Stolen Tomato Paste and Docs Shake Feds

With eight years of dirty tricks and loose laws under their belts, agents of the Rove Republican Racket in the FBI have mastered the art of deception.

Now comes the case out of the Central Valley of California that has shaken the reputation of the FBI and federal prosecutors.

In an undercover operation started in 2006, the feds targeted the so-called "Tomato King," Frederick Scott Salyer. Salyer is the heir to one of the largest agribusinesses in California.

The feds filed 20 charges of mail and wire fraud last February. But yesterday, his defense team struck back hard.

The Salinas Californian reports:

The defense motion is potentially the most damaging counterattack in one of the biggest prosecutions ever against the nation's food industry. Legal experts say case law is clear that the government cannot encourage an informant to steal documents it can legally get for it-self, nor can it acquiesce in such conduct by knowingly accepting the documents. "By the time Manuel's efforts were complete, he had conducted more than 40 illegal searches over a period of 18 months with the complicity and participation of [FBI Special] Agent [Paul] Artley, viewed many thousands of documents and had surreptitiously taken and delivered to the FBI well over a thousand private documents, computer printouts, e-mails, tomato paste samples and other proprietary information," Segal wrote. Manuel became an informant in August 2006 after federal agents searched his home and, in return for his help, the government allowed him to defer a guilty plea to an unrelated crime, work off his prison time and continue receiving his $200,000 salary from Sal-yer, said Segal. The defense accuses Artley of directing or encouraging Manuel to take evidence against Salyer without a search warrant.

No One Would Stop Them

For over 16 months now, our blog has posted stories about the Rove Republican Racket, the web of political operatives headed by Karl Rove that turned the U.S. Department of Justice into a political arm of the Republican Party.

Using the dishonest "Honest Services" crime to lock away Democrats and other political opponents, the Rove-Bush-Cheney Administration's DOJ hacks consistently engaged in prosecutorial misconduct or other unsavory practices to bring fear and intimidation into the political process.Some of those practices backfired.

Now the mainstream media are picking it up.

Titled "Judicial System Takes a Hit," Michael Hiltzik, a Los Angeles Times business columnist, (pictured) wrote a piece over the weekend about the prosecutorial misconduct in the Broadcom back-dating case, which was staged in the heart of Republican country: Orange County, California.

The  judge in the case chastised the prosecutors for a "shameful campaign" to intimidate witnesses and obtain unjustified convictions. 

Hiltzik's column has a revealing quote from a legal expert on why the renegade Republican prosecutors have consistently broken the rules to jail opponents:

"In the post- 9/11 years, a lot of prosecutors got emboldened to go as far as they could and play as dirty as they could, figuring that no one would stop them," Bennett Gershman of Pace University law school, the author of a legal text on prosecutorial misconduct, told me. "Judges seem to have become emboldened by what they see the prosecutors doing."

 Amen, Brother Gershman!

Silicon Valley's New DA Under Fire

The Queen of the Rove Republican Racket in the Silicon Valley, Dolores Carr, narrowly lost her re-election bid in June. As readers recall, she spurred a boycott of a sitting judge after the judge had lambasted prosecutorial misconduct in Carr's office.

Now the incoming prosecutor is under fire by Carr's friends for his own prosecutorial misconduct.

The San Jose Mercury News writes:

The prosecutor who narrowly won the race for Santa Clara County district attorney has been flagged for misconduct by an appellate court for the second time in his career — though in both cases the panel found the errors "harmless" and upheld the underlying criminal convictions.

The 6th District Court of Appeal this week found that Deputy District Attorney Jeff Rosen violated a judge's order in a 2008 trial by disclosing to a jury that a man on trial for rape had a criminal background. Nine years ago, an appellate court found Rosen erred in a different case — also by divulging evidence that could bias the jury against the defendant, despite orders from a judge not to do so.

Rosen's political opponents Thursday seized on Wednesday's decision by the appellate court as proof that the prosecutor who will replace first-term District Attorney Dolores Carr in January is unethical — and a hypocrite to boot for attacking Carr's ethics during the contentious campaign.

Katrina Killers and the Cover-up

We have focused extensively on corrupt prosecutors, unethical U.S. Attorneys, and renegade law enforcement officers.  The Rove Republican Racket inspired a generation of arrogant and incompetent attorneys and officers of the law.

The Rove-Bush-Cheney Administration's biggest domestic failure was the response to Hurricane Katrina.

But even more troubling were the alleged actions by six police officers (pictured) after the hurricane hit.

But now, under the era of Obama, justice is being sought. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

Six current or former New Orleans police officers were charged in a sweeping federal grand jury indictment Monday that accuses four of the men of shooting unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge several days after Hurricane Katrina and all six of them of plotting to cover up what they knew was an unjustified attack. The charges, unsealed Tuesday, are the culmination of a two-year probe by the federal government, the third investigation into the hugely controversial events that took place on the bridge on Sept. 4, 2005. The first inquiry, led by police, found no wrongdoing by officers. A state grand jury convened to look into the matter charged seven officers with murder, but the case later fell apart.

