There are strong resemblances that underscore that loss of civil rights in white-collar prosecutions is real & should concern those from both right and left.The oversight bodies operate largely for show & their own career goals,I'm ashamed to say.I don't recall it as being this way during my first stint as a full-time reporter three decades ago.Bottom line:if it could happen to this Repub and this Dem,we've all got a problem.

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My guest today is Washington-based journalist and commentator, Andrew Kreig. Welcome to OpEdNews, Andrew. This past week, you wrote a piece about Bernie Kerik, former NYC Police Commissioner. It looks like he's going to be serving time soon for his felonious behavior. Why is that a bad thing?



Thanks, Joan. I've admired your work for a long time, and have been looking forward to a time I'd have enough to say for a good interview. In the Kerik case, there are troubling procedures suggesting that he was bulldozed into a guilty plea by over-zealous prosecutors enabled by an unfair judge. Even though fairly few people know about that, it's a horrible situation for a family and also for the public.

Thanks for the kind words, Andrew. Do you find many similarities between the prosecution of Kerik, a Republican, and former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a Democrat?



Yes, there are strong resemblances that underscore that the country's loss of civil rights in white-collar prosecutions is real and should concern those from both right and left. Here a few of the similarities:

Each was relentlessly prosecuted with great public fanfare, with financial ruin for their families just one part of the ordeal.

Each was convicted on relatively trivial felonies based on circumstances far less serious than commonly reported.

Each prosecution was enabled by a pro-prosecution judge who showed their true colors in proof-positive ways with abusive prison sentences and other confinement conditions.

Each has struggled mightily to have the true story fairly reported because of a pro-prosecution bias by traditional media that has increasing budget difficulty staffing expert coverage of secretive and powerful government departments, such as Justice.

So, let's say that you're correct: that political prosecutions exist and affect both Republicans and Democrats. Hasn't that always been just the way the Game is played? And what can we as concerned citizens do about it? And, while we're at it, why isn't the press all over this?

It's not supposed to be a Game, of course, but instead a serious quest for justice. The guiding principle is still supposed to be the eloquent words of U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson, speaking in 1940 at the second-ever conference of the nation's U.S. attorneys as war clouds gathered. "The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America," he said, in comments cited in an essay by former Attorney Gen. Janet Reno in 2008, as guidance for the new Obama Administration. "While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficial forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst."

I know you're being a good, neutral reporter here asking devil's advocate questions, but it's important for me to make clear that a tradition of fearless and fair prosecutions has a solid basis in our history. Jackson, of course, went on to become both a Supreme Court Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg World War II war crimes trials. The later role especially underscores how every public official has a duty to make honest decisions, not just go along with whatever is the accepted wisdom in vital matters of civil rights.

Regarding the public's ability to influence events, there's no easy answer. I've been struggling with this since I embarked on investigative reporting about abusive prosecutions nearly 18 months ago. For a long time, I thought that if the news articles were researched solidly enough, the appropriate oversight institutions would kick into gear in the three branches with a minimum of initiative from the press or other surrogates of the public. Not so.

The oversight bodies operate largely for show and their own career goals, I'm ashamed to say. I don't recall it as being this way during my first stint as a full-time reporter three decades ago. Back then, I recall prompting a number of investigations on relative trivial matters (like a federal employee using staff to build a doghouse in his backyard) as well as much bigger stuff. For whatever reasons, now you can document appalling conduct and consequences and there's only a random chance that anyone will look into it.

What's happened to the news media is the topic of many fine recent books, and so it's hard to sum up here. Twenty years ago I wrote a book called Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper. It was a case study of the paper where I'd worked for 14 years, the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, as it was transformed from local ownership to becoming upgraded, ostensibly, by Los Angeles-based Times Mirror, one of the best of the news chains. The book documented how the rhetoric of the press regarding reader service doesn't really match the financial realities: which is that reporting on public affairs doesn't really help news organizations in the bottom line that much because readers don't know what they're missing for the most part. Also, many news organizations rely heavily on income from non-media affiliates, which may be reluctant to antagonize powerful political or other government officials.

The Justice Department, in particular, can be a good ally or a bad foe to a news organization It can approve mergers and price hikes, and it can make both beat and investigative information available to reporters or ignore any requests for even routine information.

So, it sure looks like the deck is stacked against achieving justice a la Jackson or documenting injustice and having anyone on the other end listen. So, again, I ask, what can concerned citizens do about it?

The key question, of course, and sorry I didn't address it head-on the first time. The main things are to be creative, efficient, safeguard your livelihood and obtain maximum impact. Writing letters to the editor and government officials, sadly, are not really creative or efficient in my view. The Justice Department and White House have received hundreds if not thousands of communications protesting the Siegelman prosecution alone, with no real response except to ask for 20 more years in prison for his non-crimes and to ask the Supreme Court to reject his appeal, despite 91 former attorney generals seeking review . These power centers have shown they don't care about these traditional methods of citizen concern because it's private communications that they can simply ignore.

