[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ALLEGATIONS OF SELECTIVE PROSECUTION: THE EROSION OF PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN
OUR FEDERAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
=======================================================================
JOINT HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME, TERRORISM,
AND HOMELAND SECURITY
AND THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON COMMERCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE LAW
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 23, 2007
__________
Serial No. 110-61
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
Available via the World Wide Web: http://judiciary.house.gov
========
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
38-507 PDF WASHINGTON DC: 2008
---------------------------------------------------------------------
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866)512-1800
DC area (202)512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2250 Mail Stop SSOP,
Washington, DC 20402-0001
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
JOHN CONYERS, Jr., Michigan, Chairman
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California LAMAR SMITH, Texas
RICK BOUCHER, Virginia F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr.,
JERROLD NADLER, New York Wisconsin
ROBERT C. ``BOBBY'' SCOTT, Virginia HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina
MELVIN L. WATT, North Carolina ELTON GALLEGLY, California
ZOE LOFGREN, California BOB GOODLATTE, Virginia
SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
MAXINE WATERS, California DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts CHRIS CANNON, Utah
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida RIC KELLER, Florida
LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California DARRELL ISSA, California
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee MIKE PENCE, Indiana
HANK JOHNSON, Georgia J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia
BETTY SUTTON, Ohio STEVE KING, Iowa
LUIS V. GUTIERREZ, Illinois TOM FEENEY, Florida
BRAD SHERMAN, California TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin LOUIE GOHMERT, Texas
ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York JIM JORDAN, Ohio
ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
ARTUR DAVIS, Alabama
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida
KEITH ELLISON, Minnesota
Perry Apelbaum, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Joseph Gibson, Minority Chief Counsel
------
Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
ROBERT C. ``BOBBY'' SCOTT, Virginia, Chairman
MAXINE WATERS, California J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts LOUIE GOHMERT, Texas
JERROLD NADLER, New York F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr.,
HANK JOHNSON, Georgia Wisconsin
ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina
SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
ARTUR DAVIS, Alabama DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California
TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
BETTY SUTTON, Ohio
Bobby Vassar, Chief Counsel
Michael Volkov, Minority Counsel
______
Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law
LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California, Chairwoman
JOHN CONYERS, Jr., Michigan CHRIS CANNON, Utah
HANK JOHNSON, Georgia JIM JORDAN, Ohio
ZOE LOFGREN, California RIC KELLER, Florida
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts TOM FEENEY, Florida
MELVIN L. WATT, North Carolina TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
Michone Johnson, Chief Counsel
Daniel Flores, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
OCTOBER 23, 2007
Page
OPENING STATEMENTS
The Honorable Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott, a Representative in
Congress from the State of Virginia, and Chairman, Subcommittee
on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security..................... 1
The Honorable J. Randy Forbes, a Representative in Congress from
the State of Virginia, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on
Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security........................ 3
The Honorable Linda T. Sanchez, a Representative in Congress from
the State of California, and Chairwoman, Subcommittee on
Commercial and Administrative Law.............................. 194
The Honorable Chris Cannon, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Utah, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Commercial
and Administrative Law......................................... 200
The Honorable John Conyers, Jr., a Representative in Congress
from the State of Michigan, Chairman, Committee on the
Judiciary, and Member, Subcommittee on Commercial and
Administrative Law............................................. 207
WITNESSES
The Honorable Richard Thornburgh, Kirkpatrick and Lockhart
Preston Gates Ellis, LLP, Washington, DC
Oral Testimony................................................. 209
Prepared Statement............................................. 213
Mr. Donald C. Shields, Professor, University of Missouri-St.
Louis, Kansas City, MO
Oral Testimony................................................. 224
Prepared Statement............................................. 226
G. Douglas Jones, Esquire, Whatley, Drake and Kallas, Birmingham,
AL
Oral Testimony................................................. 271
Prepared Statement............................................. 274
APPENDIX
Material Submitted for the Hearing Record........................ 388
ALLEGATIONS OF SELECTIVE PROSECUTION: THE EROSION OF PUBLIC CONFIDENCE
IN OUR FEDERAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
----------
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2007
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism,
and Homeland Security
Subcommittee on Commercial
and Administrative Law,
Committee on the Judiciary,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittees met, pursuant to notice, at 10:10 a.m.,
in Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building, the Honorable
Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott (Chairman of the Subcommittee on
Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security) presiding.
Present from the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and
Homeland Security: Representatives Scott, Waters, Delahunt,
Johnson, Jackson Lee, Davis, Baldwin, Sutton, Forbes, Gohmert,
Coble, Chabot, and Lungren.
Present from the Subcommittee on Commercial and
Administrative Law: Representatives Conyers, Sanchez, Johnson,
Lofgren, Delahunt, Watt, Cohen, Cannon, Jordan, and Keller.
Staff present: Bobby Vassar, Chief Counsel, Subcommittee on
Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security; Michone Johnson, Chief
Counsel, Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law;
Eric Tamarkin, Majority Counsel; Mario Dispenza, Majority
Counsel; and Veronica Eligan, Professional Staff Member.
Mr. Scott. The hearing will come to order.
Good morning. I am pleased to open this hearing on
Allegations of Selective Prosecution: The Erosion of Public
Confidence in our Federal Judicial System.
For some months now, we have been looking at the issue of
whether some United States attorneys were fired because of
their unwillingness to bring politically based prosecutions. Of
course, if there is evidence that some U.S. attorneys were
fired for their failure to bring politically based
prosecutions, that leaves the question of whether any of those
not fired kept their jobs because they were willing to bring
such prosecutions.
Today's hearing focuses on this aspect of the question as
the continuing investigation of the issue of whether there is
inappropriate politicization within the Department of Justice
and looking at instances in which prosecutions appear to have
been politically motivated.
United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once
said, ``While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most
beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or
other base motives, he is one of the worst. Therefore, he
should have as nearly as possible a detached and impartial view
of all groups in his community.''
Unfortunately, however, evidence has come to light that the
United States Department of Justice may be falling far short of
holding a detached and impartial view. Allegations have risen
that U.S. attorneys have aggressively investigated political
opponents for activity that was only technically criminal or
not even criminal at all, then timed the announcement of
indictments to affect elections.
U.S. attorneys have also been accused of selectively
prosecuting only Democrats for activities in which Republicans
have engaged in similar activities. In fact, the latest
statistics in one study that we will hear today showed that of
375 investigations of political candidates and officeholders
initiated under the Bush administration's Department of
Justice, 80 percent have been against Democrats, and this
disparity in the department's focus calls its objectivity into
question.
We have researched the trend and uncovered a number of
disturbing incidents that raise questions as to the
department's impartiality, and since we announced plans to
conduct this hearing, a steady flow of cases has come to our
attention that deserve attention, but time prohibits us from
detailing them fully.
We will hear about a number of specific cases today, but I
want to focus briefly on just one case that highlights both the
doubtfulness and the selectiveness of prosecutorial activity.
Paul Minor was a major Democratic contributor in
Mississippi and a trial lawyer who had won two major lawsuits
against companies that may have been involved with the U.S.
attorney. He was indicted for guaranteeing loans and providing
houses for Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz. The
justice had recently won an election to the Mississippi high
court over a close friend of the U.S. attorney's and was
indicted on corruption charges for his dealings with Paul
Minor.
Like a number of other cases we will hear today, the
indictments were announced 90 days before a major election, in
this case the 2003 gubernatorial election, and that
announcement was widely seen as an attempt to paint the
Democratic Party as corrupt. The dubiousness of the allegations
comes from the fact that although there were, in fact,
financial dealings between Paul Minor and the justice, there
was no evidence of influencing the justice or even an attempt
to influence him.
The prosecution offered no evidence that the justice
presided over any cases that Paul Minor brought before the
court. Moreover, investigators never even interviewed the
justice's fellow jurists to determine whether he had improperly
influenced any cases involving Paul Minor or anyone associated
with him.
And, finally, the activity for which Paul Minor was
indicted had been commonplace in Mississippi, and prosecutions
for such impropriety had never been brought in the past.
Ultimately, Paul Minor and the justice were acquitted of any
charges of activity between them. However, the acquittal was
long after the Mississippi gubernatorial race, which was won by
the Republican candidate.
The allegation of selectivity in the case stems from the
fact that the U.S. attorney apparently ignored activity of a
major Republican contributor and brother-in-law to a Republican
U.S. senator. The Republican contributor also made loans to the
justice and was Paul Minor's co-owner of the very building that
the justice used as his residence for which Paul Minor was
indicted. Yet the Republican contributor was not even
investigated, let alone indicted.
In fact, when the investigating FBI agent brought the
evidence about this very Republican contributor to the
attention of the U.S. attorney, the agent was transferred to an
antiterrorism unit in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and was replaced by
an agent who had contributed to the Republican Governor Haley
Barbour's campaign.
Mr. Minor had entered a lengthy and articulate motion to
dismiss the charges against him, which the trial court did not
grant. However, without objection, I would like to enter Mr.
Minor's Motion to Dismiss on the record so the details of the
allegation here can be fully recognized.
This is just one of a growing list of cases in which U.S.
attorneys have allegedly attacked political rivals, while
allowing similar activity by its allies to go unchallenged. It
is incumbent upon us as part of our congressional oversight
responsibilities to determine to what extent these determined
allegations are true, and that is why we are holding this
hearing.
I would like to now recognize my friend and Virginia
colleague, the distinguished Ranking Member of the
Subcommittee, the Honorable Randy Forbes who represents
Virginia's Fourth Congressional District.
Mr. Forbes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, today is another sad and embarrassing day for
the Judiciary Committee. Rather than focusing on important
issues to the American people, such as the rise in violent
crime, the threat of terrorism, violence on college campuses,
the increase in international gangs, the invasion of Chinese
espionage agents into our country, the majority is wasting our
time to try and create smoke where there is no fire and deal
once again with politics, politics and politics.
It is sad to see how the historical traditions surrounding
the Judiciary Committee have been jettisoned in favor of
partisanship, all to the detriment of the American people. Is
it any wonder why Congress's approval ratings are so low right
now?
So we bring in our usual cadre of witnesses, and we have
hearings on things that we never did before: ongoing trials. We
bring people in here, and then we limit the cross-examination
to these fine men to 5 minutes apiece. Wouldn't that be
wonderful if you could be in a trial setting, some of the very
trials that the Chairman mentioned earlier, but you could say
to the attorneys who were doing the cross-examination, ``But
you are only going to have 5 minutes to ask these people any
questions,'' and, also, it would be good because prosecutors
have barred most of these cases from coming in here and putting
on their side of the story.
This hearing is not a review of the abuse of prosecutorial
discretion. We have raised that for months now. If it were, we
would be examining the Duke Lacrosse players where the
defendants were fully exonerated and the prosecutor disbarred.
Some of these cases, we have situations where you had
individuals brought before a court, the judge tried the case,
the jury found them guilty, they were sentenced, they have an
appeals process to go through, and yet we want to look at that.
But in other cases, we have situations, as in the Nifong case
and the Duke players, where they have been completely
exonerated.
Have we listened to that? Have we looked at that? No. Have
we heard anything about the political prosecutorial discretion
that was used in the Texas case against Tom DeLay? No. Have we
looked at the situation in Louisiana where this Subcommittee
went down, refused to take testimony on it, but they actually
came to another hearing we had, and the concern there was that
individuals, the police and members of the chamber of commerce
were saying that the prosecutors were not prosecuting
corruption, that, in fact, only 12 percent of the people
arrested or less than 12 percent ever went to jail.
But we do not want to listen to those cases. Instead, we
are sitting here while the majority embraces baseless claims
made by criminal defendants who have no other forum in which to
allege prosecutorial misconduct. This is not a surprise. These
ridiculous claims have turned the Judiciary Committee into
judge and jury of criminal prosecutions. I cannot think of a
more inappropriate abuse of this great institution.
In its zeal to make mountains out of molehills, the
majority is questioning the conviction of former Alabama
Governor Don Siegelman, who was found guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt of bribery, mail fraud and conspiracy by a
jury and sentenced to 7 years in prison. Governor Siegelman was
found to be a corrupt politician who sold his public office for
money. He was prosecuted by a career prosecutor. He was found
guilty by a jury of his peers and sentenced by a Federal judge
with a record of fairness.
I ask unanimous consent, Mr. Chairman, that statements by
U.S. Attorney Leura Garrett Canary and Acting U.S. Attorney
Louis V. Franklin be submitted for the record.
Mr. Scott. Without objection.
[The statements of Ms. Canary and Mr. Franklin follow:]
Mr. Forbes. Like any defendant who has been found guilty
and sentenced to jail, Siegelman is now alleging that he was
prosecuted for political reasons. His credibility is no
different than any other criminal with a motive to say anything
to get out of prison.
What is unusual today is that the majority is conducting an
investigation based on these claims. The majority's misguided
reliance on these claims is proven by their decision not to
call Jill Simpson as a witness in this hearing. She is the sole
witness who made the initial allegation about a single
telephone call 5 years after the fact, 11 months after
Siegelman's conviction and 1 month before his sentencing. Two
individuals who she alleged were on the telephone have
submitted affidavits contradicting her claim.
Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that these statements
be included in the record.
Mr. Scott. Without objection, so ordered.
[The statements of Mr. Riley and Mr. Lembke follow:]
Mr. Forbes. I also ask unanimous consent that the statement
of Governor Riley's election attorney be submitted for the
record.
Mr. Scott. Without objection, so ordered.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Butts follows:]
Mr. Forbes. The Judiciary Committee staff questioned
Simpson for hours about her allegation. Her credibility was
shredded beyond repair. Her statements during the interview
were misleading and unbelievable. In my view, the Committee
should consider referring her to the Justice Department for
further examination. That is why the majority did not want her
here today.
Simpson swore out in affidavit in May 2007 about an alleged
telephone conversation in November 2002, a conversation that
she did not memorialize, nor tell anyone about until years
later. In her affidavit, she alleged that Siegelman conceded
the election because of a controversy surrounding a KKK rally.
When interviewed, Simpson changed her story. She claimed for
the first time that Siegelman had also conceded the election
after receiving assurances that he would not be prosecuted.
Continuing her fabrication, Simpson alleged for the first time
in her interview two additional conversations regarding
Siegelman's concession and prosecution.
Finally, in her effort to tie Karl Rove to the Siegelman
prosecution, Simpson identified the name Karl in an e-mail
discussing a FEMA contract as Karl Rove. We have since learned
that the Karl referred to on the e-mail is Atlanta attorney
Karl Dix, contrary to Simpson's assertion. That is why the
majority did not want her here today.
Because the majority has not called Simpson today, I ask
unanimous consent to submit the transcript of her September 14,
2007, interview with the Judiciary Committee staff.
Mr. Scott. Without objection, so ordered.
[The information referred to follows:]
Mr. Forbes. Now, in an attempt to keep this so-called
investigation afloat, the majority has turned its attention to
other outrageous claims. Today, our Committee has turned into a
political circus when we should be addressing issues of serious
public concern. The American people hopefully will see this
event for what it is, just one more in a string of dead-end
political investigations, but at least the majority will
succeed in one major thing. They will break yet another record.
They will move their approval rating even lower than the 11
percent they currently have earned.
And I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
And I would now like to recognize the Chairwoman of the
Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, the
Honorable Linda Sanchez who represents California's 39th
Congressional District.
Ms. Sanchez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
During the course of the U.S. attorney investigation, we
have attempted to learn why nine talented U.S. attorneys were
fired in the middle of Bush's second term. While the answer to
that question remains elusive, today, we will try to answer a
different question, but a no less troubling question: Did the
U.S. attorneys who were not fired, the so-called loyal Bushies,
base Federal prosecutions on improper partisan purposes rather
than on facts and law?
This hearing, I would remind my colleagues, is about the
single most important issue in the criminal justice system:
whether the power of the prosecutor, the power to take away
someone's freedom, has been abused. The public must learn the
full extent to which the Justice Department has been
transformed into a political arm of the Bush administration.
During former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's tenure,
nonpolitical Justice Department lawyers, such as assistant U.S.
attorneys and immigration judges, were hired for jobs based on
party affiliation and campaign contributions rather than
because of their qualifications. Top members of Mr. Gonzales's
staff attended pre-election White House political briefings led
by Karl Rove and his aides. Mr. Gonzales authorized almost 900
people in the White House to have communications about ongoing
civil and criminal investigations with at least 42 department
officials.
Some Federal indictments were timed so as to have a maximum
impact on upcoming elections, and evidence suggests that nine
U.S. attorneys were fired in part because they refused to make
prosecutorial decisions for politically motivated reasons. This
hearing will explore whether political considerations
improperly influenced prosecutorial judgment in several cases
across the county.
In July, Chairman Conyers, Mr. Davis, Ms. Baldwin and I
requested documents from the Justice Department on three
alleged selective prosecutions that we believe require
additional investigation. Former Alabama Governor Don
Siegelman, Wisconsin State official Georgia Thompson, and Cyril
Wecht, a prominent former Democratic coroner in Pittsburgh.
Three months have passed since our original request, and we
still do not have an adequate response from the department.
While our document requests focus on three cases of alleged
selective prosecution, several other cases have come to my
attention since we started the U.S. attorney investigation. For
example, the prosecutions of former Los Angeles City Councilman
Martin Ludlow, Georgia State Senator Charles Walker,
Pennsylvania State Senator Vince Fumo, Michigan Attorney
General candidate Geoffrey N. Fieger, Puerto Rico Governor
Anibal Acevedo Vila, and Democratic contributor Peter Palivos
may warrant additional scrutiny and Committee action.
At this time, I would ask unanimous consent to enter
letters regarding the cases of Mr. Fieger, Mr. Palivos, Mr.
Walker and Mr. Acevedo Vila into the record.
Mr. Scott. Without objection, so ordered.
