America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History

Catalogue

America’s Nazi Secret

An Insider’s History of How the United States Department of Justice Obstructed Congress By: Blocking Congressional Investigations into Famous American Families Who Funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab terrorists; Lying to Congress, the GAO and the CIA about the Postwar Immigration of Eastern European Nazi War Criminals to the US; and Concealing from the 9/11 Investigators the role of the Arab Nazi War Criminals in Recruiting Modern Middle Eastern Terrorist Groups.

John J. Loftus

Formerly GS-13 Supervisory Trial Attorney, Director of the Belarus Project,

Office of Special Investigations, Criminal Division Headquarters,

US Department of Justice, Washington, DC.

An updated, declassified and uncensored version of the original work, The Belarus Secret

Original Manuscript censored by the US Government in 1981, 1982, and again in 1983

Nominated for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers

Segment Winner, 1982 Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, CBS 60 Minutes

Subject of open Congressional Hearings, House Judiciary Committee, 1985

Files declassified 2009-2010, Central Intelligence Agency

Upcoming Documentary Film, American Secrets, 2011

America’s Nazi Secret: An Insider’s History of How the United States Department of Justice Obstructed Congress By: Blocking Congressional Investigations into Famous American Families Who Funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab terrorists; Lying to Congress, the GAO and the CIA about the Postwar Immigration of Eastern European Nazi War Criminals to the US; and Concealing from the 9/11 Investigators the role of the Arab Nazi War Criminals in Recruiting Modern Middle Eastern Terrorist Groups.

Copyright © 1982 , 1983, 2010, 2011 John Loftus. All Rights Reserved.

Presentation Copyright © 2010 Trine Day, LLC

Published by:

TrineDay LLC

PO Box 577

Walterville, OR 97489

1-800-556-2012

www.TrineDay.com

publisher@TrineDay.net

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010936158

Loftus, John — Author

America’s Nazi Secret: An Insider’s History of How the United States Department of Justice Obstructed Congress By: Blocking Congressional Investigations into Famous American Families Who Funded Hitler, Stalin and Arab terrorists; Lying to Congress, the GAO and the CIA about the Postwar Immigration of Eastern European Nazi War Criminals to the US; and Concealing from the 9/11 Investigators the role of the Arab Nazi War Criminals in Recruiting Modern Middle Eastern Terrorist Groups.—2 ed. (The Belarus Secret, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982)

Includes index, p. cm. (acid-free paper)

Epub (ISBN-13) 978-1-936296-69-9 (ISBN-10) 1-936296-69-1

Mobi (ISBN-13) 978-1-936296-70-5 (ISBN-10) 1-936296-70-5

Print (ISBN-13) 978-1-936296-04-0 (ISBN-10) 1-936296-04-7

1. World War, 1939-1945—Atrocities. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Byelorussian S.S.R. 3. War criminals—United States. 4. War criminals— Byelorussian S.S.R. 5. Byelorussians—United States. 6. Byelorussian S.S.R.—History. 7. United States—Dept. of Justice—Corruption. I. Loftus, John. II. Title

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA

Distribution to the Trade by:

Independent Publishers Group (IPG)

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

312.337.0747

www.ipgbook.com

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.

— Heinrich Himmler

The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

— Simon Wiesenthal

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.

— John F. Kennedy

Publisher’s Foreword

And no matter what the progress

Or what may yet be proved,

The simple facts of life are such

They cannot be removed.

— Herman Hupfeld, As Time Goes By

When I first came across The Belarus Secret, an earlier version of this book, in the 1980s at my public library, I was amazed at the revelations, and surprised to find some of the same characters that I had come across while researching a subject I call CIA-drugs. The same intelligence-community crew that was corrupting our Republic from the shadows … was also, and most egregiously, doing so from within.

I had first heard of this cancer in the late 1960s from my father, an OSS/CIA veteran. But at that time I had no context within which to put his rare, frank discussions of how he felt the world really works. He spoke to me about the drug trade, about psychological warfare, propaganda and big games. He said the news wasn’t the real news; they were sway pieces. I didn’t comprehend that at all at the time. As a kid, I had been a paperboy for almost six years and my father would get up with me in the dark morning hours and read the paper. And he had been an avid TV news watcher. He did make odd comments to the TV now and then; during an NBC report on Vietnam, he suddenly retorted aloud, No, we knew that! But the whole concept of controlled news was beyond me. It just wouldn’t compute in my teen-age brain.

