More rule-breaking that shouldn’t be punished:
A former Justice Department grant-making administrator violated federal ethics and procurement rules in awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars in sole source contracts to ideologically favored companies and individuals, the department’s inspector general concluded today.
The administrator, J. Robert Flores, was a political appointee during former president George Bush’s administration who left his post after the inauguration in January. The department’s public integrity section declined to pursue civil or criminal charges against Flores after ethics watchdogs forwarded their findings, investigators said.
The report issued this morning culminates a nearly two-year investigation into alleged irregularities with grants awarded by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention during the Bush administration.
You know the drill: we can’t look backwards, there’s so much else on our plate right now we don’t have time to think about this, this is not time for partisan vengeance, blah blah blah.
asiangrrlMN
Oh, good grief. Was there anyone in the last administration and minions who wasn’t a corrupt bastard?
robertdsc
And people wonder why these scum can’t get jobs.
Wingnut welfare to the rescue!
Cat Lady
That whole fucking administration was ABOUT being unethical and illegal. We should just assume that everything that was done by every hack in it is prosecutable.
Cheney and Rumsfeld. Keep your eyes on the prize.
asiangrrlMN
@Cat Lady: Yeah, I am with you on that one, although for personal reasons, I want Yoo thrown in the mix. However, I will be willing to let the rest go if Cheney and Rummy got tossed in jail for life.
Slightly OT–I’m watching Olbermann from last night, and Tweety is on. He makes me grind my teeth to a nub. Gaaaaaah!
omen
is this why bushies staffed the admin with people like gonzales, yoo and flores? in case dems decided to go after them, republicans get to point their fingers and cry “RACISM!”
it’s the clarence thomas gambit.
Dennis-SGMM
I’d bet that there are no criminal penalties attached to violating either ethics or procurement rules. Remember those Bush DOJ types who violated both ethics and Civil Service rules? They left government before the boom was lowered and they suffered exactly dick for their actions.
Warren Terra
IANAL, but presumably, unless you can prove bribery or some other explicit quid-pro-quo, the recipient of the grant is off the hook (technically all they did was apply for grants; and I doubt they could be compelled to refund the cash) and the official broke (important!) civil service rules but didn’t personally benefit, which may limit their liability. And the amount of money misappropriated may not be huge compared to a federal trial. And, of course, the official presumably no longer works there. So, unless they want to make an example I can see reasons not to bother prosecuting.
Still, why wouldn’t they want to make an example? Honest, open, fair, nonpartisan administration of government money is rather an important principle, after all. And while I’m likely to like the friends of Obama’s appointees rather more than I like a right-wing Honduran military politico with ties to Jesse Helms’s views on Latin America, I’d be just as happy to see Obama’s appointees scared into playing straight – let alone the next time Republicans are in power.
Still, short of criminal prosecution, are any professional penalties possible? Disbarment, say, if he’s a lawyer? Is he at least blocked from future government work? From lobbying governmental agencies?
asiangrrlMN
@omen: Well, it’s also Bush’s way of being color-blind. He doesn’t care what color you are as long as you blindly adhere to his beliefs and unthinkingly do his bidding.
Brachiator
Hmmm. Definitely sounds like a fair amount of justice was prevented here.
Comrade Darkness
Fiscal responsibility, b*tches.
Nancy Darling
Is it significant that she is a Regent U. alum?
kay
The shame of this is two-fold.
The DOJ juvenile justice project was established to look at state practices and procedure regarding delinquent juveniles and insure that state practice comported with due process, etc.
That was the point of having a federal program.
The delinquency prevention portion was supposed to be geared toward the 8 to 10% of juveniles who are likely to be repeat offenders. They can be and often are identified in the first interview, when they get picked up the first time. They have risk factors that indicate a really intensive approach.
Having parents who are themselves incarcerated, history of child abuse or neglect, siblings in prison, like that. Not lock-up, but “wrap around services”. Essentially, they monitor those kids every move for months. It works, too. They often don’t re-offend.
