bripat9643
Diamond Member
- Apr 1, 2011
- 170,163
- 47,312
@JimBowie1958’s comment quoting The Federalist defending poor Enron from being “shaken down” by Federal prosecutors after its 2002 implosion explains — in an utterly twisted way — the historical background. His exact words: “Andrew Weissman is a thug in a suit, who should have been disbarred for his role in the Enron shakedown. Arthur Andersen was charged with and found guilty of obstruction of justice for shredding the thousands of documents and deleting e-mails and company files that tied the firm to its audit of Enron.”Andrew Weissman is a thug in a suit, who should have been disbarred for his role in the Enron shakedown.
It is also interesting to note:
"Arthur Andersen was charged with and found guilty of obstruction of justice for shredding the thousands of documents and deleting e-mails and company files that tied the firm to its audit of Enron. "
Then there is the Meryl Lynch bullshit:
Does Mueller’s Lead Prosecutor Have A History Of Ethics Violations?
These facts raise serious concerns about Andrew Weissmann’s continued service on Robert Mueller’s team and justify delving further into his career.thefederalist.com
Both The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell have exposed Weissmann’s reckless win-until-reversed modus operandi that has destroyed countless lives. Weissmann’s tactics sent four Merrill Lynch executives to prison, until a federal appellate court overturned their convictions and freed the men—but not before upending their lives. Also, Weissmann’s prosecution of former accounting giant Arthur Andersen for its role in the Enron collapse shuttered the firm, leaving tens of thousands of people unemployed. Several years later the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the Arthur Andersen conviction, but it was too late by then to undo the harm Weissmann had caused.Further research into Weissmann’s role in the prosecution of Enron executives Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth Lay, and Richard Causey (the “Enron case”) reveal a more startling and concerning possibility: that Weissmann improperly threatened witnesses. In that case, co-defendants Skilling, Lay, and Causey filed a joint motion to dismiss the criminal charges brought against them, arguing the Enron Task Force, which Weissmann joined in 2002 and headed from 2004 until his abrupt departure in July 2005, engaged in multiple incidents of prosecutorial misconduct.
Andrew Weissman and other prosecutors, whatever legal mistakes they made (or were made by judges and private parties suing for damages) played crucial historical roles in confronting out-or-control corrupt cowboy capitalism in that period. Their work was mandated by President Bush to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct in huge imploding corporations like Enron and WorldCom, and carried out mostly under terribly inadequate laws. Fortunately, those scandals and investigations resulted in passing a whole new set of rules for corporate governance, accounting governance, and even “Whistleblower” protections in the corporate world, embodied in the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 and its subsequent amendments. SOX was passed 99-1 in the U.S. Senate precisely because the legal basis for determining what was a crime in corporate and accounting offices was so unclear in those days. SOX of course could not prevent the financial crisis in 2007-2008, which had to do with much larger financial practices of “crony capitalism.” Nevertheless, it was a major step forward, still denounced by a few extreme anti-regulatory Republican “libertarians” like Senator Paul, some big corporate billionaires in both parties, corrupt deep swamp elements who thrive on unaccountability, and of course even many rightwing judges like Kavanaugh (who originally worked with the Bush administration to write the law).
I don’t doubt there are many “thugs in suits” in both parties, and that Andrew Weissman today may be one of them, but the forces supporting President Trump are certainly thuggish themselves, often far more so than those they falsely accuse of being “Deep State Democrats.” The fact is there are deeper issues at play here, and the Republican Establishment and opportunist ideological supporters of Trump, people at The Federalist for example, have their own agenda.
Yet Mueller tapped a different sort of prosecutor to lead his investigation — his long-time friend and former counsel, Andrew Weissmann. He is not just a “tough” prosecutor. Time after time, courts have reversed Weissmann’s most touted “victories” for his tactics. This is hardly the stuff of a hero in the law.
Weissmann, as deputy and later director of the Enron Task Force, destroyed the venerable accounting firm of Arthur Andersen LLP and its 85,000 jobs worldwide — only to be reversed several years later by a unanimous Supreme Court.
Next, Weissmann creatively criminalized a business transaction between Merrill Lynch and Enron. Four Merrill executives went to prison for as long as a year. Weissmann’s team made sure they did not even get bail pending their appeals, even though the charges Weissmann concocted, like those against Andersen, were literally unprecedented.
Weissmann’s prosecution devastated the lives and families of the Merrill executives, causing enormous defense costs, unimaginable stress and torturous prison time. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the mass of the case.
Weissmann quietly resigned from the Enron Task Force just as the judge in the Enron Broadband prosecution began excoriating Weissmann’s team and the press began catching on to Weissmann’s modus operandi.
