The newest lawyer to join Special
Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Trump campaign team
collusion with Russia gained notoriety for her conduct in defending
former President Obama's immigration orders, Politico reported Saturday.
Besides her work for Obama, Kyle Freeny, now the 16th
member of Mueller’s legal team, Federal Election Commission records
show she donated in each of the past three presidential elections to
Democratic nominees, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Freeny and her colleagues came under judicial fire
while defending a lawsuit in which Texas and 25 other states contested
Obama’s executive order in 2014 on immigration. The federal judge
hearing the case, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, blasted Freeny and
her colleagues for misleading him when the litigation began by
indicating that none of the changes Obama had ordered had taken effect.
In actuality, one major change, to issue longer work permits, had
already begun.
Hanen said the government lawyers had engaged in
“misconduct” that was “intentional, serious and material,” according to
Politico
“In fact, it is hard to imagine a more serious, more
calculated plan of unethical conduct,” wrote the judge, who eventually
dropped plans to impose sanctions on the government lawyers.
Freeny is one of nine attorneys on Mueller’s team who has donated to Democrats a total of nearly $65,000, according to The Daily Caller.
She had been working in the Justice Department’s
money-laundering unit where she helped lead an effort to seize profits
from the “The Wolf of Wall Street” film because it was allegedly
financed with assets looted from Malaysia’s government.
Read another report on Kyle Freeny below:
Names Of DOJ Attorneys Who 'Misled' Judge In Immigration Case Scrubbed From Court Doc
The U.S. Department of Justice won't release the names of attorneys
whose conduct in a high-profile immigration case was called "unseemly
and unprofessional" by a federal judge, or whether those attorneys will
face internal disciplinary action.
The DOJ says it "emphatically" disagrees with Judge Andrew Hanen's May order in
State of Texas, et al. v. United States of America, et al., in which he wrote
that he was “disappointed” that the court even had to address the
subject of lawyer behavior when it has “many more pressing matters on
its docket.”
Hanen concluded that DOJ attorneys “effectively misled” the plaintiff
states into foregoing a request for a temporary restraining order or an
earlier hearing on a motion for an injunction.
Their names, following a court order, were redacted from the department’s response to the judge's order.
Their misrepresentations, the judge said, also “misdirected” the
court as to the timeline involved in the implementation of a 2014
Department of Homeland Security directive, which included amendments to
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
DOJ attorneys said Obama's three-year amnesty plan wasn't being
implemented, but the judge says it actually was - and more than 100,000
aliens were to be affected.
The Justice Department declined to release a complete list of all those attorneys involved, and their salaries, to
Legal Newsline.
Many DOJ lawyers are listed as participating in the case. They are
James Gilligan, Daniel Hu, Adam Kirschner, Jennifer Ricketts, Daniel
Schwei, John Tyler, Kathleen Hartnett, Bradley Cohen and
Kyle Freeny.