[The information referred to follows:]
Ms. Sanchez. Anecdotal concerns regarding alleged
politically based select prosecutions have been reinforced by
an academic study by Professor Donald Shields, a witness at
today's hearings, and John Cragan. The study found Federal
prosecutors during the Bush administration have indicted
Democratic officeholders far more frequently than their
Republican counterparts. I look forward to hearing Professor
Shields' testimony today and to gaining a better understanding
as to why Democrats are disproportionately targeted for Federal
prosecution.
I was encouraged that when Attorney General Nominee Michael
Mukasey was asked about the role of politics in law enforcement
decisions, he responded, ``Partisan politics plays no part in
either the bringing of charges or the timing of charges.''
However, as we learn from the divergence of Mr. Gonzales's
initial public statement from his actions at the department, I
will reserve judgment on Mr. Mukasey until we are certain that
his actions reflect the interests of the American people rather
than simply the President.
I hope that, if confirmed, Mr. Mukasey will act quickly to
remove the cloud of politicization over the Justice Department
and help steer clear the department back to its core mission:
to guarantee fair and impartial administration of justice for
all Americans. Ensuring that U.S. attorneys base prosecutions
on legitimate crimes instead of political considerations would
be a good start. The American people need to be assured that
political calculations do not determine whether an individual
is arrested or prosecuted.
And with what, I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Ms. Sanchez.
And I would like to now recognize the Ranking Member of the
Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, the
Honorable Christopher Cannon, who represents Utah's Third
Congressional District.
Mr. Cannon. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to begin by asking unanimous consent to submit
for the record correspondence between Commercial and
Administrative Law and the Justice Department. There are three
separate items here, and I do not think we need to identify
them separately.
Mr. Scott. Without objection, so ordered.
[The information referred to follows:]
Mr. Cannon. First of all, I would like to thank our
witnesses for being here today. This is always difficult, and
we appreciate your coming.
To my colleagues on the Commercial and Administrative Law
Subcommittee and the Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security
Subcommittee, let me say that I, at least in one way, I am glad
that we are here today. That is we do not often have a chance
to sit together. So it is pleasant to have a joint hearing.
As a preliminary matter, I would like to associate myself
with the comments of the distinguished Ranking Member of the
Crime Subcommittee, in particular his discussion about politics
behind this kind of a hearing. And what I have heard so far
from the other side appear to be these kinds of same wild
allegations that we have looked at continuously, which have
been in many particular cases dispelled and which remain a vast
effort of time by this Committee, by the full Committee, by the
Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law in its
oversight process of the U.S. attorney's office.
Let me just agree with my fellow Ranking Member that we
ought to be thinking about what the effect of these hearings is
on the stature of this Committee and our Subcommittees, and I
might just add by way of a final note here, a precatory note,
that we actually know why the U.S. attorneys were fired. The
majority refuses to actually look at the facts behind it. But
none of the allegations that have been so flagrantly thrown
around have been shown to have any substance at all in the
firing of the U.S. attorneys, and the damage done to the
Justice Department, which I agree has been done, is in no small
part a result of these unsubstantiated allegations, which can
be made in the most flagrant fashion from the dais and yet are
subject to cross-examination and dissipation when we have
witnesses and testimony.
I would just mark the sixth anniversary of September 11,
2001, and since that tragic day, we have witnessed bombings in
Bali, the attack on the Madrid trains, the attack in London at
the London subway, attempts on Heathrow and Glasgow airports.
We witnessed the foiling of terror plots, for example, on
inbound planes from France and Germany and elsewhere, and it is
thanks to the heroic and incessant efforts of the Justice
Department entities that we oversee as well as other agencies
and our military, that it is the list of attacks we have foiled
and terrorists we have destroyed that has grown longer, not the
attacks on our soil.
But, today, we are talking about our efforts and tools in
the war on terror and the war on crime before the Crime
Subcommittee, and we are not talking about issues of the
prosperity and stability of our economy in the context of
commercial and administrative law, as we would in our
Subcommittee. Instead, we are once again talking about U.S.
attorneys and selective prosecutions for political reasons.
The Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee has
spent an inordinate amount of time on this whole project over
the course of this year, and what has come from the
investigation is not much more than a sullied Department of
Justice and a partisan whirlwind for the majority to push on
the press in the battle to destabilize that agency. This witch
hunt has never really found anything that justified the
Committee's extraordinary expenditure of time, but it kept
going.
As one excursion after another has led nowhere, the
majority has simply shifted the targets, changed the
allegations and cast its wrecking ball anew, and so we find
ourselves today perhaps at last at the logical conclusion of
this irresponsible distortion of the oversight process.
We are summoned by the majority to hold a hearing of these
two important Subcommittees to what end? To turn the partisan
lens on two pending criminal manners. One is on appeal. One is
has not even yet come to trial. The department, of course,
cannot appear to defend itself, the cases are pending, and our
witnesses, Mr. Thornburgh and Mr. Jones, know that. The Members
of these two Subcommittees know that. As a result, we are hard
pressed to come to the truth.
I contend we should not be here at all, and our premature
inquiry promises nothing other than to undermine the criminal
justice system and perhaps even produce a miscarriage of
justice in these two cases, for every word that those who would
attack the department for these two prosecutions uttered can be
broadcast--in fact, we have cameras here today that are
broadcasting--reported in print or reported on the Web in the
districts in which the trials will occur. This hearing will
risk tainting the jury pools in those districts. This is an
unfortunate use of Committee time and resources, and I do not
intend to prolong it further by these comments.
I hope at last when we get to the dead-end of all this, we
can move on and help the Justice Department reclaim its
appropriate role in society.
And so with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Cannon.
We have a vote pending, but we would like to complete the
statements. So I will call on the Chairman of the full
Judiciary Committee, the Honorable John Conyers, who represents
Michigan's 14th Congressional District.
Mr. Conyers. Thank you, Chairman.
I want to welcome the witnesses personally, and I suppose I
could best use my time by presenting and defending the
tremendously important record of the Judiciary Committee. I am
not going to do that because I have been weaving, as the
longest-serving Member and maybe the oldest, a thread through
this that runs something like this.
First of all, this is about the Department of Justice, and
it is about the assistant U.S. attorneys. And we have a real
surplus of them here. I mean, this Committee is very expertly
organized around, first of all, our staff. Mike Volkov, Rob
Reid, Mark Dubester have all served with distinction in the
Department of Justice. In the full Committee among the Members,
we have Artur Davis; we have Mr. Schiff, an assistant U.S.
attorney from California; we have Zoe Lofgren, a district
attorney; and we also have Bill Delahunt, a district attorney
from Massachusetts. So that is the level of research and
organizing that has been going on.
Now going along with that thread that encompasses the
experience in this room, we have three attorney generals, one
is Dan Lungren. Although he is a state attorney general, he is
the only one we have, and we are proud of that. What I remember
best about Dan Lungren when he was the attorney general of the
largest state in the union is that he said that character is
doing what is right when no one is looking, and I think that is
marked the way he has approached our activity across the years.
The second person I would bring to your attention is the
Attorney General in the 1940's, Robert Jackson, who did a lot
of other things beside be Attorney General, but, you know, when
he was addressing the Attorney Generals back in the 1940's, he
made some observations that our Chairman, Bobby Scott,
referenced, and I want to just remind you how important the job
is.
So he talked about how much power U.S. attorneys have. He
was addressing a conference of U.S. attorneys, and he said that
they have more power than almost anybody else in government
and, if it is misused, it has horrible ramifications, and it is
in that sense that he is quoted liberally throughout this
hearing and our preparation for it.
And then the third Attorney General is the one that sits
before us today. You see, I was around when Mr. Thornburgh was
the Attorney General, and he came in under some very difficult
circumstances. There were some big problems which he had to
address, and he did it in a fashion that reminds me of why he
is here today. This is not an accident. He is still pursuing
the ability as when he was an attorney to make the Department
of Justice and those that serve in it, the U.S. attorneys and
everybody else, as accountable and as independent and as
impartial as is humanly possible, and it is that that guides us
in this hearing.
What makes me proud is that most of the Members of this
Committee can avoid the notion of dipping into partisanship. It
is very tempting to do in a legislative arena, but we do not do
that. We are mostly trying to improve the justice system. Our
hearings here follow the U.S. attorneys' firing, I mean,
because one of the problems of the politicization of the
Department of Justice was the abuse of prosecutorial authority,
and that is what brings us here.
So, ladies and gentlemen, there is a very logical and
reasonable line of approach here. We want to build the
Department of Justice up. We want it to gain the confidence
that it has enjoyed in the past, and our best way to do it is
to shine light on the problem areas so they will not happen
ever again.
I am happy that we have done that, and these hearings are
unique. The Members are absolutely correct this has never been
done before, and I am proud of the fact that it is being done
on my watch because we think that by examining the problems, we
are going to be able to come together and move forward, and so
I commend the multiplicity of Chairmen and Ranking Members that
are gathered here this morning, and I am so happy to see the
witnesses, and I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
We have just a few moments left on the vote. We will recess
the Committee hearing. It will be approximately 10 minutes. We
will be right back.
[Recess.]
Mr. Scott. The hearing will come to order.
We have a distinguished panel of experts from whom we will
hear testimony today.
Our first witness is the Honorable Richard Thornburgh of
the law firm of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis. Mr.
Thornburgh serves as an active advisor and counselor to the
firm's government affairs clients with respect to matters
concerning federal, state and local governments. He served as
governor of Pennsylvania, United States attorney for the
Western District of Pennsylvania, and was the Attorney General
for the United States under President Reagan and under
President George Herbert Walker Bush. He has a bachelor's
degree from Yale and an LLB from the University of Pittsburgh
Law School.
The next witness will be Donald Shields, professor emeritus
at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. He has conducted
extensive research and authored a document entitled An
Empirical Examination of the Political Profiling of Elected
Officials: A Report on Selective Investigations and-or
Indictments by DOJ's U. S. Attorneys under Attorneys General
Ashcroft and Gonzales. He has a bachelor's degree and a
master's degree from the University of Missouri and a Ph.D.
from the University of Minnesota.
Our final witness will be Mr. Douglas Jones from the law
firm of Whatley, Drake and Kallas. He served as U.S. attorney
for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997 to 2001, and
since entering private practice, he has been appointed as a
special attorney general for the State of Alabama. He holds a
bachelor's degree from the University of Alabama, a juris
doctorate from Cumberland Law School at Stanford University.
Mr. Thornburgh?
Mr. Thornburgh. Chairman Scott----
Mr. Scott. Excuse me.
As you will note the lights before you, we are asking our
witnesses to do the best they can to confine their testimony to
5 minutes. The light will go from green to yellow to red, which
will indicate that the time is up.
I am sorry.
Mr. Thornburgh?
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE RICHARD THORNBURGH, KIRKPATRICK AND
LOCKHART PRESTON GATES ELLIS, LLP, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. Thornburgh. Thank you.
Chairman Scott, Chairman Conyers, Chairwoman Sanchez,
Ranking Member Forbes and other Members of the Committee and
Subcommittees, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you
today about the significant dangers and serious harm that can
be caused by the politicizing of Federal criminal
investigations and prosecutions by the U.S. Justice Department.
First and foremost, let me affirm my own belief that
politics has no place in the decision-making process of whether
or not to charge citizens of the United States with any crime--
federal or otherwise. These citizens must have confidence that
the Department of Justice is conducting itself in a fair and
impartial manner without actual political influence or the
appearance of political influence. Unfortunately, that may no
longer be the case.
Let me begin by stating that I come before you as an
advocate representing Dr. Cyril Wecht, the former elected
coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, who is currently
under indictment in the Western District of Pennsylvania and in
which proceedings my firm represents him.
Although the indictment contains 84 counts, it is not the
type of case normally constituting a Federal corruption case
brought against a local official. There is no allegation that
Dr. Wecht ever solicited or received a bribe or kickback. There
is no allegation that Dr. Wecht traded on a conflict of
interest in conducting the affairs of his elected office. None
of the traditional indicia of public corruption are presented
in this case.
Instead, the prosecution of Dr. Wecht seeks to use the
unprecedented theories which seek to convert a hodgepodge of
alleged violations of home rule charters, county codes and
state ethic provisions into Federal felonies. Many of these
alleged underlying violations do not even carry state-mandated
penalties, yet are now utilized as a vehicle for Federal felony
prosecutions which brand the accused as a corrupt public
servant.
A detailed summary of the shortcomings in these charges is
set forth in my written statement, especially at pages four and
five, which I ask be made part of the record.
Suffice it to say, most of the charging accounts allege
what I would call nickel-and-dime transgressions which are
sought to be converted into Federal felony charges. Some of
these counts involve, for example, the use of office fax
machines for personal business, such as the transmission of Dr.
Wecht's curriculum vitae and fee schedule to a local public
defender seeking his assistance and an executed contract for a
teaching engagement, postal charges for mailing histological
slides to attorneys in black lung cases who had consulted Dr.
Wecht and expense billing irregularities in invoices mailed to
Dr. Wecht's private clients, a number of felony counts derived
from alleged improper billing for use of a county car while
traveling to outlying counties to assist local prosecutors and
coroners.
Astonishingly, the government's own evidence indicates that
they knew prior to indictment that an audit of the billings of
Dr. Wecht of the counties in question showed them to be 99.99
percent accurate, a record that was nonetheless turned into 37
separate felony counts covering a total of $1,700, and the list
goes on.
What has come to pass is the realization of the often-
expressed fear that the generality and ambiguity of the mail
fraud statutes could be used to expand Federal jurisdiction so
far into matters of state government that it could be used, as
one judge put it, to regulate theft of pencils from an office
supply cabinet. The Congress might fairly be asked: Is that
what you intended?
A similar expansion of Title 18 USC 666(a)(1)(A) charges
that Dr. Wecht, in each year from 2001 to 2005, stole property
valued at $5,000 or more, charges not based on a classic theft
required by law, but on Dr. Wecht's use of county personnel,
equipment, resources and, yes, space of the coroner's office to
assist in his private business. We thus found ourselves asking,
``Why would the U .S. attorney's office for the Western
District of Pennsylvania attempt to make such a stretch of
Federal law?"
With that background, we came to learn, in part from your
Committee's investigation, as well as from various news
accounts, that the Department of Justice, in its evaluation of
its prosecutors, in certain cases, fired U.S. attorneys not for
performance-based reasons, but for political ones. We came to
learn that those United States attorneys, who, among other
things, aggressively pursued Democrats, as opposed to those who
did not, remained in place or were promoted. In fact, we
learned from the study conducted by Messrs. Shields and Cragan
that this Administration is seven times more likely to
prosecute Democrats than Republicans.
Possessed of that information, the prosecution of Dr. Cyril
Wecht takes on a different and troubling light. Dr. Wecht is a
prominent and highly visible Democrat in the predominantly
Democratic region of the Western District of Pennsylvania. He
is known nationally and internationally as one of the world's
leading forensic pathologists. He often speaks and is retained
to conduct autopsies in some of the country's highest profile
cases.
In addition to Dr. Wecht's renown in the area of forensic
pathology, he has always been a contentious, outspoken, highly
critical and highly visible Democratic figure in Western
Pennsylvania. In other words, he would qualify as an ideal
target for a Republican U .S. attorney trying to curry favor
with a department which demonstrated that if you play by its
rules, you will advance. Ms. Buchanan must have observed this
phenomenon firsthand during her service as the director of the
executive office of U.S. Attorneys.
Dr. Wecht's case, although high profile, was not the only
apparent political prosecution in Western Pennsylvania. In
addition to Dr. Wecht, U.S. Attorney Buchanan conducted highly
visible grand jury investigations of the former Democratic
mayor of Pittsburgh Tom Murphy, and Peter DeFazio, the former
Democratic sheriff of Allegheny County in which Pittsburgh is
situated. She also prosecuted some lesser-known Democratic
Party members in the sheriff's office.
It should also be noted that of these three high-profile,
very public, Democratic prosecutions, one resulted in a
misdemeanor macing plea, one resulted in no plea and an
alternative resolution, and Dr. Wecht's case remains pending.
All three Democrats were front-page stories during the run-up
to the 2006 elections
During this same period, not one Republican officeholder
was investigated and-or prosecuted by Ms. Buchanan's office--
not one. Although a whistleblower in Republican Congressman Tim
Murphy's office accused the congressman of using paid staff
members in his election campaign, no investigation was
conducted that we are aware of. Despite a local outcry that
former Republican Senator Rick Santorum was defrauding a local
community by claiming residency when he actually resided in
Virginia for purposes of having the school district pay for his
children's cyberschooling, we are aware of no investigation
being conducted.
I cannot and do not opine on the merits of either case, but
the fact that no investigation was undertaken stands out when
Democrats in the Western District of Pennsylvania have been
investigated and indicted in such a highly visible manner.
This stands in stark----
Mr. Forbes. Mr. Chairman, point of order.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman----
Mr. Thornburgh, could you summarize quickly the rest of
your testimony?
Mr. Thornburgh. I am about through, Mr. Chairman, and will
do my best.
We have set forth in our written statement to which I
refer, once more, concerns we have about the conduct of the
case agent, FBI agent in this case, and I will refer you to
that.
One might argue that Dr. Wecht is entitled to a day in
court, and he will have that day. But the public's perception
of apparent politics at the Department of Justice will not
easily be changed or remedied, no matter the outcome of his
trial. Sally Kalson, a veteran columnist for the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, wrote in her column of July 22, 2007, ``An
ambitious and enthusiastic Bush partisan like U.S. Attorney
Mary Beth Buchanan might well consider Dr. Wecht a plum target,
good for many brownie points at the White House.'' She further
wrote, ``The jury has yet to convene on Dr. Wecht, but the
verdict on the Bush administration is loud and clear: 100
percent political.''
This is the unfortunate manner in which this Department of
Justice is viewed in the Western District of Pennsylvania.
We should not allow any citizen of the United States to
proceed to trial knowing that his prosecution may have been
undertaken for political reasons as opposed to being done to
serve the interests of justice. Sadly, that appears to have
been so in the case against Dr. Wecht.
And I thank you for the extended opportunity to appear
before you today.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Thornburgh follows:]
Prepared Statement of the Honorable Richard Thornburgh
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Mr. Thornburgh.
Professor Shields?
