John Cruden, the long-time career Deputy Assistant Attorney General with the Environmental and Natural Resources Division, is leaving the Department of Justice to become President of the Environmental Law Institute.
Cruden, known for his “rah, rah” attitude, will depart on June 22, an associate at DOJ said. Ignacia Moreno, Cruden’s boss as the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the ENRD, once told Main Justice that she considered her long-time deputy “Mr. Enforcement.” A past president of the District of Columbia Bar Association, Cruden was credited with making the ENRD a coveted place to work, as Main Justice reported two years ago.
The Environmental Law Institute calls itself “an internationally recognized, non-partisan research and education center working to strengthen environmental protection by improving law and governance worldwide.”
Convicted mobster Vincent Basciano, who is also known by the sobriquet Vinny Gorgeous, was once ready to kill federal prosecutor Greg Andres, now a top official in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, according to ex-mob capo Dominick Cicale.
Cicale’s testimony, delivered in the penalty phase of Basciano’s trial as federal prosecutors seek to have Basciano put to death, added an exclamation point on an episode that has already featured vivid glimpses of life in the underworld. Last week, Basciano was convicted of murder for ordering a hit on mob associate Randolph Pizzolo.
At the time, in the mid 2000s, Andres was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. And what was Andres’s “offense,” at least from the perspective of Basciano and his wise guy pals?
Well, he had helped to take down part of the Bonanno crime family for starters. Perhaps just as bad, every Thursday night he dined at Campagnola’s, an Upper East Side restaurant whose clientele, according to a review in New York magazine, is “urban-country club” and made up in part of “bejeweled, heavily made-up women on the arms of dapper older men.”
Not incidentally, Cicale said, the restaurant is “under the protection” of Genovese family capo Dominick (Quiet Dom) Cirillo , according to an account in The New York Daily News.
“Cicale said that Basciano got a message in the spring of 2004 from a private eye who had visited then-Bonanno boss Joseph Massino in prison,” The Daily News said. It seems Massino wanted to let Vinny Gorgeous know that Andres had been “disrespectful,” and that he dined at the restaurant every Thursday.
In documents filed as part of the penalty phase, prosecutors introduced portions of tape recorded conversations between Basciano and Massino in which Basiciano, referring to Andres says, “Listen, this prosecutor, I can’t underestimate him because he’s a dirty, rotten c—sucker.”
Anyhow, Basciano interpreted that information as an order to kill Andres in the restaurant. “Vincent Basciano would go into the restaurant in a baseball cap, walk up to Greg Andres and shoot him,” Cicale said, according to The Daily News. Basciano wanted to do the job himself because “the hit had to be done right,” Cicale said. Luckily for Andres, the order was never confirmed, or maybe lines of communication get frayed in the mob world, as they do in more mundane businesses. (We decided there must be a reason for Quiet Dom’s nickname, so we did not try to contact him for comment.)
Basciano, 51, is already serving a life sentence for the shotgun murder of Bronx junkie Frank Santoro, The Daily News reminded us, so he’s unlikely to visit Campagnola’s anytime soon.
The Justice Department has given prosecutors approval to seek charges against former presidential candidate John Edwards for alleged campaign law violations in connection with attempts to hide an extra-marital affair, ABC News reported.
The network, quoting a source close to the case, said Edwards is aware of the decision and that the former North Carolina Democratic senator is exploring his options.
The government will contend that hundreds of thousands of dollars provided by two Edwards supporters actually went to Rielle Hunter, Edwards’s mistress. Those payments, prosecutors will argue, were illegal donations.
Hunter was a campaign filmmaker when she had a lengthy affair with Edwards. That affair resulted in a daughter, Frances Quinn Hunter, who is now three years old.
The Justice Department is expected to rely on the testimony of Andrew Young, a former Edwards aide who initially claimed paternity of Hunter’s trial three weeks before the Iowa caucuses in 2008.
In a statement, Edwards attorney Gregory Craig said that Edwards did not break the law. “The government’s theory is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law,” he said. The federal government continued the investigation even though investigators found that no money from the Edwards campaign was involved.”
Craig continued, “The Justice Department has wasted millions of dollars and thousands of hours on a matter more appropriately a topic for the Federal Election Commission, not a criminal court.”
Democrat Kathy Hochul, wife of Buffalo, N.Y., U.S. Attorney William Hochul, pulled off an upset Tuesday to win a special election for a House seat previously held by Republican Chris Lee.
Hochul received 47 percent of the vote, 3 percent more than Republican Jane Corwin, according to The Associated Press. Tea Party candidate Jack Davis garnered 9 percent of the vote, the AP said.
