Did not former Chairman jERRY Lewis also fire some one hundred congressional staff investigators prior to the 2006 election cycle ?-
Whatever became of those investigators & their work ??

Here's a question smarter people than me could maybe answer:

If an AG squashes investigations into targets he/she wants to protect, and then leaves office, can the new AG reopen those investigations that he/she thinks was tainted?

Setting aside cries of "it's time to move on" etc.

I keep thinking about what a bang-up job Alice Fisher's done in neutering the Abramoff Scandal--remember how it was supposed to be bigger than Teapot Dome? My question is, could an Obama AG say "I don't trust these people farther than I can throw them, much less their 'work'" and then do a top-to-bottom review of it all?

Or am I veering into rule-of-law fantasy territory? Too much justice, I know.

Feinstein? Oh, well in that case I feel so much better now.

Brilliant post, Mary!

I would like to know if "M" personally pbserved the following while assigned; was O'Brien his supervisor; or is he getting this second hand:

O'Brien also done more to fix the budget problems, to boost morale, and enforce accountability in the office than any U.S. Attorney in LA in recent memory.

- Did "M" get the information first hand; did they sign a "confidentiality" agreement; and how does "M"'s reports compare with the Denver US Atty editorial striking a resounding vote of no confidence in the DOJ?

"Budget issues" are a new issue. Perhaps we could hear more about this:

- Were "budget issues" driving "lack of training" decisions; was there a problem with the "budget" for the "training" of US Atty videos on prosecutions?

- Why, with the US Atty firings, is "M" mentioning "budget" issues: What's the relevance, from their perspective, of mentioning this "new" issue?

Sugesting there is a "boost in morale" is curious. The LAT reports the US Attys, as the "disbandment" meeting were "suprrised," suggesting there was a communiaction problem; or they had no inclinding there was a problem with their performance; or did not anticpate management's concerns or solutions with that performance. Regardless the "reason for the Assty US Attys shock," one can hardly say there is "boost" in morale when there exists an apparent communiations issues.

By way of analogy, fter Saddam was captured, there was, indeed, a boost in morale. But his capture did not address the core problems with governance.

- When he says there is an "improvement" in morale, has this been over many years; and was morale recently so low, that something short of awful morale is considered an improvement?

This is making the point AL and Mary raised: ]

Now, that section has been merged with the frauds section, which has dozens more attorneys, many of whom are the best attorneys in the office.

Notice what's happened: rather than transfer the "best" attorneys from the Fraud unit to the "underperforming" unit that was "disbanded," the US Atty shut down the unit.

- Why weren't the "best" attorneys already assigned to the ethics unit?

- Why weren't the "best" attorneys assigned to provide mentoring, leadership?

It makes no sense to admit there were "better" attorneys elsewhere, but not bring them in.

Mary --

Eloquent post, but I think you're missing a very important piece here. A professor of mine in law school once said, "If you really want to protect constitutional rights, go be a prosecutor." The point is obvious. If you care about rights, be one of the people who makes sure that the system protects peoples' rights.

I'm a former federal prosecutor and a firm believer in the protection of constitutional rights. And yes, I felt real apprehension working for an administration whose policies I strongly disagreed with. And many of my colleagues felt the same. So what did we do? We did what we were supposed to do -- we made sure that in every case we worked on we acted with respect for constitutional rights that went beyond the letter of the law. We educated young federal agents on how to act within the law -- how to build case without pushing the envelope. And we pushed back when agencies wanted do do something that was close to the line.

I'd like to think that the work we did from within made a difference and had an effect beyond our limited caseloads. I'd like to think that while decisions were being made by others that crossed the lines, we stayed well within them and helped others do the same.

In a sense, my protest against the administration's practices was to do prosecutions in the right way, to show that we could build good cases without resort to the kind of extreme tactics applied in Gitmo and elsewhere.

And Mary, I'm sorry, but you're wrong about the Lewis investigation. Debra Yang's move to Gibson Dunn had absolutely no impact on the case. She was not running the investigation -- she had no impact on the day-to-day of the case. So that had no impact. O'Brien's appointment of Emmick to the Lewis investigation was widely seen and reported as a major boost to the investigation and an indication that the investigation was being taken very seriously by the office. No one expected Emmick to go anywhere, and he was an office institution. There's no conspiracy here. The investigation is still going, despite major challenges.

Testing -- Good questions. The budget issue is not a new issue -- it's been covered here at TPM and elsewhere. Bottom line, the real US Atty scandal was the administration's slashing of the USAO's budgets for from 2004-2007. This undermined the USAOs in a different way than the USAO firings, but no less damaging. No new hires in LA for two years, prosecutors who can make three times more in the private sector working without raises. The office is only now recovering. The budget problems -- no new hires, no raises, more work for less people -- had a devastating impact on the office's morale. And O'Brien's done a ton to address that -- raising salaries for the first time in years, bringing in dozens of new young prosecutors, and praising folks publicly for good work in ways no USA has in years. I observed all these things first hand.

