The mainstream media is reporting that there may be an “early release” in the works for former Enron executive Jeff Skilling, now serving a 24 year sentence even though he stole nothing from Enron or its shareholders.  Please remember that Andrew Fastow, former Enron CFO, often referred to as the “architect” of the financial fraud, stole millions upon millions from Enron.  Fastow, however, served only approximately 5 years, but that was because the “elite Enron Task Force” gave Fastow a special deal for saying what they needed him to say to convict Skilling and Lay.  Meanwhile the prosecutors hid from the defense the exculpatory evidence that contradicted their “theory of the case.”  That exculpatory evidence appeared only in the hundreds of pages of raw notes of the government agents who interviewed Fastow.

It took multiple orders from the Fifth Circuit to force the government to release those notes.   Once the defense got the notes, it was obvious why the government did not want them disclosed.  They were chocked full of evidence that contradicted what Fastow said and the government’s theory of the crime.

In Skilling’s appeal, the Fifth Circuit  brushed aside the exculpatory evidence the notes revealed, although it did express it was troubled by some of it,  but no court ever fully examined it or questioned the prosecutors about it at all.  And to date, no one in the Skilling case or the Merrill Lynch/Nigerian Barge case (which was also corrupted by the prosecutors’ suppression of evidence favorable to the defense) has ever even had a hearing to bring that evidence and more to the light of day.

The most interesting term reported from the proposed agreement our Department of Justice seeks to strike with Skilling would require him to give up his Motion to Dismiss or For New Trial Because of Government Misconduct, based on these “elite prosecutors” conduct in HIDING EVIDENCE they unequivocally knew was favorable to the defense and that they were CONSTITUTIONALLY  REQUIRED to disclose.

In fact, this is the ONLY REASON that would really motivate the government to work a deal with Skilling-they are trying to cover up what these prosecutors did.  The LAST THING DOJ wants right now is for all the misconduct of those “elite prosecutors” to be exposed to the public and the media in a hearing where the defense could question the witnesses and obtain their emails.  At a real hearing then, we might actually have a shot at JUSTICE.  

Gosh, if a judge actually required the prosecutors to answer questions under oath and produce what they really had and said, we’d probably wind up needing a special prosecutor appointed to investigate the prosecutors as happened in the failed prosecution of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens.  NO, obviously, DOJ wants to shut any possible inquiry as fast as it can.  

DO YOU KNOW WHY??   Well,  the LEAD prosecutor in the trial against Skilling is now CHIEF WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL.  That’s right, Kathryn Ruemmler was the lead prosecutor in the Skilling case.   She was also the lead prosecutor in the Merrill Lynch/Enron Barge case, one of the underpinnings of the government’s case against Skilling.  She hid evidence in the Barge case too, and four Merrill executives spent a year in prison for conduct the Fifth Circuit eventually found was not criminal while Ruemmler and her colleagues hid the evidence that directly contradicted what they told the jury.

 Ruemmler is now the subject of a serious grievance filed against her with the D.C. Bar Association, establishing that she violated Rule 3.8 by failing to give the defense in the Merrill Lynch case evidence that she had even yellow-highlighted as Brady material before the trial and still hid.  The United States Court Of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that she “plainly suppressed” evidence favorable to the defense.   That alone is a finding of a Rule 3.8 violation, but so far, nothing has been done about it.  We will post more on this later.  Stay tuned. . .   To what lengths will DOJ go to hide the truth?