The Justice Department’s Hurricane-Strength Misconduct
Along with former Department of Justice lawyer and PJ Media Legal Editor J. Christian Adams, I have written a lot over the past several years about the misbehavior, unprofessionalism, and unethical conduct of lawyers at the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. We have also written of the bias and incompetence of the lawyers in DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is supposed to investigate misconduct by Justice lawyers. But now there’s a new author writing about the “skullduggery” and “perfidy” of DOJ lawyers. Those are the words of Louisiana federal district court Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt. They appear in his 50-page order issued Nov. 26, 2012, in U.S. v. Bowen. (Christian Adams noted this order at PJ Media on November 28.)
Bowen involved the Obama administration’s prosecution of former New Orleans police officers for shooting suspected looters on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge. The shooting occurred on September 4, 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The case was handled by the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana. In August 2011, five of the six defendants were found guilty on numerous criminal counts, including making false statements to authorities to cover up what happened.
The defendants then filed a motion with Judge Engelhardt for new trials, claiming that the government attorneys had “engaged in a secret public relations campaign … [to ensure] that public opinion would be inflamed against the defendants, and that the government’s version of the facts would be well known before anyone set foot in a courtroom.” This was done through leaks to the media about “the activities of the federal grand jury, the identities of targets, the status of plea negotiations, and other sensitive confidential information that became widely known publicly before trial.”
Some of these leaks, particularly those of grand jury proceedings and sealed proceedings, violated the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
There were also anonymous postings on Nola.com, the website run by the New Orleans Times Picayune, “both before and during the trial.” These postings “mocked the defense, attacked the defendants and their attorneys, were approbatory of the United States Department of Justice, declared the defendants obviously guilty, and discussed the jury’s deliberations.”
It turns out that many of the anonymous blog postings were made by two DOJ lawyers, although we don’t know yet how many others may have been involved.
The Civil Rights Div at DOJ is, for the most part, nothing more than a leftist, renegade, reactionary force of so called lawyers. Their mission is not to prosecute but to social engineer and redress perceived societal ills – but only towards their preferred ‘victims’.
And it is decidedly the case, under the purview of the Racialist AG that no manner of justice is adjudicated. He, and his gang of lawyers, is a serial lawbreaker and needs to be put in prison forthwith -http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/01/will-barack-hussein-obamas-lawless-justice-department-under-the-aegis-of-ag-holder-finally-fall-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/…The Mafia and their gangsters would do a better job of handling the DOJ, considering the way things are shaking out under the (mis)reign of Holder!
Off to the slammer they gotta go!
amen !
WOW. Just . . . wow. Someone told me last week that I was the last ethical lawyer, and I’m starting to see why. I can’t even IMAGINE doing something like that. I have never commented, or have even been tempted to comment, on an article about the facts of one of my cases, anonymously or otherwise. And then to lie about it to the court? I’m pretty much the last person around here who even takes verifications seriously, so it wouldn’t even occur to me to lie to the court.
I’m having flashbacks to Professional Responsibility class–I swear we discussed this exact situation and concluded that it was blatantly unethical. I just looked up the standards of the Louisiana Disciplinary Board, and if you check out Standard 5.0 and its subsidiaries, these folks are at least looking at suspension, if not disbarment. Sheer stupidity.
(I seem to have trouble commenting today–I am getting a WordPress error message. My apologies if there are multiple posts)
Perhaps you were just alluding to the need for a verifiable source or precedent here, Julia, but I find the idea that a person would have to take a course before knowing that such conduct is unethical beyond Orwellian.
I was just about to make a similar comment when I read yours.
That’s rather like concluding that the sky is higher than the oceans.
I’m not really sure what the complaint is here? My point is that this is a specific topic that is discussed within the realm of professional responsibility–there is no available excuse such as “No one has applied this rule to internet commenting before.” I made the point because there ARE some areas where there is honest misunderstanding of how an older rule applies to new technology (such as what sort of internet conversations create an attorney-client relationship), but this isn’t one of them. I never said you had to take a law school course to see the obvious shadiness here–I was talking about the specific understanding of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the legal industry today. These people had no excuse.
“If no wrongdoing is uncovered, it will come as a surprise to no one given the conflict of interest existing between the investigator and the investigated.” (Emphasis mine)
Despite the author’s optimism (“Let’s hope the inspector general at DOJ also takes the straight course and steadily seeks the truth of what happened internally at DOJ in this shameful and shocking case,”), IMO, the COI observed by Judge Englehardt to exist between the DOJ’s OPR and those they investigate is identical to the one shared by all of the governments’ numerous IG’s, even under the best of circumstances.
Sadly, in this particular case, in light of the reportedly substantial and deliberately engineered infiltration of DOJ by “justice” workers who are apparently without scruples of any sort, I would expect very little “truth,” and still less meaningful action to result from yet another of their putative “investigations. “
Growing up in the 1960′s, 1970′s and 1980′s we saw all these movies and TV shows, and read novels, where the bad guys were corrupt good-old boy networks, sheriffs, small town and backwater county office holders who used their official powers to harass and intimidate, to harm the small and disenfranchised. These officials were always bigots.
Well here it is late 2012 and we have exactly the same thing. Only the bad guys are the US Justice Department and the parts of the FBI, along with local and state police and prosecutors corrupted by the good-old boy networks of “liberal” Democrats. They are just as bigoted as the worst of the racist and corrupted local, county and state offices in the South during the civil rights era.
One constant is that the bad guys then were Democrats and the bad guys now are Democrats.
Well, if they can railroad a sitting U.S. Senator, why not a couple of cops in New Orleans? For the DOJ, “truth” is in the eye of the beholder. As bvw points out above, nothing much has changed.
How can there be any expectation of a valid investigation by an inspector general connected to our thoroughly corrupt DOJ? There must be some other legal method by which malfeasance of this magnitude can be properly scrutinized.
Most Americans will never hear about this, not that many would care if they did.
Abolish DoJ including all it’s agencies and bureaus, start over from scratch.
That action would leave the miscreants unpunished and free to engage in further chicanery. I favor an open season and no bag limit.
Do they no longer teach ethics in law school and when did they stop? I’ve never seen so much conflict of interest in my life.