“But MY emails!!!”

[UNCjigga]

What is it with these luddites going apeshit over emails all the time?

Forwarding email is a crime, Jerry Falwell Jr. says after leaks to media

Forwarding email is a crime, Jerry Falwell Jr. says after leaks to media

A legal expert told the AP Falwell's claims were "totally insane."

arstechnica.com

High-profile evangelical conservative Jerry Falwell Jr., a staunch Trump supporter and president of Liberty University, wants the FBI to investigate current and former university employees for... forwarding emails.

Falwell claims to have evidence that employees "improperly shared" emails belonging to the university, the Associated Press reports. Falwell said the communications were shared as part of a "criminal" smear campaign and "attempted coup."

Falwell told the AP he contacted the FBI before the story was published, when he learned reporters were reaching out to Liberty employees about the "stolen" emails. "I am going to the authorities and I am going to civil court" over the shared documents, Falwell said.

The emails in question form the cornerstone of a magazine feature Politico ran Monday on Falwell and Liberty University. The story, running under the headline "Someone's gotta tell the freaking truth," dug into financial arrangements between the Falwell family, the school, and other entities, and it depicted the university as a "dictatorship" under Falwell's thumb.

One official at Liberty told Politico, "We're not a school; we're a real estate hedge fund."

"I'm not going to dignify the lies that were reported yesterday with a response," Falwell told the AP, but he said he hired "the meanest lawyer in New York" to pursue civil cases against sources who shared communication with Politico.
"Liberty owns every single one of those emails. It's our property. They were working for us when they used our server," Falwell told the AP. "Our policies make it clear every email sent on our server is owned by Liberty, and if anybody shares it with anybody outside Liberty, it is theft. And so that's the underlying crime."

—

 

[DrDoug]

He should have hired Hillary's IT people to secure his emails.

 

[interchange]

This is funny. But I actually wonder if there is some legal contact that restricts the distribution of an email if he could be right. But I'm not sure such a broad policy is actually worth anything, particularly if the distributed information is evidence of a crime.

 

[fskimospy]

This is funny. But I actually wonder if there is some legal contact that restricts the distribution of an email if he could be right. But I'm not sure such a broad policy is actually worth anything, particularly if the distributed information is evidence of a crime.

I could see there being some sort of confidentiality agreement as part of an employment contract for Liberty that could give him some civil way to go after people his claims of this being a criminal act are hilariously wrong.

Falwell Jr. looks like he’s super, super dirty and I for one am looking forward to such a terrible person going down.

 

[JSt0rm]

the chuds dont care

 

[Moonbeam]

My my, clearly Falwell has no faith. Every Christian knows not to worry about wrong doers because God with his perfect discernment will send them to hell. You'd have to be an abject atheist to trust the baddest of New York's lawyers to know right from wrong. Looks like Falwell isn't going to heaven. It don't take no two time gamblers, no cigar smokers or any hypocritical swine.

 

[SMOGZINN]

I could see there being some sort of confidentiality agreement as part of an employment contract for Liberty that could give him some civil way to go after people his claims of this being a criminal act are hilariously wrong.

Falwell Jr. looks like he’s super, super dirty and I for one am looking forward to such a terrible person going down.

I doubt he could even get a civil court to hold them liable for breaking confidentiality when it was used to expose a crime. I'm pretty sure that illegal activity voids the confidentiality contract.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I doubt he could even get a civil court to hold them liable for breaking confidentiality when it was used to expose a crime. I'm pretty sure that illegal activity voids the confidentiality contract.

Even if it didn’t, I suspect the discovery period in court would want to be avoided.

 

[tweaker2]

For the lawyers in the house:

So is an NDA required to enforce this allegation or not? If there wasn't one signed by employees upon hiring then is there some other legality that Falwell can exploit?

It would be sweet karma rearing its vengeful head if Falwell goes to jail following this imbroglio.

This has all the same stank that Trump trails behind him.

 

[UNCjigga]

It would be remiss not to link back to the original POLITICO story about Fallwell's shenanigans and "rule by fear": Someone's gotta tell the freakin' truth

Some highlights from Falwell's current and former aides breaking their silence:

“We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,” said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. “We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.”

Liberty employees detailed other instances of Falwell’s behavior that they see as falling short of the standard of conduct they expect from conservative Christian leaders, from partying at nightclubs, to graphically discussing his sex life with employees

In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that in the run-up to Trump’s presidential campaign, Cohen hired John Gauger, a Liberty University employee who runs a private consulting firm, to manipulate online polls in Trump’s favor. Not previously reported is the fact that, according to a half-dozen high-level Liberty University sources, when Gauger traveled to New York to collect payment from Cohen, he was joined by Trey Falwell, a vice president at Liberty. During that trip, Trey posted a now-deleted photo to Instagram of around $12,000 in cash spread on a hotel bed, raising questions about his knowledge of Gauger’s poll-rigging work.