As to the "best attorneys" piece, M's e-mail said "some of the best attorneys," not "all of the best attorneys." There are good attorneys in all sections in the USAO, but it's widely known that the frauds section attracts many of the best, for several reasons. The cases tend to be bigger in frauds, the attorneys on the other side tend to be better, and there are better opportunities after you leave the office for those who've been in frauds. So generally, frauds gets its pick of the litter. Putting frauds folks on these corruption cases is the best thing that could happen for those cases.

And as far as FISA and NSL abuses, the USAOs are the voice of reason in the administration on this front. The USAOs don't control these processes (the FBI and Main Justice do), but the USAOs can make sure these things are done right in the cases they prosecute, and can refuse to prosecute cases where these things were not done right. And they have.

Infurmashun if you see this -

I can understand working as a prosecutor to make sure that you are trying to protect Constitutional rights. I used to have the most tremendous respect you can imagine for most Federal prosecutors. They work hard, don't get the private practice perks, and quite literally have very evil people who "know where they live."

It was a very difficult thing to do - to make someone like me think ill of Federal prosecutors. But done is done, I can not imagine what kind of a person would, years after the revelations began rolling out, work for an institution that affirmatively was asserting the right to disappear and torture on one man's whim, with no habeas and no trials, and even less drastically but just as devastatingly, to "Biskupic" any poor woman who happens to be of the 'wrong' political party at the 'wrong' time.

Those kinds of SYSTEMIC changes in what it meant to be a Federal prosecutor crystallized when the torture memos "came out" (although they should have been, for those involved, clear cut when Padilla was taken into custody by DOJ only to be disappeared BY DOJ into an abyss created right here, on US soil.)

Clearly, by the end of the first Bush term, it was very clear that now the actual public funciotn of DOJ was to support criminal activity in the Executive Branch, to support disappearing people and evidence. The clearly stated position of DOJ on several fronts was that the President was above the law, above the restrictions of the Constitution.

At that point, no, you don't "protect" the Constitution by public silence in the face of revelation after revelation.

At that point it's more like watching your boss use his children in a back office to produce child pornography and saying, "well, as long as I'm better than that to MY children, I don't have to take a stand on what he is doing to his" And even when your boss goes public and admits what he is doing, to still say silent, no public word of condemnation - that seals who our Federal prosecutors are and what our Dept of Justice has become.

That silence, from Federal prosecutor after Federal prosecutor, for years, on everything - well, it's pretty much changed forever how I will personally view the system and everyone who continued, voluntarily to tell the world that this was all fine.

And as to Yang, I don't know what I said about the Lewis investigation that was wrong. I said Yang and OBrien look bad and I still think they do. Whatever the allocations of responsiblity on the case, nothing has happened with it since she left. And it seems odd that there would be a need to appoint Emmick (didn't Cardona do that originally, not O'Brien?) if Yang and her AUSA leaving didn't have any impact on the investigation.

In any event, it does not look good that she left and went to Lewis' defense firm (and took an assoc), where Ted Olsen had also made his appearance. And that when she left it just so happens she was on the tip of Mier's tongue. And, mostly -- really the only important thing bc otherwise no one would notice any of the rest -- that nothing has happened with the case since she left.

It does look bad - that's not to say that it "is" bad or even that it would look bad if the investigation had stayed on track. Although saying that she was so uninvolved in a case about a powerful member of Congress doesn't really make her look great either. Still, if you're a prosecutor you know when facts don't pass the smell test. That doesn't always mean there's something there, but it does mean that you better be the first one out with those facts instead of ignoring them.

It doesn't look good that O'Brien never thought through the situation, even with all the high profile investigations of the political maneuvering at main justice, of having to have his "chief prosecutor" re-authorized every year. It doesn't look good that O'Brien threatened employees if they talked and it doesn't look good to sit in the middle of a stalled public corruption investigation and disband your public corruption unit. To do all that without having a PR gameplan in place so that, as the disbanding is done, you have the lawyers on your side and a good backstory to sell to the public - that's amateurish.

As to how much impact Yang leaving had on the case as a sole factor, who knows? Combined with Lam being fired? Combined with others being fired? Combined with rampant political maneuvering throughout DOJ?

So I stand by saying that Yang and O'Brien don't look good, but I'll also cave and say that maybe it's no big deal too, even with the unanswered questions and the absolute lack of results or progress.

Because in the end, it really is small potatoes.

The Lewis situation is one of the more innocuous things to have come out of DOJ over the last few years. The development of a whole legion of lawyers who are willing to work without quibble for the right of the Executive to pick up and torture on whim - that is far and away worse.

And that gets back to my original point regarding M - or your - possibly quite valid point. It's hard to hear them, when they come for a source who has been willing to work for a torture administration.

If you never really thought of it that way, what with not making your cases - your children - star in pornographic or torture efforts, then that is probably where we have a divide that can't be crossed in trying to communicate.

Every day for the last four plus years, I've tried to understand how someone could work for torturers and never say a work in public rebuke and I just cannot understand. I guess I'm just not smart enough to follow.

Al,

Good catch on MZM. They're also on the list of WH contractors involved with the e-mail "retention" project. See the conflict? Other discussion here.