Criminal inquiry over CIA tapes - John Durham to Lead ("Whitey" Bulger prosecutor)

The Hartford Courant (Jan 2, 2008) reports:

U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has named John Durham, the first assistant U.S. attorney from Connecticut, to lead an investigation into the destruction by CIA personnel of videotapes of detainee interrogations."...

.... "An investigation of this kind, relating to the CIA, would ordinarily be conducted under the supervision of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the District in which the CIA headquarters are located," Mukasey said in a press release. "However, in an abundance of caution and on the request of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, in accordance with Department of Justice policy, his office has been recused from the investigation of this matter, in order to avoid any possible appearance of a conflict with other matters handled by that office."

"Mr. Durham is a widely respected and experienced career prosecutor who has supervised a wide range of complex investigations in the past, and I am grateful to him for his willingness to serve in this capacity. As the Acting United States Attorney for purposes of this investigation, Mr. Durham will report to the Deputy Attorney General, as do all United States Attorneys in the ordinary course. I have also directed the FBI to conduct the investigation under Mr. Durham's supervision."....

Edward Mahoney's story in the Courant (Jan 28, 2001) (Avenging Angel Takes On FBI)provides insight into who Durham is, in the eyes of his colleagues and opposition attorneys:

... One year in Connecticut, as an assistant U.S. attorney, he put a third of New England's mafia in jail. He has never lost a case....

...Two and one-half years ago, then-U.S. Attorney General Janet C. Reno appointed Durham to explore allegations that, for three decades, FBI agents and police officers in Boston have been in bed with the mob. In particular, he is looking for crimes committed by agents working with James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, two murderous gangsters who served as FBI informants for a combined 50 years.

What Durham has found to date is nothing less than sensational, judging from what has become part of the public record.

Among other things, he has accused a decorated FBI agent of setting up at least three murders and he is examining evidence suggesting that a second agent might have participated in another - the execution of a former owner of World Jai Alai Inc., once one of the country's leading parimutuel businesses. What's more, he has charged state and local police officers in Massachusetts with secretly helping Bulger and Flemmi. A half dozen bodies have been unearthed from secret graves scattered around the city.

Last month, Durham gave defense lawyers secret government memos suggesting that unscrupulous FBI officials – probably with the knowledge of ex-Director J. Edgar Hoover – framed four men for a 1965 murder. State prosecutors, after 30 years of intransigence, immediately began steps to drop charges against the four - two of whom died of old age in prison.

To say Durham has been turning heads in Boston's clubby legal community is an understatement. That's nothing new in Connecticut, where Durham has compiled one of the most successful prosecutorial records in the country.

"You underestimate Durham at your own peril," said Hugh Keefe, a New Haven defense lawyer.

Successful prosecutors often leave embittered defense lawyers and alienated witnesses in their wakes, victims of a win-at all-costs mentality. Durham, by all accounts, is a refreshing departure. A colleague, struggling for the right description, recently caught himself short and confessed: "I don't want to get maudlin here. But he really is a good person." Even defense lawyers known to attack prosecutors reflexively have little criticism.

"There is nothing negative that I can say," Boston lawyer Anthony Cardinale said. "So if you're looking for that, I'm not in that mode."

Cardinale would seem like a shoo-in for the negative, having been one of a half-dozen lawyers who squared off against Durham in Hartford in the early 1990s in what then was the biggest mob trial in the country. His client, Louis "Louie Pugs" Pugliano, got life without parole. So frustrated was Cardinale, who has defended clients in some of the country's more notable organized crime trials, that he nearly got himself jailed for contempt."

He's obviously a very fierce competitor," Cardinale said. "But he's not a zealot. And he does it by the rules. He is very professional. He is courteous. I've been up against them all over the country and I'd put him in the top echelon of federal prosecutors. He's such a decent guy you can't hate him. That can make it hard to get motivated."

The view from within law enforcement is even less complicated.

"There is no more principled, there is no more better living, there is no finer person that I know of or have encountered in my life," said Richard Farley, a former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's New Haven division.

Or, Farley might have added, anyone who pays such close attention to detail....

