I watched a large part of this 3-hour 2024 interview with Daniel Sheehan. Sheehan makes a blizzard of claims of varying degrees of plausibility. I didn't bother fact-checking many, because he asserted them all with absurdly high self-assurance, even though some of them stood out as obviously implausible. The ones I checked were:
1. JFK was shot from the grassy knoll. This of course was so thoroughly refuted by the Zapruder film and JFK autopsy that for many decades the less-silly conspiracy theorists have felt compelled to claim that both the film and body had been tampered with. (They don't bother to explain why the best shooter would be so badly mis-positioned that the body would need later tampering.) But there is a third debunk for this claim: Zapruder would have seen any shooter behind the fence on the grassy knoll. See for yourself with these images https://t.co/fIkurHrWUS. Anybody who confidently posits a grassy knoll shooter just isn't serious about the case.
2. Betty Hill's star map authenticates her alien abduction story. No, that star map was already dubious by 1980 (see Carl Sagan on Cosmos) and thoroughly debunked by the 2000s. See the summary at https://armaghplanet.com/betty-hills-ufo-star-map-the-truth.html.
3. Yamashita's gold. Sheehan claims that 33B ounces ($1.2T/$32/oz) of Yamashita's gold were spirited from the Philippines to Switzerland to finance nefarious "robber baron" schemes. But the known world supply of all above-the-ground gold is only 6B ounces. It's profoundly unserious to claim that somebody has an extra 33B ounces.
4. The "1934" FDR court-packing scheme was about corporate right of contract. Aside from the date being 3yrs off, this is still just demonstrably wrong. Just read e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era#Ending. Or just ask your favorite AI:
Was the Lochner Court's resistance to New Deal legislation based on the commerce clause and how much contract rights (regardless of corporate involvement) were protected from government police powers by the 14th amendment? Or was it more based on corporate personhood?
Sheehan's fourth claim here is not as kooky as the three above, but if Sheehan fancies himself a constitutional scholar then he should know better. (As a Libertarian I will half-agree with Sheehan by saying the problem with corporate law is not personhood but rather limited liability. However, any rights-respecting scheme to park unlimited liability on some officers or shareholders would ultimately not make much difference, because of contractual arbitrage.)
2025-02-22 Update:
Sheehan's CV says: "Served as Co-Counsel before Supreme Court with James Goodall (New York Times), Alexander Bickel (Yale Law School), and Floyd Abrams (Cahill, Gordon, et al.)." This claim is at best a deliberate exaggeration.
- Sheehan misspells the name of NY Times general counsel James Goodale.
- The district court opinion United States v. New York Times Company, 328 F. Supp. 324 (S.D.N.Y. 1971) lists as the NY Times' counsel only Alexander Bickel, Floyd Abrams, and William Heggarty.
- The Supreme Court opinion 403 U.S. 317 lists as the NY Times' counsel only Alexander Bickel.
- The NY Times search portal for the case finds several mentions each for Bickel, Abrams, and Goodale, but none for Daniel Sheehan.
- A Google search for "new york times" "goodale" "abrams" "bickel" finds almost 200 hits. If you add "Daniel Sheehan" to that search, it finds only Sheehan's own CV and a couple of Reddit posts debunking it. (You can't just add "Sheehan" to the search, because Neil Sheehan was the NY Times reporter who broke the case.)
- Floyd Abrams reportedly confirmed in 2024 that "Dan was a young associate that did work on the Pentagon Papers case". Even if that's true, Sheehan clearly is exaggerating and misleading when he claims he was "Co-Counsel before Supreme Court with" the case's lead attorneys.