TESTIMONY OF DONALD SHIELDS, PROFESSOR,
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-ST. LOUIS, KANSAS CITY, MO
Mr. Shields. Mr. Chairman, thank you for this opportunity.
First, you may be wondering how a communication professor
comes before Congress with information about political abuses
of the Justice Department, and I want to tell you that that is
a valid question.
At the University of Minnesota where I received my Ph.D.,
Dr. Ernest Bormann developed a communication theory called
symbolic convergence. Communication, including political
communication, consists of dramatized messages that, when
shared by other people, can turn into a rhetorical vision that
catches up large groups of people into a similar symbolic
reality.
Now symbolic reality may have nothing to do with actual
reality. To cite a famous example, Barry Goldwater in 1964 was
not actually a dangerous warmonger.
For three decades or more, I have studied and applied
symbolic convergence theory to political messaging on a
national level. With the collapse of Communism, a real question
arose as to what would replace anti-Communism as the dominant
rhetorical theme among American conservatives. Then when John
Ashcroft became Attorney General, he announced a major DOJ
initiative against public corruption. The study I report to you
began as a means of tracking participation in this new
neoconservative anti-corruption rhetorical vision.
To do the tracking, I compiled a list of the publicly
reported Federal investigations and indictments of elected
officials. I went beyond the national media to the local media,
and that proved the key that unlocked Pandora's box. By
accident, I made the discovery that the Justice Department,
acting below the radar of the national media, was investigating
and indicting local Democratic officials at a rate much higher,
and local Republican officials at a rate much lower, than the
percentage of each in the population of elected officials, and
the DOJ continues to do so throughout 2007.
Nationally, the party affiliation of elected officials is
roughly 50 percent Democrat, 41 percent Republican, and 9
percent Independent. These national percentages are closely
reflected in my control group study of the investigation and
arrests of 251 elected officials and candidates by nonfederal
law enforcement at the state and local level. These
investigation rates mirror the national percentages of 50
percent Democrat, 41 percent Republican, and 9 percent
Independent-Other.
When I began my study of the U.S. attorneys, these were the
results I anticipated, that is no significant difference
between the observed percentages and the actual percentages.
To the contrary, however, when it comes to investigation
and indictment of local officials by the DOJ, the numbers are
staggeringly disproportionate: 80 percent Democrats, 14 percent
Republicans, 6 percent Independent. That is 5.6 Democrats
investigated for each Republican, 5.6 to 1, when the ratio
should be 1.2 to 1, and that is out of 820 investigations now,
Mr. Chairman, not the 375 you referred to.
These numbers speak clearly that Federal investigations and
prosecutions of local officials are highly disproportionate, so
much so that the possibility of such a difference occurring by
chance exceeds the .0001 level. That is less than one chance in
10,000.
So there is political bias--I call it political profiling--
in such selective investigation and prosecution rates. The
question that could not be answered until now concerns whether
the bias has been a bias of individual prosecutors or a policy-
driven bias. Both biases translate into the selective
investigation and prosecution, however.
And the numbers do not lie. They represent real people with
real faces, people like Puerto Rico's Governor Anibal Vila;
Alabama's former Governor Don Siegelman; Allegheny County,
Pennsylvania's former coroner Cyril Wecht; Michigan's former
attorney general candidate Jeffrey Fieger; Michigan's Carl
Marlinga, a prosecutor and congressional candidate; or
Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz, Jr.
Each of these investigations and indictments were suspect.
The anecdotal stories and facts behind these cases need to be
told. They and others like them show both the tenacity and the
zeal with which the DOJ has selectively investigated and
selectively prosecuted Democrats, elected officials and
candidates.
Other recent revelations concerning the firing of a number
of U.S. attorneys for not prosecuting Democrats or for
prosecuting Republicans would seem to indicate that the
political profiling is very much a policy-driven bias coming
directly from the Office of the Attorney General and perhaps
even the White House.
Regardless of the origin of political profiling and
regardless of the party being targeted, Congress, I think, has
the obligation to protect against this abuse. Because the
powers of Federal law enforcement are so great and the
political abuse of those powers so unspeakably dangerous,
Congress must act. My written statement provides several
suggestions for Congress to consider.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Shields follows:]
Prepared Statement of Donald C. Shields
Mr. Scott. Thank you, Professor.
Attorney Jones?
TESTIMONY OF G. DOUGLAS JONES, ESQUIRE, WHATLEY, DRAKE AND
KALLAS, BIRMINGHAM, AL
Mr. Jones. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is a privilege to be back. I testified before Chairman
Scott's Committee earlier this summer on the Till bill which I
still hope will pass both Houses so that we can further
investigate and prosecute the unsolved crimes of the Civil
Rights era.
For today, we are here on a much more disturbing topic
that, I believe, has significantly damaged the credibility of
the Department of Justice, and that is the role of partisan
politics in recent criminal investigations. I want to echo what
my colleague at the other end of the table, former Republican
Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, said. Partisan politics plays
no role in either the investigation, the prosecution or the
timing of cases, and, unfortunately, that does not appear to be
the case with the current Administration.
Mr. Chairman, I have submitted a lengthier written
testimony that I know will be made part of the record. I would
like to just spend a few moments to sum up the timeline of the
Governor Siegelman investigation that goes back to 1999 at a
time when I was still a United States attorney.
Governor Siegelman, who had been a force in Alabama
politics, probably the most dominant force in state politics as
a Democrat since he first took office in 1978, was elected
governor in 1998 and assumed office in January 1999, and it
seemed that no sooner had he taken office that certain
investigators and lawyers and the attorney general's office of
the State of Alabama targeted him for investigation.
Now, ultimately, those charges brought against a Siegelman
supporter in 2001 did not include Governor Siegelman. In fact,
he was not named as a co-conspirator, and his name was rarely
mentioned even in the trial.
But it was in 2001 and 2002 that a separate investigation
also started. It was being prosecuted jointly with the U.S.
attorney's office out of Montgomery. The allegations involved
corruption among one of Governor Siegelman's Cabinet members,
Nick Bailey, and a supporter named Lanny Young.
Clearly, those two individuals had committed crimes. It was
bribery that Nick Bailey testified to that Governor Siegelman
had no knowledge about, but very quickly the investigation
turned the crosshairs on to Governor Siegelman.
I did not represent Governor Siegelman at the time. I did
not begin to represent him until 2003, following the death of
his counsel, David Johnson, but one of the first things that we
did in 2003 was to visit with the U.S. attorney's office and
the Alabama attorney general to discuss the case, to tell them
that we did not believe that politics should be involved in
this case, but we were concerned about timing and that this
case needed to move forward. Governor Siegelman had lost the
election in 2002 and now was very obviously going to run again
in 2006.
We were assured that it would not, and I believed that. I
believed it then, and I believe it today, that at that point
politics may not have played a role. There were allegations
that needed to be looked at and, as a prosecutor, I know that
you have to look at serious allegations no matter who it is.
But in 2004, all of a sudden, a case that had originated in
1999 and resulted in a conviction of Dr. Bobo and had been
reversed came back and, for the first time, Governor Siegelman
is included in an indictment out of the clear blue sky. It came
as a complete shock to us that Don Siegelman was included in
May of 2004 in that indictment as a co-conspirator with Dr.
Bobo.
I detail this more in my statement, my written statement,
Mr. Chairman.
The case is ultimately dismissed. I was recused in that
case, but continued to work on the case out of Montgomery.
In the summer of 2004, while the case in Birmingham was
pending, we met with U.S. attorneys in Montgomery. We were told
at that time that they had written off most all of the charges
that had been looked at for 2 years or more against Governor
Siegelman, that they had narrowed their focus to three charges,
including one that involved Mr. Scrushy. They wanted us to
extend the statute of limitations because they had just not
quite got the evidence they needed, which we did, we gladly
did, because we were convinced that there was no crime and that
no amount of time would result in finding evidence to support a
crime. This was in July of 2004.
We did not extend the statute of limitations again,
although we were asked to do that. Instead, I continued to
call. We were promised in the summer of 2004 that an answer
would be given to us within the month, that they would make a
decision, that the case needed to move. It came and went. The
month came and went. I kept calling.
What is interesting is that in October of 2004, the case in
Birmingham was dismissed. Governor Siegelman's case was thrown
out on a motion of the government after an adverse ruling by
Judge Clemens. A month later, in November of 2004, I again had
discussions with the assistant U.S. attorney in Montgomery. At
that time, we were told very specifically that they had had a
meeting in Washington and that Washington had told them to go
back and review the case top to bottom.
What resulted in 2005 was not, Mr. Chairman, simply a
review of the case. It was a wholesale renewed investigation,
casting wider nets, subpoenaing more records, allegations that
were off the table were back on, new allegations that came
forward that ultimately resulted in charges. All of this was
absolutely stunning and a complete reversal of what we had been
told only a few months before.
I ultimately did not represent Governor Siegelman at trial
because of a trial conflict that I had in Birmingham, but there
is no question in my mind the Department of Justice in
Washington were integrally involved, despite the statements
made by the acting U.S. attorney in Montgomery. The case was
working out of Washington. They were an integral part of the
case. I think the evidence clearly demonstrates that.
Mr. Chairman, finally, as a wrap-up, let me just say that I
understand that here in Washington and within the beltway, this
hearing would appear to be driven by politics, but I can assure
you, as is attested to by the fact that you have both a
Republican and a Democrat on this panel, that across the
country, people who have worked in the Department of Justice
are concerned, and they see a disturbing trend and a trend that
involves partisan politics that should never be the case.
Resources have to be used appropriately and, in this case,
Mr. Chairman, when partisan politics are involved, it will
undermine the entire credibility of the system, taint any jury
verdict that could come out and erode the confidence of the
public. It is as I said in my statement.
Dr. King once said that injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere, and that, I think, is happening across the
country today, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Jones follows:]
Prepared Statement of G. Douglas Jones
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
And I thank all of our witnesses for their testimonies. As
has been suggested, the full written statements in their
entirety will be entered into the record.
I would like to enter into the record a petition in support
of urging the United States Congress to investigate the
circumstances surrounding the investigation, prosecution,
sentencing and detention of Don Siegelman, the former governor
of Alabama, that is signed by 44 former state attorneys general
urging the Congress to take that action.
Without objection, that will be placed in the record.
[The information referred to follows:]
Mr. Scott. Mr. Thornburgh, we cut your testimony off. Was
there more that you wanted to say. I think you were about to
talk about the FBI agent.
Mr. Thornburgh. If I could just take a minute to summarize
my testimony, it is set forth at length in my written
statement, but one troubling aspect of this investigation and
prosecution and I think further evidence that it was motivated
by something other than a search for justice relates to the
conduct of FBI Agent Bradley Orsini, the lead agent assigned to
Dr. Wecht's case, as well as the case against the former mayor,
and an agent with an unseemly past.
Agent Orsini, while in Newark, New Jersey, was investigated
for years by the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility
and found to have falsified official records and FBI Form 302s.
He was reprimanded twice for falsification of evidence spanning
years, demoted and suspended without pay for 30 days and placed
on probation for a year before transferring to Pittsburgh in
September 2004.
There are currently motions pending regarding Orsini's
actions in connection with three highly publicized warrants he
obtained in this case, an admitted violation of Department of
Justice policy. Following disclosure of his past reprimands for
serial falsification of evidence, at the mandate of the Third
Circuit Court of Appeals, prosecutors told three different
Federal courts that they do not wish to sponsor Orsini as a
witness and went so far as to attempt to prevent us from even
bringing up his role at trial. This, we suggest, is further
evidence of irregularities in the conduct of the investigation
and prosecution of this case.
One final troubling incident, Mr. Chairman, at the news
conference announcing the indictment of Dr. Wecht, the United
States attorney touted the 84-count indictment against Dr.
Wecht, but then added that he had in her own words literally
provided unclaimed cadavers to a local Catholic university in
exchange for lab space, an allegation we will prove to be
totally false and unfounded at trial and which was never even
discussed in the pre-indictment meetings we had with Ms.
Buchanan and her staff.
Predictably, Dr. Wecht, the Democrat scientist and
educator, was forthwith labeled a body snatcher and a media
feeding frenzy ensued. The U.S. attorney thus succeeded in the
department's apparent mission of casting Democrats in a
negative light during the election year.
This, it seems to me, as part of the cumulative record
here, indicates a failure and breakdown in the supervision of
the conduct of this investigation and prosecution, and we bring
it to the Committee's attention for that purpose.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
When you were Attorney General under two different
Presidents, could you tell us about the number of people in the
Department of Justice that could communicate with numbers of
people in the White House and what implications that has in
terms of limiting the politicization of the Justice Department?
Mr. Thornburgh. Primary vehicle for communication between
the White House and the Department of Justice was
communications between myself and the White House counsel who
was then C. Boyden Gray.
I made a rather strict rule about the department speaking
with one voice and, unless otherwise exempted in a particular
case, that voice to the Administration, to the news media and,
indeed, to the Congress was to be the Attorney General. Now,
obviously, for practical reasons, that was not always the case,
but any conduct with the White House in particular would be
subject to review by our office.
Mr. Scott. And what implications did that have on
politicization of charging decisions?
Mr. Thornburgh. It was designed to have a prophylactic
effect to prevent anyone with designs upon affecting department
investigations from attempting to contact people in the
Department of Justice. We had a couple of instances where we
learned of that and apprised the White House accordingly that
that was not the way that we intended to conduct the business
of the Department of Justice.
Mr. Scott. Thank you. My time is about up.
I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.
Mr. Forbes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornburgh, thank you for being here today. You have
heard so many people compliment you on your great record of
public service to this country, and we certainly thank you for
that.
But taking your own words today, you said you are here
today as an advocate for Dr. Wecht, and I assume that your firm
represents Dr. Wecht. I think that was your testimony.
Mr. Thornburgh. Yes, we do. Yes.
Mr. Forbes. And you do not represent him as a part of that
public service. You are representing him for compensation, your
firm is.
Mr. Thornburgh. Exactly.
Mr. Forbes. Isn't that correct?
Mr. Thornburgh. We are engaged----
Mr. Forbes. And you are paid for that?
Mr. Thornburgh. Exactly.
Mr. Forbes. Now you suggest that these charges should not
have been brought against Dr. Wecht. They were brought in a
Federal court, as I understand it. Is that correct?
Mr. Thornburgh. They were indeed.
Mr. Forbes. And did your firm file a motion to dismiss in
that matter?
Mr. Thornburgh. We did.
Mr. Forbes. And a Federal judge heard that case?
Mr. Thornburgh. Yes.
Mr. Forbes. He was not the prosecutor, was he?
Mr. Thornburgh. I am sorry?
Mr. Forbes. The Federal judge was not the prosecutor, was
he?
Mr. Thornburgh. No.
Mr. Forbes. And he heard your written statements and he
heard whatever arguments you made and he denied your motion to
dismiss. Is that correct?
Mr. Thornburgh. That is correct.
Mr. Forbes. So he basically disagreed with you that the
charges should not have been brought. In addition to that, this
case is set for trial in January. Is that correct?
Mr. Thornburgh. That is correct.
Mr. Forbes. The prosecutor could not very well come here
today and testify on any of the contrary facts that he might
have because if he did that, wouldn't that be unethical for
him, and wouldn't that certainly lead to the appearance of him
politicizing this issue by coming here and setting forth those
claims in a forum like this?
Mr. Thornburgh. Under department rules, that is true,
although I understand that the United States attorney has
testified in secret to this Committee.
Mr. Forbes. Well, there is a difference between testifying
perhaps if you are required to testify somewhere else and
between in a public forum like this, isn't it?
Mr. Thornburgh. Well, it is, indeed, but on occasion, when
I was Attorney General and when I was myself a U.S. attorney,
testimony was given to Committees of Congress who had a
legitimate oversight interest in particular matters----
Mr. Forbes. Well----
Mr. Thornburgh [continuing]. And that rule is not a hard-
set rule.
Mr. Forbes. So then you would suggest it would have been
more appropriate if the Democratic majority actually called her
in to answer questions to them? You would suggest that it would
have been better for the prosecutor to be able to come in a
public hearing like this before the case was tried in January
to talk about the case?
Mr. Thornburgh. I think in this instance where the
Committee has expressed such a high degree of interest in the
circumstances surrounding this prosecution, that might be
appropriate. I do not know what her testimony was. I am merely
responding, at your request, at this Committee's request----
Mr. Forbes. Well, we have not finished----
Mr. Thornburgh [continuing]. To present the point of view
of a person charged with a highly irregular pattern of crimes.
We will argue the case to the jury and defend this individual--
--
Mr. Forbes. Mr. Thornburgh, my time--I do not have quite
the same privilege that you do. I will be cut to 5 minutes. So
I am just going to say I understand you will argue that case. I
think that is appropriate to do. I would just be very concerned
if the attorney trying this case came here and presented all
these facts and discussed it today. I think that would be
highly inappropriate for her, and I think we end up not having
that.
Mr. Shields, in your report--and let me just make sure I am
correct here--by your own study, you put, ``This is not a
longitudinal study.'' I am sorry. ``This longitudinal study is
not a legal study. It does not purport to track the actual case
history of any individual, other than as it may have been
reported in the news story or the Federal press release.'' Is
that true?
Mr. Shields. Yes, that is true.
Mr. Forbes. So you based yours on the press release?
Mr. Shields. Well, no, the Justice Department will not
release the data on cases. Mr. Congressman, as you well know,
the Justice Department will not release the data on the actual
investigations and----
Mr. Forbes. In fact----
Mr. Shields [continuing]. Who they are investigating, but--
--
Mr. Forbes. Mr. Shields, my time is about out, but we just
had a hearing last week, and one of the witnesses came up and
said, ``Thank you for at least pointing out that prosecutors
oftentimes cannot disclose all the information.'' Oftentimes,
the information is not disclosed out of there, but one of the
things----
Mr. Shields. Well, if they had not----
Mr. Forbes. Mr. Shields, you can respond to anybody else. I
do not have much time. I have about 30 seconds.
Mr. Shields. Okay.
