Booby trap

If you walk into a booby trap, is it your fault?

Maybe, if it’s a really obvious trap. Still, you’d think that the trapper would have some responsibility.

Do you blame the kid or the robbers if the Home Alone house burns down?

I bring this up because the owner of an entire floor of the Sherry-Netherland building, a very expensive structure next to Central Park in New York City, has sued the United States of America for walking into a trap.

The 17th floor of the building owned by the plaintiff was damaged after the FBI raided the 18th floor, owned by Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire who was later convicted of fraud — just the kind of guy you’d want to put on your bingo card of Trump pardon candidates.

(Side note: There’s some serious litigation jujitsu going on here. The lawsuit makes a point of noting that Guo was being investigated “under the Biden administration” and “the DOJ (then led by Merrick Garland) and the FBI (then led by Christopher Wray).” Could it be that making the Biden FBI the bad guys will trick the current government into not defending this case? This is evil genius stuff.)

According to the lawsuit, a fire broke out in Guo’s apartment while FBI agents were searching it.

“Whether the fire was a result of a deliberate booby-trap or sabotage on Guo’s part, or the result of the agents’ own carelessness in breaching a secure door or secured vaults … has not been explicitly reported. In either event, the fire resulted from and began because of the FBI agents’ negligence … .”

In either event?

The complaint goes on to say the FBI “should have foreseen that there was a risk that Guo had incendiary devices, booby traps or other sabotaged items in the apartment.”

So they negligently got trapped by someone who set the fire on purpose and the victim is at fault.

The cynical among you may think this was filed because Guo is in jail and declared bankruptcy so they can’t get money out of him. I can’t help it if your mind works that way.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see if the current FBI defends the former FBI here. Joe Biden, after all, is responsible for everything.

I’m guessing this story gets weirder.

Trigger warning. Stop reading here if you’re easily embarrassed.

If you’re still with me, the following is the entire text of a concurring opinion in a case called Olympus Spa v. Armstrong submitted by a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge: “Regarding the dissenting opinion of Judge VanDyke: We are better than this.”

Want to know what Judge VanDyke had to say?

Here’s the first sentence from his dissent: “This is a case about swinging dicks.”

I hate to indulge in stereotypes but I’m going to anyway: The pearl-clutching judge is an Obama appointee and the dick swinger is a Trump appointee. Make of that what you will.

You have to get down to page 60 of this 105-page set of opinions to find the fun stuff. Persistence pays off.

The dispute, in case you’re wondering, is a classic example of how one small incident involving just one person can snowball into years of litigation and 105 pages of opinions.

It began in 2020 when a transgender woman who hadn’t had a sex change operation was denied service at a nude spa and complained to a state agency. The spa, apparently, had no problem serving transgender women who had gender surgery or lesbians — it just didn’t want a swinging dick upsetting other naked patrons.

(Side note: There’s no explanation as to why the dick would have been swinging. My guess is that this came from the imagination of the Trump judge.)

There was no deluge of transgender dicks demanding spa treatment — in fact, there was some controversy as to whether the person who complained had even shown up at the spa.

No matter how you feel about this, there was a pretty easy solution: Give the woman a towel.

The story should have ended there.