When Republican Sarah Palin, the soon-to-be-former governor of Alaska, needs advice, she turns to John P. Coale, a Democratic lawyer with an impressive and varied range of connections.
A Bill and Hillary Clinton confidante, and the husband of Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, Coale has supported numerous Democratic candidates through the years.
However, he endorsed Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, after Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama.
And during the campaign, Coale met Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, through Van Susteren.
After the election, he became an adviser to Palin (unpaid, Van Susteren stressed on her blog).
According to Todd Purdum, who profiled Palin in the August issue of Vanity Fair, Coale helped Palin create a political action committee, SarahPac, after the election.
He also reportedly assisted Palin in establishing The Alaska Fund Trust, her legal expense fund.
Coale told The Washington Post that Palin’s decision last week to step down as governor was motivated in part by what she saw as attacks upon her family.
“She couldn’t ignore the hits on the kids,” Coale said. “She said, ‘It brought out the mama grizzly in me.’”
Coale and Van Susteren, who is also a lawyer, were married in 1988. For a while, they practiced together, but he is now a partner in the Washington firm of Coale, Cooley, Lietz, McInerny & Broadus.
Both are members of the Church of Scientology, a religion practiced by Tom Cruise and John Travolta.
Coale represented another Scientologist, Lisa Marie Presley, in her divorce from Michael Jackson.
As a lawyer, Coale’s “particular specialty is the high-profile calamity,” wrote Peter Boyer in The New Yorker in 1999.
The first of his calamity cases was filed in 1979, when Coale unsuccessfully, but prominently, represented a group of U.S. citizens who had been held hostage for months in Iran, asking $10 million in damages for each of the plaintiffs.
In 1984, Coale heard of a toxic gas leak at a Union Carbide plant that killed thousands in Bhopal, India. He rushed to the scene and signed up more than 60,000 plaintiffs. He didn’t prevail in court as the case was decided in India, rather than in a U.S. court.
In the 1990s, Coale was one of several lawyers who came together as the Castano Group in suing Big Tobacco.
To add clout to their suits, Coale, a regular visitor to the Clinton White House, signed up Hugh Rodham, a lawyer and Hillary Clinton’s brother, to work on the case.
Coale and his colleagues did this, Boyer suggests, to out-brother-in-law Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the Mississippi lawyer heading up an opposing anti-tobacco lawyers’ group. Scruggs’ wife was the sister of then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.
Scruggs’ group got the better of the settlements, though he is now in federal prison, having been convicted of attempting to bribe a judge in another case.
After the tobacco suits, Coale turned his attention to organizing municipalities to sue gun manufacturers.
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2 Comments
#1. Damian DeWitt 07.10.2009
Sarah Palin’s apparently continuing relationship with John Coale and Greta Van Susteren is a scandal to Catholics, pro-lifers, and Republicans who support the party’s pro-life platform.
All of Scientology is run by an organization called the Sea Org which staffs its mid- and executive level ranks.
The Sea Org has a policy of coercing all its pregnant women into abortion, If they refuse they are verbally and physical abused until they submit.The policy was instituted by Scientology leader David Miscavige upon the death of founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1986 because he did not want to spend money for expanded facilities to accommodate a growing number of families in the Sea Org.
Three lawsuits have been filed against CoS by three former Sea Org members: Marc Headley, his wife Claire, and Laura DeCrescenzo. A cause of action in all three cases is human trafficking because Sea Org recruits, particularly teenagers, on fraudulent promises of education and medical care, subjects Sea Org members to virtual imprisonment, and forces them to work 100 hrs a week for 39 cents an hour.
For human trafficking in Scientology see:
http://www.exposescientology.com/humantrafficking.html
Coerced abortion is a cause of action for the two women: Claire Headley was coerced into two abortions. Laura De Crescenzo was coerced once as a minor at age 17. For details on the lawsuits, and the violence of the Miscavige regime see Infinite Complacency.
http://infinitecomplacency.blogspot.com/
As good Scientologists, Greta and John Coale are committed to the Global Obliteration of Psychiatry as proclaimed by David Miscavige. Both have worked on cases where Scientology sued the manufacturers of Ritalin, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and a patient advocacy group of parents of children with attention deficit disorder.
In May, the APA was feed up, and Dr. Nada Stotland, its president referred to Scientology and its front group, the Orwellian named Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) which carries on the Global Obliteration of Psychiatry, as an anti-psychiatry hate group.
http://shattersuppression.blogspot.com/
Last month the St. Petersburg Times did extensive coverage of leader David Miscavige based on interviews with the two highest-ranking Sea Org’s ever to defect from his regime, Mike Rinder and Marty Rathbun. The revelations are shocking. Miscavige frequently humiliates and physically assaults his executives and makes them assault one another.
http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2009/reports/project/
John Coale and Greta Van Susteren are pure political poison for Palin. It is disturbing to think that Coale is still in the thick of things, and will be increasing his power if she really is aiming for the 2012 nomination. You can be sure anything he learns is going straight to David Misccavige.as he continues to beat up his Sea Org executives.
Oh, did I mention Scientology maintains an intelligence and secret service agency called OSA (the Office of Special Affairs)? Under a previous name they carried out Operation Snow White, the largest known infilitration of the US government. The Church of Scientology fielded 4,000 covert agents to infiltrate the IRS, the Justice Department, and various state offices to steal documents relevant to regaing their religious tax exemption.
For God’s sake, Mrs. Palin, stop drinking the Scientology Kool Aid. Do you really want to defend your Scientology pals’ anti-psychiatry hatred, human trafficking, coerced abortions of their Church and the violence of its leader?
Sadly, it appears you do. Catholics, Evangelicals, and pro-lifers cannot in good conscience support or vote for you.
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#2. highcrowpilenothighprofile 07.13.2009
don’t forget his ethics complaint for solicitation and ambulance chasing. run right out of west virginia. he and his wife implicated for hiring people to stalk injured people.
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