OVERBREADTH

According to the Reporter:

Los Angeles U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien disbanded his public integrity unit last Monday. Those 17 attorneys will be redistributed among the major fraud and organized crime sections.

Don’t be nervous though. This is good news for those who want to see public corruption prosecuted diligently.

“Our view is that it’s a significant enhancement of the public corruption unit,” he said.

I understand where he’s coming from. I once watched a large press flatten a car of mine, converting it from something that looked like a destroyed automobile to a giant brick of steel, which was much more suitable for stacking and selling for scrap metal–a “significant enhancement” you might say.

But some disagree, like Irell & Manella partner, John Hueston:

“Obviously the existence of a division in a prosecutor’s office is not itself a guarantee of competence, much less elan,” Hueston said. “However, the dismantlement of that unit in a time the office is supposed to be growing is troubling.”

Hueston apparently has a difficult time seeing how disbanding a group can be a “significant enhancement.” He is mistaken. One need only look at history (e.g., when the New Kids on the Block disbanded).

I know conspiracy theorists among you are going to look at recent events with Elliott Spitzer and suspect that this has something to do with a perceived negative tendency of public corruption units to expose public corruption.

But one former prosecutor theorized at TPM there was a different motive: statistics.

“Public corruption cases are very difficult and very time consuming,” the former prosecutor explained. “A lot of that doesn’t result in a statistic.”

Like Huckabee, I didn’t major in math, but apparently there’s some trick with fractions where you can get a bigger number by, instead of increasing the numerator, decreasing the denominator. I know, it sounds counterintuitive, but apparently this is totally true and accepted in the mathematic community.

So if the justice department is engaging in a perfectly legitimate operation on fractions, why are liberals getting so upset?

One upset liberal is Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who yesterday sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey in which she asked, “What initiated this decision?”

Please provide me with the Department of Justice’s rationale behind eliminating the public corruption unit in Los Angeles, including the specific facts, statistics, and circumstances that drove this decision. What initiated this decision? Who was consulted before making this decision? What was the role of Main Justice and the White House, if any? Did any of the DOJ’s prosecutors in the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section have any input into the decision-making process? How will this decision affect the public corruption cases that have been and are currently being investigated in Los Angeles?

Senator Feinstein needs a lesson in mathematics, and I suspect she’s not going to get one from the White House. She’s also not going to get an immediate answer from Mukasey, who was busy–get this–giving a speech yesterday touting the Department of Justice public corruption efforts. I hope he pointed out in the speech that the proportion of successfully prosecuted public corruption cases is expected to continue to rise.

(Thanks to TPM for the excellent coverage.)

Tags: Law and Disorder //