Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice

By David Burnham

The U.S. Department of Justice is an institution of vast reach and power over the American people, with little oversight into its internal operations. This book examines the ways that attorneys general, FBI directors, federal prosecutors and other Justice Department officials have often abused their powers to achieve political goals rather than pursuing justice. Its warning remains as relevant in the digital post-9/11 era of the expanded national security state as it was in the days of J. Edgar Hoover.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781497696853

Book preview

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Law, Order and Politics: The Working of the United States Justice Department

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested four Arab immigrants for bombing New York’s World Trade Center, the FBI agents acted in the name of their parent organization, the United States Justice Department.

When government antitrust lawyers filed suit against AT&T charging that America’s most powerful monopoly was illegally retarding the development of a revolutionary new age in communications, they did so in the name of the United States Justice Department.

When the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) forcibly abducted deposed dictator Manuel Noriega from Panama to face federal drug trafficking charges in Florida after his capture by U.S. military units, the DEA agents acted under the name of their parent organization, the United States Justice Department.

When four hundred deputy U.S. marshals confronted a violent mob of Mississippians in an ultimately successful effort to carry out the court-ordered admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi, they did so as an arm of the United States Justice Department.

When the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) rounded up scores of illegal Chinese aliens after their freighter went aground on a beach near New York City, the INS agents acted in the name of their parent organization, the United States Justice Department.

When the solicitor general of the United States, in an appearance before the United States Supreme Court, argued that the nation’s Constitution required congressional districts of substantially equal population, he did so as a senior official in the United States Justice Department.

When Al Capone was incarcerated in Alcatraz Prison, America’s most notorious gangster experienced life in one of the toughest environments in the United States. The escape-proof prison, located on an island in San Francisco Bay, was operated by the Bureau of Prisons, an arm of the United States Justice Department.

When the nation became obsessed with communism immediately after World War II, the principal operator of the government’s massive and freewheeling effort to discharge allegedly disloyal federal employees was the United States Justice Department.

When evidence emerged suggesting that the Defense Department’s nuclear weapons facility near Denver was violating the nation’s environmental laws, the U.S. attorney for Colorado became the lead player in directing the federal investigation of the corporation that managed the facility.

Thus, in an amazingly helter-skelter way, the Justice Department and its component parts—the solicitor general, the ninety-three U.S. attorneys, the FBI, the antitrust division, the DEA, the INS, the U.S. Marshals and the Bureau of Prisons—have become a significant force in almost every aspect of American life, directly and indirectly influencing the way we work, the way we communicate, the way we learn, the way we govern ourselves and even the way we play.

The broad impact of the Justice Department is not perceived or understood for several reasons. A powerful contrary notion—the idea that the department is just a small bunch of good guy cops going after a lot of bad guy criminals—has been fostered by a compliant media which for many years has lived off staged events, official press releases and the not-for-attribution whispers of ambitious prosecutors. A videotape sequence of agents smashing down the front door of a major cocaine dealer is the lifeblood of television, almost as addictive as the drug itself. A carefully leaked story that the FBI is investigating eight members of Congress for corruption makes the front pages of three major New York and Philadelphia newspapers on the very same day.

The unquenchable thirst for good visuals, hot scoops and a simple story line means the media frequently miss or ignore the quiet but momentous events that often occupy the Justice Department. Of course the reporters and television cameras were present in Little Rock, Arkansas, when the 101st Airborne Division arrived to enforce the federal court order integrating the schools. But the long series of intense White House meetings between Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., and President Dwight D. Eisenhower that led up to Ike’s historic decision were largely ignored.¹ Nor did reporters pay a great deal of attention when Stuart M. Gerson, an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, filed a forty-seven-page memorandum opposing the request that the federal court require the president to obtain a declaration of war from Congress before he ordered American troops to attack Iraqi forces in Kuwait.²

The pervasive ignorance about the Justice Department’s underlying powers and day-to-day operations, however, cannot be blamed only on the media. Frequently, information about momentous actions and decisions of the Justice Department never sees the light of day because of the agency’s strenuous and effective efforts to keep secret the darker aspects of its business.

On August 3, 1948, for example, apparently without informing anyone outside of the Justice Department and only a very few within, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover agreed upon a plan by which President Harry Truman could suspend many of the key safeguards of the Constitution. Under the top-secret agreement, code-named Security Portfolio, the bureau was authorized, in the event of an ill-defined emergency, to summarily arrest up to 20,000 persons and place them in national security detention camps. A watch list of those who would be detained—along with detailed information about what they looked like, where they lived and their place of employment—was developed by the FBI. The decision as to who was placed on the watch list was left to the FBI and included many whose only crime was to openly criticize some aspect of American life. The McGrath-Hoover detention plan did not require the FBI to obtain individual arrest warrants and it would have denied detainees the right to appeal their arrest in federal court.³

Two years later, Congress approved the Internal Security Act of 1950, one section of which officially authorized an emergency detention program. The new legislation, however, presented the attorney general and FBI director with a problem. Because the program authorized by Congress did not suspend the Constitution—detainees, for example, could appeal their incarceration in federal court—it placed the department’s secret detention program, which offered no such right, in violation of the law.