Well, now I am past 60, and absolutely amazed at what goes on in our beloved country. The levels of corruption and the methods of manipulation are outrageous. We are getting played – left, right, and center. Over forty years of research can be crystallized to reveal the means of hidden control: a leviathan of three levels with three parts to each level.

The top level is Mining-Metals-Money. This operation (which includes all our major mineral resources, but especially the metals gold and silver, used in wealth quantification) is held very tight-to-the-vest and its true dimensions, methods and transactions do not garner much discussion because they are seldom exposed. It holds the reins on all the rest.

The middle section, Drugs-Guns-Oil, gets a bit more interesting. Its basic function is to funnel or direct the money and control, i.e. power. A shadowy world where ends justify means, chiefly war.

At the bottom is the level I call Media-Movies-Magic. This is where the hooves hit the road, where the beast gets its traction and the capacity to manipulate perception – keeping us all ignorant about the true reality of the world – and to game us unmercifully. Magic consists of psychological warfare, meme warfare, groupthink and a myriad of other covert ways to manipulate and coerce us. Magic is the ability to hoodwink. Movies are a very important part of our cultural landscape and they have an immense impact on society’s norms, moods, values and cultural narratives…. For that reason, they are highly controlled.

Media – well, let’s talk some about Big Media: America’s Nazi Secret and its startling new revelations has been offered to national news organizations, but they have declined, even though the earlier, censored edition of this book generated wide publicity and helped 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace win an Emmy. Was the control more lax then? Probably. Did the sanitized version serve a certain purpose? Maybe.

I find the silence disturbing. Why the suppression now?

With restored vigor and vibrant truth this new edition of The Belarus Secret, released now as America’s Nazi Secret, greatly helps our understanding of difficult historical facts as well as the dynamics in play in the years immediately after World War II … and also today.

A former newsperson for ABC and CBS told me recently she feels there should be two journalism schools these days. One that offers courses in how to learn the official facts and go through life with blinders on. And one where the students learn to do it all: become news entrepreneurs, figure it out from the bottom up, and deliver the story themselves because there are no media organizations of any size or influence today that will follow certain stories to their true conclusions.

What did my father mean by sway pieces? Take us here with one official opinion, then take us there with another one. Soon we are fighting each other, and since none of the information is complete in the first place, it taints civic dialogue. And then, awash in the bread and circuses, disgust and apathy, we simply just lose interest in the whole shebang, allowing the corruption to run rampant. The hoodwink works!

I implore news professionals to buck the corporate masters, dig deep below the surface and behind the curtain, discuss our true reality and redeem the Fourth Estate. Please become, once again, a true partner and steward of our Republic.

When he discovered the truth of the matter, John Loftus told it to the American people: The good, the bad, and the ugly. Here he expands and deepens that truth, for which we thank him.

Onward to the Utmost of Futures

Peace,

Kris Millegan

Publisher

TrineDay

September 22, 2010

To Solomon, a Jew, who bore witness to the Holocaust,

And

To Meg, my newborn, so that she may never have to

Author's Note

for Second printing

America's Nazi Secret is an invisible book. Invisibility is a relatively easy thing to arrange in American publishing. An embarrassed book reviewer once explained that all it takes for a book to disappear in America is the influence of a mere handful of critics at the New York Times or the Washington Post. If these critics take a pass, no other wanna-be book reviewers will have the courage to defy the alpha dogs and write about it on their own.

My, my, how times have changed. Newspapers used to have courage, and I used to be a favorite son of the press.

After I first submitted the core of this book for government censorship in 1981, enough of the truth remained that my publisher, Alfred Knopf, nominated it for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1982. A CBS 60 Minutes segment about the book won Mike Wallace that year's Emmy Award for outstanding investigative journalism.

For a brief period of time, my name was on the front page of almost every newspaper in America. My book, originally The Belarus Secret, was the cover item for the Washington Post Book Review. It went through five printings, and was regarded as a seminal work on Holocaust history and on corruption within the American intelligence community.

That was then, this is now.

Now, US bureaucrats have apparently arranged that America's Nazi Secret will never be reviewed by a major newspaper. Previously, all they had needed to do to censor my writing was to keep me under wraps. Because of my many security clearances, after retirement I was subjected to a thirty-year restriction forbidding publishing without government review and editing. When the classification clock ran out, I received word from the CIA that I did not have to submit my books for censorship anymore. I decided to rush something into print quickly before they changed their minds.

