Witness Tampering and More by Senior Justice Department Officials
It looks like some nasty things are starting to crawl out of the woodwork in the DOJ. Chuck Schummer’s predictions last night on Countdown are beginning to happen - more on that in a minute.
The Washington Post reports that a huge case filed by the Clinton administration against tobacco companies in 1999 was politically interfered with by Bushies in the Department of Justice. According to the Post, “Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.”
Eubanks was a 22-year veteran of the Justice Department and the lead prosecutor for the “government’s racketeering case” against the tobacco companies. Allegations of impropriety in the case were made public in 2005; however, none of the prosecuting attorneys spoke out against the Justice Department at the time for obvious reasons.
The officials that Eubanks has directly made allegations against are then-Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum, then-Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler and Keisler’s deputy at the time, Dan Meron.
She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said. (Emphasis added.)
“Political interference is happening at Justice across the department,” she said. “When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general’s office, politics is the primary consideration. . . . The rule of law goes out the window.”
Although there are several allegations, witness tampering alone is more than enough to give Scooter Libby some company in prison.
The DOJ was cleared of any wrong doing in mid-2006 by the Office of Professional Responsibility, but that’s not exactly vindication. The Office of Professional Responsibility, “reports directly to the Attorney General, [and] is responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct”
Congress is going to put Alberto Gonzales through the meat grinder.
It also appears that McCallum’s intervention in the potential landmark case worked out quite well for him. McCallum is now ambassador to Australia. Not a bad place to live mate; I know I used to live there.
The Post also reports that “lawyers from Justice’s civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by supervisors in the past.”
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) knew what he was talking about on Countdown last night when he said the Justice Department’s dirty laundry would come out regardless of whether Bush challenged the Judiciary Committee’s subpoenas or not. Specifically, Schumer said:
I hope that this president will see the light, negotiate with us on a fair and reasonable basis, not give us take it or leave it of an unreasonable offer, so we can get to the bottom of it quickly.
And I‘d say one other thing, Keith. There are enough disgruntled people in the Justice Department in particular, because they really resented what happened here, that the information is going to come out. It will either come out drip, drip, drip, or it‘ll come out all at once, we‘ll get to the bottom of it in a complete way, and solve the problem and move on.
It would be much better for the White House itself, as well as the Justice Department and the country, if they let it all come out at once.
Yep, W. is doing a heckuva job restoring integrity in the White House.
