immunity order now us where the witness mr maule if you will please rise and raise your right hand do you swear or affirm under penalty of perjury that the testimony you are about to provide the committee will be the truth the whole truth and nothing out the time they entered their appearance what type of arrangement that they had in connection with the case by that i mean was it an hourly rate or a contingency basis i did find out  judge no one told me that did you know that judge porteous requested money from a model and that a model had given him about twenty five hundred dollars in  that that a lawyer who reason believes that the judge before whom he is appearing should not raise the issue so that it may be confronted and put to rest any other course would risk undermining public confidence in our judicial system  everyone understands that i recognize my duty and obligations and i'm fully prepared to listen to the judge indicate to you that he at least understood the law in terms of what he was required to do he knew what the appropriate  lunch with them the answer is definitive yes i've been going to lunch with all of the members of the bar when the judge made those statements was in your opinion trying to give the impression that they were friends but not on like every other member of the bar that he had lunch with that was my impression when you pointed out mr maule you said the public perception is that they do dine with you travel with you that they have been true to your campaign responded well luckily i didn't have any campaign so i'm interested to find out how you know that i never had any campaigns counsel and never had an opponent he then goes on to say the first time i ran one hundred eighty four i think is the only time when they gave me money was it your impression from what the judge was saying that curators to the amount of law firm and they would kick back some of the money from those curatorship to the judge if you had known of that relationship that would've been much more significant to you than another point the hearing the judge said to you you haven't offended me but don't misstate don't come up here with a document it clearly shows well in excess of sixty seven hundred with some innuendo that that means that they gave money that money to me if you would have checked your homework you would have found that that was a justice for all program for all judges in jefferson parish but go ahead i don't dispute that i received funding from lawyers when the judge said that  between mr moto and the judge where over a period of time he'd given the judge thousands of dollars do you consider it misleading that the judge accuse you of not doing your homework for suggesting that the court goes on to say i've always taken the position that if there was ever any question in my mind that this court should recuse itself that i would notify counsel and give them the opportunity if they wanted to ask me to get off the court during the course of your research for your client to find another lawyer to bring in the case did other lawyers in the community ever tell you that they were aware of attorneys giving money to the judge conversation in which the judge said you better prove your case or the circuit will take it away from you were you aware of this conversation do you consider it appropriate during the litigation opposing counsel and imposing party were seeking damages but in the judge's order the judge awarded the hospital to the other party and at no time in the received from the attorneys on the other side and i presume perhaps you answered this i presume that as this case drug on for a long period of time after  doesn't judge porteous failure to notify the parties after these events after in fact he said he would do so amount to a fraud on the court client would be a fraud on our judicial system would it not i would tend to agree with knowing what you know now which is more than what you knew then about the relationship between the judge and the attorneys do you believe that the decision was based solely on a reasonable interpretation of the relevant law or do you think it was case or the fifth circuit will take it away from you you know that rang through based on what are were you surprised or concerned about the length of time it took the judge to decide this case almost three years from the time he went into court until he rendered opinion is that  examined or cross examined your witnesses after you had put them on and after the berg attorneys had questioned those witnesses that's correct that's not entirely unusual judges do from them had a contractual arrangement with life mark to run the pharmacy in the hospital for profit and then they have had a mortgage in the hospital that was held by life mark and all those relationships when travelers finance their medical office building about the time we got to trial the little litigation was over the loss of the hospital which they blamed on my client which is life mark life mark and over how much money life marked them for brewing and very important and very complex a lot of documentation lot of work that would go into it for your preparation and i understand that in the course of working on this case there was a decision to hire don gardner and forgive me if you've answered this but i just want to reinforce the point how much was mr gardner paid for simply entering into the contract one hundred thousand dollars the difficult situation and i'm not happy about it let me try to put it in a different way so that certainly counsel can provide a variety of support but did did the quantum level of work intensity of work equal to the purpose or courthouse where you don't know anybody and you walk in and everybody else knows everybody else and you know the judge in the world in the courthouse where the judge is they don't know you and that's normal human aspects of the case last everyone and as we always have a special affinity for the case we are trying but as a seasoned lawyer do you think you had some aspects of your you had none of that because neither the judge nor the attorneys on the other side revealed the correct that certainly wasn't your understanding there was any obligation on the part of the judge or the other attorney to reveal that to you and to reveal that to the court for the record recall legal research and reasoning when we that would indicate a personal relationship with the judge a motion were being made in which you represent one of the parties and i agree with what jake said yesterday that if  conclusions of the circuit court of appeals in which they characterized judge ruling in various aspects of it as inexplicably constructed entirely out of whole cl nonsensical indicating that there was nothing in the law or fact to justify the decision yet under cross examination i believe mr mot suggested that well you have to understand the appellate judges were from texas and they don't understand louisiana law i'm i'm i don't practice in louisiana having practiced in louisiana what would your response be to that well truth is a defense so thank you for that but do you have an opinion about the possible reason for the delay in the rendering of the opinion in other words did that disadvantage