Members of the Liberty University community are generally reluctant to go on the record. The school uses nondisclosure agreements to prohibit many university employees or board members from openly discussing what they’ve seen Falwell do...Tenure and its protections are not available to Liberty faculty members outside the law school. If you teach or work at Liberty, you must get approval from Falwell’s office before you speak to the media. Talk to reporters without his approval—or publicly criticize him, even obliquely—and you could lose your job.

“Everybody is scared for their life. Everybody walks around in fear,” said a current university employee who agreed to speak for this article only after purchasing a burner phone, fearing that Falwell was monitoring their communications.

One longtime university employee shared a 2012 email in which [Falwell Jr.'s wife] Becki contacted four school executives at 7:06 p.m. to complain that a low-level university employee had posted a Facebook status on her personal account criticizing a lack of adequate parking on campus. “Someone needs to talk to this girl. I don’t think that we allow employees to post negative remarks about Liberty,” Becki wrote to the school officials in a message that included a screenshot of the employee’s post. Shortly before 9:00 p.m., one senior official replied, “We are attempting to call her at home right now.” The woman in question did not respond to requests for comment, but according to her Facebook profile, she is no longer an employee of Liberty University.

Liberty University has transformed under Jerry Falwell Jr.’s leadership. When he took over as president in 2007, the school, which is a nonprofit, had listed assets of just over $259 million on its then most recent IRS Form 990; in its filing for the fiscal year ending in June 2017, its assets surpassed $2.5 billion. That number is now more than $3 billion, according to public statements Falwell made in 2018. That growth is driven largely by a vast increase in the number of online students at the school, who now number some 95,000. Many Falwell confidants are concerned with where they see that university tuition money going: into university-funded construction and real estate projects that enrich the Falwell family and their friends. In an email dated July 18, 2012, Falwell informed several university executives that his son, Trey Falwell, was “starting a new company to do the management” of properties owned by the school...Experts on tax law and nonprofit organizations said that having the president of a nonprofit university directing university business to a company led by his son would be troubling.

“There was no picture snapped of me at WALL nightclub or any other nightclub,” Falwell wrote. When told that I had obtained a photo of him for this article, Falwell said I was “terribly mistaken.” “If you show me the picture, I can probably help you out,” he wrote. “I think you are making some incorrect assumptions, or have been told false things or are seeing something that was photo-shopped.” Falwell—the president of a conservative Christian college that frowns upon co-ed dancing (Liberty students can receive demerits if seen doing it) and prohibits alcohol use (for which students can be expelled)—was angry that photos of him clubbing made it up online. To remedy the situation, multiple Liberty staffers said Falwell went to John Gauger, whom they characterized as his “IT guy,” and asked him to downgrade the photos’ prominence on Google searches. In a statement on August 21, Jerry Falwell denied the existence of any photo of him at the club.


Longtime Liberty officials describe Gauger as a sort of fixer for Falwell, a man promoted [from MBA graduate up to Liberty's CIO] because he would do what Falwell asked of him without complaint. But Gauger is more than just a university employee: Since 2009, Gauger has also run RedFinch LLC, an online business he founded that specializes in search-engine marketing and does lucrative contract work for Liberty. Tax records show Liberty paid RedFinch $123,950 during 2016, for what sources described as search-engine recruitment of online students for the university. Gauger did not respond to requests for comment. RedFinch’s online work for the school goes beyond typical SEO marketing. In an email from August 2013 obtained for this article, Falwell asked Gauger to defend him in the comments section of a local news article that Falwell felt reflected too negatively on him. Falwell even emailed Gauger the exact wording to post.

In May 2019, Reuters reported that [Trump fixer Michael] Cohen helped Falwell contain the fallout from some racy “personal” photos. Later that month, Falwell took to Todd Starnes’ radio talk show to rebut the claims. “This report is not accurate,” Falwell said. “There are no compromising or embarrassing photos of me.” Members of Falwell’s inner circle took note of the phrasing. “If you read how Jerry is framing his response, you can see he is being very selective,” one of Falwell’s confidants said. Racy photos do exist, but at least some of the photos are of his wife, Becki, as the Miami Herald confirmed in June. Longtime Liberty officials close to Falwell told me the university president has shown or texted his male confidants—including at least one employee who worked for him at Liberty—photos of his wife in provocative and sexual poses. At Liberty, Falwell is “very, very vocal” about his “sex life,” in the words of one Liberty official—a characterization multiple current and former university officials and employees interviewed for this story support. In a car ride about a decade ago with a senior university official who has since left Liberty, “all he wanted to talk about was how he would nail his wife, how she couldn’t handle [his penis size], and stuff of that sort,” this former official recalled.

 

[hal2kilo]

Christians.

 

[brycejones]

Conservative Evangelical Christians.

FTFY. The Falwell family has long been scam artists, sounds like they are well on their way to making it a 3 generation business.