29 October 2007

More Political Prosecutions

This time, it involves Dr. Cyryl Wecht, the former Allegheny County Coroner, and former Attorney General, Pennsylvania Governor and former senate candidate, and staunch Republican Dick Thornburgh has testified before congress about this prosecution.
Thornburgh is one of Wecht's defense lawyers, and his complaints stem from what he's called the "sheer intensity" of the investigation, which involves relatively minor accusations that Thornburgh says should have been handled by the state ethics commission.

As a means of showing the relative triviality of the charges (the 84-count indictment doesn't put a price tag on Wecht's fraud), Wecht's lawyers have calculated that the cumulative cost for the 37 charges in the indictment that involve improperly charging the county for gasoline and mileage costs add up to $1,778.55. The most colorful of the charges, of course, involve the elaborate body snatching scheme: prosecutors allege that Wecht gave a local Catholic university unclaimed bodies in exchange for laboratory space.

The source of the investigation's "intensity" is U.S. Attorney for Pittsburgh Mary Beth Buchanan, a member of the DoJ's inner circle who played a role in the U.S. attorney firings. It's not the first time that Buchanan has drawn fire. During the heat of the scandal, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the district (from 1995-2000, before Buchanan took over) publicly called on Buchanan to resign because of "the extent to which she has looked to Washington for direction and political advancement." Or to put it in plainer terms: Buchanan has prosecuted a number of Democrats but no Republicans.
There is also a history of not particularly veiled threats toward the defense attorneys.

Seriously, once Bush and His Evil Minions are out of office, we are going to have to deBushify our government in the way that we deNazified the German one after WW II.

Bush has polluted everything he has ever touched in his life.

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