worth reading the whole piece.
>
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/hbc-90001405Chicago Court Orders Discovery of DOJ Political Prosecutions
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED October 13, 2007
In civil litigation connected to one of a substantial number of federal prosecutions of campaign funding of contributors to Democratic candidate John Edwards, a federal court has directed the Department of Justice to submit to discovery to ascertain whether improper political motivations stood behind its management of the case. The litigation, entitled Beam v. Gonzales, questions the actions of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Federal Elections Commission chair Robert Lenhard in going after a group of Edwards fundraisers. At the time of the actions taken, Gonzales was counsel to George W. Bush and was heavily (and improperly) involved in shaping and directing Department of Justice prosecutions, and the head of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was Michael Toner. Before his appointment, Toner was Chief Counsel to the Republican National Committee, and prior to that Toner served as General Counsel of the Bush-Cheney Transition Team and General Counsel of the Bush-Cheney 2000 Presidential Campaign.
..........
Papers filed in the Beam case provide further evidence of how the scheme was surreptitiously carried out. It appears that Justice Department lawyers involved in the scheme improperly issued subpoenas to financial institutions designed to collect information on campaign fundraisers for Edwards. The subpoenas were marked with a legend saying that their existence was to be treated as a secret. Since the subpoenas were issued in violation of federal laws protecting the secrecy of information by financial institutions, one has to suspect that this extraordinary step was taken because the Justice Department officials involved knew their conduct was unlawful and sought to obscure that fact by avoiding detection. In any event, the existence of the subpoenas was not a fact entitled to protection. The prosecutors also invoked grand jury secrecy requirements as a reason for maintaining secrecy, a contention which is sure to raise eyebrows in light of the aggressive leaking of grand jury materials in a wide array of political prosecutions. More likely, the prosecutors were extremely anxious to insure that the full breadth of the scheme targeting the Edwards campaign be kept out of public knowledge.
The stench surrounding these prosecutions is enormous and one particular passage of the plaintiffs’ brief stands out to me:
Gonzales personally authorized a small army of nearly 100 federal agents to raid a law office and simultaneously raid the homes of its employees and their families. Indeed, one agent commented about how he had been flown in from Iraq to help find out why American citizens had made contributions to the John Edwards campaign.
This is extremely telling. As Robert Jackson warned, prosecutorial abuse rarely takes the most obvious form. It generally will appear to be far more subtle........
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