This incongruity worried Hoover, a canny bureaucrat who almost always sought and obtained higher approval for his questionable activities. For two years, while the FBI continued to secretly establish the detention camps and work out detailed seizure plans for thousands of individuals, Hoover kept badgering President Truman’s attorney general for private relief. His request: McGrath’s official permission for the FBI to ignore the 1950 law and carry on with the more ferocious 1948 program.⁴

On November 25, 1952, the attorney general, a heavy-drinking former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, caved in to Hoover. Pursuant to the questions which you have raised in the latter memorandum, I wish to assure you that it is the Department’s intention in the event of an emergency to proceed under the program as outlined in the Department’s Portfolio invoking the standards now used, McGrath wrote in a brief note.⁵

This remarkable letter, in which the nation’s senior law enforcement official formally advised the nation’s top cop to go on breaking the law, remained secret for more than twenty years.

A second example of the Justice Department’s considerable skill at hiding some of its important business from the public occurred about ten years later. At some point in the second half of 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was told that, in the last years of the Eisenhower administration, the CIA had hired Sam Giancana, a senior member of the Mafia, to engage in certain clandestine efforts, sometimes referred to as dirty business, against Fidel Castro.

The subsequent Senate investigation into the Giancana affair, and several other American attempts to assassinate world leaders, found evidence that Kennedy, after being informed that the CIA had hired an organized crime boss to assassinate Castro, had complained about the agency’s failure to consult him about the arrangement but did not seem to question its basic propriety. In addition, the committee was unable to find evidence that either Kennedy or Hoover, after learning about the plot, ever inquired into the nature of the CIA operation with Giancana, or that the attorney general instructed the CIA not to engage in assassination plots in the future. Considering Kennedy’s intense public commitment to the federal government’s all-out attack on organized crime, the attorney general’s apparent lack of curiosity about the CIA-Giancana connection was surprising, perhaps even suggestive. The 1974 Senate investigation, however, further discovered that, between May 1961 and May 1962, Robert Kennedy attended a series of White House meetings that did in fact lead to the development of another contingency plan in connection with the possible removal of Castro from the Cuban scene.⁶

After an extensive investigation of the meetings, the Senate committee said the records it had obtained did not make clear precisely how the officials who took part in these secret sessions were using the word removal. From the context, however, the committee decided that the assassination of the Cuban leader may well have been the objective.

This conclusion is consistent with the committee’s finding that several more efforts to assassinate Castro did in fact go forward during the Kennedy years. By a bizarre coincidence, for example, one of the last U.S. attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader occurred at about midday on November 22, 1963—the same hour and day that John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas. During this particular effort against Castro, which was never consummated, a CIA officer gave a Cuban agent a CIA-designed poison-pen device that was to be used to murder the Cuban leader. Attorney General Kennedy’s extensive, but finally murky, involvement in clandestine efforts to get rid of Castro remained secret for more than a decade.

On November 21, 1986, Attorney General Edwin Meese ordered a secret inquiry into the Reagan administration’s sale of arms to Iran, which had just been revealed by a Lebanese newspaper. Three years later, during a related criminal trial, Meese acknowledged that, as a personal friend and political adviser to the president, the initial purpose of his 1986 probe was to head off a political firestorm that could very well cause the possible toppling of the President himself.

And your focus was really not the focus of an attorney general wearing the attorney general’s hat but it was basically to try to gather information to protect the President as best you could and deal with this enormous political problem brewing in Congress, correct? Meese was asked.

Yes, he replied.⁷

To achieve the narrow goal of protecting his boss from an impeachment investigation by the House of Representatives, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States acted in a most unprofessional way. Instead of selecting seasoned criminal investigators or experts in the legal aspects of covert operations to make his emergency inquiry of the arms sales, Meese chose a small number of personal staff members and political appointees. In picking the members of this team, Meese rejected the formal request of the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Criminal Division that the FBI be brought into the investigation.⁸

Meese also failed to immediately seal important files of the National Security Council (NSC) when his special team arrived at the White House. According to one critical analysis, this failure meant that many of the central documents in the case were altered or destroyed, almost guaranteeing that we will never know the complete truth about what transpired. Further undermining the credibility of the investigation, the critics said, was the fact that Meese’s team disregarded standard investigative procedures such as taking notes in key interviews.⁹

By the time the disturbing defects of Meese’s secret little inquiry became known, important parts of the record had disappeared and the Reagan administration, close to the end of its second term, was no longer in danger of disintegrating.

The power of the attorney general and the United States Justice Department to influence the lives of individual Americans and the course of American history in both open and secret ways is clear. This book is the story of the misuse of that power. It describes situations when—through political calculation, malice, incompetence or neglect—the official agents of this increasingly powerful institution have done harm.

