This is a very interesting book, and very timely, too, considering Eric Holder’s resignation announcement.
The author is an attorney defending a former Merrill Lynch employee, Jim Brown, caught up in the Enron prosecutions, and she writes both about her experience defending Brown (with lots of dialogue which presumably came from trial transcripts rather than reconstructed storytelling), and the bigger picture of what happened with the government’s prosecution of both the Enron case and the Stevens corruption case. The bottom line is that in both cases, the government deliberately, egregiously hid crucial exculpatory evidence from the accused, despite their legal obligation to provide it, called the “Brady” obligation after a court case establishing this requirement.
This was quite eye-opening. I had pretty much thought that the Bad Guys got what was coming to them, and that Stevens, a long-time senator from Alaska, was guilty of abusing his power. But he was exonerated — though he then died in an unexplained plane crash shortly thereafter. As to the Enron case, even Arthur Anderson was exonerated, long after the company was destroyed. I didn’t know this. And the prosecutors went after bit players based on more or less invented crimes, relying on the anger in Houston, and the willingness of judges, for their convictions. Powell’s client was in the end partially exonerated, and had a new trial ordered for other of his “crimes,” which in the end, the federal prosecutors declined to prosecute, after they apparently accidentally revealed that they had previously been hiding exculpatory information.
The biggest actual fraudster in the Enron case, Andrew Fastow, happily cooperated with the DoJ’s other prosecutions, testifying for them, and served less than 6 years in prison.
It’s not even partisan politics, because these cases began under the Bush administration and continued under Obama. The bottom-line reason for the DoJ corruption was that winning convictions was the path towards career advancement — and in an epilogue, Powell chronicles the fate of these lawyers, not meeting a downfall worthy of their misdeeds, but advancing in ranks in government work or in private law firms. The most notable of these promotions was Kathryn Ruemmler, who suppressed exculpatory evidence, made her way to White House counsel.
And Holder? When these cases came to light, he announced that henceforth, the DoJ would follow the law, then started backtracking and has not implemented any serious reform. Powell doesn’t point to any current prosecutions where Justice attorneys are suppressing exculpatory evidence — but the key is that in both the Enron and the Stevens cases, it wasn’t known until after the fact, due to “accidental” revelations or whistleblowers, that this happened.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In