LHP–

And you want to rush that shot?

No I don’t, but I do believe there has been time to take it. And I am very worried that it won’t be taken, and if that happens I won’t fully understand why.

You could come back and remind me that Pat Fitzgerald has a very full plate managing cases in the Northern District of Illinois, and you would get no argument from me there. It is not lost on me that although the MSM and the public didn’t notice it much, I was very aware that Pat had to fly back and forth between Chicago and D.C. and was really handling two very big jobs.

You have made these points before and I appreciated them then and I do now.

I’m not sliming Pat with a runaway prosecutor meme. But it is a big mystery to me (and to people I know who are very experienced vets of DOJ who were thought to be among the most outstanding litigators trial litigators there for years who ran sections/units as to why Pat keeps that office open, and did not and does not indict Karl Rove.

You are very aware of what Rove has done. Marcy has explicated it and butressed it with supporting detail, as well as anyone writing today in print or on a blog. Christy has and you may have two. I try to read all your blogs but may miss them from time to time.

Pete, how many criminal public corruption cases have you tried and won? How many public corruption cases have you investigated?

First, I’d like to underscore I’m in good company asking why Fitz didn’t indict Rove before and hasn’t yet. I appreciate all your points. I understand the difference between going to a grand jury with a sloopy case–I got to watch Siegelman’s clusterfuck and the one that the 30 year old from Pin fucked up against Geoffery Fleiger that I don’t think was merited–I think it was purely political–I think Marcy indicated she thought it might have been merited but sloppily handled. I agree with her as to the handling. There are also the activities of Christopher Christie in your neighboring New Jersey not to mention his making a very rich man out of people like Ashcroft–your former AJ in your old job or was it Jan Reno? There is additionally the ridiculous prosecution of distinguished forensic/surgical pathologist Cyril Wecht that just ended in a mistrial.

About as many as full cardiac and respiratory arrests, 16 year olds with critical bleeds into their heads (whose chests needs opening in the ER and you have to literally knock the OR down with a borrowed sledge hammer to get a rib spreader to get to the heart so you can stabilize the kid so the nuerosurgeon can open his head and try to save him from the epidural hematoma with a 16% recovery rate in series from the best NYC or rest of the country tertiary medical centers, or complicated kiddy facial lacerations, drug overdoses, 7 year-old little girls electrocuted and drowned in a bathtub that you saved who graduated at the top of the high school classes, telephone workers/power workers or cable engineers electrocuted on a pole and classes for EMTs so we could get the drugs we needed on the trucks for first responders and advanced EMTs) as you have handled I would guess.

You talked about trying to save kids in Harlem from becoming fatal drug ODs when you were with Public Corruption SDNY and I appreciate that. I was one of the guys who had to save them when they came in. It does not take much of a Tyleonol OD to get someone onto a Done’s Nomogram scale so that they are going to need a Mucomist antidote in a critical amount of time either.

IQ of 3 might not have been the best choice of phrase and you know that I was not casting aspersions your way or to your former colleagues and current friends specifically. And your latest blogs on issues with respect to DOJ have been illuminating and very well written. I have read the blogging although not probably every bit of it that you have done and Christy has done and it reflects a lot of research, insight and hard work. So whatever it would mean to you or if you were indifferent, if you didn’t think I have considerable respect for your past career and current talent, there should be no mistake in your mind now that I do.

What I’m saying is that DOJ has always been extremely eager to go after relative little guys and very reluctant and hesitant and careful about going after big fish when the big fish aren’t involved in purported drug cases with purported drug kingpins. I’m not for a moment saying that doing these prosecutions can’t be very laborous, require considerable skill and savvy both in getting them done and ealing with not only the defense bar but people at Main Justice or in your unit. The Kingpin law btw is being rewriteen and tightened in the House and Senate as we speak.

