Month: <span>August 2022</span>
Month: August 2022

Month: August 2022

LAW

Pence’s Ex-Chief of Staff and White House Lawyer Testified to Jan. 6 Grand Jury

Multiple news reports revealed Monday that two top aids to former Vice President Mike Pence recently were subpoenaed and appeared before the federal grand jury probing the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

Marc Short, who served as Pence’s chief of staff, “was caught by an ABC News camera departing DC District Court on Friday alongside his attorney, Emmet Flood,” the outlet reportedsharing a still from the footage and citing sources familiar with the matter.

While spokespeople for Short and the US attorney’s office declined to comment, sources also confirmed his appearance to short-pence-jan-6.html”The New York Times and department-questions-top-pence-aides-over-trump-bid-to-overturn-election-11658783628?st=ftbgmoyxg2ur50m&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink”The Wall Street Journal.

Journalists and others noted that Short is now the highest-ranking official from former President Donald Trump’s administration known to have cooperated with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation.

“This is movement in the right direction. Because #JusticeMatters” tweeted Glenn Kirschner, an MSNBC and NBC News legal analyst, about Short’s testimony, which reportedly lasted two to three hours.

Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said that “we don’t totally know what this means, but it’s clearly good news for accountability.”

In a series of tweets, Just Security‘s Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel, laid out the potential significance of Short cooperating with the probe.

“Most importantly, Marc Short has significant testimony he could give that implicates Trump. Also importantly, he can give testimony that significantly implicates Mark Meadows,” Goodman said, referencing the former president’s White House chief of staff.

Greg Jacob, Pence’s top White House attorney, also recently appeared before the grand jury under subpoena, according to the Journal.

The newspaper noted that the DOJ recently added prosecutors and resources to the probe and suggested

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LAW

Egypt frees lawyer who backed French protest group, after 4 years in jail

CAIRO, Egypt — An Egyptian judge Monday ordered the release of a human rights lawyer held in preventive detention for nearly four years for backing a French protest movement, a rights group said.

Mohamed Ramadan, 47, was arrested in September 2018 after posting on Facebook a picture of himself wearing a yellow vest in support of the “yellow vest” protest movement that was rocking France at the time, the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE ) said in a statement.

He was accused of “terrorism” and placed in preventive detention — a punishment that can last two years in Egypt and during which suspects are held without trial.

But when that term ended in 2020, Ramadan was accused of “spreading fake news” and again placed in a two-year preventive detention, the rights group said.

His announced release Monday comes just days after French President Emmanuel Macron received his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Paris.

During Friday’s meeting focusing on security and defense ties, the two leaders also “addressed the issue of human rights,” Macron’s office said in a statement.

Meanwhile, rights watchdog Amnesty International said on Monday that it was “alarmed” by reports that a prominent jailed activist, Ahmed Douma, had been “tortured” last week for having requested that a fellow inmate receive medical care.

Douma reportedly demanded that the authorities provide health services to Ahmed Samir, a researcher sentenced to four years in prison in June 2021 for “spreading false news on social media” — an accusation frequently

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LEGAL

Korean Legal Clinic creating bilingual legal glossary to bridge culture and language barrier

The Korean legal clinic was established in 2019 by a team of Korean lawyers upon realizing there was no Korean and English legal clinic in Ontario. In addition to the language and cultural barriers and differences, Chun says 33 percent of Koreans living in Canada experience financial difficulties, contributing to the limited access to legal services amplified by the other obstacles encountered as immigrants.

The clinic held public legal seminars in 2021, followed by consultation sessions with some participants where the lawyers gave summary legal advice, but Chun says the pandemic limited some activities.

Chun, who joined as executive director in March, says the clinic is moving towards in-person services this month to provide consistent services and manage the law student volunteers.

“We’ve been getting our inquiries only by email. So, we would communicate with the questions over email and give them referrals or summary legal advice. However, we realize that certain people prefer to meet in person, which provides them with more comfort.”

Love Toronto, a non-profit organization assisting Korean immigrants who have difficulties with settling in Canada, has offered free office space for the Korean Legal Clinic at 5915 Leslie Street, North York, and Chun would be providing legal advice that runs up to 30 minutes on Tuesdays from 6 to 8 pm.

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LAW

Trump DOJ Coup Lawyer Jeff Clark Adds DC Bar Complaint To His CV

jeffrey clark Justice Department Makes Announcement On Opioid Settlement In Washington

(Photo by Yuri Gripas-Pool/Getty Images)

Last week, the DC bar filed a Petition Institute Formal Disciplinary Proceedings against former Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark. This is hardly the most pressing concern for the onetime Kirkland & Ellis attorney, who woke up on June 22 to the FBI knocking at his door with a warrant to size his electronic devices. But the prospect of bar sanctions on top of the rest of his legal worries isn’t exactly a plus on the old resume.

Clark’s plot to weaponize the DOJ as part of Trump’s fraudulent electors scheme has been widely reported for over a year. But the January 6 Select Committee’s June 23 public hearing laid bare his conduct for the wider public, and in the least flattering light possible. In short, Clark, an environmental lawyer who was then-acting head of the Civil Division, cooked up a Proof of Concept letter making various false allegations about fraud in the swing states to provide the Republican-dominated legislatures a pretext to re-cast the states’ electors for Trump.

The letter claimed that the Department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.” This was false — in fact, multiple US Attorneys on the ground in Georgia investigated the fraud claims and found them groundless. Clark also claimed that it was the position of the Department that state legislatures had the inherent constitutional authority to convene themselves to bless “alternate” slates of electors. This was in no wise the position of the DOJ, although it was certainly the position of Trump’s coup-curious campaign lawyer, John Eastman.

Perhaps most hilariously, the complaint alleged that the Justice Department found “troubling the current posture of a pending lawsuit in Fulton County” and the “litigation’s sluggish

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LEGAL

Tupperware legal director breaks down effective liaison with lawyers

How to identify and collaborate well with external counsel that best fit the company’s needs is a persistent puzzle for in-house counsel. Nancy Weilegal director at Tupperware (China), and formerly placed at Mayer Brown and Stephenson Harwood, shares valuable insights from her experience on both sides

WITH ECONOMIC GROWTH at full tilt, constant improvement of the rule of law, and business expansion across all sectors, corporate counsel, being a relatively emerging group of legal practitioners in China, continue to grow and mature. In-house counsel groups and alliances are spontaneously formed for the purpose of mutual learning and exchanges among peers.

As in-house counsel are positioned within the companies, they are inevitably malleated by their respective industry and corporate culture. However, their work is still connected by easily identifiable common ground.

Comprehensive nature of risk control. From contract management, advertisement review, intellectual property risk control, dispute prevention and resolution to labor and employment compliance, data compliance and competition law compliance, the handprint of in-house counsel in a company’s risk prevention and control is ubiquitous.

Bridging internal communication and external risk management. To ensure the operation of the company under a lawful and compliant framework, corporate counsel are tasked to carry out internal lecturing and training on regulations and perform routine in-house counsel reviews, while additionally playing a pivotal leading role in preventing and resolving external risks. It is imperative that they grasp the key points of both duties and achieve balance.

TYPES OF EXTERNAL COUNSEL

Matching the pieces, Nancy Wei
Nancy Wei

Based on the author’s understanding and observation of China’s legal profession, law firms in China can be largely classified as follows:

(1) “Red circle” firms, the top eight law firms in the Chinese legal market in terms of annual revenue that handle a great number of major, difficult, complex and well-known cases and

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