One of the mysteries of modern life is why—while the people working within large organizations often try to do good—the systems they serve often do not. The answer to this apparent conundrum may be more obvious than it seems. Most individuals have an internal moral compass, an ethical guidance system that imposes on them responsibilities and obligations to family, friends and neighbors. By definition, however, large organizations do not have such a compass and seem to demand a blind loyalty that frequently works to subvert the idealism of their employees. As the world continues to create larger, more powerful and less accountable organizations, the task of nurturing the humanity of those who work for dominant organizations like the Justice Department may be one of the most difficult challenges of our age.

However, it is equally obvious that over the years, thousands of principled men and women have sought to exercise the powers of the Justice Department in idealistic and constructive ways to deter or incapacitate society’s outlaws. Ruthless criminals have been sent to prison. Dangerous spies have been uncovered. Exploitative corporations have been forced to live by society’s laws and regulations. Organized efforts designed to deny black Americans their right to vote have been dismantled. It is thus easy to identify countless individual examples in which the Justice Department has met, and even exceeded, the expectations of the American people. That story is an important one that any objective critic must affirm. This book examines the darker side.

WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?

The grand pooh-bah of this incredible mélange of investigative, prosecutive, policy-making and advisory powers, at least according to the official organizational charts, is the attorney general of the United States. As I write, the position is held by a Harvard-trained Miami lawyer named Janet Reno. Like every one of the seventy-six men who preceded her, Reno was appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate and serves as a member of the cabinet.

In many other ways, however, Attorney General Reno is an oddity. Unlike the men George Washington and Ronald Reagan selected as their first attorneys general, for example, Reno did not come to President Bill Clinton’s attention because she had previously been his personal lawyer, the one responsible for protecting the family fortune. That, of course, was the most significant characteristic of Washington’s Edmund Randolph and Reagan’s William French Smith.

Reno also had never been the head of the Democratic Party in her state, the national chairman of her president’s political party or her president’s campaign manager, nor was she an obvious candidate for high elective office herself, all attributes of a surprisingly large number of attorneys general.

It was Levi Lincoln, a Massachusetts lawyer President Thomas Jefferson selected to be attorney general in 1801, who was the first out-and-out political leader to hold the job. Many others followed. President Woodrow Wilson’s best-remembered attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, was an influential Pennsylvania Democrat, a former member of the Democratic National Committee, former senior member of the House of Representatives and a leading candidate to be the Democratic Party’s next nominee for president at the time of his appointment. Warren Harding’s attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty, arguably the biggest crook ever to hold the office, had been Harding’s campaign manager before his appointment. Franklin Roosevelt’s first attorney general, Homer S. Cummings, was a Connecticut politician who previously had headed the Democratic National Committee. Two of Truman’s attorneys general, J. Howard McGrath and J. P. McGranery, were cut from the same cloth. Herbert Brownell, Jr., Eisenhower’s first attorney general, was a New York politician who directed Dewey’s two failed attempts to become president but hit the jackpot as Ike’s de facto campaign manager. Robert Kennedy and John N. Mitchell were the campaign directors and senior political strategists for the men who appointed them, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The man Nixon chose as attorney general when Mitchell stepped down to direct Nixon’s ill-fated second campaign was Richard G. Kleindienst. Kleindienst’s achievements included a year or so as the 1968 director of field operations for Nixon’s campaign committee and as the general counsel of the Republican National Committee and, before that, a stint with the presidential campaign organization of Barry Goldwater. Griffin B. Bell, an experienced corporate lawyer, was the chairman of JFK’s campaign in Georgia, a federal judge and a family friend before Jimmy Carter selected him to be attorney general. Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s second attorney general, got his start in public life as a hard-charging local prosecutor during the turbulent free speech disputes at the University of California at Berkeley. He then became a leading conservative figure, first as an assistant to Governor Reagan in Sacramento and then to President Reagan in Washington.

It is hard to overstate the casually cynical way so many presidents have gone about the job of selecting their attorneys general. One interesting example of how little presidential concern is generally invested in assuring the quality of the person often called the nation’s number one law enforcement officer involved Franklin Roosevelt.

Shortly before New Year’s Day of 1939, FDR asked Robert H. Jackson to join him for lunch at the White House. Jackson, a distinguished and competent lawyer then serving as the solicitor general, was the obvious candidate to replace Homer Cummings, FDR’s first attorney general, who had recently announced his plans to retire after six years in office.

During the lunch, Jackson later recalled, Roosevelt told him that he truly was the person he wanted to nominate as attorney general. But here’s my problem. Frank Murphy has been beaten for governor of Michigan. Frank hasn’t got one nickel to rub against another. He’s got to have a job on the federal payroll. Having been governor of Michigan, and having been in the Philippines as high commissioner, I can’t offer him anything less than a cabinet position. It’s the only vacancy I’ve got. I don’t think Frank ought to be attorney general. It isn’t his forte, but temporarily I don’t know of anything to do but appoint him and take care of him.¹⁰

Jackson later wrote that he told FDR he understood the president’s dilemma and would be willing to stay on as solicitor general. So, early in 1940, Frank Murphy became attorney general, a position he held until FDR found him another job about a year later, when Jackson took on the overall command of the Justice Department.

