Andrew Kreig2013-05-26T05:45:12-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=andrew-kreigCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Andrew KreigGood old fashioned elbow grease.GOP 2012 Contender Roemer Decries Free Trade, DC Political Corruptiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10101582011-10-14T15:00:07-04:002011-12-14T05:12:02-05:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/Republican 2012 Presidential candidate Buddy Roemer ramped up his reform message Oct. 13 with the kind of protectionist and anti-Wall Street language not usually heard from his party peers, much less bankers.
In a 30-minute interview on Washington Update, the public affairs radio show I co-host, Roemer sharply criticized the U.S. free trade bills with South Korea, Panama and Colombia that Congress passed this week with wide Republican support and President Obama's encouragement.
Roemer, a Harvard MBA degree-holder, called the agreements bad for the U.S. economy and workforce, and typical of what he's been calling corrupt special interest control of Washington. Also, he has criticized the Obama jobs proposal, which failed to survive a Senate cloture vote this week.
It's that kind of free-swinging commentary along with his varied record that prompts me to share these comments here. After all, lots of candidates are giving lots of interviews.
But Roemer is the only one this cycle who, for example, has been both a governor and a congressman -- and more important is pounding at many of his own party's standard positions as well as the opposition's, but isn't included in the TV debates.
Roemer described how he made the decision with his family to return to politics for the Presidential race "because our country is in trouble."
The former Louisiana governor and four-term congressman said he became a Republican when 97% of that state's office holders were Democrats, leading to what he called "corrupt" one-party rule. He later became a businessman, leading a bank that he describes as highly successful with an innovative, community-based strategy.
He is now based in New Hampshire much of the time, preparing for its primary. He said he decided at the beginning of the race to forgo any contributions over $100 and all political action committee (PAC) donations from corporations, unions, etc. He is the only prominent Presidential candidate from either major party to make such a pledge.
Organizers of Republican TV debates have excluded him from that exposure for what he describes as vague and oft-shifting reasons. Roemer, a recent guest on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, tries to see humor in what he calls a "Catch 22": Some pollsters exclude him from their surveys, whose results are then used by TV debate organizers as a basis for debate exclusion.
Even so, he says he is committed to his reform strategy. He finds encouragement in GOP rival Herman Cain's rise from 3% in poll support this summer to become the top-rated GOP choice in a poll announced Oct. 13 by the Wall Street Journal. On the radio show, Roemer addressed many issues during his 30-minute interview beginning at 17 minutes past the hour. The live show is now on the archive of the MTL business radio network that my co-host Scott Draughon founded nearly decade ago.
Roemer said earlier this week that his goal in traveling from his New Hampshire campaign headquarters to New York City this week to support the "Occupy Wall Street" protest was "to listen to, and to speak with, my fellow Americans who are fed up as I am with the corruption that is occurring before our very-own eyes."
Roemer served in Congress from 1981-1988 and was Louisiana's Governor from 1988-1992. Since leaving public office, he has been CEO of Business First Bank.
"Wall Street continues to be a major player in the corrupt game of politics," Roemer said about his trip to New York. "They did not create the problem or the game. They are just making it permanent and worse. Our President and Congress like to pat themselves on the back for supposedly 'regulating' Wall Street. Yet a week later they take their money at $35,000 a plate."
"I was born," he says, "just not yesterday."
"Americans ought to unite together," he continues, "and demand an end to the corruption and greed that poisons our political and financial systems; Tea Partiers; and Occupiers; Democrats and Republicans -- for this Movement is an American movement and is not going away."]]>Spy vs. Spy As Hackers Square Off Over DC Dirty Trickstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8239702011-02-17T14:32:57-05:002011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/sell political dirty tricks services to hurt critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Bank of America.
Blogs (including by intended victims) and specialty publications provided most of the early in-depth coverage after the hacker group Anonymous announced that it had hijacked 40,000 emails from contractor HBGary Federal because the latter was compiling dossiers to hurt Anonymous, among others.
What's new this week is that traditional broadcasters and newspapers are increasingly digging into the story, which is complicated by government and media antipathy to WikiLeaks and hackers. Not surprisingly, the rebellious free-thinkers fare poorly in comparisons to the nation's commerce and homeland security giants who are closely intertwined with many media companies.
Also, the federal government is using at least two grand juries to gather evidence against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Anonymous. The latter group of hackers, who keep their identities secret, are suspected of disrupting operations of such Internet service companies as PayPal and Amazon.com in retaliation for their halt of customer services to WikiLeaks.
The increasingly powerful Republican fund-raiser and media pundit Karl Rove last August raised the ante against WikiLeaks by going on television to urge the U.S. government to try Assange for disclosing secret cables. Nearly two months ago, my Justice Integrity Project documented here on Huffington Post that Rove is not simply a pundit and huge Republican fund-raiser empowered by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, but was listed also on his website as having worked as a consultant for Sweden's governing Moderate Party. The New York Times, which published some of the WikiLeaks revelations last year, is among WikiLeaks-critics also -- as illustrated by Executive Editor Bill Keller's harsh criticisms of the organization recently in a Sunday magazine article and in remarks at the National Press Club.
But an apparent plot by big business to destroy political enemies with confidential data makes this a dramatic story, albeit largely relegated to the inside pages. News value also comes from the sheer audacity (or foolishness) of the players.
"You don't mess with Anonymous," the hackers wrote on HBGary's website as they hijacked some 40,000 of the contractor's emails, thereby foiling its proposed sale of other data. "You have blindly charged into the Anonymous hive, a hive from which you've tried to steal honey. Did you think the bees would not defend it? Well here we are. You've angered the hive, and now you are being stung."
The Chamber denies wrongdoing. But emails from HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr and his colleagues suggest that the plot was not supposed to be final until sale of the information to the chamber's law firm Hunton and Williams. Further, a law firm can retain confidentiality (at least initially) under a claim of lawyer-client privilege.
Also, the disgraced contractors seem from the emails to have obtained some of their data from their government work helping implement oversight of the public's communications, a process enabled by the controversial Patriot Act now up for reauthorization. This creates large questions: Who has the power and motive to monitor government contractors if their government contacts, perhaps overly friendly as part of Washington's notorious "revolving door," won't protect the public's privacy against political retribution? Must we rely for oversight on anonymous hackers -- who themselves apparently violate the law?
What's obvious to insiders but seldom articulated in general interest publications is that such Spy vs. Spy "games," while perhaps astonishing when they are revealed, are far from unique to this scandal. Famous political reporters typically voice bromides about public moods or trends without probing the arsenal of dirty tricks the pros can use to change public perceptions.
Our work at the Justice Integrity Project provides us with information about such dirty tricks, sometimes involving major political figures and their donors. The ability -- and indeed eagerness -- of some contractors, politicos and of course the government itself to compile dossiers on opponents vastly dwarfs anything that reporters do can do. HBGary's proposed seven-figure monthly retainer, while never received, suggests that the market for such services vastly exceeds what reporters or government officials earn for similar research and publications work.
Illustrating further the complexities in public policy is the ironic contrast of two important news stories on Feb. 15. As reflected by Washington Post stories, Secretary of State Clinton delivered a major address warning governments not to interfere with Internet freedom. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors argued on the same day a few miles away in Virginia that unprecedented snooping into the personal social network relationships of targets associated with WikiLeaks is routine law enforcement.
To provide a range of news coverage, it's helpful to draw on a range of interpretive columns that go beyond the mainstream, of course. Nate Anderson at Ars Technica provides excellent analysis, supplemented on Feb. 15, "Spy games: Inside the convoluted plot to bring down WikiLeaks." Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake assembled useful charts of the major players. In retrospect, now is the time also to read the 2009 announcement in Security Dark Reading, "HBGary Launches HBGary Federal."
Our project has not been successful in obtaining comment from our inquiries to HBGary Federal's CEO or his colleagues. Neither have we received a response from Hunton and Williams, a law firm of the Chamber implicated by emails as working with contractors to plot against Chamber critics. The emails suggest that targets of the plot included individual bloggers as well as Democratic-oriented organizations, including unions.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the U.S. Senate announced that its Judiciary Committee has created a new subcommittee led by the party's Minnesota Sen. Al Franken to oversee Internet-related privacy and security issues.
The ranking minority member is Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a Republican who frequently fights conventional politics in advocating personal freedoms. Other senators on the subcommittee include: Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. The latter for many years has been in the forefront of state attorney generals in pro-consumer class actions.
"The boom of new technologies over the last several years has made it easier to keep in touch with family, organize a community and start a business," said Franken on Monday. "It has also put an unprecedented amount of personal information into the hands of large companies that are unknown and unaccountable to the American public. As chairman of this new subcommittee, I will try to make sure that we can reap the rewards of new technology while also protecting Americans' right to privacy."
If that's any indicator we can predict this is not the last we'll hear about HBGary and its services, at least in the Senate.
]]>Rove Suspected In Swedish-U.S. Political Prosecution of WikiLeakstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7987372010-12-19T01:52:03-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
Rove has advised Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt for the past two years after resigning as Bush White House political advisor in mid-2007. Rove's resignation followed the scandalous Bush mid-term political purge of nine of the nation's 93 powerful U.S. attorneys.
These days, Sweden and the United States are apparently undertaking a political prosecution as audacious and important as those by the notorious "loyal Bushies" earlier this decade against U.S. Democrats.
The U.S. prosecution of WikiLeaks, if successful, could criminalize many kinds of investigative news reporting about government affairs, not just the WikiLeaks disclosures that are embarrassing Sweden as well as the Bush and Obama administrations. Authorities in both countries are setting the stage with pre-indictment sex and spy smears against WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, plus an Interpol manhunt.
"This all has Karl's signature," a reliable political source told me a week and a half ago in encouraging our Justice Integrity Project to investigate Rove's Swedish connection. "He must be very happy. He's right back in the middle of it. He's making himself valuable to his new friends, seeing the U.S. government doing just what he'd like ─ and screwing his opponents big-time."
WikiLeaks created a problem for Sweden and its prime minister, at left above, by revealing a 2008 cable disclosing that its executive branch asked American officials to keep intelligence-gathering "informal" to avoid required Parliamentary scrutiny. That secret was among the 251,000 U.S. cables obtained by WikiLeaks and relayed to the New York Times and four other media partners. They have so far reported about 1,300 of the secret cables after trying for months to vet them through U.S. authorities.
Assange, a nomadic 39-year-old Australian, sought political haven in Sweden during this planning. Also, he fell into the arms of two Swedish beauties who offered to put him up at their apartments on his speaking trip to their country last August. Now free on bond, he is likely to be extradited from the United Kingdom to Sweden to answer questions about his one-night stands.
Swedish prosecutors initially dropped their investigation of assault complaints. But the decision was reversed. Far more ominously than the sex probe, Swedes could ship Assange to the United States.
The New York Times reports that the Obama Justice Department is devising espionage conspiracy charges under an innovative use of spy law to persuade an alleged WikiLeaks source, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, now being held pre-trial in harsh solitary confinement conditions, to testify against Assange. Attacks on WikiLeaks are from many sides. Among them are the top congressional Homeland Security leaders: Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent, and New York Republican Rep. Peter King.
Legal Schnauzer blogger Roger Shuler scooped me on the story about Rove's Swedish work in a Dec. 14 column, "Is Karl Rove Driving the Effort to Prosecute Julian Assange?" But a big part of our role as web journalists should be following up on each other's work.
Shuler is an expert on how Rove-era "Loyal Bushies" undertook political prosecutions against Democrats on trumped up corruption charges across the Deep South, including against former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, his state's leading Democrat. The Siegelman case has turned into most notorious U.S. political prosecution of the decade, as readers here well know. It altered that state's politics and improved business opportunities for companies well-connected to Bush, Rove and their state GOP supporters.
Ultimately, the House Judiciary Committee's oversight questioning of Rove in July 2009 turned out to be a whitewash. The probe was crippled by restrictions on format that had been brokered by the Obama White House and, more importantly, by an unwillingness of House Democrats to risk antagonizing Rove and his backers by asking obvious questions. Call it speculation, but the federal bribery charges that imprisoned the wife of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) surely deterred him from building a thorough case regarding Rove's relationship with the DOJ, or at least calling relevant witnesses from the Justice Department and elsewhere for public testimony.
At this stage, the specifics of Rove's Swedish work for Reinfeldt, a former Council of Europe president nicknamed "The Ronald Reagan of Europe," remain in doubt for outsiders.