Mr. Forbes. But we had some investigations by the Justice
Department. You have Robert Nell. You got Jack Abramoff. You
got David Safavian . You got Neal Volz. You got Tony Rudy. You
got Roger Stillwell. And we hear a lot of people come in and
say, ``Look at all this corruption by the Republicans,'' and I
am sure some of them felt that that was improper and wrong,
too.
Mr. Jones, I do not have much time to ask you any
questions, but I know that when the initial allegation against
Governor Siegelman were brought up, you were the U.S. attorney
at that time--is that correct--or at some point in time when
those allegations----
Mr. Jones. In the Bobo investigation, they were never
brought up. What I said in my statement was an assistant
attorney general for the state hoped they were going to go that
far. It never came up. So----
Mr. Forbes. But you subsequently testified you are a
longtime friend of Governor Siegelman's, right?
Mr. Jones. Oh, yes. Yes.
Mr. Forbes. And at one point in time, you were trying a
case, and did the court ask you to stop?
Mr. Jones. Well, after the Bobo case was reversed and came
back and Governor Siegelman was, in my opinion, shockingly
included in that, I sought to continue to represent him. I was
his lawyer at that time, but because I had initially agreed
that the early Bobo case that did not include Siegelman come to
my district, Judge Clemens felt that that would not be
appropriate for me to represent him.
Mr. Forbes. So you disagreed with him, but the judge told
you that you could not represent him in that case?
Mr. Jones. Yes.
Mr. Forbes. And also you have given significant campaign
contributions to Federal candidates across the country,
Democrats, including Members on this Committee, correct?
Mr. Jones. Yes, sir.
Mr. Forbes. Okay.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for your patience. My time has
expired.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentlelady from California?
Ms. Sanchez. Thank you.
Mr. Thornburgh, you served as the U.S. attorney for the
Western District of Pennsylvania, the very district in which
Dr. Wecht is charged with corruption. Is that correct?
Mr. Thornburgh. That is correct.
Ms. Sanchez. Okay. In your testimony, you mentioned that
his indictment is not one which normally constitutes a
corruption case. What would a normal corruption case resemble,
and is there a threshold of activity that you looked for when
you were the U.S. attorney in bringing those types of charges?
Mr. Thornburgh. The normal type of corruption, in my view,
is where there is a bribery case, an extortion case, a conflict
of interest that gives rise to some financial gain for an
officeholder, as distinguished from a series of minor
irregularities that are apparent in this case that under a
broad reading of the Federal mail fraud and theft of services
statutes have attempted to be converted into Federal felonies,
and that is what brought my attention to this case and these
aspects I have discussed this morning.
Ms. Sanchez. So, in your opinion, the case that is brought
against Dr. Wecht is not the typical kind of corruption case
that you hear about in the news headlines about----
Mr. Thornburgh. Absolutely.
Ms. Sanchez [continuing]. People taking bribes, quid pro
quos or favors or those types of things?
Mr. Thornburgh. Absolutely. They all relate, I might add,
to the conduct of his outside business, a practice that is
expressly condoned by the authority under which he holds
office. There is nothing sinister about him holding public
office and doing the outside business, and----
Ms. Sanchez. In fact, that outside business sometimes
helped prosecutors in some of the counties?
Mr. Thornburgh. In large part, he was engaged by
prosecutors in outlying counties, more rural counties where
they did not have the forensic pathology capability available,
and he did that not only in Pennsylvania, but across the Nation
and, in fact, in major high-profile cases because of the wide
respect that he has attained.
Ms. Sanchez. I am interested in getting at the particulars
of this case. I have read your written testimony, and you
indicated that the U.S. attorney's office in the Western
District of Pennsylvania has taken an overly expansive view of
Federal criminal jurisdiction to effectively transform common
events in the public workplace into Federal felonies, and one
of the examples, if you could just refresh my memory, involved
faxes and a total net worth of about--the number of $24 sticks
in my mind.
Mr. Thornburgh. Well, I do not know what the exact amount
befixed on the use of a fax machine, but, in point of fact, a
number of the counts in this indictment relate to Dr. Wecht's
alleged use of a county fax machine to send his curriculum
vitae or to send his fee schedules or to send reports to some
of those agencies for which he had done outside work or to
other sources that had requested him to speak. He is widely
known as a speaker on these issues. And each one of those
illicit, supposedly, uses of the fax machine is charged as a
felony in this indictment. It does not make any sense.
Ms. Sanchez. I would agree with you. I think that most
people occasionally use a fax machine in their office to
conduct stuff that perhaps is not directly related to their
work, but----
Mr. Thornburgh. It is probably not ethical, but hardly a
Federal felony.
Ms. Sanchez. A Federal felony. How would you suggest that
Congress change the law so that public corruption cases are
based on evidence of criminal activity rather than ordinary
types of events in the public workplace?
Mr. Thornburgh. I think a review of the type suggested by
Judge Easterbrook and cited in my written statement would be in
order of these statutes that are so loose in their potential
application, notably section 666 and 1346, which he said have
an open-ended quality to them that permits prosecutors to kind
of define the crime themselves. I think the Congress ought, in
its oversight function, to examine precisely how those statutes
have been interpreted and to tighten them up, and----
Ms. Sanchez. So that we are not charging people with
Federal felonies for taking pencils home from their workplace?
Mr. Thornburgh. Exactly. Exactly.
Ms. Sanchez. In your written testimony, you also indicate
that the public's perception of apparent politics at the
Department of Justice will not be easily changed or remedied. I
am interested in knowing what steps could the Attorney General
take to change the public perception that improper political
considerations are being injected into prosecutorial decision-
making at the Department of Justice.
Mr. Thornburgh. I think an important step has already been
taken in that regard with the appointment, subject to Senate
confirmation, of Judge Michael McCasey, a widely respected
jurist who has experience in the Department of Justice and who,
as noted here today, at his hearing testified that partisan
politics should play no part in either bringing of charges or
the timing of charges, and the timing is important as well, as
we pointed out in our statement, that these cases were all
brought against Democrats in the run-up to the 2006 election.
But Judge McCasey has clearly indicated his concern over
these allegations, over the image of the department, over the
integrity and reputation of the department, and I think he will
ask for and deserves the support of your Committee and its
counterparts in the other House.
Ms. Sanchez. Thank you, Mr. Thornburgh.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Keller?
Mr. Keller. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornburgh, I do not know if Dr. Wecht is guilty or
not. I do know that the Federal judge will ensure that the
trial is conducted based on witnesses with personal knowledge,
documents which are authenticated and admissible evidence.
Your testimony is that there is a perception of an
appearance that Dr. Wecht may have been prosecuted for being a
Democrat because the prosecutor might be trying to please the
White House, possibly to advance her own career. Your
testimony, to be blunt, is the most pathetic example of
speculation and innuendo and hearsay that I have seen in 7
years on this Committee.
I think it is totally ridiculous to imply that the
President of the United States would call up a United States
attorney and say, ``Why don't you go find some local Democrat
elected official, preferably a dog catcher or coroner, and
prosecute the hell out of them to help us keep the U.S.
Congress in Republican hands?'' It is so farfetched, I am
almost embarrassed to be an attorney listening to it.
And you go so far as to buttress your unsupported
assertions by quoting a local opinion columnist who then
speculates that ``U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan might well
consider Dr. Wecht a plum target, good for many brownie points
at the White House.'' I think it is fair to say that is a
pretty tenuous argument for questioning the honor and integrity
of a United States attorney.
So let me get back to some of the real evidence issues here
and ask you do you, sir, have any personal knowledge of any
conversations between U.S. Attorney Buchanan and the President
in which it was discussed that Dr. Wecht should be prosecuted
because he is a Democrat?
Mr. Thornburgh. I would be mortally embarrassed if I had
come before this Committee and made a charge that the President
of the United States had had conversations with U.S. Attorney
Buchanan.
Mr. Keller. I will take that as a no.
Mr. Thornburgh [continuing]. For such statements, and you
should be cited for misciting the record.
Mr. Keller. Well, it is right there. I am quoting your
statement.
Mr. Thornburgh. I did not ever say that the President of
the United States had any discussions with Ms. Buchanan.
Mr. Keller. Do you have any personal knowledge of any
conversation between any White House officials and the U.S.
Attorney Buchanan in which it was discussed that Dr. Wecht
should be prosecuted for being Democrat?
Mr. Thornburgh. Ms. Buchanan's testimony to this Committee
was given in secret, and I have no access to that, so I cannot
answer that.
Mr. Keller. You have no such personal knowledge, do you?
Mr. Thornburgh. Not at this point.
Mr. Keller. Do you have any personal knowledge of any
conversation between any Department of Justice official and
U.S. Attorney Buchanan in which it was discussed that Dr. Wecht
should be prosecuted because he is a Democrat?
Mr. Thornburgh. No, I might remind the Member that the
Department of Justice has refused to make any of this
information available to this Committee.
Mr. Keller. You do not have any personal knowledge----
Mr. Davis. Mr. Chairman, point of order.
Mr. Keller. I would like my question answered.
Mr. Davis. Point of order, Mr. Chairman. May the former
Attorney General of the United States be allowed to finish his
answer?
Mr. Keller. I can reclaim my time anytime I like.
Mr. Scott. The Committee will come to order.
Mr. Keller. Yes.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman will proceed. We would appreciate
it if you would, if you are going to ask a question, give him
an opportunity to respond.
Mr. Keller. I would like an answer. Do you have any
personal knowledge of any conversation between U.S. Attorney
Buchanan and any Department of Justice official whence it was
discussed that Dr. Wecht should be prosecuted because he is a
Democrat?
Mr. Thornburgh. Obviously not.
Mr. Keller. Do you have any personal knowledge of any
conversation between U.S. Attorney Buchanan and anyone on this
planet in which it was discussed that Dr. Wecht should be
prosecuted because he is a Democrat?
Mr. Thornburgh. Obviously not, since I have no access to
the public record created by her testimony.
Mr. Keller. Have you seen any letter or other document
between the U.S. attorney and any person on this planet in
which it was discussed by U.S. Attorney Buchanan that she was
pursuing Dr. Wecht because of his political affiliation as a
Democrat?
Mr. Thornburgh. What we have done is respond to this
Committee's request in your investigation of allegations of
political influence with a set of facts that raise real
questions about why this prosecution was initiated in the first
place. We do not have access, as you do or as other authorities
might have, to the record that would seek to verify those
facts, but we have raised these questions, and we think that is
a legitimate role for the Congress to play in its oversight
function.
Mr. Keller. Mr. Attorney General, you have not seen any
letter or other document?
Mr. Thornburgh. No, of course not.
Mr. Keller. Okay. You have made the factual assertion that
the Department of Justice demonstrated that if you play by its
rules, you will advance. Can you give me the U.S. attorney
whose career has advanced solely because he or she prosecuted
Democrats?
Mr. Thornburgh. Those were disclosures made in the course
of the investigation being carried on into political influence
within the department.
Mr. Keller. Do you have the name of any U.S. attorney who--
--
Mr. Thornburgh. Have I spoken with him personally?
Mr. Keller. The name?
Mr. Thornburgh. I relied on news accounts and other
authorities that----
Mr. Keller. Tell me the name of the U.S. attorney who was
promoted, advanced, according to what you said, because he or
she prosecuted a Democrat?
Mr. Thornburgh. I cannot give you that information
specifically now.
Mr. Keller. Mr. Chairman, my time has expired.
Mr. Cannon. Mr. Chairman, may I inquire about just a matter
of order in the Committee? We have had a couple of times when
Republicans have been questioning witnesses, not just in this
Committee, since we actually have not met as a joint Committee
before, but in the full Committee. I think Mr. Davis made a
point on a couple of occasions that the Member should let a
witness answer.
There is no rule, I believe, that requires that a witness
should answer. We have the right to inquire, I believe, and if
we are a little coarse with a witness, I think that is
appropriate, because sometimes we have witnesses that are a
little bit not forthcoming, so I think it would be----
Mr. Davis. Mr. Chairman, if I might respond?
Mr. Cannon. Well, pardon me. I----
Mr. Scott. The Committee will----
Mr. Davis. My name was invoked.
Mr. Cannon. May I just finish by saying that if the Chair
would please make it clear that it is the gentleman's time or
the gentlelady's time who is making the inquiry, I would
appreciate that.
Mr. Scott. The Committee will come to order.
And we would appreciate, just as a matter of courtesy, that
if you ask the witness a question that the witness be allowed
to answer. Depending on who the witnesses are, it goes both
ways, but we will try to be courteous to the witnesses the best
we can.
Mr. Keller. Mr. Chairman, if I can just interject, if I am
asking a witness a question, I am not required to sit here and
listen to 5 minutes of nonresponsive sentences under any
scenario----
Mr. Scott. Well, the gentleman was given----
Mr. Keller [continuing]. And I will not.
Mr. Scott. All of the----
Mr. Forbes. Mr. Chairman, can I ask for some courtesy for
the former Attorney General of the United States?
Mr. Scott. The Committee will come to order.
The opinions have been expressed, and we will move on to
the next person who is the gentleman from Michigan, Chairman of
the full Committee.
Mr. Conyers. Thank you. I thank you for keeping us in order
and lowering the emotional level that was beginning to rise
here. You are a great Chairman.
Now I want to help the gentleman from Florida out. I have
the name of a case he may want to inquire when he was asking of
General Thornburgh. If you will examine the case involving U.S.
Attorney Steven Biskupic, who was on the list to be fired and,
after he indicted Georgia Thompson, his name was restored. His
name was taken off the list. So he did not get a promotion, but
he did keep his job.
And so what I would like to do now is to ask Attorney
General Thornburgh if he wanted to make any further
elaboration, as eager as I am to move on, to the questions that
were put to him by my friend from Florida?
Mr. Thornburgh. No, Mr. Chairman. I think the distinction
that I am trying to make is that we are engaged by our client
to protect his rights and will vigorously defend him in the
criminal trial set for January.
Mr. Conyers. Thank you.
Mr. Thornburgh. There is a separate role, however, as the
Committee clearly recognizes in the calling of this hearing,
the oversight role that this Committee has over the conduct of
the Department of Justice and an examination whether
allegations of political influence have been present in these
cases, and it is for that reason that we appear today and set
forth the testimony that we did.
Excuse me for interrupting you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Conyers. No, that is quite all right.
As a matter of fact, the hearing is cautiously entitled
Allegations of Selective Prosecution. I commend the two Chairs
for their discretion in titling the hearing.
But we started off earlier in the year with the
politicization of the Department of Justice. These hearings
follow along to allegations of prosecutorial abuse. That is a
very direct connected line. This is not some off-the-wall
hearing. This directly follows the work of both these
Subcommittees that we have gone along.
Now somehow this former U.S. attorney from Alabama has
persuaded me to give him a minute of my time, so when I get to
4 minutes, would somebody please advise me so I can recognize
him? The yellow light will come on.
Okay. Thanks, Mel Watt. I will remember this.
Before the yellow light comes on, I want to put in here
everything I have said has been beyond controversy, and I just
want to start off with the statement of the prosecutor from
Louisiana to show you how far prosecutors have gotten out of
line.
He infamously stated to a room full of schoolchildren, ``I
can ruin your life with the stroke of a pen.'' Can you imagine
a state prosecutor talking to a group of schoolchildren like
that?
And then I have for the record, just for those of you who
may not remember it, when Attorney General Gonzales spoke
before U.S. attorneys, he said, ``I work for the White House,
and you work for the White House,'' and as a matter of fact, it
cost one U.S. attorney his job, if our investigation was
correct.
And then there is Monica--oh, the light went on. Okay,
there is Monica Goodling who was nervously called into the
White House by then Attorney General Gonzales, and she was
interviewed about her steadfastness in her position as liaison
to the White House, and she admitted sitting right in the chair
that Donald Fields is in that, ``Yes, I did cross the line a
number of times in my job.''
And I yield now to my friend from Alabama, Artur Davis.
Mr. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to make one quick point before too much time goes
forward in the hearing.
And I thank the Chair for yielding.
The very able Ranking Member is a good friend of mine, Mr.
Forbes. I was surprised by an assertion that he made during his
opening statement regarding Jill Simpson, one of the witnesses
in the Siegelman case. My friend, Mr. Forbes, at one point
suggested that Ms. Simpson's testimony had been conclusively
debunked, as he put it, and he amazed me by somehow suggesting
that the Committee should refer her for prosecution.
One point that I hope my friend from Virginia will take
note of--and I would ask unanimous consent to introduce Exhibit
4 to the Simpson deposition into the record. Exhibit 4 to the
Simpson deposition is a list of wireless phone calls made from
her phone--if you examine the phone list, on November 18, 2002,
the date that she contends that she made a phone call to Rob
Riley and others, there is a number listed, 205-870-9866, 11/
18, duration for 11 minutes.
All three affidavits submitted from Mr. Butts, Mr. Lembke
and Mr. Riley deny that there was a conference call that
occurred on November 18.
I ask to also introduce into the record a search for law
firms in Alabama on NetOpus.net. Enter the law firm name Riley
Jackson. The following phone number comes up, 205-870-9866----
Mr. Scott. The gentleman's time----
Mr. Davis [continuing]. The exact same phone number that
surfaces in Exhibit 4.
Mr. Forbes, in light of that revelation that these three
affidavits are contradicted by the phone record, I ask you to
withdraw your statement, sir, regarding possible perjury by Ms.
Simpson.
Mr. Scott. Is the gentleman asking unanimous consent to put
these into the record?
Mr. Davis. Yes.
Mr. Scott. Without objection.
[The information referred to follows:]
The gentleman's time has expired.
Do you want----
Mr. Forbes. Yes, Mr. Chairman. If the gentleman would
listen to my statement, I did not say perjury. I said referred
to the Department of Justice for investigation.
Mr. Davis. I thought it was extraordinary, Mr. Forbes, sir,
your statement is contradicted by the phone records.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman's time has expired. If the Ranking
Member wants to finish his response or make a response to the
gentleman's comments----
Mr. Forbes. Mr. Chairman, I was very careful in saying that
it should be referred to the Department of Justice.
