Meet the Judge Who Tackled AG Barr

3/6/2020

The Hon. Reggie Walton From Donora, Pa.

On Thursday, a federal judge characterized the public statements of Attorney General William P. Barr as “distorted” and “misleading” in his early descriptions of Robert S. Mueller III's report last year.

I missed the name of the judge at first, but later the name drifted from the television in the next room.

“Oh, my God, that’s Reggie Walton!” I blurted, a bit informal toward a prominent judge.

I learned about Federal Justice Reggie B. Walton a decade ago when I was writing a biography of Stan Musial, the great baseball player from Donora, Pa. I was blessed to have two mentor-guides to that hard-times steel town: Bimbo Cecconi, one of Pitt's great athletes, and Dr. Charles Stacey, the former school superintendent and a town historian who was proud of both Musial and Walton.

“You ought to talk to Reggie Walton,” Dr. Stacey said. Later, on his own, he called his star pupil and suggested he give me a ring. That is the Donora connection – the pride of people who survived the mills and the streets and the hard times.

There was a history to Judge Walton. His parents worked hard -- the job market was always tougher for African-Americans -- and had high hopes for their son. Reggie was a competitor, who goaded his football teammates not to quit against much bigger teams, but he also ran with a tough crowd. In his senior year of high school, he thought he was going to a fist fight between two gangs from opposite sides of the Monongahela River.

Somebody pulled a sharp object and a boy from the other side was stabbed. Reggie Walton helped him get medical help, and then he decided to make himself scarce from gang activity. People in town pointed him toward West Virginia State University, a historically black college, to play football, and maybe to study.

The football was all right, but the studying was better. Reggie Walton is now a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., who has been in the news a few times since being appointed by President George W. Bush.

In 2005 the judge broke up a street brawl near the courthouse, and in 2007 he presided over the trial of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, for outing a C.I.A. agent. The jury convicted Libby and the judge sentenced him to 30 months, but President Bush set him free, and President Trump later pardoned Libby. The judge was reportedly not amused, either time.

I finally got to meet Judge Walton in 2011 as he prepared for the perjury trial of Roger Clemens in the steroids frolics. Maybe because of his former school superintendent, Judge Walton agreed to meet me, on the grounds that we not discuss Clemens, at all.
I thought maybe I could slip in a question or two, but after five minutes in his office, I knew better than to try to make a fancy journalistic feint through Judge Walton's defense.

Nobody pulls the okey-doke on Judge Walton. I was in the courtroom in the first hour of the Clemens trial, when the prosecution alluded to a witness who had been ruled off limits. The highly-paid defense lawyer stuck up his hand and made an objection and the judge called a timeout, saying he needed a few minutes to think it over. After consulting his colleagues in back chambers, the judge declared a mistrial.

This year Judge Walton was assigned a case questioning whether the attorney general had accurately portrayed the Mueller report long before the public could see it. The judge alluded to “inconsistencies” from the attorney general.

In football terms, the liaison between the president and the attorney general has produced a dirty game for the past three years -- lots of grappling in the mud, kneeing and gouging in the pile.

All I know is, when the oblong football skitters loose in a legal scrimmage, I want it to roll near Reggie Walton, from Donora, Pa.

The article I wrote in 2011 before the brief Clemens trial:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/sports/03vecsey.html
Judge Walton's official website:
https://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/content/senior-judge-reggie-b-walton

bruce

3/7/2020 02:26:08 am

george,

he certainly did the right thing.

i wonder how it'll be circumvented?

i see the world's self proclaimed greatest legal system came thru in alabama.

it's been 58 years since the state committed murder up here in the great white north.

coarsens the country and the culture.

seems people are a bit selective about the 'good book'.especially many of those devout born again evangelicals who seem to be anti christian more often not.

bruce

George Vecsey

3/7/2020 10:19:14 am

Bruce: I don't know the particulars of this ruling by Judge Walton -- there's always the Supreme Court -- but it's hard to erase days and days of headlines quoting this stern judge (appointed by GW Bush.)
As for the evangelicals, they still think Trump was sent here by the Almighty. What can I say? GV

bruce

3/7/2020 10:30:05 am

george,

i read the story about walton's decision and, of course, that he was a bush2 appointee.