The special election in the 26th District was seen as a testing ground for Democratic messages heading into the 2012 election and Hochul hammered Republicans over their proposals to change the Medicare program.
Lee resigned Feb. 9 after it was disclosed that he had an e-mail exchange with a woman he found through a Craigslist personal ad. Lee, who is married, sent the woman a shirtless photo of himself. He also lied to her about his job and age.
Hochul currently serves as the Erie County clerk, the the highest ranking female elected official in the county. She previously was first deputy county clerk. Hochul also was a legal counsel and legislative assistant to Sen. Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Rep. John LaFalce (D-N.Y.)
And Hochul’s political affiliation wasn’t lost on the George W. Bush Justice Department
William Hochul, a 24-year DOJ veteran and Barack Obama appointee, failed to secure a promotion to a counterterrorism job in D.C. at the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys in 2006 because of his wife’s political affiliation, a 2008 Justice Department Inspector General report concluded. Under the direction of then-DOJ White House liaison Monica Goodling, a less experienced Republican was promoted over Hochul, who handled the successful prosecution of the “Lackawanna Six” for providing material support to al-Qaeda. The Inspector General report didn’t identify Hochul by name, but called the matter “the most troubling example” of politicized hiring that the office examined.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday employed a procedural technique to push forward a four-year renewal of expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, preventing any amendments to legislation extending the authorities.
Reid put the legislation in a House message received by the Senate after the chamber voted 74-13 to table the bill. Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mike Lee of Utah and Dean Heller of Nevada joined 10 senators who caucus with the Democrats to vote against the motion. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) voted present.
The Senate is scheduled to vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur with the House message by Thursday morning. The expiring Patriot Act powers sunset Friday.
Paul, a Tea Party favorite, was looking for the Senate to vote on amendments he offered that were designed to protect civil liberties in legislation extending the Patriot Act for four years. In one amendment offered by Paul and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a Dec. 31, 2013, sunset was proposed for national security letters, administrative subpoenas that the FBI uses to obtain evidence without a court order.
The Republican senator expressed frustration that the Senate did not have more time to debate Patriot Act renewal legislation as Reid promised earlier this year.
“Today’s events further underscore the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and accountability to the American people,” Paul said in a statement.
Reid said on the Senate floor he has “a responsibility to try to get this bill done as soon as possible.”
“I understand Senator Paul’s exasperation because this is something that is extremely important to him and there was every desire, from my perspective and I think that of this body, to have a full and complete debate on the Patriot Act,” Reid said. “But the Senate does not always work that way.”
Reid and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reached a deal on the extension Thursday. They agreed to extend until June 1, 2015, the “roving wiretaps” power and “business records” authority, which makes it easier for federal authorities to get tangible evidence — such as library records — as part of an investigation. The congressional leaders also decided to give a four-year extension to the “lone wolf” power, initially authorized under a 2004 law, which allows probes of suspected terrorists not tied to a specific organization or nation.
The three authorities are currently allowed under a 90-day extension that Congress approved in February.
The House tried to pass legislation in February that would have extended the powers until December. That bill was considered under House procedures that required a two-thirds majority to pass the bill. But House Democrats and conservative Republicans joined together and the bill was not approved.
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he was “ultimately responsible” for the politicized hiring system employed for the Justice Department honors program when he was in office, The Blog of Legal Times reported Tuesday.
Gonzales, who was Attorney General from 2005 to 2007, said in court filings in a pending lawsuit on the matter that he was “disappointed that I didn’t do things differently,” according to the blog. A suit was filed in 2008 on behalf of applicants who weren’t accepted to the program because of their ideological or political affiliations.
“Obviously everyone is smarter in hindsight. In hindsight you wish you would do some things differently and … I feel disappointment in myself,” Gonzales said in the court filings, according to The BLT.
DOJ officials searched the Internet to find applicants’ ideological and political leanings, putting their findings in the candidates’ files, internal probes of the honors and summer intern programs concluded. The Privacy Act generally prohibits the government from recording how people exercise their First Amendment rights, unless they authorize it.
Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is expected to testify in his own defense after his second trial on corruption charges surrounding President Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat resumes on Wednesday.
“Blagojevich has been preparing to take the witness stand for several days and worked in depth on his possible testimony over the weekend, sources said,” The Chicago Tribune reported on Tuesday, adding that it was not unclear just when he would be called.
The prosecution rested its case on Monday, and U.S. Judge James Zagel of the Northern District of Illinois gave everyone Tuesday off, since he had pressing business unrelated to the trial. The judge has yet to rule on defense lawyers’ motion for a mistrial. The defense argued in part that the prosecution has failed to prove its case, and that some of the judge’s remarks in front of the jury have been prejudicial.
