Give Me Some Smelling Salts: Did I Really Read This?

() wisecatI did a double take at the lead of the article“The US attorney goes way overboard.”  I was reading the Boston Globe so I figured the column by Scot Lehigh was about some US attorney out in New Mexico who was prosecuting those who cross our borders illegally.  Glancing at it I saw the name Tim Sullivan which did not ring a bell until the name Mayor Marty Walsh came into view. It wasn’t about some US attorney in a far away land it was about our own US attorney; it was about the Globe’s Bostonian of the Year and its witting servant of many years Carmen Ortiz the Boston US attorney. 

What happened I wondered? It always appeared they had a tacit agreement that it would not criticize her as long as she played along with it. It would pick some people to write nasty things about and she would call a federal grand jury to investigate them. It could always depend on her to add publicity to its stories with an indictment or two against people it did not like. In return it appeared she was just too marvelous for any words to be written against the way she ran her office.

Yesterday I wrote about her gimmick of charging people without criminal records with offenses that carried serious penalties even though their actions were not really criminal. I noted there are few who can afford to defend themselves in federal court from specious charges which will take away as much money as it takes to send a kid to a good college for four years. On top of that at the end if you insist on your innocence and go to trial but the jury of strangers thinks otherwise you’ll be spending the next few Christmases away. And if you are unlucky, you may be called back, put before a grand jury and forced to tell all you know about anything anyone else you may have met had done. That way they can keep you tied up for years afterwards. 

 Scot Lehigh knows Tim Sullivan, calling him “honest, civil and gentlemanly,” so he might have managed to slip this past the editors; or, perhaps the Globe seeing that Ortiz cannot do any more favors for it has decided to tear up their understanding and throw her overboard;  or Lehigh is so outraged, as he should be, he convinced his bosses to let him take a well deserved shot at Ortiz. 

Lehigh complains that Sullivan belong in this jam noting there  is “no allegation that Sullivan himself benefited in any way”.  Where was Scot when the Probation Commissioner John O’Brien was being tried and there was no allegation he benefited. Or to the many other prosecutions where there was no allegation like that of retired FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick?

Lehigh points to other prosecutors who rightly suggest this is huge overkill. Of course it takes a guy who has seen it all to come up with the right answer which should be in big bold letters that stare every federal prosecutor in the face when he arrives at work each day. Former Attorney General Frank Bellotti is quoted as saying: “My general feeling is that when you have that power to prosecute and indict, once you come down, it doesn’t make any difference whether they are guilty or innocent — they are destroyed.”

Lehigh adds: “For my money, that’s exactly what Ortiz risks doing here: destroying two decent people because of actions that, though they may have been misguided, weren’t corrupt.” I

Welcome aboard, Scot. It is a little late but better late than never. You can put away the smelling salts.

4 Comments

  1. On the other hand,

    The sight/sound of Trump and Clinton shedding their reptile skins on the way to re-birth, might be too much for the viewing public to absorb in a mere ninety minutes. Then, again , illumination might be instantaneous.

  2. wa-llahi! Nobody wants to talk about the debate? Why not? Glorious Leader delivered a sterling performance, fully exposing what lazy-minded, loud-mouthed fool, he truly is. Where are the trumpeters now? I’m not being contemptuous. Trump is beneath contempt. Prof. Duke must be seething with disappointment. The great white hope had feet of clay. Oct.9 cannot arrive too soon.
    I gotta take to the way-back, if this was ’68, some gang of merry pranksters would be figuring out a way to dose both those yayhoos thirty minutes before the debate. Talk about a howl! Oh my Brothers, that would be a spectacle worthy of the Toast Masters of Taft.

  3. Abusive prosecutions by the government are not intended to destroy individuals though they do just that. The real target is the people in large. The individual is puny and of little consequence, but the general population of a class is large and is meant to be intimidated.

    Example, the DOL [Department of Labor] has just filed a lawsuit against Palantir Technologies for discrimination against Asians. The company took on 11 Asians out of 25 hires. The pretext is that 85% of the applicants were Asians and only 44% of those hired were, therefore discrimination is obvious. Palantir is a software firm that deals in security sensitive products which necessitates personnel decisions that by their very nature often must be obscured.

    At stake is access to a minimum of $340 million worth of contracts. That is a powerful incentive to kowtow to the whims of political appointees.

    So, what is the backstory? Palantir’s co-founder is Peter Thiel and he spoke at the GOP convention for Donald Trump. This is a warning to business CEOs that you better not stray off the Obama/Clinton plantation or else. Thiel has left the barn. He is not the target though he gets to take the bullet. The lawsuit will go nowhere, but the intimidation will rock coast to coast and beyond.

    Secretary of Labor Perez is playing Third World Thug politics. So is Ortiz. When you import a large Third World population you cannot keep a First World country.

    If you want to reform a man you must start with changing his grandparents. Assimilation takes generations as the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York [D] detailed in his academic works on the myth of the Melting Pot. The more the emigrants’ homeland differs from our culture the longer it takes. The encouragement of so-called diversity, that is, the retention of alien customs, prolongs the process further.

    The difference between your idea of fairness and justice with that of Carmen Ortiz is in large measure cultural. She is different from you. It is insurmountable. For centuries the Irish suffered horribly under English tyranny. It is ironic that those woeful travails made it easier for Irish migrants to our shores to assimilate quicker into American mores. Their culture was already familiar with the uniquely Anglo-Saxon ideals, however abused in Ireland, that the Revolution brought to fruition.

  4. Matt,
    Last week I mentioned fact-checking (apologies for not fact-checking Norfolk and Middlesex county jurisdictions) as a possible future topic for today.

    Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact.com has a pretty good analysis of last night’s debate as far as truthfulness or reality of some of the statements made by both candidates.

    It’s worth a look…..

    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/sep/26/live-fact-checking-first-trump-clinton-presidentia/

    A few personal observations…
    -Trump reminded me of a fighter who abandons his trainer’s game plan early in the fight. He was noticeably restrained at the beginning (well-coached) but reverted to form interrupting and talking over pretty quickly…
    -Hillary seemed a little softer and more humanized after all I have been seeing and reading about her leading up to this historic debate…answers were more direct than I expected.
    -Trump made a few stupid comments but not as bad as I thought he would.
    -This debate made the race tighter
    -Looking forward to the next two (I believe that they will be joined by Gary Johnson in the third and final debate)
    -This one might trump the “hanging chad” Election of 2000 (Bush conspiracy?) for intrigue and closeness. Pun intended.