JFK terror plot : USA Bush appointee Roslynn Mauskopf needs another look
This is what I've found...
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0210,barrett,32841,5.h... The Louima Prosecutor
Pataki and D'Amato's Pick Is Unqualified and Tainted
by Wayne Barrett
March 6 - 12, 2002
The breathtaking Louima reversals—reconstructing the Blue Wall of Silence—require that George Pataki withdraw his nomination of Roslynn Mauskopf as U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, the office that faces the daunting challenge of achieving justice in that case and in the recently overturned conviction of Yankel Yosenbaum's alleged killer, Lemrick Nelson.
If Pataki will not act, Senator Chuck Schumer, who chairs the judiciary subcommittee that reviews these appointments and told the Voice last week he was "troubled" by Mauskopf's lack of federal prosecutorial experience, must send her name back to the Bush White House. Schumer has just assembled a judicial screening committee of 14 lawyers—including Loretta Lynch, the former U.S. attorney who oversaw the Louima prosecutions until last year—to make recommendations to him about New York appointments. That committee is scheduled to interview Mauskopf next week.
The U.S. attorney must decide whether to reargue the Louima decision before the full Court of Appeals, take it to the solicitor general for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, retry Charles Schwarz on the assault charge, or re-indict all three cops for lying to state and federal investigators. Once these decisions are made, he must have the experience and commitment to make them stick. Alan Vinegrad, who personally tried the Louima and Nelson cases, has been the acting head of that office since Lynch left in May 2001. A coalition of minority clergy and leaders, led by Andrew Young and Fernando Ferrer, is now reportedly petitioning Schumer to allow Vinegrad to remain until some of these critical matters are concluded.
Mauskopf, who was a prosecutor in Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office for 13 years and has been Pataki's inspector general since 1995, would be the first U.S. attorney in Brooklyn without any credentials as a federal prosecutor in at least the last 30 years. The résumé she submitted to Schumer does not specify a single significant case put together by her IG office, which has been faulted in both news accounts and a state audit. Other than assisting in an '80s garment-center prosecution led by Eliot Spitzer, who has since become the state attorney general, she lost her only other major case as a Morgenthau aide, when a 1994 jury acquitted boxer Ray Mercer on charges of trying to fix a heavyweight fight.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0210,barrett,32841,5.h... And this...
Pataki Patronage
The Guv's Attempt to Name a Prosecutor Lays Bare His Own Scandal
by Wayne Barrett
February 27 - March 5, 2002
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0209,barrett,32637,5.h... Will his chairmanship of a powerful Senate subcommittee protect New York from a soiled appointment?
George Pataki was one of the few governors invited to spend Sunday night at the White House after fellow Yalie George Bush's dinner for all 50 governors, the New York Post tells us, adding that he is also a hot prospect for vice president on the 2004 ticket. That would seem to make all the more interesting the solitary patronage appointment Bush has sent to the Senate on Pataki's recommendation: the largely ignored and pivotal nomination of Roslynn Mauskopf as the next United States attorney for Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island.
The selection of Mauskopf for one of the top prosecutorial posts in the country is a window into the seedy side of Pataki's Albany, as well as a consequence of his continuing alliance with ex-senator and current big-time lobbyist Al D'Amato. It is also a measure of the will and judgment of the only man in Washington who can stop it, Senator Chuck Schumer, who defeated D'Amato in 1998 after airing a television commercial called "Decades" that documented D'Amato's long history of sleaze. If Judiciary Subcommittee chair Schumer rubber-stamps Mauskopf, he will be installing a candidate whose ties to D'Amato are so incestuous that he might well have picked her himself if he were still in the Senate.
Mauskopf, a former assistant in Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office, has been the state inspector general under Pataki since shortly after he took office in 1995. Her appointment was a product of her friendship with Barbara Jones, a top Morgenthau aide who'd been dating D'Amato for years and has since been named to the federal bench. Over the course of her years in Albany, Mauskopf became extremely close to Jones's best friend, Zenia Mucha, the legendary political operative who has been both D'Amato and Pataki's top aide. The Post and New York Law Journal have published stories faulting her social ties to those at the head of a government she is charged with independently investigating.
