Chief justice deletes ‘sovereign citizen bingo’ page on courts website as scandal grows
Tennessee supreme court conferences are illegally secret; F$3 million lawsuit demands they be opened under 1st amendment, TN open meetings law
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024 — A powerful documentary about this reporter’s judicial conference arrest makes a first-day Internet sensation just as a federal court filing against the former chief justice jacks up the acidity level in a black-robed scandal metastasizing across Tennessee.
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio Network
Justice Roger Page gets a copy of my appeal brief sent to the 6th circuit court of appeals in Cincinnati just as the story about the expulsion and arrest of journalists explodes across the “cop watch” and “1st amendment audit” sector of social media.
The documentary “$3 million lawsuit! Room full of judges cheer the unlawful arrest of journalist David Tulis” by police reporter Billy Blume has 127,000 views on its first day on YouTube at the Shields of Shame channel, and 1,733 comments as of 9 p.m. Friday. Franklin city police bodycams tell the story of judicial conspiracy to imprison a press member.
On Wednesday Christopher Sapp, midstate bureau chief, does a search for “sovereign citizen bingo,” a game played by all Tennessee city court judges Nov. 6, 2021, as they hold a secret meeting at the Embassy Suites Cool Springs hotel in Franklin, a wealthy suburb of Nashville. Mr. Sapp, a prominent figure in the citizen clamor for access to the courts, finds a live copy of the game at the court website.
“You’ve got to check the last text message I sent you. I just found the smokin’ f—-kin’ gun. **** [Mr. Blume] said, ‘Holy crap, you mean to say we’re payin’ those sons of bitches to go down there and play this kind of bingo? — where they’re making fun of the people and the taxpayers are paying for that?’ And I’m like, ‘Exactly.’ This’ll get scrubbed from the Internet in about 10 seconds once this becomes viral.”
On Thursday morning Shields of Shame reporter Blume posts his report about the Tennessee judiciary’s arrest of a radio reporter. I am on deadline to have in the U.S. mails my appeal brief, a 22pp analysis seeking to salvage Tulis v. Orange et al after dismissal in federal court in Nashville.
Hastily, I draft a “supplemental filing” to my brief that includes a link to the Shields of Shame report and 17 pages from sovereign citizen bingo.
“This on the TNcourts.gov website,” Mr. Sapp declares in an excited voice. “I was trying to find the sovereign bingo card on your website, and this was the first item to pop up. And I said, ‘Hold it.’
Ten minutes before going to a nearby post office, I email “service of Tulis v. Orange appeal brief” on Lauren Rota, the lawyer in attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti’s office who is defending judge Page and AOC education manager John Crawford. By next morning, the sovereign bingo page on the court website is gone.
“I would put it in,” Mr. Sapp says about my pending court filing. “The judiciary of the state of Tennessee is mocking the citizens of the state, and this is proof of it on their own website. This shows the conspiracy.”
The bingo game, like the judge’s secret lecture, lets conference attendees identify pro se litigants who are aware of their rights and willing to fight for them. Game buzzwords include color of law, special appearance, Black’s Law Dictionary, corpus delecti, traveling not driving, I do not consent. Judges are training to be harsh or dismissive hearing such words. A word for such oppression and prejudicial policy, as the sovereign citizen bingo game notes, is called “rule and run.”
Also intended to to get judges’ squint-eye treatment: “God’s law” and “moral high ground.”
