So, because of that, unfortunately, we were forced to file a federal lawsuit in the federal court in the Southern District of New York. And that's the lawsuit that John O'Kelly is helping us with. We're very fortunate to have John as my co-counsel on that case. That case has been pending now for a while. The purpose of it is pretty simple. There are two components. One is that we want a disclosure from the U.S. Attorney, either to us or to the court—hopefully to the public—that our evidence has been given to the grand jury on the demolition of the Trade Center buildings on 9/11. Or it has not. Either way, we want to know.
And if the answer is the latter—that the evidence was not given to the grand jury—then the second part of our lawsuit would become active. Otherwise it would be moot. But the second part is: If there has been no compliance with the grand jury statute by the U.S. Attorney, then we want the court to order compliance. Which means we want a court order requiring the U.S. Attorney to hand our petition and the evidence we submitted to the special grand jury. So that's what that lawsuit is about. And if you're ready, I can tell you the status, but you may have some questions.
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Okay, so the short version, Andy, is that once we filed the mandamus complaint in the Southern District of New York's District Court, the government had 60 days to answer it. And normally what an answer is is a paragraph-by-paragraph reply to each allegation in the complaint, either admitting or denying each allegation. However, in this case, instead of doing that, which I think would have served the public interest better, what the government in its wisdom chose to do was to file a letter brief, a letter motion, with the local U.S. District Court judge asking for a conference, according to local procedure, before they file what they anticipate filing, which is a motion to dismiss our complaint on procedural grounds without getting to the merits of whether we're right or wrong about their duties and their compliance.
John and I have responded to the government's letter motion with a letter brief of our own. And so both sides are now put before the U.S. District Court. What I would call the gist of the government's anticipated argument is that we lack standing to bring this suit and that the statute that we're trying to enforce isn't really enforceable by citizens. And even if it was, there's no mandatory duty imposed on the government. So that's the short version of the government's position. They took pains to say that they were not saying in their letter brief to the judge that they had not given our evidence to the grand jury and they were not saying that they had.
What they were saying was we didn't have a right to find out, basically, through this lawsuit. So we responded and basically said the opposite: That we have standing. There's actually a case in the Southern District of New York where someone did this before and did a submission to a U.S. Attorney of evidence they wanted given to a grand jury, and that was not done. So that person sued, and the District court actually found, in a very well-analyzed decision, that the citizen reporting the crime had standing to bring the lawsuit to enforce the duty to give the evidence to the grand jury. And so we explained this to the judge in our short letter brief, and [explained] that the law was enforceable by two different federal laws.
One was the Administrative Procedures Act, which allows citizens to sue a federal agency that fails to perform a mandatory duty under law or that unreasonably delays the action required of it under law.
We also sued under the federal mandamus statute, which allows citizens to sue federal officials for failure to perform a mandatory duty. The judge looked at both of the filings and then canceled the planned status conference. He didn't say why he canceled it, but my guess is he had his questions answered by the two written submissions. So he's now basically issued is a briefing order—a briefing schedule.
So the government is now planning to file its formal Motion to Dismiss about ten days from now. The court gave us a fairly short time to respond—only seven days. And I think the reason for that short time frame was that we told the court we anticipated filing an amended complaint after the Motion to Dismiss is filed, which is our right under the federal rules of procedure. And that would add, we hope, new plaintiffs, including one or more 9/11 family members. We're actually hoping that Architects & Engineers [for 9/11 Truth] will join us in that lawsuit. Currently, Richard Gage is already a co-plaintiff. But we're hoping that [the judge] would consider [adding it] as an organization.
Then we're going to beef up our standing allegations, probably submit some standing affidavits to support our position more clearly for the judge's benefit, and articulate as clearly as we can our legal claims. Once we file that amended complaint, it essentially moots the Motion to Dismiss that the government will have by that time already filed, because we have a right to amend, and the amendment replaces the original. So, because the government's first motion was targeted to the original complaint, it now becomes moot. And the government has to refile a new motion if it chooses.
[The government] doesn't have to do this, but we predict they probably will. But once they read our amended complaint, if they still find, in their own mind, that their standing and other arguments are correct, they'll probably just re-file their Motion to Dismiss. At that point, we'll file our opposition. And eventually we'll get a decision from the Southern District of New York District Court on whether we have a right to proceed with this lawsuit or not.
If we do have that right, it'll get very interesting pretty quickly, because the government will have to respond to the merits of our allegations about their duty to give the evidence to the grand jury and whether they have done so or not, which is something they don't seem to want to disclose. If the district court decides we don't have the right to pursue this lawsuit, we will then bring an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and see if the Court of Appeals can establish our right to proceed. So that's where that case is standing at the moment
