Tag: U.S. attorneys

Do these people have no shame?

The LA Times is reporting that the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles has been trying to ring up impressive numbers – by having his prosecutors going after, well, parking violators:

The disgruntled prosecutors in Los Angeles say they are now spending an exorbitant amount of time working on less significant cases — mail theft, smaller drug offenses and illegal immigration — to reach quotas. They cited the recent disbanding of the office’s public integrity and environmental crimes section, a unit with a history of working on complex police corruption and political corruption cases, as evidence of a shift toward high-volume, low-quality prosecutions . . .

Talk about burying the lede. The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Nevada refused to prosecute a Pentagon procurement scandal last year – a scandal which involved (mirabile dictu!) President George Bush. The Pentagon’s Inspector General, which just two weeks ago found serious problems with the testing and procurement of billions of dollars of body armor contracts, looked into the awarding of a $50 million contract to Strategic Message Solutions, a company that, as the Post says, “barely existed” (all emphases added):  

[I]nvestigators concluded that [Air Force Maj. Gen. Stephen M.] Goldfein and others worked inside the Air Force contracting system to favor SMS and its owners, despite an offer by the company that was more than twice as expensive as another bid.