Yesterday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy suggested that if the White House stalls on sending top aides Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify under oath, they risk the wrath of career employees at the Department of Justice who are unhappy about political interference from the Bush political office.
It appears Leahy was right. Sharon Eubanks, the former leader of the DOJ team that prosecuted the tobacco companies on racketeering charges said yesterday that Bush political hacks inside the department forced her to pull her punches at the last moment, including dropping the companies’ fines from $130 billion to $10 billion
[Eubanks said] that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government’s racketeering case.[She also said that] Bush loyalists in Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales’ office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.
She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop arguments that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim from a closing argument they rewrote for her, she said.
“The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said. And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public,” she said.
Eubanks, who served for 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said three political appointees were responsible for the last-minute shifts in the government’s tobacco case in June 2005: then-Associate Atty. Gen. Robert McCallum; then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Peter D. Keisler; and his deputy at the time, Dan Meron.
This story was buried on page A13 of the Los Angeles Times today. If it gains traction, Sharon Eubanks can expect to be the target of a devasting campaign of smears and lies from the West Wing.
Let’s hope that there are other courageous people inside Justice Dept. who will come forward to tell the truth about Bush political hackery at DOJ. The American people need to know the truth about full extent of George W. Bush’s defiling of the United States justice system.
