The Apple Inquisition: An appeals court looks at the extra-judicial mugging of the tech firm
“It’s getting harder to distinguish among the executive branch, the judiciary and the private sector in the antitrust campaign against Apple —and a federal appeals court seems to agree,” The Wall Street Journal writes. “This week the Second Circuit rebuked the Justice Department, the federal judge and the white-shoe attorney ganging up to plunder the tech maker”
“The Second Circuit temporarily suspended the outside monitor who Manhattan district court Judge Denise Cote handpicked after she ruled last summer that Apple conspired to drive up digital book prices. Michael Bromwich has since been acting as a prosecutor, demanding privileged documents and interviews with Apple executives and board members who have no relevance to the antitrust compliance that is supposed to be his mandate,” The Wall Street Journal writes. “Mr. Bromwich says he must oversee Apple’s “corporate structure, process, culture and tone” and the “tone at the top of the company,” as he put it in a recent declaration. While he’s at it, maybe he can invent something as revolutionary as the iPad tablet, whose introduction Judge Cote and the Justice Department think was an act of price fixing.”
“The improper relationship between Judge Cote and Mr. Bromwich extends beyond their friendship, political ties and ex parte communications,” The Wall Street Journal writes. “Special masters are usually imposed on companies in negotiated legal settlements and the litigants consent to the terms of their appointment. Yet Apple is appealing Judge Cote’s injunction and the terms of Mr. Bromwich’s installation. The core problem is that under Article III of the Constitution judges aren’t allowed to conduct open-ended investigations, as Mr. Bromwich is doing.”
“Judge Cote said even before the antitrust trial that she was predisposed to rule against Apple, and she is now presiding over a separate class-action damages trial that starts in May,” The Wall Street Journal writes. “Yet in her Jan. 13 tirade she said consumers “suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in harm.” Has she made up her mind in advance in that case too?”
MacDailyNews Take: Lady Elaine Fairchilde (left), Judge Denise Cote (right), or vice versaApple is innocent and Denise Cote is a vacant-eyed puppet on the hand of a clueless U.S. DOJ marionette whose strings are being pulled by Jeff Bezos.
