Apr 10, 2018
Philip Levine just got smacked down in court by Twitter Inc. trying to avoid testifying in own case
Former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine just got called out by Twitter Inc. in an unusual court filing yesterday, for demanding sworn in-person testimony from Twitter’s CEO in a Miami courtroom instead of personally testifying in his defense. (Document embedded below)
Levine’s lawyers didn’t get what they wanted, and resorted to try and bully the $21 billion dollar social media network, where, ironically, the Mayor took great pleasure in bullying his political opponents in Trump-like tirades while in office.
It’s probably going to cost Miami Beach taxpayers a small fortune to get out of this mess now.
Philip Levine must be afraid that explaining why he violated the Sunshine Law by censoring me on social media and withholding records of his block lists will not look good to Democratic primary voters, because there is no reasonable explanation for most of his behavior over the last two years.
So Levine subpoenaed Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey to testify about Twitter’s online help guide in his stead.
Then, Levine’s attorneys finally admitted the real reason why they think he should not have to sit for sworn depositions and testimony to Twitter’s legal team, according to a sworn statement by their counsel Hayley L. Berlin, Esq. of Perkins Coie, LLP.
Levine must be terrified of testifying under oath at his own censorship trial because Miami Beach City Attorneys insist that he is a “‘serious’ gubernatorial candidate who would prefer not to testify.”
Now, Twitter’s high powered legal team of Perkins Coie, LLP and Greenspoon Marder is demanding that a Miami-Dade Court quash the city’s subpeonas against both Dorsey and Twitter’s General Counsel.
So, his Miami Beach city lawyers decided that they would harass Twitter’s CEO and General Counsel by using a court demand to try and compel his testimony instead.
Illegally.
They also refused to file their subpoena in a San Francisco County, California court, giving Twitter ample legal recourse to quash the action and demand fees for their attorneys’ time and troubles.
“Levine’s attorneys at the City of Miami Beach have been keeping their demands for testimony from Twitter’s CEO completely secret from us, and we don’t know why,” says attorney Faudlin Pierre, who represents me in this case.
What makes the unreasonable demands of Miami Beach even more bizarre, is that the City acknowledged that they don’t really need to drag Twitter’s CEO and top attorney 3,000 miles from their offices to testify under oath in an evidentiary hearing that Philip Levine himself has demanded.
But former Mayor Levine’s attorneys continued to threaten the social media platform — after declining to follow due process, or to seek written documents as Berlin explained they could obtain — in their quixotic quest to force Twitter to produce a witness for their hearing.
The end result is that next Tuesday, April 17th, both the City and my attorneys will have to trek down to the Miami-Dade Courthouse to settle the matter in front of Judge Rodolfo “Rudy” Diaz.
Based on the legal filing below, Miami Beach taxpayers are probably going to get hit with a pretty sizeable legal bill for helping the “serious” gubernatorial candidate out.
If ex-Mayor Levine doesn’t want Democratic primary voters to know why he’s an ardent censor and violator of the First Amendment, then they need to know that he’s willing to use his lawyers to try and bully Twitter — the very platform he uses to bully private business — by crossing a red line that not even President Trump himself, has rent asunder, by seeking to compel the Twitter’s CEO to do his bidding in court.
Instead of using an online help manual.
Shamefully, the root cause of Gubernatorial candidate Philip Levine’s censorship and lies is his utter desperation to censor and suppress that the Levine administration squandered paradise by polluting South Beach and its surrounding waterways, doing shoddy construction on no-bid contracts to fight sea-level rise — sometimes illegally — and generally running the City of Miami Beach as an “absentee Mayor according to his own police department.
Levine doth protest the need to testify under oath so much, it begs the question; What is he hiding?
Read the entire non-party court filing by Twitter here, including the sworn affidavit in Exhibit B on pages 19–21:
