A conservative public interest group wants to know whether Justice Department officials met with the NAACP about a controversial voter-intimidation case involving the New Black Panther Party.
In its suit filed on March 9, Judicial Watch demands that the DOJ turn over any records it may have about contacts with Kristen Clarke, co-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Political Participation Group. Clarke met with DOJ officials to talk about the New Black Panther Party case before the Department dropped most of the charges in the civil lawsuit against the anti-white fringe group in 2009, according to Judicial Watch.
Judicial Watch said the DOJ has yet to respond to its Nov. 2 Freedom of Information Act request for information about the matter. The FOIA law requires a response in 20 business days.
“I find it outrageous that leftist special interest groups seem to be directing the activities of the nation’s top law enforcement agency,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The Obama Justice Department has made a mess of the Black Panther lawsuit.”
DOJ declined comment about the suit.
The DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder has come under fire from Republicans regarding the Department’s handling of the case, raising concerns that politics played a role in the DOJ’s decisions in the case. Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) pushed Holder on the case this month at a House hearing, alleging that the Attorney General allows reverse racism to flourish in the DOJ Civil Rights Division. Holder vehemently denied the claim.
The George W. Bush administration filed the civil lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and three members just days before President Barack Obama took office. It alleged the New Black Panther Party members intimidated voters by wearing military-style clothing outside a polling place in a black Philadelphia neighborhood during the November 2008 election. One of the men held a nightstick.
The conservative-led U.S. Commission on Civil Rights spent most of the last two years investigating the DOJ’s handling of the case. The commission said in a report on its investigation that the department did not completely address “serious accusations” made by former DOJ Civil Rights Division J. Christian Adams and Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Coates, the former chief of the Civil Rights Division Voting Section, about opposition in the DOJ to taking up voting rights cases against minorities.
“This Department of Justice does not enforce the laws in a race-conscious way,” Holder said at the House hearing this month. “Any allegation that has been lodged in that regard is simply false.”
President Barack Obama says he didn’t tell Mexico officials about a controversial gun smuggling investigation because he didn’t know about it, The San Antonio News-Express reported.
In an interview with the Spanish-language network Univision this week, Obama said neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder authorized “Operation Fast and Furious,” which allowed traffickers to bring weapons into Mexico in an effort to track them, the newspaper reported. The traffickers were not arrested. The program has come under fire from Congress, as well as the Mexican government. Two weapons found at the scene of the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry were traced to the program.
Obama recently met with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and discussed cooperation between the two nations on the gun running issue. However, the program wasn’t discussed, Obama said, because he didn’t know about it. “There may be a situation here in which a serious mistake was made; if that’s the case then we’ll find out and will hold someone accountable,” the president said.
He said that Holder has assigned the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General to investigate the operation.
However, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned whether the OIG can conduct an independent investigation of the operation. In addition to Grassley’s questions about the probe, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he too is investigating the operation.
Scores of colleagues of a former FBI agent convicted in a mob case urged Attorney General Eric Holder to order a probe of the ex-official’s prosecution, The Associated Press reported Thursday.
The former agents petitioned Holder to appoint a special counsel to investigate the prosecution of John Connolly, an agent who worked on cases against New England mob bosses James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi. In June, Connolly, 70, will complete a federal prison term from his 2002 conviction on racketeering and obstruction of justice charges and will then begin a 40-year sentence on a 2008 conviction in Florida on second-degree murder charges stemming from a 1982 mob killing. The charges stem from his relationship with the mobsters.
“I’ve never seen them go after a gangster like they have John,” former FBI agent Joseph Pistone told the AP. “He was dedicated as an FBI agent. He got all kinds of commendations. All of a sudden he goes wrong? That’s kind of hard to believe.”
The DOJ has declined to take up the former agents’ grievances so far, noting his unresolved appeal of his conviction in Florida, according to the AP.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys John Durham and Fred Wyshak, the lead prosecutors on the federal case, declined to comment to the news wire.
Michael Von Zamft, who was a prosecutor in the Florida case, told the AP the claim that Connolly is innocent is “just ridiculous.”
“Connolly had his trial. He got convicted,” Von Zamft told the news wire. “They attacked it with new evidence, and they lost that one, too.”
The Justice Department’s troubled Alaska corruption probe took another major hit Thursday, as a three-judge appeals panel threw out the conviction of former state Rep. Pete Kott (R) and remanded to the district court for a new trial, the Alaska Dispatch reported.
Pete Kott (AKRepublicans.org)
The panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government withheld crucial evidence from defense attorneys, a now-familiar refrain in the DOJ probe. Earlier this month, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the conviction of former state Rep. Victor Kohring (R) for the same reason.
And in the most celebrated case, DOJ decided to drop a case against the late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) because of allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. Stevens had been convicted of failing to report gifts in disclosure documents.
In the Kott case, the court said, “There is no doubt…that the prosecution suppressed evidence favorable to the defense.” That information includes evidence that prosecution witness Bill Allen had sexually exploited minor girls and that he had solicited perjury to conceal that fact. The evidence, at the very least, could have been used under cross examination to impeach Allen’s credibility.