And the other thing that I emphasized--the gentleman
probably heard--was Ms. Simpson's not here. It would be very
easy to bring Ms. Simpson here--you had the ability to call the
witnesses--and have Ms. Simpson choose the kingpin, have her be
in testimony, to have her be here so that we could cross-
examine. She is not here.
That is my statement, I believe it is accurate, and----
Mr. Scott. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Forbes. Thank you.
Mr. Scott. The Ranking Member of the Subcommittee, Mr.
Cannon?
Mr. Cannon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate the
calm and thoughtful way you have been handling this hearing.
A couple of points that I would like to make before I ask
some questions. In response to Mr. Conyers, I just would like
to point out to Mr. Biskupic or Biskupic never knew that his
name was on the list, and I think we have verified that through
out discussions with various witnesses.
And, secondly, I would like to congratulate the gentleman
from Michigan and do hope that the newspapers lead with the
headline ``allegations'' in huge type, and then the rest of
this about selective prosecution in small letters, because that
is clearly the distinction that we are dealing with here.
And I want to apologize, Mr. Chairman, also. We have a
markup in Resources, and I have to be over there to vote. I
have been here other than the voting over there, but I did need
to be gone. I am sorry.
I apologize to our witnesses for not having been here for
the questioning, and I apologize if I am redundant in any way.
But, Mr. Thornburgh, I would actually like to ask you a
question, a bit of a loaded question, I grant you, but do you
believe that your client is innocent?
Mr. Thornburgh. I believe that the government has the
responsibility to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,
and my role is to hold the government to that standard. My
beliefs one way or the other are not really relevant.
Obviously, I believe that this is an unjustified
prosecution based on the facts that I set forth and which
involved to me the use of trivial irregularities and an attempt
to escalate those into Federal felony charges. In that sense, I
do believe he is innocent.
Mr. Cannon. Well, that was really quite direct. Thank you.
I note that we have television cameras here today, and it
occurs to the mind it is not because of large type allegations
but because of your presence as a former Republican Attorney
General. Now I recognize the fact that you have a special
interest in the Department of Justice and that your concerns
about the department carry a personalized and a particular
view.
But it seems to me that your appearance here today does a
couple of dramatic things. In the first place, it says that you
believe strongly enough about this that you should appear.
Don't you think that affects the nature of the case that is
going forward in a way that may help your client, but may be
detrimental to the department?
Mr. Thornburgh. I would certainly hope not. I appear here
today as a lawyer for an individual who has been charged with a
Federal felony, serious, 84 counts of felony, and my job as a
lawyer is to represent that individual as best I can and see
that insofar as he is concerned, justice is accomplished.
Mr. Cannon. That is a very lawyerly statement, and I agree
with it entirely as a lawyer. But you are not just a lawyer.
The reason the cameras are here today are not because you are a
lawyer defending a client who you may believe or whom you are
just defending and trying to get the best defense possible.
That is not why they are here. They are here because of your
prior status. Doesn't that concern you somewhat?
Mr. Thornburgh. Well, I do have a devotion to the
Department of Justice. I served over half of my professional
career in the Department of Justice in one capacity or another,
and I have spoken out previously on irregularities that I think
are occurring, most notably on the attempt to subvert the
attorney-client privilege which has been undertaken by the
department.
Mr. Cannon. And we agree on that point, by the way.
Mr. Thornburgh. Well, that is an example----
Mr. Cannon. There are lots of issues out here.
Mr. Thornburgh. Yeah, that is right, and one of the issues
to me is the overreaching of Federal prosecutors to create
Federal offenses out of trivial violations of----
Mr. Cannon. We do not disagree on much, let me just say,
and, clearly, look, my biggest concern is with your role and
your history and your current advocacy because you are
advocating for your client.
Mr. Thornburgh. I am, indeed. I am here----
Mr. Cannon. My problem is that the Justice Department will
always have problems whatever the Administration is, and it is
the job of this Committee to help keep those things on track.
It is easy for that organization to go off track a little bit.
It has, as you know, wonderful institutions, wonderful rules,
wonderful checks and balances within the department. Those are
deteriorating for many reasons, including the war on terror.
I would just in conclusion suggest that you take a step
back as an advocate and recognize that our job here is not to
hammer the former Attorney General, not to make a case in a
narrow sense against one prosecutor or against, say, two
prosecutors, which, by the way, after having been in some of
these cases, they are not before us today.
The fact is we have prosecutors who, generally speaking,
are doing a good job and, as a Committee, we have a
responsibility to help reinforce the good and root out the bad,
and I suspect that if you reflect on this, you are going to
agree that your advocacy here probably is counterproductive to
your longer-term views and concerns about the department.
Mr. Thornburgh. I would certainly hope not, but I
appreciate your views on that.
Mr. Scott. Thank you. The gentleman's time has expired.
Did the gentleman from Georgia have a motion to make?
Mr. Johnson. Yes, Mr. Chairman. I request that the
gentleman from Alabama, Mr. Davis, be granted 1 minute of my
time.
Mr. Scott. Without objection, the gentleman from Alabama is
recognized for 6 minutes.
Mr. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Johnson, for yielding.
Mr. Jones, most of my questions would be to you, but I do
want----
Mr. Delahunt. Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Scott. The gentleman from Massachusetts?
Mr. Delahunt. Yes. A parliamentary inquiry.
Mr. Scott. State the inquiry.
Mr. Delahunt. Is it appropriate at this point in time for
me to move to grant to the gentleman from Alabama 4 minutes of
my time?
Mr. Scott. Without objection, the gentleman is recognized
for 10 minutes.
Mr. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Delahunt, for being so gracious,
also.
Most of my questions, Mr. Jones, would be to you, but I
want to briefly pick up on the point that I made before. There
was a loss of exchange between myself and Mr. Forbes.
One of the irresolvable questions before this Committee is
the veracity of the individuals who submitted these affidavits.
This Committee is not a grand jury. This Committee is not a
jury. So we are enormously limited and we should be limited in
our capacity to determine who is being accurate and who is not.
I suppose the public has to make that judgment.
But I do want to make sure that we do not turn this into a
hearing in which we cast dispersions on witnesses to suggest
that they have manipulated their testimony and, if that is
done, it needs to be done with a factual foundation. So I turn
again to the point that I made earlier.
This is a material question here. Simpson alleges that on
November 18, 2002, she had a conference call with Terry Butts,
former member of the Alabama Supreme Court who had become
politically active; a gentleman named William Canary, political
operative in Alabama whose wife was the U.S. attorney then and
is still now the U.S. attorney of the Middle District of
Alabama; and Rob Riley, an attorney who practices at the firm
Riley Jackson, the son of the current governor.
Three affidavits submitted today by Mr. Riley, Mr. Butts,
and another individual who was working for Mr. Butts, Mr. Matt
Lembke. All three of these affidavits make the assertion that
there was no phone call on November 18 in which they
participated with Jill Simpson. Exhibit 4 to the Simpson
deposition, which I have asked unanimous consent that it be
introduced into the record of these proceedings, is crystal
clear on one point. If you look at the bottom of the entry, 11/
18/2002, a call to Birmingham, Alabama, to 205-870-9866, for 11
minutes. If you run a search on NetOpus.net, you will find
Riley & Jackson, phone number 205-870-9866.
Mr. Chairman, I believe I have asked unanimous consent that
this search inquiry be admitted into the record.
So, before we make judgments about Simpson or anyone else,
let those judgments not be immediately contradicted by the
phone records and the unimpeachable facts.
Mr. Jones, you mentioned your representation as Don
Siegelman's attorney in connection with the matters that
eventually led to his indictment. I want to focus you on one
timeframe. I want to focus you on the end of 2004, at least the
last 6 months of 2004.
Because even with 10 minutes, my time is limited. I am
going to move to the questions, and I ask you to give me quick
responses.
In the end of 2005 or that last 6 months of 2004, were you
in regular conversations with two prosecutors in Montgomery and
the U.S. attorney's office, Mr. Feaga and Mr. Franklin?
Mr. Jones. Congressman, I attempted to be for several
months after we were told we would get an answer within 30
days. I attempted to be, and it was very little conversation
until ultimately the conversation on the telephone in late
November, early December of 2004
Mr. Davis. Okay. Now, before we get to that, during the
period of time when you were in communication with Mr. Feaga
and Mr. Franklin, did there come a point when they made
representations to you regarding the quality of their case
against Mr. Siegelman?
Mr. Jones. Yes. That was in July of 2004.
Mr. Davis. Would you quickly tell the Committee about that
conversation?
Mr. Jones. Essentially, we were told that most all of the
allegations that we had been looking at previously had been
written off, they were too trivial to bring with the former
governor.
Mr. Davis. Now let me slow you down. This is important. The
people who made the representation to you that most of the
allegations against Don Siegelman had been written off were the
two prosecutors, Mr. Feaga and Mr. Franklin. Is that right?
Mr. Jones. That is correct.
Mr. Davis. All right. Continue.
Mr. Jones. We were also told that they had narrowed the
focus down--they had only been on the case, by the way, about 3
months--into three areas. Two of those areas which I have
outlined were absolutely clear. There was no crime committed.
We knew that there was nothing there. They recognized that. The
issue with the----
Mr. Davis. And, again, I am going to slow you down. When
you say ``they recognized that,'' you are saying that Mr.
Franklin and Mr. Feaga acknowledged to you that two other areas
had little or no merit?
Mr. Jones. Well, I will not say they used those terms, but
it was pretty obvious they were concerned about that area.
Mr. Davis. Okay.
Mr. Jones. The third one involved the allegation of this
appointment of Richard Scrushy to the CON Board, and while Mr.
Feaga did say----
Mr. Davis. Now let me slow you down because, again, you and
I know these facts. Everybody here does not. There was an
allegation that was eventually included in the indictment that
Mr. Scrushy was appointed to the state certificate of need
board and that there was a quid pro quo in which Scrushy agreed
to contribute money to a lottery initiative the governor was
sponsoring. That was one of the allegations, correct?
Mr. Jones. Correct.
Mr. Davis. And Mr. Feaga and Mr. Franklin indicated to you,
did they not, that that was the dominant area in which they
were looking as of July 2004? Is that correct?
Mr. Jones. That is correct, Congressman.
Mr. Davis. Did Mr. Feaga and Mr. Franklin characterize to
you the quality of the evidence around that particular
allegation?
Mr. Jones. The way they characterized the evidence, you
know, Mr. Feaga in particular felt that the circumstantial
evidence, in his view, was compelling, but as I rattled off all
the defenses and all of the facts that were holes that they had
in the case, which they never filled, by the way, he also
acknowledged that the defenses in that case factually and
legally were also compelling, and it was very troubling, and it
indicated to us that if he could not fill those holes, then
likely these charges would not be brought.
Mr. Davis. Did the lottery transaction or the alleged quid
pro quo rest on the testimony of one particular cooperating
defendant, Nick Bailey?
Mr. Jones. Nick Bailey solely.
Mr. Davis. Did Mr. Feaga indicate to you in his
conversations that there were problems with the credibility of
Nick Bailey?
Mr. Jones. Yes. Everyone----
Mr. Davis. Would you tell the Committee about that?
Mr. Jones. He knew that. Everyone knew that. Mr. Bailey had
committed several crimes with Lanny Young. He had taken a
couple hundred thousand dollars worth of bribes, and there was
a serious gap factually in----
Mr. Davis. In addition to the normal kinds of impeachment,
cooperating witness, the fact that Mr. Bailey admitted to
numerous crimes, did Mr. Bailey or did Mr. Feaga indicate to
you that at one point Mr. Bailey had changed his story
regarding the transaction?
Mr. Jones. Not at that time. Not at that time, Congressman.
At that time, that was the significant gap because what Mr.
Bailey was telling them could not match up to the objective
facts about when the check was cut, when it was delivered to
Montgomery.
Mr. Davis. And did Mr. Feaga acknowledge that there was
this gap based on Mr. Bailey's testimony?
Mr. Jones. Oh, yes, sir. Absolutely. And it was not until
later when I brought that back up--and this would have been in
2005--where he said, ``Well, Mr. Bailey has now essentially
rethought his testimony, and that is not''----
Mr. Davis. All right. But as of July of 2004, did Mr. Feaga
suggest to you that there were major factual gaps in Nick
Bailey's testimony?
Mr. Jones. Yes, sir. That is why he wanted us to toll the
statute of limitations so they could try to fill those gaps.
Mr. Davis. All right. What was your state of mind in July,
early summer of 2004, regarding the likelihood of the U.S.
attorney's office bringing a case against Don Siegelman?
Mr. Jones. All three of us--all three of the defense
lawyers--felt like that case was coming to a close within the
next----
Mr. Davis. And was that based on statements or your reading
from statements that the prosecutors--Mr. Franklin, Mr. Feaga--
made to you?
Mr. Jones. It was based on those statements. It was based
on my 20-something years of experience, and it was based on our
own investigation.
Mr. Davis. Did there come a point at the end of 2004 when
Mr. Feaga indicated to you that he had been in communications
with the Department of Justice regarding this case?
Mr. Jones. That is correct. In late November of 2004, early
December, Mr. Feaga apologized for not giving us the answer he
had promised earlier, but indicated there had been a meeting in
Washington and that the lawyers in Washington had asked him to
go back and look at the case, review the case top to bottom.
Mr. Davis. Did Mr. Feaga suggest to you when the
communications with the lawyers in Washington had happened
regarding the Siegelman case?
Mr. Jones. He did not. He just said, ``We had a meeting in
Washington.''
Mr. Davis. But your interaction with Mr. Feaga was in
November 2004. Is that correct?
Mr. Jones. Correct.
Mr. Davis. Inferring to you that the conversations happened
at some point prior to November 2004?
Mr. Jones. That is correct.
Mr. Davis. We have had the Ranking Member introduce into
the record the full transcript, the sworn transcript, of Jill
Simpson's testimony of September 14. Let me refer to it.
On pages 50, 51 and 52, Ms. Simpson testifies that in early
2005, she had an exchange with an individual, Rob Riley, and
that Mr. Riley made the representation to her that he had been
told that Karl Rove, the President's former political adviser,
had been in communication with the Office of Public Integrity
and that he, Mr. Rove, had prodded the Office of Public
Integrity to bring a case against Mr. Siegelman.
Certainly, all of us figured on time to review in detail
what she said, but that is contained on pages 50, 51 and 52. In
other words, Ms. Simpson's suggests that the timeframe of
Rove's intervention happened in late 2004, Mr. Rove's
intervention at the Department of Justice.
Mr. Jones, did Mr. Feaga indicated to you that he had been
in communication with the Department of Justice at some point
in late 2004 during the exact timeframe as Simpson alludes to?
Mr. Jones. Congressman, he not only indicated to me, but
there were lawyers representing witnesses later on that he also
made the same representations to. Yes.
Mr. Davis. Mr. Chairman, my time has expired. I will have
my 5 minutes come around to me eventually, but I thank my
colleagues for yielding their time to me.
Mr. Scott. Thank you. I think we used your 5 minutes. You
had 4 from Delahunt, 1 from the gentleman from Georgia and your
5. So I think you may be getting someone else's.
Ms. Lofgren. Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to yield a
minute of my time to the gentleman.
Mr. Scott. Okay. Let's go at this time to the gentleman
from Ohio, Mr. Jordan?
Mr. Jordan. I thank the Chairman. I would like to yield a
couple minutes to the Ranking Member on the Commercial
Committee.
Mr. Cannon. Thank you. I appreciate the yielding.
And I am intrigued by the gentleman from Alabama, Mr.
Davis, who, as I understand, was a prosecutor and who is now
interrogating a friendly witness based upon conversations with
the opposition, and I think the record should sort of reflect
the fact that the testimony thus far is sort of one-sided.
I would like to suggest a couple of things here. In the
first case, Mr. Feaga is a well-known prosecutor who, in fact,
did prosecute Democratic Governor Siegelman, but he also
prosecuted former Republican Governor Guy Hunt. This is a guy
who I think is well-respected in the field. You may have some
personal views about him. I do not know, Mr. Davis. But he is
not a Republican hack going after Democrats. I do not think
that would be fair to say.
And I would like to ask unanimous consent to introduce into
the record a letter to The New York Times sent by Mr. Feaga,
and I am just going to read one paragraph, and then I will
yield back.
[The information referred to follows:]
Mr. Davis. If the gentleman would yield, he is actually a
very fine lawyer, and I work with him. He inquired about my
personal opinion, a very fine man, a very fine lawyer. I did
not suggest otherwise.
Mr. Cannon. I appreciate that, especially in the context of
his statement. This is a letter to the editor of The New York
Times, I believe. ``The case of the United States v. Siegelman
was pursued and successfully prosecuted because my co-counsel
and I, a grand jury, a trial jury and a Federal judge, after
hearing the facts, believed that those facts established that
Siegelman unlawfully sold out the best interests of the people
in the State of Alabama. Any assertion to the contrary,
regardless how well or maliciously intended, is just plain
wrong. We are not a court of law. We are not a jury. We are not
looking at Mr. Feaga.''
And I think that he has actually come out of this
particular round of this discussion pretty darn well, and the
friendly witness testimony to the contrary notwithstanding,
this is not about whether Mr. Siegelman should or should not be
in jail. It is about the Department of Justice, and I think
that what we have heard so far is not compelling that we have a
problem with it or the problems we have are not being resolved
by this hearing.
And I would yield back to the gentleman from Ohio, and I
think that the gentleman, Mr. Forbes, would like to have time
yielded to him.
Mr. Jordan. Mr. Chairman, I would like yield the remainder
of my time to Mr. Forbes.
Mr. Forbes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Jones, I just want to come back to you because, you
know, the problem we have with these hearings is we get all
kinds of apples and oranges and everything that is involved,
and I know that you did not get to be in the trial with
Governor Siegelman. That was your testimony.
Mr. Jones. Correct. That is correct.
Mr. Forbes. But Governor Siegelman did go to trial. Isn't
that true?
Mr. Jones. He did.
