Surrealistically Licensed to Lie

Book review of Sidney Powel, Licensed to Lie

Very surreal to be writing this review on the day after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. This book focuses on the long slide of our “justice” department into a “conviction machine” by a woman who started her career as a starry-eyed believer in the integrity of the DOJ.

As I observe the events of yesterday, I could not believe that a competent Secret Service would not detect person on a roof with a rifle within 150 yards of a former president/current leading presidential candidate, especially when people in the crowd were pointing and yelling “there is a guy with a gun up there” prior to the shots fired.

The current director of the SS is Kimberly Cheatle, former director of security for Pepsi. An expert in protecting soda pop, and excellent an excellent DEI example. As I watched the smallish women agents scurry around the larger Trump, and read about what the current agency, it’s main area of pride (PRIDE?) was that it is “diverse”. One of the agents had a lot of difficulty holstering her weapon, something an average pistol shooter would have no issue with.

Size matters. If you are smaller than the person you are protecting, you can’t effectively shield them with your body. You will find that the average size of an NFL offensive lineman significantly exceeds the size of the QB - One reason that QBs need to be fairly tall so they can throw over their own line.

So that is the surreal part.

The book is excellent and written in a way to hold your attention. If you like lawyer stuff on TV or in the movies, you are likely to love it.

The key insight of the book for me is that in the 1963 case of Brady vs Maryland the SCOTUS made it clear that it is a constitutional requirement of government prosecutors to turn over any exculpatory evidence to the defense (evidence that may prove innocence or justify actions of the accused).

Why? Because the mission of the justice department is JUSTICE, not winning convictions. An inscription of the walls of the DOJ states that: “The United States wins its point whenever justice is done for its citizens in the courts”.

The first case discussed is the corruption case of Ted Stevens, former senator from Alaska, who was charged with “making false statements on disclosure forms” relative to a remodeling project on his house. He paid $165k for the project, the DOJ threatened the contractor with prosecution for crimes if he did not testify that the value of the remodeling work was $250k. Stevens lost his senate race, the Democrats got 61 seat control of the senate to help newly elected Barack Obama.

In this case however, an honest FBI agent came forward at great risk and informed the defense that DOJ had hidden very relevant Brady information — the real value of the remodeling work was $80k. The case was appealed, and Stevens was exonerated. It took a courageous FBI agent and the honest judge Brendan Sullivan to finally achieve justice. I personally only remember Stevens being convicted, and with my bias against corrupt politicians never noticed his innocence on appeal.

As we ought to all be aware, as stated by Judge Sullivan “Any citizen can be convicted if prosecutors are hell-bent on ignoring the Constitution and willing to present false evidence”. As we saw with Trump, it is even “better” if the case can be tried in front of a hostile jury!

What happened to the corrupt prosecutors? They moved to prominent law firms, other positions in the DOJ, or cushy high-level positions as legal scholars at law schools.

Another case covered is the case of the Aurthur Anderson accounting firm and Enron relating to destruction of documents, which turns out to have a direct effect on protestors charged in the J6 protest. The prosecution used an obscure statute that they stretched to cover “attempting interfere with a government proceeding”. The SCOTUS ruled.

“To prove a violation of Section 1512(c)(2), the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or as we earlier explained, other things used in the proceeding, or attempted to do so,”

The SCOTUS kicked the J6 cases back to lower courts, which depending on the level of corruption in the system will likely vacate the sentences. Much more detail here.

BTW, the DOJ had played the same trick with withholding Brady (exculpatory) evidence in the Anderson case, and the conviction was overturned by the SCOTUS, but of course Anderson was out of business by then. The case boiled down to Anderson following its own document retention policy, and complying with DOJ demands to produce documents once subpoenaed, however the DOJ managed to obscure Anderson’s legal retention policy and obtained a conviction on “obstruction of justice”.

The bulk of the book is about a very long running case tangentially related to the Enron debacle that boiled down to whether an Enron executive GUARANTEED a fixed rate of return to Merrill Lynch vs just “best efforts” to obtain $12 million profit on a loan relative to barges with generators on them for Nigeria.

In this case, there was no honest judge nor whistle blower, and although having committed no crime, 3 people served prison time and were under legal peril for a decade just so some federal prosecutors could save face, shuffle around to various prestigious jobs, etc. One of the innocent people remains a “convicted felon”, something that has been established today as being often a merit badge, or maybe a “bullseye” to bear.

I close with a quote from page 401 of the book.

“Our system of justice is crying for a culture change. We must return to a system in which prosecutors seek justice more than headlines and in which judges are willing to judge. Our founding fathers created three separates but equal branches of government. They intended the federal courts to serve as a check and a balance on the executive branch, which runs the prosecution, and the legislative branch which makes the laws. Judges are the only immediate and most meaningful ones who can spare a defendant the stress and anxiety on bogus charges or concocted facts. When judges hold prosecutors to the highest standards and provide a fair trial, they do justice.”

Sadly, our once great nation is now so corrupt that finding such judges and supporting the good ones rather than trying to have them removed (see Clarence Thomas) seems impossible.

Only by an act of God was Trump spared yesterday. Perhaps God still has some grace to shed on this corrupt nation, and we can at least be decent again.