2017 has been a tough year for U.S. Circuit Judge Bill Pryor, of Alabama, and it might get tougher before too long.
Pryor appeared to be Donald Trump's No. 1 choice to fill the late Antonin Scalia's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS), but he finished no higher than No. 3 as the nomination went to Neil Gorsuch, of Colorado. Pryor saw his political booster, former U.S. senator and Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, become ensnared in KremlinGate for lying to Congress about meetings with a Russian ambassador -- and Sessions could face criminal prosecution on at least three counts, according to a bar complaint by Boston attorney J. Whitfield Larrabee.
Now, two additional nude photos of Pryor, from a gallery that appeared at the gay-porn super site badpuppy.com in 1997, have surfaced. Did our reporting on the first gay-porn Pryor photo help cause his SCOTUS chances to implode? I know a number of smart people who think the answer is yes. If that's the case, the two new photos are likely to have Pryor's judicial career floating like a corpse in a slow-moving river.
A strategically blurred version of gay-porn photo No. 2 is at the top, right corner of this post. (You can view the full-blown, NSFW version by clicking on a link at the end of this post.) As you can see, this photo appears to be taken in the same setting, with the same primitive "techniques," as No. 1. This time, Pryor appears to be sitting on, or straddling, a block of wood. Not sure what that is supposed to signify. (Not sure I want to think about what that is supposed to signify.)
Photo No. 2 has surfaced at Tumblr and a number of Europe-based porn sites. The same goes for Photo No. 3, which we will reveal in an upcoming post. According to multiple sources, the original Pryor gallery included eight to 12 images. Alert Legal Schnauzer readers now are scouring various Web sites for the remaining images. We hope to have the full collection within the next two or three months. It's sort of like collecting baseball cards, without the chewing gum.
How could 2017 get tougher for Pryor? Multiple news sites have reported that Pryor's gay-porn past actually has helped his judicial career. The photos, our sources say, likely surfaced via Republican political operatives, who knew they could be used as blackmail against Pryor. That made Pryor an attractive candidate to be a compromised judicial nominee, who could make sure certain cases turned out the way Karl Rove GOPers desired. In blunt terms, Pryor is known as a case fixer, and that could get him into a heap of trouble in 2017.
Robed Bill Pryor and disrobed Bill Pryor
from gay-porn photo No. 1
But Jeff Sessions appears to be in deep doo-doo, especially if some form of wiretap captured his conversations with Russian officials at Trump Tower. I know of a number of individuals, fed up with courtroom corruption in Alabama, who are gathering information for the FBI about judges who issue orders that run contrary to actual law.
Will the FBI, already investigating the actions of Trump insiders in KremlinGate (and that almost certainly includes Jeff Sessions), look at judges and others who have benefited from Sessions' crooked political clout -- especially those who, at this moment, appear to be fixing court cases? If the answer to that one is yes, it could unleash a torrent of intriguing information, especially as it relates to an Alabama "justice system" that has been hopelessly dysfunctional since at least 1995 -- and probably much earlier than that.
It's well established that judges cannot be sued for acts in their official capacity, no matter how corrupt they might be, because of a judge-created concept called "judicial immunity." (Note: We never will have an honest court system until judicial immunity winds up in the trash bin of history.) But it's also well established that judges can be criminally prosecuted, just like the rest of us. And there is little doubt Pryor, Proctor, and Hopkins (plus many others in Alabama) have engaged in criminal activity.
Corrupt judges in Alabama have been acting for years like they are beyond the long arm of the law. They might discover soon that they were wrong about that.
We sought comment from Pryor for this post, but he has not responded to our queries. The timing of a recent court order, however, suggests he might have responded in a different way -- by helping to fix a case. We will explain in an upcoming post.
Bill Pryor NSFW No. 2
(To be continued)