...He likes to hunt ducks, work trout with a fly rod and still looks fit. He has thinning hair, steel-framed glasses and probably a closet full of gray suits. He has a tart sense of humor and, despite a daunting professional schedule, is a fixture at wakes and retirements. He takes Lent seriously and rarely misses Mass on Sunday....

...Through the 1980s and '90s, Durham prosecuted or supervised every organized crime case in Connecticut. His team contributed critical evidence to the conviction in New York of Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He conceived the strategy that put Connecticut's big cities a decade ahead of those in neighboring states in eradicating violent urban crack gangs - a strategy that was later adopted elsewhere in the country. He demoted himself to assistant U.S. attorney about two years ago - guilt, friends said, over spending too much time in Boston."

John was given that thing in Boston, I am quite convinced, because he has a reputation for being above the fray, of being absolutely incorruptible and of absolutely calling things the way he sees them," said Ira Grudberg, a defense lawyer in New Haven. "Despite the fact that he can be a hard ass about certain things, I believe he is a real straight shooter."

Durham has built a career on the presumptive integrity of the criminal justice system. Criminals are supposed to know that their punishments are just because the system operates without bias. Durham was sent to Boston as a special prosecutor to investigate signs that the system had failed....

Election Rigging Goes High into GOP, Cheney's office catches fire

Greg Gordon reports on the McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day
scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's
tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he
believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will
publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the
blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

Raymond's book, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican
Operative," offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled
and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all
costs....

...The 2002 New Hampshire Senate race, in which GOP Rep. John Sununu edged
Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen by 19,000 votes, was among several targeted by
Republicans seeking to win control of the U.S. Senate.

Raymond said those who've tried to make him the fall guy for the New
Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other
evidence documented the complicity of a top state GOP official and the
Republican National Committee's northeast regional director.

Both men were later convicted of charges related to the phone harassment,
along with Raymond and an Idaho phone bank operator. Defense lawyers have since
won a retrial for James Tobin, the former regional director for both the RNC and
the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

A lawyer for Tobin didn't respond to phone messages.

GOP committees have paid Washington law firms more than $6 million to defend
Tobin and to fight a Democratic civil suit against the party. Raymond, himself a
former RNC official, said in the book and an interview that he believes that the
scandal reaches higher.

"Any tactic that didn't pass the smell test would never see the light of day
without, — at the very least, the approval of an RNC attorney," he wrote.

Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the New Hampshire Democratic party, said that phone
records obtained in the civil suit showed that Tobin made 22 calls to
the White House political office in the 24 hours before and after the
jamming....

Today, James Gerstenzang at the Los Angeles Times reports:

A fire erupted this morning in the vicinity of Vice President Dick Cheney's ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. The vice president was not in the office at the time, a White House spokesman said.

Thick, black smoke billowed out of the windows and balcony doorway of an adjacent office. The century-old stone building on Pennsylvania Avenue was evacuated. Deputy White House Press Secretary Scott Stanzel said many of the 1,700 employees of the Executive Office of the President work in the building.

There were no injuries reported. The cause of the fire was not immediately disclosed....

Oh, how convenient can a fire be! Let's all figure out what records were burned this morning.

Could the destroyed records have anything to do with the White House's participation in the discussions with CIA about the possible destruction of the CIA torture videos?

WASHINGTON (AFP) - - The White House on Wednesday made a rare public demand for a formal correction from the New York Times for implying that it had misled the US public over the destruction of CIA interrogation videos....

...Late Tuesday, the Times reported that four top White House lawyers were more involved than previously acknowledged in the decision.

Citing current and former administration and intelligence officials, which it did not name, the Times said that the four took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2005 on the question of whether to keep recordings of the sessions with two Al-Qaeda operatives.

"The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged," it said.

The Times cited "conflicting accounts" as to whether any of the lawyers supported destroying the tapes, but cited one former top intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter as saying that "there had been 'vigorous sentiment' among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes."

Other officials told the Times that no-one at the White House called for destroying the tapes -- but that no White House lawyer ordered that they be preserved or warned that destroying them might be illegal.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino angrily denounced the Times's sub-headline -- "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said" -- in a highly unusual written statement that demanded a formal correction.

"The New York Times' inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling, and we are formally requesting that NYT correct the sub-headline of this story," she said....