NYT: US Attorney Christopher Christie a Crook, too (like Kevin O'Connor)

[kathleen]

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Subject: NYT: Christopher Christie a Crook, too (like Kevin O'Connor)

Date: Jan 10, 2008 8:29 AM

Christopher Christie (NYT article below about doing friendly business
with another
Top GOP Operative, Ashcroft) is a Republican whore like Kevin O'Connor
who persecuted
Lyme treaters instead of the perpetrators of the Lyme crimes, and
Christie has been
given information by me on numerous occasions about these Lyme crimes.

Christie should be thrown in jail with US Attorney Kevin O'Connor for
obstructing
justice:
http://www.actionlyme.org/LYME_CORRUPTICUT.htm
http://www.actionlyme.org/USDOJ_COMPLAINT_RICO,htm

I am completely convinced crooks are deliberately chosen to lead state
and federal
"law enforcement" divisions. To Wit, didn't US Attorney Kevin
O'Connor
live right next door to Hot Tub Rowland? Is Kristine Ragaglia a
drunken slut, but
whenever any other mother is too demented by drugs or alcohol their
children taken
away by DCF?
http://www.actionlyme.org/RAGAGLIA_GRANDJURY_DETAILS.htm
The whole state new about her. They accused John Rowland of being the
father of
one of her children. It was "THE STATE RUMOR." Even the Catholic
priest
in the prison had heard about it. Everyone knows the DCF are
outrageous drunken
sluts who party with the drunken slutty cops:
http://www.actionlyme.org/VIKING_INTERVIEWS.htm

Hey, the USDOJ PROMOTED O'Connor for keeping his mouth shut about all
the crime,
here and re Alberto Gonzales and his torture, twice, didn't they?
http://www.actionlyme.org/JAMES_PHILLIPS_HOMEPAGE.htm
Oh, yeah, they love all that secret outrageously decrepit behavior.
The more the
better. That's why the FBI and DOJ watch porn 24/7 and set up porn
stings.
You can't pull them away from it. They conduct outrageous slutty
behavior on
their own time, then they go to work and do more of the same, watching
their porn
monitors all day.


That new FBI building at 600 State Street in New Haven was entirely
constructed
around setting up all the porn monitors for the FBI to jerk off all
day long and
set up stings.

KMDickson
ActionLyme.org

============

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

January 10, 2008
Ashcroft Deal Brings Scrutiny in Justice Dept.
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON -- When the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey needed to
find an outside
lawyer to monitor a large corporation willing to settle criminal
charges out of
court last fall, he turned to former Attorney General John Ashcroft,
his onetime
boss. With no public notice and no bidding, the company awarded Mr.
Ashcroft an
18-month contract worth $28 million to $52 million.

That contract, which Justice Department officials in Washington
learned about only
several weeks ago, has prompted an internal inquiry into the
department's procedures
for selecting outside monitors to police settlements with large
companies.

The contract between Mr. Ashcroft's consulting firm, the Ashcroft
Group, and Zimmer
Holdings, a medical supply company in Indiana, has also drawn the
attention of Congressional
investigators.

The New Jersey prosecutor, United States Attorney Christopher J.
Christie, directed
similar monitoring contracts last year to two other former Justice
Department colleagues
from the Bush administration, as well as to a former Republican state
attorney general
in New Jersey.

Officials said that while there had been no accusations of wrongdoing
on the part
of Mr. Christie or Mr. Ashcroft, aides to Attorney General Michael B.
Mukasey were
concerned about the appearance of favoritism.

Mr. Mukasey, a former federal judge who was sworn in as attorney
general in November,
has vowed to remove political considerations from decision-making at
the department
in the wake of a series of scandals under his predecessor, Alberto R.
Gonzales.

Mr. Ashcroft was awarded the contract last fall at the direction of
Mr. Christie
as part of his office's settlement of criminal accusations against
Zimmer Holdings
and four smaller firms accused of paying kickbacks to doctors.

A spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft said that the Ashcroft Group had not
lobbied for the
contract but was pleased by the referral.

The disclosure of the monitoring agreement, in which Mr. Ashcroft's
fees are paid
directly by Zimmer, prompted Democratic lawmakers from New Jersey to
question if
the contract was new evidence of political favoritism in the Bush
administration's
long-embattled Justice Department.

Justice Department officials said the internal inquiry by the Criminal
Division
began several weeks ago with no public announcement.

Department officials said the review was expected to result this year
in formal
guidelines to prevent the appearance of conflicts in the choice of
monitors to oversee
out-of-court settlements reached between federal prosecutors and
companies accused
of wrongdoing.

