“I understand, Judge. I put that in writing in June.”
“I know you did,” he said. “I’m saying it again because some lawyer for Dalton Voss is going to stand up in a courtroom someday and claim you engineered this whole thing to get a sheriff you didn’t like. I want the record to be clean as a hospital sheet.”
Six weeks later, Atlanta defense attorney Gerald Fontaine, who charged $850 hourly, claimed I had “orchestrated” my own arrest and contaminated the investigation to fabricate evidence against Voss—exactly the argument Brennan anticipated.
A Middle District of Georgia magistrate judge, whose court I had never served, rejected the motion in four pages. She cited my June recusal memo, the FBI inquiry that began six weeks before my visit, and the diner footage.
“The record reflects,” she wrote, “that Judge Whitlock did not approach Sheriff Voss, did not identify herself, did not provoke him, and did not resist. She ordered lunch. The government did not orchestrate the defendant’s decision to arrest a woman eating catfish. The defendant did that on his own.”