So, the pressure has got to be public and it's got to potentially hurt. That was the genesis of the infamous Rahm Emanuel ""retarded" insult to progressives thinking about running primaries against Blue Dogs in order to pressure for health care. That got his attention, and he wasn't happy about it.

Here are a few activities that I think are efficient and productive: Instead of writing letters to the editor, write what you want on the comment sections of websites, particularly of widely read mainstream publications. Cut and paste into multiple sites of relevant articles. Also, try to support with comments your favorite writers either in the comments sections of their websites or when they write for larger publications. This can be done individually, and not even under your full name necessarily.

For the more daring, there's the idea of picketing relevant people or institutions and leveraging their "strength" against themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like if a few well-dressed people stood for a few hours a day outside a major news organization with signs and leaflets urging passing motorists, "Honk if you think the paper shamed itself" on some relevant issue. This can also be done with individual dignitaries during their professional appearances, as some of the torture protesters from Progressive Democrats of America are doing on the book tour of torture memo author John Yoo. I wonder also what it would be like to leaflet outside federal courthouses seeking to empanel jurors, and provide educational materials about alleged injustices in the jurisdiction.

This is not for everyone, however, and so it's important that an activist undertake activities congruent with your personality and need for job security. It's easy to get fired over the wrong kind of protest even in your spare time.

Saving perhaps the best solution for last, it's safer, more productive and probably more fun to undertake these kinds of activities along with others. It could be a political group, such as the justice accountability group of Progressive Democrats of America. Or it could be leveraging a professional group by joining the speakers committee of an otherwise neutral group. Or it could be trying to cross-pollinate in some kind of creative way.

For example, I saw that conservative and law enforcement groups were extremely responsive and pro-active to my story documenting the abusive prosecution of Bernie Kerik on corruption charges. I received an email from the publisher of Newsmax saying he was reposting my article on its site, for example, lots of emails from others saying they were reposting and transmitting to thousands of new readers. Geraldo Rivera wrote that he was doing a Fox News "At Large" segment on the topic.

Ironically, some in the pro-Kerik camp couldn't imagine that progressive sites would allow publication of such an article. But in fact I think there exists the possibility of some truly powerful alliances on these kinds of constitutional and civil rights issues. It's really the Mushy Middle that's most complacent about the steady loss of our freedoms. Orwell's "Big Brother" has always been an extreme bugaboo both to the Right and Left. It's part of the book's brilliance that partisans on each side like to think they're the heroes of the book, and those with different politics are the Big Brother "Party" villains.

As a last option of what to do, I would encourage involvement in a unique organization I founded this year called The Justice Integrity Project. This is a non-partisan, Washington, DC-based non-profit organization that's intended to obtain action on these federal prosecution issues. Among the ways will be newsletters, events at such places as DC plus a unique "matchmaking service" between local news sources and media. The website is www.justice-integrity.org. I've studied the field of somewhat similar legal reform organizations, and believe the project is well positioned to fill a need by monitoring these trial courts.

Your project sounds incredibly timely, Andrew. Anything you'd like to add, before we wrap?

Joan, I'm so glad you and OpEdNews are so diligent in pursuing these important stories. I've come to know you as someone who is literally tireless in bringing out vital stories, but ones that are also largely ignored if not suppressed by the corporate media.

So, I think it's appropriate to close with why this story is important to your readers, not to those directly affected such as Bernie Kerik, Don Siegelman, their families and their supporters.

Kerik and Siegelman were extremely knowledgeable about the legal and political systems, as well as the media, and yet they have been ordered to prison for lengthy and unmerited terms after spending millions of dollars and seeing their families ruined. What's even more important is how many others in their families and supporters have been ruined in the effort to snuff them, and how few in the public know anything like "the real story" despite hundreds of articles about each.

Bottom line: if it could happen to this Republican and this Democrat, we've all got a problem.

We need to build awareness, build connections between wider constituencies of those who value the constitution and do something drastic to halt these Big Brother-style abuses.

I agree, on all fronts. Thanks so much for being with us today and for all your efforts to point out abuses and restore justice to our judicial system. It's been a pleasure, Andrew. I look forward to hearing more about the activities of The Justice Integrity Project.

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Feb. 21

Connecticut Watchdog, "Kerik's 4-Year Prison Term From Connecticut's Former Top U.S. Prosecutor Raises Questions," Andrew Kreig, (Feb. 21, 2010)

Fox News/Geraldo At Large, "Former NYC Top Cop Sentenced To 4 Years On Corruption Charges," Geraldo Rivera

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.