U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia resigns -- Taylor was king of cover-ups....
On May 28, 2009, Jeffrey Taylor, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, resigned to take up a position with the accounting firm Ernst & Young. A former counselor to two ethically-tainted Attorneys-General, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, Taylor has held the position of interim U.S. Attorney since 2006 because his nomination never moved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Although Taylor withdrew his nomination last September, he continued to serve as U.S. Attorney for the nation's capital during the first four months of the Obama administration.
To say that Taylor lorded over a U.S. Attorneys office that was driven by politics over integrity and ethics would be an understatement.
Taylor's major role was to declare "case closed" for a number of high-profile investigations that the Bush-Cheney administration did not want to see pursued further. Taylor declared U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins single handedly carried out the post-9/11 anthrax attacks that saw Congress traumatized into passing without debate the draconian Patriot Act. Although there was and continues to be a wealth of evidence pointing to other culprits in the anthrax attacks, Taylor, with a straight face, stated on August 6, 2008, "Based upon the totality of the evidence we had gathered against him, we are confident that Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks."
Of course, Taylor took the opportunity to close the anthrax case because of a fortuitous occurrence for the Bush-Cheney administration: Ivins had allegedly committed "suicide" on July 29, a little over a week before Taylor's announcement that Ivins was their guy all along. The reported cause of Ivins' death was an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. Of course, no autopsy was performed.
Another troublesome "cold case" was simply whisked away by Taylor with a simple indictment. Taylor. After eight years of no leads, Taylor indicted illegal El Salvadorean immigrant ne'er-do-well, Ingmar Guandique, for the murder of Washington intern Chandra Levy, who also just so happened to be having an extramarital affair with House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence member Gary Condit. Taylor was never interested in what knowledge of a classified nature Levy may have garnered from Condit, knowledge that prompted her to avoid any direct flights from Dulles International Airport to San Francisco a little over four months from the 9/11 attacks.
A District of Columbia's public defender appointed to represent Guandique summed up nicely the problems with Taylor's case: "This flawed investigation, characterized by the many mistakes and missteps of the Metropolitan Police Department and every federal agency that has attempted to solve this case, will not end with the simple issuance of an arrest warrant against Mr. Guandique."
However, for the Bush-Cheney administration, Taylor's indictment of a tough who was already serving a 10-year prison sentence for attacking two women in Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, was just good end-of-term housekeeping.
The third major housekeeping chore accomplished by Taylor was the prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called "Washington Madam," whose Pamela Martin & Associates escort service catered for some 13 years to Washington's high and mighty, including Senator David Vitter (R-LA), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Randall Tobias, and, as reported by WMR, Halliburton President and CEO Richard Bruce Cheney, who sued the pseudonym Bruce Chiles when engaging the services of Palfrey's escorts for scatological trysts.
Taylor pursued an arcane Mann Act case against Palfrey, which prohibits interstate trafficking of persons for purposes of prostitution. Taylor also pressured the judge in the case to disallow Palfrey's attempt to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) in her case, a move that may have highlighted Pamela Martin's clandestine work for the CIA. Taylor succeeded in having a jury find Palfrey guilty on counts of money laundering, mail fraud, and racketeering. But fortuitous for Taylor and his bosses, Palfrey, like Ivins, conveniently committed "suicide" by allegedly hanging herself in a shed next to her elderly mother's house on May 1, 2008. Case closed again.
Taylor represents the extreme politicization of the Justice Department, not for political gain, but for the covering up of major crimes against the American people. While serving as a counselor to Ashcroft and Gonzales, Taylor oversaw the operations of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, the unit that implemented, over the objections of a number of career prosecutors, the illegal National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless wiretapping program code named "STELLAR WIND."
Taylor will now be heading up something called the Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services (FIDS) area within the Americas Assurance practice at Ernst & Young...., i.e. CIA.
