Where Are The Washington Post And New York Times On The Richardson Story?
Author: Hans Von Spakovsky
Last Friday I had a post about the Justice Department’s dismissal of a public corruption case against New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. The AP reported that sources within Justice said the investigation had been killed in Washington. More evidence of that possibility comes from a letter sent by the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, Gregory Fouratt, who is not an Obama political appointee, but a career lawyer appointed by the federal judges in his circuit to fill the vacancy in the U.S. Attorney’s office.
The purpose of the letter was to notify Richardson and his political donor, a company called CDR, that the “United States will not seek to bring charges.” But the letter goes on to say that CDR and its officers “made substantial contributions to Governor Richardson’s political organization during the time that the company sought financial work” with the state government and “pressure from the governor’s office resulted in the corruption of the procurement process so that CDR would be awarded such work.” The notification letter “is not to be interpreted as an exoneration of any party’s conduct.”
This is a very unusual letter, as anyone who has worked at the Justice Department can tell you. If one takes the innocent view, it could mean that Fouratt was telling the defendants that he knows they acted corruptly and illegally but they just got by with it because he does not have quite enough evidence to go to a jury with, but he is keeping his eye on them.
On the other hand, if you take a more cynical and jaundiced view, especially given the apparent political nature of many decisions in the Holder DOJ, the content of this letter supposedly clearing Richardson provides evidence that the AP story was correct and it was not the decision of the U.S. Attorney to dismiss this case. Fouratt came as close as he could to saying that in the letter without doing so directly. You don’t have to do much reading between the lines to see that Fouratt may have been angry about being told by his political bosses in D.C. to dismiss an investigation that had revealed “corruption of the procurement process” by the governor’s office.
But none of the media denizens of the press like the Washington Post or the New York Times are interested in this story from any standpoint other than reporting that Richardson, a political ally of President Obama, is now free and clear of a federal investigation because of claimed intervention by the president’s political appointees at Justice.
Given the apparent political motivations behind so many of the recent decisions at the Department of Justice (DOJ) — from the dismissal of the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party to the re-investigation of CIA interrogators after DOJ prosecutors had already reviewed the matter and decided there was no reason for further criminal prosecution — the latest news about the dropping of the investigation against New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Obama’s former nominee to be commerce secretary, raises a lot of questions. The Associated Press report cites a DOJ source saying that the investigation of pay-to-play allegations involving one of the governor’s largest political donors “was killed in Washington” by top DOJ officials.
For anyone familiar with internal Justice Department procedures, this is particularly suspicious. The DOJ has a manual called “Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses” (I helped edit the latest edition when I was at Justice) that sets out the rules and procedures for U.S. attorneys when they are investigating these types of public-corruption cases. It is the U.S. attorney in New Mexico who would normally make the final call on a local public-corruption case, not “top Justice Department officials” in Washington.
The DOJ manual sets out the consultation rules for U.S. attorneys, who are required to “consult” with the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division in Washington. But only consultation is required; the Public Integrity Section does not make the final decision on whether an investigation should go forward. (Attorney General Eric Holder should not have forgotten this, since Public Integrity was the first place he worked at Justice.) So if the AP is correct in reporting that “top” officials in Washington killed the investigation, then political appointees within the department did not follow normal DOJ procedures.
Now, I will be the first to tell you that I think the attorney general should have the final authority on all actions taken by the Justice Department. But that is not the rule set out for public-corruption cases being investigated by U.S. attorneys. So did top political officials in Washington make the final decision to dismiss this case against a Democratic officeholder? Have they changed the rules in the prosecution manual that only require consultation? I seriously doubt that Eric Holder will provide any answers to these questions, or that the lack of a response by the Justice Department (or the validity of the response if it makes one) will be investigated by Congress. By comparison, the Bush administration was castigated for supposedly firing U.S. attorneys for not pursuing such investigations vigorously enough, and its officials were the subject of endless congressional investigations and subpoenas. Yet the Obama administration has ended such an investigation and received nary a word of criticism. There will certainly be no congressional investigation of its actions. This double standard is depressingly familiar, but its rank hypocrisy still amazes me at times.