via MAL Contends

The House Judiciary Committee is proceeding in investigating the Bush administration's political prosecutions.

Press Release from April 17

(Washington, DC)- Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and Committee Members Linda Sánchez (D-CA), Artur Davis (D-AL), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) announced three critical actions in the Committee's investigation into allegations of selective or poltiically-motivated prosecution in the Justice Department.

The Members today invited Karl Rove to testify before the committee; urged the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate those allegations; and demanded that Attorney General Michael Mukasey provide additional documents on this subject.

Today's actions result from the Committee's majority staff report, also released today, which details the cases, interviews and documents they have reviewed since the Committee began its investigation last year.

Harper's magazine remains the best watchdog of the U.S. Dept of Justice corruption.

From Scott Horton's column today blasting U.S. Atty Biskupic:

Compensating the Victims

The Bush Justice Department has engaged in a number of blatantly political prosecutions. One was already ascertained in an internal probe. My understanding is that a pending Inspector General investigation has reached the same conclusion in another case in which it confirmed Karl Rove’s intervention and involvement, and that it is looking at several more. And one of them was ascertained by a Court of Appeals decision, by a unanimous, all-Republican panel of the Seventh Circuit, which in fact labeled a prosecution, which produced a conviction and was before them on appeal, with a stinging one-word rebuke. They called it “preposterous.”

The Appeals judges ordered the immediate release of the prisoner after hearing the case, not even waiting for the issuance of an opinion. This was the case of Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin civil servant, who was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney in Milwaukee with the evident purpose of helping the Republican candidate for governor get a leg up during the election. Moreover, the U.S. Attorney had previously been on Karl Rove’s list of prosecutors to fire, and after this and some other highly suspect cases, his name disappeared off the list. The facts speak for themselves, a lawyer might say.

Why should Wisconsin citizens get stuck with the $200,000 tab paid to an innocent Wisconsin woman who was the victim of a political prosecution by the United States Dept of Justice?

State Representative Pedro Colon (D-Milwaukee) says the federal government should foot the bill, not Wisconsin taxpayers.

United States Attorney Stephen Biskupic was excoriated by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit last year in an extraordinary decision that freed the innocent state worker, Georgia Thompson.

From the Associated Press:

MADISON,Wis. (AP) -- A lawmaker wants the state to force the federal government to reimburse an employee who was wrongly convicted in federal court.

Revelations of prosecutorial transgressions nationwide including a stunning lack of prosecutorial discretion, systemic biases, and clear cases of corruption and misconduct have led to calls for examination of the prosecutor’s role in society at all levels of government.

The prosecutor’s office (beyond the corrupt nature of Bush’s U.S. Department of Justice, former Winnebago County District Attorney Joseph Paulus’ corrupt fiefdom, and spectacular cases of prosecutorial wrongdoing such as the Duke University lacrosse misconduct and the Georgia Thompson prosecution) as never before has become a platform for politicians eager to generate politically appealing win/loss records which can be touted as unassailable proof of commitment to law and public service.

Bradford Plumer has a piece out today in The New Republic discussing “How Worried Should We Be About Rogue Prosecutors?”

Plumer’s reasonable conclusion is not reassuring. Writes Plumer:

Every politico in Wisconsin is familiar with the Georgia Thompson prosecution; a travesty of justice that has tainted Wisconsin’s fading reputation for fair play and impartial justice at all levels of government.

But being flushed out now is the scope of a program that the U.S. Dept. of Justice employed onto political opponents in key races across the nation, in which the infamous Georgia Thompson prosecution was but one ugly piece.

Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and writer at Harper's, has broken much new ground investigating DoJ political prosecutions including today's column linking Karl Rove to the prosecution of former Democratic Alabama governor, Don Siegelman.

Weeks ago Horton had also uncovered the outlines of a DoJ scheme to use the DoJ machinery against major Democratic opponents and one tier of Democratic supporters, trial attorneys.

Writes Horton:

Via Mal Contends - Even as the U.S. Justice Department arrogantly stonewalls requests by the House Committee on the Judiciary for documents pertaining to politically-charged prosecutions in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (the Georgia Thompson affair), Wisconsin’s U.S. Atty. Stephen Biskupic volunteered to offer transcribed testimony under oath before the Judiciary Committee.

From Dan Bice in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

"If they (the House Judiciary Committee) want to hear from me, I'm happy to do it."
Even if the testimony is transcribed and under oath?
"It really doesn't matter to me," said Biskupic.

The New York Times editorial this morning calls for an aggressive investigation into the DOJ's partisan prosecutions, singling out the innocent Wisconsin state worker Georgia Thompson (prosecuted by US Atty Steven Biskupic) among three cases cited.

Wisconsin has been in the national news quite a bit these last few years; few would have believed it would be for corruption and the diminishing integrity of public office for political gain.

I would like to hear what Steven Biskupic has to say about the DoJ's politicalization. Is he for it? Does he dispute that it is taking place?

One part of the Justice Department mess that requires more scrutiny is the growing evidence that the department may have singled out people for criminal prosecution to help Republicans win elections. The House Judiciary Committee has begun investigating several cases that raise serious questions. The panel should determine what role politics played in all of them. ...

U.S. Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) has had enough of the politicized prosecutions of the Bush/Rove Department of Justice.

Davis, a three-term congressman and member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, has taken up the cause of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman (D), roundly criticizing the DoJ prosecutions of him (one prosecution was dismissed) and calling for a Congressional investigation.

The bizarre conviction of Siegelman this year is drawing nationwide condemnation as a political prosecution engineered by Karl Rove, similar to the prosecution of the innocent Wisconsin state worker Georgia Thompson, now exonerated.

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by Michael Leon, via MAL Contends

Madison, Wisconsin—In this Karl Rove/Dick Cheney age of politics when the governmental machinery is so politicized that Richard Nixon seems a progressive reformist by comparison, it’s not surprising to find the United States Department of Justice ravaging a Vietnam-era veteran diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

But many veterans charge the peculiar case of US v. Roberts is a disgraceful miscarriage of justice even by the contemporary swift-boating standards of the Bush administration.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

In June of 1999, Airman Keith Roberts (1968-71) was granted a disability rating by the US Veterans Administration (VA) after a 12-year, excruciating benefits claim process to which the honorably discharged American veteran from the northern town of Gillett, Wisconsin was subjected.

Roberts had been diagnosed with (PTSD) years after he witnessed a fellow airman killed in a gruesome C-54 aircraft crushing death of fellow Airman Gary Holland in 1969 while on “line duty” at a Naval Air Facility in Naples, Italy, and later in the same year was assaulted by the Navy Shore Patrol and forcefully hospitalized.

Roberts believed that negligence caused Holland’s death and that the Navy then covered it up, blaming the dead rookie Holland who could not defend himself.

Madison, Wisconsin — The innocent Georgia Thompson will never get what she deserves after US Atty Stephen Biskupic indicted, jailed, and went all-out to keep her in prison while her case was on appeal, but this state worker who spent four months behind bars before an appeal freed her filed a claim with the state today.