Has Rove simply provided routine political advice and fund-raising counsel for Reinfeldt's successful re-election in September? Perhaps Rove gave media advice, based on his work with Murdoch-owned Fox News and the Wall Street Journal and many other traditional broadcasting and print outlets. Rove's patrons at those media outlets, perhaps not coincidentally, tend to disdain independent, web-based journalists who can disrupt their information gatekeeper role by going directly to documents instead of relying upon high-level contacts, or at least the willingness of bureaucrats to return phone calls.
Or has Rove drawn on any opposition research and dirty tricks skills that earned him such nicknames as "Turd-Blossom" from former President Bush and "Bush's Brain" from others?
One way to learn is to ask Rove himself, which I did via his chief of staff on Dec. 14. I attached for convenience the Shuler column about Sweden and in its inevitable allusions to Rove's prior work.
As readers here well know, Siegelman's convictions came only after years of pre-trial prosecutorial smears, witness sexual blackmail, and a bizarre trial before a judge enriched on the side by Bush contracts for the judge's closely-held company. No one column can encompass at reasonable length every important abuse in this tawdry, nearly decade-long tale. But my Huffington Post blog from last April, "Siegelman Judge Asked To Recuse Now, With Kagan, Rove Opposing Oversight," links to the scandals cited above.
Then, all of the wrongdoing was covered up by whitewashes by the Obama administration and congress. Siegelman, 64, is free on bail after a Supreme Court ruling last June created a new hearing for him in January, perhaps forestalling an Obama recommendation last year that he receive an 20 additional years in prison.
The former governor maintains that his prosecution was orchestrated by Rove and Rove's longtime friend William Canary, whose wife Leura led the state's U.S. attorney office prosecuting Siegelman. Remarkably, the Bush 2001 appointee Leura Canary still runs that Montgomery-based prosecution office more than two years after Obama's election, much to the horror of Siegelman's supporters nationwide. Siegelman is pictured below, including in a photo from his imprisonment. Authorities initially denied bail during appeal and put him in solitary confinement that prevented contact with family and the media after his 2007 sentencing, which was largely for reappointing to a state board in 1999 a donor to the non-profit Alabama Education Foundation.
Rove denies improper involvement in Siegelman's prosecution, and has not yet responded to my inquiry about Sweden. For reader convenience, I'll note that his memoir Courage and Consequence published this year contains no mention of Sweden or his client Reinfeldt. Rove's book also denies that he was forced from the White House over the firing scandal or that he had any improper role in the Siegelman case.
Whether or not Rove advised Sweden on how to go after Assange, the WikiLeaks revelations have brought into plain view dramatic opinions that often cross conventional political divisions.
Feminist scholar, rape victim and longtime volunteer rape counselor Naomi Wolf, for example, describes the sex assault investigation as "theater" designed to bring Assange into U.S. custody on more serious charges, not to enforce the law in routine fashion. "How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden's treatment of Julian Assange is a form of theater?" she wrote. "Because I know what happens in rape accusations against men that don't involve the embarrassing of powerful governments."
Yet a New York Times report Dec. 18 implies a more straightforward investigation via leak of a 68-page confidential Swedish police report. Earlier, more context was reported in a Daily Mail article and a Crikey blog.
Regarding the espionage allegations, we see impassioned opinions that seemingly conflict with career affiliations:
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, a Texas Republican and tea party hero, spoke on the House floor defending the right of WikiLeaks to cooperate with conventional news organization to publish secret cables.
Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: 'A dead man can't leak stuff ... there's only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch."
Former CIA agent Ray McGovern rebuked CNN anchor Don Lemon for disparaging WikiLeaks as "pariah," urged Lemon and his network to emulate Assange by reporting more such news.
But there actually is a pattern. Defenders of the WikiLeaks role tend to see a commitment to democracy in fighting for its values in the U.S., not in overseas military actions to fight "terror." In varying ways, Arianna Huffington, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Parry and Scott Horton argue compellingly that Mideast wars are the real issue with WikiLeaks, and that spy conspiracy charges baseless under our law endanger all investigative reporting on national security issues, not simply WikiLeaks. Such threats against the First Amendment coincide with broken Obama campaign promises on a host of justice issues.
So why does the Obama administration treat Rove and his GOP allies with kid gloves? Why are so many in the conventional media so passive to threats to our historic due process and First Amendment freedoms?
A thorough answer requires at least a separate column for documentation. For now, let's just say that a lot of opponents of WikiLeaks seem to be in a big bed together, shouting, "Terror! Terror! Terror! Fear! Fear! Fear!" ]]>Terror and the TSAtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7864342010-11-20T17:16:04-05:002011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
"Groping people at the airport doesn't solve our problem," says Congressman Ron Paul. The Texas Republican last week introduced a bill forbidding airport security agents from actions that would be illegal if undertaken by a private citizen.
Also, the congressman attacked former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, above, an early advocate of the new equipment. Chertoff's security consulting company has secretly promoted Rapiscan Systems, one of two manufacturers winning federal contracts for at least $165 million apiece.
Paul says the government's current plan is so foolish that pilots required to carry guns have been "groped" like ordinary travelers at security checkpoints. Similarly, the conservative RedState reports that civilian airport security in Indianapolis searched U.S. soldiers returning from Afghanistan to confiscate such threats as a nail-clipper -- even though each soldier was carrying an assault rifle, as required.
Complaints come from across the political spectrum. HuffPost is netcasting an MSNBC report about a U.S. Airways flight attendant humiliated at Charlotte's airport in North Carolina by being forced to remove her breast prosthesis for inspection by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
This is crazy. Even for a docile traveler, these searches waste vast amounts of time and, in the aggregate, taxpayer money. For those more sensitive, it's also an unnecessary invasion of privacy to use high-tech radio waves to visually strip down children, nuns and those with intimate conditions such as penile implants or colostomy bags. Additionally, some may say the health dangers of radiation from scanners is "low" but so is the danger of being on a plane with a bomber.
In sum, the government's ramped-up searches make scant sense except to stoke pointless fears and animosities, and then to reassure us with other Big Brother initiatives.
Who benefits? Paul, among others, point to such fear-mongers as Chertoff, whose security company secretly worked for Rapiscan while he was telling reporters how much the country needed such equipment. L-3 Communications is the other manufacturer, with a $165 million contract that's $8 million less than Rapiscan's. The CEO of Rapiscan's parent company, OSI Systems, accompanied President Obama on his recent trip to India, underscoring the bipartisan political ties in the nation's capital involving such contracts and global deal-making.
Chertoff's successor, Secretary Janet Napolitano, has implemented and applauded the full-body scanner deployment even though she and her staff haven't met the privacy concerns of the House Homeland Security Committee leadership. Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) wrote a blunt letter Nov. 19 to the TSA requesting answers to his September request for documentation about privacy compliance, as reported by FireDogLake. Thompson wrote:
Before implementing this new, more invasive pat-down procedure, as a preliminary matter, TSA should have had a conversation with the American public about the need for these changes.
Commentator Michael Collins recently summarized why there's scant logic in the official explanation that the Dec. 25 "underwear bomber" who flew to Detroit requires this heightened airport scrutiny. Critics also include the Government Accounting Office in a report last spring.
Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom professed by most Washington leaders is that these radical new procedures are needed and supported by the public. Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a Democratic member of the Senate Homeland Security and Armed Services Committees, last week called the controversial TSA searches "love-pats." Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent portrayed above at left, last week gave a video interview to MSNBC saying why he favors passenger pat-downs that are part of the new procedures, especially for those avoiding the scanners.
In such ways, Washington's leadership is reckless with our rights and craven in abusing its budget powers. They are politically short-sighted also, even if a recent poll shows that 81% of the public approves the new security. But such polling is pointless when most haven't yet undergone the procedures, which are just getting underway -- or when the new procedures appear to violate basic constitutional rights that shouldn't be determined by polls anyway.
Meanwhile, Rep. Paul, above at right, introduced legislation against the new scanning equipment and denounced its manufacturers for exploiting public fears. "We are not safer, and we also know there are individuals who are making money off this," he said, continuing:
Michael Chertoff! I mean here's the guy who was the head of the TSA, selling the equipment. And the equipment's questionable. We don't even know if it works, and it may well be dangerous to our health.
Paul encouraged a so-called "opt out day" over the Thanksgiving holiday and introduced the American Travel Dignity Act to ensure that TSA personnel couldn't have immunity from what might be crimes without their government authority. As evident in a C-SPAN video, he said on the House floor:
I see what has happened to the American people is that we have accepted the notion that we should be treated like cattle....We've had it. I think this whole idea of an 'opt out' date is just great. We ought to opt out and make the point. Get somebody to watch it, take a camera. It's time for the American people to stand up, shrug off the shackles of our government, of TSA at the airport.
Questions remain, of course. No one wants to see terrorists blow up planes. So, we need to ask tough questions about the effectiveness and loss of rights involved in alternative measures, such as profiling passengers in advance. Another difficult issue is measuring the long-term health hazards from low-levels of radiation. We need to avoid health fear-mongering or whitewashing dangers. Finally, there's no point in scape-goating low-level TSA personnel. That's like a student blaming a cafeteria server for the food quality when decisions are made at the administration level.
So the biggest question is this: Why are DC politicians still so out of touch even after the mid-term elections? We, the Sheeple, must set them straight.
]]>Justice Probe of CIA Torture Evidence: Another Whitewash?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7819202010-11-10T18:58:40-05:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
The DOJ compromised its probe from the beginning in 2008 by assigning it to Connecticut federal prosecutor John Durham, whom courts have twice implicated in suppressing evidence. In one of those cases, a federal judge attacked him also in 2003 for what she described as "severe misconduct" during cross-examination.
As background on this week's case, the DOJ announced Nov. 9 that it would not file obstruction of justice charges against CIA personnel for destroying 92 videotapes showing CIA interrogation of terrorism suspects in 2005 using waterboarding.
"This decision is stunning: There is ample evidence of a cover-up regarding the destruction of the tapes,'' commented ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. "The Bush administration was instructed by a court of law not to destroy evidence of torture, but that's exactly what it did.''
No one should be surprised.
In today's report, the Justice Integrity Project reveals that U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton in New Haven found Durham was part of a prosecution team that failed to turn over evidence to the defense in a gun possession case. Her 57-page ruling also said Durham then engaged in "severe misconduct" during an "incendiary cross-examination" of a key defense witness. As a result, the government dropped its charges against the defendant, Anthony Washington.
Another of Durham's controversial cases was the prosecution of Connecticut businessman Charles Spadoni on corruption charges. The case also compromises the credibility of Durham's Connecticut colleague Nora Dannehy, whom the DOJ entrusted to probe potential misconduct by her colleagues in orchestrating the DOJ's notorious political purges in 2006.
Let's recap revelations about these two prosecutors from our investigative report broken last July in Nieman Watchdog and reprinted promptly in the Huffington Post. Under Durham's overall supervision at their office, Dannehy was the lead prosecutor against the businessman Spadoni during his 2003 trial on campaign finance-related charges. In 2008, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the major convictions because prosecutors improperly suppressed evidence.
Shortly after the ruling, Bush Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey, above left, named Dannehy as the special DOJ investigator into potential lawbreaking in DOJ' s unprecedented mid-term firing of U.S. attorneys in 2006 for political reasons.
She primarily focused on one firing, that of New Mexico U.S. attorney David Iglesias. She made no apparent effort during her two-year investigation to interview the victims around the country of politically motivated decision-making. In July, the DOJ under Mukasey's successor Eric Holder, above right, announced that her confidential report showed no basis for criminal charges against anyone.
The probes by Durham and Dannehy illustrate features that reappear in other major DOJ internal investigations of scandals. The probes are announced with fanfare and assigned to investigators with seemingly sterling credentials, but who may be compromised or otherwise incentivized in ways known only to insiders. The investigations are inherently secret, often with hidden groundrules that foreclose speaking to the best witnesses, and can stretch for years until public attention dwindles. Then they end with scant results.
Harper's contributor Scott Horton is among those who see this kind of pattern, as in his "Another DOJ Whitewash" column last summer about Dannehy and Durham. But even the best isolated commentaries are no substitute for daily reporting, which is all that most top officials and the public ever see.