In the Bush administration, federal prosecutors have increasingly
relied on out-of-court
settlements with large corporations in criminal investigations that in
the past
might have resulted in indictments and trials. The settlements often
call for outside
lawyers to be retained by the companies to monitor the agreements. The
contracts
call for the lawyers to monitor the company's compliance with the
settlements through
financial audits and other types of internal investigations.

A new study by two Texas lawyers, Lawrence D. Finder and Ryan D.
McConnell, found
that the number of so-called deferred-prosecution or nonprosecution
agreements between
the department and large companies grew to 35 last year from 5 in
2003.

Often, the names of corporate monitors are not made public. The
internal inquiry
started after Zimmer Holdings revealed in filings with the Securities
and Exchange
Commission in late October that it had hired Mr. Ashcroft's consulting
firm, based
in Washington, to monitor its settlement of criminal charges based on
accusations
of kickbacks to doctors involving the company's knee and hip implants.

The firm said Mr. Christie had directed it to hire Mr. Ashcroft. Mr.
Christie has
acknowledged that he chose Mr. Ashcroft for the assignment. The
disclosures in Zimmer's
filings about Mr. Ashcroft were first reported several weeks ago by
The Star-Ledger
of Newark and other New Jersey news organizations.

Mr. Christie directed similar contracts in settlements with other
medical-supply
companies to two other former Justice Department colleagues -- David N.
Kelley, the
former United States attorney in Manhattan, and Debra Wong Yang, his
counterpart
in Los Angeles -- and to David Samson, the former Republican attorney
general in
New Jersey.

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Christie said he chose Mr.
Ashcroft and
the others for the monitoring assignments because they had impeccable
legal credentials
and he knew and trusted them.

"It's really important that the working relationship between this
office and the
monitors is very, very close," he said. "I can't tell you how much
work we do with
these monitors." He said he had selected Mr. Ashcroft to work with
Zimmer, the largest
of five companies in the criminal investigation, because "I knew he
was somebody
who understands these issues and would be taken seriously by the
company as an authority
figure."

Mr. Christie has disputed accusations raised by Democratic lawmakers
in New Jersey
that it was a conflict of interest for him to direct large, no-bid
contracts to
former colleagues and friends, but he has referred those questions to
the Justice
Department in Washington.

Department officials said they had no formal comment but noted that
the monitoring
agreements were not given only to Republicans and that Mr. Christie's
recommendations
of outside monitors in other large corporate investigations had been
praised.

Although he was a prosecutor in the Bush administration, Mr. Kelley
has registered
as a Democrat in the past. Mr. Kelley, who has done legal work for The
New York
Times, did not respond to e-mail messages on Wednesday. Mr. Samson and
Ms. Yang
did not return phone calls.

The dollar value of the contracts obtained by Mr. Kelley, Ms. Yang and
Mr. Samson
is unclear, since the medical-supply companies they are monitoring
have not revealed
those details, suggesting that they are smaller than Mr. Ashcroft's.

Under the settlements with the Justice Department, the companies
negotiate the fees
with the monitors themselves, a situation legal scholars say has the
potential for
abuse because companies might be overly generous to encourage
leniency.

Department officials said that there were few internal guidelines for
hiring independent
monitors and that Mr. Christie was not required to seek approval from
the Justice
Department to name Mr. Ashcroft and the others and had not done so.

A spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft's firm, Mark Corallo, said that Mr.
Ashcroft was an
obvious choice as a monitor.

"I know John Ashcroft, I know his capabilities," Mr. Corallo said. "No
matter what
people think of his politics, he ran an unbelievably efficient
operation at Justice
as a manager. He understands the law. He understands how to manage an
enormous organization."

He said that Mr. Ashcroft knew nothing about the assignment until the
possibility
was raised by Mr. Christie, who was confirmed as United States
attorney in 2002,
shortly before Mr. Ashcroft was sworn in as attorney general. Mr.
Christie had been
a lawyer in private practice and a Republican fund-raiser in New
Jersey.

Mr. Corallo said that Mr. Ashcroft's firm had hired more than 30
employees and outside
advisers, including accountants and lawyers, to oversee the monitoring
contract
and that Mr. Ashcroft had traveled to Indiana several times for the
assignment.

"It's taken a large personal commitment from him," Mr. Corallo said,
adding, "In
coming months, people will realize that Chris Christie did exactly the
right thing
in choosing these folks to be monitors."

In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Zimmer said
it had agreed
to pay the Ashcroft firm a monthly fee of $750,000, and to reimburse
it for expenses
that were expected to total $150,000 to $250,000 a month.

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