New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie left the campaign trail Thursday to trade punches with congressional Democrats, who — in a transparently political attempt to bloody the Republican front-runner — called him to testify about lucrative monitoring contracts he awarded while he was the state’s U.S. attorney. And it was punchy.
 

Christie’s testimony before the House Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law, in which he defended a contract worth up to $52 million to former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s consulting firm, exceeded all expectations, in terms of raw shock factor.

We’ll begin at the end.

After two and a half hours of sparring, Christie up and left the hearing, at 1:30 p.m., as Chairman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) shouted in his wake, refusing to excuse him. (Christie had a 2 p.m. train to catch, he said.) Outside the committee room, Christie spared a few seconds to explain to reporters that he and the chairman had previously agreed on his departure time. That’s at least half true – Christie did indeed tell the committee in this letter that he had to leave by 1:30 p.m. It would seem, however, that Cohen didn’t agree to his timetable.

The hearing featured a window-dressing panel of scandalously underused experts, including Hogan & Hartson partner Chuck Rosenberg, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; Gary Grindler, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; Eileen Larence, director of homeland security and justice issues at the Government Accountability Office; and Vikramaditya Khanna, a professor at University of Michigan Law School.

But it was all Christie, defending himself, his office, the efficacy of non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements, and his Italian-American heritage. Christie’s chief antagonist was Cohen, who called the Ashcroft contract “outrageous.”

“Even if you took steroids and hit 70 home runs, it’s not worth $52 million,” Cohen scoffed.

Um, yeah.

The contracts in question derived from five NPAs and DPAs Christie’s office brokered with manufacturers of hip and knee replacements. During a three-year investigation, Christie’s office uncovered a massive kick-back scheme. Rather than prosecute the firms, which, Christie said, would have led to their demise and the loss of about 47,000 jobs — think Arthur Anderson — the office went the monitor route. Ashcroft and his firm made $28 million to $52 million  in 18 months for monitoring Zimmer Holdings. Cohen accused Christie, who worked under Ashcroft at Main Justice, of steering the contract to his old boss.

“You gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse,” Cohen said, referring to Zimmer.

At this, Christie took great offense.

“First of all, it is an ethnically insensitive comment to an Italian American. Secondly, you were not in the room in this situation,” Christie said. (Cohen, backpedaling, backpedaling, backpedaling, said he was unaware of Christie’s ethnic heritage.)

Christie said the monitors were recommended on merit, and each company had a chance to object after meeting with them. He recalled that representatives of Zimmer, after meeting with Ashcroft, “came back and said, ‘We got the best monitor.’”

Later, the company’s counsel at Fulbright & Jaworski would complain that Ashcroft’s rates were unreasonable. When they appealed to Christie, he shooed them away. ”Take another stab at resolving the substantive issues raised in your email directly with the monitor,” he wrote in one email to Fulbright partner Rick Robinson. (Democratic staffers handed out the email exchanges at the start of the hearing.)

“If a U.S. attorney got inolved in every dispute between monitor and companies their monitor, the U.S. attorney would have no time to do anything else but moderate those disputes,” Christie said, when Cohen raised the issue.

There were other choice moments in the hearing. Although Christie is leading in the polls over Democratic incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine in a high-profile race, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) told Christie that “until today, I did not realize you were a candidate for governor.” 

Sigh.

Delahunt said the Ashcroft contract highlighted the problem of an appearance of a conflict of interest, as much as an actual conflict.

“I’m not suggesting you did anything improper, but appearances are important,” Delahunt said.

A bill pending in the House Judiciary Committee would add a layer of judicial oversight to agreements. The Justice Department opposes the bill on the grounds that it would diminish prosecutorial discretion. Since 1992, DOJ has entered into about 150 DPAs and NPAs. Last year, the department added new guidelines to the U.S. Attorneys’ Manual for entering into DPAs and NPAs, selecting of monitors and ensuring compliance with the agreements.

Click here, here, and here for our previous Christie coverage.

Chris Christie stalked out of a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing today after testifying about controversial court-monitoring contracts he awarded when he was the New Jersey U.S. Attorney.  Now the Republican candidate for New Jersey governor, Christie told the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Steven Cohen (D-Tenn.), that he had a 1:30 p.m. train to catch — and had already informed the subcommittee of that fact.

