JANUARY 14 - 20, 2005
Dirty Little Secrets
Bush’s Homeland Security czar Mike Chertoff and his days in New Jersey
by Doug Ireland
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Chertoff was a political attack dog in that job(NJ US attorney), indicting and convicting a raft of Democratic officeholders. But one whom Chertoff deliberately let get away was his big buddy Bob "The Torch" Torricelli, forced to resign his U.S. Senate seat from Sopranoland in a major corruption scandal. Nick Acocella, editor of the respected insider newsletter New Jersey Politifax, recalls that, at the height of the Torricelli scandal, and while Chertoff was U.S. attorney, he saw The Torch and Chertoff, at a South Jersey Jewish banquet, embrace and huddle intimately "like twins separated at birth." One would have thought a federal prosecutor would have kept his distance from a target of criminal investigations that were making daily headlines in the Jersey press.
When Chertoff was named by Bush to head the Justice Department’s Criminal Division — partly because he was a skilled political hit man who’d also raised a ton of money as financial vice chair of Bush’s Garden State campaign in 2000 — it was an open secret in Jersey that he squelched an indictment of Torricelli as a reward for The Torch’s support of key Bush legislation the Democratic Party leadership opposed. (Many of the fat cats Chertoff shook down for Bush had also been huge givers to The Torch.)
Long active in the Federalist Society — a conspiratorial brotherhood of legal reactionaries — Chertoff, at Justice, helped to write the civil-liberties–shredding Patriot Act. He was John Ashcroft’s honcho in the indiscriminate grilling of over 5,000 Arab-Americans after 9/11, devised the use of "material witness" warrants to lock up people of Middle Eastern descent and hold them indefinitely without trial, and on behalf of the Justice Department wrote a brief (in Chavez v. Martinez) arguing that there was no constitutional right to be free of coercive police questioning.
Moreover, Chertoff wrote legislation, known as the Feeney Amendment, that gutted federal sentencing guidelines, under which federal judges were allowed to use some discretion when sentencing criminal defendants, by preventing judges from shortening sentences — and, moreover, required judges who deviated from the Feeney Amendment to have their names and actions reported to the Justice Department, thus establishing what Senator Teddy Kennedy denounced as a judicial "blacklist."
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