by Claire Wolfe
So after a nine-week trial, years of investigation, and who knows how many millions of our tax dollars, a jury found baseball star Roger Clemens not-guilty on all six charges. It took them just 10 hours.
Did Clemens use steroids or human growth hormone to enhance his athletic performance? I don’t know. I don’t care.
The federal government shouldn’t care, either. That’s a matter for Major League Baseball to deal with.
Nevertheless, Congress has been gaga about athletes and drugs since the Bush II administration, and the crimes the Department of Justice (sic) tried to pin on Clemens all involved lying to Congress.
Think about that: lying to the biggest pack of liars on the planet. The DoJ was eager to ruin a man’s reputation, take his freedom, force him to spend millions, and cost him his shot at the Baseball Hall of Fame for that.
The main witness against Clemens, former trainer Brian McNamee (who claims to have delivered the shots to the star’s butt), is a co-conspirator if his story is true. He’s a perjuror if it’s not. But don’t hold your breath for him to be put in the dock; even when they’re obviously lying (and in McNamee’s case, we don’t know) prosecution witnesses are seldom held accountable for even the most outrageous falsehoods.
The opponents are set to meet again in civil court and that should be interesting.
But the main thing is that this huge federal case was based on hearsay “evidence” from one informant — whose claims and character were questioned by a long parade of defense witnesses.
The DoJ seems to be making a habit out of cases like this.
Worse, they’re doing it at a time when the country is staggering under real problems. When the reckless gamblers and crooked mortgage lenders who set off the crisis of 2008 not only walk free but are richer than ever. When Jon Corzine steals $1.6 billion — that’s billion, with a “b” — of clients’ money and hasn’t spent a single night in jail. When the DoJ and its own leaders are lying their heads of about their murderous Fast & Furious “gunwalking” program. While even the formerly innocuous federal General Services Administration is buying itself Las Vegas orgies — all without legal consequence.
The “good” thing about these big, showy federal prosecutions is that, these days, so many of them are falling flat, flat, flat on their ugly faces.
A few examples:
John Edwards? He’s a cad you wouldn’t want your daughter to date. But when a jury deadlocked after finding him not-guilty of the most serious charge related to misuse of presidential campaign finances, the DoJ had to drop its case. That case, too, was based on the testimony of one guy with a grudge and amazingly little solid evidence.
The Hutaree militia? A federal judge tossed out all the most serious charges against them and freed them from jail. She said that while “something fishy” might have been going on, two FBI agents and hundreds of hours of recordings hadn’t proved it. One of the two undercover agents, Steve Haug, did his aggressive best to talk Hutaree members into creating a conspiracy to bomb something. He couldn’t even manage to invent a crime for them: the Hutaree were just harmless yammerheads.
More quietly, another big federal case fell apart early this year. The Africa Sting was concocted by the FBI and a do-badder named Richard Bistrong who served as its “confidential informant.” Bistrong had gotten himself into trouble violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — a law that the State Department and the DoJ are hot to make big noise with. To cut down his own potential prison sentence, Bistrong dragged 22 small military contractors into a completely invented “conspiracy” (because the defendants went to one party together) to bribe officials of the government of Gabon. The targets of the sting were assured that the State Department had approved the deal to sell equipment to Gabon. They were told they just had to pay a “commission.” The word “bribe” was never used, and not one of the 22 showed the faintest criminal intent.
After two inconclusive trials, the DoJ was forced to drop that case, too. The courts even vacated the convictions of the three who had pleaded guilty (something innocent people often do these days just to end the torment and the money-bleeding).
A few years ago, the DEA, FBI, and IRS conspired to bring a money-laundering case against hip-hop record producer Irv “Gotti” Lorenzo. To give an idea how sloppy these prosecutions are, the entire multimillion dollar case was built on wild lies that the prosecutors never even bothered to check. Gotti’s company was legitimately funded by a couple of other established music industry biggies, but apparently none of the agencies involved in the prosecution bothered to make the simple phone calls or issue the subpoenas to learn that. Disreputable liars making up stories about shoe boxes full of cash from a notorious drug lord were much more entertaining.
In the end, the jury not only found Gotti innocent, but swarmed around him afterwards to congratulate him. One juror hugged him and called Gotti and his also-accused brother Christopher “my boys.”
Yes, it’s “good” when these prosecutions — and others just as cruel, absurd, and sloppy — flop. But it’s hardly “good” that Roger Clemens had five years of his life blighted. Or that some of the Hutaree spent two years in jail awaiting trial. Or that 22 small business people were financially ruined. Or that Gotti got dragged through the mud. John Edwards . . . well, maybe he got what he deserved, but it should be enough that he got it through the tabloids and tell-all books. A federal case? Forget it.
Yet the feds keep doing this. And to ruin lives like this while real crimes against the people — crimes at the highest levels of Wall Street and Washington — crimes that are literally wrecking the country — go unpunished . . . well, that’s a crime in itself.
But who’s going to prosecute?
Thank you to Donna Duvall, who made this blog entry better than it might have been.
Claire Wolfe is the author of the Paladin books The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship, Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook, and I Am Not a Number, and a contributor to The Paladin Book of Dangerously Fun Stuff and Tough Times Survival Guide, Vol. 2.