But Cohen would not excuse him. Then the congressman and the gubernatorial candidate started yelling at each other. Christie got up and left.

Read the Star-Ledger report on the hearing here.

View a clip of Christie’s testimony below:

The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved U.S. Attorney nominees John Paul Kacavas for the District of New Hampshire and B. Todd Jones for the District of Minnesota late this afternoon.

The meeting was originally scheduled for noon today, but was postponed due to the length of an earlier committee hearing.

The panel unanimously approved last week U.S. Attorney nominees Preet Bharara for the Southern District of New York, Tristram Coffin for the District of Vermont and Joyce Vance for the Northern District of Alabama. The panel still must consider the U.S. Attorney nominations of Jenny Durkan for the Western District of Washington and Paul Fishman for the District of New Jersey, which the White House forwarded to the Senate last month.

The full Senate must still approve the nominees before they can become U.S. Attorneys.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, the leader of Texas’s House Democratic delegation, told Main Justice in an interview today that his state’s two Republican senators can go ahead and screen all the candidates they want for Texas’s four U.S. Attorneys jobs. But Texas Democrats will have the final say on recommendations to the White House, he said.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) and President Obama (Gov)

The Austin Democrat said he certainly welcomes the informal advice of Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison. But he added:

“I think the screening committee is frankly not very helpful,” Doggett said. “The screening that will make the final determination is the screening from our Democratic delegation.”

We reported earlier this week that the senators have tried to keep their hold on the recommendation process by adding some Democrats to their traditionally all-Republican screening committee. Cornyn and Hutchinson have maintained that only senators can provide the president with advice and consent on nominations. White House counsel Greg Craig and his office have been mediating the dispute since March.

Deputy White House Counsel Cassandra Butts reassured the Texas Democratic delegation at a meeting last week that the White House would not nominate any U.S. Attorneys in Texas without the approval of the state’s Democrats.

“I think (the senators’) thoughts on this are important to have,” Doggett said. “But I’m not sure there is yet a recognition by Sen. Cornyn of the election results and that this will not be like the last eight years where they decide because the people of America have spoken and even the justice system in Texas must change.”

Closing arguments in the government’s case against Dongfan “Greg” Chung were heard Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney, reports the Associated Press.  Chung is accused of passing critical trade secrets to the Chinese government on the United States’ space program.

Cormac J. Carney (RobeProbe.com)

Dongfan "Greg" Chung

While six economic espionage cases have been settled before trial, Chung is the first person to actually be prosecuted under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, which was created with the intention of allowing the government to crack down on those who stole information from private companies with government contracts.  A second case is set for trial in San Jose later this year.

Federal prosecutors said that Chung stole over 300,000 pages of sensitive documents from Boeing Co. and Rockwell International to pass on to the Chinese government.

The attorney conceded that Chung “did some dumb things” and may have violated Boeing policy, but he insisted Chung stopped short of doing anything illegal. He added that his client simply brought thousands of documents home because he was a “pack rat” and said the government couldn’t prove Chung had actually passed any of it to China.

…

Thomas Beinert Jr. (Bienert, Miller, Weitzel & Katzman)

“He’s a guy who likes knowledge for the sake of knowledge, including sharing knowledge … but he does that because he wants China to become more like America, not because he wants America to be under the thumb of China.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Staples of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California responded:

“The 300,000 pages of documents is not the work of a pack rat, it’s a pack elephant,” he said. “This is a very, very big red flag. It’s as big as any red flag flying over China today.”

Carney is expected to deliver a verdict in the next two weeks.

You can read the full story here.

“Effective and fair” and “tough and equitable.” That’s the sentencing scheme Attorney General Eric Holder is striving for, he told a crowd of judges, members of Congress, activists and law school students at a symposium on sentencing policy this evening.

David Ogden (usdoj)

While it was kind of a “duh” moment, it was also earnest. The Justice Department has endorsed legislation that would eliminate the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. Deputy Attorney General David Ogden is heading a working group considering, among other things, the department’s own sentencing policies and alternatives to incarceration, and “other unwarranted  disparities in federal sentencing.” And Holder has asked DOJ lawyers in Washington and in the U.S. Attorneys Offices around the country to get involved in the effort. Holder told the crowd,

There is no tension between a sentencing scheme that is effective and fair and one that is tough and equitable.  We must work toward these twin goals and we must do so now.  Too much time has passed, too many people have been treated in a disparate manner, and too many of our citizens have come to have doubts about our criminal justice system.