I offer not only DFAs in this current Mukasey and formerly Gonzales DOJ that have become pandemic, but the fact that Rezko is very small potatoes with small impact on the public relative to the very precise code sections that Bush, Cheney, Addington and Rove have broken and flaunted. Rove has as much pitched a “Fuck You in Spades” to this DOJ, and I’m going to bet that not too many of your targets when you were there represented themselves that defiantly to you and your collegues. And if they did, I suspect you were pretty competent in showing them why that was not a good idea.

I didn’t say that everyone who tries public corruption cases as you have has an IQ of 3 and I have been quick to praise a number of your blogs. I didn’t say that there weren’t extremely bright headsup people with great educations, at some of the country’s best law schools even when they might not be as well known as Yale, as I’m sure you were when you were there in SDNY who did important work and were possibly outstanding doing it.

I was making a comparison betwen the relative damage that Tony Rezko and people like him who were profiled during the trail that finished yesterday did and specifically the damage that Rove, Addington, Cheney and Bush have done who have all been heavily implicated in illegal leaking and I believe now obstsruction of justice and perjury in the Plame affair. Of course except for Rezko’s appeals to the 7th Circuit and the Supreme Court–Amy St. Eve’s won’t give him an appeal bond and Posner and his homeboys and homegirls in the 7th Circuit will back her. Rezko immediately turned himself in to the marshals yesterday. I don’t know if he’s getting credit for pre-sentencing time (in fact defendandts do not but I believe that it was worked out that Tony will get credit beginning this morning for his time served now)

But I can point out a greatest hits of stupid blunders by AUSAs that would dwarf Hugh’s list and

so can you.

Further, the bigger the fish, th emore slam dunk solid you case has to be or else you, and your officce, get branded as viglanites or out for personal glory or generally out of control.

Yes mam. No doubt there. People with resources can hire the same type of dream team that Geoffrey Feiger did with one of Bmaz’s faves
Spense. Siegelman has three excellent attorneys working his appeal who did his trial.

But what you don’t hear a lot of people from DOJ tell you until like some I know they go from heading a unit for years into private defense so they can send their kids to college is that FRE, FRCrP and the ranks of AUSAs and USAs that migrate to the federal bench and the budget that they have to operate with in terms of the FBI and their subspecialists as investigators result in the 93.5% conviction rate that AUSAs currently enjoy as well as people who travel from Main Justice units like PIN in DC to prosecute.

I would offer for you to take a quick drill into the Siegelman case or the PIN 30 something that screwed up badly in Geoffrey Feiger’s case who lost Monday and I bet you would agree that things were badly out of control there. As Siegelman’s appeal develops I wouldn’t be surprised to see some excellent blogs from you, Christy, and EW and of course there already have been. Why do you think that last week in the Eleventh Circuit Siegelman’s prosecuting team filed motions to drop their appeal of his sentence and had nothing to say about it as I noticed when people at the Eleventh told me aboaut it and EW blogged here the other day? The prosecution in that case has been beyond the pale with every bit of respect due to anyone and it’s just one reason I am beyond the pale frustrated that Fitz cannot will not prosecute Karl Rove. Let’s face it. Conyers or SJC may get Robe to testify LHP, but do you really expect Rove to give useful answers to questions there (he’s not going to show and Obama is very cognizent of the contempts in both the House and the Senate by Bush officials. I don’t see any scintilla of Rove to claim Executive Privilege in the Siegelman matter and neither did 22 US Attorneys who filed one of the five amicus briefs in the D.C. trial court the other day (the others were two liberal groups and two conservative groups and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was one of the former US Attorneys

And I read your insightful critiques of the recent situation in Spitzer.

If he took his shot at Rove and DIDN’T get a clean kill, no one would ever be able to take a shot at rove again.

Politically you might think so, but we both know legally that’s not the case. Siegelman is enjoying his ***third** proseuction as a target of DOJ. He was acquitted in one and one was dismissed. Would you like to have the chance to cross examine Leura Canary and her husband Bill? I’d jump at it.

Pete, think it through. What witnesses would say what in a Rove trial? Things already on the record. What documents would be used as exhibits at Rove’s trial?

