Free Republic

Dozens of former prosecutors are questioning the government’s handling of a case against two lawyers hit with charges that could put them in prison for nearly 50 years for torching an empty New York City police vehicle last month.

Robert M. Morgenthau, a courtly Knickerbocker patrician who waged war on crime for more than four decades as the chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York State and as Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 99. Mr. Morgenthau’s wife, Lucinda Franks, said he died at Lenox Hill Hospital after a short illness. In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Mr. Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors and governors, who came and...

The Underworld Bank scandal is oozing out all over. Conceived in Karachi, financed in Abu Dhabi, the conspiracy reached into the world's Western capitals and perhaps the U.N. under the protection of high-paid lobbyists and naive spooks. The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking system. For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from governments and individual depositors to be put to the...

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press. The two South American countries are known to have close ties with Iran, but this is the first allegation that they are involved in the development of Iran's nuclear program, considered a strategic threat by Israel.

When Jihad Came to America by Andrew C. McCarthy On May 2 and 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy in Cairo alerted its counterpart in Khartoum that Egypt’s “leading radical,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was on his way to Sudan. Warning that his ultimate plan might be to seek exile in the United States, the Cairo embassy asked its colleagues to pass along any information they might learn about his activities on Sudanese soil. What did U.S. officials already know about Abdel Rahman in 1990? As the 9/11 Commission would later determine, they knew that he had been arrested repeatedly in Egypt...

In 1939, ten years after the crash on Wall Street, the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., told the House Way and Means Committee: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job. I want to see people get enough to eat. WE HAVE NEVER MADE GOOD ON OUR PROMISES ... I say after eight years of this administration WE HAVE JUST AS MUCH UNEMPLOYMENT as when we started ......

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them. Here's how regulation of Wall Street is supposed to work. To begin with, there's a semigigantic list of public and quasi-public agencies ostensibly keeping their eyes on the economy, a dense alphabet soup of banking, insurance, S&L, securities and commodities regulators like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as supposedly "self-regulating organizations" like the New York Stock Exchange....

WASHINGTON -- New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau left his home turf and came to the nation's capital on Tuesday to sound the alarm about a "blossoming relationship" between Iran and Venezuela. Comparing the situation to the lead up to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Morgenthau warned of growing threats--involving missiles, nuclear ventures and terrorist training--that Iran and Venezuela are now cultivating, together, "in our backyard." "Axis of unity" is the label that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez have themselves chosen for their alliance. The rise of this partnership, according to Morgenthau, dates from Ahmadinejad's...

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work ... After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!" Henry Morgenthau Treasury Secretary under FDR, after 2 terms of FDR's "New Deal".

Barack Obama and the FDR-Great Depression Mythby Michael Fumento (more by this author) Posted 11/26/2008 ET The cover of Time magazine has Barack Obama photoshopped into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous convertible, complete with oval-shaped glasses and cigarette holder held between the teeth. “The NEW New Deal,” The cover reads. Surely many who voted for Obama saw him as potentially the new FDR, the man to lead us out of hard economic times. But they’ve been misled, for even FDR wasn’t FDR. He is a quasi-mythical creature who not only didn’t end the Great Depression but probably greatly prolonged the...

May 1939, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau testified: "We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. ... I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt, to boot."

The circumstances of today's $700 billion bailout are eerily similar to those of FDR's New Deal, and today's Pied Pipers are playing the same bipartisan, power-grabbing tune. "It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury Department spokeswoman told Forbes.com concerning how the figure of $700 billion was arrived at for the financial bailout package. "We just wanted to choose a really large number." Choosing a "really large number" helps, of course, if one is trying to convince the American public that the nation is facing a really large emergency, and that the government must be given really large...

“Morgenthau, after being in charge of this economic debacle called the New Deal, finally sort of exploded in 1939 and said, ‘We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work,” quoted Folsom. “‘I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt, to boot.”

...Last month we learned that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan may have been aware that Swiss inspections company Cotecna was bidding for an Oil for Food contract it eventually won later that year.... Mr. Annan has denied having any prior knowledge of the Cotecna bid in testimony to Paul Volcker's committee investigating Oil for Food. But if the substance of the Cotecna memo is accurate -- the company confirms its authenticity -- it means the Secretary General may have misled investigators.... Then there is the continuing investigation of Benon Sevan, the senior U.N. bureaucrat formerly in charge of Oil for...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has launched a criminal investigation of former U.N. oil-for-food chief Benon Sevan, the official's spokeswoman said Monday. Barbara Thompson would not give details of the investigation into Sevan, who came under scathing criticism from a U.N.-backed probe investigating claims of corruption in the $64 billion program in a February report. It wasn't clear how long Morgenthau has been investigating Sevan. Last year, the U.N.-backed investigation, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, had sought Morgenthau's help in the oil-for-food probe, investigators said at the time. The criminal probe against...

Peter Malchin — Zvika to his friends — has left us, having died in a New York City rehabilitation center following a serious blood infection. 'snip' That is how he became the greatest undercover agent of his generation, and perhaps the greatest ever. 'snip' His most celebrated accomplishment was the capture of Adolph Eichmann in Buenos Aires. He was the invisible man who came up to the Nazi murderer on Garibaldi Street and whispered, "Un momentito, senor," and — his hands encased in gloves to avoid having to actually touch the monster — took him away. During the interrogation of...

POST WORLD EXCLUSIVE WASHINGTON — Billionaire Marc Rich has emerged as a central figure in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal and is under investigation for brokering deals in which scores of international politicians and businessmen cashed in on sweetheart oil deals with Saddam Hussein, The Post has learned. Rich, the fugitive Swiss-based commodities trader who received a controversial pardon from President Bill Clinton in January 2001, is a primary target of criminal probes under way in the U.S. attorney's office in New York and by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, sources said. "We think he was a major player in this...

Standing outside the Capitol in Albany one summer afternoon in 1998, Eliot Spitzer released a statement that said if he became attorney general, he would use the considerable power, influence and bully pulpit of the office to "take on all the problems that have led to governmental stagnation and corruption in New York." During his nearly six years in office, Mr. Spitzer has indeed claimed the mantle of reform. But he has done it by focusing on the financial and insurance industries - not state government. Mr. Spitzer has built a nationwide reputation as an aggressive pursuer of corporate malfeasance....

Last week certainly was instructive about the epic... United Nations Oil for Food program. First came Monday's hearings in Norm Coleman's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations where we learned that Saddam Hussein gamed the program for twice as much unmonitored revenue as previously thought -- $21.3 billion, up from $10 billion. Also fascinating was chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer's testimony that he believes, based on what high-level Iraqi sources have told him, that U.N. Oil for Food director Benon Sevan did in fact profit from Iraqi oil vouchers. Mr. Sevan continues to deny the allegation. Then on Wednesday Henry Hyde's House...

<p>Peace, in setting presidential reputations, far outranks its brother prosperity. I didn't realize how completely war and peace define our presidents until I was asked to think about their economic leadership.</p> <p>Our OpinionJournal.com1 and the Federalist Society sponsored a new rating of the presidents, and in June an expanded print version will be published in collaboration with Simon & Schuster. I was asked to join William Bennett, Richard Brookhiser, Robert Dallek and others in contributing. Asked about leadership on economic policy, I couldn't find much.</p>