This book, America's Nazi Secret, is like a sandwich. The center of the sandwich is the original thirty-year-old text of The Belarus Secret. On one side of that is a quite lengthy new introduction, explaining what was previously taken out of the book by US Government censors. The other piece is a lengthy epilogue, explaining why so much of the information that has been censored out of all seven of my books during the last three decades is still vitally important today. The new material I have added has more than a bit of relevance to current headlines.

And it still has the potential to put bureaucrats behind bars.

In 1982, Mark Richard was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division, at the Headquarters of the US Department of Justice in Washington, DC. It was he who directed the censorship of my book and threatened me with disbarment and imprisonment if I ever told the truth about him.

Mark Richard was a despicably evil little man, and one who perpetrated a fraud on Congress, the CIA, Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans. It was he, more than any other, who protected Nazi war criminals living in America and obstructed justice for the victims of the Third Reich.

It was a measure of Mark Richard's power and influence that Eric Holder, President Obama's Attorney General, recently gave the eulogy at his funeral in May 2009. I regret that Richard did not live just a few years more, so I could have had him indicted instead of eulogized. At least he knew that I was coming after him, and it panicked him into committing his lies to paper. According to his obituary article in the Washington Post, not satisfied with his bar mitzvah ceremony at age 12, he had repeated it in April of that year. 'He performed like a champ,' his rabbi said.

Richard knew that he was dying of cancer, and he also knew that my thirty-year classification clock would expire in 2011, and I would be free to speak out without pre-publication review. He knew that I was a stubborn old Irishman, and that someday I would tell the world of his awful deeds, recorded in the secret files I had read. Every time I submitted a book for censorship, it only made things worse for him. The censorship only proved the truth of my charges. Sooner or later, all the deletions would come back to haunt him. Richard had arranged for the CIA to put its name on the censorship orders, but it was he who actually controlled the rules for inter-agency deletion.

Before his death in 2009, Mark Richard commissioned a 600-page classified report in which the Justice Department defended Richard's role in the failed hunt for Nazi war criminals in America. Of the 15,000 Nazi war criminals officially estimated to have lived in America, fewer than one hundred received any form of mild sanction from the Justice Department, and that at a staggering cost of more than a half-million dollars per case. Congress had delivered the money, but Justice never delivered the goods. Nazi hunting may have been the least effective program in Justice Department history.

Mark Richard edited the Justice Department document to exonerate himself and to shift the blame to a lower-ranking bureaucrat, Allan Ryan, whom Richard accused of perjury and dishonesty. He devoted an entire chapter of the report to me, claiming that I was an amateur historian who exaggerated things about Nazis working for American intelligence. And then Richard made a fatal mistake. He told the truth, just a bit, but enough to sink his reputation.

For thirty years, Richard and Ryan had falsely claimed that there was no evidence whatsoever of any connection between the US Government and the immigration of Nazi war criminals. But in his long-winded deathbed screed, Richard grudgingly admitted that perhaps some Nazis may have had a little US government help, and perhaps a few lies had been told to the federal courts.

It is an old lawyer's trick to cop a plea to a misdemeanor to avoid a felony charge, but Richard should have stayed with the total stonewall instead of going for the limited hang out. Richard and Ryan had been peddling the we never helped the Nazis line to the press for thirty years, and reporters were quick to pick up on the change.

America's Nazi Secrets was released, without any advance notice to the government, in November 2010 on Veteran's Day. (Although advance copies were sent to the New York Times, which may have provided an early warning to the Justice Department.) That same week, someone took a copy of Richard's classified report out of the Justice Department safe and leaked it to the Times, which broke the story three days later. Now, instead of praising Mark Richard, the Times reported primarily that the Justice Department acknowledged that the US government helped Nazis immigrate and then lied about it. That was the headline that ran all over the country.

The Times actually published Richard's entire 600-page report on its website, but it seems that only I and a handful of others ever read the whole thing. The bias was self-evident. There is a whole section about an unnamed former Justice Department prosecutor who helped the Australian Government uncover Nazis there. Richard took the credit for the Australian success, but he never mentioned that I was the one who had actually done the praiseworthy work. That would have conflicted with his previous chapter denouncing me as an amateur exaggerator. There is an old saying that those who would lie about history deserve to be forgotten by it.