What it looks like they did was funnel that money and attention to “general population” programs. Abstinence programs, mostly, at the middle school level.
gnomedad
Bushco strategy: corruption so all-encompassing that any effort at accountability will look like a witchhunt.
gwangung
@kay:
Ah, thereby showing that stupid social do-gooder stuff doesn’t work….
media browski
Dougj, are you just going to recycle the same WATB complaints every few posts? Because if that’s the extent of your thoughts, I can just start skipping your posts.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
Oh, I disagree. I think we should have a Department of Retrospection, in charge of looking backward at all times. Constant revenge and retribution is their mission.
I would like to see you get a prominent position there. You could share an open cubicle with Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and maybe Michele Bachman.
For once, we’d have a government bureau that really got things done!
Not one that would serve any particular useful purpose, but hey, who cares about that?
Your slogan could be “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take other people not being mad as hell any more!”
I even found you a logo.
DepartmentOfEndlessNavelGazing
Just to seal the deal. I’m with you all the way on this.
DanSmoot'sGhost
Yes. SATSQ.
HyperIon
@Warren Terra:
What I would like is a website where it just lays out what is known. So future employers could find out certain details of this person’s employment history. Not accusations. Rather a summary of what was investigated and what decision was made about the investigation. Oh, and IANAL either.
Hob
Kay @12: Now I’m feeling sick all over again, thinking about the horrible juvenile court corruption that was going on for years in Pennsylvania. It sure sounds like this DOJ project was the kind of thing that might’ve had a chance of uncovering that, and saving a lot of kids from being literally sold to jails, if the feds hadn’t been busy with their own pissant schemes.
kay
@gwangung:
I had a graduate of our ACE program call me from Iraq. Sadly, I’m an idiot, and I hung up on him. There’s a delay when calling from Iraq, and when the call was transferred to me, the person on the other end (him) didn’t respond immediately, and I hung up on him.
He called again told the secretary to tell me to wait ten seconds before hanging up. Unless I was “just being a wiseass” and not taking calls.
TenguPhule
More like well past time and long overdue.
TenguPhule
No.
SATSQ.
Shoot them all and move on.
kay
@Hob:
the process is more detailed than i can describe here, but that’s a good catch.
there are state reporting guidelines but they’re voluntary. something like 19 states are out of compliance. we’re not even permitted to know which states, but i’m guessing pennsylvania is one.
Zifnab
@gnomedad: Is it a witch hunt when you’re combing through Hoggwarts?
Elie
I have been reading but not commenting on this thread and the other about torture and justice.
This has been an important process — to have public discussion to lay out not only facts and effects of corruption and bad policy but to also weigh what we want out of all of this — where do we want to be..
I have been reading Richard Brinkley’s The Great Deluge about NOLA and the Gulf Coast experience with Katrina. It has been painful and maddening the layer upon layer of incompetence, indolence and downright indifference to pain and suffering by all layers of government from Federal down to the most local. Nobody really gave a damn to do it right, to care – to balance decency and mercy as values above all others.
It became apparent to me that Katrina was an allegory for this time of great corruption, greed and loss of decency and caring.
We are starting to wake up from this horror — seeing this image of ourselves, ugly and mysterious. How did we get there? But to me, the most important question is how do we get from there to where we want to be — and where is that?
Much of the torture and other judicially based actions came from fundamentally misunderstanding safety and protection — not knowing that fear could drive us to complete depravity that we would still label as necessary to avoid danger. In those scenarios — my safety and the protection of my people and my stuff justified almost anything — many who made these decisions were that afraid and their fear spread like a new virus — we had so little resistance to fight it off until now..
The question I pose to our community here now and to the broader nation is what do we want?
If punishment is our goal, we will punish and there will be a certain satisfaction to that. But if our goal is to re-educate and influence our population such that this is not as likely to happen again, the punishment model alone cannot work. Punishment is just likely to cause shame in those who receive it. The people who are taken to trial are not the lone recipients of this punishment but everyone who at the time, albeit mistakenly, believed that we needed that kind of safety. It is important to move away from that kind of need for safety, but we want to replace it. With what? Not shame and repudiation and certainly with the heat and anger that I read in these posts every day.