And those assigned on a regular basis to law enforcement beats (as I was for five years at the Hartford Courant many years ago in Connecticut) have difficulty these days to go into much depth. In this instance, it would have required identifying, without any hint or encouragement from the DOJ itself, that the leaders of two major internal misconduct investigations might be productively researched via court decisions about their track records.
We've tried without success to obtain comment and any other additional perspective from Durham, Dannehy and DOJ's official spokespeople. They've kept mum.
So, the DOJ's total comment on this important probe apparently is its statement attributable to Public Affairs Director Matthew Miller:
In January 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed Assistant United States Attorney John Durham to investigate the destruction by CIA personnel of videotapes of detainee interrogations. Since that time, a team of prosecutors and FBI agents led by Mr. Durham has conducted an exhaustive investigation into the matter. As a result of that investigation, Mr. Durham has concluded that he will not pursue criminal charges for the destruction of the interrogation videotapes.
That's the official word. Now, let's examine why Durham's results are disturbing:
First, the "harsh interrogations" involving waterboarding at issue are also suspected to be "torture" under longstanding international definitions. Historically, torture can be a war crime. The iconic Nuremberg War Crimes Commission may seem far away in time and space. But Chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert Jackson interrupted his Supreme Court duties for the task. As a plain-speaking and eloquent U.S. attorney general, he earlier provided inspirational guidance to the nation's prosecutors by urging an all-out commitment to fairness. So, it's a big deal on the world stage -- and in conflict with our highest traditions -- if authorities intentionally whitewash culpability in a torture probe.
Second, a government whose CIA agents apparently escape responsibility for destroying evidence remains shameless in throwing the book at private defendants. For example, the Connecticut U.S. attorney's office is still seeking to imprison Spadoni for deleting files from his office computer in 1999. That obstruction of justice count is the only one remaining from his decade-long ordeal after the appeals court vacated his substantive convictions.
Finally, the Justice Department's public relations techniques illustrate lack of accountability and transparency. This is a bipartisan problem. Mukasey, Holder and their staffs portray their internal investigations as tough, thorough, transparent and independent. The reality is the opposite.
These problems go far beyond the CIA videotape and political purge investigations. On Sept. 23, USA Today published an investigative series entitled, "Misconduct at the Justice Department." It documented 201 criminal cases since 1997 "in which judges determined that Justice Department prosecutors -- the nation's most elite and powerful law enforcement officials -- themselves violated laws or ethics rules."
One of those was the Durham case, U.S. v. Washington, where the trial judge found prosecutorial misconduct. USA Today's synopsis did not name Durham, but his role is specified in the judge's opinion and in a Connecticut Law Tribune report on June 23, 2003, entitled, "Attorney's Trial Tactics Impugned: Judge Tosses Conviction."
In fairness, let's note that many prosecutorial decisions are complex, with unpredictable results. Also, prosecutors, the FBI, CIA and other law-enforcers and security personnel protect the public against grave tangible threats, of course. Therefore, our system provides, appropriately enough, immunity from sanctions (and most of the time even embarassment) in all but the most extreme situations. And here any defendants would have undoubtedly mounted an aggressive defense. CIA clandestine officer Jose Rodriguez, who destroyed the tapes, "is truly an American hero," according to Robert Bennett, his powerhouse Washington attorney. Bennett told NPR Justice Department reporter Carrie Johnson, "He's a patriot and all he did was protect his people and his country."
That leads to another consideration. A court's finding of an error or lapse shouldn't unduly tarnish successes over an otherwise positive career.
Those who have worked with Durham and Dannehy, for example, can point to many examples of impressive work. As the top special prosecutor in a previous case examining a federal law enforcement scandal, Durham led the team that convicted John Connolly, a once-illustrious FBI agent. Massachusetts Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf (for whom I was law clerk two decades ago) started the probe after he became suspicious of FBI and prosecutorial misconduct in a series of mob cases. The judge held in-depth hearings in the late 1990s. Durham then won racketeering and obstruction of justice convictions for Connolly, who last year was also sentenced for conspiracy to commit murder.
Wolf, a special assistant to Attorney General Edward Levy in the late 1970s who helped his boss create DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility, is one of several chief federal judges who wrote Holder in 2009 urging him to be more active in ensuring that law enforcement personnel comply with the law.
Regrettably, these and many other reform efforts are disappointing in their results so far. But inaction can't be the alternative. Misconduct by authorities is a disaster for those whose freedom is at stake, and for those committed to a fair and credible justice system.
]]>Peak Oil Experts Fear Big New U.S. Job Losses, Economic Downturntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7589212010-10-12T01:16:57-04:002011-05-25T18:00:30-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
"Deal with public sentiment," he told a rapt audience at the annual convention of Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, USA (ASPO-USA) in urging steps to achieve better-informed voters and consumers. "Half the population doesn't believe in global warming."
Create a "purposeful Congress," was his next theme. "It's the most powerful branch of government [in the Constitution], except it doesn't like to use its power," Nader said. "It likes to send it to the White House."
His final suggestion is drawn from his latest book "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" In a novel-like stretch of imagination, he portrays how real-life billionaires could help preserve the world's economic systems and ecology.
Nader spoke on the last day of a three-day event convening 325 peak oil researchers and other interested parties for the first ASPO-USA convention in the nation's capital. The group argues that after 150 years of oil extraction most major oil exporting nations are well past their supply peaks, defined by scientists as "Peak Oil." The concept also encompasses exports, not simply production peaks.
During the conference kick-off, former CIBC chief economist Jeff Rubin predicted oil production declines soon ranging from 2 to 6% annually. This, he said, will double or triple oil prices on the market, creating further economic slow-downs and job losses beyond those of the recent recession. His wrote a Toronto Globe and Mail column last week on this, "We have run out of oil we can afford to burn."
Conference headliners included former Nixon and Ford administration Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who was also the nation's first Energy Department secretary under the Carter administration. Earlier, he had been CIA director and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission under President Nixon. He is now chairman of Mitre Corp., a major government contractor.
Dr. Schlesinger, above, wrote the forward to the newly released, "The Impending World Energy Mess ─ What It Is and What It Means to You!"
"This is an important book," he said. "Yet despite the importance of the message it will not be a welcome book because its message is unpalatable."
The three co-authors, Dr. Robert Hirsch, Dr. Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, use their more than 100 years combined experience in energy and economics to describe peak oil themes, building on a pioneering research paper they co-authored in 2005. But they illustrate also divisions even in the environmental community by skepticism about the possibility of solving global warming, or its causation by humans.
Regarding issues more specific to oil production, several speakers cited a U.S. Department of Defense study that predicts worldwide peak oil in 2015. In general, the concept of peak oil has found more support among the military and intelligence communities, which need fuel for mobility, than among politicians. The latter, of course, are more vulnerable to short-term election pressures from the vast array of lobbyists with narrow and often short-term or selfish concerns.
Thus, the only federal politician on the speaker program was U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett of a Maryland, the second-ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee. The only elected state official scheduled was Connecticut Assistant House Majority Leader Terry Backer, a Democrat from Stratford who sent regrets because of illness.
ASPO-USA seeks to change this by ramping up its efforts in Washington. This includes its decision to locate in the nation's capital, and open the convention with a Capitol Hill briefing. That session attracted a standing-room-only crowd of 150, primarily congressional staffers and reporters.
ASPO-USA President Jim Baldauf is a Texas oilman in what he calls "a very small way" and a lifelong environmentalist. "Peak Oil will affect every aspect of our life," Baldauf says, as quoted in my HuffPo column last week at the start of the convention. E&E TV's Monica Trauzi interviewed Baldauf on such points, with their dialogue available on video, with a transcript.
"Just about everyone understands peak oil now, from major oil companies to academics to the environmental community," Baldauf said. "It's an endowment of energy that has taken hundreds of millions of years to accumulate and we've ripped through about half of it in 150 years."
But some are eager to pronounce the peak oil group's momentum over, even before most consumers and voters have even become acquainted with supporting data.
After the pioneering researcher Matt Simmons died suddenly this summer, for example, the Wall Street Journal published a blog entitled, "Without Matt Simmons: Has Peak Oil, Well, Peaked?"
As noted above, differences of opinion coexist even within the core group. The range is illustrated further by the major discussion of the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster.
The moderator was Dr. Tad Patzek, chairman of the department of energy and geosystems engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Despite widespread suspicions in the environmental movement about the disaster's causes and clean-up, his panel was balanced and technically oriented. It was far from a bash-BP session.
The diverse interests relevant to the peak oil debate were illustrated also by the conference's impressive total of 40 supporting organizations and publications, far beyond what most energy and communications conventions obtain.
Bianca Jagger provided a non-technical message based on her three decades of prominent human rights advocacy. She and others sought to prepare the public for the risks that could come from $150+ a barrel oil (up from today's price of about $83). Some predicted gas lines similar to those in the 1970s after OPEC embargos but of much longer duration, along with further U.S. job losses as companies reduced production.
Predictions for the rest of the world included warnings that emerging economies in China and India would use their funding for a larger share of the available fuel ramping up gas-station prices in the U.S. to world levels of $7 a gallon and higher, and that have-not Third World nations would face desperate food-production and other calamities.
Against this backdrop, Nader praised what he called as $132 billion in U.S. stimulus funds helping to address such problems here. "There's never been anything like that out of Washington," he said. But he added that too much of the funding money would inevitably be "wasted" because the spending was pushed out to stem a recession, and hasn't been coordinated by the kind of long-term, expert planning needed for optimal efficiency.
As for the mid-term elections? Nader attacked what he called, "The complete absence of any serious debate between the candidates" on what he regards as the most relevant energy issues. "I can hardly tell the difference between the Republican and Democratic candidates."
Nader blamed the corporate-owned media, especially TV. "Ninety percent of that is entertainment and ads," he said. As for journalists at the major newspapers, he alleged, "They don't like to work on weekends."
Zeroing in on TV programming, Nader said, "I hear they're preparing a 'Chimpanzee Channel,' where they'd dress them up, and have them prance around."
"We don't even have a channel for humans."
]]>Peak Oil Theory, Data and DC Convention Deserve Our Attentiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7563402010-10-11T10:21:02-04:002011-05-25T18:00:30-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
"I would submit," he said, "that all of these tragedies are due to Peak Oil. Peak Oil will affect every aspect of our life."
Baldauf, above, is a Texas-based oil executive, lifelong environmentalist and the key leader of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, USA (ASPO). The group argues that after 150 years of oil extraction most major oil exporting nations are well past their supply peaks, defined by scientists as "Peak Oil."
Baldauf is also one of the headliners at ASPO's sixth convention, which continues through Saturday in the U.S. capital with economists, energy and human rights experts as the group brings its important message for the first time to opinion-leaders in Washington, DC.
Among the headline speakers are former Nixon and Ford Administration Secretary of Defense Dr. James Schlesinger, below, who was also the nation's first Secretary of Energy under the Carter Administration. Earlier, he had been CIA Director and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission under President Nixon.
Ralph Nader and Bianca Jagger are among others, most of whom are prominent in energy, economics, human rights and academia.
Their thesis demands attention even from those inclined to skepticism or indifference. We risk losing big with the wrong choice. This is the game theory suggested by the Renaissance mathemetician-philosopher Blais Pascal, portrayed below, who famously posed "Pascal's Wager" providing his conclusion that our best bet is for us to live God-fearing and otherwise righteous lives.
On a more pedestrian scale, why is oil production relevant to the mission of the legal reform Justice Integrity Project that I lead?
A steep decline in the U.S. economy would affect pretty much all of us, and further test our legal system.
Our research reveals direct ties between energy industry issues and the complexities of the justice system. For instance, the Justice Department's high-profile announcement that it will seek criminal charges because of the BP Gulf volcano (which was far from a "spill" and "leak") raises obvious questions:
Will the investigation unfairly scapegoat some defendants? Will it whitewash others? Despite the government bluster about the vigor of its crackdown, we all saw that the Coast Guard and law enforcement helped unduly restrict news and other public access to evidence of the vast damage.
We see many relationships between the energy and justice system that merit much closer examination.
The DOJ has maintained, for example, that no one should further review its 2006 federal corruption conviction of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, 64, in the nation's most notorious political prosecution of the decade. But we documented in the Huffington Post last year the Democratic defendant's trial judge, Mark Fuller, held a disturbing controlling interest in the closely held Doss Aviation, Inc., which enriches the judge by its federal contracts to refuel Air Force planes.
