In the span of just a few days, a trove of confidential information and testimony sworn to remain out of public view
has been released in the shooting death of Ferguson, Missouri, teenager Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson.
Highly selective and very particular in their focus, these leaks have not been a complete info dump, but seem to be a strategic release to sway the public opinion to the side of Darren Wilson. Responding to this, The Justice Department made the following statement to Matt Pearce of the Los Angeles Times:
The department considers the selective release of information in this investigation to be irresponsible and highly troubling. Since the release of the convenience-store footage, there seems to be an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case.
A DOJ official, in an interview with Ryan Reilly of the
Huffington Post,
went on to say that Attorney General Eric Holder was "exasperated" by "selective leaks" and that he and fellow DOJ officials believed it fit into a troubling pattern demonstrated for months.
Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson previously released information against DOJ wishes just a week after Mike Brown was first killed.
So, with such strong words from Eric Holder and the Department of Justice regarding these confidential breeches of the public trust, many are asking what can be done about it. What follows below the fold are four immediate action steps that can be taken.
1. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, seeing the damaging nature of these leaks, has the power to appoint a special prosecutor to replace St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch. A Washington Post op-ed by Dana Milbank recently called the entire grand jury process in this case a "farce."
2. Judge Carolyn Whittington, who swore this grand jury in, has the ability to investigate leaks, replace those responsible, and even start the entire process over again.
3. Prosecutor Bob McCulloch could, himself, lead an investigation into these troubling releases of information and decide to address them head on. Certainly a conflict of interest exists with this option because he could actually be the source of the leaks and it's in his professional best interest to find nothing at all.
4. The Department of Justice, as was just suggested by Eric Holder's comments, seeing these continuous leaks as a pattern of behavior by various departments throughout St. Louis, has the ability to put in place new guidelines and restrictions with real consequences for not following them. However, the federal government is not able to actually intervene to help prosecute state and local cases. Unless the DOJ found that Darren Wilson violated the civil rights of Mike Brown, the DOJ can only act as a monitor and guide throughout this case.