-Caveat Lector-
http://interactive.wsj.com
March 22, 2001
Review Outlook
Politics and Prosecutors
Last week, the Bush Administration took some serious steps toward
putting the Department of Justice in order after years of Clinton
scandal and controversy. President Bush nominated Michael
Chertoff, an experienced former federal prosecutor to head the
department's criminal division; Mr. Chertoff performed well as
chief counsel to the original Senate Whitewater Committee. And
Mr. Bush set in motion the orderly departure of U.S. Attorneys.
Mr. Bush also let it be known that the U.S. Attorney for the
Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White, would remain in her
job indefinitely. This is a mistake. The Southern District is the
most powerful federal crime-fighting office outside of
Washington. It is critical for a President to have his own person
in the post.
The Southern District is responsible for a wide array of
prosecutions, from political corruption to financial fraud to
world terrorism. Ms. White has done an outstanding job building a
team to prosecute major terrorism cases, winning convictions in
complex trials stemming from plots to blow up the World Trade
Center, the United Nations and U.S. airlines in the Far East.
Today she is prosecuting the important embassy bombings case
against the Osama bin Laden network.
The chief argument for keeping Ms. White on is that she needs to
supervise the bin Laden case. We find this unconvincing, but a
solution could be found in appointing Ms. White special master to
oversee the prosecution, making way for her successor.
It may turn out that it was just Ms. White's misfortune to have
been U.S. Attorney for the Southern District while Bill Clinton
was President; she is not alone in this particular brand of
misfortune. The fact remains that her office ended up with
prosecutions relating to the Clinton faction's depredations
against the political system, specifically those involving the
Teamsters Union and the Democratic Party. The U.S. Attorney's
handling of these cases has been famously slow, and the statute
of limitations on fraud in the Teamsters case expires at year's
end. THE CLINTON YEARS
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In 1999, Ms. White's prosecutors convicted former Teamsters
political director William Hamilton for fraud and conspiracy in a
1996 scheme to embezzle $850,000 from the union treasury for the
re-election campaign of then-Teamster President Ron Carey. The
money was laundered as donations to other unions and political
groups, which then returned it in contributions to the Carey
campaign.
Trial testimony about the schemes implicated Mr. Carey, AFL-CIO
Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka, American Federation of State
County and Municipal Employees head Gerald McEntee, Service
Employees International Union chief Andy Stern, and Terry
McAuliffe, then head of the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election effort
and currently chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Ms. White is not connecting the dots in the McAuliffe case, but
others are. Last month the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that
"little noticed testimony" at the trial and before a Senate
committee portrayed Mr. McAuliffe "as a prime mover in a plan to
find Democratic contributors for Carey's faltering 1996
re-election campaign in exchange for Teamsters contributions to
Democratic Party accounts." The Inquirer noted that a 1998 Senate
report concluded that Mr. McAuliffe and other Democratic National
Committee officials "participated in efforts to engage in a
contributions swap scheme. Such efforts included soliciting an
illegal contribution for Carey's campaign."
Mr. Carey was indicted in January in connection with the case but
none of the other men have been charged. All have declared they
did no wrong, and that indeed may be true. But the Carey case is
a dagger pointed at some of the most powerful figures in the
Democratic Party and the American labor movement. Someone other
than Ms. White should make the decision about further
prosecutions, before the clock runs out.
Leaving aside the bin Laden prosecution, there is also the real
possibility that the White tenure will simply begin to go off the
rails. Our reading of her capture of the pardon cases is that it
is largely grandstanding. Law enforcement officials are in wide
agreement that making a case against the former President in the
pardons matter would be almost impossible and constitutionally
ill-advised.
Moreover, both of New York's Senators have begun to intrude
themselves, criticizing the Administration for replacing New
York's three other federal prosecutors. Senator Clinton's
disapproval is especially hilarious, as her husband summarily
fired the entire federal attorney corps as one of his first acts.
With Senators Clinton and Schumer now protectively looming over
Ms.
