In today’s Washington Post, John Kenney and Bruce Ohr respond to the allegations that the Bush Administration interfered with the federal government’s RICO case against the major tobacco companies.
One of us is the senior career official in the Justice Department’s criminal division, has served in the department for 56 years through Democratic and Republican administrations, and also served as the criminal division’s principal decision maker in the tobacco case during the relevant period. The other one of us is the career chief of the organized crime and racketeering section in the criminal division and has served at Justice for 16 years, also during Democratic and Republican administrations.
The allegations reported in the article are entirely groundless. The Justice decisions at issue adopted and followed the authoritative positions we developed and the specific recommendations we made and approved as senior career prosecutors in the criminal division, which by Justice regulation is vested with authority over enforcement of civil and criminal RICO. Those positions, recommendations and decisions were based entirely on legal considerations, not political ones — as the department’s office of professional responsibility, staffed exclusively with independent career attorneys, concluded after the matter was investigated.