A drunken pumpkin riot! Now THAT’S News!

Possible answers to the question posed above:

1. Because everyone already knows that the Justice Department is corrupt and Eric Holder is an incompetent political hack.

2. There was a huge pumpkin festival riot in Keane, New Hampshire!

3. The news media is so biased that it will even treat an astounding judicial ruling as a made-up “conservative media” story.

4. It’s just more evidence of how abysmally the Obama administration is being run, and an election is coming up.

5. The world has gone mad.

I think any of them are plausible explanations.

Whichever it is, I guess I am honored to be able to help break some news, as it is not usually an Ethics Alarms function. This story has made it to exactly one news source as I write this, the New York Observor, though a few conservative blogs are noting it. Read the story itself and the links here.

Meanwhile, I’ll summarize:

Two former Assistant United States Attorneys say Holder ‘s Justice Department engaged in deceit and corruption  in pursuing  its litigation against Sierra Pacific Industries, a California lumber company. Responding to the allegations—and remember that false allegations of this magnitude would mean the end of these lawyers legal careers– Federal District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. has ordered the recusal of every federal judge in the Eastern District of California, on the theory that since the court may have been defrauded by the government,  an outside judge is needed to handle the matter to avoid a conflict of interest.

Under the pressure of litigation that was allegedly based on a frame job by state and federal investigators, Sierra Pacific Industries and other defendants agreed to pay $55 million to the United States over a period of five years and transfer 22,500 acres of land as settlement of charges brought against the company by DOJ for causing a 2007 wildfire that destroyed 65,000 acres of land in California. Judge Englund’s remarkable  ruling, which is based on evidence that the government lied about the origin of the fire in order to have a corporate villain to blame and collect millions of dollars from to the ringing sound of environmentalist cheers, jeopardizes that settlement. The evidence was provided to Sierra Pacific by the two DOJ lawyers, and Sierra Pacific told the federal court that “the United States presented false evidence to the Defendants and the Court [and] advanced arguments to the Court premised on that false evidence or for which material evidence had been withheld…” and DOJ  “prepared key. . .investigators for depositions, and allowed them to repeatedly give false testimony about the most important aspects of their investigation.” DOJ also “failed to disclose the facts and circumstances associated with the. . .lead investigator’s direct financial interest in the outcome of the investigation arising from an illegal bank account that has since been exposed and terminated.”

One of the former DOJ lawyers swears he was removed from the original prosecution by his supervisor, David Shelledy, chief of the civil division in the United States Attorney’s office, because he refused to “engage in unethical conduct as a lawyer.”

This week, Eric Holder will award Shelledy the Department’s highest award for excellence, because in the Justice Department of Eric Holder and Barack Obama, this is what excellence has come to mean.

But who cares about the systemic political corruption of the nation’s Justice Department when there’s a pumpkin riot to talk about?

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Pointer: Powerline

Facts: New York Observor, Licensed to Lie, All Gov California,