Two significant federal political prosecutions from the last decade are still making news this week.

In Mississippi, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate again postponed resentencing of the imprisoned trial attorney and Democratic fund-raiser Paul Minor, whose prosecution on corruption charges in 2003 helped Republican Haley Barbour, below left, win the state’s governorship.

In New Jersey, imprisoned former Qwest Communications CEO Joseph Nacchio sued his politically well-connected former lawyer, Herbert Stern, on grounds of ineffective legal work during Nacchio’s prosecution on insider trading charges – despite Stern’s $25 million in legal fees.

The Justice Integrity Project has tracked both their cases after researching evidence that the Bush Justice Department targeted them both improperly for political reasons.

The reasons? Minor was a highly successful plaintiffs attorney in torts cases against corporations, and also the leading donor to Democrats in Mississippi, including judges who seek donations in a system of elections. Democrats were vigorously contending a decade ago for state and local offices. But years of news reports about charges arising from loans and donations such as his, categorized as bribes by authorities, helped Republicans win state and local offices.

Regarding Nacchio, he was the only one of the nation’s top telecom CEOs in 2001 to decline Bush administration requests to provide customer records without guarantees of legal compliance for widespread federal surveillance. Nacchio regarded the secret federal requests as violating wiretapping law and company policy. At the time, his company's stock price had also slipped badly during the so-called telecom "tech wreck" of 2000-2001 affecting many companies. He sold personal stock holdings during that period, making him vulnerable to an aggressive political prosecution.

Years previous, the nation’s insider trading laws were enacted with vague language, as author Harvey Silverglate has demonstrated in his important 2009 book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. Vague law permits authorities to make new law, in effect, by selecting particular targets for enforcement in a process that is often too complicated for many to understand.

As a result, authorities pillory some and largely ignore others for similar conduct, as Silverglate and other critics have shown..

By Andrew Kreig / Director's Blog

The Jersey Sting is a new book about a major federal corruption case that helped former New Jersey U.S. Attorney Chris Christie win his state’s governorship in 2009.

Readers here know that our Justice Integrity Project has documented in multiple columns the unfairness of the controversial 46-defendant case initiated by the Republican Christie. Prosecutions, primarily resulting in guilty pleas but also including an unusually high number of acquittals or pre-trial rulings adverse to the government, have continued vigorously under Christie's successors in an office now led by the Democratic-nominated U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman.

Authors Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin are investigative reporters who long worked the Star-Ledger, the state’s largest daily newspaper. St. Martin’s Press, which published the book this month, says, “The Jersey Sting takes you deep inside a one-of-a-kind case, through a narrative fashioned from scores of interviews — both on and off the record — and from thousands of pages of documents, criminal complaints, transcripts of federal wiretaps, court records, and sworn depositions.”  Book excerpts set the scene, as follows:

On a warm day that would turn overcast with scattered rain, climbing to near 80 degrees in the summer humidity, more than 300 FBI and other federal agents were in position across the metropolitan area well before the crack of dawn. Deployed from Brooklyn and Jersey City to the wealthy beachfront enclave of Deal along the Jersey Shore, it was an invasion force about to execute a coordinated assault of military-style precision, a takedown that would shatter New Jersey’s political landscape and reach all the way into the governor’s office, while tearing apart an insular Orthodox religious community that had long shunned outsiders.