Did You Know - Sad State Of Law

Commentary from John Nichols at The Nation...

With top lawyers and administrators resigning at an alarming rate, the scandal-plagued Justice Department is becoming an increasingly dysfunctional agency, a shell without credible leadership. Within that shell lies the rot of politicization, as evidence mounts that the Bush Administration has used the nation's chief law enforcement agency to undermine not just civil liberties but democracy itself, and so it shall be as long as the primary architect of the department's decline, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, remains at the helm.

I'm not sure I buy the bit about it being Gonzales - I think it's Bush/Cheney and Gonzales is just a puppet.

Did You Know - Attorney Probe

Some of the Bush administration shenanigans can be attributed to incompetence, for sure. But how much can be attributed to political partisanship and conscious criminal behavior? Here's a clip and a link to an interesting article from the New York Times a few days ago...

When a jury acquitted Carl J. Marlinga, a former county prosecutor from suburban Detroit, of bribery charges last year, his initial reaction was to write off the episode as a terrible mistake that at least had been corrected.

“Prosecutors can make mistakes for innocent reasons,” Mr. Marlinga
said. “I know that first hand.”

But as he looks back at the case, Mr. Marlinga, 60, who was charged while he was a Democratic candidate for Congress, no longer has such confidence in the integrity of the legal system.

“Was there some extra pressure on the United States attorney’s office, whether articulated or tacitly understood, by their superiors in Washington who would not look favorably upon the office if this case was not pursued?” he asked. “I have to wonder.”

That kind of second guessing has surfaced with increasing frequency in recent weeks in states including Alabama, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Since the dismissals of eight United States attorneys, local lawyers, politicians, editorial writers,
members of Congress and defendants are questioning what they say is a pattern of investigating Democrats. They point to inquiries that drag on for years but end with no charges, an acquittal or convictions for relatively modest infractions.

Did You Know - Carol Lam

The following is from Progress Report (3/19/2007)...

ETHICS -- LAM'S FIRING MAY HAVE BEEN TIED TO CIA CORRUPTION PROBE: Yesterday on CBS's Face the Nation, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) revealed that then-San Diego U.S. attorney Carol Lam notified the Justice Department on May 10, 2006 that she intended to execute search warrants on Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, as part of a corruption probe surrounding former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA). The next day, on May 11, 2006, Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales's chief of staff, sent an e-mail to deputy White House counsel William Kelley, asking Kelley to call to discuss "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires." Lam was dismissed seven months later as part of the Bush administration's purge of eight U.S. attorneys. Lam oversaw the investigation that led to the conviction of Cunningham, who pleaded guilty in late 2005 to accepting $2.4 million in bribes. He was sentenced in March 2006 to eight years and four months in prison. Lam was expanding the Cunningham probe to also look at the actions of then-House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA). "There were clearly U.S. attorneys that were thorns in the side for one reason or another of the Justice Department," Feinstein said. "And they decided, by strategy, in one fell swoop, to get rid of seven of them."