In backhanded ways, even the Justice Department sometimes has obliquely acknowledged the seedy character of several of its maximum leaders. Consider, for example, the two long rows of portraits that hang along the echoing hallway outside the spacious fifth-floor office of the attorney general. These are the attorneys general of the United States. A few faces, however, are missing in action. The mystery of their abduction was solved a few years ago when an enterprising Washington Post reporter noticed The Hall of Shame, a short hallway located in a seldom visited area on the building’s seventh floor. Hanging there in not-so-splendid obscurity were John Mitchell, Richard Kleindienst, Harry Daugherty and Ramsey Clark. The first three, of course, were perfectly understandable: They had all been charged with committing criminal acts while in office.

But why Clark? Although he had indeed been viewed as an outspoken liberal while serving as Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general, did the profoundly conservative civil servants of the Justice Department really think liberalism was a sufficiently serious offense to warrant Clark’s exile? Maybe not. His crime, it seems, was an artistic one. Apparently, Clark had been banished to the seventh floor because of his decision to hire an artist who had painted his official portrait in a mildly unorthodox impressionistic style. (Edwin Meese, one of Ronald Reagan’s more controversial attorneys general, had not been banished to the seventh floor despite his having been investigated by three special prosecutors and the conclusion of one of them that he had violated a number of criminal statutes.¹¹ Meese, it should be recalled, was never actually indicted.)

The involvement of so many attorneys general in the rough and tumble of national politics is not, by itself, improper. And the performance of distinguished attorneys general like Theodore Roosevelt’s Charles J. Bonaparte, Franklin Roosevelt’s Francis Biddle and Jerry Ford’s Edward H. Levi proves that even with its built-in conflicts, the job can be handled in an honorable fashion. But the powerful intensity and nonstop nature of the political connections makes it reasonable to ask how frequently self-serving partisan considerations come into play at the Justice Department; the extent to which improper considerations have influenced law enforcement actions—who gets investigated and who gets charged—and the advice given to a succession of presidents on sensitive policy issues.

Given the fact that so many attorneys general actually have directed the political campaigns of the men who appointed them, it is hardly surprising that some enforcement actions are judged in political, sometimes partisan, terms. While such considerations are difficult to prove and almost always denied, concrete evidence of such calculations does exist. During an examination of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department papers at the Kennedy Library in Boston, for example, I found copies of political polls conducted by Louis Harris, Oliver Quayle and several other pollsters in 1961, 1962 and 1963. One of the polls sought to assess the views of Democratic voters in Maryland, including how they felt about Negro Opportunity in Maryland, Negro Equality in U.S., President’s Civil Rights Program and the conflicting rights of property owners and Negroes in public accommodation disputes.

This particular poll, which Attorney General Kennedy probably had before him in late 1963 as he was making enforcement decisions regarding the nation’s civil rights laws, carried an unsigned handwritten notation that Joseph Tydings—a liberal Maryland senator of the day—is anxious to keep this confidential.¹²

A key point of representative democracy at the federal level, of course, is to make the government, including the Justice Department, responsive to the will of a majority of the voters that elected the president. It remains unsettling, however, to know that Kennedy—the chief law enforcement officer of the United States—was scanning the latest political polls while deciding how the department would handle various civil rights challenges. Was the attorney general making his decisions on the basis of his assessment of the legal issues or because the polls showed that 44 percent of the Democratic voters felt Negroes should be given a better opportunity to participate in American life; 37 percent said there should be no change; 12 percent were unsure and 7 percent said they should have less opportunity?

The concern about the extent to which improper political considerations manifest themselves within the Justice Department is reinforced by the curious fact that the department employs far more political appointees, in relation to its size, than do nine other major civilian agencies of the federal government. Considered together, for example, the agencies within the Justice Department have eleven times more political appointees at the managerial level than the Veterans Administration, four times more than Treasury and three times more than Health and Human Services.¹³

The relatively high-profile position of the politicos in the department does not fully demonstrate just how political the agency has been at various times in its history. Consider, for example, that up until the end of World War II every individual FBI agent served at the pleasure of J. Edgar Hoover. This meant that during the first years of the bureau agents who displeased the director for any reason at all were subject to summary dismissal. Such dismissals, of course, tended to reduce the likelihood of agency whistle-blowers challenging the bureau regarding its partisan or otherwise improper activities. While this unique power has been gradually reduced by such changes as the special rights granted to returning veterans, agents have always been subject to frequent transfers, some of them punitive in nature. To this day the considerable authority of the FBI contrasts with the situation at the IRS, where the tax agency’s criminal investigators are represented by a union and enjoy normal civil service protections.

Yet another factor contributing to the blatantly partisan cast of many department decisions is the process by which U.S. attorneys—the senior federal law enforcement official in each of the ninety-three districts—get their jobs. According to the Constitution, U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. In fact, as will be explored in greater detail in a later chapter, it is the other way around. Almost always, U.S. attorneys are selected by the senator or other senior elected official in each state who belongs to the party in control of the White House, and that candidate is then confirmed by the president. This means that the federal prosecutor in each district is usually more responsive to the focused political needs of the appointing senator than to the orders of the attorney general.

