The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee is accusing the Justice Department of refusing to allow congressional investigators to interview 11 DOJ employees about the gun-walking operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.
In follow-up questions to Attorney General Eric Holder, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) says investigators want to interview 12 department employees and so far, only former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke has been made available. DOJ officials have not made the other witnesses available, citing “line attorney policy,” according to Grassley.
In his questions to Holder, Grassley raised the possibility that DOJ officials are attempting to stall until after a Dec. 8 House Judiciary Committee hearing at which Holder is scheduled to testify about Fast and Furious.
Fast and Furious allegedly resulted in the selling of at least 2,000 firearms to drug cartel members in Arizona via straw buyers. The ATF then allegedly permitted the guns to be trafficked to Mexico, where the bureau lost track of them. Two guns from the operation were recovered in December at the scene of a shootout between Border Patrol agents and Mexican bandits near Rio Rico, Ariz., that resulted in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry. Other guns sold during the operation have been linked to violent crime scenes in Mexico. House Government Oversight and Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Grassley are conducting their own probe.
Burke’s office supervised the operation and Holder has said that DOJ officials in Washington were misled by the Arizona U.S. Attorney’s office about gun-walking allegations.
Grassley also is pressing the attorney general for a list of people who regularly read memos sent to the attorney general’s office. Holder has said he did not become aware of the gun walking allegations until earlier this year. However, Republicans have said that memos were sent to his office discussing the controversial tactic.
John C. “Jack” Keeney, who joined the Department of Justice when Harry Truman was president and rose to be deputy assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, a post he held for several decades until his retirement last year, died on Saturday at his home in Kensington, Md. He was 89.
Keeney retired (see Main Justice’s report) after nearly six decades, ending a career in which he became the longest-serving federal prosecutor in American history, and for that matter one of the longest-serving federal employees ever.
Jack Keeney
Anonymous to much of the public, Keeney wielded enormous power inside the Criminal Division as its “steadying hand” and “institutional conscience,” according to the book Main Justice by Brian Duffy and Jim McGee.
“For the last six decades, Jack Keeney served the Department of Justice with dedication, integrity and an unshakeable commitment to the rule of law,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. “As the longest-serving federal prosecutor in the history of the United States, the contributions that he made – to the Justice Department and to the nation he was so proud to serve – are beyond measure. And I am one of many who have been grateful to count him as a mentor, advisor and friend.
“He was truly an American hero,” the National Association of Former United States Attorneys said in announcing Keeney’s passing.
Keeney served in the Army Air Corps during World War II and was a prisoner of the Germans in the closing months of the conflict, after his B-17 bomber was shot down. After his service, he graduated from the University of Scranton in 1947. He received law degrees at Dickinson School of Law in 1949 and from George Washington University School of Law in 1953.
Keeney joined the DOJ Criminal Division in 1951, at a time when the Cold War was burning hot. Three years later, he became chief of the unit that prosecuted cases involving conspiracies to overthrow the U.S. government. In 1960, he moved to the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, serving as Deputy Chief. From 1969 to 1973, he was chief of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section.
Keeney and his wife, the late Eugenia Brislin, had five children and two grandchildren.
“In 1990 Keeney received the Henry E. Petersen Award, the Criminal Division’s highest award. He 1996, he received the Attorney General’s Award, the highest award bestowed by the Attorney General. In 2010, one of the Criminal Division buildings was name in honor of Jack,” the former U.S. attorneys’ organization noted.
But the honor Keeney most cherished may have been bestowed upon him last year, when Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, commented on Keeney’s impending retirement. Keeney, Breuer said, was a “career prosecutor in every sense of the word and meaning. His devotion to the department and to mentoring thousands of young prosecutors is unparalleled.”
Attorney General Holder said as much on Monday: “Although Mr. Keeney will be sorely missed, his legacy will live on – in the Justice Department building that bears his name, in the standard of excellence that he established in the department’s Criminal Division, in the work of countless attorneys that he mentored throughout his career, and in the inspiration that he will continue to provide public servants across our nation.”
