Asked to explain how he's lasted for nearly fifty years as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, David Margolis answers bluntly: "I rely on guile, bluff, balls, and the good work of my colleagues, not to mention some luck."
"If I retired, it would make too many people happy," Margolis says. It's a strategy that's worked well. Margolis has served under nine presidents, and in recent years he has handled some of the most important legal cases in the country.
Mr. Margolis is far too modest. Margolis, long intimate with and immersed into the intricate workings of the DOJ, must know exactly where all the bodies are buried, seems characterized by elaborate scheming and intrigue, especially for the gaining of political power or favor, quite Byzantine dear Mr. Margolis.
For instance, there's the case of Leonard Peltier, July 20, 2000 letter by Peter Matthiessen, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., William Styron, Rose Styron, and E.L. Doctorow:
On Monday, June 12, in a hearing before the parole officer at Leavenworth Prison, attorneys Ramsey Clark, Carl Nadler, and Jennifer Harbury filed a request for parole for the Native American leader Leonard Peltier, whose immediate release from prison is strongly supported by Amnesty International (which recognizes Peltier as a political prisoner), by the Kennedy Memorial Center on Human Rights, and by 250 Indian tribes represented by the National Congress of American Indians. The request is also supported by the Assembly of First Nations tribes of Canada; by Nobel laureates Desmond Tutu and Rigoberta Menchú, by Nelson Mandela and his Holiness the Dalai Lama, and by many other responsible political and religious leaders, including one of Peltier’s own judges on the Federal Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Leonard Peltier has already served twenty-three hard years behind bars for the alleged murder of two FBI agents, Ron Williams and Jack Coler, at Oglala on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, on June 26, 1975. This young man, aged twenty-seven, who had no violence on his record, was part of a group of between twelve and twenty young supporters of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who took part in defending a local community against harassment by two agents who had entered private property for disputed reasons, despite strong warnings not to do so from the tribal police. Peltier escaped to Canada but was captured and extradited a few months later, largely on the basis of fabricated depositions from Myrtle Poor Bear, who was alleged by the prosecution to be his girlfriend and an eyewitness to the killings. She confessed before his trial that she had never laid eyes on Mr. Peltier in all her life.
Meanwhile, two other young Indians, Darrell Butler and Robert Robideau, indicted originally with Peltier on identical evidence and charges but tried separately in his absence, were entirely acquitted in federal court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa....
In an extraordinary step, FBI officials across the nation are mobilizing to prevent a presidential pardon for Leonard Peltier, the American Indian activist imprisoned for murder whose claim of innocence has inspired a two-decade protest movement on his behalf. FBI officials in Milwaukee say they fear that Peltier…will be freed by President Clinton on his way out of office.
Three months ago, in March, I had a phone call from a lawyer who has never been involved in the Peltier case but was aware of my longtime concern. A friend in the Justice Department had just mentioned to him that the FBI was intensifying its anti-Peltier vendetta within the department, with Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis as the point man. In recent days, this friend informed him, Mr. Margolis had gone to the Attorney General’s office to reiterate the Bureau’s case, and he was followed there by Director Louis Freeh, who had taken the trouble to bring with him the lurid photos of the agents’ bodies at Oglala.
Then, there's the problem of
Margolis' considerations on torture:
After more than a year's delay, the Department of Justice released the Office of Professional Responsibility's report on whether government lawyers who wrote two notorious torture memos violated professional ethics. OPR is the Justice Department's internal watchdog, and it has the authority to recommend referring errant DoJ lawyers for professional discipline or even criminal prosecution. The 260-page OPR report, plus two earlier drafts released at the same time, harshly condemn the torture memos and recommend discipline for the lawyers who wrote them. But Friday's document dump also included a 69-page memo by David Margolis, the senior DoJ attorney who resolves challenges to negative OPR findings like this one. Margolis ripped into OPR and rejected the ethics office's recommendations that Jay S. Bybee (now a federal judge) and John Yoo (now a law professor) should be referred to their state bars for discipline. Margolis' decision means that Judge Bybee and Professor Yoo will be spared further ethics investigations. They are home free.
The blogosphere has been crowded with initial reactions. .. (... James Fallows' comment is indispensable; he rightly notices how heavily Margolis leans on post-9/11 panic to excuse the lawyers for shredding the law against torture.)
Always protective of those in power, Margolis expected to be removed from the DOJ when George W. Bush took over:
But he never left his fourth-floor office ... “There wasn’t any question as to whether I was going to keep him,” President George W. Bush’s first Deputy Attorney General, Larry Thompson, who had known Margolis since Thompson was U.S. attorney in Atlanta in the 1980s, told Legal Times in 2006. “You don’t make decisions; you let Dave make decisions.”
Thompson deferred to Margolis in the leak investigation of Sen. Richard Shelby, a strong political ally of President George W. Bush. Prosecutors had prepared a draft indictment against the Alabama Republican for allegedly disclosing classified information to reporters in 2002, when he was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
But Margolis denied the prosecutors’ request to subpoena the reporters, Legal Times reported, crippling a high-profile investigation and insulating department leaders from allegations of political interference.
Jeff Kaye at Firedoglake opens a closet filled with Margolis' skeletons such as Pat Fitzgerald’s Libby investigation which went nowhere.
Don Siegelman:
The most dramatic political prosecution in the 21st century—involving a former governor in Alabama, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the Bush White House and Justice Department—has been rocked by incriminating new disclosures by a knowledgeable career Justice Department staff member who has provided information charging serious misconduct by the prosecutors.
Among other disclosures shattering the credibility of the case, U.S. Attorney Leura Canary’s “recusal” for conflict of interest is revealed as a sham. Moreover, The Daily Beast has learned, the matter has touched off concerns within the Justice Department over efforts to sweep accusations of unethical conduct under the carpet....
A career Justice Department lawyer stated that apprehension about the matter was building within the department. “What happened in this case is a disgrace that threatens the reputation of the Department as a whole and federal prosecutors across the country,” he said. He identified David Margolis as having failed to take corrective measures. “He has essentially checked out and is intent on sweeping everything under the carpet. It will be one hell of a mess for the new tenants.”