Such apologists for the judge as the DOJ and former Bush White House advisor Karl Rove say the judge is entitled to own stock, even a controlling share in a company with $300 million in recent Bush-era federal contracts, most related to refueling. But this puts the regionally powerful chief federal judge in the energy business, in effect, with scant apparent concern by DOJ about appearance of fairness, or more serious allegations regarding the judge and his company where key witnesses have never been questioned.
With litigation over Gulf health, jobs and liability issues almost certain to explode in all manner of cases, now is precisely the time when the public needs more confidence, not less, in federal civil and criminal decision-making.
Regarding the business of oil extraction itself, Baldauf says, "The era of low-cost, easy-to-get oil has come to an end, a moment of historic significance and one fraught with danger. The Gulf of Mexico disaster occurred because the quest for new supplies requires that we drill miles beneath the ocean surface."
Peak-oil advocates are eager to work on solutions, especially because they believe the U.S. economy already is already poised for significant new declines soon until public awareness and mitigation measures increase.
Dr. Roger Bezdek, a former U.S. energy delegate to NATO who briefed the staffs of both 2008 presidential nominees during their campaigns, told the Press Club audience this week that mitigation of both supply and demand issues can take years, if not decades. Trucks have a 25-year average projected use, he noted this week, and even if nuclear plants are again allowed they would take many years to plan and build. A U.S. Joint Forces command study predicts worldwide peak oil in 2015.
Scott Daughon, founder of the My Technology Lawyer radio network and my co-host for four years on our weekly "Washington Update" series, is a skeptic of peak oil scenarios. He has a free-market proponent's confidence that cost-effective solutions arise to meet our needs. Nonetheless, he welcomed discussion of the issue our shows this week and for that scheduled next week.
Baldauf, pointing to his group's site for further information, says:
Without affordable energy to drive our economy, we can expect price spikes and economic crisis to be the new normal. The debate about Peak Oil is over. It is time for bold action. If we do not change our current approach we will see tremendous global repercussions.
In the spirit of our first known cosmic odds-maker, Blais Pascal, let's wager that Baldauf's bet is worth examining -- not for his sake but for ours. ]]>U.S. Charges of Alabama Corruption Tainted By Past Federal Misconducttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7519952010-10-06T00:16:01-04:002011-05-25T17:55:20-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
But federal authorities ruined their probe's credibility from the outset by relying on prosecutors implicated in the nation's two most notorious public corruption investigations of the last decade.
The story below describes a fiasco by the Justice Department, which has selectively ignored serious allegations of wrongdoing by top Alabamans, most notably by current Gov. Bob Riley and other so-called "anti-gambling" politicians and their supporters.
A likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Riley, above, has been harshly attacked on ethics grounds for many years, including by some in his own party. He helped initiate the current indictment by closing Alabama's casinos. This pleases both his anti-gambling constituents, and also his past Mississippi funders who want Alabama gamblers to keep streaming into their casinos.
In announcing 11 arrests of Alabama legalized gambling advocates, DOJ's Assistant Attorney Gen. Lanny Breuer proclaimed Oct. 4 that, "Vote-buying, like the kind alleged in this indictment, corrodes the public's faith in our democratic institutions and cannot go unpunished."
Those arrested included the regional powerbroker Milton McGregor, gambling entrepreneur Ronald Gilley, their lobbyists and the four state senators (two of them Democrats) accused of multi-millions in bribes and promises.
Yet the 100,000-employee DOJ is using prosecutors who separately helped railroad former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and the late Alaskan Sen. Ted Stevens, albeit with no DOJ internal finding so far of wrongdoing years after their convictions.
Alabama legal commentator Roger Shuler, who predicted in a Sept. 8 column the day on which the DOJ would issue its indictment for maximum pre-election impact, aptly summed up the situation in his column this week entitled, "Alabama Arrests Mark a Dismal Episode for the Obama DOJ." Shuler wrote:
How bad does the Obama DOJ look in all of this? Let us count the ways. The investigation was initiated by two of the most corrupt U.S. attorneys from the George W. Bush era. The prosecution team includes at least four prosecutors who have been involved in dubious cases.
The indictments clearly were timed to have an impact on the November elections. To top it off, U.S. Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL), an Obama buddy, piped up and revealed himself to be even more of a weasel than we already thought he was.
Most importantly, however, the investigation covered only one side of a two-pronged controversy, and DOJ officials flatly lied to the public about the scope of their handiwork. In short, yesterday's charade in Alabama almost makes you yearn for the good old days of the Bush administration.
Furthermore, the non-partisan Justice Integrity Project that I lead has heard for more than a year from Alabama sources that top Republicans in Alabama have looked for ways to snare a larger share of McGregor's gambling loot, in part by fleecing him out a $13 million investment he made in a Russian lottery venture.
Reportedly, the money was secretly steered to Republican campaign coffers by claims from the Riley camp to McGregor that someone in Russia stole the funds, regrettably. Investigative reporter and Russia Today cable news contributor Wayne Madsen published on his subscription-only www.waynemadsenreport.com a long, independently researched column detailing more precisely the reputed scam on McGregor and several other Alabama investors. The details are congruent with what we've heard.
Separately, several other investigative reports by DOJ critics in the past day have attacked the circumstances of the DOJ's gambling indictment. Much of it questions DOJ's timing, motives and veracity in welcoming all witnesses, including former Republican candidate for governor Bill Johnson. He wrote Leura Canary asking to testify about his party's high-level fund-raising from Indian casinos.
What's going on?
The specific DOJ charges appear to be supported by electronic recordings and at least one snitch, thereby providing at least some substance despite the usual murky interpretations involved in political wheeler-dealing.
Beyond that, DOJ's remarkable embrace of tainted prosecutors and selective prosecutions is best explained by its culture: Democratic and Republican DOJ leaders alike benefit long-term (including in their lucrative post-government careers) by coddling over-zealous and politically motivated fellow prosecutors, and then using superficial internal investigations to whitewash whatever happened.
The payoff? The major Washington law firm Covington & Burling supplied the DOJ both Breuer and his boss, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder. The firm has long made its money by serving such important clients as tobacco companies and, more recently, defense giants such as Halliburton. When personnel acquire the public interest cachet of a high administration position their market value is vastly increased.
In extreme instances, this can take the form of multi-million no-bid contracts that DOJ has awarded to such well-connected personnel as former Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft to oversee ethics compliance by corporations in lieu of their indictment. More commonly, well-connected DOJ personnel are rewarded by promotions and partnerships upon departure with high-paying law firms.
USA Today has been illustrating the problem of rampant prosecutorial misconduct with an investigative series about 201 cases since 1997 identified by judges. Meaningful punishment by DOJ is almost unknown.
Earlier this summer, our Justice Integrity Project showed that the DOJ relied for the past two years on special prosecutors found guilty by a court of misconduct themselves in 2008 to lead the department's two most important national internal probes.
Madsen, a former National Security Agency analyst and author, entitled his column today, "Ponzis and casinos: The transformation of America into a kleptocracy, state by state." He compared the Alabama indictments with a presentation about Minnesota that he saw at the National Press Club last week.
The lecture and Q&A by former Chicago Sun-Times and Atlanta Constitution political editor James Merriner focused on his research about federal misconduct in Minnesota after authorities discovered a $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme.
Merriner described how Minnesota prosecutors, courts and the Ponzi scheme operator's criminal defense attorney-turned-receiver sought to steer assets via questionable tactics to well-connected bankruptcy lawyers and to the federal government itself through forfeiture. Merriner's book is Ponzi-Dot-Gov, with his analysis cited in one of our own recent columns.
Madsen began his piece today:
From the "Heart of Dixie," Alabama, to the "North Star State," Minnesota, unscrupulous federal and local prosecutors, attorneys, judges, and businessmen are fleecing taxpayers and investors.
The corruption that has permeated state and local government, courthouses, and business councils is turning America into a Nigerian-style kleptocracy where corruption pays off and whistleblowing results in continuous retaliation from those who hold positions of trust....
Where might this lead?
Soon, we'll provide a more detailed description of the tainted prosecutors whom the DOJ assigned to the new Alabama prosecutions, as well as our theories of why the DOJ orchestrates such travesties for scant apparent reason.
Most important, we'll provide a courageous on-the-record warning to the public from a once-important figure in the nation's gambling industry. He worked closely with his friend Jack Abramoff on gambling issues on a major regional and indeed national level.
In an exclusive interview, our source will describe why the gaming industry has a special ability to "bring democracy to its knees" because gambling creates special opportunities for money laundering to impact political campaigns.
Our view is that illicit money plays a key hidden role determining public policy on jobs, defense, the environment, education -- and indeed entire range of issues that voters think we're deciding on their merits in the mid-term elections.
To be continued....
]]>Famed Doctor Cyril Wecht: Fight Justice Department Misconducttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7411632010-09-27T20:14:18-04:002011-05-25T17:50:22-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
On Sept. 23, the paper reported 201 criminal cases in which federal judges found that prosecutors broke laws or ethics rules since 1997. Overall, the abuses put innocent people in jail, and set guilty people free.
Dr. Wecht's prosecution didn't fall within the newspaper's scope because his first judge in Pittsburgh coddled the prosecution instead of criticizing it. But we at the Justice Integrity Project, a non-partisan legal reform group, documented Wecht's ordeal from 84 overblown felony charges in 2006 carrying long prison sentences for trivial matters. He was vindicated last year at age 78.
We asked him to describe what a defendant can face, in general.
"Once a victim has been targeted," he responded, "there are no limits to the amount of time, energy, money, and use of personnel that the Feds will employ to pursue and persecute that individual. No charge will be considered too petty or unimportant in their efforts to coerce the victim into pleading guilty to avoid the frightening possibility of a lengthy jail term."
Wecht, who holds both M.D. and J.D. degrees, is a world-famous consultant in his specialty of forensic medicine. Also, he's a longtime professor of medicine, a leader of medical societies and the author of more than 550 professional publications and many books. Moreover, he's an outspoken expert on celebrity deaths, including his courageous criticism of the federal government's official account of the single-bullet theory for the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy.
For 20 years prior to his indictment, he had been elected as the part-time, $65,000-a-year coroner for Allegheny County in Western Pennsylvania, where he was also Democratic county chairman.
Most of the federal charges that the Bush Justice Department brought against him were for sending 43 personal faxes that cost his county an estimated grand total of $3.86, according to ours and other published accounts. The costs were simply for the nominal phone charges and electricity, but were masked in the indictment by portentous-sounding allegations of "fraud." The other charges were similarly trivial, such as disputed reimbursement on his mileage expenses as coroner.
His cost to defend himself? Some $8.6 million for his attorneys, who included former Attorney Gen. Richard Thornburgh, a Republican former Pennsylvania governor. The attorneys estimate that taxpayer costs were at least as high for the prosecution, which declines comment.
The Bush DOJ brought the case via Mary Beth Buchanan, an ambitious Republican U.S. attorney who had previously directed all 93 of DOJ's U.S. attorneys from her office at DOJ's Washington headquarters during 2005.
This was the same year her colleagues were seeking ways to ensure that "loyal Bushies," as one top DOJ official wrote White House advisor Karl Rove, would fill the powerful regional U.S. attorney posts as the 2006 election season heated up. Buchanan then returned to Pittsburgh as U.S. attorney to burnish her image as corruption fighter before her run for Congress.
Under the federal theory of the Wecht prosecution, authorities can bring similar charges against almost any local or federal government worker who uses a government-owned computer or phone. Such investigations bring under federal scrutiny the addressee of any such communications, however innocuous. This increases the scope of federal jurisdiction to a mind-boggling proportion of the population, such as relatives and friends of government workers.
Wecht further explained:
When there is a politically motivated (obviously, never publicly expressed) etiology in such a federal prosecution, and especially where the selected victim enjoys some degree of celebrity, then the intensity of the criminal lawsuit is ratcheted up several notches.
Wecht, a past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and also the American College of Legal Medicine, assessed the dilemma faced by unfairly accused defendants on whether to plead guilty:
For defendants, fighting is incredibly expensive, emotionally draining, and usually quite protracted. That is why the Feds can boast of a 95% success rate in guilty pleas. Very few people are capable of engaging in an all-out battle against the multi-facetted, unlimited forces that the DOJ, FBI, and other federal governmental agencies will muster in achieving their objective.
In addressing the abuses, USA Today provided a well-indexed regional chart of judicial opinions. They augmented it with such other experts as Pace University Law School Prof. Bennett Gershman, who literally wrote the book on "Prosecutorial Misconduct."
