House Dems not satisfied with Justice Dept. reforms

WASHINGTON -- If the Justice Department hoped to allay Democrats’ concerns about deferred prosecution agreements by changing their guidelines yesterday, they weren’t successful.

At hearings today that were first for called by Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), Democrats said they weren’t satisfied with the proposed rule changes that would take some power out of the hands of U.S. Attorneys in deciding who gets assigned monitoring contracts.

Pascrell called for hearings after it was reported that U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie gave an oversight contract to former Attorney General John Ashcroft worth $28-52 million.

In a statement, Pascrell said that the changes do not reach far enough, addressing only the selection of federal monitors, ignoring how to provide guidance on deferred prosecution agreements to corporate attorneys and failing to address public disclosure. Moreover, Pascrell said, the memorandum by the Justice Department merely reinforces pre-existing rules about the avoidance of the appearance of conflicts of interest when selecting federal monitors.

“From reading these statutes it seems quite reasonable to understand that Mr. Christie has already violated the letter and the spirit of these pre-existing ethics guidelines with his selection of former colleagues and associates to serve as federal monitors,” he said.

Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who was the first politician to criticize Christie on the agreements, said that the reforms were “too weak,” and advocated removing the responsibility from the Justice Department altogether.

“I believe that the only way to ensure that politics and favoritism are completely removed from this process is to have someone independent of the Justice Department, like a U.S. district court judge, involved in the process,” he said in his statement.

Pallone’s own legislation on the matter would require such a judge to pick a monitor.

Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), who chairs the Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, also said that the reforms were too vague.