Mr. Forbes. And he had, I am sure, talented and competent
attorneys who you would worked with before, and you do not lay
any claim that they were not competent or did not do a good job
at the trial, did you?
Mr. Jones. You know they are sitting right behind me, and I
would not dare say that. [Laughter.]
Mr. Forbes. They would beat you. They would hit you with a
chair by then.
Mr. Jones. No. You are right.
Mr. Forbes. And all they were able to ask whatever
questions they want under the appropriate rules of procedure
for the court to the witnesses that were testifying at that
trial, weren't they?
Mr. Jones. I am assuming that is true.
Mr. Forbes. And at the end of all of that trial, not the
short little tidbits that we have here today, but at the end of
the trial, a full Federal trial, a jury found Governor
Siegelman guilty. Is that correct?
Mr. Jones. That is correct.
Mr. Forbes. And I am sure there were motions made after
that to the Federal judge to find something that the jury did
wrong, and the judge said no and he sentenced Governor
Siegelman based on that trial. Is that accurate?
Mr. Jones. That is correct.
Mr. Forbes. And now that is up on appeal, and we trust
judges to look at that. In fact, the Chairman of this Committee
made a statement the other day when he came in to national
security issues. If you trust judges, you do not have any
problem with this act. We trust them for national security
issues, but we do not trust them on these kind of legal
procedures.
And, basically, Mr. Thornburgh raised the question about
the appearance of impropriety, and then we emphasize
allegations. But here is what happens. The cycle repeats itself
over and over again. You make allegations. You bring witnesses
in who make statements sometimes without facts because it is
something they have read in the paper or they have heard or
they have seen. The prosecutors cannot even come in here and
refute it because they feel ethically that would be improper to
do.
Then you make the allegations long enough and loud enough,
people begin believing and taking those allegations as fact,
and then, all of a sudden, you have an appearance of
impropriety which leads to the erosion of public confidence. We
come in here and repeat the cycle over and say, ``Why does it
happen?''
Mr. Shields, I hope I will get a few more minutes with you,
but I only have a couple seconds now.
You do not have a law degree, do you?
Mr. Shields. No.
Mr. Jones. And you do not have a degree in statistics, do
you?
Mr. Shields. I have taken a number of statistics courses.
Mr. Scott. Will the gentleman use the microphone, please?
Mr. Jones. But you have taken some courses, right?
Mr. Shields. I have taken about 18 hours worth, yes.
Mr. Jones. Okay. And in just the couple of seconds I have
left, why did you not limit the data in your study to either
actual indictments or convictions instead of just the ones that
were reported in newspapers?
Mr. Shields. Well, because I am a communication professor,
and I am interested in communications.
Mr. Jones. That is right. You are a communication
professor, and you are not looking at statistics of what
actually happened. You are looking at the communications. But
isn't it true--or maybe you do not know this, not having a law
degree or a statistics degree--but a lot of investigations by
prosecutors are never made public, are they?
Mr. Shields. No, but they are just as damaging when they
are made public, as if they had prosecuted.
Mr. Jones. I am sorry?
Mr. Shields. As if they had indicted----
Mr. Jones. No, no. When you are looking at the
investigations, there are a lot of investigations that take
place that are not reported in newspapers. Isn't that true?
Mr. Shields. Well, I have found----
Mr. Jones. But you do not know that. You are not a lawyer.
Mr. Shields. I am not a lawyer, but I have found a number
of investigations were reported in the newspaper.
Mr. Jones. I see, but you do not know about the ones that
were not reported in the newspapers.
Mr. Shields. No.
Mr. Jones. Okay. Thank you.
Mr. Shields. The DOJ will not give us that information.
Mr. Jones. That is right.
I yield back.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Watt?
Mr. Watt. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Professor Shields, I am struck by one particular section of
your testimony that I want to read into the record and get you
to elaborate on.
Your hypothesis was that party affiliations of the
officials and candidates investigated would match the normative
data. I am reading from page 4 of your testimony. However, the
sample includes 631, 76.95 percent, investigations of Democrats
and 142, 17.32 percent, investigations of Republicans, and 47,
5.73 percent, investigations of Independents or other
officeholders or candidates.
And then you say this, which I want to make sure that
nobody misses, ``The disparity in the proportions of the actual
sample between investigations and-or indictments of Democrats
in relation to Republicans is again statistically significant
beyond the .0001 level and could have occurred by chance less
than one in 1,000 samples.
Mr. Shields. Yes, that is 10,000.
Mr. Watt. One in 10,000 samples. Does that mean, Professor,
that all else, everything else being equal, the chances of no
political partisanship being taken into consideration in this
grouping of prosecutions, charges, investigations, is less than
one in 10,000?
Mr. Shields. It is pretty significant data, yes. That is
the point. Less than one in 10,000 chances of this data being
in error when you do the chi-square statistic.
Mr. Watt. Okay. And so if you just did a regular
statistical analysis, the chances that something other than
sheer chance was taken into account?
Mr. Shields. That is correct. That is correct.
Mr. Watt. It is less than one in 10,000.
Mr. Shields. Yes.
Mr. Watt. Okay. That is what I wanted to be clear on.
With that, I will yield the balance of my time to the
gentleman from Alabama.
Mr. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Watt.
Mr. Jones, let me return to you, and let us pick up the
timeframe that we previously talked about after Mr. Feaga
represented to you that the Department of Justice wanted a
review of this case. As you move into the 2005 calendar year,
did there seem to be a change in the tenor and the tone of the
investigation that you noted?
Mr. Jones. A hundred and eighty degrees opposite.
Mr. Davis. Would you tell us about it?
Mr. Jones. Every month with the grand jury, we saw new
witnesses coming forward. Everything was back off the table.
The Federal role was, I think, greater. It was very public, and
it was very intense. It was not a review literally as a review.
It was as if the case started all over again.
Mr. Davis. Did it appear that the U.S. attorney's office
had ceded a significant amount of the day-in, day-out
responsibility in this case to the Department of Justice?
Mr. Jones. Well, the FBI were doing the day to day, and Mr.
Feaga was conducting most of that grand jury, as I understand
it.
Mr. Davis. Does the name Noel Hillman register to you?
Mr. Jones. Yes. He was head of the public integrity section
at the time.
Mr. Davis. Did Mr. Hillman at some point move from public
integrity to become a United States district judge?
Mr. Jones. He did.
Mr. Davis. And was it shortly after the period of time in
which he would have been the Office of Public Integrity to go
from Public Integrity to the U.S. district judgeship?
Mr. Jones. That is correct. That is correct.
Mr. Davis. Let me refer to the opening statement that you
have submitted to the Committee today. I want you to elaborate
on this sentence. You talk about how the tenor and tone of the
investigation changed, and there appeared to be a systematic
effort to gather any negative evidence on Mr. Siegelman.
This is what you say, ``Targeting individuals rather than
crimes taints that entire process,'' referring to the system of
justice, ``and gives investigators and prosecutors an ends-
justify-the-means license to abuse the public's trust.''
Mr. Jones, would you elaborate on what you mean by that
sentence?
Mr. Jones. Certainly, that is exactly what appeared to have
happened here. There were allegations that had surfaced that
had been written off, but then, all of a sudden, there was this
much wider net that we were seeing that included every
financial contributor, every investment that Don Siegelman had
made, every check that his wife had written. This was--my
public statements reflect it--an investigation about an
individual, and that is just something that we cannot tolerate
in this country, to investigate individuals. It does give
prosecutors--and investigators as well--licenses to change, to
twist, to cajole testimony.
Mr. Davis. Mr. Thornburgh, would you comment on that?
Mr. Thornburgh. I think that the responsibility of
prosecutors at every level of government is simply to follow
the evidence wherever it leads, and oftentimes it leads to
people in high public office, and they should not hesitate to
prosecute those persons. But it is all evidence based and not
based on any targeting process.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentlelady from Ohio, do you have a motion?
Ms. Sutton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I ask unanimous consent to yield my 5 minutes to the
gentleman, Mr. Davis.
Mr. Forbes. Mr. Chairman, I have no problem with her
yielding her 5 minutes when it is time for her to go, if that
is okay.
Mr. Scott. Without objection, her time is yielded to the
gentleman from Alabama and will be used when her time would
have come up.
Ms. Sutton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Gohmert?
Mr. Gohmert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And I appreciate the witnesses being here.
As a former judge, former prosecutor, former chief justice,
I am always curious as to how people arrive at conclusions, and
so I am curious about a number of things.
First of all, I really do not know the answer. Do you know
how many Democratic Party members are elected officeholders in
the United States? Any one of you?
Mr. Shields. The total number of elected officials in the
United States is estimated at slightly over 500,000, and so it
would be about 50 percent of that.
Mr. Gohmert. And where does that information come from?
Mr. Shields. The total number of elected officers, I think,
comes from the Department of Commerce, and the 50 percent
information comes from the Eagleton Institute of Rutgers
University.
Mr. Gohmert. The Eagleton Institute?
Mr. Shields. Yes.
Mr. Gohmert. Okay. And do you know how recent that 50
percent figure was obtained and how it was obtained?
Mr. Shields. Yes. I obtained it when I started the study,
and it is as recent as 2002.
Mr. Gohmert. Okay. All right. So it does not take into
account, well, I guess the last 5 years then. And that is
interesting that it is 50-50, and it is----
Mr. Shields. No, it is 50, 41 and 9.
Mr. Gohmert. Oh, 50----
Mr. Shields. Forty-one Republican and 9 Independent-Other.
Mr. Gohmert. Oh, okay. So there are many more Democratic
Party member officeholders than there are Republicans.
Mr. Shields. Well, there is 9 percent more.
Mr. Gohmert. Okay. All right. Okay. And by your study, have
you ruled out the possibility completely that perhaps there are
more Democratic Party member officeholders who have violated
the law than there are Republicans who have violated it?
Mr. Shields. Well----
Mr. Gohmert. Do you just take that as a given or----
Mr. Shields. No, Mr. Gohmert. That is a legitimate
question, and that is why I had the control group with
nonfederal law enforcement from the state and county, the city
prosecutorial level as reported in the study. There were 251
individuals in that, and there the investigations reflected 50
percent Democrat, 41 percent Republican and 9 percent
Independent/Other, which, across the Nation, meant that it
exactly matched the percentages of elected officeholders. So--
--
Mr. Gohmert. Okay. So----
Mr. Shields [continuing]. That there was no political bias
at the state and local level, and the question then became: Why
is there at the Federal level?
Mr. Gohmert. Okay. So you would take a city or take 251.
How did you arrive at those 251?
Mr. Shields. Selected them from newspaper accounts and
television accounts using Google searches.
Mr. Gohmert. Right. But you are saying that was your
control group. I find it interesting, though, when you try to
extrapolate numbers across the country because we know from
some of our Committee hearings, for example, there are six
murders per 100,000 people in New York, there were 50 murders
per 100,000 in New Orleans before Katrina. I think our last
hearing said there were 90 murders. So there are different
rates of crime around the county depending on what is being
prosecuted and which crimes are actually being looked at.
But I am so intrigued. When I was looking at your study and
some of the results because this is my third year here in
Congress, and the whole time here, I have heard now Speaker
Pelosi and other leaders in the Congress talk about repeatedly
Republican culture of corruption, Republican culture of
corruption, Republican culture of corruption, and I had no idea
there were more Democrats corrupt than there were Republicans,
according to the prosecutions that were going on. So that was
quite enlightening.
Mr. Shields. I suspect that is because she was talking
about her colleagues in the House and the colleagues in the
Senate.
Mr. Gohmert. Well, that is an interesting issue, too,
because if you read the 80-page affidavit getting a search
warrant to go into William Jefferson's office, and if you took
the things in there that were sworn to be true as true, then I
do not know why he was not prosecuted prior to the 2006
election. It looks like it was a lay-down case if they could
prove the things they swore were true in that affidavit.
Yet the prosecution, as I understand it, demanded that a
month before the election, he enter the plea if there were
going to be any agreement. Otherwise, the agreement was off,
which sure looks like politics, kind of like when Caspar
Weinberger was indicted in June before the election in 1992
which had an effect on the election, just like Bob Ney's
situation did, too. So I see why it was----
Mr. Shields. Mr. Gohmert----
Mr. Gohmert [continuing]. Enlightening to know that there
are more Democrats in trouble than there are Republicans, and I
am pleased to know that I will be able to use your study
helpfully----
Mr. Shields. There are 17 percent in the sample. I would
say that sometimes----
Mr. Gohmert. Oh, so you are saying that that is----
Mr. Shields. No, it is not.
Mr. Gohmert [continuing]. Not a big deal?
Mr. Shields. The issue you raise of timing of when the
investigations occur is very important no matter whether it is
a Republican or whether it is a Democrat.
Mr. Gohmert. Sure it is.
Mr. Shields. I am not here to defend one or the other. I do
not like either one of them when they occur, and there is no
doubt, I think, that this Justice Department also investigated
some liberal Republicans that did not quite pass their litmus
test, and I think that is probably reflected in the data, too.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Gohmert. I would yield back, but I do not have anything
to yield.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman from Georgia, Mr. Johnson, for 4
minutes?
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Perhaps the most significant statement about the dangers of
political interference with prosecutorial judgments was made by
then Attorney General and later Supreme Court Justice Robert H.
Jackson who stated that, ``With the law books filled with a
great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance
of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the
part of almost anyone.
``In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the
commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has
committed it. It is a question of picking the man and then
searching the law books or putting the investigators to work to
pin some offense on him.
``It is in this realm in which the prosecutor picks someone
whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass or selects some group
or unpopular person and then looks for an offense that the
greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.''
And having said that, I would like to point out that along
with concerns about Governor Siegelman and George Wilson being
investigated because of pressure from the White House and from
Karl Rove, there are concerns about the prosecution of Georgia
State Senator Charles Walker.
Senator Walker has a case that is on appeal. His lawyers,
Dershowitz, Eiger & Adelson, in an October 22, 2007, letter,
which appears in our packet, have asked the Committee to take a
look at this case, and I just want to talk about the case.
Senator Walker was one of the Georgia's most prominent
Black politicians, a former state senator who had served in a
legislature for 20 years. He made history in 1996 by being
elected as senate majority leader in Georgia, making him the
first African-American to become a senate leader in the
country. His efforts in changing the state flag and beating the
current governor for the position of senate majority leader has
led many to believe that those events led to his downfall.
During the current governor's campaign for governor--and he
switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party--the
current governor vowed to create an inspector general's office
to investigate corruption and cronyism. To drive the point
home, he not only traveled to Senator Walker's hometown of
Augusta to introduce this initiative, he held a press
conference in front of one of Senator Walker's businesses.
Concurrently, the Georgia Republican leadership openly
pressed the U.S. attorney to go after prominent Democrats, a
fact that was confirmed through a subsequent investigation by
the Justice Department. The current governor won the election.
Walker was defeated in his bid for re-election, and it was
later revealed that the U.S. attorney, Richard Thompson, was
carrying out a political agenda with respect to some of his
investigations on Walker and others. The Office of Professional
Responsibility investigation within the Department of Justice
found that Thompson was guilty of a number of politically
motivated ethical lapses, including his duty to refrain from
making public comments on ongoing investigations, his duty to
refrain from participating in a matter that directly affected
the interest of a personal friend, that is, the governor, and
political ally and, three, his duty to refrain from taking
action that would interfere with or affect an election.
The investigation concluded that U.S. Attorney Thompson
abused his authority and violated the public trust for the
purposes of benefiting a personal and political ally. Thompson
later resigned his office as U.S. attorney in disgrace.
The investigation of the former officials were dropped, but
the investigation of Senator Walker continued. Thompson's
successor, Lisa Godby Wood, continued the investigation which
resulted in an indictment filed against Walker on 142 counts of
mail fraud, tax fraud and conspiracy, including numerous counts
related to his service as a member of the Georgia Assembly.
Several questions with respect to Senator Walker's trial
had been raised from the integrity of the judge presiding to
the selection of the jury. The judge, U.S. District Court Judge
Dudley Bowen, whose nomination Senator Walker had opposed due
to allegations that the judge was a member of private clubs
which excluded Blacks, had close ties to the Augusta newspaper
which was the principal competitor of Senator Walker's
newspaper business, and the jury pool was expanded from the
largely minority district of Augusta, Georgia, to the outlying
areas outlining the city which is predominantly White which
resulted in an expanded jury pool.
This issue has ignited a lot of attention. Senator Walker's
case is on appeal.
And I will yield back the remainder of my time.
Thank you.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentleman from California, Mr. Lungren, who is a former
attorney general?
Mr. Lungren. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And I thank the witnesses for appearing.
The quote from Justice Jackson was, in fact, an important
quote for all of us to consider, particularly the part where he
says, ``It is in this realm where the prosecutor picks some
person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass or selects some
group or unpopular person and then looks for an offense that
the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.
``It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the
real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant
or governing group being attached to the wrong political views
or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the
prosecutor himself.''
And I do think that is an admonition against prosecutors. I
would also think it is an admonition against Members of
Congress in the way we conduct ourselves from time to time,
that it is a tremendous temptation to try and find some
particular item that we can to discredit someone.
Having said that, Mr. Attorney General Thornburgh, I just
want to say that I have great respect for you. I can recall
when you were Attorney General and you had a meeting with
Members of my side of the aisle, including a number of Members
of this panel, some 20 years ago at which time a Member of this
Committee was under investigation by your department--and I
think you came about that close to reading him his Miranda
rights during the meeting we had--and the only reason I mention
that is I understand the difficulty when we have law
enforcement with a discretion that is given to them through the
Constitution and the proper appointment by the President, in
your instance, and the political interplay that takes place
with respect to public policy issues.
I take very seriously claims of selective prosecution, but
I also recall being, as attorney general of California, accused
of selective prosecution whether you brought a case or you did
not bring a case whenever there was some political element
involved, and I understand how serious and difficult it is for
you to make such claims in this case, although there are a
series of questions that were asked you, and I wish I could get
into them, but I do not have enough time.
