With Anthony Kennedy retiring at SCOTUS, will Trump overlook Bll Pryor's history with gay porn and Bad Puppy to pick a closeted nominee from Alabama?

Bill Pryor, with and without robe

Anthony Kennedy yesterday announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS), and that means Birmingham's Bill Pryor, who currently sits on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, again is being floated as a possible Donald Trump nominee to the nation's highest court.

Pryor widely was seen as the favorite when Antonin Scalia's seat opened up, but Trump wound up picking Neil Gorsuch of Colorado -- with Pryor finishing a distant third. A number of knowledgeable observers noted then that Pryor fell out of favor because of our reporting on his background as a closeted gay, who appeared nude in photographs that wound up at badpuppy.com. (See four nude images of Pryor that have surfaced so far, at the end of this post.)

We also reported that Pryor and Attorney General/former U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Pryor's most ardent advocate, had a gay affair that featured numerous late-night visits by Sessions to Pryor's apartment in Montgomery -- many of them captured on Alabama law-enforcement surveillance.

From Metro Weekly

Will our reporting, which was picked up by numerous Web sites around the country, again help keep the fiercely anti-LGBT Pryor off SCOTUS? (The gay press has taken special delight in reporting on Pryor's hypocrisy, as you can tell from images in this post.) It probably is too early to say. But it's not too early to say we are close to breaking new stories about Pryor's status as a closeted queen. If those pan out -- and we are extremely close to nailing one or two -- they are likely to dampen any Trump enthusiasm that is left for "The Endowed One."

Mother Jones (MJ)has included Pryor in its list of possible Trump picks to replace Kennedy. From the MJ report:

With Wednesday’s announcement that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will be retiring, President Donald Trump has the opportunity to appoint the second justice of his presidency. His choice will likely shift the court farther to the right—and for decades to come. As the court’s frequent swing voter, Kennedy sided with the court’s liberals more often than any of his conservative colleagues. That’s not likely to be true of his replacement. In November, Trump released his shortlist of 25 potential Supreme Court nominees, an updated version of the list he had produced during the presidential campaign. They’re a very conservative bunch.

Here are some of the likeliest candidates for the next Supreme Court justice . . . :

William Pryor Jr. (age 56), 11th Circuit Court of Appeals: If Trump really wanted to make liberals apoplectic, he could choose Pryor to replace Kennedy. Pryor previously succeeded Attorney General Jeff Sessions as Alabama’s attorney general, and he has been an outspoken conservative on the appellate court.

Pryor was such a toxic nominee when President George W. Bush chose him for a federal judgeship in 2003 that Senate Democrats initially filibustered him. Pryor has referred to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision making abortion legal, as the “worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” creating “a constitutional right to murder an unborn child.” As Alabama’s attorney general, he filed a brief to the Supreme Court supporting Texas’s anti-gay sodomy law—he was the only state attorney general to do so—and defended a ban on the sale of sex toys in the state, writing that “the commerce in sexual stimulation and auto-eroticism, for its own sake, unrelated to marriage, procreation, or familial relations is an evil, an obscenity…detrimental to the health and morality of the state.” In 2014, he was on a panel of judges that barred the Obama administration from enforcing the contraceptive mandate against EWTN, a Catholic TV network. While on the court, he voted to continue a ban on volunteers feeding homeless people near Orlando’s city hall; upheld a restrictive Georgia voter ID law; and refused to block the use of opening prayers at government meetings in Cobb County, Georgia.

With support from Sessions, Pryor was an early favorite to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia but was ultimately rejected in favor of Neil Gorsuch. Pryor’s stock in the White House has likely plummeted along with that of Sessions, who has been at odds with Trump for months over his decision to recuse himself from the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

We, of course, don't know what impact, if any, our reporting on the gay porn in Pryor's past might have had on Trump's decision to go with Gorsuch the last time around. But this is from a Legal Schnauzer report the day after the Gorsuch selection was announced, and it includes what others think about the issue:

Alabama federal judge Bill Pryor came in no better than third last night in the race to become Donald Trump's first (and, hopefully, only) nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. That was quite a fall for a candidate who widely was considered the front-runner just a few weeks ago. And that raises this question: Did our reporting here at Legal Schnauzer about Pryor's ties to 1990s gay pornography cost him a lifetime appointment on the nation's highest court?

