I hate Dick Renzi. He’s a scumbag who embodies everything that is wrong with our Congress and this country’s politics. He doesn’t deserve a single vote. He deserves to be locked up and have his ill-gotten worldly wealth and power stripped from him publicly and humiliatingly. I wish it were true that a federal grand jury has indicted the bastard – along with a sizable chunk of the GOP’s Congressional majority and most of the political appointees in the Executive.
Just establishing my street cred.
Given all of that, I still think this rumor that Renzi has been indicted and the US Attorney for Arizona is ‘sitting on’ the indictment until after the election is simply a sophomoric and joyously optimistic rumor. I believe with 99% certainty that this rumor is patently false.
How it got started I can only imagine, but it seems to have first appeared in the blogs at LoftyDonkey, and his/her diary at KOS (I have no idea the identity of Lofty Donkey, though I have spoken with someone using his/her address via GMail and Google IMs). Since then, it has trickled hesitantly across the nets. I read the rumor with fascination and excitement, like most on the left, I’m sure. I don’t know how Lofty got the information, but I’m sure it was passed on in good faith, even if it was not actually vetted, apparently.
Doubts quickly crept in, and before catapulting the propaganda further into the blogosphere, I contacted Lofty Donkey for verification of sources. Lofty Donkey told me the name of an AP reporter and told me that it was his/her understanding that the source for that reporter was an ex-staffer from Renzi’s congressional office. This immediately put up my antennae. A staffer seemed unlikely as a source on this, at best, and the reporter could be easily contacted.
That’s what I did. This morning I got a call from an exasperated and fairly angry AP reporter who asked to have his/her name kept out of this business. S/He denied there was any such investigation and that the rumors in the blogs and editorial rooms over the weekend were the first s/he had heard of the entire matter. S/He had been fielding calls from editors putting down the rumor, and was understandably pissed. There is no source. There is no reporter. There is no leak. Ergo, the likelihood that there is an indictment and that it is being ‘sat on’ is quite low.
Note, however, that dead tree purveyors were sniffing after this internet rumor already. The netroots do have power.
I don’t know all the fine details of federal practice, but the idea of a US Attorney ‘sitting on’ an indictment for political purposes is simply absurd. The only legal way of which I am aware that a federal prosecutor can ‘sit on’ an indictment is for a judge to agree to seal it. That keeps it secret for a very narrow class of reasons. The main ones being that the target of the indictment may learn of it and flee, or that the target is a prominent public figure and the prosecutor is giving that person a chance to ‘make it go away’ by cooperating with the investigation. The idea that career US Attorney, even one appointed by Bush, would deceive the court and ruin his career to help Dick Renzi is implausible.
Of course, it is possible that the US Attorney sealed a indictment of Renzi as a prelude to cooperation with an investigation. However, the rumor states that Renzi is under indictment for accepting a bribe and possibly fraud, even going so far as to say that he has been interviewed by the FBI (possibly true), and that the FBI wiretapped Renzi’s phone and have a recording of him soliciting a bribe (implausible for so many reasons). These ‘facts’ make Renzi the focus of the investigation. No prosecutor is going to deal away the blue fin tuna to catch a few mackerel. Sealing Renzi’s indictment makes no sense.
Now, if the prosecutor really wanted to delay legal action against Renzi until after the election, he or she could simply not present evidence to the grand jury until after the election. No muss, no fuss. That’s how I would do it if I wanted to avoid political consequences of an indictment. I wouldn’t present to the grand jury (risking a leak from the jury or court personnel), ask the presiding judge to seal it (involving the judge in my scheme and exposing myself to disbarment), or somehow prevent the unsealed indictment from being routinely announced (causing all sorts of red flags to rise), or hide it in my office or bury it in my back yard – when all I had to do was not present evidence in the first place. Especially if I have a recording pursuant to a valid warrant as evidence! That’s not going anywhere. No timeliness issues other than the statute of limitations.
For all these reasons the story is utterly absurd from a legal and logistical standpoint.
No source. No reporter. No indictment. No story. It’s all utter bullshit.
So stop writing about it!
It could be true that a case is being prepared against Renzi. He’s done some shit that may very well warrant prosecution. And it could be that the US Attorney is not going to take the case to the grand jury until after the election. That is a perfectly reasonable factual basis for this outlandish rumor. It might yet happen that Carpetbagger Dick is going to get his. There may still be a grain of truth on that beach of ignorant innuendo.
I can’t claim perfectly clean hands. I have published things based on rumor, or based on the word of someone it turns out I should not have relied on, or who had in turn innocently relied on innuendo or lies. But if blogs are going to ever become a source of news not available elsewhere, they also must be trustworthy enough for the public to spend their scarce time reading. We have to resist the tidal forces of the scoop. Traditional journalists suffer the same pernicious incentives, and when publishing is a matter of a mouse click, that pressure becomes a rip tide.
Check your facts, use your critical faculties, seek expertise: especially when the story is as explosive and important as a conspiracy to suppress the indictment of a Congressman weeks before the election, we owe our readers at least this much.
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“Think about how that would affect the credibility [of] Right Blogostan”
Are you kidding me?