These problems increasingly alarm legal experts on the political right, left, and in-between. The free-market Cato Institute, for example, held a compelling forum last year featuring two of its scholars with new books on the topic, Harvey Silverglate (Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent) and Timothy Lynch (In the Name of Justice).
Last week's newspaper project focused only on judicial findings of misconduct. But our research shows the harm is worse when judges ignore official law-breaking or, as occasionally the case, encourage rogue prosecutors.
As the country nears mid-term evaluation of the Obama administration, its Attorney Gen. Eric Holder, above, declined to answer questions from USA Today about its project. That's congruent with DOJ's pattern. Holder declined also to take questions at the University of Alabama Law School last week after boasting there about the Obama DOJ's civil rights record.
He must have known he'd face criticism about why he and his minions have argued for 20 more years in prison for the state's last Democratic governor, Don Siegelman, 64, whose convictions largely rests on his asking a wealthy man to donate to an education non-profit in 1999.
Alabama-based legal commentator Roger Shuler, one of the pioneering reporters documenting such Bush-era DOJ crusades in the Deep South, today published, "USA Today Investigation Scratches the Surface of Decay in U.S. Justice System." Harper's columnist Scott Horton a few days earlier characterized the paper's project as showing, "An Ethics Meltdown at the Justice Department."
Wecht's expertise, suffering and victory entitle him to the last word:
The flagrant abuse of governmental power by the DOJ and FBI in attempting to destroy an individual ─ financially, professionally, socially, and sometimes physically for personal and political reasons, and to an extent that is grossly disproportionate to any alleged act of criminality ─ is the hallmark of a totalitarian government.
All decent, fair-minded American citizens ─ liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans ─ need to let their voices be heard in denouncing such deplorable, dangerous tactics.
]]>Victims In $3.6 Billion Ponzi Protest Court Processtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6935222010-08-25T01:21:58-04:002011-05-25T17:25:21-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
The feds used hardball tactics to install well-connected cronies in key positions, which should trouble anyone who fears the precedent if their own finances get trapped in such a dispute nationally.
Most remarkable was that the federal judge supervising the case named the prominent local attorney Douglas Kelley to be court receiver and U.S. trustee. This was even though Petters, above as shown shortly after his arrest in 2008, had previously hired Kelley to defend his companies.
Victims are so disturbed at such decision-making and what they regard as excessive legal fees by Kelley and his team that some of helped produce The Second Fraud, a documentary about their case that premiered Aug. 25 at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis for a one-night showing.
On behalf of the Justice Integrity Project, I was on a seven-person panel assembling there to discuss the case after the movie. Kelley and at least four other representatives of the government or Petters defense were invited, but none have confirmed. Here's a look at the discussion about this fascinating case:
For more than a decade, Tom Petters masterminded the first multi-billion dollar U.S. "Ponzi scheme" ever discovered. Authorities raided his companies on Sept. 24, 2008 after a tip from his former receptionist-lover, who'd received $8 million in bonuses during her ascendancy into his executive ranks.
Petters, a college drop-out now aged 53, received 50-year prison term in April. This ended his huge donations to leading politicians in both major parties, his swank lifestyle, and his control of such well-known companies as Polaroid and Sun Country Airlines.
But Second Fraud filmmaker Ryan Frost says:
Ultimately we discovered a tangled web of local professionals: judges, politicians and lawyers, some of which may have knowingly or unknowingly allowed the Petters fraud to perpetuate in
the first place. Now these groups are left in charge to clean up the mess.
As hundreds of years of legal precedent are blatantly ignored, creditors and victims are crying foul from the sidelines as they are swindled a second time by the very system that is in place to protect them.
On Friday (Aug. 20), I published a column as part of my legal reform group's research on such situations nationally.
During the post-film panel, I'm among those arguing that Petters oversight so far fails to provide the legal checks-and-balances among various litigants we need to protect the victims of such cases.
First-hand accounts come from Chicago hedge fund manager Thane Ritchie and New Jersey liquidator William Procida, who was elected by creditors such as Richie to be receiver via a process in Illinois promptly after the fraud was discovered. Procida, who says he's handled the liquidation of billions of dollars of assets, describes how Kelley used his twin roles as Petters attorney and as a former prosecutor to consolidate power in unusual ways.
Among them was the decision by U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery to issue an order that empowered Kelley, her former law school classmate and colleague at the Justice Department. The order also granted Kelley judge-like immunity, thereby limiting the ability of various parties to force oversight.
Count me among those who don't understand the fascination with handing off complex problems in this way, even to well-credentialed private attorneys. To be sure, a special master is a longstanding concept. But this kind of vast power potentially has life-or-death consequences for companies and people alike, with too few due process rights.
Kelley essentially runs the show in Minnesota for victims nationwide. Kelley is subject largely to post-decision review by the judge, who named him ex parte in a private meeting. Creditors claim the Petters assets are being chewed up in legal fees, forfeitures to federal government and other controversial transactions.
In response, Kelley argues in his occasional public remarks that his decision-making balances the best interests of all to obtain optimal returns. Neither Kelley nor the judge has responded to my invitations for comment.
Others on the post-film panel with its creator Frost are law professor Richard Painter, bankruptcy expert Garrett Vail and longtime journalist James Merriner, author of an ad campaign spiked by the state's largest newspaper decrying court oversight of the Petters case.
The moderator is Bill Hillsman, founder of the ad agency that created Minnesota's campaign victories for underdog Senate Democratic candidate Paul Wellstone in 1992 and third-party gubernatorial candidate Jesse Ventura in 1998.
Nationally, some see excessive bankruptcy fees as a big problem. The American Bankruptcy Institute published a report in July entitled, "When a Pig Becomes a Hog...."
Without mincing words, the report quotes a Texas judge as saying last year: "At some time [the] Court must draw the line as to what is reasonable and what is not." The judge concluded, "When a pig becomes a hog it is slaughtered."
That's Texas talk, and perhaps a little rough for sensibilities elsewhere. But $3 billion in missing assets with only lawyers to help can be worse than tough talk. For some, it's grim reality.
]]>New Facts Call Into Question DOJ Investigations Past and Presenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6593332010-07-26T14:52:03-04:002011-05-25T17:10:24-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
This previously unreported fact from Dannehy's past calls into question her entire national investigation. The revelation similarly compromises the pending investigation by her Connecticut colleague, John Durham, who since 2008 has been the nation's special prosecutor for DOJ and CIA decision-making involving torture.
Here's the story, which the Justice Integrity Project I lead just broke in Nieman Watchdog:
In September 2008, the Bush Justice Department appointed Connecticut career federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy to investigate allegations that Bush officials in 2006 illegally fired nine U.S. attorneys who wouldn't politicize official corruption investigations.
But just four days before her appointment, a federal appeals court had ruled that a team of prosecutors led by Dannehy illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case in Connecticut. The prosecutors' misconduct was so serious that the court vacated seven of the eight convictions in the case.
The ruling didn't cite Dannehy by name, and although it was publicly reported it apparently never came up in the news coverage of her appointment.
But it now calls into question the integrity of her investigation by raising serious concerns about her credibility -- and about whether she was particularly vulnerable to political pressure from within the Justice Department.
Now, almost two years later, Dannehy has provided arguably the most important blanket exoneration for high-level U.S. criminal targets since President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Iran-Contra convicts post-election in late 1992.
The DOJ announced on July 21 that it has "closed the case" on the nine unprecedented mid-term firings because Dannehy found no criminal wrongdoing by DOJ or White House officials.
But the official description of her inquiry indicates that she either placed or acceded to constraints on the scope of her probe that restricted it to the firing of just one of the ousted U.S. attorneys, not the others -- and not to the conduct of the U.S. attorneys who weren't ousted because they met whatever tests DOJ and the White House created.
And although reaction to the closing of the inquiry has been muted, some observers are accusing her of a whitewash.
"This is an outrageous act of cowardice and cover-up!" former Alabama governor and alleged political prosecution victim Don Siegelman emailed me regarding DOJ's decision and the failure to interview him.
The Supreme Court vacated much of Siegelman's conviction last month after years of controversy, including charges by Republican whistleblowers that he was prosecuted primarily because he was a Democrat. As a result, House Judiciary Committee leaders and Siegelman's first trial judge, U.W. Clemon, last year separately urged Attorney Gen. Eric Holder to investigate suspected DOJ prosecution irregularities in what Clemon called "the most unfounded" prosecution he'd witnessed in nearly three decades on Alabama's federal bench.
Dannehy's probe, my reporting suggests, was compromised from the beginning.
She was appointed by Bush Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on Sept. 29, 2008. On Sept. 25, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City found misconduct in a 2003 trial she had led.
The court found that the prosecution suppressed evidence that could have benefited the defendant, Connecticut businessman Charles B. Spadoni (pictured). Spadoni had been convicted of participating in a plot by his then-employer, Triumph Capital, Inc., to bribe former state Treasurer Paul Silvester to invest $200 million of state pension money with his firm.
But the appeals court found that prosecutors had failed to turn over to the defense an FBI agent's notes of a key interview they conducted with Silvester's attorney. In doing so, the court ruled, "the government deprived Spadoni of exculpatory evidence going to the core of its bribery case against him."
The court reversed Spadoni's convictions on seven counts of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, bribery and wire fraud, leaving intact only an obstruction of justice conviction.
Prosecutors found by a court to have committed misconduct typically face some sort of internal investigation within the Justice Department. But whether there was any such investigation, and why or why not, is not publicly known.
As it happens, the Spadoni case also raises concerns relative to the ongoing federal probe of potential Bush administration wrongdoing in covering up torture that is being led by John H. Durham, another prosecutor from Connecticut. Durham supervised Dannehy's decade-long prosecution of Spadoni.
Like Dannehy, Durham was appointed by Mukasey in 2008 to be a special prosecutor with national responsibility. Durham's initial charge was to investigate suspected destruction of dozens of torture tapes by CIA personnel. In 2009, Holder expanded that probe to other decision-making, including by DOJ personnel.
Until now, neither DOJ nor anyone else has linked Dannehy and Durham by name to the prosecutorial misconduct against Spadoni, as far as I can determine. The court decision doesn't cite specific actions by the two. But it clearly refers to their case, and the information is readily available online in Lexis and in any good law library.
In April, as the acting U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, Durham signed a DOJ filing denying the merit of the appeals court finding of prosecution misconduct, while calling for Spadoni's continued prosecution for the remaining charge of obstruction of justice for deleting computer files in advance of a potential subpoena.
I sought additional comment beyond the court filings from Dannehy, Durham and Thomas Carson, DOJ's spokesman for its Connecticut office. Carson wrote me, "We have no further comment, as the matter is still pending."
The DOJ's letter said Dannehy found that the evidence "did not demonstrate any prosecutable criminal offense" in the 2006 firing of former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, and stated that there was no basis to broaden the investigation beyond his circumstances.
Iglesias, a Bush appointee whose 2008 book In Justice had a chapter entitled, "All Roads Lead to Rove," wrote me last year that he largely wants to put his ordeal behind him. Now returned to his original field of working in military justice, he told investigative reporter Jason Leopold:
I'm glad the matter is finally over. I'm gratified the Justice Department took the matter seriously enough to appoint an experienced corruption prosecutor to investigate. I will not second-guess her findings. I hope this scandal prevents future administrations and political leaders from attempting to politicize U.S. Attorneys.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers issued this comment:
It is clear that Ms. Dannehy's determination is not an exoneration of Bush officials in the U.S. attorney matter as there is no dispute that these firings were totally improper and that misleading testimony was given to Congress in an effort to cover them up.
One such official, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced out over the scandal, commented to CNN, "I feel angry that I had to go through this. That my family had to suffer through and what for?"
But several close observers of the case cried cover-up.
Rather than look at the entire U.S. attorneys scandal, Dannehy settled on a probe of a single case: that involving New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. This is the one case in which the available evidence showed that the decision was taken by President Bush himself, in the White House....
The probe should have examined the entire pattern of terminations as a common scheme and taken it as a basis for action. Instead, other related cases were - as I am informed by persons involved in them - shunted off to the Justice Department's "roach motel," the Office of Professional Responsibility, where they will likely languish without any serious investigation, much less any action.
