The Department of Justice is resisting efforts by defense lawyers to keep Attorney General Eric Holder from commenting about a Portland, Ore., terrorism case, asserting that Holder’s remarks have been entirely appropriate and in no way prejudicial.
“It is clear that the Attorney General’s remarks struck a proper balance between defendant’s due process rights and the need to inform the public on law enforcement actions,” Portland Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ethan Knight and Jeffrey Sweet wrote in a brief filed on Monday and reported Wednesday on Allan Lengel’s Tickle the Wire blog.
The prosecutors asked the U.S. District Court in Portland to dismiss a motion filed in December by lawyers for Somali-born U.S. citizen Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who was arrested in November on charges he attempted to bomb a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland. Mohamud was arrested after undercover FBI agents provided him with bomb materials, authorities said.
In their motion, which Main Justice reported at the time, the defense lawyers contended that Holder’s remarks about the case went beyond the facts set out in the indictment, and that the remarks risked prejudicing the pool of potential jurors.
On the contrary, the government said in its counter-motion, the Attorney General has not only a right to comment but an obligation. “The need to inform the public was especially true with respect to sting operations, which although not new have garnered a lot of publicity in the context of this case and others like it,” Knight and Sweet wrote in their 40-page filing.
“Defendant’s argument is predicated on the assumption that the Attorney General’s comments were, in fact, somehow inappropriate. They were not,” the prosecutors wrote. “As the chief law enforcement official for the United States government, it is entirely appropriate for the Attorney General to address issues of public concern in pending federal cases.”
“Moreover,” the prosecutors asserted, “defendant has cited no precedent for the type of order he seeks, and we have found none.”
The prosecutors cited a recent Supreme Court case in which the justices declared that exposure to news accounts does not automatically contaminate potential jurors and that impartiality “does not require ignorance.”
[...] has strongly denied suggestions that Mohamud was a victim of government entrapment. Attorneys say Holder’s statements violate constraints placed on pretrial public comments by prosecutors [...]