Former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh has been named to investigate the child sex-abuse scandal that has stunned the Penn State University community and cast a long shadow over its football program, it was announced on Monday in Philadelphia.
“The scope of our probe will be broad, covering a lengthy period of time,” said Freeh, promising to “leave no stone unturned,” according to an account by John Martin of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Freeh said he has assembled a team of investigators, including former FBI agents, that the inquiry will include scrutiny of the university’s policies and internal controls.
Ken Frazier, president and chief executive of Merck and Co. who heads a special investigative committee created by the university’s Board of Trustees, announced Freeh’s appointment. (Frazier is a graduate of Penn State and Harvard Law School.)
Freeh, who has six sons, said the allegations that have been raised and the charges that have been brought in the scandal are “extraordinarily serious,” and that the investigation would go all the way back to the mid-1970s, around the time that Jerry Sandusky founded his Second Mile charity for troubled youths.
Sandusky has, 67, the former defensive coordinator for the football team, been accused of numerous incidents of sexually abusing boys. The former Penn State Athletic Director, Tim Curley, and a former university Vice President, Gary Schultz, have been charged with failing to report knowledge of Sandusky’s deeds and lying to a grand jury about it. And former Penn State President Graham Spanier and legendary football coach Joe Paterno lost their jobs for not alerting police after a graduate student said he witnessed Sandusky assaulting a boy in 2002. (Sandusky has denied any wrongdoing.)
Frazier described Freeh, 61, who is a former federal prosecutor and former federal judge, as ideal to head the probe. Freeh has no connection to Penn State or the state of Pennsylvania, Frazier said.
A German businessman was briefly detained in Tuscaloosa, Alabama last week for violating the state’s new immigration law by not having proper identification.
He had been stopped by police because his rental vehicle didn’t have a tag, and when he could only produce a German identification card, he was arrested and taken to police headquarters.
The 46-year-old Mercedes Benz executive was released after an associate retrieved his passport, visa and German driver’s license from his hotel room, according to a Friday report in the Associated Press.
The length of his detainment and the status of his court case weren’t immediately known, the AP reported.
Republican governor Robert Bentley, a supporter of the law, called the state’s homeland security director, Spencer Collier, to get briefed on the arrest after hearing of it.
“It sounds like the officer followed the statute correctly,” Collier said after speaking to Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson.
He also said that he has made at least a dozen similar calls about detentions under the newly enacted legislation, which is currently being challenged by the Justice Department in a federal appeals court.
“It’s just to make sure they’re using best practices and following the law,” he said.
He also said that a similar scenario would have only resulted in a ticket and a court summons before the new law took effect.
The Justice Department first filed a lawsuit against Alabama over its immigration law on August 1. On September 28, federal judge Sharon Blackburn upheld most of the law. The legislation, signed into law by Gov. Bentley in June, was supposed to take effect on September 1.
A Mercedes-Benz spokesperson said that the man was visiting Alabama on business. The company’s first American assembly plant is located just east of Tuscaloosa.
A court-appointed investigator says that prosecutors in the criminal case against the late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) willfully and intentionally concealed evidence that should have been turned over to defense attorneys.
In his report, Henry F. Schuelke said there is insufficient evidence to prosecute any of the attorneys for criminal contempt of court. Schuelke’s report has not been made public, but the information is contained in a Monday court order from U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
“The prosecutorial misconduct that permeated the proceedings before this Court to a degree and extent that this Court had not seen in twenty-five years on the bench,” Sullivan said in the ruling, which sealed the investigator’s report until all sides in the Stevens case have the opportunity to review it. However, Sullivan also made it clear that he intends to release as much of the report as possible.
In his order, Sullivan made it clear that Justice Department officials had completely cooperated with the investigation. A DOJ spokeswoman said Monday that the department is reviewing Sullivan’s order.
Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, was convicted in 2008 of lying to conceal gifts from an Alaska oil executive and other friends. He lost his Senate seat in that fall’s election. But in 2009, as problems in the handling of the case continued to crop up, Attorney General Eric Holder had the charges dismissed. Stevens died in a plane crash in 2010.