If Blagojevich does indeed testify, it would not be surprising, since he told The Tribune on the eve of his retrial there was a “strong likelihood” he would take the stand — something he did not do during his first trial, which ended last August with his conviction on only one of the two dozen charges against him. That conviction was for a relatively minor charge of lying to the FBI.
And what if he changes his mind and decide not to testify after all? That would not not be shocking either, since his lawyers signaled at his first trial that he would taken the stand.
The first trial was widely seen as a defeat for the prosecution, and there was considerable discussion afterward on whether the prosecution’s case had been overstuffed with too many facts, laid out in an order that was not always easy to follow. So prosecutors were expected to offer a leaner case this time around (see Main Justice’s report), focusing on allegations that the then-governor tried to put the Senate seat up for auction.
“It was his thing, his golden thing,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Niewoehner of the Northern District of Illinois told the jury in his opening statement three week ago.
Prosecutors stuck to their plan. They took just three weeks to lay out its case this time, half the time they needed in the first trial, and cut the number of counts against the defendant to 20. Still, Blagojevich, 54, could go to prison until he is in his 70’s, if he is convicted.
Blagojevich’s team has said it will call “witnesses of some prominence,” as The Chicago Sun-Times reported. If the defense follows through on its promise, the prominent witnesses could include Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.)
Jackson has heatedly denied suggestions that he was part of any plan to raise campaign money for Blagojevich in return for an appointment to the Senate seat that opened with Obama’s election to the presidency. And Emanuel, who gave up his seat in Congress to become White House chief of staff before returning to Chicago to run for mayor, would surely testify that he wasn’t part of any illicit scheme to fill the Senate seat, which eventually went to Roland Burris. (Senate ethics charges against Burris were dropped for lack of evidence, and he did not seek election in 2010.)
But former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer told The Sun-Times he doubts that Emanuel and Jackson would be called. Cramer said Emanuel and Jackson both “hurt and help” Blagojevich. “Both will say no bribe was paid or even considered,” he said. “But they will also try to distance themselves from Blagojevich.”
The decision whether to block AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile is apt to be the “legacy” of Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, a former DOJ official said Tuesday.
Speaking in a conference call with reporters, Allen Grunes, an attorney in the Antitrust Division from 1995 to 2007, said the verdict on the deal planned between the telecommunications companies will ultimately rest in her hands. The DOJ currently is reviewing the proposed $39 billion merger for antitrust pitfalls.
“She’s the decider,” said Grunes, who is the D.C. Bar Association Antitrust Committee chairman. “She’s pledged vigorous horizontal merger enforcement and this merger is where the rubber will meet the road.”
Christine Varney (photo by Andrew Ramonas / Main Justice)
Varney has overseen high-profile antitrust matters, including the decision to approve the Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc.-Live Nation Inc. and Comcast Corp.-NBC Universal Inc. mergers, since she took the helm of the Antitrust Division in April 2009. In May, the Antitrust Division under Varney also made headlines for its condemnation of the potential H&R Block Inc. acquisition of the TaxACT tax-preparation program and NASDAQ OMX Group Inc.’s planned union with NYSE Euronext.
The DOJ filed a suit to bar H&R Block from getting TaxACT. NASDAQ withdrew its unsolicited offer for NYSE after the Department threatened to go to court to block the proposed deal.
Varney told members of Congress last year that the DOJ is not afraid to file antitrust lawsuits.
“We are committed to going to court to block those mergers that will substantially reduce competition,” Varney said in remarks prepared for a House Judiciary Committee hearing. “The commitment to litigate enhances our ability to negotiate settlements that simultaneously enable any pro-competitive aspects of a deal to go forward yet also prevent harm to consumers.”
Grunes said the AT&T-T-Mobile merger is anticompetitive and the Antitrust Division has shown a willingness to oppose “bad horizontal mergers.”
“I don’t think anyone should bet on DOJ being weak on enforcement,” Grunes said. “The lawyers and economists at DOJ are first rate in my experience.”
Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, also said in the conference call that the bar has been raised for the Obama administration after it pledged its dedication to ensuring fair competition in the marketplace.
“I think everybody believed that this administration was committed,” Black said. “They understood well the value of competition and they were committed to vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws.”
In April 2009, the Obama Administration’s Justice Department wisely reversed its past policy and called for the end of the 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. The decades-old disparity – just five grams of crack cocaine triggered the five year mandatory minimum while it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same penalty – resulted in manifest injustices.
