Trump appointed Federal Judge Lee P. Rudofsky is fixin’ to get a FOIA request for a recording of a hearing that was transcribed inaccurately.

The transcript of the hearing did not include the dialogue that would be expected before the parties stipulated to a protective order. My personal memory of the hearing was that the dialogue occurred.

After Court Reporter Stephen Franklin fulfilled my order for a transcript of the hearing of December 1, 2021 in case 4:21-CV-00189-LPR, Laura Lynn Hammett v. Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, et al, I sent this inquiry by email:

“May I please listen to the recording of the 12/1/21 hearing.”

The lack of a question mark was a Freudian slip, as what I meant to say was, “you are going to hand over the tape eventually or die of old age first.”

Mr. Franklin replied:

“This was a telephonic conference.  We were not in the courtroom. If there were a recording, it would have been my personal laptop, and I do not keep those, as the only official record is my stenographic notes.”

I filed a motion to settle the record, a supplemental authority and a follow-up motion necessitated by a snarky comment PRA made in its opposition. (See FREE Docs of the Day below.)

Judge Rudofsky denied my motion and follow-up motion. (See those FREE Docs of the Day below also.) The confusing line is this:

“However, out of an extreme abundance of caution, the Court decided to double-check the portion of the transcript cited by Ms. Hammett (plus a full page before and after the page range she identified) against the audio recording.”

Wait! Didn’t the Court Reporter tell me that “if there were a recording”, he did not keep it?

I’ll keep y’all posted about how the Court explains this one.

At least when this case began, Judge Rudofsky used to feign interest in providing justice and wrote well written (but disingenuous) orders. Now he writes something like, ya, what he said. PRA can do no wrong. Hammett can do no right. Still the judge, who I now call Pinokiofsky, refuses to recuse based on 28 U.S. Code § 455(a).