UPDATED 7:49 P.M. ET (JAN. 14, U.S.A.) Judge Rosemary Collyer has been on the federal bench in the District of Columbia for 10 years. She was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2002 and was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Earlier in her career, then-attorney Collyer was appointed by President Reagan to lead the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission.
Collyer is 67. She also has broad experience in the private sector, having been a partner at Crowell & Moring, a top-tier law firm with blue-chip clients and offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
As a federal judge, Collyer has presided over national-security cases, voting-rights cases, worker-rights cases, securities cases, cases involving international intrigue and U.S. foreign policy and a case involving an alleged would-be assassin of the President of the United States.
In 2009, when the PP Blog referenced Collyer in a story that mentioned her ruling in a case involving former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, once National Security Adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, the Blog observed that “[n]o critic interested in fair or logical debate would dismiss her as an intellectual lightweight.”
AdSurfDaily figures Todd Disner and Dwight Owen Schweitzer, though, have a different take on Collyer. To the former ASD Ponzi pitchmen who went on to become pitchmen for the alleged Zeek Rewards Ponzi scheme, Collyer is a “sophist” and the author of opinions in the ASD case that a “first year law student” would have found “repugnant.”
ASD was a $119 million Ponzi scheme. In August, the SEC described Zeek as a $600 million Ponzi- and pyramid fraud. Having once been involved in an effort to raise funds purportedly to defend ASD members from government overreach, Disner then became involved in efforts purportedly to raise funds to protect Zeek members from the government.
In November 2011, ASD figure and purported “sovereign citizen” Kenneth Wayne Leaming was arrested by an FBI terrorism Task Force on charges of filing false liens against at least five public officials involved in the ASD case, including Collyer. When Leaming was arrested, he allegedly was found in the company of two individuals who’d pulled off a multimillion-dollar bizop fraud in Arkansas.
During that same month, Disner and Schweitzer sued the United States. In court filings, the ASD duo alleged that the government had produced a “tissue of lies,” that its forfeiture case involving ASD assets was a “house of cards,” that the government had relied on “some of their Washington D.C. operatives to become members of ASD” in a bid to sink a legitimate business and that federal prosecutors had shopped the case to Collyer.
In May 2012, ASD operator Andy Bowdoin pleaded guilty to wire fraud and acknowledged ASD was a Ponzi scheme and that the Florida-based firm never had operated lawfully from its 2006 inception. Collyer tossed the claims of Disner and Schweitzer in August 2012. The ASD duo appealed, accusing Collyer of bias, sophistry and issuing rulings that would deeply offend even freshmen students of the law.
The government has responded to the Disner/Schwwitzer appeal.
“Appellants go so far as to argue that Judge Collyer ‘had so improperly authorized the taking of the Appellants[’] property and effects, that a first year law student would have found it repugnant’ and that ‘she abrogated her role as a jurist and became what can only be called a sophist,’” an appeals lawyer for the government argued. “Offering nothing more than intemperate attacks on the District Court Judge, Appellants failed to raise any specific facts suggesting bias on the part of the District Judge.”