Congress also showed courage and leadership by ultimately passing the Fair Sentencing Act, a compromise reform bill that reduced the disparity to 18:1, but, unfortunately, this new law was not made retroactive. As a result, there are thousands in prison who have been sentenced under what is widely agreed was an unfair sentencing law but who received no relief from last year’s crack sentencing reforms.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission will soon consider whether to apply the new crack guidelines retroactively so that fairness will apply both to future offenders and to those who were sentenced under the old law. While those of the political left and right rarely agree on matters of policy, the fact that we – a representative of the ACLU and a former federal prosecutor – can both support this change by the Sentencing Commission demonstrates vividly the logic and fairness of the change.
The Justice Department will soon weigh in with the Commission about whether the reduced crack guidelines should be made retroactive. We hope the Justice Department will continue to guide the reform on this issue by supporting retroactivity.
While testifying about the 100:1 sentencing disparity before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2009, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said, “Public trust and confidence are essential elements of an effective criminal justice system – our laws and their enforcement must not only be fair, but they must also be perceived as fair. The perception of unfairness undermines governmental authority in the criminal justice process.” Perhaps no federal policy over the past 30 years did more to undercut respect for the criminal justice system among communities of color than the crack-powder disparity. Though the majority of crack users are white, blacks were far more likely to be prosecuted and to receive lengthy mandatory prison sentences that were designed for major drug kingpins.
Members of both parties candidly admitted that the original disparity was a mistake and was hastily passed in 1986 with little scientific support. Last year, a nearly unanimous Congress agreed with the Department that the crack disparity had to be reformed and finally acted to do so.
In the past, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has addressed policy mistakes just as private manufacturers would be expected to correct design flaws – it fixed them and adopted its own version of product recall: retroactivity. The Commission acted in 1993 to make the newly lowered LSD guideline retroactive. In 1995, it made reductions to the marijuana guideline retroactive. And just four years ago, the Commission made a modest reduction in crack sentences retroactive. When the Commission acted on the 2007 reduction it responded to concerns lodged by the Bush Justice Department by implementing new rules directing judges to consider whether an early release would endanger the community.
Requiring prisoners to petition a federal court for a sentence reduction, and allowing prosecutors to make objections – including those based on public safety concerns – is another key filter. Since 2008, hundreds of offenders who were eligible for early release have been denied. Even those who received reductions did not escape punishment, but rather had already served lengthy sentences. It is our hope that the Sentencing Commission will apply the new cocaine sentencing guidelines retroactively and that each case will be reviewed, as before, in terms of public safety before any reduction in sentence will take effect.
We both agree with the Department of Justice that our nation’s justice system suffers when it creates a perception of unfairness. Drug penalties that overwhelmingly discriminated on the basis of race are one example of unfairness that the Justice Department has rightly fought to correct. A strong perception of inequity will remain, however, if the individuals who were punished under the discriminatory policy are not provided an opportunity for relief. In fact, failing to extend the benefits of the new law to those whose experiences gave rise to it would not only be unfair, it would be cruel.
The Justice Department should continue to provide the moral leadership it has to date on crack sentencing fairness by urging the U.S. Sentencing Commission today (and Congress tomorrow) to apply the new, fairer crack penalties retroactively.
Asa Hutchinson, a former House member from Arkansas, is a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, and administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration from 2001-2003. Laura W. Murphy is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) legislative office in Washington, D.C.
A federal judge in Detroit has thrown out a suspected terrorist’s lawsuit against an FBI agent, ruling that the suspect had failed to prove that the agent had intentionally withheld evidence that might have helped the defense.
Judge Marianne O. Battani of the Eastern District of Michigan ruled in favor of agent Michael Thomas and against Karim Koubriti, one of several suspects arrested after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Koubriti was convicted in 2003 of conspiring to aid terrorists, but the conviction was thrown out the next year after the Department of Justice said federal prosecutors in Detroit had kept relevant evidence from the defense.
Battani dismissed Koubriti’s suit on Monday, according to a report by Allan Lengel on his Tickle the Wire blog. (Lengel credited The Associated Press.)
Koubriti has been seeking millions of dollars in damages. His suit originally named both Thomas and Richard G. Convertino, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled last year that Convertino could not be sued for his actions as a prosecutor (see Main Justice’s report at the time).
Convertino came under investigation for possible ethics violations and has been engaged in a long feud with the DOJ, accusing it of trying to smear him. In March, a federal judge threw out his suit against the department (see Main Justice’s report). The Blog of Legal Times reported on Monday that Convertino is appealing the dismissal.
