The Man Argentines Love To Hate Is An American Judge

[adirondacker]

For an American, it probably would be a really hard Jeopardy question, but in Argentina, pretty much anyone you stop can answer this: Who is the judge in New York at the center of Argentina's default crisis?

Pablo de Luca, a systems engineer walking down a downtown Buenos Aires street recently responded easily: Judge Thomas P. Griesa.

"Griesa is an enemy for us," he says.

Georgina Segui, an office secretary stopped while she was doing errands, also knew the answer.

"We are constantly bombarded on TV with the name Griesa, Griesa, Griesa," she said.

One of the main people doing the "bombarding" is Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez.

"No financial vulture nor judicial raptor is going to extort money from this president," she said in her most recent speech.

In Argentina, posters with his image, with a vulture on his back, have been pasted up along the streets. There also have been endless articles about the judge, whose office declined to speak with NPR.
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The Argentine press constantly cites a little-known U.S. website called The Robing Room, where lawyers give anonymous reviews of the judges they appear before. Griesa's weren't exactly complimentary to begin with, and since the Argentina case exploded into the headlines, others have written in, excoriating him for his rulings. In Argentina, the comments have been taken as evidence that he is unfit for the job."

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http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/12/04/368281989/the-man-argentines-love-to-hate-is-an-american-judge

[starroute]

1. A Nixon nominee -- there aren't a lot of those still serving

And he's been on senior status since 2000. I thought those semi-retired judges were only supposed to be called in on emergencies, not handed major international cases. There's also this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_P._Griesa

In 1978, Griesa issued an order holding United States Attorney General Griffin Bell in contempt of court for Bell's refusal to turn over FBI records about eighteen "informants" in the Socialist Workers Party. This was the first time that a U.S. Attorney General had been held in contempt for conduct during pretrial proceedings. Although Griesa declined a request to immediately jail Bell for contempt, he did indicate that if Bell failed to comply with the order within a one week deadline, Griesa would "entertain a motion for more drastic sanctions". Bell indeed refused to comply, and was held in contempt, although this order was stayed pending appellate review.

[adirondacker]

2. Ineresting! Griffin Bell seemed to have taken a weird turn at the end of his career....

On April 10, 1978, Attorney General Bell announced the indictment of former Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Mark Felt and former FBI

Assistant Director Edward Miller for authorizing break-ins of New York City radical political activists. Bell introduced requirements that any authorized illegal activities must be made in writing. Five Department of Justices attorneys resigned over the alleged reluctance of the Attorney Bell to pursue others in the department for illegal activities related to domestic spying. [2]

Bell led the effort to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. The Carter administration, advised by Bell, greatly increased the number of women and minorities serving on the federal bench. Bell recruited Wade McCree, an African American then serving as a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, to serve as United States Solicitor General, and Drew S. Days, III, an African American lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund he had admired in oral arguments before him, to head the Civil Rights Division. Bell successfully led the negotiations to divide his former appellate court, the Fifth Circuit (spanning from Georgia to Texas) into two courts: a new Fifth Circuit based in New Orleans and an Eleventh Circuit based in Atlanta. Bell also led efforts to professionalize the Federal Bureau of Investigation after Watergate and recruited another federal appellate judge to recommend to the President as Director, Judge William Webster of the Eighth Circuit. After Bell resigned as Attorney General in August 1979, President Carter thereafter appointed him as Special Ambassador to the Helsinki Convention.

From 1985 to 1987, Bell served as a member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on South Africa. In 1989, he was appointed Vice Chairman of President George H. W. Bush's Commission on Federal Ethics Law Reform. During the Iran-Contra affair investigation, he was counsel to President George H.W. Bush. As a lawyer during this period, he specialized in corporate internal investigations, many that were high-profile, like that for E.F. Hutton following federal indictments for its cash management practices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin_Bell

I wonder what that was all about?