While the Supreme Court restored judicial discretion in sentencing in the 2005 decision United States v. Booker — which held that the sentencing guidelines were, um, guidelines — the number of inmates in federal prisons, state prisons and local jails continues to rise. The inmate population has quadrupled since 1980, reaching more than 2.2 million, Holder noted.

Holder said he would take a hard look at whether current sentencing practices “show an increase in unwarranted sentencing disparities based upon regional differences or even differences in judicial philosophy among judges working in the same courthouse.”

But he also said Americans should be prepared to deal with the idea that not all disparities are necessarily evil.

The desire to have an almost mechanical system of sentencing has led us away from individualized, fact-based determinations that I believe, within reason, should be our goal.

The symposium,  hosted by the The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and the Congressional Black Caucus, was timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Sentencing Reform Act, which established the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Justice Stephen Breyer

Holder was followed by Justice Stephen Breyer, who was able to steal away from the Court during its last week of the cycle — “which is a total nightmare,” the justice said.

Breyer was one of the original members of the Sentencing Commission and wrote one of the majority opinions in Booker. He, like Holder, heralded “a new day,” but stressed a return to the basics: answering the question of what to do with criminal defendants.

And he had advice.

To judges: Judge. Follow the guidelines if a case calls for it, depart if it doesn’t. “Don’t give a sentence you think is wrong,” Breyer said. He also said some “non-uniformity” should be tolerated, adding that even when judges depart and are reversed, they contribute to the larger examination of sentencing policy.

To the Sentencing Commission: Think of new ways to do empirical work to answer the fundamental question (again, what do we do with these people?), but “beware of the legal mind,” he said. “The legal mind loves to make distinctions.” But judges need room to judge.

To Congress: “Mandatory minimums drive” sentencing guidelines “in a hundred different ways,” he said. Getting rid of them would amount to a “herculean effort,” Breyer said. He offered an argument: “It doesn’t mean you are not for punishing criminals,” but shows that “you have faith in the commission you created.”

Hmm. Feel like that one’s been used before, but like he said, it’s a new day.

Chris Christie, Republican nominee for New Jersey governor, will testify before the House Judiciary commercial and administrative law subcommittee tomorrow about deferred prosecution agreements he made while he was New Jersey U.S. Attorney.

An Associated Press rundown of the deals is here.

The Justice Department racked up another Brady complaint from a judge today, The Blog of the Legal Times reported this afternoon.

This time, it was from U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, who is presiding over the Balram Maharaj kidnapping trial in D.C. Bates chided DOJ prosecutors — including D.C. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Hegyi — for not disclosing possibly favorable information from a FBI interaction with an alleged kidnapper, according to The BLT.

Heygi said the defense was at a meeting where the interaction was discussed, but Bates wasn’t buying it, The BLT said.

“I have got to tell you Mr. Hegyi, I think the government is making some poor decisions when it comes to turning material over,� Bates said, according to The BLT.

Read the National Law Journal report on the case here.

Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP Partner William H. Orrick has been appointed to be counselor to the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Division, according to a news release from the firm where he has spent the last 25 years.

William H. Orrick (Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass)

Judge William Orrick (Berkeley Law)

Orrick started his work in the newly created position earlier this week.  His late father, William Orrick, ran the division during the Kennedy administration and went on to become a federal judge for the District Court for the Northern District of California.

Orrick is a huge Democratic donor, giving $25,000 to the Democratic National Committee in 2004.  According to Public Citizen’s WhiteHouseForSale.org, Orrick bundled over 100,000 for John Kerry in 2004.  In the most recent election, Orrick donated $4,600 to the Obama campaign, donated $30,800 to committees supporting Obama, and bundled over $200,000 for him.

From the release:

Orrick expects to focus on the affirmative litigation brought by the Civil Division, among other things.  Orrick’s father, a federal district judge in the Northern District of California who died in 2003, ran the Civil Division in the Kennedy administration.

“I am excited about this opportunity to serve the country, help the President and advance the mission of the DOJ’s Civil Division,” said Orrick.  “This position is at the intersection of the work I did at Coblentz and before that as a civil rights lawyer in Georgia. I will miss Coblentz enormously, and am I am particularly appreciative of my partners, who have always supported me.”