I wouldn’t expect any bar discipline. Here is what happened in the egregious Ted Stevens case:
“The Justice Department has found that two prosecutors involved in the botched 2008 corruption trial of Senator Ted Stevens engaged in reckless professional misconduct, but it stopped short of firing the men, saying their mistakes were not intentional.
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In a cover letter to a 672-page report provided to Congress on Thursday, alongside additional attachments and findings, the Justice Department said the two prosecutors would be suspended without pay Joseph Bottini for 40 days, and James Goeke for 15 days.
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The case, however, started to fall apart after it emerged that prosecutors had failed to turn over information, like conflicting statements by witnesses, that might have helped Mr. Stevens at his trial. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., then new to the job, asked the judge to throw out the conviction, and both the court and the department began investigations. Mr. Stevens died in a 2010 plane crash.
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And both reports essentially exonerated two supervisors at the public integrity section, William Welch and Brenda Morris, and a lower-ranking prosecutor, Edward Sullivan. (The Justice Department report said that Ms. Morris, assigned to take over the case just before trial, had shown poor judgment in failing to oversee how colleagues reviewed what evidence to turn over, but did not commit misconduct.)
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There was at least one major difference, however: the special prosecutor concluded that Mr. Bottini and Mr. Goeke had intentionally withheld evidence, while the Justice Department investigation found that their mistakes while showing reckless disregard for their disclosure obligations were not deliberate.
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Even the prospect of suspending Mr. Bottini and Mr. Goeke was disputed inside the department, the materials showed. Terrence Berg, a lawyer with the departments Professional Misconduct Review Unit who was assigned to review the report and propose any discipline, wanted to reject its findings. In a lengthy memorandum, he argued that the mistakes amounted to poor judgment but not misconduct, so no sanction was warranted.
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But lawyers for Mr. Stevens called the suspensions pathetic, saying the department had demonstrated conclusively that it is not capable of disciplining its prosecutors.
Why is poor judgment always claimed, when everybody knows it was all done deliberately, and maliciously? "Poor Judgement" my ass.