HORTON: Mukasey and Public Integrity - DoJ = "single most politically corrupt institution"

[L. Coyote]

Mukasey and Public Integrity
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002750

On Thursday, Michael Mukasey spoke about corruption during lunchtime speech to a friendly but also pointedly skeptical audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. As readers of this space know, I don’t pull any punches when it comes to Michael Mukasey’s performance as attorney general. I have also long admired Mukasey and considered him a friend .....

Mukasey .... quoted Teddy Roosevelt’s famous “muckraker” speech, one of the classics of political oratory ....

... as Mukasey points out, the Department of Justice has a long track record—established largely in the twentieth century—of battling public graft and corruption. He also points with pride to a number of prominent public corruption prosecutions carried out during the Bush Administration: the Cunningham, Ney, Abramoff prosecutions. I was amused reading these accounts, for Mukasey flags as a badge of corruption one congressman’s participation in Abramoff-paid golfing tours to Scotland. Perhaps if Mukasey knew that another participant on those junkets, which he correctly flags as corrupt, was his predecessor-in-office John Ashcroft, he might have reached for another example. And his discussion of the Abramoff case is likewise raises a number of unpleasant issues. The Abramoff case was not turned over to a special prosecutor, notwithstanding the close entanglement of the attorney general (Ashcroft) and the current head of the criminal division (Alice Fisher) in Abramoff matters. Not surprisingly, the investigation of the largest and most important corruption matter in U.S. history was suffocated in the Bush Justice Department. It is not an accomplishment, but rather a demonstration of the manner in which political concerns have been allowed to take the controls in public integrity matters. ....

Mukasey acknowledges a key fact: politically directed prosecutions are corruption. To speak of a politically influenced public integrity prosecution is therefore an oxymoron. If it is politically influenced, it is not a public integrity prosecution—it is a criminal act itself, indeed an act of corruption.

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[L. Coyote]

1. visibility kick

[L. Coyote]

2. one more time

[L. Coyote]

5. "

[Supersedeas]

3. Muk Muk has a partisan job to do -- and Shumer/Feinstein confirmed him to do it

[L. Coyote]

4. They need to hold his head underwater, metaphorically, of course!