Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Report: Acting USA facing ethics investigation for potentially helping NJ Guv candidate Christie

TPM:

The Associated Press reports that Acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra -- who is the successor to now-Republican nominee Chris Christie -- is
facing an internal investigation for possibly politicizing the recent corruption investigation, in order to benefit Christie's campaign.

The Justice Department is reportedly examining whether Marra's public comments when announcing last month's big corruption bust were politically geared towards Christie's campaign.

The comments are reportedly this: "There are easily reforms that could be made within this state that would make our job easier, or even take some of the load off our job. There are too many people that profit off the system the way it is and so they have no incentive to change it. The few people that want to change it seem to get shouted down. So how long that cycle's going to continue I just don't know."

Later update: According to the report from the AP, the investigation is not into the conduct of the investigation itself but rather into public comments Marra made at the news conference announcing the investigation. The question being whether his comments (you can see the precise words here) were aimed at or had the effect of spinning the indictments as a rationale for Christie's campaign against Corzine. That's plenty worth investigating but is certainly qualitatively different, if true, from politicizing and thus tainting the investigation itself.

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