Americans, of course, like to believe that law enforcement decisions are made by television-land law enforcement professionals, not political operatives. Throughout the long history of the Justice Department, however, most U.S. attorneys and attorneys general have either been young lawyers who see these attention-gathering jobs as the perfect springboard to higher political office, or older men who are buddies of the president. Recent examples of the former are Rudolph Giuliani in New York, James Thompson in Illinois, William F. Weld in Massachusetts and Richard Thornburgh in Pennsylvania. When it comes to the challenging job of running the Justice Department, professional competence has seldom been a concern of either party.

THE MUSCLE OF THE FEDS

Apprehension about the arbitrary power of the government to prosecute its people is not new. More than seven hundred years ago, for example, under pressure from his barons, King John of England signed the Magna Carta, one of the key documents of constitutional history. No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor send upon him, except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. Paragraph 39 of the Magna Carta was the simple but far-reaching promise of the king to live by the law.

Such promises of even-handed justice, of course, are much easier to make than to keep, a point noted several centuries later by H. L. Mencken, the outspoken American writer, editor and scholar. I marvel that no candidate for a doctorate has ever written a realistic history of the American Department of Justice, ironically so called. It has been engaged in sharp practices since the earliest days and remains a fecund source of oppression and corruption today. It is hard to recall an administration in which it was not the center of grave scandal.¹⁴

While Robert H. Jackson, FDR’s third attorney general, was more cautious than Mencken in his judgment, he, too, saw that the prosecutor could be a source of mischief. In a frequently quoted, but still pertinent, talk to a group of Justice Department officials in 1940, Jackson outlined the dangers:

The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor can choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence.…¹⁵

The final report of the Watergate special prosecutor on the abuses of federal powers leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon also spoke about the inherent capacity for prosecutorial harm. Although matters that reach the court obviously invoke court control over a prosecutor’s public conduct, the report observed, the discretionary process of initiating and conducting investigations bears great potential for hidden actions that are unfair, arbitrary, dishonest, or subjectively biased.¹⁶

Bennett L. Gershman is a contemporary student of prosecutorial power. From his current position as a professor at the Pace University School of Law in White Plains, New York, he has been studying prosecutors and their professional lapses for more than fifteen years. Before joining the academic world, Gershman was a full-time professional prosecutor, first in the office of Frank S. Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney, and then with Maurice Nadjari, a special state prosecutor appointed to combat corruption within the criminal justice system of New York City. The prosecutor’s power to institute criminal charges is the broadest and least regulated power in American criminal law, Gershman said recently.¹⁷

Few law enforcement officials, judges, lawyers, legal scholars and others experienced in the day-to-day operations of America’s criminal justice system would quarrel with the assessment of Jackson, the Watergate special prosecutor or Gershman. In fact, considering only the powers that today are expressly granted the Justice Department by law, a persuasive argument can be made that Attorney General Reno and her lieutenants exercise more unfettered control over the American people than the officials of any other agency in the United States government.

IN THE BEGINNING

It was not always this way. In its infancy, the office of attorney general was of relatively little importance. Yet even in its earliest enfeebled years the office was confronted by a serious and apparently unanticipated problem. From the very beginning, by lawful mandate, unlike the president or any of his other cabinet members, the attorney general was burdened with an inherent conflict of interest that has been a difficult challenge for every person who has held the position in modern history.

The Constitution of the United States, adopted by the required number of ratifying states in 1789, established the broad outlines of the federal government: an executive branch headed by the president, a national legislature and the judiciary. Shortly thereafter, in its first session, the new Congress began its work by approving separate laws creating three specific departments within the executive branch that would operate under the command of the just-elected president. On July 27, August 7 and September 2, 1789, the separate bills establishing the departments of Foreign Affairs (the State Department), Treasury and War (the Defense Department), respectively, were signed into law by President Washington. According to a provision in the Constitution, each of these departments was to be headed by an official who would be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Then, on September 24, 1789, Washington signed a fourth law, this one dealing with the basic structure of the new government, the Act to Establish the Judicial Courts. The law, first of all, authorized the creation of the Supreme Court, the circuit and district courts and, curiously, the positions of federal prosecutor and marshal, one for each of the nation’s thirteen judicial districts. The very last sentence of the Judiciary Act established the position and described the duties of the attorney general.¹⁸

As required by the Constitution, the attorney general, like the secretaries of state, war and treasury, was beholden to the chief executive because it was the president who appointed him, and now her, to the position. Despite this basic similarity in the offices, however, there was one critical difference.

This difference begins with the confusing fact that the provision of law creating the office of attorney general was located in the statute creating the judicial, rather than the executive, branch of government. But the key details of the difference were spelled out in four laws that describe the specific duties and responsibilities of the attorney general and the three other members of the original cabinet.

