There’s a post I’m still going to write about jails and prisons in Montana but today’s post is NOT that post. Instead, I found myself looking into the “non-profit” law firm taking a victory lap over the release of 24 people being held in the Cascade County jail:
A federal judge on Friday ordered the release of 24 people held by federal immigration officials in Cascade County after finding they were unlawfully detained, according to the Montana-based nonprofit law firm Upper Seven Law.
The order was delivered by the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, after some of the individuals had reportedly been incarcerated for more than six weeks.
Again, I’m going to write about this story from a different angle later, but today the phrase “non-profit” triggers an immediate scan of 990 forms, which, in this case, gave me a familiar name.
While I’m sure Rachel Carroll Rivas believes in the work she’s doing as “Treasurer” for Upper Seven Law as much as she did when working for the Montana Human Rights Network, and existing within the orbit of the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s precisely the political nature of that belief that I have a problem with, since tax-exempt organizations are supposed to follow certain rules about engaging in political activity.
So, what about Moonshot? Is it a weird project involving a rocket of blah blah blah, like my AI image is implying, or am I recklessly defaming Upper Seven Law and the great work they’re doing for journalism?
Because I’m sure journalism appreciates this defamation case:
Although the non-profit firm Upper Seven Law in Helena may soon challenge some of the bills passed during the 2023 Montana Legislature, they’ve got a separate, wider-reaching case on their hands as well: on Wednesday, May 10, the firm announced that they will serve as lead counsel in a new defamation suit against Fox News.
Less than a month after Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting System for $787 million, Nina Jankowicz—the researcher and former head of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has filed a separate lawsuit against Fox.
The lawsuit alleges three major falsehoods pushed by Fox: 1) that Jankowicz “intended to censor Americans’ speech,” 2) that she was fired from her position with the federal government (as opposed to resigning) and 3) that she “wanted to give verified Twitter users, including herself, the power to edit others’ tweets.”
Upper Seven will work with local counsel in Delaware, where Fox is incorporated, as well as the New York-based firm Pollock Cohen.
To get a better idea of how Upper Seven takes its “Unicorn” powers to the moon, I consulted their website.
Upper Seven Law (USL) hasn’t been around that long, but they hit the ground running in the 2023 Montana Legislative session in order to quickly undermine what those TERRIBLE conservatives had done by trying to “narrowly define” gender.
For those who don’t remember the 2023 session, local media and statewide conservatives had a VERY hard time ignoring the Zooey Zephyr show. To exemplify this annoying dynamic, the legislative bill targeted by USL after being passed into law shows how Upper Seven Law took full advantage of this attention:
A nonprofit law firm filed suit Tuesday against Gov. Greg Gianforte and Department of Public Health and Human Services Director Charlie Brereton, asking a judge to force their offices to turn over public documents the firm requested but were denied over assertions of executive and attorney-client privilege.
Upper Seven Law filed the lawsuit in Lewis and Clark County District Court. The Helena-based firm also sued Gianforte and the state last week on behalf of a group of transgender, two-spirit, intersex and nonbinary Montanans who are challenging the state’s newly passed law narrowing the definition of sex.
The suit filed Tuesday ties in with the challenge to Senate Bill 458, which defines sex as a binary in state law, because it involves records attorneys for the firm requested in preparation for the suit challenging the new law.
“In Montana, the days of policymaking in the dark and behind closed doors are long gone,” Upper Seven Law Executive Director Rylee Sommers-Flanagan said in a statement.
This law firm’s most high-profile client, Nina Jankowicz, had her moment in the Biden administration cut short because media meanies at Fox were allegedly saying such defamatory things about her role as Disinformation Czar, which we’ll get to in a moment.
First, the cutting short:
DHS’ change of course began after a storm erupted in May in reaction to the administration’s creation of a Disinformation Governance Board. Congressional Republicans called it a “Ministry of Truth.” The board was terminated just months later.
