Corruption unit closure still at issue

Five months after the sudden dismantling of the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, questions are still being raised in Washington, D.C., about the controversial move.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has been exchanging letters with a top Justice Department official over the unit’s disbanding, and the subject came up during a congressional oversight hearing late last month.

In March, Los Angeles U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O’Brien announced during a closed-door meeting that he was eliminating the Public Corruption and Environmental Crimes section and transferring its 17 lawyers to other units throughout the office.

O’Brien said through a spokesman at the time that he was making the move to enhance the office’s ability to prosecute such cases by spreading them among a larger pool of lawyers. But several prosecutors in the disbanded unit said the change was made after an angry O’Brien chastised prosecutors for working too few hours, for filing too few cases and for bad-mouthing him behind his back.

After reading news reports about the shake-up, Feinstein wrote Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey in March saying she had “serious concerns” about the move and questioning whether corruption cases would be “as vigorously pursued” in the absence of a unit dedicated to them.

Feinstein also said she was troubled by reports of “low morale and ill will” in the nation’s second-largest U.S. attorney’s office, as the result of the disbanding.

The senator asked Mukasey to provide her with the Justice Department’s rationale for the move, “including the specific facts, statistics and circumstances that drove this decision.” She also asked who was consulted before the disbanding and whether the Justice Department or White House played any role.

In a response last month, Mukasey’s office said that the “reorganization” of the public corruption unit would enable more lawyers in the L.A. office to take on such cases and that “productivity is expected to increase substantially.”

In a curt reply earlier this month, Feinstein thanked the attorney general for his “attempt” to respond but added that her questions remained unanswered. She reiterated the questions she posed in the first letter and told Mukasey that she looked forward to his “prompt response.”

In a letter sent Tuesday, Mukasey spokesman Keith B. Nelson said O’Brien made the decision to restructure the section after consulting senior staff in Los Angeles.

Neither the Justice Department, the White House nor members of the disbanded unit were consulted or played any role in the reorganization, Nelson wrote. Since making the change, O’Brien has taken several steps to make sure public corruption cases are “handled aggressively and efficiently,” including arranging for public corruption prosecutors from the Justice Department to fly to Los Angeles to train prosecutors and agents on how to develop such cases.

Scott Gerber, a spokesman for Feinstein, said the senator had not yet received the letter.

The decision to disband the unit was brought up last month during a meeting of a House judiciary subcommittee. Kenneth E. Melson, director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, was asked questions about the move by at least two members of the committee. Melson said he supported the decision and expected it to yield more public corruption prosecutions in the future.

Mark Young, a top aide to O’Brien, pointed to several public corruption prosecutions the L.A. office has undertaken in recent months, including that of an Arizona FBI agent accused of official misconduct, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney accused of bribery, and a prominent local attorney, Pierce O’Donnell, accused of criminal campaign finance violations.

Before O’Donnell’s indictment last week, one of his lawyers, George Terwilliger III, questioned whether O’Brien was trying to make an example of O’Donnell to “blunt criticism” of his earlier decision to disband the public corruption unit.

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scott.glover@latimes.com