Thursday, March 14, 2019

Be the solution

National Public Radio reports, with a straight face, the following:
Andrew Weissmann, the architect of the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, will study and teach at New York University and work on a variety of public service projects, including his longstanding interest in preventing wrongful convictions by shoring up forensic science standards used in courts, the sources added.
Emphasis mine. This Weissmann guy has spent his career specializing in wrongful convictions, as the invaluable Mollie Hemingway reminds us:
If Mueller had no effective supervision against the abuses of the above underlings, why would anyone trust him to supervise his good buddy Weissman, whom he picked to run lead on his probe of Trump? Weissman destroyed the accounting firm Arthur Anderson LLP, which once had 85,000 employees. Thanks to prosecutorial abuse, jurors were not told that Arthur Anderson didn’t have criminal intent when it shredded documents. The Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction, but it was too late to save the company.

Weissman also “creatively criminalized a business transaction between Merrill Lynch and Enron,” which sent four executives to jail. Weissman concocted unprecedented charges and did not allow the executives to get bail, causing massive disruption to the families before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed most of Weissman’s case.
The most direct way to prevent wrongful convictions is to remove people who pursue them. So it's good news, I guess.

2 comments:

Bike Bubba said...

It seems to me that the best metric of an agency like the FBI is what they do with the easy, open and shut cases, like against Hilliary Rodman Clinton, Lois Lerner, and the BATFE guys that put together Fast & Furious. If they're all over the obscure cases, but don't even convene a grand jury for the open & shut cases, you've got a problem. It's the federal equivalent, really, of local police departments running tons of speed traps while sitting on hundreds or thousands of unprocessed rape kits.

Speaking of which, guess how much work the FBI has done to suss out who else was complicit in Larry Nassar's crimes at MSU, USA Gymnastics, and the USOC? If you answered "none since the child porn trial", move to the head of the class. It's all about priorities, really.

Mr. D said...

It's all about priorities, really.

It certainly is. And the top priority in Washington is protecting the ol’ rice bowl. East Lansing might as well be Timbuktu.