Aspects of the administration’s retreat on disinformation have been reported, including a CNN story about the DHS’ rejection of a project to protect election workers from harassment. But the extent of the turnabout has not been fully examined.
“They paused all the work on disinformation, not just the board,” Nina Jankowicz, the former executive director of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, told ProPublica. “The administration kowtowed to the disinformation rather than fighting it.”
And second, the legal response to the orgs that said bad things about Nina:
I think that the way in which Fox News went after her parroted a lot of talking points that were coming straight out of Russia. While it may be the case that [certain employees of Fox] are simply useful idiots who really did the bidding of the Russian media because it was beneficial to them, the sort of ultimate effect is the same, which is that the Russian disinformation machine was able to oust a person who would’ve…potentially held their feet to the fire in thoughtful ways.
From our perspective, Nina Jankowicz has a great defamation claim against Fox News. The basics of a defamation claim are that you say things that are untrue about someone that are damaging to them. And when you have a person like Nina who is a public figure, those statements need to not only be false and damaging, but the intent behind them needs to have what’s called actual malice.
Yes, that’s right, with the help of a “non-profit” Montana law firm, poor Nina Jankowicz got to explain how she was just doing her patriotic duty to keep America safe from all that disinformation coming from Putin’s Russia and the evil right, who demonized her.
Thank the pagan gods for Upper Seven Law!
Controlling narratives can’t be accomplished with just non-profit law firms, so it’s a good thing Montana has that Chat House guy from Berkley/San Francisco to help inform dumb Montanans about their political options.
One of the people Max interviewed last year is Mary Poole from Soft Landing, the refugee resettlement agency that got some Royal money from Harry and Meghan before they fled America.
Here’s Mary telling Max how excited she is that America overthrew Syria and installed a former al-Qaeda insurgent as the new President so that retarded liberal white women in Missoula can get authentic Syrian food:
Since its founding in 2015, the non-profit organization Soft Landing has found creative and engaging ways to help hundreds of refugees and immigrants settle into life in Missoula.
One of the best, in my humble opinion, is through food. Among other projects, Soft Landing curates Supper Clubs, where a client with a passion for cooking can prepare and organize a multi-course meal held at a restaurant in town; members of the pubic can buy tickets and savor the flavors of cultures from all around the world.
…
Max: Can you share an example of a recent victory at Soft Landing?
Mary Poole: Syria, right? [The fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad] is really important to us. It was definitely the Syrian conflict that catalyzed all of this. There’s definitely a lot of celebration happening. A lot of trepidation, too.
All the Syrian families are coming in to see us, to talk about their joy around the liberation of their country. We ask, will you go home? Unanimously they say, “Oh, our home is Missoula.” They say, my kids are in school, my life is good. Things are stable here, which is unfortunately probably not going be the case in Syria.
Do you know what’s really important to ME, Mary? Identifying the idiotic trajectory of Missoula, with its addiction crisis, its affordability crisis, and more non-profits per capita than nearly any other community in America, and STOPPING THE MADNESS because what this community is doing is obviously NOT WORKING.
Instead, this is what gets Mary Poole excited:
He’s a former al-Qaeda insurgent who fought against U.S. forces in Iraq and served time in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Still, on Wednesday, new Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa stood on the world stage shaking hands with President Donald Trump and achieving a major feat for his fledgling administration.
Trump announced he would lift the crippling U.S. sanctions against Syria and urged al-Sharaa to meet specified conditions in hopes that it will stabilize the country. These conditions include normalizing relations with Syria’s neighbors, including Israel, as well as the United States.
Before concluding this post I’d like to offer a solution to fix America: END tax breaks for ALL non-profits and send any liberal white women we can’t re-educate to the Middle East and Africa. Only then, I suspect, will America start healing.
Giving partisan lawyers “non-profit” status is NOT the way to start healing, especially when you look at the type of cases Upper Seven is promoting at their website:
If you appreciate my citizen journalism and relative poverty from exposing local power dynamics WITHOUT “non-profit” lawyers coming to my rescue, please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps.
Thanks for reading!