Still, it was good for a few laughs to imagine that Richard was so terrified of what I might say about him that he wasted thousands of man-hours put in by Justice Department employees. They produced his posthumous defense packet, only to have the press focus on the precise matter I had warned Congress about decades before: Nazis didn't sneak into America; they were smuggled in by our spy agencies. It was nice to be right, even if my name wasn't mentioned in the stories.

No one in the Justice Department or the New York Times ever called to interview me about Richard's report. So much for fairness, accuracy and objectivity, but as readers of my weekly column in Ami magazine will recall, I have long known that the Times had incestuous ties to both the Justice Department and the intelligence community.

I have read the secret files about the New York Times itself, including how Abwehr Leutnant Paul Hoffman, adjutant to the top Nazi war criminal in Italy, later became the Times' Rome Bureau Chief at the request of US intelligence. The last I heard, Leutnant Hoffman is retired in Switzerland, but still writes an occasional article for the Times' Travel section.

Many of the Times' journalists over the years have actually been shady covert operatives running assassinations and South American coups. Nowadays, the Times doesn't hire Nazis or spies, but it continues to turn a blind eye to such activities. In return for scoops, the Times washes the dirty laundry of the intelligence community. They all know how to scrub a story.

The best way to cover up a scandal is merely to minimize it. That way, the rest of the press won't pay much attention: "It's no big deal. The Times already covered it. Nothing much there."

For example in the 1980s, the Times ran several skeptical articles about a New Yorker named Mykola Lebed being a suspected Nazi. Despite my urging, the Times would dig no further. A pity, because there was a lot they could have dug up. Lebed had been the head of the Ukrainian version of the Gestapo, whose thugs murdered Simon Wiesenthal's mother, along with tens of thousands of Poles, Jews and other Ukrainian citizens.

I have a good candidate for who waved the Times off the Lebed story. Back in the 1980s, one of Mark Richard's subordinates, Dick Sullivan, had convinced Congress and the CIA that Lebed had been the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in the Ukraine. To understand the scope of this lie, I should explain that I once had poor Mr. Sullivan read Lebed's entire three-volume intelligence dossier, which throughout documented Lebed's various crimes and atrocities in detail.

I also briefed Sullivan and his buddy Allan Ryan on the Justice Department's embarrassing connections to the Lebed case. In addition to finding Lebed's intelligence visa personally signed by the Attorney General (behind Truman's back), I had found a 1950s intelligence letter to the Eisenhower Justice Department asking to admit Lebed's entire Nazi team for immigration so they could be employed as assassins behind the Iron Curtain. I asked Ryan and Sullivan if I could open the sealed Justice Department Sunrise files to look for Ukrainian Nazis admitted in the 1950s.

Permission was denied.

To this day, as far as I can tell, no one in the Justice Department has ever opened the Parole Waiver Act (Sunrise) files to look for visas granted to Nazis hired by US intelligence during the Eisenhower administration under that statute. The New York Times continues to praise the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, even hiring Sullivan's buddy Ryan as a book reviewer.

Now you can begin to understand why my books are invisible, and why I think both the Times and the Justice Department are charades.

Nearly two decades after I tried to get Justice to move against Mykola Lebed and his network of Nazis, Professor Jeffrey Burds of Northeastern University confirmed the extent of Lebed's atrocities by interviewing eyewitnesses and reviewing recently opened Ukrainian archives. The professor had no doubt that Lebed had been a major war criminal, perhaps the highest ranking Nazi murderer ever to arrive in America.

In 2006, he met with Eli Rosenbaum, the last head of the Justice Department's Nazi hunting unit, who continued to insist that Lebed was nothing of the sort, and that I had exaggerated Lebed's entire Nazi collaboration. I then told Professor Burds about a memo that same bureaucrat had written back when he worked for me as a law clerk. Rosenbaum had reviewed newspaper articles referencing Nazis wanted by the USSR, compiling a list of the two dozen most notorious. Lebed was featured prominently in Rosenbaum's catalog of major war criminals.

Perhaps Mr. Rosenbaum forgot. The Times seems to have forgotten a lot as well, apparently never questioning how someone like Lebed could stay in America without the Justice Department ever checking up on him.

Unlike the remarkably uncurious Times, the CIA followed up and asked me to write a detailed history of Lebed's Nazi activities, information someone seemed to have purged from its classified files. I have a pretty good guess as to who might have done the purging. There was at least one CIA employee who had the motive, means and opportunity to shred any number of old Nazi files.

