The Justice Department’s Hurricane-Strength Misconduct
The first was Assistant United States Attorney Salvador Perricone, a high-ranking supervisory attorney in the Louisiana U.S. Attorney’s Office. Even worse, anonymous postings were also made about the case by the First Assistant United States Attorney Jan Mann, the chief assistant to United States Attorney in Louisiana Jim Letten. At an initial hearing called by the judge about the leak allegations, Mann sat in the courtroom and remained silent as her boss, Jim Letten, stood up and told Judge Engelhardt that neither he nor Jan Mann had any knowledge or involvement in these leaks and the anonymous blog postings.
The judge ordered the Justice Department to investigate the matter “to discern the source of the leaks” and Perricone’s contacts with other government employees and to file a report with the judge. That report was “supervised, compiled, written and submitted” by Jan Mann, the anonymous blogger, who claimed in the report that no one “associated with the government” was the source of leaks. She failed to reveal her involvement or her knowledge of Perricone’s activities.
When Perricone was examined under oath over his anonymous postings by the judge at a hearing, Mann was actually there representing the government. She not only failed again to reveal her knowledge of and participation in the blogging, but she “objected on the record to certain questions asked of Perricone.”
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Magner testified that Mann’s husband, who is also an assistant U.S. attorney in the same office, was anonymous blogger Perricone’s “best friend.” They spent a great deal of time together and Magner found it “very difficult” to believe that Mann would not know about Perricone’s anonymous blogging. Mann was only discovered as being one of the other anonymous bloggers after another lawsuit was filed against her in federal court in November identifying her.
Judge Engelhardt essentially called both AUSAs liars, saying that “no one, especially this Court, could reasonably find it credible that Perricone and former First AUSA Mann, while posting under the same nola.com articles, and responding to and echoing each other’s posts, were unaware of the identity of the other.”
In further proceedings before the judge, the U.S. attorney tried to shift responsibility for DOJ’s internal investigation to the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) at DOJ. Letten issued a press release saying that because the matter was under review by OPR, he would not release any further information about his lawyers’ misbehavior.
So what was the response of OPR to this unethical, unlawful, and potentially perjurious behavior by DOJ employees, which Judge Engelhardt says “might also constitute prosecutable criminal conduct?”
Apparently nothing.
Placing the investigation in the hands of OPR “seems useless,” Judge Engelhardt noted in his opinion:
First of all, having the DOJ investigate itself will likely only yield a delayed yet unconvincing result in which no confidence can rest. 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. Moreover, the Perricone matter has been under investigation for eight months (since March), and yet it comes as a complete surprise to everyone at DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s Office that another “poster” exists, especially one maintaining as high a position in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. It is difficult to imagine how this could possibly have been missed by OPR, and surely raises concerns about the capabilities and adequacy of DOJ’s investigatory techniques as exercised through OPR.
Judge Engelhardt pointed out the incongruity of this entire situation. Posting anonymous online comments “might be unprofessional and unethical, but not criminal.” But activities of DOJ employees the court was looking at also included “apparent false testimony/statements (by commission or omission), suborning false testimony, and making false statement to a federal judge. … Ironically, the defendants in this case have been accused and convicted of counts involving conduct designed to ‘cover up’ or obscure material facts.” Yet the DOJ lawyers involved seem to have engaged in the same behavior.
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.