I don't know the answer to that question, and I admit that even raising it sounds like I'm tooting my own horn. (Perhaps that's because I am tooting my own horn.) But a number of intelligent people I like and admire -- a doctor, a retired lawyer, my wife -- have told me in recent days they thought Pryor's fading prospects were directly related to our reports about his nudie photos that appeared at badpuppy.com in the 1990s. The hypocrisy, my friends and loved ones said, of an ardently anti-gay rights judge appearing at a gay-porn Web site (in photos taken during his college days in the 1980s), would be too much for the Trump administration to stomach.

So why did the nod go to Neil Gorsuch, from Colorado and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, and not Pryor, who sits on the Eleventh Circuit (based in Atlanta), holds a duty station at the Hugo Black Courthouse in downtown Birmingham, and lives in the suburb of Vestavia Hills (at 2474 Tyler Road, to be precise)?

We proceeded to address issues, which have little to do with gay porn or the nature of Pryor's "endowment," that make Pryor a horrible choice:

. . . let's set this straight: I like the idea of having cost Bill Pryor a SCOTUS seat -- I really, really like that idea. Check that -- I love the idea, I relish it. Why? Bill Pryor might be the single most over-rated individual in U.S. public life. He also might be the most evil, although Donald Trump threatens to swipe that "honor" and run away with it. George W. Bush appointed Pryor to the Eleventh Circuit because, it's been widely reported, Karl Rove wanted to reward Pryor for launching (while Alabama attorney general) a bogus investigation that led to two innocent men -- former Alabama governor Don Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy -- winding up in federal prison.

It is widely known in the Alabama legal community that Pryor was a mediocre lawyer, at best, and he's done nothing to distinguish himself as a judge -- unless you consider voicing antipathy toward gay rights to be a distinguishing characteristic. That's ironic, not only because of Pryor's gay-porn photos, but also because of our recent report that Alabama law enforcement conducted surveillance on Pryor's residence in the 1990s (prompted by the badpuppy.com photos and the likelihood of blackmail) that caught U.S. Senator and Trump attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions frequently coming and going at curiously late hours.

Sessions has championed Pryor's cause at seemingly every opportunity, and it now appears that might have its genesis in something other than Pryor's professional qualifications, which are thinner than thin.

From The Sword

Besides that, Bill Pryor simply is an awful human being. He helped send two innocent people to prison -- one of them, Siegelman, still is there (at the time this was published; he now is a free man) -- and we've heard no reports that Pryor has any problems sleeping at night. It takes a special kind of warped individual to do that. Also, it has been reported at several media outlets (including this one) that Pryor's gay-porn past actually has helped his career. It has, in fact, made him vulnerable to blackmail, and GOP corporate interests have used that to make sure Pryor nudges certain cases to turn out in certain ways.

Does it sound like I have a personal animus toward Bill Pryor? If so, that's good -- because I do. For one, I know Don Siegelman, and I've written more about his case than anyone on the planet, and I despise Pryor for what he has done to an imperfect, but good, man. I also know Richard Scrushy, and I despise Pryor for what he has done to him. Whatever his faults may be, Scrushy did a whole lot to create jobs and build prestige for Birmingham. Pryor has done nothing in Birmingham, except feather his own filthy nest.

Two, I'm convinced Pryor has engineered multiple cheat jobs against my wife and me in federal court. We've seen signs that he is doing it now and might plan to do it in the future. Pryor apparently is arrogant enough to think he can get away with such criminality. But he might want to think twice about that. Karma has a way of biting right through your robes and leaving serious scars on your ass.

That's especially true if more stories related to badpuppy.com pop up. And that is very close to happening. We've already published four gay-porn photos of Pryor -- and more photos (and/or information) might be on the way.

Bill Pryor nude No. 1

Bill Pryor nude No. 2

Bill Pryor nude No. 3

Bill Pryor nude No. 4