We're going to need a bigger fan

There's a lot of shit coming.

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."

Eubanks, who served for 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said three political appointees were responsible for the last-minute shifts in the government's tobacco case in June 2005: then-Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum, then-Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler and Keisler's deputy at the time, Dan Meron.

Supervisors intervening with remedy matters with the lawyer trying a case is bad form, demanding a verbatim closing argument be read is very, very bad form. Neither of them is illegal, and in fact at least one of the individuals above was cleared in an internal investigation on those two issues. However, instructing individuals to change sworn testimony is, well, usually very illegal.

Just more grist for the mill in establishing that Bush & Gonzo care more about politicizing justice than actual justice. After all, who is more sympathetic than a tobacco industry executive?