The July 27 law creating the position of secretary of state required the holder of this position to perform such duties as shall, from time to time, be enjoined on or entrusted to him by the President of the United States relating to dealings with foreign states and princes. The secretary of war, whose position was established by the August 7 law, was to carry out various military duties as the President of the United States shall from time to time, order or instruct.

The September 2 law concerning the treasury secretary was a bit less precise: It called upon him to carry out a number of specific functions connected with the management of the revenue and public debt and to undertake services relative to the finances, as he shall be directed to perform. Any possible doubts about who would be doing the directing was resolved in another section of the law describing the line of succession within the Treasury Department in the event that the secretary shall be removed from office by the President of the United States.…

The brief statutory provision creating the position of attorney general was very different. And there shall be appointed a meet person, learned in the law, to act as attorney-general for the United States, who shall be sworn and affirmed to a faithful execution of his office; whose duties it shall be to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court in which the United States shall be concerned, and to give his advice and opinion of law when required by the President of the United States, or when requested by the heads of any of the departments, and shall receive such compensation for his services as shall, by law, be provided.¹⁹

That’s it. Unlike the three secretaries, the early attorneys general were not administrators with a department to run and a single, clear, legally mandated loyalty to the president. Instead, the law said, the attorney general had different kinds of duties: advise the president on the nuances of law and represent the government in the Supreme Court. Thus, from the very beginning, the attorney general was an unusual hybrid with inherently conflicting loyalties. As an officer of the court, the goal was justice. As an adviser to the president, the goal was to advance the interests of the president.

At first, this conflict was mostly theoretical, because the 1789 Judiciary Act did not give the attorney general any executive powers, not even the authority to supervise the thirteen federal prosecutors and the cases they were bringing in the different districts. For the first two decades, in fact, the attorneys general kept no records of their advisory opinions, partly because they served on a part-time basis without the help of a single assistant.

The conflict became more acute in 1870, when, after many decades of debate, Congress approved a law creating the Justice Department, an agency within the executive branch. While the 1870 statute explicitly authorized the attorney general to supervise and control the new department and the already existing federal prosecutors and marshals who became a part of it, the 1789 provision, which obliged the attorney general to also serve as an officer of the court, was left unchanged.

Daniel J. Meador, an assistant attorney general during the Carter years and now a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, has given considerable thought to this predicament—one faced by no other member of the president’s cabinet. In a 1980 analysis of the attorney general, the Justice Department and the White House, Meador noted that the attorney general has over the years been referred to as a quasi-judicial officer. He also cited the 1854 opinion of Attorney General Caleb Cushing that the attorney general’s job was to give legal advice to his client—the president and the government—and at the same time to serve as a public officer, acting judicially, under all the solemn responsibilities of conscience and of legal obligation.²⁰

Whitney North Seymour, Jr., a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1970 to 1974, also commented on the problematic statute that requires the attorney general to serve two distinct and sometimes conflicted masters—the president and the law. To the president, he is a political and personal adviser. But for the public, Seymour argued, the law also imposes the duty of providing nonpartisan, even-handed Justice. Time and time again, he wrote, these two functions collide with each other head on.

Thus, from the earliest days of the nation’s history, the attorney general has been in an uncomfortable, frequently impossible position. As an officer of the court, the attorney general seeks justice. As a cabinet member and adviser to the president, the attorney general seeks to protect the White House from its enemies no matter how honorable they may be.

But with the 1870 decision making the attorney general the commander of what has developed into a formidable investigative force, the challenge became even more difficult. Rather than possessing two sometimes conflicting faces, as suggested by Meador and Seymour, the modern attorney general exhibits three.

THE GROWTH OF THE LAW

In the first years, the legal jurisdiction of the attorney general was as restricted as his administrative fiat, essentially limited to a tiny handful of laws involving truly national issues like treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Almost all criminal enforcement activities were controlled by local authorities, such as the elected county sheriff.

But starting with the populist movement that gathered steam in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the progressive era that swept the nation in the first years of the twentieth, Congress began to expand the legal responsibilities of the federal government and the Justice Department. There was the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which attempted to control the railroads; the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which held that combinations of business that restrained trade were illegal; the Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts of 1906; and the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, prohibiting the transport of women across state lines for immoral purposes. The rapidly growing place of the federal government in American life was pushed along, of course, by ambitious politicians like President Theodore Roosevelt.²¹

Then came laws prohibiting the interstate transportation of stolen cars and stolen securities and, in the wake of the heavily publicized Lindbergh kidnapping case of 1932, a law giving the FBI broad authority to investigate such crimes. With Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, the Kennedy brothers’ New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the federal jurisdiction continued to expand.

Fueled partly by the existence of problems that ignored state boundaries and partly by the political requirement that Congress and the White House appear concerned about crime, the growth in the statutory authority of the national government has been phenomenal. There is no limit, it seems, to America’s faith in the law, and to the nation’s moralistic and somewhat naive belief that there are virtually no problems that cannot be resolved by the passage of a criminal statute. One aspect of this faith, of course, may be the visceral understanding that the adoption of a criminal prohibition makes the public feel good without the necessity of raising their taxes.

