Former AUSA Gives Another Take on Disbanding of LA Public Corruption Unit

We’ve posted a couple of times this week on the move by U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles Thomas O’Brien’s decision to disband the public corruption unit in that office. On Monday, we quoted a former prosecutor in the unit on his view that the move “sends a message” to politicians that they don’t need to be so careful. And yesterday, we relayed The Los Angeles Times‘ reporting on the move, which anonymously quoted a number of the prosecutors in the office who said that O’Brien had threatened them with retaliation if they publicly disputed the move.

But TPM Reader M thinks that O’Brien is getting a bum rap:

I recently left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles for private practice, and I’ve followed the recent events in the office closely and talked to several folks who were at the meeting in question. I’m no loyal Bushie, and I’ve been outraged by what this administration has done to the U.S. Attorney’s Office as an institution and experienced firsthand how hard it is to be a prosecutor in this administration.

But Tom O’Brien is no Rachel Paulose. He’s a career prosecutor and one of the best trial attorneys the office has seen in years. Yes, he’s a Republican, but he was backed strongly by both Democratic senators Boxer and Feinstein for a job that most people figured was too radioactive to get Senate approval for anyone in the wake of the U.S. Attorney’s scandal. O’Brien also done more to fix the budget problems, to boost morale, and enforce accountability in the office than any U.S. Attorney in LA in recent memory.

It’s the accountability piece that motivated the disbanding of the public corruption section. It’s undisputed that the prosecution stats — the lifeblood of the office — were way down in the section. Despite being given many opportunities to fix their problems, some of the attorneys just weren’t pulling their weight and there were real leadership and culture problems in the section. Now, that section has been merged with the frauds section, which has dozens more attorneys, many of whom are the best attorneys in the office. What this means is that more and better attorneys will be working public corruption cases. In fact, a huge group of folks moved from the public corruption section to the frauds section a year or so ago, and that’s worked out just fine.

So as a matter of substance, the decision was probably the right one. There were, however, real problems with process — how this was done and how it was communicated. There have been leaks of internal meetings in the past, and while a U.S. Attorney should be able to have a meeting about an internal matter without it appearing on the front page the next day, O’Brien may have gone overboard in trying to head that off. But I worked under a number of U.S. Attorneys during my time, and O’Brien’s the kind of guy you want in that spot.