i've been following american politics since i was a tyke. it never ceases to amaze me how often a judge is identified by who nominated him.

i'm not going to say politics have nothing to do with supreme court up here, but it's a rare thing for people to think of it as a partisan institution.

the 75 age max and then out is a good policy.

as an aside, you've mentioned your musial book a number of times. strikes me that you seem to have broadened your already substantial number of interesting or beneficial contacts/friends from writing it.

bruce

Randolph

3/7/2020 09:15:35 am

George,
This was quite an interesting article. I did not know about him. He is the real deal.
As for trivia, he went to undergraduate school at West Virginia State. Perhaps you have already connected the dots. You see, you just wrote about another West Virginia State Alumni, math whiz, Katherine Johnson.

Peace,
RF

George Vecsey

3/7/2020 10:30:00 am

Randy, I did mention WV State for the judge. The link of my NYT column, included, mentions that that Judge Walton reached a plateau i football (his evaluation) but blossomed as a student and joined a fraternity that stressed academics...and eventually on to law school.
Thanks for linking Katherine Johnson, who passed recently.
In my old age, I am noticing the great Americans who came through Historically Black Colleges -- Kamala Harris and Howard, for example. ML King Jr. and Morehouse.
This just in: Jim Clyburn from South Carolina State.
Plus, our favorite host on WQXR-FM, classical, in NYC area is Terrance McKnight, from Morehouse, musician himself, sensational knowledge of classical, plus wonderful voice (Obama-esque) and ability to be terse, not wordy, like some classical hosts.
Bravo, HBCs. GV

Ed Martin

3/8/2020 01:07:53 pm

Thanks GV, for the Reggie article, and for the wonderful additional comment on HB colleges and universities.

Way back in the 60s I learned a lesson from a Black colleague at the US OFFICE OF EDUCATION, Leonard Stillman. The top OE officials were meeting to create our budget request for the agency’s programs. It was just after the LBJ Civil Right’s and Voting Rights Acts, 1964-65, and the opportunities for black students to go to IHE across the nation was real. I wondered about increasing scholarship funds to major universities, targeted on minority and lower-income students rather than focusing more aid to HB institutions. Leonard helped me understand the role of these institutions, the welcoming atmosphere they provided, the escape from being a black face in a white class. I saw the parallels to children with disabilities. Later I wrote an essay, “Is Juilliard a Segregated School?”

George

3/8/2020 03:36:58 pm

Ed: I’m sure it’s true — the chance to be oneself.
Common experiences. Will we ever get past that?
I remember the fiddler in Loretta Lynn’s band -/ zeke, white fun — had been the violinist in the Howard orch. Quite proud of it. Will we ever get past this?
He was quite proud of his educ.

Alan Rubin link

3/8/2020 02:02:56 pm

Thanks to George, Ed and Randolph for their first-hand accounts and Bruce's comments.

I have been exposed to the richness of the African-American culture since the age of two. Luke, a gentle giant, would periodically wash our floors with me on his back and singing spirituals.

I worked in my father’s retail appliance store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side weekends and summers during high school. Later, after a ten-year engineering career, I became a partner in the business.

Three of the four African-Americans who worked there were from rural North Carolina. I was their helper on deliveries and in the warehouse.

To this day, I consider Raymond one of my most influential mentors. There is something so logical about rural African-American ethics.

I thought of Raymond when Rep. James Clyburn impassioned appeal jump-started Biden’s campaign. It appears that he is the spokesman for a community that could well have the fate of our country in their hands.

George

3/8/2020 03:43:09 pm

Alan: Jen wrote so well about the people who worked i your family store. One was an elder in an African family or region? Agreed about Clyburn and would add Elijah Cummings:, “We’re better than that!” We need that prophetic voice calling to our better selves, or what is left of that. GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Meet the Judge Who Tackled AG Barr

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