I can come up with a witness list that I think would do considerable damage to Rove. Documents including graymail and the email situation that Marcy has covered well and Maddog and others have analyzed well from an IT perspective here are absolutely a problem. But many of us think that Pat has in his possession emails that would be very crucial in convicting Rove, and one thing that does not seem to be very well clarified and maybe you can that has been discussed here and at FDL is that Pat as Special Counsel should have control of all his work product, his evidence, his interviews and witness statements gathered in the extensive investigation for the Libby trial. It is unclear to me and a lot of others why in the world Mukasey seems to have anything to say about Pat’s use or release of that material. You know quite well because we all hawked them, that there was much in the trial transcript in considerable arguing Pat’s standing as Special Counsel to prosecute Libby, and it was the subject of the briefs for the appellee and the appellant in the D.C. Circuit an appeal which of course Pat and his appellate team won and Bush dissolved in the commutation.

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I do hope you are aware btw that I maintained for months that Hillary wasn’t vetted and something I said to you about that that I believe was appropriately questioning your vetting Clinton Jane must have thought was too flip, she never would explain it, has kept me from posting at FDL and I thought I contributed fairly well at times. I meant to ask you with respect why you have not mentioned these reasons that are in fact keeping Hillary Clinton out of the Obama administration. If you did I missed it. Remember LHP you said you wanted to vet Obama. He has been vetted and he will continue to be.

I think having experienced law school at one of the best schools in the country, and a nice career, you can appreciate what it would take reflecting on your classmates’ paths from college through law school what it means when someone gets out of college and takes the following path: Obama goes to work on Chicago’s South Side after graduating Columbia with High Honors, completes Harvard Law school, gets an offer to be Avner Mikvah (who went on to be White House Counsel for the Clintons) to be his D.C. Circuit law clerk out of Harvard, and turns it down to once again go to work for a relatively small law firm in Chicago and instead of getting a job at a D.C. NYC powerhouse firm with a 6 figure entry level income, took until just recently to pay back his college and law school loans and Michelle’s.

I got to vet her where it counted though by submitting my questions to the Obmama legal vetting team. I got what I wanted there. She is not going to be Veep candidate nor on the S. Ct. (boy was that a stretch–Hillary on constitutional law is like me picking up someone in the back of a McDonald’s and asking them to go open a chest of a trauma case in an ER). She flunked the D.C. bar by the way and althought that would have had little bearing on her career had Hillary had real experience (she has not) doing any significant litigation at Rose or anywhere else except for the cases where she or her husband were defendants.

I want to make sure you know that a number of us have input into Holder and Caroine Kennedy’s team of attorneys who attempted to vet the Clintons and are now vetting VP candidates. She is not, let me repeat the word not, under consideration by Obmaa’s team and has not been. She was told months ago to cough up in several areas and she and Bill Clinton defiantly and imperiously refused.

1) 2007 Income Taxes
2) Library Foundation Fiscal documents, money transfers, and complete list of donors and their organizations (like the donor who profited from the uraniam deal)
3) Any and all sources of income by the Clintons including transfer of monies to her campaign from one Ron Burkle and Yucaipa. None of us particularly cares about alledged liasons with Gina Gerson, or the 20 somethings regularly recruited for the jaunts Bill Clinton takes with Burkle one what his security staff calls “Air Fuck One” aka the Burklejet. But the 527s would have rolled this sexually referenced material out in spades the way they are making films of Rezko walking around, and tying them to pictures of Obama

That’d be this one LHP:

Financier Frank Gustra donates $31.5 to Clinton after Clinton swings deal from former Kazakhstan Dictator Butcher

I welcome you to look at questions I proposed and the ones above were actually proferred to the Clinton’s and they were indignant and imperious and refusing to answer them.

I simply asked you why you wouldn’t want to use them to vet her, and it cost me posting at FDL. I think it’s their loss and I proposed them to you as I’ve just answered you now with all respect due.

20 Vetting Questions for Clinton–and a few and her baggage cost her any participation in an Obama administration