This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
Canada: 
Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
USA: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
The Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security each handle different parts of the immigration system and conflict (perhaps restrained) between the two cabinet secretaries is almost inevitable.
The AG, who used to have the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, retains control of the immigration judges, the immigration prosecutors in Washington, and the U.S. attorneysin the field, while most immigration benefit and enforcement decisions are made by DHS officials. In other democracies’ more rational systems these activities all report to a single minister of immigration.
I bring this up because DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson has just released a gracious press release welcoming the nomination of Loretta Lynch as the next U.S. Attorney General; she has been chosen to succeed the retiring Eric Holder. She is currently the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Both are alumni of Ivy League law schools, Columbia in Johnson’s case, Harvard in Lynch’s.
In the press release, the Johnson recalls meeting Lynch in a Long Island courtroom on a criminal matter, when she was prosecuting and he was defending a criminal case. The secretary says that “She will be a terrific Attorney General.”
What he did not mention — but which can be ascertained by looking up old court records on PACER, the federal courts electronic data system — is that Lynch and her colleagues whupped Johnson and his colleagues in the matter at issue.
A search of PACER for cases involving Johnson in the Eastern District of New York (Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the balance of Long Island) shows him as participating in a single criminal case in that district, so this must be the one he is talking about. Lynch was a supervisor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the time, and her name is not on the formal papers in the case. (One can look up lawyers, as well as defendants in PACER.)
The defendant was Michael F. Zanakis. According to Johnson’s description of the case, as quoted by the Daily Caller about a year ago: “this prosecution is an 80-miles-an-hour-freight train bearing down on a single, naive unsuspecting citizen and … the McDonald’s Corporation … is in the engineer’s seat.”
The prosecutors and the jury saw it differently, and convicted Zanakis on more than a dozen counts for “planting a fried rat’s tail in his son’s Happy Meal French fries as part of a failed extortion attempt.” Zanikis was sent to jail for 30 months as a result.
Johnson’s employer at the time was the deeply liberal law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, once the place where Adlai Stevenson practiced law. The firm must have seen the Zanakis case as at least bordering on an instance of whistle-blower vs. an economic monolith.
Assuming that Lynch is confirmed, we have Johnson clambering into the cabinet before her, but being trounced by her and her colleagues when they first met.
For more on the Zanakis case, the PACER file is 0:97-cr-00261-DRH.
Click HERE to read more
Be the first to comment