CIA General Counsel, Stephen W. Preston, and sometimes Director Leon E. Panetta.
  • The list is scrutinized every six months; some names are scrubbed if the intelligence grows stale.
  • The program is overseen by the National Security Council.
  • The CIA does not need White House approval when adding names to the target list, unless the individual is a U.S. citizen.

Miller’s story contradicts a Jan. 27 story by Dana Priest at The Washington Post on a key point:

Miller: “No U.S. citizen has ever been on the CIA’s target list, which mainly names Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, according to current and former U.S. officials. But that is expected to change as CIA analysts compile a case against a Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico but now resides in Yemen.”

Priest: “As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi’s name has now been added.”

Also are targeting decisions based on whether on an individual is “deemed to be a continuing threat to U.S. persons or interests,” as Miller reported. That appears to be a slightly lower threshold that what Priest describes as an individual who presents “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.”

Semantics, perhaps, but we are talking about executing a U.S. citizen without due process.

San Diego Is A Union Town

Woe to the San Diego public official who dares cross the police unions.

Police unions are in the midst of contract negotiations with San Diego and surrounding communities.

The police union in La Mesa, a suburb east of San Diego, flexed its muscles when Mayor Art Madrid dared to point out that there isn’t a heck of a lot of crime (0 murders in 2009)  in the city of 57,000.

“Our employees aren’t getting shot at,” Madrid said during a City Council meeting.

Jeff Raybould, the city’s police union president, called that comment “slap in the face to every police officer in this fine city,” in a letter to Madrid that was obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune

Came then the hammer:

“Contrary to what you might believe, we don’t spend all of our time scooping up inebriated public officials,” Raybould wrote.

That’s a nasty shot at Madrid, whom police found lying on the sidewalk in 2008.

And for the San Diego Police Officers Association a drop in crime is apparently bad news. The SD police union urged “restraint” this week over FBI crime statistics that show overall crime plunged by 18 percent. 

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, a former police chief, has proposed $12 million in cuts — but no layoffs of sworn officers — for the SDPD, which is in the midst of contract negotiations with the city.