There is a balance that we need to strike between correction of wrongs and technical “justice” and how we reset the values of the larger population. That “reset”, and the opportunity for an epiphany about what safety and security really mean, and how they can really be assured, cannot be punished or shamed into awareness.
The justice that I believe is necessary, will need to be borne out of a different process — a reconciliation and a learning that comes from broad discussion and exposure of the ideas and beliefs (right and wrong) that drove not only the bad decisions, but the values and ideals that we believe are important to make sure we are righteous going forward.
So while I understand and in many ways support the idea of “justice” I am not sure the form that justice best takes in my own heart and mind. I want it to synch up with a vision that I have of my country once able to hold its head up again and to be brave in its values. I just don’t see punishment as factoring in that alone — not with the “just-like-that” tone that I read too often …
Thanks for listening…
mclaren
This is what happens when the rule of law goes away. Make no mistake about it, we no longer have a constitution. And now that we’ve sent the clear message that the people at the top can commit any crime and get away without punishment, why should the people at the mid-levels or at the bottom of the government bureaucracy bother to obey the law?
The fish rots from the head. We had a White House and a Senate and a House of Representatives full of cowards and torturers and murderers and monsters who lied for sport and whiled away their idle hours thinking up new torments for helpless victims. Not one of those monsters will ever serve a minute in jail, ever see the inside of a courtroom, ever be inconvenienced for their crimes in the slightest. Now we expect the lower-level government officials to obey the law? We expect cops and prosecutors to obey the law?
What law?
Cue Guns ‘N Roses: “Welcome to the Jungle.”
Elie
McLaren:
There is nothing to do from your point of view. We are hopelessly corrupt, the Constituion is gone and no one will do anything right because all the head guys were bad guys. We could spend every day for this next century punishing all the bad monsters, cowards, torturers and murderers. But it would be a waste cause no one is gonna obey the law anyway, right?
Ah c’mon. Is the anger you express offering a real way to think or deal with this? If it is hopeless to begin with, why bother?
Marnie
So just make him pay for the investigation.
That should hurt enough to slow the next guy down.
Tsulagi
That’s just standard page 2 boilerplate in the Sternly Worded Letter series.
someguy
@ Elie
The problem is that half of our country have turned into sick, bigoted, closed-minded people. They simply think wrong and do indeed need reeducation. There are models for successfully reeducating a population, but most of the successful methods probably aren’t really workable under our existing legal system.
rikyrah
Arrest him and put him in jail.
THEN, we can look forward.
mclaren
Elie wailed:
Elie
“There are models for successfully reeducating a population, but most of the successful methods probably aren’t really workable under our existing legal system”
I don’t think that it is the place of our legal system to re-educate anyone.
I believe in the social model of change. People re-educate themselves based on awareness.
The civil rights movement of the 1960’s in this country was based on non-violence and appeal to not only the sense of righteourness and justice but forgiveness and learning.
We have a very diverse society and culture. Punishment can start a cycle that we may not want as the total statement of our ideals. We obviously cannot let criminality rule, but neither can we unfetter retribution. There are many examples in our current world history about the difficulties in meting out justice when one group is seeing itself as the looser and without being heard. There is always payback and I say that not from fear of payback, but from wanting to work another line. It is amazingly easy to have the justice. punishment, retribution, cycle. Ask the Rwandans and many others — not that I am likening this to that but I respect our biological and social set up for judgement too much to be lax about acknowledging its power.
We CAN have some punishment — leavened by knowledge and complete aering and discussion around what happened and why …but we must always be respectful of our limitations and our arrogance — “all glory [substitute] righteousness] can be fleeting indeed” as the Romans learned..
Let us proceed through discovery with humility on the huge burden we have — not only for truth and justice but for learning and courage to live our ideals going forward…