U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick had ruled that the evidence would not have affected the outcome of the trial, but the 9th Circuit judges disagreed, saying that, “there is a reasonable probability that. had the evidence been disclosed to the defense, the result of the proceeding would have been different.”
One of the judges blasted DOJ for its conduct during the corruption probe. Betty B. Fletcher, in a dissenting opinion, wrote: “I am deeply troubled by the government’s lack of contrition in this case.” She added, according to the newspaper: “The government’s stance on appeal leads me to conclude that it still has failed to fully grasp the egregiousness of its misconduct, as well as the importance of its constitutionally imposed discovery obligations.”
In her dissent, Fletcher wrote that a new trial is an insufficient remedy and the charges against Kott should be dismissed with prejudice.
By all accounts, the Alaska corruption probe has been a major embarrassment for DOJ. Earlier this month, Alaska’s senior Senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski, pointedly asked Attorney General Eric Holder whether DOJ had decided not to prosecute Allen on charges that he abused a 15-year-old girl because he had cooperated in the probe. Holder denied any political motivation, but Murkowski said she would pursue the matter further.
A former leader of the Justice Department Criminal Division Fraud Section will join the white-collar defense group at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP in D.C. this week, The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog reported Thursday.
Richard Beckler (Howrey)
Richard Beckler, who headed the DOJ fraud unit in 1979, was most recently co-chairman of the securities litigation, government enforcement and white-collar defense practice at Howrey LLP, which closed its doors last week. Beckler had worked at the firm since 2003, following a 24-year stint as a partner at the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski LLP.
He served at the DOJ from 1973 to 1979, rising to Deputy Chief of the Fraud Section in 1976 and acting Chief in 1979.
Beckler received his undergraduate degree from Williams College in 1961 and his law degree from Fordham University in 1968.
The insider-trading trial of Raj Rajaratnam isn’t a football game. It’s even more important.
As in many football games, the issue is far from decided now that we are, oh, maybe near the end of the first quarter. But some people who have been following the events in the Southern District of New York offer cautious, tentative insights. (“Predictions” would be too strong a word.)
For one thing, the Wednesday testimony of Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, on behalf of the prosecution is “unlikely to seal the deal for the government,” in the view of Ashby Jones, writing on the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.
“That’s largely because Blankfein’s testimony was used for a limited, discrete purpose: to confirm that meetings attended by former Goldman director Rajat Gupta were, in fact, supposed to be confidential,” Jones observes.
The government, of course, asserts that Gupta leaked confidential information, much of it coming from two Goldman board meetings in the fall of 2008, to his friend Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group LLD hedge fund, who then illegally traded on that information, netting millions.
And Blankfein did testify that, in his opinion, data that Gupta supposedly funneled to Rajaratnam (including news of an impending $5 billion investment in Goldman by Warren E. Buffett) would have been confidential, as we reported on Wednesday.
But, come to think of it, we’ve known for some time about the government’s contention that Gupta passed on insider information to Rajaratnam. Gupta, a wealthy business consultant, has been accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of doing just that, about Procter & Gamble, another company whose board Gupta sat on, as well as Goldman. (More later about the SEC accusations against Gupta — much, much more, in fact.)
Meanwhile, one possible “source of inspiration” for Rajaratnam, according to an essay by Westlaw News & Insight and Reuters Legal, could be none other than…Richard Scrushy?
Scrushy, it will be recalled, is the former chief executive of HealthSouth Corp. who was acquitted in U.S. District Court for the District of Alabama in 2005 of a $2.7 billion accounting fraud, a result that the essay says “shows that even seemingly powerful government cases can go off track.”
Scrushy spent a lot on his defense, just as Rajaratnam is doing. And in the Scrushy case, as in the Rajaratnam trial, the government is bringing in lots of witnesses who have pleaded guilty. Rajaratnam’s defense must deal with a lot of taped telephone calls; Scrushy’s had to deal with evidence gleaned from an FBI wire.
But there’s at least one big difference between the Rajaratnam case and that of U.S. v. Scrushy. Prosecutors (and perhaps jurors?) in Manhattan are more familiar with big financial cases than those in Birmingham, where Scrushy was tried.
Before we go too far with the “Scrushy as inspiration” theme, we should note, as the essay does, that Scrushy is now in prison in a separate political bribery case.
Back, now, to Gupta. As we reported last week, Gupta has moved to have the SEC administrative action against him tossed out as unfair, unconstitutional and baseless. If he were afforded a jury trial, he asserted, he’d have a proper chance to deflate the accusations.
But in what may seem a puzzling twist (to a non-lawyer, anyhow), it turns out that Gupta invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination when the SEC sought to question him. “We repeatedly advised the SEC that Mr. Gupta was prepared to testify fully as soon as the Rajaratnam trial concluded,” Gupta’s lawyer Gary Naftalis told Bloomberg News in an e-mailed statement. “Regrettably, the SEC was unwilling to wait this brief period of time in order to have a full and fair factual record.”
Anyhow, for those who like football as well as high-stakes criminal trials, it’s good to recall what one of Scrushy’s lawyers said: “Trials are games of inches sometimes.”
