I can think like Chad and Annette. It makes me ill, but I can do it.
Annette Bosworth may have just found her next attorney. After betraying Joel Arends and monkey-wrenching Brandon Taliaferro's best efforts to defend her, the former fake Senate candidate, petition fraudster, and drama queen may be the least appealing legal client since Ted Klaudt.
But Attorney General Marty Jackley, U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson, and Hughes County States Attorney Wendy Kloeppner may have just delivered the indefensible doctor a defense attorney: Christopher Robert Jansen. The Selby attorney served a term as Walworth County states attorney from 2009 to 2012, then resigned a few weeks early to enter private practice after voters turned him out in favor of James Hare. And Tuesday, Jackley, Johnson, and Kloeppner had him arrested for three counts of first-degree rape. The three alleged victims are under the age of 13.
One would think that no reasonable client would want to pick Jansen for counsel right now. "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't stop defendants from minimizing their exposure to possible bad press. But in the "writhing snakepit of treachery and mind games" of Team Bosworth, no press is bad press. In Bosworth and husband Chad Haber's reading of Chad's bible, The 48 Laws of Power, the client no attorney wants and the attorney no client wants are the perfect unpredictable, attention-getting, water-stirring, misdirecting match.
Jansen would also be the next poster boy for Chad Haber's hashtag exploitation of child rape victims. As the centerpiece of his quixotic but devious bid for the Libertarian nomination for attorney general, Haber is charging that Attorney General Jackley has a "big pedophilia problem" in his failure to prosecute child rapist Richard Mette as vigorously as he should have. Haber needs to stop the Attorney General's new prosecution of child rape from puncturing Haber's political narrative. Haber thus needs to bring Jansen into his wife's camp and pump him for information with which Haber could spin Jansen's prosecution into persecution. He needs to make Jansen's story just another aspect of corruption in South Dakota, just like Jackley's prosecution of Haber's wife.
Expect Bosworth to announce Jansen as her attorney, and expect Haber to launch a new hashtag any day.
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Even if The 48 Laws of Power can be read as a bastard's handbook, he wrote it to demystify the dirty tricks of the executives he encountered during a dispiriting period as a Hollywood screenwriter. "I felt like a child exposing what the parents are up to and laughing at it," he says. "Opening the curtain and letting people see the Wizard of Oz."
....Greene claims that most of the emails he receives are from readers who used his first book to understand and outwit manipulative people, but surely he has inadvertently created a few scoundrels himself? "There are people on the borderline and maybe the book helps them to move into that sociopathic realm so then I feel bad," he concedes, "but mainly it's positive" [Dorian Lynskey, "Robert Greene on His 48 Laws of Power: 'I'm Not Evil – I'm a Realist'," The Guardian, 2012.12.93].
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Update 15:17 CDT: Oops—Jansen might have trouble representing Bosworth from the Hughes County Jail. At Jansen's first hearing in Pierre this afternoon, Jansen did not seek and the judge did not set bail. State's attorney Kloeppner says the state believes Jansen is a danger to the community and to himself.