Since the fall of 2008, federal investigators have been in charge of Danziger, and earlier this year, prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice broke the case wide open, showing their hand through a series of guilty pleas from officers who acknowledged the bridge shootings were unjustified and that police had conspired to cover them up. The indictment charges the rest of the officers involved in what prosecutors have termed a "bad shoot" and the alleged coverup that followed.

Stunning Defeat for "Race War" Alabama Governor

Alabama Governor Bob Riley, a Rove Republican,  has made it a cornerstone of his last year in office to target African-Americans and their jobs by using his Gestapo to shut down a local government-backed casino in the heart of the Blackbelt: Greene County, Alabama.

We wrote about Riley's Race War earlier this month.

Riley is working with a left-over Bush appointed U.S. Attorney to chill free speech and intimidate casino operators, Democrats, and African-Americans (which they like to call "Negroes" or worse down in backwards Alabama.)

Yesterday, Riley was handed a stunning loss: his hand-picked successor for Governor,  Republican Bradley Byrne, lost! Amazingly, Byrne lost in a run-off after having won a plurality in the first round of voting in early June.

The racist assault on Greene County has obviously backfired but the economic damage has shaken Alabama.

This week, Riley had the audacity to send a mobile "unemployment" office to Greene County.

Today's Tuscaloosa  News writes: 

The arrival of the industrial relations department with its mobile Career Center is in response to the recent raid on Greenetrack by Gov. Bob Riley's Task Force on Illegal Gambling. The task force, with the aid of the Alabama Supreme Court, removed more than 800 electronic bingo machines from Greenetrack and about 375 people lost their jobs at Greene County's largest employer. Luther W. “Nat” Winn, president and CEO of Greenetrack, said he was insulted by the Career Center's arrival in Eutaw, a move he believes was orchestrated by Riley and his administration. “Greenetrack employees signed up for their unemployment ... the day Bob Riley's task force put them out of a job,” Winn said. “And if Bob Riley wants to help the people of Greene County, then he needs to send them jobs with comparable wages to what they were making at Greenetrack, along with benefits.”

Targeting Protestors in Santa Cruz

With the Patriot Act in hand, U.S. Attorneys from the Rove Republican Racket love to call political opponents terrorists or corrupt.

In Santa Cruz, California a few animal rights activists were targeted by over-zealous federal prosecutors, but the case was dismissed on Monday.

Although prosecutors want to target these activists again, we suspect the four protestors aren't high-paying Republicans.


The San Jose Mercury News reports:

A federal judge on Monday dismissed the indictment against four animal rights activists accused of a violent protest at the home of a UC Santa Cruz researcher more than a year and a half ago, but attorneys involved in the case estimated the legal battle is far from over. U.S. District Court Judge Ronald White, who heard arguments on the motions to dismiss the case a month ago, sided with the activists in a 14-page ruling issued Monday. "...(T)he indictment fails to allege the facts of the crimes charged with sufficient specificity," the judge's ruling stated.

Joseph Buddenberg, Maryam Khajavi, Nathan Pope and Adriana Stumpo were arrested in February 2009 and charged with interfering with animal enterprise - a violation of a federal law - and conspiracy. Attorneys for the four filed motions this spring that challenged the indictment, stating in court documents that the allegations were too vague and failed to outline the criminal behavior the group is accused of taking part in. "The reason the indictment was so sketchy is because the government didn't want to put it out there in public that these people are accused of being terrorists for picketing," said Robert Bloom, attorney for Buddenberg. " ... It's not a crime to picket. Nobody has committed a crime in this case."

"Serious Fault" with U.S. Prosecutors

As you most likely know, Roman Polanski, the famed film director (pictured) who has been under house arrest in Switzerland, was not extradited to the U.S. today.

Although Los Angeles County prosecutors and U.S. State Department spokesmen are attempting to say  the Swiss let a sex offender off the hook, the truth is the Swiss let Polanski go because U.S. prosecutors failed to turn over documents.

The decision was not based on the merits of the case. It was based on prosecutorial negligence.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

In its decision Monday, the Swiss Justice Department said it could not exclude the possibility that the extradition request was "undermined by a serious fault" because the U.S. had failed to turn over certain documents. Specifically, the Swiss wanted to determine whether the 42 days Polanski had already spent in a Los Angeles jail would have been considered sufficient time served for having sex with a minor. Also, Swiss authorities said that until 2009, the U.S. had not filed any extradition request against Polanski "for years," even though it knew he had bought a house in Switzerland in 2006 and was a regular visitor there. That gave the director a reasonable expectation that he was not under threat of arrest and deportation from there. "Roman Polanski would not have decided to go to the film festival in Zürich in September 2009 if he had not trusted that the journey would not entail any legal disadvantages for him," the Swiss justice department said.