Right wing bloggers report utter nonsense nearly continually, and they don’t get blasted by the public for it. They get lauded by the press.
Don’t believe me? Let’s talk aboout John Kerry’s mistress, then. Or hell, let’s talk about Limbaugh’s fantasies about Clinton’s death lists or Hillary’s lesbianism.
The Right constantly makes up and promotes lies. I’m not saying that we should act like them — clearly we shouldn’t — but let’s not pretend that any conservative has ever lost credibility for spending falsehoods about liberals.
Their whole strategy is based on that. It’s how they get attention, how they get on the air, how they’re invited to cable talk shows.
Ann Coulter, anyone?
Didja ever hear the story of the 2 psychiatrists who passed each other in the hall? As they passed, each said to the other “Good morning” and, after they passed each other, the second psychiatrist said to himself, “Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that?”
I may not have made my case succinctly. Let me try again. Suppose for a moment that the shoe were on the other foot and it was, say, Grijalva who the rumor was about. Due to reputationl effects the story would be far less credible I grant you, but the right wing blogs pick it up with zero evidence given and start building a national chatter about it nonetheless. Think about how irresponsible you would think that was. Think about how that would affect the credibility Right Blogostan (except with the most vociferous true believers). I think most of us aspire to be listened to by more than just the choir.
I’m not saying that we should withhold anything from the public, but I am saying that perhaps we should apply a little higher standard to running with a story (even a process oriented, caveated one) with only a bald assertion from another blog to rely on for a story of such explosive public import. I don’t want to end up with the reputation of those mouth-breathing fascist knee-wackers over at Little Green Footballs. As Stacy found out, even thoughful look at the rumor can quickly lead to other citing YOU as a source for the veracity of the story and it quickly becomes a credibility- sapping circle jerk.
Yes, we owe our readers the best we have to give, and sometimes that includes talking about stories that have not yet been independently verified in the press, but are nonetheless, important.
The blogs are an amazing conduit of information, information that sometimes doesn’t get to people through the mainstream press. We owe owe voters the opportunity to learn all the information out there and decide for themselves. And in this case, the information is circulating out there–independently of Lofty Donkey’s blogging.
The real problem isn’t that the blogs are talking about this story–the problem is that a lot of the blogs on this subject have missed the point here: the news isn’t the indictment itself or what the U.S. Attorney is or is not doing.
The story is this: We’re weeks away from an election in a critical district. We have a Congressman who won’t debate. We have a Congressman who has a history of corruption, of breaking or bending ethics laws, of proposing legislation to benefit his friends and associates. He’s slipped by before, under the radar, when the FEC should have brought out his audit before the election, not after. The voters were denied a chance to get the full story on Renzi before they went to the polls last time. And it can happen again, here.
I’m not after the U.S. Attorney–he has a right to decide when to indict, when to conclude an investigation. What I’m wondering is why Renzi himself isn’t denying this is true—why is he mum about this when he’s been so vocal to deny wrongdoing on FEC violations, the Mantech stuff, and his Sandlin land-swap deal?
Voters have a right to know if there is even a possibility that there is an investigation of Renzi going on. But how will voters have the chance to hear about it, and have opportunity to put pressure on Renzi to comment, to pressure him to speak to the voters at all, if the blogs don’t point out that there is at least suspicion that there is something going on behind the scenes?
We owe it to our readers not to keep things from them that are as explosive and important as this.
I didn’t want people to think that I believed the rumor (the timing was a little too perfect, as I insinuated in the title of the post) but suddenly my blog was being cited as a source for it. Yikes. It’s a tough spot — do you ignore the rumor and pretend it’s not there (I saw it on 3 blogs before posting about it), or do you pass it on with a caveat (as I did)? I chose to pass it on because even if it isn’t true, who’s putting it out there and why? There’s another story. But, lesson learned — got to make damned sure that people aren’t using you for their own means…
Whew! I never realized speculation could reach such heights of intellectual activity – learn something new every day!
You make a strong case. However, just because the AP reporter that Lofty Donkey referred to denies the story does not mean that the story is false. One thing does not necessarily lead to the other.
I think you are more correct in your analysis when you say this:
“It could be true that a case is being prepared against Renzi. He’s done some shit that may very well warrant prosecution. And it could be that the US Attorney is not going to take the case to the grand jury until after the election.”
I think bloggers intentions in spreading this rumor were good–and I’m not sure that anyone ever said it was a conspiracy by the U.S. Attorney’s office to wait until after the election to release the indictment. “Sitting on” to me, meant, waiting. I think the point was that it would be a lot better if this information came out before the election, and that’s what bloggers were trying to make happen. There are some out there in the press and the blog community that have better resources than others–if the story was floating around out there on the blogosphere in the same way it’s floating around Arizona, maybe others would pick it up and find out the truth one way or another. And as far as I’m concerned, that hasn’t yet happened. I haven’t seen anything saying it’s true by a non-partisan mainstream media source, but I haven’t seen anything, other than what you’ve written here, that has said it is not true.
Until it is verified or denied, it remains a rumor and like you said, something that very well may happen yet. We’ll just have to wait and see.