As a result, by 1992, there were over 3,000 separate federal offenses listed on the books. These ranged from statutes dealing with the serious matters presented by big-time bank swindlers, sleazy purveyors of tainted food and drugs and spies to more trivial business problems such as the one addressed in Title 18, Chapter 89, Section 1821 of the Federal Criminal Code: a law authorizing federal imprisonment of up to one year for any person convicted of the interstate transportation of dentures which were manufactured without a prescription from a licensed dentist.²²

Yet even the dizzying increase in the number of specific federal offenses substantially underestimates the growth in the statutory authority of the national government. This is because the Justice Department, with the approval of the courts, has steadily expanded the categories of cases it can bring under long-standing laws originally used for far more restrictive purposes. Perhaps the most astonishing such metamorphosis involves the federal mail fraud statute, a vaguely worded law originally approved by Congress in 1872. Under the creative Justice Department lawyering of the last few years, this century-old statute has been molded to prosecute and convict the owners of a Long Island pet cemetery who did not cremate the deceased dogs and cats in the dignified way they had promised, a Virginia physician who solved the infertility problems of a number of women by impregnating them with his own semen, a group of college athletes who allegedly defrauded several universities by entering into financial agreements in violation of the rules of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and even a former governor of Illinois who allegedly had deprived the state’s voters of honest and faithful service when he accepted through the mail some stock from a horse racing company.²³

The rapid growth in the legal responsibilities and activities of the Justice Department has been reflected, of course, in a steady expansion of the agency’s staff and budget. At first, as already noted, the attorney general had no staff. Shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately thirty years after the creation of the Justice Department, the attorney general was, at least in theory, responsible for the work of 260 employees in Washington and another 1,300 around the country. Last year, the department had approximately 100,000 employees, a sixty-six-fold increase in departmental employees since 1904.

GROWTH IN FEDERAL PROSECUTORS

1980–1992

(per million population)

Although Presidents Reagan and Bush both argued for a smaller and less intrusive federal government, their views apparently did not apply to the Justice Department: During their time in office the number of federal prosecutors more than doubled. As a result of the serious budget problems of the Clinton years, this expansion has come to an end. (TRAC ANALYSIS OF JUSTICE DEPARTMENT AND CENSUS BUREAU DATA)

The Justice Department’s lawyers, investigators, economists, computer scientists, engineers, psychologists, prison guards, clerks and specialists (in DNA analysis, the thought processes of serial murderers and the placement of hidden recording devices) are members of a federal army who have come to occupy a position in our country that even a few decades ago would have been unimaginable.

The cost of maintaining this army—paying its salaries and benefits, providing the necessary offices and purchasing the elaborate computers and other necessities of the trade—came to about $11 billion in 1993. For that $11 billion—which included $2 billion for the FBI, $700 million for the DEA, $1 billion for INS, $2, billion for the Bureau of Prisons and $1.8 billion for the lawyers working in the Justice Department proper and the offices of the ninety-three U.S. attorneys—the public gets a good deal of activity.

The FBI, for example, among other accomplishments during fiscal year 1993, reported it had investigated 64,871 violent crime matters, 47,418 white-collar crime matters and 5,824 civil rights matters. The DEA said it had made 21,799 drug arrests. The INS reported it had apprehended 1,197,000 individuals.

The Justice Department as a whole reported it had collected $151 million in criminal fines—all but $5.6 million of it through the seizure of tainted property—and $440 million in civil penalties and forfeitures. The Bureau of Prisons detained 65,000 men and women.

A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

All these numbers, however, are curiously unsatisfying. Glance back at them and you will see why: Despite the appearance of solid fact, none of them provide a context against which the daily choices of federal prosecutors can be judged.

Federal laws, scores of court decisions, administrative rules and a long historical tradition give federal prosecutors unrivaled control over all criminal and civil enforcement efforts at the federal level. While the agencies can open preliminary investigations pretty much at will, Justice Department lawyers and the ninety-three U.S. attorneys exercise a virtually unchecked authority in deciding which of the agency investigations will move forward: who will be called before a grand jury, what questions they will be asked and who will be publicly charged. In recent years, as Congress passed laws reducing the authority of judges to decide individual prison terms, the prosecutors also have taken over de facto control of federal sentencing.

Obtaining an overall view of the work performed by an agency as large and as complicated as the Justice Department is not easy. The FBI, DEA and INS, for example, while eating up about one quarter of the department’s annual budget, are very secretive about their investigative actions, many of which are never made public. A federal investigation, even those that never result in prosecution, can be a massive event in an individual’s life. Later chapters will focus on selected aspects of these investigative agencies.