What's most disturbing is that if confirmed by the Senate, Mauskopf will be taking over an office that just launched an investigation involving D'Amato. Newsday and the Times revealed last week that the office is probing Computer Associates International (CA), the giant Long Island software company whose financial and accounting practices have been likened to Enron and Global Crossing. CA chair Charles Wang has long been so tied to D'Amato that he broke records orchestrating $128,000 in hard and soft money contributions to aid D'Amato's 1998 re-election, encouraging 14 CA employees or spouses, including a Wang secretary, to give the federal maximum. He and another CA executive have given Pataki $60,000 since March 1999. Six months after D'Amato left the Senate in 1999, Wang helped name him to CA's 10-member board of directors.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0209,barrett,32637,5.h... And this..
http://newsa3.topsite2007.com/Tops-Search-BushCos-US-At... /
A Different Kind of U.S. Attorney Scandal
Or, how to stay in the good graces of Karl Rove
by Wayne Barrett
April 10th, 2007 2:13 PM
New York’s two United States Attorneys–Roslynn Mauskopf, who runs the Brooklyn-based Eastern District, and Michael Garcia, the head of Manhattan’s Southern District–have gone unmentioned in the weeks of news coverage about the eight federal prosecutors unceremoniously fired in Washington. But the saga of what’s happened in these two elite jurisdictions is one more alarming indication of how badly politicized the evaluation process is at the Bush Justice Department.
Mauskopf, who had no federal prosecutorial experience when George Pataki convinced the White House to make her a U.S. Attorney in 2002, got the highest possible rating in the memo Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, sent the White House in March 2005. She was one of many on the list that Sampson’s memo said should be retained because she had “produced well, managed well, and exhibited loyalty to the president and the attorney general.” In fact, Mauskopf is such a White House favorite that in June 2006, and again this January, she was nominated for the federal bench, one of only four U.S. Attorneys tapped for a judge-ship at either time. GOP officials in New York and Washington are so determined to make her a judge that they negotiated a deal with Senator Charles Schumer, the Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who has led the probe of Gonzales on the dismissals. According to Eastern District sources familiar with the terms, Schumer has agreed to support Maus-kopf’s confirmation, as well as two other GOP selec-tions, in exchange for White House support of a judge the senator will select in the next few months.
The Bush infatuation with Mauskopf is difficult to attribute to the standards that the Department of Justice (DOJ) maintains that it applies to U.S. Attorneys-her gun convictions are well below the average percent of total caseload nationally, and her immigration prosecutions barely exceed Clinton-era totals. The overall criminal caseload in her office plunged an astonishing 38 percent in her first two years. And just as when she was New York State inspector general under Governor Pataki, she has made virtually no public corruption cases. When Schumer acquiesced to her appointment in 2002, he insisted that she recuse herself on any cases involving the Pataki administration. Though her predecessor conducted major probes of the governor before she became U.S. Attorney, she hasn’t had to recuse herself-because her office hasn’t done any. She chose not to recuse herself, however, on the office’s biggest corporate corruption case-Computer Associates-even though Al D’Amato, the former senator tied to Pataki and closely linked to Mauskopf, was a CA board member and, as audit committee chair, was charged with overseeing the company’s misreported finances. D’Amato’s lobbying partner was the sole member of the Pataki screening panel who recommended her for U.S. Attorney.
While Mauskopf did not score well on the gun, immigration, and public corruption standards that the DOJ claims it uses to evaluate prosecutors, she was at the top of the charts by a standard the department has not acknowledged that it employs: enthusiasm for the death penalty. Her office has sought the death penalty against at least 16 defendants, prevailing, for the first time in 50 years in New York, with the recent sentence meted out to Ronell Wilson for the murder of two NYPD detectives. While this tally is among the highest of any federal jurisdiction in the country, she wound up withdrawing the death penalty notice in five cases. Her office originally filed capital charges against five members of a drug gang, one of whom was merely a lookout, but two weeks later, scaled back the charges against all but the ringleader. A jury eventually refused to execute the ringleader.
http://newsa3.topsite2007.com/Tops-Search-BushCos-US-At... /
It sounds like she was appointed becasue she had no experience and could possibly be corrupt. Maybe this whole JFK "terra" plot is just something to make her look good. hmmmm