In this book, I have now included a copy of my previously classified memo to the CIA about Lebed, along with some of the very recently declassified CIA memos identifying their man responsible for handling any Lebed issues. The CIA trusted Dick Sullivan's expertise on Lebed, since Sullivan had previously worked in the Nazi-hunting unit at Justice. Despite the fact that Sullivan had already seen all of the files at Justice naming Lebed as a war criminal, he nonetheless convinced the CIA that Lebed was an anti-Nazi resistance leader wanted by the Gestapo. There was even a phony wanted poster. Mark Richard must have been so proud of Sullivan.

I suspect that pretty much everything the Times has ever published about how successfully the Justice Department pursued Nazis in America is a bit of a fraud. Fraud is a bit harsh, you may think. Maybe the editors were just absent minded about events that happened a long time ago. But if so, how can the Times reconcile that with its own coverage in November 2010?

Prior to the official release on Veterans Day, my publisher sent the New York Times advance copies of America's Nazi Secret along with press releases. The book clearly asserts that the Justice Department itself sponsored the immigration of war criminals, including Mykola Lebed and his entire Nazi network. Even if the Times ignored all the press releases and had mislaid all their advance copies on Veteran's Day, someone still should have called me shortly after Mark Richard's 600-page classified report landed on their desks, coincidentally arriving just three days after my book was published. Yeah, that's what it was. Just a coincidence.

Following standard practice and checking the indexes for previous Times stories about Nazis or Lebed or Justice Department cover-ups, a staffer would have seen my name as the whistle-blowing Justice Department lawyer who had read all the classified Nazi files at CIA, including Lebed's. Forget the archives index, my name was featured prominently in Richard's report itself. It is more than a bit odd that I never got a phone call.

There are other oddities. Someone has shredded the bulk of the CIA's entire file collection on the Muslim Brotherhood. There are only a few press clippings in the file. The New York Times continues to publish puff pieces about the wonderful Muslim Brotherhood as an old fashioned anti-colonial political group that may play a modern role in a future Egyptian government. The truth, as this book reveals, is that the Muslim Brotherhood was the original Arab Nazi movement, working for British intelligence to crush the infant State of Israel. In the 1980s it was hired by American intelligence to recruit the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, and it is now the parent organization of every Sunni terrorist group in the Middle East. A rather significant omission in the Times' coverage of the Muslim Brotherhood, wouldn't you say?

A favorite quote of mine is from George Orwell, author of 1984: The omission is the most powerful form of lie, and it is the duty of the historian to ensure that those lies do not creep into the history books.

There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.

– New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1

Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin’s program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding.

– New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6

There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.

– New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13

You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

– New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18

Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.

– New York Times, August 23, 1933

[The news dispatches of Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent who won the Pulitzer Prize for a lie: he covered up the Ukrainian Famine to conceal Stalin’s crimes.]

The New York Times has a long history of deception by omission. During WWII, the Times omitted numerous reports of Nazi atrocities against Jews, and buried even the smallest mention of what we now call the Holocaust in its back pages. The Times has since acknowledged this as a major journalistic failure. During the post-war struggles that lead to the creation of the State of Israel, Times' reporting can best be described as neutral or in favor of the Arabs, perhaps because the owner of the paper had publicly declared that if Israel ever became a nation, he would resign from the Jewish race.

That owner frequently corresponded with his friend, Robert P. Joyce of State Department intelligence. He offered the newspaper as a cover for covert operations. The Times has never reported that its foreign bureaus were used to support the assassination of President Allende in Chile, the overthrow of the Mossadegh democracy in Iran, and the hiring of former Nazi intelligence officers during the Cold War.

Unlike almost every other major American newspaper, the Times did not provide front-page coverage of the 60 Minutes segment in 1982 describing the revelations in The Belarus Secret. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, a former employee of that newspaper, called to congratulate me for forcing the Times to cover the story at all: Don't you understand? You made them do it.

Mark Richard has passed away, but Allan Ryan, Dick Sullivan's best buddy from the Justice Department, continues to write the occasional book review for the New York Times. Of course that could just be another one of those odd coincidences. On the other hand, it could explain how some books became invisible to the general public. Books about the Holocaust rarely remain invisible in the Jewish community, but then many Jewish Americans seem not to want to know this history.

One very nice reporter for a small Jewish newspaper in California told me why she had so much trouble reading this book: "I read the cover and then stared at your book for a full week. I was afraid to read it because if I did, it might be true, and then my world would change. It was like that movie The Matrix, where they offered a pill that would make you wake up. Did I want to wake up?"

