The Justice Department’s Hurricane-Strength Misconduct
The lead prosecutor in the case, Barbara Bernstein, the deputy chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section, told the judge that she knew nothing about the anonymous blogging or the leaks. Yet she tried to minimize the unprofessional and potentially criminal conduct of her colleagues by asserting to the judge “that the conduct at issue had no effect on the validity of our verdict in the Danziger case” and Jan Mann’s anonymous postings were “irrelevant.”
Perricone resigned as an Assistant United States Attorney in March of 2012. U.S. Attorney Letten announced that Mann had been relieved of her posts as first assistant U.S. attorney and chief of the Criminal Division. But Mann remains an employee of DOJ despite her misconduct, which included sitting “through the sworn testimony of Perricone knowing full well the infirmities of his assertions and untruths which he told” and submitting a report to the court that was “tendentious, unreliable and unacceptable.” As Engelhardt said, the “very appearance of any attorney, acting on behalf of the United States of America, participating in such conduct should be dealt with promptly and harshly. The integrity of our criminal justice system requires as much.” Apparently, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten does not agree, since he has not fired Mann or her husband who apparently also knew about the anonymous postings but failed to inform Letten or the court.
The judge’s condemnation of the Justice Department in the final pages of the court order is devastating. As the judge says, a “cavalier attitude toward the truth cannot be indulged at any juncture or level.” In addition to the leaks and anonymous blog posts, the judge outlines other extremely questionable tactics employed by Bernstein, her prosecution team, and FBI agents. This included “shockingly coercive tactics” employed against witnesses, such as three defense witnesses who refused to appear at trial after DOJ threatened to prosecute them for perjury as a result of earlier grand jury testimony. Yet as the court pointed out, none of the witnesses was ever charged with any crime.
This case is not over. Judge Engelhardt ordered DOJ to do a real investigation of the grand jury leaks and other problems that occurred in this case. And he stated that he was forwarding a copy of his order to the Louisiana Bar Association for disciplinary proceedings against Perricone and Mann. He refused to rule on the defendants’ requests for new trials, but only because of the “inadequacies” of DOJ’s superficial investigation of wrongdoing in the case. As he said, “prosecutorial misconduct in this case is a very near and present thing” but he did not yet have enough information to come to a final conclusion. Judge Engelhardt said that he intended to “follow the advice of Washington himself: ‘There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily.’”
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.
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.