Print  email 

Justice Sanders: heckler or no?

• Published November 25, 2008

• Comments (0)

Since reporting that Washington Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders denies being present when U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed last week, I’ve had several emails insisting not only that Sanders was there for at least part of Mukasey’s speech, but he heckled the A.G., shouting "Tyrant!"

I asked Sanders yesterday about an Internet article identifying him as the heckler at the Federalist Society dinner.

"As to that, I don't have any comment. But I wasn't there when he collapsed. I heard it on television the next morning, I was very sorry to hear it," Sanders said.

The inbox today is full of the sort of legalistic parsing of words that one might expect, and frankly, that Sanders seems to deliberately have invited. Does he mean that he did shout at Mukasey earlier, and left before the famous collapse?

Forgive me for not having an exact transcript of the conversation, but Sanders explained to me that he had been at the convention in Washington, D.C., but went back to his hotel prior to Mukasey's speech. That seems to rule out being a heckler during the speech, regardless of the time of the feinting spell that occured during the talk. Or at least that is the impression I had. Could it be he left during the speech?

Aside from the off-the-record comments saying it was Sanders who taunted the attorney general, Wall Street Journal writer James Taranto was there and says it was Sanders in his "Juvenile Jurist" column:

We were seated close enough to the heckler to note that he was at Table 50--Sanders's assigned table, according to the dinner program. Although we did not recognize the heckler, we observed that he had white hair and a mustache, as does Sanders in the photo on his personal Web site and in this Cato Insitute Video. Of the five men assigned to sit at Table 50, we are acquainted with, and would have recognized, three.