either side n very difficult to run a hospital with a pharmacy which supplies all of medications who is hostile to my client they have to cooperate and reporting the hospital to various state agencies and trying to make trouble in suing us this is not the only lawsuit that we had with a very difficult relationship and severing that relationship was very important and that went on for three more years and had to in my opinion delighted and work in the favor of your client it certainly is not  where a judge has a personal relationship with the attorneys on the other side where there are actual payments of funds made by those attorneys too that were in the past there are legal proceedings directed to those attorneys by the judge and which result in some financial benefit to those attorneys and is the source of the funds that pay the judge for his personal expenses  if you have that information going in if you had that information going in what would you advise your clients about the prospects of getting a fair trial facts during the conduct of the of the trial itself did you feel you were getting a fair shot is so one sided and portable that it will raise eyebrows and we should be able to get it reversed and some of the claims where i didn't feel we had a strong case is others i think increased in value but you were banking on a fifth circuit court of appeals that couldn't understand the intricacies of louisiana law or you know i had every confidence that and then you want a fifth circuit court of appeals that did in fact understand the laws and the proper application of the laws these issues that have been written in the press that have been discussed that have been aired now on c span that are out in the public domain of the attitude of the new orleans bar toward having  recuse are you aware of whether information went out among the local bar in new orleans about your and what it occurred in your c would you know of lawyers around new orleans who would not be requesting a jury trial on complex cases supposed to have a right to either have a trial by jury or a trial by and if one of those two is affectively excluded then it would seem to  request i'm curious i know that some terms that are used in the constitution and in the law have meanings that are relative one term that's used in the constitution is good behavior that who engage in the same conduct as someone being charged are often more sympathetic to the one being charged and so i'm just curious how prevalent the practice is and if that is something that is common to your knowledge corruption and the number one problem in new orleans after hurricane katrina is still graft and corruption that was his observation i was also surprised to find during that testimony we were told in that hearing that it is not uncommon practice for a criminal defense attorney to contact a state judge directly without the prosecutor knowing and lowing the blind of a criminal defendant in in jail and if the judge is willing to lower the bond to a level that the defendant can make and post and get out of rather shocked by that and shocked to find it apparently that was considered appropriate there in new orleans so i'm just trying to find the extent to which the conduct that apparently is and be around the hundred fifty in initially and then two hundred dollars just happened to coincide directly with the number of curatorship in my understanding of the evidence for us so you dance on my came to light because i am concerned about the effect on future litigants if the information we take from this hearing or deign to be good behavior and allowable and judge go and you appear on a regular basis before both state courts and federal courts that is correct to your knowledge what are the what is that imposes the code of ethics in  lawyer appearing before the federal court to bring in again for the primary reason of you know having a friend of the judge relating to this matter is that correct under oath one was before the grand jury and the other for the fifth circuit and in all of that testimony you've always indicated that you felt the way the judge  and just to kind of close up on that issue you told us that when you came back the next week the judge not only ruled in a manner on the record that seemed well thought out he overruled your objection but gave you the opportunity to do cases the cross examining attorneys for the correct and he would follow up with his own questions and at times you felt that went further than you would have preferred and that's because you thought it was underling work you thought you had done well fair statement work that are in the witness but in each case he didn't cause the witness to say anything that wasn't true diddy i don't recall the details but i felt the witness points that were not there without any follow up and so what was appropriate was follow up not exactly what he was doing in questioning and that's what got him angry and so as a practical matter this was not the first nor will be the last time you've had a federal judge get involved in questioning particularly during a bench trial certainly not now  between two parties that were not afraid to litigate is that a fair statement they were there was a lot of animosity extremely intense a lot of emotion between the parties and it in fact it had a long history before you were involved but you're a trial lawyer and i'm a trial lawyer we don't have that many slam dunks do we we all like to think we have one but whether we do i guess remains in the result fair statement  one was that you just one of the survive the judgment i think was the expression that you used does that indicate that you had the feeling all along during the trial that the judge was going to rule the other way litigator are you familiar with judges efforts to make sure that their record is upheld on appeal fair you mention that you know as a trial judge for his knew what he was doing and knew the rules of evidence and that was manifest to his handling of the recusal hearing you understood what the legal standards were and the argument you were making thereafter ok i think you said and i want to make sure of this correctly that if the judge recused himself and gardner was out of the case by that did you mean that if the judge took himself off the case that gardner's participation in the case after that would not be necessary and he would no longer be part of the legal team on the case that's correct  the guard was brought in because the judge and if the judge changed and you got a new judge there was no need to have guards on the case anymore certainly didn't want to continue to be involved to your knowledge was there any reason why a model in levinson were brought into the case unrelated to their relationship with the judge by my due diligence what i learned of them leads me to conclude that there was no other reason they had no expertise or experience that made them suitable for that and certainly what they did during the course of the case didn't change that  the sense i had of standing in front of him asking him to step down and implying that he was compromised was that he was looking at me to find out how much i knew and if i didn't know enough he certainly wasn't go