But getting a handle on the department’s prosecuting side also is challenging. According to the department, for example, formalized complaints—what the Justice Department calls matters—can be referred to federal prosecutors by something like two hundred federal agencies as well as state and local organizations. In dealing with this highly varied mass of incoming matters, the prosecutors can choose from dozens of possible options. Some matters are immediately dropped; others are declined after weeks or months or years of consideration. In addition, because of the way the laws are written, a person believed to have committed a single criminal act usually can be charged under a variety of statutes, depending upon special circumstances and the whim of the individual prosecutor. It is this power to select the law under which an individual will be charged, and thus the potential penalty, that in the end gives the prosecutors near total control over federal sentencing decisions.

In an effort to make the pattern of these extremely complicated processes more comprehensible, I propose that instead of looking at the Justice Department’s workload for one whole year, we focus our view on a single week. My chosen week, which statistical analysis indicates is quite typical, begins on Sunday, May 2, and ends on Saturday, May 8, 1993.²⁴

But in undertaking this examination, where in the legal process should the accounting begin? Should we first focus on matters, all the suspicious situations the agencies refer to the Justice Department? Or should we instead start by looking at cases, those situations where the department decides to bring a formal charge against an individual? Although there is merit in either of these approaches, I have decided upon a third strategy: an examination of all the criminal and civil matters and cases that the department in one way or another disposed of during our test week.

All together, during this particular seven-day period, data tapes obtained from the Executive Office of United States Attorneys show that Justice Department lawyers working in Washington and the assistant U.S. attorneys around the country disposed of a grand total of 5,725 matters and cases. These included 3,101 civil actions, 2,191 criminal and 433 that were declined after an hour or less of consideration.

This means that if all ninety-three U.S. attorneys’ offices were equally busy—which they of course are not—each would have closed, in one way or another, about sixty-one matters that week.

On just the criminal side, the FBI was the source for about one third of the department’s business. Most of the balance of the criminal matters came from the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Customs Bureau; the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Postal Service and the Internal Revenue Service.

The single largest clump of the Justice Department’s criminal business—slightly more than one out of four—involved drugs. Two other areas of major federal concern were guns and immigration. Added together, these three categories made up 695 of the 2,191 criminal matters and cases that were disposed of during the first week in May, just under one third of the total.

As already noted, Congress over the years has passed literally thousands of laws making a huge variety of other kinds of specific acts a possible criminal offense. This fact means that a strong majority of all the matters and cases dealt with by the Justice Department that week involved a truly dazzling array of allegations.

Between May 2 and May 8, 1993, for example, the federal government disposed of one matter involving computer fraud, a second concerning corruption charges against a single federal law enforcement official, a third relating to the smuggling of cigarettes and a fourth connected with labor racketeering—the use of union power for personal gain. Also disposed of that week were matters and cases involving three persons the government believed had violated the nation’s copyright laws, two people who were thought to have breached consumer product safety statutes and six individuals investigated for disobeying the nation’s customs laws.

It is widely assumed that the Justice Department channels a substantial part of its resources into enforcing federal regulatory laws, an activity which by definition cannot usually be assumed by state and local prosecutors. For the last thirty years, in fact, this basic belief about the federal government has fueled an intense lobbying effort by business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers to reduce federal enforcement when it comes to the corporations. The core of this campaign—first successfully articulated by Ronald Reagan, then a middle-aged actor on the corporate payroll of General Electric—was a heartfelt denunciation of the federal government’s unnecessary and heavy-handed regulation of business.

When it comes to the Justice Department, however, the evidence shows the Reagan complaint echoed recently by the Republican Congress wasn’t true when Reagan was working for General Electric, it wasn’t true when he was president and it isn’t true today. Of all the matters and cases disposed of in the 1993 test period, only eighteen of them, less than one percent of that week’s total, involved possible violations of environmental, consumer protection or occupational safety and health laws.

When it comes to prosecuting criminals, the phrase disposed of suggests only one outcome: conviction. But in the lingo of the Justice Department, the phrase has many possible meanings. Of the eighteen environmental, consumer and safety matters processed during the test week, for example, six involved alleged criminal violations against employees. These six matters were disposed of in the sense that the U.S. attorneys declined to prosecute a single one of them, thus totally ignoring the formal recommendations of the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The eighteen matters also included two situations involving criminal allegations where consumers were believed to be at risk. One of these was declined by the Justice Department before it got to court, the other was dismissed by a federal judge at the request of the Justice Department.

The last ten of the eighteen matters and cases disposed of that week concerned the environment; situations where the FBI, the EPA and a handful of other agencies had obtained evidence indicating that corporations and others had violated the law in a criminal way while dealing with their hazardous and toxic waste products.

Half of the ten were declined by the Justice Department. One was disposed of by a court of appeals. The remaining four—slightly less than one quarter of all the health, safety and environmental matters disposed of during the week all over the nation—resulted in findings of guilt. Yet not one individual involved in these four cases was sentenced to prison.

The Justice Department’s data show that the department’s handling of this group of regulatory matters during the test week was noticeably less harsh than its handling of most other categories of crime. In immigration cases, for example, instead of most of the matters being dismissed and none of the individuals going to prison, four out of five were found guilty and two out of three were sent to prison. In drug cases, half were found guilty and two out of five went to prison. Of all the 2,191 individual criminal matters and