Judge Blames Accountants, FBI Vendetta for Conviction

U.S. District Judge Harry E. Claiborne, seeking to stave off removal by the Senate, testified Friday that errors by his accountants led to his imprisonment earlier this year for federal income tax evasion.

The veteran Las Vegas judge, addressing the first Senate impeachment proceeding in 50 years, said the errors were exploited by federal law enforcement agents in Nevada, who he said had been seeking to discredit him for at least six years.

Claiborne, 69, told a special Senate committee that his 1984 federal court conviction for under-reporting his income for 1979 and 1980 by $106,000 culminated a vendetta led by former FBI Agent Joseph Yablonsky, who once headed the Las Vegas FBI office. He said the Internal Revenue Service also took part in the campaign against him.

‘Personal Dislike’

“When the tax investigation started, I knew that I was under surveillance and that my friends were being questioned about me,” Claiborne testified.

“It was not a good atmosphere, to say the least. The head of the FBI office somehow took a personal dislike to me. They heard I had been a criminal (defense) lawyer, and immediately to them I was considered a threat.”

A 12-member panel chaired by Sen. Charles McC. Mathias Jr. (R-Md.) is weighing evidence against Claiborne that has been gathered by the House, which approved impeachment proceedings against him.

After concluding its hearings early next week, the committee is expected to recommend to the full Senate whether Claiborne should be removed from his $78,700-a-year judgeship.

Even though Claiborne is serving a two-year prison sentence for tax evasion, he has refused to resign from the bench. Since a judge is given a lifetime appointment, he can only be removed by a vote of the Senate.

First Trial of Kind

Claiborne’s case marks the first Senate impeachment trial for a federal judge convicted of crimes committed while in office.

Defending his financial conduct, Claiborne testified that he faithfully furnished his tax accountants with full information about his 1979 and 1980 earnings but that one accountant never received a key document and another used a “creative” but erroneous formula for calculating his taxes.

House prosecutors said Claiborne “should have been writing a check for $52,516” for taxes owed, rather than claiming a refund of $20,927 on his 1980 return. They charged that the judge, among other deficiencies, failed to list about $88,000 in deferred legal fees he had received.

Claiborne testified that he listed those fees on a sheet of yellow legal paper that was placed into evidence. But prosecutors have said it may have been altered at a later date.

House prosecutors also have charged that, after he became a judge in 1978, Claiborne began cashing his checks for past legal work in Nevada casinos to make them difficult to trace, rather than depositing them in his bank account as he had previously done.