The satirist Ambrose Bierce had it right:
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
I might suggest a rather inelegant rephrasing of an old proverb:
Live by Falsifying Evidence, Die by Falsifying Evidence
And, that's how it started....
"Setting aside questions of credibility" when it comes to Michael E Mann's iconic hockey stick... Mann opened this case in the District of Columbia Superior Court on October 22nd, 2012 – with a lie – a big whopper:
It is one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics. It is quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient.
In his opening statement to the jury, Mark expanded upon Mann's original complaint:
That's one of THREE paragraphs in Mr Mann's original complaint in which he claims to be a Nobel prize winner. Quote: "The professional and personal
defamation of a Nobel prize recipient."As I said, I had no idea that was a crime - either in the District of Columbia or anywhere else. But that's what Mann and Williams initially charged me with.
There's only one problem with it. This man is not a Nobel prize recipient. Not at all.
Yet he has passed himself off as one for years on end. There are very few of
those - a few dozen around the planet at any one time. So purporting to be a
Nobel Laureate is the equivalent of what they call "Stolen Valour" - those
contemptible men one runs into from time to time who claim to have been
combat veterans, in the thick of it at Omaha Beach on D-Day, or in Vietnam, or the Sunni Triangle in Iraq or wherever – when in reality they were back home in the La-Z Boy recliner watching "Dancing with the Stars".As you will hear in the coming days, Michael E Mann is the only scientist on the planet for whom the Director of the Nobel Institute has had to issue a statement explaining that he is NOT and NEVER HAS BEEN a quote "Nobel prize recipient"...
So I wrote all those years ago that his hockey stick was a fraud, but I came to learn very quickly, as you will, that Michael Mann himself is a terrible fraud. He lied to this very court.
And, even after his lawyers here were forced to withdraw that first fraudulent Statement of Claim in 2012, Mr Mann continues to lie about being a quote "Nobel Prize winner"....
(Indeed, so bold is the lie that even the leftist hacks of Wikipedia couldn't ignore it – despite the sad and pathetic pleadings of Mann otherwise.)
That should have been it – then and there. Credibility shot. Case closed.
Yet, the original trial judge – whose main legal expertise was navigating landlord and tenant law – decided to let the Court Fool/ Plaintiff quietly amend his complaint to remove the "professional and personal defamation of a nobel prize recipient" – thus, emboldening him to continue his lies. He paid no price.
Until yesterday, when - finally - the lies caught up with him. Judge Irving:
Setting aside questions of credibility or even perjury...
Dr. Mann eliminated one grant entirely (grant number 11, $90,612), marginally revised the budget amount for another (grant number 10, reducing budget from $300,514 to $300,171), and inflated the budget amount for a third (grant number 13, increasing budget from $391,000 to $450,042).
As such, the four funded grants now totaled $895,215, with a resulting disparity closer to $2.4 million—still a far cry from the $500,000 in funded grants and $2.8 million disparity figure presented to the jury. As with the inflated disparity figure derived from Dr. Mann's superseded June 2020 interrogatory responses, the record does not reveal any cognizable basis justifying such misrepresentation or offer of plainly false evidence through Exhibit 116 and Dr. Mann's accompanying testimony.
The same circumstances supporting a finding of Mr. Williams and Mr. Fontaine's knowledge of the erroneous nature of Exhibit 517A and Exhibit 117 also support a finding of their knowledge of the erroneous nature of Exhibit 116...
As such, the Court finds that Mr. Fontaine violated Rule 3.3(a)(1) and (4) by offering Exhibit 116 into evidence and representing the accuracy of the information therein while having knowledge of the significant, erroneous nature of the post-publication funded grant amount that he prominently displayed and emphasized to the jury...
...Therefore, as Mr. Williams and Mr. Fontaine knowingly violated the rules of professional conduct, the Court finds that their conduct, in service of Dr. Mann, involves the requisite bad faith warranting sanctions pursuant to the Court's inherent authority.
It goes on at painstaking length. But what it boils down to is this:
For a defamation claim to be successful, the plaintiff must demonstrate "damages".
During the discovery phase of the case, Mann presented various grants he claimed to have lost as a result of defendants, articles. And, during that process, various holes were poked in those "reports" which had to be continually "revised".
Whatever the purported numbers, the fact is Mann was unable to put up one witness to testify that he lost out on a grant due to the articles. Indeed, the one guy who tried to make the tenuous link had to admit under cross examination by Mark that it was the controversy over the release of the East Anglia emails by a whistleblower – and not Mark or Rand Simberg's respective articles – that led him to leave Mann's name off a project.
As it turned out, Mann had applied for fewer grants after publication. And, in any event, even if Mann's claims were true, the funds would not have gone into Mann's pocket personally but to the institution itself. And, in this case, the institution – the corrupt Penn State – was not a party to Mann's lawfare suit.
Thus, after cross-examination of Mann by Mark on these points and a forensic review by our co-defendant's brilliant attorney Victoria Weatherford, Mann and his lawyers appeared desperate. They needed to somehow blunt the damage done to their "damages" case. In a bold move on re-direct, they brought in a big blow-up exhibit (the type one has to arrange for in advance as Mark observed to the court) and plopped it up on the easel in front of the jury. And, right there on the blow-up graph it gave the impression that Mann had lost nine million dollars. NINE MILLION DOLLARS. It seems if you're Mann and you're going to lie, you might as well go big, or go home.
Thus, the Nine Million Dollar Lie (exhibit 116) revealed the depths to which this Court Fool/ Plaintiff would go to win – at any cost. And, he did.
Even still, the jury did not find a link – awarding only $1 in compensatory damages between Mark and Rand respectively. The judge thinks that is because defendants were able to demonstrate to the jury that these numbers were false. Respectfully, I disagree.
I believe that jury could not possibly have followed all the back and forth discrediting Mann's false exhibit. Ultimately, the exhibit did not go back to the jury room. But it sat in front of them – for a long time in the courtroom – and I would bet dollars to donuts that most, if not all of them, jotted down "9 million" in their little notebooks that did go back with them.
Even these jurors – who all agreed "climate change" was a big problem during their voir dire – would have been hard-pressed to award nine million (if it had existed) as compensatory to someone who wouldn't have received it in the first place.
And, yet. Nine million is an impressive number.
The jurors so far haven't talked. But it is not unreasonable to think that number was on their mind - plus Mann lawyer Williams' improper "send a message" instruction to jurors in his closing and Mark's status as the longtime guest host of Rush Limbaugh – contributing to the jury's unconstitutional punitive award of one million dollars against Mark.
Thankfully, that award was reduced last week by the same judge to a mere 5k. And, in this ruling yesterday, Mann's lies have started to catch up to him. The actual amount of the sanctions is yet to be determined...
As Matt Ridley observed:
How can the reputation of a scientist, who dragged others through the courts for years, survive this?
Indeed.
In case you missed it, please enjoy Mark's reaction to the court order at the start of this week's Clubland Q&A action replay here.
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