Blogs For Victory

Interesting connection between the Stevens and Libby cases:

…In the Libby case, the press avoided what I thought was a critical bit (among many) of prosecutorial legerdemain: The last minute admission in court that respecting the first interview of the key witness, the late Tim Russert, the newscaster told the FBI agent Eckenrode (missing from the case by the time it was tried) that he may well have told Libby that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA at the very time Libby recalled Russert had.

The original copy of those notes was somehow missing from the prosecution’s files and could not, therefore, be given to the defense — who surely would have been able to make a great deal more of this had the agent and his notes been available at trial.

So, it was with great interest that I read that the Department of Justice attorney, Brenda Morris, already held in contempt by Judge Sullivan in the matter involving the wrongful prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens, and now under investigation by both the Department of Justice and the special prosecutor chosen by the Judge, was also a supervisor in the Libby case…

…I am dismayed to learn that so many people are under the impression that the Stevens case was dropped because of some mere technicality, and not because the case against him was riddled with perjured testimony and evidence of his innocence was unlawfully hidden by the prosecution team. I ask if you hear anyone say anything so foolish that you set them straight.

Stevens had an A- Frame house in Alaska for which he’d engaged a contractor (Veco) to do some renovation work. He asked for and received bills for this work for which he paid Veco in full in the sum of $150,000. The government claimed that the job was really worth $250,000 and that Stevens violated the law when he failed to disclose as a gift the additional $100,000 on his Senate ethics reporting form. The government never charged that VECO had sought any favors for this “gift” or that Stevens had done any for VECO. The crux of the case was only about whether or not he had paid fair value for the work.

The foreman on the job was a Mr. Allen. On April 15, 2008 , before Stevens was indicted ,the government interviewed Allen and he provided a great deal of evidence that established that Stevens’ defense was credible. For example, he valued the work done for Stevens at $80,000, about ½ of what Stevens had paid for it and about 1/3 of what the government said it was worth. The government had an obligation to turn this over to Stevens and never did. Had they done so, much of Allen’s testimony for the prosecution on the stand would surely have been discredited on cross examination. But there is more.

On Oct. 6, 2002, Stevens sent a handwritten note to Allen asking that it be “done right” making clear he wanted to pay in full for Veco’s services, adding

“You owe me a bill.” “Remember Torricelli, my friend. Friendship is one thing, compliance with the ethics rules entirely different.”

The author goes on to note that there has been a rule against bringing prosecutions against politicians right in front of elections – this being a means of preventing prosecutors from deciding the outcome of elections. The mere fact that Stevens was on trial right in front of the election should have raised some warning bells – and now that the case has completely fallen apart, what we have is a man who has been slandered and who lost an election due to a prosecutor not doing her job right.

Then we go back to the Libby case – the completely bogus notion that because Libby had a different memory of a conversation he was accused of perjuring himself in a case which centered on who told a name, with that name-teller not being Libby and such fact already known by the prosecutor. And there is that oddity where evidence exonerating Libby was not brought forward by the prosecution, even though are required by law to be diligent in providing exculpatory evidence to the defense. The conviction we know was done by a jury pulled from a very liberal demographic group who were essentially told they were trying President Bush for lying us into war – but how did the case even go to trial? Who allowed this crock of nonsense, and the Stevens crock of nonsense, to go forward?

We’ll probably never fully get to the bottom of it – while Morris clearly is hip deep in both cases, she’s not a free agent. Even if only lightly supervised, she was still supervised and someone other than her had to sign off on the cases. But finger pointing and obfuscatory statements will ensure that the tangled web being woven won’t be unraveled for some time to come. But these cases – as well as the bogus cases against the Duke lacrosse team, Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay indicate a need for a careful reform of the way cases are brought before a court.

What exact form such reform would take I haven’t thought all the way through at the moment, but I think that central to any such reform is to create some means where a prosecutor doesn’t have a free hand in bringing charges. This would probably require a modification of the Grand Jury system – providing more power, and more independent power, to the Grand Jury so that it may ride herd on the prosecutors. We can also ensure against such things as the Libby case by making it that when an appointed official of the Executive branch is brought to trial, he must be brought to trial in the jurisdiction he resided in prior to taking office…this will stymie most politically-motivated prosecutions of Republicans as the jury will no longer be made up of DC liberals, but of Texas conservatives, and such. It won’t have any effect on liberals as most who come to DC reside in liberal hotbeds and so its a matter of perfect indifference as to where they are tried.

The justice system belongs to the people, not to the prosecutors. Via our juries, we are to decide who is guilty of what – and so we must make it via our Grand Juries that the decision is made to bring charges against a man…but not the lapdog grand juries we have today, but genuinely independent bodies who can ask questions, query the accused, demand to see all the evidence, etc, etc, etc. It is said with great truth that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich – this is something which we must change – our liberty is too precious a thing to be placed at risk by prosecutors playing to the galley and hoping to strike it rich by dragging some poor soul through a trial.