After Stevens Case:
Will Holder Shut Abscam II?
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Even the Washington Post, which once played a pivotal role in the black propaganda drive to railroad Lyndon LaRouche into prison, saw the handwriting on the wall in Attorney General Eric Holder's April 1 decision to throw out the conviction of former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Ak.). Reporting on the Holder action on April 2, the Post's Carrie Johnson and Del Quentin Wilber wrote: "Holder's decision invites tough new scrutiny of a unit that polices corrupt officials, and it could foreshadow a shakeup in the way the government prosecutes those crimes.... Current and former department lawyers predict an overhaul that will sweep aside senior leaders in the Public Integrity Section."
But Holder will need to go much further than a cleanup of the Public Integrity Section, according to sources familiar with the crisis at the Department of Justice and FBI. According to these sources, FBI Director Robert Mueller has launched the equivalent of "Abscam II," a political targetting of senior members of Congress, to be framed up using the very tactics that have now blown up in the Stevens case. Sources say that, in the past year, the FBI has shifted scores of corrupt agents into the unit specifically charged with probing allegations of corruption by members of Congress. These agents, according to the sources, have been funneling half-baked allegations, wiretap data, and other illegally obtained or fabricated information to "private" think-tanks and select reporters, to build the climate for politically motivated prosecutions.
One source, who insisted on anonymity, put it in the following, blunt terms: "For the past few decades, the Department of Justice has become a haven for corrupt, incompetent lawyers, who could never make it in the private sector. It is as bad as the political corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." The source concluded, "It is going to take a serious clean-out to solve the problem. The eight years of Bush and Cheney compounded the problem, tremendously, but this is a longer-term disease."
A second source, also speaking anonymously, concurred. "This problem goes back almost 30 years. Look at Abscam, and you see the roots of this political targetting."
