Burt Newsome
A deposition at the heart of a lawsuit over Balch Bingham's alleged conspiracy to steal the lucrative collections practice of Birmingham solo attorney Burt Newsome shows signs of being a hoax, according to a new report at the Web site banbalch.com.How could a deposition be a hoax? K.B. Forbes, publisher of banbalchcom, lays out the peculiar circumstances that point to possible discovery fraud in this instance. One of the most suspicious factors involves the deponent's resistance to answering any question that would reveal his personal-identifying characteristics. (The deposition is embedded at the end of this post.)
Why would Balch and its affiliates want to create a phony deposition? Newsome's legal team determined that conspirators likely used a a Birmingham-based phone number -- (205) 410-1494 -- to communicate about the conspiracy, perhaps via prepaid "burner" phones. If the deposition was a hoax, it likely was designed to stonewall Newsome's effortts via discovery to unearth communications among individuals who were trying to ruin him professionally.
The deponent, a Verizon Wireless employee named "Jason Forman," testified that (205) 410-1494 was a router switch, and to his knowledge, had no ties to burner phones. But consider the odd circumstances surrounding the deposition, which leave a reasonable person wondering if the deponent really was a Verizon employee named Jason Forman. One oddity? Forman identified himself as a custodian of records at Verizon but denied having any expertise about the technology behind cell-phone numbers. Forbes provides background on the deposition:
And Balch Bingham almost got away with it.
Hitting the panic button after Newsome’s legal team linked all the co-conspirators to a single wireless phone number in 2017, Balch Bingham and their stooges put into a play what many believe was a phony, staged deposition in July of 2017 allegedly with Verizon’s top experts.Balch attempted to take a Verizon burner cell phone and magically turn it into a “router switch.”
And the embattled law firm appears to have used all their political and legal connections to prevent Newsome from showing Balch and the co-conspirators had allegedly perjured themselves when they consistently declared they did not know each other.
What about specifics that point to possible discovery fraud? Forbes provides them:
We learned recently that the alleged phony, baloney deposition with Verizon on July 31, 2017 was done via computer video conferencing; yet no video recording of the deposition is available.The alleged expert Jason Forman was no expert on routing switches or telephony. He simply processed subpoenas for 14 years at Verizon.
And the individual who gave the deposition: Was he really who he said he was? Was he an actor?
Also consider the recent revelation that Jay Town (U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama), who was captured in photos meeting with Alabama Power CEO Mark Crosswhite in an apparent effort to rig the summer 2018 North Birmingham Superfund bribery trial, has ties to Verizon Wireless and Balch Bingham. Here is how we desribed it in a recent post, based on Forbes original reporting:
We . . . have questioned the legitimacy of the deposition. Was it a real or staged event? Highly unusual, the deposition with Verizon did not take place at their large corporate campus.Instead, this deposition supposedly took place at a Regus Center (a rent by the hour office space facility) in Bedminster, New Jersey, less than 10 miles from Verizon’s Corporate Headquarters located in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
And what law firm represents Verizon regularly? McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney and Carpenter in Morristown, New Jersey, just one mile away from Verizon’s Corporate Headquarters.
And who worked for McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney and Carpenter before his career as a prosecutor?
Jay E. Town.
Pulling in all their weight to crush Newsome, we suspect Balch (and/or their sister-wife Alabama Power) appears to have reached out to Town for his assistance in July of 2017, a tour de force.
Forbes provides more insights in yesterday's banbalch.com post:
Reading the deposition, you can see the affair was a farce, pure fiction.
Why would Jay E. Town be tied to such a half-baked deposition? He was in the process of being confirmed in the U.S. Senate and we believe a phone call or two were made. Who was Balch’s biggest stooge at the time? U.S Senator Luther Strange.We remind our readers that a staged event is of no surprise.
Alabama Power’s sister-wife Balch Bingham gave birth to a fake AstroTurf campaign in the North Birmingham Bribery Scandal. The use of actors by electric utility companies and their consultants was exposed in 2018. And Alabama had a legendary story of actors portraying themselves as tree-hugging environmentalists in 2013 so they could smear and eventually oust a Public Service Commission member in 2014.
In our almost two decades of advocacy work, we have never, ever seen such an extreme miscarriage of justice as we have seen done against Burt Newsome, a father of four children, who allegedly was wrongly targeted, falsely arrested, and defamed by Balch Bingham.
Town should have let the FBI probe the trampling of the civil liberties and due process of an innocent man; instead Town appears to have looked the other way for the sake of his friends: the Siamese twins of Alabama, Balch Bingham and Alabama Power.
If Town has an ounce of integrity left in his body, he should hand the Newsome Conspiracy Case off to the Public Integrity Unit of the FBI in Washington, D.C.
That brings us back to "Jason Forman," the guy who stonewalled in the Newsome deposition. Was he legitimate or was he an "actor," providing information that had little connection to reality? The deposition tells us this, for sure: "Jason Forman" was determined not to provide any personal information that could be used to confirm his identity.
(To be continued)