I would like to direct some questions to Mr. Jones.
On the record, I will just say Don Siegelman's a friend of
mine. He served as Attorney General when I was attorney
general. I got to know him and his wife and his family, and
while I would oppose selective prosecution of any individual, I
would particularly take offense on someone I know and someone I
served with and, during the time I served with him, found to be
a credible and responsible person.
So the allegations that are alleged here are very serious,
in my estimation, and so I just want to get a feel from you
about the prosecutor in the case, the person who actually
prosecuted the case and the acting U.S. attorney.
When I received a call from Governor Siegelman's wife on
this, I started to make a little bit of an inquiry myself, and
one of the things I received in response to my inquiry was the
statement from Louis Franklin on this matter in which he said,
``I can, however, state with absolutely certainty that the
entire story is misleading because Karl Rove had no role
whatsoever in bringing about the investigation or prosecution
of former Governor Don Siegelman. It is intellectually
dishonest to even suggest that Mr. Rove influenced or had any
input into the decision to investigate or prosecute Don
Siegelman. That decision was made by me, Louis F. Franklin,
Sr., as the acting U.S. attorney in the case in conjunction
with the Department of Justice's public integrity section and
the Alabama attorney general's office.''
Now that is a pretty strong statement on his part. I was
thinking of cases I had in which it turned out when we
prosecuted someone, it was someone of a high profile of the
other party, who there was a contention might be a rival of
mine in a future race, and, frankly, all I could say in
response was, ``I did not do it for that purpose. I took into
account prosecutors.''
I remember having a number of meetings with my career
prosecutors about the quantum of evidence that was there,
making them go over and over with me that quantum of evidence
to convince me that this was a solid case, and so I guess I am
trying to ask what is it that would have you convince me that
this statement is erroneous and that Mr. Franklin and the
prosecutor in the specific case brought a case in which they
did not believe, did it only for political purposes?
And the reason I ask that is this--and, again, I come out
of the construct of my own experience--in California, the
attorney general has supervisory responsibility for all D.A.'s
offices. When I was attorney general, I could take over any
D.A.'s office. I could not intervene to stop a prosecution,
however. I could only intervene to take over a prosecution or
start one that the D.A. had refused to do, and the thinking was
that if a prosecution that should have been brought was not
brought, there is no recourse for the public.
But if there is a prosecution that is questionable and
ought not to be brought, the prosecutions are with, in the
first case, the grand jury, the judge, the appellate court and
finally the Supreme Court, and that was sort of the framework
of California law, and I thought it was a fairly reasonable
approach to look at things. So, when I hear a serious
allegation from someone I consider to be a friend that there
has been selective prosecution, and I look at the case, I would
just ask you to help me on that, please.
Mr. Jones. It is a very fair question. Let me make sure you
understand. I have never ever said that Louis Franklin or Steve
Feaga were politically motivated. In fact, I do believe that by
the time this indictment was rendered, they were invested in
the case and they believed it. I publically said that before.
I do not believe, however, though, that Mr. Franklin can
make any statement anymore than I can about whether or not Karl
Rove or anyone else at the White House discussed with the
public integrity section whether or not to go forward against
Don Siegelman.
All I know is that Mr. Feaga and Mr. Franklin did not think
a lot of this case, based on my experience and what they said,
in the summer of 2004. We were told by Mr. Feaga that he was
asked to go back by the public integrity section and, in fact,
that that is what happened.
So, unlike maybe looking at U.S. attorneys, I have never
thought necessarily that Mr. Feaga or Mr. Franklin were
motivated by any political motive there.
Mr. Lungren. That goes to the question. When I was dealing
with some very difficult cases, I told my prosecutors and
investigators to go back and look at it, in one case when there
did not appear to be sufficient evidence, but we had
accusations and in another case where I did not think they had
sufficient evidence, and that is the normal course of a
supervisor, and that is why I am trying to find what is
different here, if you could tell me so I could figure out what
is different.
Mr. Jones. Congressman, my reaction was in part the same at
the time. But when you look at the entire timeline and you look
at the fact that the indictment against Governor Siegelman had
been dismissed, and then when you look at what actually
happened in 2005, which was not just simply a review.
Remember this case had been going on for 2, 2\1/2\ years,
and the allegations were there. This was more than a review.
This was going back and starting to look at areas that had
never been looked at before and that, in fact, so many
businessmen and others that were subpoenaed had to spend time
and money with allegations or at least looking at areas that
never came to fruition. It was a whole new investigation, and
that is all I can say.
But I do appreciate your comments because, at the time, my
reaction was one of the same. It would not be unusual. I was
concerned because of the dismissal, though, previously that
they all of a sudden come back.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentleman from Massachusetts is recognized for his one
remaining minute?
Mr. Delahunt. I think it is important that we understand
that this is an important hearing because it does focus on the
integrity of the decision-making process of the prosecutor.
I would like to put aside partisan considerations,
irrelevant of whether it is a Democrat or a Republican, but I
think we have to know and have confidence if we are to reassure
the American people that the mechanisms, the checks and
balances that ensure the integrity of that decision-making
process are working, that they are effective.
The Ranking Member mentioned the Nifong matter. The state
took action there. He said we ought to be looking at the Duke
Lacrosse case. Well, they did. They did that.
I think the issue is: Is OPR properly functioning? I do not
know the answer to that question.
I also want to comment on Attorney General Thornburgh's
observation about the criminalization of ordinances and county
codes, et cetera. Do we really want to do this? Is this what we
intended when we passed these substantive laws? This is
something that this Committee, Republican and Democrat, has to
take a hard look at.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
The gentlelady from California is recognized for 5 minutes?
Ms. Waters. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Mr. Scott. Wait, wait. Excuse me. Ms. Lofgren. I am sorry.
Ms. Lofgren. Mr. Chairman, thank you for recognizing me.
First, I have a letter that has been delivered to us by
Timothy Hawks, the lawyer for Ms. Thompson who was convicted
and whose conviction was overturned and, in response, I would
ask unanimous consent to put that in the record.
Mr. Scott. Without objection, so ordered.
[The information referred to follows:]
Ms. Lofgren. And I just want to raise that issue because
when we started out on this inquiry, I will confess, I thought
we were going to find some ineptness and some bungling. I never
really believed that we would uncover something that looked
very seriously wrong and people who, because they were going to
risk their job, brought prosecutions that should not have been
brought.
And then, of course, that brings us to the question: What
about the people who did not lose their jobs? What did they do?
And the case of Ms. Thompson is a pretty stark one. I mean,
as this letter indicates, the Republican Party sent millions of
dollars advertising Ms. Thompson as a symbol of corruption of
the incumbent Democratic regime, but when her case was heard on
appeal, the appellate court, the Seventh Circuit, described the
government's evidence as, ``beyond thin,'' and described the
legal theories of the prosecution as ``preposterous,'' and the
very day of oral arguments ordered that she be released from
custody.
So my question, Mr. Attorney General and Mr. Jones, are you
familiar with another case where the appellate court on the day
of the oral arguments orders the appellant released with this
kind of description of the prosecution?
Mr. Thornburgh. Pretty unusual, I must say.
Mr. Jones. I think it would be extremely unusual.
Ms. Lofgren. Well, it just seems to me it looks not right,
and I would hope--first, let me say, Mr. Attorney General, that
politically we are not aligned, but I do respect your integrity
and you are what we always thought of on my side of the aisle
as an honest conservative and that you would stay here today
and speak as you have in an effort to really, I think, save the
country from a souring and a corruption of the prosecution
process is really in keeping with your reputation as an honest
conservative, and I appreciate it. It cannot be easy to do. I
appreciate that you have done this.
And I hope that all of us in the Congress will get a grip.
It is time to stop defending the indefensible and time to clean
up something that appears to have seriously damaged the
integrity of the judicial system, which is core to our free
society.
And with that, Mr. Chairman, I would like to yield the
balance of my time to the gentleman from Alabama, Mr. Artur
Davis.
Mr. Davis. Thank you, Ms. Lofgren.
Let me turn to another aspect of this case that has raised
questions and ask unanimous consent to introduce a Time
magazine article, October 4 of this year, called Selective
Justice in Alabama.
Lanny Young, Mr. Jones, you will recall, in addition to
Nick Bailey, was the government's other principal witness
against Don Siegelman. Mr. Young indicated that he had bribed
Siegelman and a number of Siegelman staffers for a number of
years.
According to the Time magazine article, which relies on FBI
302s, documents turned over to defense lawyers, in May of 2002,
Mr. Young met with the U.S. attorney's office, met with
individuals from the Attorney General's office and made a
series of allegations against Republican officeholders, one of
them, one of the senators from my state, another one, the
former Attorney General who is now a Federal judge.
He indicated that he had laundered campaign contributions
for them illegally. He indicated that he had made contributions
in violation of Federal campaign finance laws. Quote from the
story, ``Several people involved in the Siegelman case who
spoke to Time say prosecutors were so focused on going after
Siegelman that they showed almost no interest in tracking down
what Young said about apparently illegal contributions to
Sessions, Pryor, other well-known figures in the Alabama GOP,
and even a few of the safe Democrats.''
In other words, no matter what Lanny Young said, the only
thing that the government wanted to hear about was that which
related to Don Siegelman. Quote from the story, ``It just did
not seem like that was ever going to happen,'' that being an
investigation of the others, ``said an individual present
during key parts of the investigation. Sessions and Pryor were
on the home team.''
One of two things happens here, it seems to me. Either the
government did not even look into the allegations against these
other individuals, which raises an obvious question of
selectiveness, or more likely this, they concluded very quickly
that Lanny Young was a liar who could not be trusted, and that
what he said about our senator and our Attorney General had no
corroboration, no proof.
I will direct this question to Mr. Thornburgh and Mr. Jones
as a former Attorney General and a former U.S. attorney. Does
the government not have ethical obligations to not put someone
on the stand who appears to be a noncredible witness?
And, Mr. Thornburgh, would you be troubled if the
government brought a case based on someone who had made
allegations that appeared to conclusively be disproved?
Mr. Scott. Can I ask the witnesses to respond briefly? The
gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Thornburgh. Yes.
Mr. Jones. Yes.
Mr. Scott. The gentleman from Tennessee?
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am concerned about these cases that have been raised,
pretty much so, but I would like to turn our discussion to a
case in Mississippi that Chairman Scott mentioned in his
opening statement, a case that raises serious questions of
selective prosecutions.
The Committee has received letters from Mississippi Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Diaz, as well as Mississippi trial lawyer
Paul Minor and Mississippi attorney and former judge John
Whitfield, detailing the facts of their prosecutions in
Mississippi. They all believe these have been politically
motivated. And it is mentioned in Justice Diaz's letter that
John Grisham, a distinguished author, former member of the
Mississippi House of Representatives, has written a lot about
Mississippi in fiction. It looks like something that is even
more scary. It looks like a tale of intrigue, of political
incest in the highest orders and places of the Mississippi
Justice Department, and attempts to get even with folks on the
other side of the aisle.
I would like first to ask unanimous consent that the three
letters that we have received from the justice, the attorney
and the former judge be included in the record.
Mr. Scott. Without objection.
[The information referred to follows:]
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, sir.
In what Justice Diaz, who is the sitting member of the
Mississippi Supreme Court, describes, ``as a scheme hatched by
politically corrupt employees of the United States Department
of Justice and elsewhere,'' in 2003, the United States attorney
for the Southern District of Mississippi, Mr. Lampton,
prosecuted Justice Diaz, Mr. Minor, Mr. Whitfield, another
judge and Justice Diaz's ex-wife based on allegations that Mr.
Minor attempted to gain an unfair advantage from the judges by
guaranteeing loans in the 2000 campaign when Justice Diaz was
running for judge, a man who was a Republican but had
Democratic friends over the years, against a man named Starrett
who was a good 100 percent silk stocking Republican with all
the things that Republicans do to be in good graces, a loyal
Bushie, so to speak.
In that particular election in 2000, Mr. Minor made
guaranteed loans to the candidate running for justice, Mr.
Diaz, at approximately $65,000. That was legal in Mississippi.
It is perfectly legal under Mississippi law. Another gentleman,
Mr. Richard Dickie Scruggs, made loans of $80,000 to Justice
Diaz, the same election. There are differences. And you start
to see the branching of justice and the definite questions
which this Committee, Mr. Chairman, needs to look into.
After that 2000 election, you have the same set of facts.
Two legal guaranteed loans made to this Supreme Court justice
candidate, one by Mr. Diaz and one by Mr. Minor. Yet in 2003,
Justice Diaz, Mr. Minor, Mr. Whitfield, then a judge, another
judge and Mr. Diaz's wife are all indicted. They are indicted
in July of 2003, even though Justice Diaz had recused himself
from every case he had ever had dealing with Mr. Minor, never
voted on a thing, but he is indicted.
He is indicted because he guaranteed these loans to this
man running for the Supreme Court. Mr. Scruggs guaranteed a
loan at a higher amount of money, repaid those loans himself
rather than raising money as Mr. Minor did. Accordingly, Mr.
Scruggs is more ingratiated, so to speak, with the justice than
Mr. Minor would have been, but Mr. Scruggs is not indicted.
Well, what is the difference in the two situations
according to these letters? Well, if you look at them, Mr.
Minor was one of the largest donors to the Democrats in that
state, one of the 10 top donors to John Edwards' Presidential
campaign and was known for his support as a trial lawyer in
working for the people's interest and against the tobacco
interests.
On the other hand, Mr. Scruggs, also a trial lawyer, also a
trial lawyer, had after that election given half a million
dollars to Republican causes, a quarter of a million dollars to
the Bush-Cheney campaign, and, coincidentally or not, is the
brother-in-law of Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi. Well, Mr.
Scruggs not indicted and apparently not even investigated.
It is this suggestion of politically motivated selective
prosecution that raises the question of whether the prosecution
of Justice Diaz and Mr. Minor fits in the larger potential
pattern of selective prosecution that we are discussing today.
Justice Diaz was not only indicted, but once the jury found
him not guilty, acquitted him of charges. Three days later, he
is re-indicted. And when you read through these letters and you
see a pattern of relationships and conflicts of interest that
are not taken into consideration by the court on the part of
Mr. Lampton who twice ran for Congress as a Republican, was
constantly the opposition of Mr. Minor--he was his foil, his
antithesis--and Mr. Minor had sued a Fortune 500 company which
Mr. Lampton's family is involved in--Mr. Lampton does not
recuse himself. He brings a prosecution looking apparently at
the man first and the facts later and prosecutes and conflict
of interest did not discuss.
What I would like to ask in this situation is----
Mr. Forbes. Mr. Chairman, the time has long expired.
Mr. Cohen. I would just like to ask the Chairman if he
could look into and include in this particular hearing
discussions of whether selective prosecution, politically
motivated, happened in Mississippi with these Democratic
officeholders and include the Mississippi case in the document
requests that are made and ask the Committee to make this case
a full part of its inquiry. If you look at it, it does an
injustice to the State of Mississippi, to Lady Justice and to
what we know as fair play in America.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Scott. Thank you. The gentleman's time has expired.
We have a Committee hearing in this room at 1. That will
begin at the conclusion of this hearing.
Next is the gentlelady from California, Ms. Waters?
Ms. Waters. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to first just congratulate you for this
hearing. This is extremely important, and I would think that
all the Members of this Committee from both sides of the aisle
would be supportive of this hearing and work that should be
done to ensure that the citizens of this country can depend on
the criminal justice system and the Justice Department to be
impartial, to be fair and not single out or political profile
elected officials and basically politicize the process. So I am
very thankful to you.
I would just like to turn to Mr. Shields.
Professor Shields, earlier, you were asked whether or not
you were an attorney, and you were also asked if you had a
degree in statistics. I would like to debunk the notion that
being an attorney would somehow make you a better researcher or
would make you a better professor----
Mr. Shields. Thank you.
Ms. Waters [continuing]. Or would somehow give you more
credibility than the professor emeritus that you are, the
Department of Communications, University of Missouri, St.
Louis, and lecturer, Department of Communications Studies at
the University of Missouri, Kansas City. You are, indeed,
professor emeritus, Department of Communication, University of
Missouri, St. Louis. Is that true?
Mr. Shields. That is true.
Ms. Waters. And you are published?
Mr. Shields. Yes.
Ms. Waters. Have you ever been accused of having sloppy
research or having published something that proved to be untrue
or statistically incorrect?
Mr. Shields. Not to my knowledge.
Ms. Waters. Is it true that when you started out the work
that led you to where you have come in looking at the political
profiling that that is not where you started out. You were
looking for something else. Is that correct?
Mr. Shields. That is correct.
Ms. Waters. Would you tell the Committee what it was you
were researching when you stumbled upon this political
profiling?
Mr. Shields. Yes. As I said in my opening statement, I was
studying rhetorical visions and had noted that with the end of
Communism, why there was not a dominant conservative theme,
piece of rhetoric around, and then John Ashcroft, who happens
to be from my state, Missouri, and was once our attorney
general, was once our governor, was once our United States
senator before becoming Attorney General for the Nation, began
a public corruption initiative, and so I was studying to see if
people were caught up in this new vision, and he was running
around not only the country giving speeches on public
corruption, but he was running around the world giving speeches
on public corruption.
Ms. Waters. And----
Mr. Shields. So I was studying this.
Ms. Waters. As you describe this, this was a kind of new
approach to preemptive strike on corruption----
Mr. Shields. Yes, that is correct.
Ms. Waters [continuing]. That Mr. Ashcroft was talking
about?
Mr. Shields. It was a move away from investigating and
prosecuting actual crimes to kind of ferreting them out before
they happened.
Ms. Waters. And in your research, you had discovered that
there had been 375 investigations and-or indictments of
candidates and elected officials brought by U.S. attorneys
since 2001.
Mr. Shields. Yes.
Ms. Waters. Would you reiterate again for us and would you
give us the percentages of indictments relative to Democrats
and Republicans?
