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Joel Young
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AC TRANSIT | Embattled AC Transit Board Director Joel Young may have further incriminated himself in his written response last week to the allegations detailed in a hard-hitting internal investigation released two weeks ago. The report alleges Young used confidential information found in legal documents and heard in closed session meetings for his personal use as co-counsel for two cases similar to a successful lawsuit filed by bus drivers against AC Transit.
Young’s seven-page response distributed to the public did not include an omitted eighth page the board’s general counsel, David Wolf, deemed contained closed session information that “could be construed as an admission against the board’s interest.” The board later decided against releasing the page to the public. “He still doesn’t get it,” lamented AC Transit Board President Greg Harper.
Later, Board Director Elsa Ortiz also claimed Young unwittingly released closed session information in another instance contained in his written response. Young’s retort also lodged four unrelated allegations against her and Harper. “If Joel were here, I would say, ‘Is this facts or gossip?’” said Ortiz. “There he is disclosing closed session information about a case that has not been adjudicated. If it’s gossip, it’s irresponsible. If it’s facts, then he is in violation of closed session protection.”
Afterwards, Harper dismissed Young’s allegations against him. “It’s a little bit symptomatic of his style,” said Harper. “Rather than address the issues, he wants to say, ‘I’m not worse than anybody else.’ He counterpunches and he thinks that’s effective and then kind of flails away.”
At the conclusion of the agenda item, Young returned only to be seen chatting and quietly pleading his case at the dais with Ortiz for nearly 20 minutes as the meeting continued. At meetings end, Young then spoke with AC Transit general counsel, David Wolf for an extended period of time as the room emptied. Young could be heard repeatedly telling Wolf the board’s policy as interpreted would not allow him to practice law. Wolf, however, disagreed.
The AC Transit Board of Directors could decide whether to sanction Young for violating various board policies at a meeting later this month. They could also choose to censure Young. The process has not been use by the AC Transit board since 2000 when it approved a resolution to censure former Board Director Nancy Jewell Cross for misuse of public funds.
By MW:
In the above item I neglected to mention that lawyers who are special masters do not just get involved in evidence gathering and searches of other lawyers' offices.
Since one of the other things that lawyers who are special masters also sometimes do is act as supervisors and overseers of projects that can run for up to several years in which a judge, and in his or her “wisdom,” has seized and basically taken over control of this or that agency, but the judge, and who perhaps lacks the time to personally supervise the day to day operations of what he has seized control of, then appoints a special master to do most of the time consuming work of carrying out the judge's wishes.
That happened in Union City at a multi million dollar project on the property of Pacific States Steel, and in which federal judge Marilyn Hall Patel seized control and then appointed a particular lawyer/special master whose resume included degrees from both Harvard and Stanford.
Ask Patel whether after several years of her strongly and totally backing up that special master, and regardless of what that sleazeball, embezzler, and money launderer with a law license pulled, and after years of newspaper articles concerning his thefts, she finally came to the conclusion that she had no choice but to remove him.
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By MW:
If Joel Young is as sleazy as the reports over the past year or so on his alleged conduct would seem to suggest, then the California State Bar should arrange to have appointed as a special master.
(The CSB is the totally corrupt organization that pretends to regulate California's lawyers, and it also pretends that protecting the general public from lawyers who are corrupt and/or incompetent is its primary reason for existence.)
In order for a lawyer to be appointed to be a special master, theoretically he has to have proven himself to have met even much higher standards of honesty and integrity than other lawyers are supposedly held to by the totally corrupt CSB.
However in reality some of the very sleaziest lawyers are appointed to be special masters, and I assume that is since certain corrupt judges who want under the table bribes to be funneled to them want co-conspirators, in other words extremely corrupt special masters, to be their partners in: one, various money laundering operations; and to, retaliating against whistleblowers.
NOTE: According to California law and present CSB rules, if certain parties, and such as for instance a judge, decide to investigate the conduct of a lawyer, a lawyer who has been appointed to be a special master is then allowed to immediately march in and grab any files he and/or the judge says are relevant, and without the lawyer who is the object of the investigation having the right to object or to first litigate it in court.
So basically a special master has the rights of a king, a czar, and an absolute dictator. Obviously if we are going to grant anyone such rights, then we had better first make sure that the people we grant such rights to are of the very highest honesty and integrity.
However in reality some of the lawyers who are appointed special masters are even far sleazier and/or much more drug addicted than the typical lawyer.
In fact among San Francisco judges the “standards” for being appointed to be the special master in a major lawsuit are so low, that therefore if Nadia “The Drug Addict, Nitwit, Total Nutcase, and Professional Pathological Liar” Lockyer decided to use San Francisco, and instead of Hayward, as her home base, it would not surprise me at all if one of the paid off political hacks in judges' robes who staff SF Superior Court would arrange to have her appointed a special master.
Or Joel Young could always move to San Francisco and then probably get himself appointed a special master.
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At least the voters were smart enough to not send him to Sacramento!
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