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Horton's findings are congruent also with the research of the Justice Integrity Project into the nether world of elections. Our research is primarily about unwarranted prosecutions, often involving political motives. This also involves persistent reports from otherwise credible sources of blackmail of candidates via "opposition research," conspiracies to change election totals by manipulating voting machine software, systematic campaign finance violations, manipulating voter registration lists, and similar tactics that are either too boring or too incendiary for normal news coverage.
Under the New Jersey plan put in motion by Christie and carried forward by his successors, federal authorities are requiring victims of Dwek's frauds to pay Dwek between $10,000 and $12,000 a month in living expenses out of the estate of his bankrupt companies. Authorities have extraordinary and controversial discretion to determine legitimate expenses after Ponzi and bankruptcy proceedings, as illustrated dramatically by our recent reporting on the $3.65 billion Petters fraud in Minnesota.
In court, several of the political defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial on corruption charges, and have been sentenced to prison. Each guilty plea creates new headlines that further cement public perceptions about Christie effective work as a corruption fighter. It's one of his enduring images as indicated by the nationally syndicated Broder column, although his election victory drew also on such related factors as widespread unhappiness with the Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine.
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Louis M. Manzo by Louis M. Manzo
Disrupting the orderly progression of defendants to prison is former state assemblyman Louis M. Manzo, who has mounted a nearly one-man campaign to expose the prosecution as political and otherwise abusive.
A defendant himself, Manzo and his brother Ronald were both charged with accepting $27,500 in cash payments from government informant Dwek during early 2009 in exchange for Manzo's official assistance on development matters if he became mayor. Manzo wrote us:
I maintain my innocence. I never took a bribe from anyone, or agreed to any corrupt action. The prosecutors in this case know that as well. The indictment is the manipulation of a corrupted prosecution, handled by some prosecutors who had personal and professional stakes in the investigation and prosecution of the Bid Rig III police action. Those stakes, as documented from the public record, were jobs for themselves or family members tied to former United States Attorney Chris Christie's election for Governor of New Jersey in November 2009.
The presiding judge dismissed the main charges against Manzo as unfounded. But the government has refused to give up, and its appeal that could keep him in jeopardy or at least limbo for two years or more.
Authorities deny wrongdoing. Marra, the acting U.S. attorney who handled the pre-election indictments, went on to join the Christie administration as senior vice president of the New Jersey State Gaming Commission, and win absolution from an ethics complaint to DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility. DOJ declines to provide the text of its ruling. That's typical of the protection that office affords to its employees and former employees against meaningful public scrutiny.
Christie put Brown, by then at a private law firm friendly to his administration, on his transition team with an assignment to bring on more of his staff. He later named her as his appointments counsel, one of at least 10 former federal prosecutors from his office he brought with him, including Marra.
The Justice Integrity Project researched the matter and identified it as a "Leading Case" of suspected Justice Department misconduct nationally, with details here.
Manzo, meanwhile is tireless in creating charts showing what he calls "undisputed facts" showing how the prosecution has been undermined by vast self-dealing and outrageous conflicts of interest by its leading figures, unfair devastation of defendant victims and apathy by ostensible watchdogs at DOJ and Congress. He says that Dwek has made vastly more donations to local Republican politicians than Democrats, under at least some circumstances constituting bribery, but that authorities declined to pursue those cases.
Manzo speaks passionately of the Christie charade of good and "limited government," and its nationwide implications:
This is the most egregious corrupt prosecution of all the cases you at the Justice Integrity Project are bringing to light. The tragedy of Bid Rig III is that if the government will stoop this low to target for prosecution grandfathers and single moms running in local elections who then is safe?
Manzo is seeking not simply to preserve his freedom but to document why the prosecution system is out-of-control both in New Jersey and extending to top level of his own Democratic party's political appointees in Washington, DC.
