John Emshwiller and Gary Fields of The Wall Street Journal have been producing a series of front-page stories about overcriminalization in the United States, with a focus on vague and overbroad statutes, especially federal statutes. Their stories have highlighted an unfortunate basic fact about living in this country: the Department of Justice has an unconscionable number of laws at its disposal, and they know how to use and abuse them to target the innocent – many of the same themes I’ve covered in my “Injustice Department” series on forbes.com.

But in one of their recent articles about the DOJ’s practice of bringing “false statements” prosecutions, they failed to discuss the most important—and most pernicious—aspect of the feds’ use and abuse of the false statement statute. These false statements prosecutions must be understood in conjunction with the FBI’s deliberate policy not to record their interrogations and interviews of targets and of witnesses, and to instead rely on agents’ “Form 302” reports to supposedly document interviews. The result is a truly corrupting and terrifying combination, and helps to explain the problem Emshwiller and Fields highlight.

You can find a link to our article here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/harveysilverglate/2012/04/18/what-the-wall-street-journal-missed-about-false-statements-made-to-the-fbi/

On January 27^th of this year, Kevin White, the man often credited with helping turn Boston into the modern city it is, died after a long illness. Since then, there have been a number of news reports and editorial commentaries discussing White’s sixteen year run as mayor, his subsequent career as a Boston University professor, and even the final years of his political life—capped as it was by seemingly endless federal corruption investigations that nailed a few underlings, but despite then-US Attorney (later governor) Bill Weld’s best efforts, never landed the “Great White.”

But missing from most of the coverage has been a description of how the press played handmaiden to Bill Weld’s prosecutorial apparatus and prevented Mayor White from pursuing a fifth term in office. In my post to ThePhoenix.com, I relate a number of stories of prosecutorial targeting and abuse that were largely ignored—and even aided—by the mainstream media at the time. It seems to me that these stories cry out to be told, uncomfortable as they may be for so many participants, myself included.

Rod Blagojevich was sentenced on December 7^th (Pearl Harbor Day!) to 14 years in prison. I argue in my latest “Injustice Department” piece at Forbes.com that Blagojevich was a victim of an ever-expanding federal prosecutorial apparatus. He violated no state laws, and yet found himself under the thumb of a prosecutor citing vague federal statutes. The result was Blagojevich’s having been found culpable for behavior that was not criminal, and that he had no reason to think would be construed as such. In the run-up to his sentencing where the trial judge played his assigned part in a morality play enabling unjust federal prosecutorial power, and in a last desperate attempt to lessen his punishment, Rod Blagojevich admitted responsibility. But he admitted to having committed what I deem to be non-crimes. And if a new congressional bill—the “Clean Up Government Act”—gets enacted into law, we will see a great many more unsuspecting local politicians finding themselves in the crosshairs of  an overzealous and unjust federal criminal justice system.  Today it is the pols in the DOJ’s crosshairs; tomorrow it can readily be all of us (indeed, it pretty much is already).