Two months after prosecutors abandoned the criminal conviction of former senator Ted Stevens, the Justice Department unit that polices public corruption remains in chaos, coping with newly discovered evidence that threatens to undermine other cases while department leaders struggle to reshuffle the ranks.
William Welch and Brenda Morris, senior managers in the department’s Public Integrity Section who supervised the case against the Alaska Republican, have been moved into other roles following the transfer this month of two of their subordinates, who worked on lengthy investigations of Alaskan influence peddling, according to four sources.
At the same time, document-sharing lapses that provoked the Stevens turnaround are also affecting other bribery prosecutions in the state, prompting authorities to take the extraordinary step of releasing two Alaska lawmakers from prison late last week. A new team of government lawyers and FBI agents is reviewing thousands of pages of evidence, trying to assuage the concerns of judges and fielding complaints from defense attorneys.
There is not one part of the government that is not a smoking ash heap after the last eight years.
schrodinger's cat
Shorter Bush administration:
We is in Ur gubmint, messing it up.
Derelict
Please understand: These failures at Justice are a feature, not a bug. The criminality of Republican lawmakers (especially the AK delegation) was so huge that it simply could not be ignored. However, we can’t have Republicans going to jail now, can we? So, BushCo makes sure the prosecutions are run in a such a way that the perps get off. Problem solved!
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
This PROVES that government is inefficient! Why can’t we just privatize the Justice Department and let the invisible hand of the market handle federal investigations and prosecutions? Can anyone give me a GOOD reason- one that isn’t backed up by a lot of Socialist claptrap?
NutellaonToast
I didn’t know that Regent (sp?) University had a criminal justice department.
geg6
Oh, those little molies the Shrub left behind have been very, very busy digging their little tunnels of incompetence, haven’t they? How these people breathe and walk at the same time astonishes me.
DVT
wait, are you saying that replacing dedicated public servants of 20-years experience with a bunch of Regent Law School holy roller flunkies was a BAD thing?
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
If you were a real American, you’d praise our smoking ash heaps.
Only dirty fucking islamofascist commie sociaIist stem-cell eating liberal gay fucking hippies want to reduce carbon emissions, you know.
.
The Grand Panjandrum
Don’t forget about the fired US Attorney’s debacle. One of the cases that was NOT prosecuted, and got David Yglesias fired, was the corruption case against former NM State Senate Majority Leader Manny Aragon (D) that Yglesias refused to facetrack. Both Heather Wilson and Pete Domenici got caught up in that fucking disaster. Aragon had long been suspected of corruption and when they finally got the goods on him the state GOP went apeshit. Fortunately, Yglesias put the law before politics and may have kept the case from being tainted by rushing to get an indictment before the case had been made to the prosecutors standards.
The entire party was so hell bent on politicizing every part of the government which in turned caused severe damage to themselves and our governmental institutions that is only now being measured. For the GOP I say good riddance but it will be yearts before our institutions are nursed back to health.
The government is by its nature a poltical beast but when jurisprudence is dished out based on partisanship we are all in very deep kimchi.
donovong
Gee, why don’t I hear about this on the MSM? Hmmm….
jenniebee
If only this was something that we could fix just by changing our font color…
JGabriel
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Every time I see the name Manny Aragon, I wonder what the flipping heck the Ranger King of Gondor is doing in New Mexico.
Which only proves what a frickin’ geek I am.
.
Aaron
It seems the Republicans care locked in a self-perpetuating belief that government doesn’t work – and so they treat government as the problem, therefore ensuring that it can’t work. Rinse, Repeat
Victor Von Doom
No wonder there are so many flies in the White House considering the vast pile of shit that was left behind.
Jim
No wonder there are so many flies in the White House considering the vast pile of shit that was left behind.
The Grand Panjandrum
@JGabriel: LOTR. Nice (But the spelling is not quite right though.)
SGEW
A recent conjecture: The “Justice” Department is FUBAR.
Why have Obama and Holder acted so objectionably in recent D.O.J. actions? State secrets, Guantanamo, the DOMA brief, etc.? Words and deeds indicate motives and beliefs, certainly, strongly, but perhaps there is another interpretation; another constraint?
