As I posted yesterday, the law firm representing Congressman Jerry Lewis hired the U.S. attorney responsible for investigating and possibly prosecuting corruption charges against the powerful Republican. The firm, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, reportedly offered U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang a $1.5 million signing bonus.
It starts to get really interesting when you learn that Yang wasn't the only attorney from her office hired by Gibson Dunn. There were two others: Douglas Fuchs, the Deputy Chief of Major Frauds, and Maurice Suh, who had served as the Deputy Chief of the Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section during President Bush's first term.
I did some digging, and it turns out that these three lawyers were the only government lawyers hired by Gibson Dunn in the past five years who did not have a prior employment relationship with the firm. That fact should set your alarm bells ringing. (I do not think that this has been reported before. It is based on my research, explained below.)
You already know that U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was fired after putting Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham behind bars. Last fall, White House counsel Harriet Miers also considered firing Yang, who was conducting a similar probe into Lewis. Instead, Yang was offered $1.5 million to join the law firm representing Lewis, and within months a former colleage from the Public Corruption section (Suh had taken a job with the city of Los Angeles) and the Deputy Chief of the Major Frauds section were hired by the same firm.
Now that smells really fishy. But it gets worse when you start thinking about how unusual it must be for a major firm like Gibson Dunn to hire three government attorneys within four months?
I thought it seemed strange. But I haven't seen much media coverage of this angle on the U.S. attorney's scandal, so I had to do some digging on my own.
What I found shocked me. Gibson Dunn has announced hiring 58 attorneys on its web site over the past five years (there is nothing more boring than reading five years of press releases from a law firm). Of these 58 attorneys:
This bears repeating. Other than these three hires, over a five year period, Gibson Dunn has not announced the hiring of a single government attorney, let alone one from a U.S. Attorney's office, with the exception of the four lawyers who had previously worked for the firm.
Another way of putting it:
The only government lawyers Gibson Dunn have hired in the past five years worked in the very same U.S. Attorney's office investigating one of their highest profile clients.
I do not think these facts have been reported anywhere by any media outlet.
But so far as I can tell, they are true facts. And I think they are quite important.
This whole thing stinks to high heaven.
It's time for some real reporters to get their act in gear. If I can figure this out in an evening of web surfing, imagine what someone who does this for a living could do.
(Here's a summary of what we know.)
© Jed Lewison