Nora Dannehy's decision to take no action, coupled with all the lame rationalizations of inaction that preceded it, is another self-administered bullet wound to the integrity of the Justice Department...How can a Justice Department hold its own personnel to a lower standard under the law than they hold other public officials? This is a formula for disaster.
Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen repeated in a subscription-only post his 2009 report that Dannehy and her family have benefited from career-building decision-making that sometimes conflicts with her "tough" reputation. In charting the Dannehy family's career progressions during the past decade, Madsen cited, for example, her husband's appointment in 2007 to become director of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center.
In addition, Alabama legal affairs blogger Roger Shuler, who has closely documented what he has described as political prosecutions in the Deep South, published "Shirley Sherrod Is Not the Only One Who Has Been 'Put Through Hell.'" The article compared the plight of Alabama DOJ whistleblower Tamarah Grimes (pictured) to that of Sherrod, the Georgia employee of U.S. Department of Agriculture who was fired after false accusations were made against her this month.
Grimes was fired in June 2009 from her job as a paralegal in the Middle District of Alabama, eight days after writing a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder outlining misconduct in the prosecution of former Governor Don Siegelman. Grimes remains without a job and says she has faced significant financial and emotional stress....Tamarah Grimes has an important message for the Obama administration. It did, to its credit, try to get things right in the Shirley Sherrod matter. But its double standard on matters of "injustice" is glaring.
My Justice Integrity Project published a profile of Grimes that includes background on her and DOJ's reaction, which is to deny all of her allegations of government misconduct. DOJ also claimed that she was fired for once saying she had taped evidence of wrongdoing in the office. She denied describing or making any tapes.
A Republican, Grimes has told me that she has wanted to testify to Congress or any other official body about the vast waste and unfairness she witnessed, including by the Bush political holdover Middle District U.S. Attorney Leura Canary.
Canary's husband is William Canary, leader of the Business Council of Alabama and former campaign manager against Siegelman's 2002 opponent, current Republican Gov. Bob Riley. Sworn testimony before congressional staff never explored by DOJ itself by calling the witnesses suggests that William Canary was at the center of the plot begun with his wife and his friend and then-White House advisor Karl Rove in 2002 to frame Siegelman.
But even under the Obama administration, Bush-appointee Leura Canary continues to run the Alabama office that prosecuted Siegelman as of today, more than 18 months after Obama took office. Grimes is now out of work and about to lose her home to foreclosure.
What's next? "Nora Dannehy has not contacted me," Grimes wrote me of DOJ's nationwide probe. "If the DOJ is conducting its own 'inquiry' history tells us that it is one hundred percent whitewash."
The unprecedented mid-term purge of nine U.S. Attorney by the Bush administration created a firestorm in Congress when word leaked out in 2007, partly because of fears that many of the remaining U.S. attorneys in the nation's 93 offices were being forced to make politicized decisions to keep their jobs. Then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, had recommended to White House senior advisor Karl Rove that they populate prosecution offices with "loyal Bushies."
For years, defendants in official corruption cases around the nation have been counting on DOJ to investigate any wrongdoing involved in the purge. In 2007, the House Judiciary Committee cited research by University of Missouri professor Donald Shields into news reports of Bush DOJ probes of elected officials, candidates and fund-raisers. The Shields findings, most recently of some 1,200 elected officials, candidates and fund-raisers from throughout the eight years of the administration, showed that the targets were nearly 5:1 Democrats.
The investigations and convictions deeply affected the nation's political map and policy-making since most targets lose their jobs and careers, bringing shame on their supporters as well. So, the patterns are important not simply to the often financially devastated defendants and their families, but also to a wider group of those concerned about government policy across the range of potential decision-making in such varied matters as health, jobs, education or public safety.
The bipartisan Justice Integrity Project was founded to investigate such cases under both Bush and Obama administrations.
In this, we have followed the March 2007 warning of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who said the real story isn't the firing of nine prosecutors. Instead, he urged, the public needs to know what the remaining 84 presidentially appointed U.S. attorneys were doing to keep their jobs.
Our in-depth investigative reporting has exposed serious irregularities in the prosecutions of Democrats Don Siegelman, New Jersey mayoral candidate Louis Manzo and forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht. We've found similar abuses in the prosecutions of Republicans Ted Stevens (the Alaskan senator whose convictions were vacated because of suppression of evidence), Die Hard filmmaker John McTiernan and former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, plus several non-partisan targets in the military or other national defense work. Details of these "leading cases" are on our website.
But Dannehy never contacted such victims, who almost uniformly tell me they want to testify under oath before an impartial investigator. Similarly, there's no indication from DOJ comments about the 60 witnesses she interviewed that any of them were third party experts best known for their research in this field.
Is there good reason for that, or is it part of a pattern in which prosecutors tend to find scant wrongdoing against their colleagues, in part by not looking?
A question reporters and the public need to pursue is whether a culture of error and cover-up prevailed in the Department of Justice under Bush and continues under President Obama.
It is one thing to want to look forward, as Obama stated as he took office. But it is wrong and immoral for our criminal system not to examine what appear to be obvious abuses that discredit the justice system, local and regional politics, and, indeed, our nation's standing in the world as a beacon of democracy and civil rights.
Ironically, the appeals court finding of misconduct by the team led by Durham and Dannehy leaves only a disputed obstruction of justice count against Spadoni that focuses on his deletion of files from his computer as he feared that his company would receive a subpoena.
In certain ways, the vast resources that DOJ has expended in pursuing him and Grimes parallels Durham's investigation of CIA personnel, who under the Bush administration allegedly destroyed dozens of videotapes showing the torture of terror suspects. Whether DOJ will seek to hold government personnel accountable in the same way is a question that remains open and divisive.
But this is now a matter for Congress, which must summon the obvious witnesses without further dithering.
]]>Feds Bully Die Hard McTiernan Into Plea for False Statementstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6444622010-07-13T12:08:05-04:002011-05-25T17:05:23-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
Here's a version such wire services as Reuters provided to the vast majority of Americans:
Die Hard film director John McTiernan pleaded guilty to lying to law enforcement officials in connection with the racketeering case of a private detective who represented many Hollywood stars.
A trial for McTiernan had been expected to begin on Tuesday in Los Angeles on two counts of making false statements to federal agents and one count of perjury. McTiernan, 59, originally pleaded guilty in 2006 to a charge of knowingly lying to agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the criminal case against private detective Anthony Pellicano, who has since been jailed.
But the film director later withdrew his plea, saying he had received poor legal advice, had been drinking and was jet-lagged from traveling when FBI agents questioned him. Federal officials again charged McTiernan with crimes in 2009, leading to Monday's guilty plea. A judge set a sentencing date of Oct. 4....
I've written at least a hundred variants of this kind of traditional guilty plea story while covering federal courts fulltime from 1976 to 1980 for the Hartford Courant, Connecticut's largest paper. But times have changed, and IMO the essence of McTiernan's case is better conveyed this way:
Yet again, federal authorities have abused their vast powers by manufacturing a crime and ruining a defendant's career ─ at needless expense to federal taxpayers.
Too tough a verdict? You be the judge. First, kindly note as a matter of basic accuracy that McTiernan's plea was "conditional" on the results of his appeal. This qualification was totally omitted by the Reuters story and thus by such headlines around the nation as that by the July 13 Washington Post, which blares out to its readers: "John McTiernan is headed to jail."
Wiretappers Unmasked
In 2002, a federal investigative team led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders and FBI agent Stanley Ornellas exposed a scheme whereby the famous LA private eye Pellicano systematically broke wiretapping laws to help his clients in big-dollar entertainment industry battles.
In 2004, Howard Blum and John Connolly authored an in-depth overview for Vanity Fair entitled, "The Pellicano Brief." It described Pellicano's "A-list" clients and a pivotal raid of the detective's offices by the feds, who seized guns, $200,000 in cash, plastic explosives and hand grenades on their way to winning a 15-year prison term for the tough-talking PI.
The article didn't mention McTiernan among the detective's many famous clients, who included some vastly more powerful than McTiernan. But we now know that McTiernan by then had sampled Pellicano's services in 2000 by paying him $50,000 for a two-week investigation of fellow moviemaker Charles Rovan as the two struggled for creative control over their film, Rollerball, which was destined to become a box office flop.
Fast forward to early 2006. More than three years after the big raid on Pellicano's office, none of the "A-list" Hollywood stars, managers, producers and lawyers had been jailed.
As sometimes happens in such situations, authorities sprang a perjury trap on McTiernan, who was famous for directing such action films as Predator, Die Hard, and The Hunt for Red October. In a perjury trap, authorities can create a crime by inducing a target in an unguarded moment to forgo the right to silence and give a false statement about an embarrassing matter that might otherwise not provide a basis for a criminal charge.
The concept became notorious after Independent Counsel Ken Starr relied on it to try to save his otherwise failed Whitewater investigation of Bill Clinton by surprising the president at a grand jury with unrelated questions about Monica Lewinsky.
The Lewinsky case illustrated how reporters and readers alike tend to focus, understandably enough, on the sensational specifics of a scandal without reflecting that a perjury trap is often unfair. Why? Almost anyone has done something embarrassing. So, it's not right for authorities to use all-out tactics to create a crime by trapping some miscreants instead of focusing on whether the underlying activity is criminal.
Unfair or not, these kinds of methods are generally legal under the vast discretion that we provide to authorities. Here's how the one against McTiernan unfolded, according to court records:
After returning ill from a film shoot in Thailand, using medicine and drinking, McTiernan received an evening phone call at home from Ornellas, the FBI's lead agent in the Pellicano case. Towards the end of a brief conversation, McTiernan falsely denied that he'd engaged Pellicano for illegal services.
McTiernan was promptly indicted, pleaded guilty to false statement, and received four months in prison and $100,000 fine as the first big-name entertainment industry defendant hit with time in the case. U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer, a 2003 appointee of President Bush, denounced McTiernan at sentencing for what she called his arrogance.
The defendant changed lawyers, and won a 2008 federal appeals court decision that enabled him to withdraw his guilty plea. Authorities responded with a new indictment that increased the defendant's liability by reconfiguring the original false statement into two separate felonies, plus a perjury charge arising from his pursuit of his appeal.
These maneuvers increased McTiernan's potential prison sentence to multiple years if he dares offend authorities further by proceeding to trial. I've reviewed the jury instructions approved by the judge, which almost guarantee a guilty verdict by limiting the defendant's ability to argue that he wasn't in a position to know if the person asking him questions by phone really was an FBI agent. McTiernan's work inevitably brings calls from imposter "reporters" and others seeking details about such stars from his films as Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
McTiernan doubtless didn't ingratiate himself with authorities by helping to found a non-profit called Project Save Justice, which filmed a 2009 documentary entitled, The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove. The film, available for free use in schools and for other free viewing on the project's website, powerfully documents the travails of U.S. victims of political prosecutions. The film and a congressional report have also helped publicize academic studies showing that local Democrats were investigated at a nearly 5:1 ratio during 1,200 official corruption probes of local officials by the Bush administration's DOJ around the nation.
McTiernan describes his background as being a moderate Republican. But the director, like some others in the civil rights field, including at my bipartisan Justice Integrity Project, has come to see since 2008 that the Obama DOJ is permeated also by resistance to criticism and win-at-all-cost attitudes that transcend party lines.
McTiernan's attorney, Oliver E. Diaz, notes that his client's conditional guilty plea maintains his right to appeal numerous per-trial motions filed by the government and granted by the judge. Diaz, a Republican former Mississippi Supreme Court justice, himself had been one of the Bush DOJ's prosecution targets before twice being acquitted of federal corruption charges. The Diaz story is described in the Project Save Justice documentary, at my Justice Integrity Project, and in a Harper's article by Scott Horton.
Last month, McTiernan failed in his attempt to recuse the judge, a Republican whose courtroom comments suggest that she despises the defendant. Part of the issue seems to be that some federal authorities become personally offended if defendants use up courtroom time by failing to plead guilty, as do 95 percent of those accused.
I saw something similar earlier this year in covering the sentencing of Republican former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.
His Democratic federal judge became almost unhinged in denouncing the defendant, citing such factors as Kerik's higher income than the judge's and the defendant's prolonging the proceedings by not pleading guilty promptly enough. Embarrassingly, that judge has since quit the federal bench to join a law firm with an annual per-partner compensation of $2.1 million. Kerik's supporters around the country were already angry, as illustrated by this Oklahoma criminal site, and the resignation is further stoking their fires.