What if the D.O.J. is (as this report and many others similar to it seem to show) completely broken as a functioning civil institution? What if Holder is not actually in full “control” of his Department? As commentators such as Horton have been implying, there has been a civil war in the D.O.J. for years, with top-down Bushies vying with the rank and file, while rank corruption and negligent incompetence run rampant through every strata. How deep and comprehensive is this institutional rot? This utter disfunction?
How much damage did the last eight years do to the D.O.J., exactly?
Also: What is more damaging, politically? Sucking up criticism about breaking campaign promises and issuing highly objectionable briefs, or admitting that you don’t actually control a bedrock institution of your governmental branch?
I don’t know; is this too far fetched? Too apologia-esque/apocalyptic? Fails Occam’s razor? Maybe. But it’s sounding ever more persuasive to me.
See, also, the “Intelligence Community,” State Dept. contractors, and the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex.
[ETA: On second thought, scratch state secrets. I think Obama owns that one now.]
Legalize
If I were a current DoJ lawyer I wouldn’t walk around that place without a machete in one hand and a vial of holy water i in the other. There’s no telling what manner of ghouls and goblins are hiding up in there. I think they might be better off leveling the whole building, salting the ground and rebuilding a couple blocks over.
Jim
Sorry about double post. Couldn’t see how to delete.
burnspbesq
These examples of prosecutorial misconduct may be egregious, but unfortunately they are far from rare. Prosecutors go to trial all the time in all sorts of cases where no one could help but suspect that the key evidence was fabricated or planted by the cops. They put cops on the stand knowing that cops always commit perjury. They withhold Brady material because … well, because that scumbag probably should be in jail, and this may be their best shot to put him there.
In an adversarial system, there will always be players who put winning before seeking justice. The only thing you can do is bury them when you catch them, and undo the bad effects of their bad behavior to the greatest extent possible.
A Ghost To Most
What Derelict said. Their intent was to screw the case up so bad that a conviction would never stand. It was definitely a feature, not a bug.
Ash
@SGEW: I wouldn’t be surprised. So many of these people are probably so used to going off the reservation, they don’t even know who they work for anymore.
EconWatcher
We can certainly blame the last administration for some of this. But in fairness, DOJ’s Public Integrity Section has had issues for a long time with, well, its own integrity. Old timers may recall how, back in the days of the Clinton Administration, the prosecution of former Minnesota Senator David Durenberger was derailed when it was revealed that one of the PIS prosecutors had lied about the contents of some grand jury testimony. It wasn’t Clinton’s fault–just some career prosecutors who got overzealous–but there have been other high-profile disasters from that section of DOJ as well.
I think it was career prosecutors who went astray in the Stevens case too. So I’m not sure this PIS problem is really related to the massive and much more serious scandal over hiring, firing, and pressuring local US Attorney offices to bring Voting Rights cases to further Karl Rove’s strategies. There just appears to be a longstanding cultural problem in the Public Integrity Section of DOJ. That happens in bureaucracies sometimes.
Ed Drone
Bush wanted to be president in the worst way, when campaigning.
AND HE SUCCEEDED!
Ed
EconWatcher
By the way, for those who think the career prosecutors in the Stevens case committed misconduct intending to be caught, so as to intentionally blow the case and help Stevens–that’s a whopper.
Apply Occam’s razor: the much simpler and therefore more plausible explanation is that they cut corners to help win a high profile case against a (guilty) U.S. Senator to further their careers. Happens all the time. Conspiracies among prosecutors intending to get caught in misconduct, to destroy their own careers and risk their law licenses in order to help a defendant–all motivated by political kinship–well, let’s just say those instances have been somewhat less common.
Comrade Dread
Never assume evil when simple stupidity and incompetence will do.
Sour Kraut
Which, apparently, was the whole point of the last 8 years.
Anne Laurie
Derelict wins the thread…
… but SGEW rules our collective nightmares!
KCinDC
When does Don Siegelman get his case dropped?
gex
@KCinDC: Silly question. He’s a Democrat. We only drop cases against Republicans.
joel
I am shocked, shocked, to find out that Alberto Gonzales was running a hack shop.
