Tobacco case meddled with, prosecutor says
WASHINGTON – The former leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said Wednesday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government’s racketeering case.
Sharon Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to smokers.
She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop arguments that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim from a closing argument they rewrote for her, she said.
“The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said,” Eubanks said. “And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public.”
Eubanks, who served for 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said three political appointees were responsible for the shifts in the government’s tobacco case in June 2005: then-Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum, then-Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler, and his deputy at the time, Dan Meron.
News reports on the changes at the time caused an uproar in Congress and sparked an inquiry by the Justice Department. Government witnesses said they had been asked to change testimony and one expert withdrew from the case. Government lawyers also announced that they were scaling back a proposed penalty against the industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.
High-ranking Justice Department officials said there was no political meddling in the case, and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility concurred after an investigation.
Eubanks, who retired from Justice in December 2005, said she is coming forward now because she is concerned about what she called the “overwhelming politicization” of the department demonstrated by the controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Lawyers from Justice’s civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by supervisors in the past.
McCallum, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Australia, said in an interview Wednesday that congressional claims of political interference were rejected by the OPR investigation, for which Eubanks was questioned.
In June 2006, OPR cleared McCallum, concluding that his “actions in seeking and directing changes in the remedies sought were not influenced by any political considerations, but rather were based on good faith efforts to obtain remedies from the district court that would be sustainable on appeal.”
Keisler and Meron did not return telephone calls seeking a comment.