Solutions?
The good news is that solutions shouldn't be hard to devise. My three suggestions are:
First, authorities should focus on underlying crimes, not creating new ones to save face. If we as a society hate illegal wiretapping let's focus directly on that and its perpetrators, who are far more numerous and effective now than during John McTiernan's two-week foray into those dark arts in 2000.
Second and much more important, lots of these trial problems would go away if judges encouraged both sides to proceed with a better sense of proportion. For authorities to insist, as they did here, that McTiernan spend at least a year in prison if he pleads guilty inevitability stretches out the proceedings at vast cost to everyone. To what purpose? Do taxpayers really have unlimited funds for these kinds of selective prosecution jihads? I think not, especially since Schwarzenegger as California's governor recently sought to reduce all state salaries to the minimum wage for lack of funds.
This spring, authors Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell cited my article about Dr. Cyril Wecht in their best-selling book American Conspiracies. Until a Pennsylvania judge threw out the case last year, the feds forced the aged Wecht in the twilight of his distinguished career to spend $8.6 million in legal fees. This was largely to defend himself from 43 federal felony charges for sending personal faxes 43 times that cost his county a grand total of $3.86 -- yes, that's less than $4 -- during his 20 years as a county coroner. Even after all charges were dismissed, his federal prosecutor had the gall to run for Congress last fall. But the public seems to be getting wise, and she was defeated.
Finally, we've got to find new ways of providing oversight. The U.S. Senate rubber-stamps most federal prosecution and judicial appointments. The Senate provided unanimous approval, for example, for the judges overseeing both the McTiernan and Kerik cases. Congress rarely enforces subpoenas on sensitive oversight matters any longer if DOJ doesn't want to comply. And the traditional courthouse news reporter that I used to know in olden days has disappeared for cost reasons. They've been replaced for the most part by visiting stenographers who carrying the title of reporter but primarily serve to amplify to the public whatever information federal authorities want to emphasize.
But if the public must be burdened with multiple information sources at least the perspectives should be entertaining. In that spirit, we've presented above, Rashomon-style, two different accounts of the same crime story. The first is the one that went out on the wires, and the second is my commentary.
Even more on target than Rashomon is a telling comment by the Sally Field character in Absence of Malice, the 1981 film about the interplay of federal prosecutors and reporters. My perspective on it has changed. Upon its release, I denounced it to my friends as an unwarranted slur on the news and legal professions. Live and learn. I've highly recommended it for the past two decades.
At the end, Field's character comments about a news story that omits vital context in describing her role in a crime probe: "It's accurate," she says. "But it isn't 'true.'"
]]>Court Vacates Siegelman Charges, As Kagan and DOJ Team Losetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6297352010-06-29T15:58:40-04:002011-05-25T16:55:19-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
The court remanded their Alabama convictions to the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta despite arguments last November by Solicitor General Elena Kagan that their convictions should stand.
Ironically, the court met to decide the case Monday afternoon, which marked also the beginning of Kagan's Senate confirmation hearing to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, a Republican who became the court's most influential liberal of recent years.
In several exclusives published on The Huffington Post the past 13 months, I've shown the shocking conduct of federal prosecutors and the trial judge in framing Siegelman and Scrushy, the former CEO of HealthSouth Corp. The articles, here and here, for example, showed how Alabama Middle District Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller allowed wholesale misconduct by prosecutors against his longtime enemy Siegelman while the judge was also being enriched by some $300 million in federal contracts since 2006 for Doss Aviation, Inc., which he controlled as its largest stockholder.
"The Supreme Court's action is not only important to Governor Siegelman, but also to anyone who runs for public office and for anyone who makes a campaign contribution," his counsel Peter Sissman wrote me this afternoon in assessing the significance. "If what Governor Siegelman is alleged to have done is a crime, then anyone who donates money to a presidential candidate, and who is later appointed to be an ambassador, can be charged with a felony at the whim of a politically motivated prosecutor."
The Supreme Court's sparsely worded grant of certiorari today does not allude to that dark history. The court simply referenced its decisions last week in other cases holding that a federal crime of failing to render honest services can violate constitutional protections by being too vague.
But the broader story of Alabama injustice is much on the minds of supporters who have followed the defendants' ordeals for many years through investigative reports in Alabama and elsewhere. The best known was broadcast by CBS 60 Minutes in 2008. Two Republicans described why the defendants were framed. Also, Nick Bailey, a former Siegelman aide who was the prosecution's top witness, revealed that he was coached by prosecutors up to 70 times before trial, with few of the sessions disclosed to the defense.
The Justice Integrity Project, my bipartisan group researching this and similar federal misconduct across the nation, yesterday opposed the Kagan nomination to the Court, in part because of her now-failed argument against the Alabama defendants.
Earlier, an unprecedented coalition of 91 former state attorneys general from more than 40 states had filed a friend-of-the-court brief countering Kagan's arguments. The former chief law enforcers said, in essence, that it wasn't a crime for Siegelman to reappoint the wealthy Scrushy to a state board after Scrushy donated to the non-profit Alabama Education Association in 1999 at Siegelman's request.
Sissman referenced that history this way in commenting further about today's decision:
At the time that he was indicted, Governor Siegelman was a candidate for governor in the Alabama Democratic primary. It was expected that he would win the primary and go on to defeat his Republican opponent. According to some reports, Karl Rove stepped in and orchestrated the prosecution. If true, it would be a prime example of using the law to eliminate a political rival.
Governor Siegelman did not personally benefit from the donation. The contribution was to a foundation whose purpose was to permit a lottery in Alabama to raise funds to be used for education.
Rove, Fuller and the justice department have consistently denied wrongdoing in the case, which received relatively little national publicity until June 2007. Jill Simpson, a Republican attorney from northern Alabama, stepped forward shortly before sentencing that month to file a sworn statement suggesting the defendants had been framed.
But Fuller proceeded to impose seven-year terms on both defendants. Fuller ordered them to begin serving their terms immediately, without the appeal bonds customarily granted white-collar defendants.
The defendants were taken directly from court in chains in front of TV cameras to prison. Weeping relatives were unable to say goodbye. Authorities initially put Siegelman in solitary confinement, preventing any contact with family, supporters or the news media.
The former governor was ordered freed on bond by an all-Democratic appeals court panel in March 2008 after national concern ramped up from the CBS broadcast and other reports, along with petitions by former state law enforcers.
Scrushy, a Republican and father of nine, has remained in prison, saying he was swept up in a political plot to use the justice system against the former governor. Scrushy's criminal convictions are entirely because he donated to the education foundation. Meanwhile, HealthSouth's collapse amid claims of financial fraud have resulted in a $2.8 billion civil fraud judgment against Scrushy and seizure of his assets.
The Obama administration has puzzled many of its Democratic supporters by seeking 20 additional years in prison last June for Siegelman and retaining the Middle District U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, a Bush-appointed Republican who took office in 2001.
Federal authorities continue also to fight longstanding federal freedom of information act requests by Scrushy seeking DOJ documents on whether Canary actually recused herself from supervising the case, as she's claimed. Her husband, William Canary, was campaign manager for Siegelman's opponent, Republican Gov. Bob Riley, and a longtime friend and political ally of Rove. DOJ last year fired a paralegal who says Leura Canary remained heavily involved in the prosecution.
More generally, DOJ still hasn't completed its nationwide investigation under Connecticut federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy of political prosecutions. DOJ reluctantly initiated the probe under congressional pressure because of the uproar over the Bush administration's 2006 purge of nine U.S. attorneys for political reasons. Congressional investigation later showed that a DOJ chief of staff had written the White House that it needed "loyal Bushies" in prosecution posts, not simply Republicans.
Siegelman and Scrushy now return to a Republican-majority appeals court that, for the most part, has decided previous rulings in their case largely along party lines.
Siegelman and Scrushy have become increasingly outspoken in their complaints about injustice. Siegelman filed on June 28 a blistering 34-page Second Motion for Recusal based on new information last month that their trial judge improperly met with postal inspectors to discuss claims that jurors were communicating illegally during the trial. And a year ago this month, both defendants filed extensive affidavits suggesting additional prosecution misconduct, including secret blackmail of their chief witness Bailey with threatened exposure of his sexual partners.
This photo of Judge Fuller was taken in 2006 just after the Siegelman jury gave its guilty verdicts. Photographer Phil Fleming helped commemorate the occasion at the judge's request.
The Republican judge has denied any wrongdoing in his filings. In response to my request for comment, he wrote that judicial rules prevent him from commenting to me or others in the media.
This year, he responded to defendants long-pending requests for his recusal by asking that another federal judge examine whether there is any reason for him to withdraw. The Justice Department has long maintained that not one reasonable, independent person in the United States would think Fuller needs to recuse himself under the legal standard requiring withdrawal to avoid the appearance of impropriety.
I'm among the many commentators who have suggested potential reasons why the Obama administration has insisted on fighting so hard to uphold the positions of those involved in such a notorious prosecution. But no one can know for certain short of a full, independent investigation calling all relevant witnesses under oath.
One factor is doubtless the inevitable institutional loyalties of a crime-fighting organization such as DOJ, whatever its traditional mantra that it promotes justice, not winning. Books have been written on this general theme: DOJ prosecutors and agents don't like to lose. The Obama administration has added further protections to DOJ decision-making by arguing in another case this year that prosecutors shouldn't be held liable even if proven to have intentionally framed suspects.
Some of us have reported that Artur Davis, Alabama's senior Democratic congressman and an Obama friend, wanted to obtain business support during his just-failed campaign for governor from William Canary, head of the powerful Business Council of Alabama.
But any such help didn't prevent Davis from being upset by a nearly 2-1 margin in Alabama's Democratic primary June 1. Huffington Post readers read that this was in part because some Alabama Democrats were furious with Davis for abandoning Siegelman and not pushing harder to replace Leura Canary with a Democrat, as traditional in the United States after a change of presidential administrations. Canary, below, remains in office as arguably the nation's most controversial federal prosecutor in decades.
Neither political party has much stomach to poke into the web of military and financial relations that some of us have reported as key factors prompting the prosecution. The judge's company Doss Aviation, for example, has a remarkably important role in training Air Force pilots and refueling Air Force planes. As amplified in my group's statement against the Kagan nomination yesterday, there's far more to that part of the story than most want to explore publicly, especially in wartime and especially given the business relationships involved.
Whatever the background, the Supreme Court's decision today creates a new legal environment. For the first time, the defendants have momentum from a major court victory along with facts gleaned from particularly courageous whistleblowers and reporters.
One of the best has been Alabama journalist Roger Shuler, who has expertly followed the prosecution for three years along with those like it in the Deep South. Here's his analysis of today's decision:
[T]oday's Supreme Court finding is, in a sense, a smokescreen. It might lead to long-delayed justice for victims of political prosecutions. But it does not address the real problem -- that corrupt federal prosecutors and judges caused this grave injustice to happen.
]]>Why Alabama Democrats Rejected Centrist Artur Davis, Obama's Paltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5975842010-06-02T11:16:18-04:002011-05-25T16:40:24-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
Sparks ran to the left of Davis, a friend of President Obama since their overlapping studies at Harvard Law School. The 62-38 Sparks victory Tuesday confounded pollsters, the centrist strategy promoted by the White House, and conventional wisdom that the better-funded Davis would defeat Sparks or force his withdrawal before the primary.
"But Sparks didn't drop out, and on Tuesday he was rewarded with one of the more remarkable upsets in Alabama primary history," wrote the Birmingham News.
Davis, representing Montgomery and adjoining areas, launched his bid in strong position. In 2007, he became first congressman outside Illinois to back Obama for president. But job worries are strong in Alabama, BP oil is approaching the shoreline, and Davis opposed health care and pro-grambling measures favored by many Democrats.
The Sparks victory parallels other recent Democratic challenges to party leaders by less-than-docile voters. Senate candidate Joe Sestak beat an incumbent in Pennsylvania, Bill Halter earned a run-off against a Senate incumbent in Arkansas, and Hawaiian House candidate Colleen Hanabusa this week forced a former congressman to withdraw from an expected primary.
I've followed the Davis election campaign closely for a year after documenting in Huffington Post and elsewhere how former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman was framed on federal corruption charges as part of a nationwide effort by the Bush Justice Department to use criminal charges for political purposes, primarily against Democrats.