Mr. Shields. Yes. As I also said in my opening remarks, the
written statement that I provided for the public record for
here now has 820 investigations, not just 375. So I will just
give you the new numbers. And the new numbers are 5.6 to 1
Democrats investigated versus each Republican. So, for every
Republican in this room, if you were investigated, there would
be 5.6 Democrats that were investigated along with you by this
Justice Department.
Ms. Waters. You did much of your research from news
reports, and you mentioned that you were Googling and----
Mr. Shields. Yes.
Ms. Waters [continuing]. Going on the Internet. Did you
find it odd that so much was being written about what appeared
to be the political profiling of elected officials?
Mr. Shields. Well, what is interesting is by looking at
investigations at the local level, what I was really looking at
was little newspaper stories from all over the country about
little local candidates and those stories did not get
publicized in other newspapers. So, if you were not reading the
Birmingham News, you did not know what was happening in some
community around it in Alabama, but by doing the Google search,
you could find those articles and you would know. So it was the
collective unity of all of those small newspapers across the
country that enabled me to come up with 120 cases through
September 16, which is when Attorney General Gonzales stepped
down.
Ms. Waters. Aside from questions that have basically, I
think, attempted to discredit you and your work, do you find it
odd that the Justice Department has refused to give information
to this Committee or to you or anybody else who would request
it that would further help to illuminate exactly what has been
going on and if, in fact, they have not been profiling, they
could clear up the questions that are being raised or, if they
are, we would have more information by which to do our
oversight and do the corrections? Do you find that odd?
Mr. Shields. Yes, I do find that odd. There is no doubt
that the Justice Department has this data and, if they would
release it, we would know the answers to just how accurate my
study is tomorrow morning.
I can tell you that in New Jersey, the U.S. attorney for
New Jersey is very proud of the fact that he goes after elected
officials, and he announces periodically an update on the
number of actual elected officials that he has investigated and
prosecuted, and his last statement was on September the 24th,
and he said he had 124. Well, I have 116 of those in my
database, and so it would seem to me that I am within about 10
percent of having a census of the investigations that are out
there.
Ms. Waters. Thank you.
Mr. Scott. The gentlelady's time has expired.
The gentlelady from Ohio is recognized. She has by
unanimous consent yielded her time to the gentleman from
Alabama.
Mr. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me thank all of my colleagues for being so generous in
yielding time for me to bring out as many facts as I could
regarding this case. This is not a jury, but I do feel the
public is owed some conclusions. I am about to give one
Member's conclusions.
Ms. Siegelman and her two children are here today, and I
will tell all three of you very candidly that 6 months ago, if
you had asked me if you could rely that the system that
prosecuted your father and your husband had integrity, 6 months
ago, I would have told you that I believe in the system. I
cannot sit here today and say to you that I have confidence
that the system worked in a fair and just manner in this case.
I will tell you just some of the reasons.
At every turn, we see politics. Government was very eager
to prosecute Don Siegelman in 2002, sat down with a man named
Lanny Young, listened to what he had to say. The only time they
believed him is when he talked about Don Siegelman. That
suggests selectiveness.
We know there has been a lot of dispute around the
credibility of this lady, Jill Simpson. None of us has a truth
detector. I do know this much. She made her statements under
oath in May, it took until this morning for countering
affidavits to make their way to this Committee, and what do all
the countering affidavits say? No phone call on November 18,
2002. Did not happen. Pull the phone records. Jill Simpson
called Rob Riley's office on November 18, 2002. Do not have a
truth serum, but I know on that critical point the countering
affidavits are disproven and she is bolstered.
Look at Doug Jones's testimony. He describes a U.S.
attorney's office that was all set to walk away from this case,
had doubts about its own witnesses, ready to close the books.
All of a sudden, Washington comes in. By the way, Washington
comes in in the very timeframe that Simpson said she was told
they came in, the very timeframe she says she was told that
Rove intervened, and all of a sudden, the Department of Justice
begins to run the show.
What do we know about this Department of Justice? We know
that it purged U.S. attorneys for being insufficiently loyal
Bushies, and that is not my phrase. That is the phrase of one
of the people who worked in the Department of Justice. We know
that this Department of Justice had a pattern of
disproportionate prosecutions so steep and so mountainous that
the odds are 10,000 to one against it. We know that.
Every time you look at the twists and turns in this case,
you see the presence of party politics. So I have to conclude
this much.
Before that, let me make this other one observation. Mr.
Lungren, I am with you. This is a mystery to me, too, because I
know a lot of these individuals. I like the prosecutors in the
Montgomery office. I served with them, know them to be good
men. I wonder how in the world they got pulled into bringing a
case so lacking in merit that they wanted to walk away from it.
Maybe this is the best answer. Maybe we ought to stop
asking who is lying and who is telling the truth because we
cannot sort that and focus on this one question: Could it be
that there was such a culture that the Gonzales Justice
Department created that good prosecutors were somehow pulled
into it and that they believed the only way to maybe earn spurs
in this department is to go out and turn the U.S. attorney's
office into a political tool? Maybe they came to believe the
only way to advance is to use this office to get political
enemies. Maybe before they even knew it, they started to think
the U.S. attorney's office was just another thing to be used,
another piece of opposition research to be put on the table.
I would like to think that was not the case, but that is
the culture that I see tainted by all of this evidence. So I
think, ladies and gentleman, Members of the Committee, politics
influenced this case. That is the irresistible conclusion based
on the facts--Washington politics, Karl Rove politics--and
finally, the politics that says if I cannot beat your ideas, if
I cannot have confidence that I can beat you at the ballot box,
maybe I can do it the old-fashioned way and just destroy you
and destroy your reputation.
Ladies and gentleman, if that is what U.S. attorneys'
offices and the Department of Justice becomes, it eats away at
the integrity of this whole system. People who have committed
crimes ought to go to jail, but, Mr. Jones, you said it better
than anyone could say it today. Diligent prosecutors unaffected
by politics investigate crimes, not people in search of a
theory hoping that they can put them in the dock.
Thank you.
Mr. Scott. Thank you. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentlelady from Texas, Ms. Jackson Lee?
Ms. Jackson Lee. Mr. Chairman, I heard a comment as I was
coming into the room that this has been devastating. I want to
thank the distinguished panel for their presence here, and
thank you for your indulgence of this timeframe. I thank the
Chairmen of the joint Committees for their leadership on this
issue.
I just want to quickly make a point on the record, and then
I am going to go right at some pointed questions. My colleagues
have been certainly direct.
I hear the constant refrain of Karl Rove, and I would say
to my Chairpersons that it seems that he should be in this
room. Karl Rove has had his name engaged repeatedly in the
whole episode and debacle dealing with the fired U.S.
attorneys. It seems that those U.S. attorneys were from swing
states, the very places that a political Karl Rove would want
to win. Karl Rove has a long history with Alabama, and he seems
to have been able to engineer the GOP takeover of Alabama in
the 1990's. We know that our President has been to Alabama.
Mr. Scott. Will the gentlelady suspend for just a minute?
I understand that Mr. Jones has a flight that he might be
able to make if he leaves right this minute.
Mr. Jones. It is close.
Mr. Scott. Are there any questions to Mr. Jones? If not,
you are excused.
Mr. Jones. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Thank you, Mr. Jones.
As well, we know that Governor Siegelman was someone who
changed the landscape, if you will, of politics in Alabama.
So, Mr. Jones, as you leave, let me thank you and just
simply say: Do you think they were out to get Mr. Siegelman,
and I will let you go at that.
Mr. Jones. I do not think there is any question that there
were a lot of people out to get him. Yes, ma'am.
Ms. Jackson Lee. No question?
Mr. Jones. No question.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Thank you for that answer.
Let me pose my questions quickly to the two gentlemen. I
would say to you, Professor Shields, in looking at the numbers,
do you think that it might have been a thought that we could
command that they were out to get Governor Siegelman?
Mr. Shields. Well, I only know about the dismissal and then
the second re-indictment.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Yes.
Mr. Shields. I go by the fact that there was a dismissal
and then there was a sudden re-indictment.
Ms. Jackson Lee. And so that looks like a turn of events
out of the ordinary?
Mr. Shields. Yes.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Let me for the record indicate that one of
my colleagues mentioned Mr. Jefferson. Let me make it very
clear that I think your numbers encapture his circumstances,
but I think it is important for our colleagues to note on the
record Mr. Jefferson has been protesting and presenting his
innocence and it is one of the longest cases we have ever seen
in comparing it other cases. It was the personal choice of any
Member of Congress who decided to plea. It was their personal
choice. To date, Mr. Jefferson has not, and he has continued to
insist on his innocence, and I think that speaks volumes.
I do want to go to this line of questioning about inaction.
We have talked about selective prosecution, and, General
Thornburgh, I want you to know that we have respected your
legacy in civil rights. Those of us who have studied generals
and understand we have heard your voice being very strong.
So I am going to pose you a question and this is on
inertia, but I do want to hear a little bit about Dr. Wecht, a
75-year-old, because that speaks to discretion and judgment and
why someone who seemed to have the association with maybe more
liberal viewpoints might have been subjected to selective
prosecution.
I want to bring up the gentleman in Chicago that was a
Democratic fundraiser, Professor Shields, if you happen to know
about that individual who was asked to roll over and did not
roll over, but, more importantly, was told if you roll over,
you will go free.
But really I want you to get at this question of lack of
enforcement. In the Western District of Louisiana in the Jena 6
case, there was a sitting U.S. attorney who kept his job who
was an appointee who did not see fit to investigate or pursue
the idea of hanging nooses, the idea of disparate treatment--it
was on the state level--but the idea of civil rights
prosecution, meaning going forward to suggest that the abuse of
a student, taking a gun out, beating up a Black student, even
though we do not condone the actions--we are not condoning the
actions of those youngsters--but if you would speak to the two
points I gave you and then this question of selective inertia
where the U.S. attorney could have been effective but for
politics possibly holding him back.
General Thornburgh, you want to speak on your case and then
if you would to the other points I have made.
Mr. Thornburgh. As I told the Committee earlier,
Representative Jackson Lee, I have a hard time figuring out why
the U.S. attorney would go to such lengths to convert these
trivial irregularities into Federal felony charges. When I look
at it in the context of her having carried out no
investigations or prosecutions against Republicans and bringing
this case against a prominent Democrat and measure that against
the backdrop of the allegations of nationwide actions of a
similar ilk, I can only come to the conclusion that the
prosecution was politically motivated.
I was asked earlier whether I had any evidence of
conversations between the White House or Federal officials. No,
I do not, obviously, have those, but I look at this and I try
my best to come up with some other explanation as to why these
charges might have been brought, and I come up empty-handed.
I must apologize for being unable to comment on the Jena
case. I simply do not know, obviously, with any degree of
certainty that I have about the case I am discussing where I
represent the individual who is the subject, a target of this
investigation the facts, and it would be, I think you would
agree, irresponsible for me to offer an opinion on that in that
context.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Professor Shields, inertia in prosecution?
Selective nonprosecution?
Mr. Shields. Well, in regard to the cases that are not of
elected officials or candidates, I did not study those. I can
tell you that I have run across a number of investigations of
fundraisers. Now which political party these fundraisers are
of, I do not know, but I did not track them as a database.
I think there is no doubt that the data speaks that
something caused this irregularity, this disproportion between
investigations of Democrats and investigations of Republicans.
It was either policy driven, which I suspect--the data and the
other circumstantial evidence that this has been brought up
here today and in previous months by the Judiciary Committee
suggests its policy driven. But even if it were a result of
just independent U.S. attorneys acting, it is a bad thing. It
is not good to investigate 5.6 Democrats to every one
Republican. When the ratio should be 1.2 Democrats to one
Republican.
So, even if it is not policy driven, it is something that
this Committee and the Congress needs to enact certain
structural changes that will prohibit that from continuing.
Ms. Jackson Lee. And the same thing with inaction?
Mr. Shields. And the same thing. I mean, prosecutors have
always had discretion not to bow out of a case, but there does
not seem to be any harm in that. But there is harm if it is
done selectively.
Mr. Scott. The gentlelady's time has expired.
The gentlelady from Wisconsin, Ms. Baldwin?
Ms. Baldwin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the fact
that you are holding this hearing today, and I certainly
appreciate the patient panel of witnesses for coming to speak
with us today.
I had actually intended to ask my question of Mr. Jones,
but I will offer these witnesses an opportunity to respond.
But I want to use my time to address the case that has been
very, very controversial in my home state of Wisconsin, the
prosecution of a state employee by the name of Georgia
Thompson. Many, I think, are already familiar with the Georgia
Thompson case.
She was a procurement officer for the State of Wisconsin, a
civil servant who was hired during the term of a Republican
governor, and she was criminally prosecuted on charges that she
awarded a contract to a firm owned by someone who had made
campaign donations to our Democratic governor.
The case raised a lot of question marks when the Seventh
Circuit Appeals Court reversed her conviction last April
calling the government's evidence ``beyond thin'' and
describing the government's legal theories as essentially
``preposterous,'' and in a very unusual move, the Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order the very day of oral
arguments directing the government, the authorities to release
Ms. Thompson immediately before close of business that day, at
oral arguments.
When it became clear that Ms. Thompson had not even known
about the donations and the winning bidder had submitted the
lowest bid, the question became even more urgent. Why was this
woman prosecuted and sent to prison?
Well, one possible answer is suggested in a letter
submitted to the Committee by counsel for the state workers
union who represent Ms. Thompson, and I would like to ask, Mr.
Chairman, unanimous consent to enter that letter into the
record.
[The information referred to follows:]
Mr. Scott. Without objection, so ordered.
Ms. Baldwin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I especially commend the letter to my colleagues because it
really catalogs the awful personal toll that this prosecution
on Ms. Thompson produced. She in the course of this prosecution
to defend herself and her good name spent approximately
$360,000, exhausting her entire life savings, in the course of
the prosecution, lost her job and her home, facts, I think,
that we should never lose sight of when we consider these cases
and their consequences.
As to why the case might have been brought, the letter also
describes the prosecution as highly politicized. It further
states, ``The context of the prosecution of Ms. Thompson was a
dangerous mix of partisan electoral politics.''
Following Ms. Thompson's release after 4 months in Federal
prison, The New York Times editorialized that U.S. Attorney
Biskupic had turned a flimsy case into a campaign issue that
nearly helped Republicans win a pivotal governor's race.
The letter goes on to question why the case was brought in
the Milwaukee Federal court instead of Madison where Ms.
Thompson lived, the contract was executed, where she worked,
and questions the timing of the indictment and the trial
alongside the timing of a heated electoral campaign.
Quoting again from the letter, ``During that time, the
Republican Party spent millions of dollars on advertising
specifically portraying Ms. Thompson as a symbol of corruption
of the incumbent Democratic regime. It is clear that the
prosecution was politically useful to Republicans, but, at this
point, of course, we do not know if that was a side effect or
if the prosecution was, in fact, politically motivated.''
Now U.S. Attorney Biskupic, who is respected in the State
of Wisconsin, has strongly denied this, and I have not formed a
judgment on that ultimate issue, and I have an open mind, but
we do know a few things.
First, we know that for a time, Mr. Biskupic's name was on
the U.S. attorney's firing list, and he appears to have been
removed from that list after the Thompson indictment was
brought.
Second, we know that Karl Rove was concerned about so-
called vote fraud enforcement in Mr. Biskupic's district, and
other U.S. attorneys who were not aggressive enough on those
cases to satisfy Republican interests do appear to have
actually been fired.
Finally, we know that the Seventh Circuit has told us that
this was not just a weak case. It appears to have been simply
an unreasonable one. It is one thing to have a conviction
reversed. It is quite another thing altogether for an appeals
court to reverse a conviction, to ridicule the prosecution and
to order the government to release the defendant before the
close of business that very day.
So, on that note, I will give you two the question I was
going to give to Mr. Jones. Are you aware of the frequency of
criminal convictions, especially those reversed in that fashion
and, if not, what would you reaction have been to something
like that?
Mr. Thornburgh. May I speak to that, Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Scott. Yes, Mr. Thornburgh?
Mr. Thornburgh. I ask to do so because the findings of the
Seventh Circuit Court in the Thompson case relate directly to
the grievance that I presented to this Committee today.
In the opinion rendered by the Seventh Circuit, a
distinguished Federal judge, Frank Easterbrook--I must make
full disclosure, a former colleague of mine at the Department
of Justice, but a respected Federal judge--expressed the
growing misgivings that Federal courts have about overzealous
applications of section 666 and 1346 of the Federal Code, the
very sections that we have pointed out were abused in the Wecht
prosecution.
And knowing that this Committee is interested not only in
hearing grievances, but in taking constructive action to
prevent this from recurring, I would refer you to Judge
Easterbrook's suggestion that Congress take another look at the
wisdom of enacting ambulatory criminal prohibitions, which is a
fancy way of saying prohibitions that are adjustable to the
moment and can be fashioned in the manner that has been
discussed today.
I would ask on behalf of all those defendants whose cases
have been discussed here today involving these open-ended kinds
of opportunities that the Congress might be well-advised in its
oversight hearings to look at these particular statutes and the
opportunity for abuse that lies within having such vague and
open-ended admonitions in the Federal Criminal Code.
Thank you.
Mr. Scott. Thank you.
Mr. Shields?
Ms. Jackson Lee. I have a unanimous consent, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Scott. For what?
Ms. Jackson Lee. To put two names on the record that I did
not mention in my remarks.
Mr. Scott. The gentlelady will state the names.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Yes, I would like to put on the record
Democratic contributor Peter Palivos that I was mentioning in
my remarks and also former Councilmember Ben Reyes from Houston
who was subjected to prosecution under the hotel sting
operation in Houston, Texas.
I yield back.
Mr. Scott. Without objection.
I want to thank our witnesses for their testimony today.
Members may have additional written questions which we will
forward to you and ask that you answer as promptly as you can
in order that they may be made part of the record.
Without objection, the hearing record will remain open for
1 week for the submission of additional materials, and without
objection, the Committee stands adjourned.
We will begin the next hearing as soon as we can get set
up.
[Whereupon, at 1:30 p.m., the Subcommittees were
adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
----------
Material Submitted for the Hearing Record