TL;DR - This John Pierce guy, an associate of Lin Wood, is using Wood's foundation nefarious purposes. First he ripped off the Kyle Rittenhouse family, and now he's grifting off the J6 families!
Stickying this for a few minutes to get some eyes on this. This is disgusting behaviour, and it most DEFINITELY besmirches Wood's reputation.
Brian Cates - Political Columnist: About the Rittenhouse defense fund fiasco: if Lin Wood wants to shift all the blame onto John Pierce, he can do that. Pierce has been trying to get his hands on that bail money for awhile now. Next time as Wood or Pierce are barnstorming around the country soliciting donations as their clients rot in jail, i would encourage them to be very clear with the donors where those donations are going. It’s not being donated to the clients; it’s being donated to the lawyers, and it’s now the lawyers money and it always will be, through their awesome foundation. Wood can use all the clever bullshit words he wants. FightBack Foundation is his creation, he controls it. He and Pierce are now fighting over control of the $2 million that was donated to FightBack. They deserve each other.
Lin Wood filed through FightBack to get the $2 million bail money back because Pierce is trying to steal it. But Wood doesn’t want talk about how he’s now in conflict with Pierce over this money, so he pretends he has nothing to do with FightBack filing to get the money, like he’s some kind of bystander. He’s not a spectator here. And if you don’t have a problem with Wood and Pierce leaving Kyle in jail while they traveled around the country fundraising for themselves while giving the donors the impression they were supporting the Rittenhouse family, well I do have problem with that. Agree to disagree.
Right now John Pierce has talked his way into representing several J6 prisoners. He’s set up a new fundraising grift while he grossly mishandles their cases. History is repeating itself. And it’s not ancient history, either. And the people who are still covering up and making excuses for the shit he did in the Rittenhouse case need to stop doing that. Every single person who enabled him to become the Avenatti of the Right needs accountability. If you don’t like that, I don’t give a shit. Lives are in the balance.
Understand: a lot of money is at stake here for certain people. Millions of dollars, in fact. The cool new thing where lawyers create their own nonprofit "charity" foundation to raise funds for themselves while making clever pitches to donors to hide the fact the money is only temporarily used for a certain client is really taking off. The fact Pierce was able to so quickly set himself up to take advantage of almost a dozen J6 families using this scheme again is astounding to me. It means not nearly enough light has been shed on this subject. But I can fix that.
The problem with FightBack is that the two lawyers involved in the Rittenhouse case are now at odds with each other over the $2 million they raised for FightBack. Now that it served it's purpose as bail for Kyle, Fightback is supposed to get it back. What was planned for the $2 million after that, nobody knows. But now Pierce, who is a money sink and has financial creditors all over his ass wants a big chunk of it. He's obviously not raising enough from his new J6 venture to hold them at bay, which explains his fighting Wood for his 'fair share' of the money he helped raise. The sooner this trend of lawyers creating nonprofits to raise funds for themselves dies in a fire, the better.
You think I'm pissed about this now, just wait to see how pissed I am if Pierce's incompetent counsel while he's fundraising for himself through a charity supposedly for J6 prisoners results in a prison sentence for somebody who could've avoided that. It should NEVER have gotten this far. People who could have exposed this guy a year ago zipped their lips when it mattered. If this farce means 1 person goes to prison when they didn't have to, that's when you see what a pissed off Brian Cates looks like.