Ron Sparks, left, and Artur Davis
After initial interest in the Siegelman case Davis resigned from the House Judiciary Committee, avoiding pressure to explore allegations of injustice by Alabama whistleblowers who risked everything to seek better oversight of the justice system.
One was DOJ paralegal Tamarah Grimes, a Republican fired by the Justice Department after criticizing the Siegelman prosecution for waste and unfairness. Unable to obtain a Judiciary Committee invitation to testify, she's now out of work, faced with massive legal bills, and in the process of losing her home to foreclosure.
Another was Dana Jill Simpson, a small-town Alabama attorney and longtime Republican political volunteer who gave sworn statements to the committee and Siegelman's judge in 2007 alleging Republican plans to frame the Democrat Siegelman to prevent his reelection.
Siegelman, 64, was governor from 1999 to 2003. He's free on bond following his 2006 conviction on corruption charges centering on his 1999 reappointment to a state board of a donor to a non-profit that advocated a state lottery to improve Alabama's education funding.
After concluding that Davis didn't want to investigate the bogus federal charges for fear of antagonizing powerful Republicans Simpson vowed a year ago to work against his election.
"If Davis had pushed for witnesses before the Judiciary Committee and they'd taken the Fifth Amendment," she said this morning in a phone interview, "it would have ended the Siegelman prosecution years ago. Instead, we see Siegelman facing 20 more years in prison and his innocent co-defendant serving seven years on these trumped up charges."
She's also among a number of Alabama attorneys and commentators wondering why the federal appointment process Davis leads as his state's senior federal elected Democrat hasn't moved more forcefully to replace the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney Leura Canary, whose middle district office prosecuted Siegelman and whose husband leads the Business Council of Alabama.
Tuesday was payback. Davis sought election as Alabama's first African-American governor, and won endorsements from most major newspapers. Yet his state's four major black political groups endorsed the white candidate Sparks. Alabama Democratic Conference Chairman Joe Reed, for instance, wrote:
It's no secret that Davis is the preferred opponent of the Republican Party. This may be because he will be the most easily defeated Democrat, or because he is the most Republican of the Democratic candidates.
Siegelman visited black churches Sunday to describe why he was making the first primary endorsement of his long career to back Sparks. The former governor said Sunday:
Ron Sparks wants to create jobs, pay for free college scholarships for our children with our own Educational Lottery and pay for nursing home care for our seniors by taxing casinos. Ron is courageous and the hardest working man I've seen, well, since I was a candidate.
That would be enough but I am also disappointed in Artur Davis....Not only because he voted against health care and took a bunch of money from insurance companies, but Artur has taken several thousands of dollars in contributions from the very people who had me prosecuted and put in prison.
I just don't understand who Artur really is deep inside. But I do know who Ron Sparks is and what he stands for, and I like everything I know about Ron Sparks.
Similarly, progressive blogger Roger Shuler published a commentary Monday entitled: "Artur Davis: What a Waste of Political Potential. "Shuler wrote:
A hopeful person might have expected that the first black candidate with a legitimate chance to become governor of Alabama would be someone who understands the injustice and inequality that still permeates our society, especially here in the Deep South. But that hopeful person would be wrong. What we have instead is an empty suit named Artur Davis.
As a lame duck congressman with important friends, Davis may obtain a federal appointment. Shuler suggested one possibility last month, "Is Obama Holding Leura Canary's Job for Artur Davis?"
Appointing Davis to such a powerful post would be a huge mistake for Obama. Voters in troubled times are showing they want fighters to handle sensitive issues -- not careerists with fancy resumes and powerful friends.
"Down here," the whistleblower Simpson continued, "we're ready to pack the Davis bags and send him elsewhere. And we certainly don't want him as U.S. attorney."
]]>Siegelman Judge Asked To Recuse As Kagan, Rove Oppose Reviewstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5346282010-04-12T16:24:04-04:002011-05-25T16:10:21-04:00Andrew Kreighttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/
Scrushy, now serving a seven-year sentence for arranging $500,000 in donations to a non-profit at the request of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, requested last week that Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller of Montgomery rule on recusal requests filed last summer, or else withdraw.
Scrushy and Siegelman have argued that the judge must be disqualified after being enriched from $300 million in Bush-era contracts for his closely held company Doss Aviation to perform such work as refueling Air Force planes and training Air Force pilots.
"Quite simply, there is no valid reason for this Court's failure to dispose of this motion in
a timely fashion," wrote Scrushy's attorneys last week.
The former HealthSouth CEO's conviction is based on his donations to the Alabama Education Foundation in 1999 and 2000 at the request of then-governor Siegelman. In June 2007, Fuller ordered seven-year terms for defendants. The judge sent them immediately to prison in shackles with no appeal bond, and with solitary confinement initially for Siegelman that prevented any contact with his family and the news media.
A Republican former billionaire, Scrushy has argued that he was an innocent bystander caught up in a plan by the Bush Justice Department to eliminate the Democrat Siegelman from politics. His health care business collapsed early this decade amid complaints of fraud. But all of his criminal convictions were for the gifts to the foundation. "I'm the first person in history," Scrushy has said, "to be sent to prison for making a charitable donation."
Both the Bush and Obama Justice Departments have maintained that neither Fuller nor they have done anything wrong.
Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller (Phil Fleming Photo)
$50 Billion In Air Force Contracts At Stake
Meanwhile, I reported last week that a factor prompting Siegelman's prosecution was the aim of some Republicans to seek contracts valued from $35 billion to $50 billion for Europe's multi-national consortium EADS and Northrop Grumman to build next-generation Air Force refueling tankers.
The EADS-led plan would replace Boeing Corp., the previous tanker builder. Years ago, EADS used competitive intelligence agents to show that Boeing had bribed an Air Force procurement officer. My column noted that an EADS victory would enable an assembly plant in Alabama, as advocated by four European heads of state, major global financiers and some U.S. politicians.
"The ring of truth in the article," Siegelman wrote me last week after publication and follow-up ,"is that Republicans wanted EADS, and I was close to Boeing because I had helped them expand their National Missile Defense Center in Huntsville and had them locate a manufacturing facility for the Delta IV and Delta II Rockets in Decatur, AL."
Siegelman was Alabama's governor from 1999 to 2003, but lost reelection in 2002 when 6,000 of his votes mysteriously shifted from voting machines in Baldwin County after polls closed. "Keep in mind," Siegelman wrote last week, "the head of Alabama's Business Council after my election was stolen was, and is, Bill Canary."
Siegelman argues that Rove worked with Alabama prosecutors in an office run by U.S. Attorney Leura Canary. Her husband is Rove's longtime friend and political ally Canary, who managed the 2002 campaign of Siegelman's Republican rival Bob Riley, Alabama's current governor.
Leura Canary
Power Plays Against Obama Nominees
Both Leura and Bill Canary have issued statements denying wrongdoing. To defer to Alabama's two powerful Republican senators, the Obama administration has so far continued Canary in office after she served during the two Bush administrations as the president's top prosecutor in Alabama's middle district, covering the state capital region.
In February, Alabama's senior Senator, Richard Shelby, threatened to issue a blanket Senate hold on all Obama federal appointments unless the Defense Department gives more consideration to the EADS-Northrop Grumman bid. Sen. Jeff Sessions also wields power as the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and thus the gatekeeper for any Obama judicial or Justice Department nominee.
Leura Canary's office continues to make news as federal investigators this month warned state lawmakers that they risk prosecution if they illegally help Alabama's nascent electronic bingo industry fought by Riley.
This is part of a long-term battle creating a secret alliance between some Alabama anti-gambling crusaders and Mississippi casino operators, who seek to retain Alabama gambling business by limiting competition in the adjoining state. Senate testimony has revealed that Jack Abramoff arranged for up to $10 million in donations from Mississippi casino owners to fight Siegelman, who promised in his election campaigns to create a lottery to obtain funding for better schools. Siegelman signed a personal note to help found the Alabama Education Foundation to advocate for the lottery.
Bush administration prosecutors used Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base as headquarters for a multi-year investigation of Siegelman to show that Scrushy's donations to the foundation were, in effect, a bribe to Siegelman, who in 1999 reappointed Scrushy to a state board on which he'd served in previous administrations.
A bipartisan group of 91 former state attorneys general from more than 40 states formed an unprecedented coalition to file a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court arguing it should hear Siegelman's case because his actions did not constitute a crime.
But Kagan, now widely reported as a leading candidate to ascend from her post as Justice Department solicitor general to become her friend Obama's nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy, urged the high court in November to deny Siegelman a hearing. Kagan used technical legal arguments devised with the assistance of DOJ's trial prosecutors.
Kagan's stance already has created strong skeptics in progressive circles in Alabama, and is certain to irritate Siegelman supporters around the country if she is nominated to the Supreme Court. DOJ has requested that Fuller resentence Siegelman, now 64, to an additional 20 years in prison.
Siegelman supporters estimate they have sent DOJ, the White House and news media outlets tens of thousands of complaints in recent years. Yet DOJ argues that Fuller should remain deciding the case because not one reasonable person in the United States would think his impartiality could be questioned under the recusal legal standard DOJ and other lawyers have cited in briefs.
Elena Kagan
Rove Renews Attacks
Concurring with DOJ's view is former White House advisor Rove, now on book tour promoting his memoir Courage and Consequence that denies any improper role by him, others in the Bush White House, prosecutors or the judge.
Also, Rove mocks whistleblowers and congressional Democrats alike who have become involved in the Siegelman/Scrushy case.
One Rove target is California Congressman Adam Schiff, the House Judiciary Committee's chief interrogator last July asking Rove about his role in DOJ prosecutions. In Courage, Rove says Schiff "was clearly not prepared."
Schiff's work can be examined in the transcripts. Schiff, via his communications director, declined to respond to Rove's insult, which encompasses also the committee that entrusted Schiff to lead its review that committee leaders touted for two years previous as leading to a vigorous cross-examination of Rove.
Karl Rove
Rove wrote also in Courage that a Democratic committee staffer privately disparaged to him Republican whistleblower Dana Jill Simpson. She is an Alabama lawyer from rural Rainsville who had stepped forward to provide the committee in 2007 with sworn testimony and documentation of the court record on military contracting.
She alleged a plan by her fellow Republicans as early as 2002 to frame Siegelman, and later steer the case to Fuller. Her testimony said that Riley's son Robert confided to her in 2005 even before Siegelman was indicted in his second trial that Fuller hated Siegelman and would "hang" him. Robert Riley has issued a statement denying her claim, but has not been called to testify.
Simpson responds that the truth would become obvious if Congress summoned witnesses for a first-time public hearing under oath. Siegelman, released on bond in 2008 by federal appeals court Democrats promptly after CBS 60 Minutes alleged GOP misconduct, also seeks Supreme Court review and a congressional hearing.
Simpson, as a behind-the-scenes unpaid whistleblower in 2007, helped Scrushy's attorneys submit a filing to Fuller in April 2007 seeking judicial recusal because, unknown to defendants, the judge owned up to 44% of Doss when it received an Air Force contract for $178 million just before the start of trial.
Fuller refused to recuse himself. DOJ endorsed the judge's decision and communicated ex parte with him to help resolve the matter, in part by sealing the allegations against him temporarily from public view. Doss officials and Fuller have declined comment on the judge's current Doss ownership, which reportedly dwindled to 32% several years ago. Nearly all other shareholders owned 6%, apparently keeping Fuller as the controlling minority shareholder.
In general, the Obama administration maintains that the nation should look ahead, not bog down in recriminations.
On Friday, the White House announced withdrawal of the nomination of Indiana law professor Dawn Johnsen to run DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. That unit guides both the White House and DOJ on permissible uses of their powers. Progressive commentators argue that her appointment died because she was perceived as a critic of legal rationales for torture and illegal detention -- and thus too independent.
Last summer, Scrushy and Siegelman renewed their recusal and other appellate issues with filings that included a claim that the prosecution's chief witness was sexually blackmailed by interrogators at the Air Force base to shape his trial testimony in up to 70 coaching sessions, only a few disclosed to the defense.
Fuller's failure to rule on withdrawal prompted last week's Scrushy filing, which said: "The recusal motion was based on three grounds: the fact that the Chief Judge is a material witness to the facts concerning an ex parte meeting in early April 2007, which is at issue in Defendant's pending new trial motion; that the Chief Judge has personal knowledge of contested facts as a result of that meeting; and that the Chief Judge's conduct raises grave questions as to his impartiality and the appearance of that impartiality."
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