Brachiator
Why not just sent the accused to Gitmo? As we have learned from Dubya from another post today, apparently all you have to do is to look into the eyes of an accused person and know precisely their degree of guilt (innocence is never an issue).
Then I guess that Holder has his work cut out for him. He is going to have to get some tough administrators as assistants.
Really not an issue. The most important thing that Holder can do is to re-establish the effective administration of justice. The rest is noise. I note here, that Holder is also having to duck insane criticism by GOP asshats.
And Holder is expendable. If Obama needs an A.G. who will push back more against the crap thrown at him or her by Republican wingnuts seeking to score political hits, so be it. Obama seems to tend toward do-drama appointments, but a Justice Department full of Rahm Emanuels would suit me mighty fine.
TenguPhule
And they haven’t even started digging yet.
Wait till it all comes out.
It will get worse.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
Government doesn’t work; elect us and we’ll prove it.
LD50
@Roger Moore:
Reputedly a P.J. OP’Rourke quote, from one of his less douchebaggy moments.
brantl
And Obama’s administration has to sort through, all before getting anything very useful done. And people say he’s not making enough changes quickly enough.
brantl
And Obama’s administration has to sort through, all before getting anything very useful done. And people say he’s not making enough changes quickly enough.
brantl
And Obama’s administration has to sort through, all before getting anything very useful done. And people say he’s not making enough changes quickly enough.
binzinerator
@Comrade Dread:
This was the Bush administration. You’d be a fool to assume one somehow excludes the existence of the other.
binzinerator
So what happens when enough people begin to believe the Justice Department will not give us justice?
If you really want to undermine a government — hell the society it purports to govern — you’d destroy any faith in obtaining justice from that government.
When the conservatives enshrined their campaign slogan of “government is the problem” as an ideological belief, as a cornerstone of conservatism, it seems pretty obvious that what would follow would be a coordinated effort to dismantle, sabotage, cripple or destroy ‘the problem’.
But like so much of what conservatism pretends to be, their little mantra is a lie. For conservatives government isn’t a problem at all. They like it far better than most. How else to intrepret the last 8 years of vastly expanded executive powers and the mind-boggling push to involve government into so many formerly private areas of our lives? The Schiavo example, the widespread unrestricted domestic spying, a huge new bureaucracy to oversee a vast security apparatus, huge new increases in government spending, two new wars, it just goes on and on.
Conservatives don’t think government is the problem. It’s a particular kind of government that they see as the problem. And they see no value whatsoever in the institutions of such a government. In fact, it works to their advantage if these institutions fail, if people lose their faith in them.
It’s not that they don’t like government; they just don’t like democratic government.
These institutions they’ve left in a smoking ash heap — these were the institutions of a democratic government.
Do you really think people such as Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have any use for something like a Department of Justice? Do you really think anyone who imprisons people without due process and tortures them — and ignores or breaks laws or fabricates absurd justifications to do so — really gives a shit about something like justice? They made it state policy to do what is the exact opposite.
This really must be re-written to state what has been left unstated for too long:
Because that is really what the conservatives sought to destroy.
Conservatives simply do not believe in democratic government. Because so much of what they want to do, so much of what they believe in, is at odds with such a form of government.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…” This is at the very root of it all — of this democracy, and why such a government would be ‘the problem’ to conservatives. Every fucking conservative who has stood athwart history yelling stop has been at odds with this basic premise. Because when your government is underpinned by this belief and when its legal authority stems from a document that begins “We the people …” we are necessarily talking about everyone, equal, all with unalienable rights.
Go ahead and try to square that with the government conservatives created, the one that tortures, that ignores due process, with their political party that cheers such abuses and makes racial and religious bigotry part of its platform.
Conservatives do not believe in democratic government. That smoking ash heap ought to be evidence enough.
feebog
Confidence is not restored when the Prosecutors involved are merely moved to another position instead of summarily fired.
tcolberg
Interesting. I was listening to NPR this morning or yesterday and they were playing back Holder testifying before a House or Senate committee and the legislators were complaining about there not having been a plan for Guantanamo Bay for the last five months. Maybe there isn’t a plan because the Justice Dept. is just so FUBARed?