Reply #5: Yes! Nacchio and Qwest: Another Political Prosecution?

[L. Coyote]

The Bush Junta plays financial bribery with these companies if they fail to break the law, and file political indictment to jail those who oppose the illegal conduct, just as it fired the USAs who would not go along with the Juntas methods!

FROM: Nacchio and Qwest: Another Political Prosecution?
DU Archive OCT 15 2007: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2051298

The political odor of this legal case has never been proper.
The issue first arose on DU with the USA firings discussion.
* Justice Weighed Firing 1 in 4 - 26 Prosecutors Were Listed As Candidates
* http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2848874
Now, it's in mainstream press and serious legal blogs.

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Qwest: Another Political Prosecution?
BY Scott Horton - Oct 14, 2007
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/10/hbc-90001415

Last week, a career federal prosecutor friend told me, “Most of us have come to agree that there’s a real problem with political prosecutions on Bush’s watch, and that needs to be addressed, but you need to remind your readers that this is something truly exceptional and that the great mass of cases involve the normal functioning of the law enforcement system, with career professionals who are detached from political considerations.” For the record, I believe that’s true. I’m not sure how widespread the phenomenon of political prosecution is. I believe that it is no longer a question of “whether” such prosecutions have been brought—that’s now very well established. How widespread is this phenomenon? That’s an important question and the answers are unclear.

And this weekend more information has surfaced which would show the practice to be far more common that I first suspected. Last year, a Colorado lawyer told me that I should look at the insider trading litigation surrounding Qwest CEO Joseph P. Nacchio—there was strong evidence in that case of tawdry politics on the prosecution side. Of course, I knew that Nacchio was the only major telecom executive who refused to play ball with the administration on warrantless surveillance. But I did take a look at the case, and I didn’t see the evidence that was suggested.

But as of this morning, I have to admit that I misjudged the situation. It seems that the evidence was lacking because the trial judge suppressed it, not because it didn’t exist. There was a major account in yesterday’s Washington Post, and this morning in the New York Times. These accounts all stack up. Here’s Scott Shane’s summary for the Times:

The phone company Qwest Communications refused a proposal from the National Security Agency that the company’s lawyers considered illegal in February 2001, ......