Major developments during recent days in federal anti-corruption probes in Maryland, North Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama underscore the scandalous conditions within the Justice Department that most Democrats and Republicans dare not to address, in part because  law enforcers could implicate so many elected officials in financing and sex scandals. Meanwhile, a Washington, DC forum June 13 for former Justice Department Mafia-fighters from the Nixon-era recalled a time when major parties were able to work together far better than now to craft useful legislation. Among other things, those valuable laws broke the power of the Mafia with enhanced enforcement tools (such as federal wiretaps) that devastated the mob even while being far more carefully supervised by the courts than now. We’ll write separately later to review those historic law enforcement victories.

For now, the big news this week is how our era’s federal law enforcers are proceeding so erratically that they recklessly destroy public confidence that their predecessors earned for the justice system. Read legal commentator Roger Shuler's summary June 13 of the most recent legal shenanigans in Alabama over the weekend -- and remember that the Justice Department (emphasis added !!) wants to avoid courtroom questioning of whether a two-term governor illegally received $13 million from gamblers. Shuler, a blogger in Birmingham, wrote:

In a decision that should surprise no one, a federal magistrate ruled yesterday that former Alabama Governor Bob Riley will not have to testify in the federal bingo trial that heats up today with the calling of the first witness in Montgomery....The bingo trial is a national story because it grew largely from $13 million that Mississippi Choctaw gaming interests spent to help get Riley elected in 2002. Those funds reportedly were laundered through Republican felons Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, meaning the bingo trial touches heavily on perhaps the worst political scandal in American history.

Here in Washington, it's clear that Congress has become so immersed in fund-raising and related scandals that its members do next to nothing these days in terms of meaningful oversight on such matters. The DOJ, with increasing access to wiretap information and vast freedom to select among a large array of  politicians for indictment, increasingly ignores oversight requests from Congress on sensitive matters. Moreover, the New York Times just reported, F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds. This should prompt  alarms -- particularly in view of the Obama administration's effort reported last month to extend the term of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, right, for two years. His retirement date is next October under a 10-year limit. The limit is to prevent the kind of abuses created by longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover because of his organization's vast power to collect unsavory information on politicians and ordinary citizens alike. Why ignore the reason for term-limits exactly when authorities are vastly increasing their surveillance powers? NSA and other whistleblowers say surveillance in violation of historic constitutional rights involves collecting and storing billions of emails and phone calls of U.S. citizens. The rationale to the public is terror control. But it's really information control.