Licensed to Lie: Chapter 9:

BOHICA:

        by Sidney Powell

On March 19, 2007, the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in Regents, a civil suit against several large banks that had done transactions with Enron, including

Merrill Lynch in the Barge transaction. The Fifth Circuit reversed the decision and held that the banks had no civil liability to Enron or its shareholders.

How could the same court hold that the Merrill defendants should be prosecuted criminally when they did not have civil liability? Meanwhile, the prosecution planned on re-trying the defendants, using the same flawed indictment as before. The new prosecutor was Arnold Spencer, assistant US attorney from the Eastern District of Texas. He was over his head, unable to run the show like the previous prosecutors.

Ms. Powell requested Brady material from the prosecution—the Brady material that had never been received in the previous Barge trial.

Spencer ratcheted up the pressure on Jim to give a guilty plea and force him to testify in the second trial against Bayly and Furst. Jim would not “cooperate” in spite of the threats to be sent back to prison. He wouldn’t even consider pleading guilty to a crime he didn’t commit, so Spencer played his trump card. He filed a motion to send Jim back to prison for the remainder of his forty-six month term. His action was unethical. A hearing was set with all defendants present, but Jim was the only one with immediate imprisonment hanging over his head. The US Marshalls were present in the courtroom to add extra anxiety. There is a special acronym for this situation: BOHICA. It means “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”

Jim Goes Back to Court

Spencer begins with his motion to send Jim back to prison. Ms. Powell states:

“At some level, I must have thought he really wouldn’t go through with it. I never thought I would hear anyone representing the United States of America stand before a federal judge and flat-out ignore the law in such a blatant abuse of power.”

Court ended with no decision made. Ms. Powell started asking herself why the government was going to re-try Mr. Brown. The millions of tax dollars already wasted. Why would they continue to spend money and pursue this case—unless—they were protecting someone—but whom? They were fighting way too long and too hard. They were covering up something.

At this point former task force director Weissmann was at megafirm Jenner & Block, heading up its white-collar defense practice. You see they all work together for the betterment of themselves, not for their clients. Prosecution—defense—it doesn’t matter. They are all cut from the same cloth and work for the same goals. They often even go to lunch together, or defense and prosecutor lawyers are married.

Matthew Friedrich’s climb up the ladder was even more prestigious. He became special counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and was smack in the middle of the action in that department, including Gonzales’s firing of US Attorneys across the country. After Gonzales resigned in 2007, Friedrich became Michael Mukasey, the new attorney general’s deputy chief of staff.  It was at this point that Spencer was trying so hard to send Jim Brown back to prison.

“Little did anyone know that Friedrich would soon be deep into manipulating another extremely high-profile case, to which he would apply all the dirty tricks he, Weissmann, Ruemmler, and others had used so effectively to achieve wrongful convictions on the Enron Task Force.

Discussion

The point of discussion from this chapter is how these prosecutors get rewarded now for these illegal prosecutions. No longer are they interested in observing the law or seeing that justice is done. Instead, they’ve seen how rewards are handed out to prosecutors who achieve convictions, no matter what tactics are used—legal or illegal. Now it appears that “win no matter what the method” is the going Prosecutor 101 lesson.

Let’s look at the Eastern District of New York, the home base of Loretta Lynch, current U.S. Attorney General.  The Eastern District of New York US Attorney’s Office includes 200 attorneys. Loretta Lynch was the US Attorney for this district from 1999-2001when she started out as a drug and violent-crime prosecutor and 2010-2015. From 2001-2010 she was a partner at Hogan & Hartson (later Hogan Lovells). She became the U.S. Attorney General in 2015.

Roslynn Mauskopf preceded her and was US Attorney from 2001-2007, when it would appear the attacks on doctors began. Then she became a U.S. Judge

From 2007-2010, Benton Campbell was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District. Then he became a partner at Latham & Watkins in NYC.  Latham & Watkins wrote the following when Campbell joined them in 2010: “Campbell also served as a member of the Enron Task Force, where he handled the three-month fraud trial of senior executives from Enron’s Broadband Services Unit. Ben is widely respected in the New York Bar and he has earned a stellar reputation for his trial skills, legal acumen and leadership.”  So his Enron experience, which we are currently reading about as prosecutorial misconduct, launched his career, but the law firm considered his work a positive, not a negative.

A few doctors were attacked during the reign of both Mauskopf and Campbell, but they really took off during Loretta Lynch’s second tenure, from 2010 to 2015. Probably current cases started being investigated under her watch. So far, doctors identified as being attacked in the Eastern District of New York number 19. Gee, I wonder if her success at confiscating doctors’ assets had anything to do with her making U.S. Attorney General.

You will find all of the cases against doctors that I have found so far listed by district on this page of the website: http://doctorsofcourage.org/index.php/charged/