Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson, feeling the heat from the universal recognition by all responsible persons of his transparent dastardliness, has written a self-exculpatory letter to the Wall Street Journal “answering” the paper’s editorial criticism of his indictment of Paul Jacob, Susan Johnson, and Rick Carpenter for their “crime” of being involved in an Oklahoma citizen intiative drive.

See how many fallacies and/or lies you can detect in the following words, published November 24:

Regarding your recent editorial, “Oklahoma’s Most Wanted1″ (Nov. 17), I was surprised at the vigor with which you condemned the state for our prosecution of three individuals who are charged with violating Oklahoma campaign laws.

Oklahoma law requires anyone who circulates an initiative petition be a qualified elector, which means a U.S. citizen over the age of 18 and a resident of Oklahoma. To be a resident, our state supreme court has ruled that a person must intend to remain in the state.

The signature gatherers Carpenter, Jacob and Johnson brought into Oklahoma had no intent to live here. They came only to do a job and then move on. They were not residents. Oklahoma law requires signature gatherers to be residents, and a grand jury that reviewed the evidence found Carpenter, Jacob and Johnson “knowingly, willfully, fraudulently and feloniously” violated that law.

It’s perfectly legal for out-of-state interests to finance a petition drive. They just have to follow Oklahoma law which includes using only qualified electors to gather signatures. The main point your editorial writers missed is that, through their allegedly illegal actions, Carpenter, Jacob and Johnson silenced the voices of the Oklahoma voters who signed the initiative petition. This scheme to circumvent Oklahoma’s residency requirement caused the entire petition to be scrapped. The accused are not the victims. The victims are those Oklahomans who signed a petition that has been thrown out because of fraud.

If you don’t like this particular statute, go to the legislature and change it.

W.A. Drew Edmondson
Atorney General
State of Oklahoma
Oklahoma City, Okla.

Worn out yet? Richard over at the Sam Adams Alliance has made a good start:

After reading last week’s Wall Street Journal editorial that slammed the indictments of Paul Jacob and the “Oklahoma Three,” the politically-motivated OK attorney general Drew Edmondson wrote a letter to the editor defending his actions, including his most recent blunder.

Blunder no. 1: Indicting three people because he disagreed with their politics, disregarding all judicial precedent on initiative petition signature-gathering.

Blunder no. 2: Having to revoke his grand jury indictment of the Oklahoma Three because it had a legal flaw having to do with multi-county grand juries. Edmondson, the top government lawyer in the state of Oklahoma, apparently doesn’t know how to file an indictment correctly.

It strikes me, then, that his letter to the WSJ (PDF) cites the grand jury indictment as proof that the OK 3 conspired to break the law:

The signature gatherers Carpenter, Jacob and Johnson brought into Oklahoma had no intent to live here. They came only to do a job and then move on. They were not residents. Oklahoma law requires signature gatherers to be residents, and a grand jury that reviewed the evidence found Carpenter, Jacob and Johnson “knowingly, willfully, fraudulently and feloniously” violated that law.

No matter that one of the petition gatherers lived in Oklahoma for almost a year following the petition drive. Does a resident have to pledge to live in Oklahoma forever in order to be able to gather signatures? And no matter that this exact grand jury indictment has been scrapped…prior to Edmondson’s WSJ letter.

Drew Edmondon’s original indictment against Paul, Susan Johnson and Rick Carpenter was flawed and now he’s planning to indict them again from his office, leaving out the whole grand jury thing this time.

So no, Mr. Edmondson, the indictment of the OK 3 was not “OK.” It was wrong according to principle, law and judicial process.

Please don’t embarrass yourself or your office any further. 

It’s worse than what’s noted above, however. Edmondson knows darn well that the interpretative court decision he cites as justification for prosecuting the OK3 was handed down after the allegedly criminal involvement by Jacob, Johnson, and Carpenter in the petition drive and after they had secured relevant advice about the residency status of the petition circulators from the Oklahoma secretary of state’s office. The OK3 had every reason to believe that they were following the law. (See Paul Jacob’s explanation of the background of the case.)

Is Edmondson of the opinion that no matter how scrupulously citizens in these United States follow a particular law, he or other officials may rightfully prosecute them for violating said law so long as some court comes along and redefines what said law means so that their actions in the past now contradict the law as re-interpreted or reconstituted in the present? But one can’t follow any law, whether it’s right or wrong, constitutional or unconstitutional, which is not objective at least insofar as a person attempting to abide by said law can tell what that law is and what it would mean to violate it.

Wait, there’s more. Per Edmondson’s reading of the court’s decision, “Oklahoma law requires anyone who circulates an initiative petition be a qualified elector, which means a U.S. citizen over the age of 18 and a resident of Oklahoma. To be a resident, our state supreme court has ruled [after the fact, after the petition drive] that a person must intend to remain in the state.” This is a very definitive enunciation of principle for Edmondson, obviously. The ruling impelled him as a responsible officer of the law to rush out and try to put Paul Jacob, Susan Johnson, and Rick Carpenter behind bars for ten years. As a responsible state attorney general, he could do no other, presumably. 

Let’s now conduct a thought experiment, shall we? Suppose that under Oklahoma law, one must be a citizen of Oklahoma in order to vote. Suppose that to be a citizen one must (at least) be a resident. Suppose that to be a resident “a person must intend to remain in the state,” just as “our state supreme court has ruled.”

Does this mean then that any Oklahoma citizen who votes in an election while intending to move out of state in the next week or month should also be arrested and threatened with ten years in prison? Seeing as how voting, actual voting, is a much more direct and immediate kind of involvement in an election than is handing around a sheet of paper asking for signatures in support of putting a question on the ballot? What I mean is, if Edmondson were persuaded that an anti-constitutional court were on his side in the matter, would he happily, and out of a profound sense of duty, lend the imprimatur of his office to the rounding up and prosecuting of any electorally active Oklahoma citizens—to wit, voters—suspected of not intending to remain in Oklahoma in perpetuity? If not, why not?