Colin Kaepernick Has Filed a Grievance Against NFL for Collusion

There's not much to be said about this one except, do you think he's right? Post a comment below.

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has filed a grievance against the NFL, alleging the owners colluded to keep him out of the league because of his protests during the playing of the national anthem before games.

The grievance alleges the league's owners "colluded to deprive Mr. Kaepernick of employment rights in retaliation for Mr. Kaepernick's leadership and advocacy for equality and social justice."

The NFL did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Instead of filing the grievance through the NFL Players Association, Kaepernick has hired attorney Mark Geragos, who has represented several high-profile clients, including Michael Jackson, former NASCAR driver Jeremy Mayfield and musician Chris Brown.

Geragos said in a statement given first to ABC News Sunday night that the grievance was filed "only after pursuing every possible avenue with all NFL teams and their executives."

Kaepernick's goal, he said, was just to be treated fairly and to return to playing football in the NFL, "the league he performed at the highest level for."


The NFL Players Association said in a statement that it had been in contact with Kaepernick for the past year about his options, but only today learned he had decided to file the grievance, through media reports.

"Our union has a duty to assist Mr. Kaepernick as we do all players and we will support him," the statement said, adding that the union is scheduling a call with his advisers for early this week.

Kaepernick, who has not been with an NFL team since he severed his contract with the 49ers in March, began his silent protest of kneeling during the anthem in the 2016 preseason. He told the media he was protesting against the treatment of blacks in the United States.

Some other NFL players followed his lead during the 2016 season, drawing a mixed response from football fans and the general public, with some supporting the protest and others not.

But Kaepernick's most visible impact seemed to come at the start of this season, even though he himself had not been signed to a team, after President Trump at a campaign-style rally in Alabama slammed NFL players who participate in the protest.

from Business Insider

The president told the crowd at the rally on Sept. 22 that teams should fire players who kneel during the anthem.

from USA  Today

In response at NFL games over the next few days, many more players kneeled during the anthem or locked arms with teammates and in some cases also with their team's owners.

In his statement, Geragos did not name the president, but referred to Trump's call for protesting players to be fired, saying: "Athletes should not be denied employment based on partisan political provocation by the executive branch of our government. Such a precedent threatens all patriotic Americans and harkens back to our darkest days as a nation."


ABC News' Sunny Hostin and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in this blog are strictly those of the blog author, and in no way express the views of ABC, USA Today, Business Insider, Blogger, Google or any other entity (i.e. news services) whose content and/or services may have been accessed for use in this blog. 

Remember Your Mother/Grandmother Saying "Everything Comes Clean In the Wash!"?

I always thought it was funny, but when I became an adult I began to understand what she meant. When you pour water on a dirty shirt, the dirt loosens. When the shirt is covered with water, the more vigorously you agitate the water, and the hotter you make it, the more of the dirt is dislodged, and eventually all of the material underneath is revealed.

The 'material' underneath isn't always going to be the clean, glistening, shiny white you may be expecting to see though. Sometimes, so much mud and muck has been ground in for so long, that the material is heavily stained, and will not come completely clean.

#Notmypresident Trump has a long history of throwing dirt, not just trying to 'stain' his opponents with it but also trying to cover himself up so that no one will try to dig too deeply. Evidently, in his desire to 'muddy the waters', he splashed some of his own people along the way.....

The Trump campaign’s attempted collusion

Donald Trump Jr. (Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

By Editorial Board July 10 at 7:47 PM

FOR MONTHS, the Donald Trump campaign and then the Trump administration not only have cast doubt on the facts of Russian interference in the 2016 election but also have denied there was contact between Russian agents and Trump surrogates. We now know that this insistence was at best highly misleading. Top Trump officials met with a Kremlin-allied Russian lawyer in June 2016 — and they did so with the express hope of receiving compromising information about their Democratic rival. This represents a grave new set of facts in the ongoing investigation into possible Russian-Trump collusion.

The meeting, as first reported by the New York Times, took place after Mr. Trump had clinched the Republican presidential nomination but before the convention. Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who has campaigned against Western-imposed sanctions on Russia, met with Mr. Trump’s closest advisers: his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and the Trump campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort. The meeting was suggested, as The Post reported Monday, by a Russian pop star whose family has business ties both to the Russian government and to Mr. Trump.

For months, officials failed to disclose this meeting. When the record was corrected, they then mischaracterized its purpose. Mr. Trump Jr. and Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, passed it off as “a nothing meeting,” as Mr. Priebus said Sunday, that was “apparently about Russian adoption” — meaning about a controversy over whether foreigners could adopt Russian orphans. But hours later, after further reporting by the Times, the younger Mr. Trump admitted that he attended because he had been promised damaging material about the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Times further reported Monday night that he was informed that any such material “was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.”

It will be up to federal prosecutors to determine whether federal conspiracy laws or election laws barring campaigns from soliciting help from foreigners have been implicated. What we already can say is that the plausibility of the Trump camp’s narrative, in which any underhanded Russian assistance came without the campaign’s witting participation, is eroding. The president’s associates must now explain interactions with Russians that they previously insisted never took place.

Mr. Trump Jr. claimed that he did not know the name of the person he would be meeting. His statement on the matter also indicated that, upon learning with whom he was meeting, he ended the encounter after it “became clear that she had no meaningful information.” If he had the proper concern about foreign influence on the election system, not to mention election law, he would have immediately ended any meeting premised on the offer of campaign help when learning the other party was a Russian national.

The latest revelations only intensify the questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey after Mr. Comey, according to his own testimony, declined to pledge personal loyalty to the president. They also intensify the urgency of a careful Senate vetting of Mr. Trump’s nominee to replace Mr. Comey, Christopher Wray, who will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Mr. Wray must commit to the independence of the FBI by detailing any conversations he had with Mr. Trump, and in particular whether the president asked him for his loyalty. He must be able to say that he made no such commitment. And he must promise that he will do everything to cooperate with, and nothing to impede, the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

Disclaimer: All opinions contained in this blog are those of the author, and no one else.