What a “surprise”! The Washington Post found a “whistle blower”, who said, Bush appointees through “political influence” tried to infuence her in the litigation to get big tobacco.

“The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government’s racketeering case.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.

“The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said,” Eubanks said. “And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public.”

Eubanks, who served for 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said three political appointees were responsible for the last-minute shifts in the government’s tobacco case in June 2005: then-Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum, then-Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler and Keisler’s deputy at the time, Dan Meron.

News reports on the strategy changes at the time caused an uproar in Congress and sparked an inquiry by the Justice Department. Government witnesses said they had been asked to change testimony, and one expert withdrew from the case. Government lawyers also announced that they were scaling back a proposed penalty against the industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.

High-ranking Justice Department officials said there was no political meddling in the case, and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) concurred after an investigation.

Yesterday was the first time that any of the government lawyers on the case spoke at length publicly about what they considered high-level interference by Justice officials.

Eubanks, who retired from Justice in December 2005, said she is coming forward now because she is concerned about what she called the “overwhelming politicization” of the department demonstrated by the controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Lawyers from Justice’s civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by supervisors in the past.

Eubanks said Congress should not limit its investigation to the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.”

Perhaps Congress should look into Eubanks.

Although the OPR found her accussatons baseless over two years ago, it would have been helpful to mention some of Eubanks bio, specifically what position she holds these days. such as Eubanks is a Clinton appointee and a “Special Counsel” with the George Soros funded CREW, which bills itself a government watchdog group but by a 5-1 margin spends most of it’s time going after Republicans.

CREW’s “blog roll” is telling:

Al Franken
AMERICAblog
Atrios
Buzzflash
DailyKos
FireDog Lake
Glenn Greenwald
Huffington Post
MyDD
Raw Story
Talk Left
Talking Points Memo
Tapped
Scrutiny Hooligans
Think Progress
TPM Muckraker
Washington Monthly

Interesting timing on this article though. CREW was firing off demands for investigations almost immediately after this story surfaced. Makes you wonder what conflict of politcal interest Yubanks has with congressional Democrats? I know that she was previously mentioned in the amazing loss of emails that ended up in CREW’s hands back in 2006 which devulged critical testimony in the tobacco litigation case.

Yep the things that make you go “hmmmmmmm”

UPDATE: From the July 31st 2006 issues of the Legal Times:

July 31, 2006

By Emma Schwartz, Legal Times
The Justice Department has accused a public interest group of holding internal e-mails the agency says came from the computer of a former chief lawyer for its tobacco litigation who now works at the nonprofit organization.
In a brief filed July 22 in a Freedom of Information Act case, the government alleges privileged e-mails disclosed in the course of the litigation “appear to have been printed from the government computer of former department employee Sharon Eubanks.”
The “plaintiff is now on notice that it is in the possession of stolen property,” the government writes.
The allegations heightened tensions between Justice and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that has sued the department for documents related to the DOJ’s 2005 decision to lower the civil penalties it was seeking against tobacco companies to $10 billion from $130 billion.
CREW first disclosed the e-mails earlier this month, during a deposition of former Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum. The DOJ seeks the return of the documents.
According to the government filing, the first set of e-mails contains drafts of an op-ed by McCallum that was published in USA Today on June 8, 2005. The second is a July 21, 2005, e-mail from Eubanks to Stephen Brody, her former deputy, in which Eubanks details her recommendation to McCallum for the “procedures that should be followed during the Office of Professional Responsibility investigation” stemming from allegations of improper influence in the decision to seek lower penalties.
CREW attorney Anne Weismann says the group received the e-mails legitimately. “It wasn’t Sharon Eubanks and it wasn’t from anyone who has a current or former connection with the Department of Justice,” she says.

Eubanks, who is not involved in the FOIA case, declined to comment, as did the DOJ. Judge Emmet Sullivan has scheduled a motions hearing for Aug. 7.”

UPDATE: More from Ed Whelan at Bench Memos.   This says it all:

” If senior officials ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had drafted for her, that is obviously because they did not trust her to exercise her legal judgment consistent with their directions.¬† Her renewed complaints indicate that they were right.”

Read the rest then write her off as another liberal salvo.