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Walsh's Vendetta: Criminalizing Political Disputes
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20696 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
2,238 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Fein
Bruce Fein is a constitutional and international lawyer as
well as a journalist. |
Last June 16, the Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) obtained a grant jury indictment against former Department of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. The indictment accuses Weinberger of with holding records that would have revealed to congressional investigating committees and the OIC his knowledge of a November 1985 transfer of Hawk missiles to Israel to replenish Israeli sales to Iran, and Saudi Arabian financial assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras. Weinberger is further accused of testifying falsely regarding his personal knowledge of these widely publicized facts.
Issued approximately six years after the appointment of an independent counsel (IC) to investigate the Iran-Contra affair, the Weinberger indictment highlights the institutional propensity of the office for political persecution of prominent executive-branch officials associated with failed or unpopular political initiatives. Statutory authorization of the OIC lapses next December 15; history, legal fairness, and the need for bold and forward-looking executive-branch initiatives militate against reauthorization.
Prescient Warning
More than 50 years ago, during the New deal heyday, Attorney General Robert Jackson warned of prosecutorial abuses invited by omnipresent, intrusive, and detailed federal regulation. In an address to federal regulation. In an address to federal prosecutors on April 1, 1940, Jackson worried: "With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost everyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm--in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself."
The OIC is designed for the type of political persecution Jackson worried about. It enjoys virtually unlimited access to money and resources to investigate every nook and cranny of an official's life. For
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