More ugly details about the Georgia Thompson case

Adam Cohen in the New York Times today has this interesting commentary on the remarkable Georgia Thompson case (background here).  The commentary, entitled “A Woman Wrongly Convicted and a U.S. Attorney Who Kept His Job,” questions why US Attorney Steven Biskupic “turned a flimsy case into a campaign issue that nearly helped Republicans win a pivotal governor’s race.”   Here’s how the commentary ends:

Mr. Biskupic insists that he prosecuted Ms. Thompson only because he believed a crime was committed, and that he did not discuss the political implications of the case or the timing with anyone in the Justice Department or the White House.  Congress has asked the Justice Department for all e-mail messages about the case to help resolve the matter.  But even if there were no discussions, Mr. Biskupic may have known that his bosses in Washington expected him to use his position to help Republicans win elections, and then did what they wanted.

That would be ironic indeed. One of the biggest weaknesses in the case against Ms. Thompson was that to commit the crime she was charged with she had to have tried to gain personally from the contract, and there’s no credible evidence that she did.  So Mr. Biskupic made the creative argument that she gained by obtaining “political advantage for her superiors” and that in pleasing them she “enhanced job security for herself.” Those motivations, of course, may well describe why Mr. Biskupic prosecuted Ms. Thompson.

Related post: The DOJ went crazy on Georgia