She eventually did, and wrote a fine review. But I think most people probably would rather not know the truth.

That will not stop me from writing, however. I intend to describe as much as I can about important omissions in the official histories reported in the press.

Table of Contents

Cover

America’s Nazi Secret

Page ii

Publisher Quotes

Publisher’s Foreword

Dedication

John Loftus, 1982.

Introduction

Preface

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Epilogue

Notes

Documents

&

Photographs

John Loftus, 1982.

Introduction

Let us begin at the beginning. I have already told a bit about myself in the original Prologue to this book, so I will let stand what is written. What I did not say then was how very, very much I wanted to be a Federal Prosecutor. It is the only job for an honest lawyer, they said. You can always decide whether or not charges should be filed, while defense counsel has to take every criminal who walks in the door.

I wanted an honorable life, to be a priest at the Temple of Justice. I started as a law clerk under the Attorney General’s Honors Program. Every year a few dozen bright-eyed young law school graduates are chosen from among thousands of applicants to work at the Department of Justice. In 1977 I entered Department of Justice headquarters, a monumental building in Washington DC, on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol.

I was twenty seven years old when I was assigned to the Criminal Division, Appellate Section. My office was on the second floor, next to the Great Hall of Justice. Depression-era mosaics lined the walls and staircase, depicting the famous lawgivers of history, from Hammurabi to the Prophet Mohammed.[1] On center stage was the famous statue of the Spirit of Justice a semi-nude woman without blindfold or the scales of Justice.[2] Our Latin motto translated as We who follow the Lady Justice.

My new boss shook my hand and said, Welcome to the Justice Department. You now represent the most corrupt client in the world, the United States Government. I thought he was kidding. I still think he was wrong. I did not work for the most corrupt client, just the most corrupt law firm.

For nearly a century, Wall Street has made the Justice Department its principal target of acquisition. Huge corporate campaign donations come with a price. The donors get to name the Attorney General … not always, but often. You cannot buy the US Government, but the Justice Department is for rent. It is a very lucrative business.

The environmental crimes unit at Justice can make or break corporate polluters.

The Tax Division controls the IRS through binding interpretation of tax laws. When Congress passed the Refugee Relief Act in the 1950s banning immigrants who supported totalitarian regimes, Justice’s INS interpreted the ban to apply only to those who advocated a totalitarian regime in the United States. Thus, Congressional intent to ban the immigration of those who had supported the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini or Tojo was simply reversed by Eisenhower’s Attorney General. Instead of banning Nazi immigrations, DOJ said the law legalized the immigration of former Nazis as long as they did not try to establish a Fourth Reich in America. Worse, that twisted interpretation was deployed to obstruct the Justice Department’s Nazi hunters three decades later.

Corruption in Justice has been going on for a long time. At the Treaty of Versailles negotiations, the Attorney General was described by the press as the bag man for the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell.[3] During WWII, this same law firm represented American corporations whose assets had been seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act because they operated as Nazi fronts, while at the same time other members of the firm volunteered as the Justice Department’s prosecutors, officially titled the Alien Property Custodians. It is a matter of historical record that the American Bar Association’s code of ethics for conflict of interest arose in response to the conduct of Sullivan and Cromwell attorneys.

Some may say that I am a bit harsh, that perhaps some misconduct occurred in the past which would never be tolerated in the modern Justice Department. After all, one Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, resigned rather than cave in to President Nixon’s corrupt and unlawful orders. What the defenders of DOJ tend to gloss over is that once the Attorney General had resigned, the rest of the bureaucrats at Justice were all too willing to carry out Nixon’s commands.

The bottom line is that corporate control of Justice protects the corporations’ bottom lines. For example, the Federal Courts once ruled that the Big Tobacco companies had to pay billions and billions of dollars to reimburse Medicare and Medicaid for the cost of caring for the victims of lung disease. The Big Tobacco companies donated a few tens of millions to elect a Republican President, who appointed a Tobacco-friendly Attorney General. Embarrassed federal prosecutors told the court that they had been ordered to request a much lesser amount of damages than the Judge had already awarded. The Justice Department gave billions of the taxpayers dollars back to the Big Tobacco companies.

While most of the corporate shenanigans occur under Republican administrations, the Democrats are occasionally involved as well, especially when the concern is to protect the image of the Justice Department itself. For example, while the Office of Legal Counsel gave the George W. Bush administration a free pass to ignore binding