Recent news coverage of prosecutor William Welch's leadership of the Justice Department's war on whistleblowers reveals that his overzealous and shady tactics were not restricted to his handling of the botched prosecution of late-Senator Ted Stevens, a case that landed Welch and his team in a pile of -- still ongoing -- criminal investigations.
Welch's tactics, at best idiosyncratic and ineffective and at worst unethical, expose the government's retaliatory motive in pursuing criminal convictions for whistleblowers, and betray weaknesses in the government's cases.
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Three months ago, journalist Michael Isikoff noted the disturbing "Double Standard" in White House Leak Inquiries. But now it's not just the Executive Branch. Josh Gerstein of Politico just published an article on how a judge ruled that the Justice Department can keep secret names of its own lawyers who leak classified information.
It is indisputable that the Obama, via the Holder Justice Department, has brought more "leak" prosecutions than any presidential Administration, ever.
To add hypocrisy to the injury of selective and malicious prosecutions of Shamai Liebowitz, Thomas Drake, Stephen Kim, and Jeffrey Sterling -- the Justice Department's own attorneys are immune from the "war on leaks."
U.S. District Court Judge Maxine Chesney ruled last week that the Justice Department does not have to disclose the identities of two lawyers who were found by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to have intentionally disclosed classified information to the media in 1996.
This is rank hypocrisy and the putrid stench is overwhelming.
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The strength of government's unyielding animus toward whistleblowers is no more evident than in the latest statements from disgraced prosecutor William Welch, who is "redeeming" himself amidst prosecutorial misconduct allegations stemming from the botched case against late-senator Ted Stevens by prosecuting whistleblowers like Thomas Drake under the Espionage Act.
Politico reported Welch's latest swill filed in the case against ex-CIA official Jeffery Sterling:
"The defendant’s unauthorized disclosures...may be viewed as more pernicious than the typical espionage case where a spy sells classified information for money,"
In other words, disclosing information of public interest to the public is worse the selling nuclear secrets to a foreign enemy. The idea that whistleblowers are somehow more dangerous than spies is both laughable in its absurdity and tragic as it represents the level of vindictiveness the government harbors against whistleblowers.
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The New Yorker's lead article this week is on the tragic suicide of one of the attorneys. Nicholas Marsh, in the botched prosecution of the late-Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.
As the article notes,
the senior people in the Stevens investigation, did not receive, in Marsh's mind, equal punishment.
Marsh, one of the junior attorneys, was exiled to a backwater office at the Justice Department and later committed suicide.
Yet lead attorney Welch, who is no stranger to being in criminal jeopardy (arrested for drunk driving and currently under criminal investigation for prosecutorial misconduct in the Stevens case) is now enjoying career rehabilitation on the back of whistleblowers like Thomas Drake.
In reading the latest New Yorker article, I couldn't help but note the eerie parallels between the botched Ted Stevens prosecution and the Thomas Drake prosecution. Even though these cases are quite different (Ted Stevens was convicted and Tom Drake is a whistleblower who tried to stop government corruption), they have striking things in common. I submit that the most notable aspect--and the one largely missed in the New Yorker article--is the man behind the curtain: disgraced chief of the Public Integrity Section William Welch.
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 As the 111th Congress draws to a close, the heat is on to confirm James Cole as Deputy Attorney General. Despite the last-minute push, Cole still has serious problems that haunt and disqualify him from taking a senior position at the Justice Department. From 2005 through December 2009, James Cole served as an independent monitor in the Compliance Office of the American International Group (AIG), placed there by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as part of a deal that allowed AIG to escape prosecution for fraud.
While Americans and their elected representatives are notorious for their short attention spans, it’s worth remembering, in this case, that AIG was the corporation that nearly drove the US economy off a cliff in September 2008. AIG’s Financial Products Division (AIG-FP), based in London, wrote credit default swaps involving staggering amounts of money that had to be covered with a US government bailout in the range of $180 billion.
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