DoJ: What Policy?I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to McClatchy’s great big picture story on GOP efforts to hype voter fraud efforts in Missouri last election cycle.
Bradley Schlozman, of course, was a major part of that effort. He was dispatched to be the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, and as I reported earlier this week and as McClatchy reports, he brought indictments against four ACORN workers just five days before the election on voter fraud charges.
Those indictments flew in the face of longstanding Justice Department policy not to conduct election crime investigations shortly before an election. I won’t repeat my earlier reporting on this here, but suffice it to say that the investigation appears to have been conducted with some haste in order to land the indictments before the election.
No reasonable person could argue that Schlozman’s indictments were not a gross breach of department policy. But that doesn’t mean that the Justice Department isn’t trying.
From McClatchy:
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the policy that prosecutors “refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election” didn’t bar pre-election indictments and was intended to ensure that investigators didn’t intimidate voters during an election. Boyd said officials in the departmentâs Public Integrity Section approved the indictments.
Got that? A highly-publicized indictment targeting an organization that had registered tens of thousands of poor and minority voters didn’t run the risk of intimidating them.
I think simply quoting from the Justice Department’s manual, “Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses” is a sufficient rebuttal:
In investigating election fraud matters, the Justice Department must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself…. Federal prosecutors and investigators should be extremely careful to not conduct overt investigations during the pre-election period or while the election is underway…. Thus, most, if not all, investigation of an alleged election crime must await the end of the election to which the allegation relates.
It should also be kept in mind that any investigation undertaken during the final stages of a political contest may cause the investigation itself to become a campaign issue. Many, if not most, allegations during this period come from political partisans who are actively involved in the election. It is not unreasonable to assume that such complainants may be seeking to trigger a criminal investigation of an opponent just before the election.
“Allegations during this period come from political partisans who are actively involved in the election.” How true.
