Excerpted from The Chronicle.
The Obama administration announced this week that it is nominating acting DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart to head the agency.
Leonhart's career has coincided with scandal and controversy. Her time in the St. Louis DEA office coincided with a perjuring informant scandal. As acting head of the DEA last year, Leonhart (or her staff) spent more than $123,000 of taxpayer money to charter a private plane for a trip to Colombia, rather than using one of the 106 airplanes the DEA already owned.
Her association with one-time DEA supersnitch Andrew Chambers is raising eyebrows. Chambers earned an astounding $2.2 million for his work as a DEA informant between 1984 and 2000. The problem was that he was caught perjuring himself repeatedly. The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals called him a liar in 1993, and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals echoed that verdict two years later.
Instead of terminating its relationship with Chambers, the DEA protected him, failing to notify prosecutors and defense attorneys about his record. At one point, DEA and the Justice Department for 17 months stalled a public defender seeking to examine the results of DEA's background check on Chambers. Even after the agency knew its snitch was rotten, it refused to stop using Chambers, and it took the intervention of then Attorney General Janet Reno to force the agency to quit using him.
Michele Leonhart defended Chambers. When asked if, given his credibility problems, the agency should quit using him, she said, "That would be a sad day for DEA, and a sad day for anybody in the law enforcement world... He's one in a million. In my career, I'll probably never come across another Andrew."
Another Leonhart statement on Chambers is even more shocking, as much for what it says about Leonhart as for what Leonhart says about Chambers. "The only criticism (of Chambers) I've ever heard is what defense attorneys will characterize as perjury or a lie on the stand," she said, adding that once prosecutors check him out, they will agree with his DEA admirers that he is "an outstanding testifier."
To a cop, a lie is the same as the truth when getting paid to put scum (defined as anyone, also known as a "scrote," the cops don't like) in jail. A Rapid City defense attorney told me, "The most offensive thing about the system here is that the cops lie all the time. The judges know it, and they don't do anything about it."
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A local defense attorney decided after years of law that the primary qualification for being a cop "was to be a convincing liar."
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