The cases collapsed when it was discovered that prosecutors had withheld crucial evidence from defense attorneys. That same revelation has plagued other prosecutions in the Alaska corruption probe.
Prosecutors involved in the case were the subject of multiple investigations by the DOJ Criminal Division, Schuelke, and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Sullivan also held former Public Integrity Section officials William Welch II and Brenda K. Morris in contempt for not handing over documents to Stevens’ defense. Sullivan removed them from under contempt, but he didn’t vacate his contempt finding. Holder recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the OPR probe is almost finished and that he hoped to make public as much as possible. Following the Stevens case, the attorneys who handled the prosecution were transferred to other DOJ sections.
In Monday’s order, Judge Sullivan said that Schuelke has filed a 500-page report with him. He said the report concluded that the investigation of Stevens and the prosecution were “permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated his defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.”
He also said that Schuelke and colleague William Shields “found evidence of concealment and serious misconduct that was previously unknown and almost certainly would never have been revealed – at least to the Court and to the public – but for their exhaustive investigation.” (Schuelke is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, and Shields is a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan. Both are with the firm Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler.)
Sullivan said in his ruling that Schuelke recommended no criminal contempt charges be filed against prosecutors because the attorneys did not violate a direct order from the judge. Instead, he said, he relied on the prosecutors’ repeated assertions that they were complying with their obligations and were working in good faith.
In recent months, prosecutors in the Stevens case have reemerged in sensitive cases.
Edward Sullivan was one of the attorneys handling the sentencing of former Republican Senate aide Trevor Blackann; he also worked on a bribery case in Utah.
Welch and Morris also are back handling sensitive cases. Welch, who was chief of the Public Integrity Section from 2007 to 2009, was listed as one of the attorneys handling the indictment of Thomas Andrews Drake, a former National Security Agency official accused of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter. Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor after a federal judge denied a request by the federal government to keep secret classified documents–a setback for prosecutors’ attempts to pursue leakers.
Morris was one of the attorneys who recently handled a high-profile public corruption case in Alabama. Prosecutors were criticized for their handling of that case, after former state officials and a casino owner were acquitted on several charges and there was a hung jury on others.
Brian Heberlig, who represented Edward Sullivan in the DOJ investigations, told NPR that Sullivan had been cleared by ethics authorities.
“The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility completely exonerated Mr. Sullivan,” Heberlig said. “He should not have been included in the investigation of the Stevens matter in the first place, as he was not on the trial team, had no decision-making authority, and exercised sound judgment in his supporting role. Now that he has been vindicated, Mr. Sullivan has put this matter behind him and is rightfully back prosecuting cases for the Department’s Public Integrity Section.”
A court-appointed investigator says that prosecutors in the criminal case against the late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) willfully and intentionally concealed evidence that should have been turned over to defense attorneys.
In his report, Henry F. Schuelke said there is insufficient evidence to prosecute any of the attorneys for criminal contempt of court. Schuelke’s report has not been made public, but the information is contained in a Monday court order from U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
Seven present and former Credit Suisse bankers who are accused of helping Americans cheat on their taxes hope to get the charges against them dismissed in the course of negotiations between the United States and Switzerland to end a long-running dispute between the countries over tax issues.
Lawyers for the seven wrote to Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole on Nov. 8 to say they wanted to resolve their case as part of a settlement between the U.S. and Swiss governments, and any accord between the Department of Justice and Credit Suisse, Bloomberg reported.
The defendants were indicted in July in the Eastern District of Virginia (see Main Justice’s report) in the latest development in an investigation of Credit Suisse, which has long been suspected of helping some wealthy Americans evade taxes. One particularly creative tax-evader carried $250,000 from the United States to Switzerland by hiding the cash in nylon pantyhose, Bloomberg noted.
The defendants include Markus Walder, former head of North America offshore banking at Credit Suisse; Marco Parenti Adami, a senior manager and private banker, and Susanne D. Ruegg Meier, also a senior manager and private banker, Bloomberg said.
