Saturday, January 15, 2005
Crimes and Corruptions of the New World Order News at blog-city January 12, 2005:Chertoff is as political an appointment as one can imagine--especially for those who know the arcana of politics in New Jersey, where Chertoff was U.S. Attorney, and where his naming to the DHS job caused jaws to drop.
Chertoff was a political attack dog in that job, indicting and convicting a raft of Democratic officeholders. But one who Chertoff deliberately let get away was his big buddy, Bob "The Torch" Torricelli, forced to resign his U.S. Senate seat from Sopranoland in a major corruption scandal. Nick Acocella, editor of the respected insider newsletter New Jersey Politifax, recalls that, at the height of the Torricelli scandal, and while Chertoff was U.S. Attorney, he saw The Torch and Chertoff together at a South Jersey Jewish banquet where they embraced and huddled intimately "like twins separated at birth." One would have thought a federal prosecutor would have kept his distance from a target of criminal investigations that were making daily headlines in the Jersey press.
When Chertoff was named by Bush to head the Justice Department’s Criminal Division--partly because he was a skilled political hitman, who’d also raised a ton of money as financial vice-chair of Bush’s Garden State campaign in 2000-- it’s an open secret in Jersey that he squelched an indictment of Torricelli as a reward for The Torch’s support of key Bush legislation the Democratic Party leadership opposed, including tax cuts for corporations and the very rich. (Many of the fat-cats Chertoff shook down for Bush had also been huge givers to The Torch.)...
Chertoff, at Justice, helped to write the civil liberties-shredding Patriot Act. He was John Ashcroft’s honcho in the indiscriminate grilling of over 5000 Arab-Americans after 9/11, cooked up the use of “material witness” warrants to lock up people of Middle Eastern descent and hold them indefinitely without trial, and on behalf of the Justice Department wrote a brief (in Chavez v. Martinez) arguing there was no Constitutional right to be free of coercive police questioning.
Moreover, Chertoff wrote legislation, known as the Feeney Amendment, which gutted federal sentencing guidelines -- under which federal judges were allowed to use some discretion when sentencing criminal defendants -- by preventing judges from shortening sentences--and, worse, required judges who deviated from the Feeney Amendment to have their names and actions reported to the Justice Department, thus establishing what Sen. Teddy Kennedy denounced as a judicial “blacklist.“
Why would Chertoff give up a lifetime seat on the federal bench to take a job in the hornet’s nest of problems that is the DHS? According to a top Jersey Democratic pol who knows Chertoff well, Chertoff--described as being “as cold-blooded as they come“-- has a personal agenda that includes becoming U.S. Attorney General and, eventually, grabbing a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. But there’s a problem for Chertoff with conservative Republicans--he happens to be pro-choice. So, taking the DHS job is Chertoff’s way to "make his bones," as they say in Jersey, and grab headlines as a hard-line persecutor of "the towel-heads." .....---
.....| Posted at 17:17 | PERMA-LINK |
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