As long as the Justice Department is being scrutinized, how about the tobacco case?

while they're looking into the politicization of the justice department, they would do well to dig into the tobacco racketeering case settlement, a travesty that's been questioned since june 2005, when the government made its stunning reversal...

The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.

"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."

this isn't a new charge... it was already perking last fall...

A Justice Department official who slashed the amount of money being sought from tobacco companies made misleading statements to Congress, says a former government lawyer who handled a landmark lawsuit against the industry.

The comments by attorney Sharon Eubanks follow Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum's decision a year ago to downsize a proposed smoking cessation program from $130 billion to $10 billion. That's the amount the government wants a judge to order cigarette companies to pay.

A month ago, McCallum sent written statements explaining his actions to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was considering his nomination to be U.S. ambassador to Australia. The Senate subsequently confirmed McCallum, a former Yale classmate of President Bush, to the post.

and, even at that time, had been in the news since 2005...

The lead trial lawyer in the government's landmark lawsuit against the tobacco industry has quit the case and left the Justice Department, a move that comes at a particularly sensitive time when the companies and the department could still negotiate a settlement.

Sharon Eubanks, who had aggressively pursued the racketeering case against the tobacco industry, was withdrawing effective Thursday, the government said in a one-sentence filing in U.S. District Court.

Eubanks said her supervisors' failure to support her work on the tobacco case influenced her decision to retire after 22 years with the department.

Her withdrawal follows a stunning reversal in June in which the Justice Department disregarded the recommendations of its own witness — Dr. Michael Fiore — and reduced the amount it was demanding from the tobacco industry for smoking cessation programs to $10 billion. Fiore had proposed $130 billion.

in fact, allegations began to surface immediately after the verdict...

A top Justice Department official threatened to remove a government expert from its witness list if he did not water down his recommended penalties for the tobacco industry, the witness said in an interview yesterday.

Harvard University business professor Max H. Bazerman said a career trial lawyer told him senior Justice officials wanted him to change his recommendation that the court appoint a monitor to review whether it was appropriate to remove senior tobacco company management. Bazerman said the lawyer was passing along the "strong request" the week before Bazerman was to take the witness stand on May 4 in the government's landmark racketeering case against the industry.

looks like there's enough here to warrant a separate investigation, particularly since our already-broken health care system has to deal with the consequences of what big tobacco keeps dumping on our society...

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