And what are the defendants’ prospects of getting the charges dismissed? Not so good, in the opinion of one tax lawyer who is not involved in the case. “I kind of doubt the Justice Department’s tax division would be willing to walk away from this indictment and dismiss it,” Larry Campagna told Bloomberg in a telephone interview. “After convicting other bankers and taxpayers, giving a pass to these people is somewhat unlikely. But if I were representing them, I’d probably do the same thing.”
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has accused the Department of Homeland Security of obstructing Republicans’ efforts to conduct oversight of the department’s immigration policies.
Smith said on Thursday that DHS has provided inadequate information to the committee after it voted along strict party lines to subpoena the department for immigration data on November 2.
Republicans want Immigration and Customs Enforcement to reveal “unique identifiers” of people recorded as undocumented immigrants that have committed crimes, but have not been detained or placed in removal proceedings by the agency.
But Smith said that data provided to the committee in the wake of the subpoena won’t permit it to “cross-check the information to see if they have gone on to commit more crimes.”
“Instead of providing this information, all DHS gave was a list numbered 1 through 220,995. Proving the administration can count is not what we asked for,” he said.
The House Judiciary Committee subcommittee on immigration policy and enforcement voted to subpoena the Department of Homeland Security for the information after the panel said that the department refused to provide Smith with data he had requested in August.
Democrats voted to oppose the subpoena, saying that not all efforts to obtain the information had been exhausted, and that the FBI had voiced an opposition to releasing the data.
A former hedge fund manager who used his medical training to earn millions of dollars trading in health care stocks was sentenced in Manhattan on Friday to five years in prison for using inside information to escape big losses.
Joseph F. “Chip” Skowron III, 42, who once worked for FrontPoint Partners LLC, was sentenced by U.S. Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York, who told the contrite defendant that his crimes “caused investors to lose money, undermined the integrity of the U.S. securities laws and caused many people to lose jobs,” according to a New York Times account.
Skowron, who pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and lying to the Securities and Exchange Commission to cover up his wrongdoing, lamented how he “slipped into a world of relativism where the ends were justifying any minds,” according to the Times.
Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, who has made insider trading a priority for his office, said after the sentencing that “the desire to win at any cost, including breaking the law, has a steep price that Chip Skowron will now pay.”
Skowron admitted that he avoided $30 million in losses by trading on data leaked by a consultant for an expert network about the results of a clinical drug trial (see Main Justice’s earlier report).
Skowron admitted using insider information from Dr. Yves Benhamou, an internationally recognized expert on liver diseases, to avoid some $30 million in trading losses. Benhamou, who leaked advance word to Skowron about problems with a hepatitis-treatment drug that had arisen during clinical trials, pleaded guilty last April to conspiracy and lying to the SEC and cooperated with investigators in the hope of leniency. He is to be sentenced next month.
Skowron must also pay about $8 million in fines and forfeiture costs, The Times said. It is not clear how much money he will have left after his legal problems are over. The government estimated that Skowron will have a net worth of $15 million or more even after paying his penalties, but he faces numerous civil claims in connection with his wrongdoing. (FrontPoint Partners, which was not accused of wrongdoing, has shut down.)
An oddity in the case, The Times noted, is that one of the victims of Skowron’s illicit dealings was Galleon Group LLC, the hedge fund once controlled by Raj Rajaratnam, who is himself on his way to prison for 11 years for insider trading. According to papers filed in court, Galleon lost about $1.5 million when it bought stock in the company producing the hepatitis-treatment drug before the negative news became public.
Texas Governor and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry Friday blasted Attorney General Eric Holder’s management of the gun probe known as Operation Fast and Furious.
Perry, speaking at the Annual Federal Law Enforcement Foundation Luncheon in New York City, said that federal law enforcement agents “deserve an Attorney General who displays the same courage and a sense of responsibility for which they serve,” according to MSNBC.
The governor also said that the failed Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives gun-walking operation exemplifies the Obama administration’s shortcomings on border security.
“To say that the border is safer than ever is to turn a blind eye to the very real dangers that federal and state and local law enforcement continue to face as a result of Washington’s failure,” he said. “Even worse, it sweeps aside the fact that there is bureaucratic bungling which has made the border substantially more dangerous.”
Perry was at the event, held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan, to receive the foundation’s State Service Award.
