Misplaced Priorities

[Universe Prince]

Excerpts from "A Glimpse Into Government: What those Justice Department emails really reveal" by Radley Balko:

In addition to its misplaced priorities, this Justice Department has endured allegations of illegal spying and wiretapping, abuse of national security letters, neglecting federalism in its enforcement of drug and death penalty policies, attempting to suspend habeas corpus for terrorism suspects, and all-around contempt for the Constitution. It’s sad, but not terribly surprising, that it would take accusations of excessive partisanship – that is, unfairly using the office to gain a political advantage over the Democrats – to spur the Democrats in Congress to take any meaningful action. Trample on the rights of U.S. citizens, and the Democrats largely look the other way – can’t be seen as soft on crime, or on national security. But trample on the political prospects of Democrats, and the subpoenas fly.

   [...]

The discrepancy understandably gave Charlton pause: How could he prosecute a company for violating federal obscenity laws when another company was making money for the federal government selling the same titles? The conflict didn't seem to faze the Justice Department. Charlton's hesitation sparked a letter of complaint from Brent Ward to Kelvin Sampson. In an office where the attorney general had declared fighting obscenity a "top priority," a complaint from Gonzalez's hand-picked "Porn Czar" undoubtedly carried heft.

   [...]

So here we have several disturbing revelations pertaining to the way the Justice Department operates. And all were revealed via a series of emails pertaining to just one U.S attorney by way of an unrelated scandal. We see in from this one example that a federal prosecutor's attempts to make just a few recommendations on good government and proper procedures with respect to the way federal crimes are prosecuted were shunted aside as unnecessary hurdles to more charges, more convictions, and more sentences. That's worth knowing. And it makes you wonder what else we'd discover were this administration not so hell-bent on keeping everything it possibly can hidden from public scrutiny.

Whole article at Reason Online.