“U.S. Attorney Jim Letten resigns amid online commenting scandal in his office”

The title of this post is the headline of this notable federal criminal justice story out of New Orleans.  Here are the highlights:

Amid a metastasizing scandal in his office, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten announced his resignation at a news conference Thursday morning, ending an 11-year run in the post.  He was the nation’s longest-serving U.S. Attorney, having been kept in the job by President Barack Obama despite his Republican Party affiliation.

Letten said his resignation would be effective Tuesday, but that he would stay on briefly — not as head of the office — to aid in the transition.  He delivered an emotional, 10-minute speech in which he spoke of his pride in having served for more than a decade as the region’s top federal law enforcement officer….

Dana Boente, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, will serve as Letten’s interim replacement, the Justice Department announced in a release issued shortly after Letten’s news conference.  Boente has been a federal prosecutor for 28 years, according to the release.   The news release also said that John Horn, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, will investigate leaks and other matters in the Danziger Bridge case, a probe that U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt requested in a tartly worded Nov. 26 order.

The series of moves comes eight months into a scandal revolving around anonymous online commenting by high-ranking prosecutors in his office, including the shocking revelation that Letten’s longtime First Assistant, Jan Mann, was involved.

The troubles for Letten began in March, when landfill owner Fred Heebe — the target of a sprawling federal probe — filed a civil lawsuit alleging that prosecutor Sal Perricone had been using an online alias to savage him and other federal targets in comments posted at NOLA.com.

Perricone, the office’s senior litigation counsel and a member of Letten’s inner circle, quickly admitted his sins and resigned.  The matter was referred to the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility for investigation, and the scandal seemed to die down.  In an interview with New Orleans magazine published in August, Perricone insisted the commenting brouhaha started and ended with him, saying no one else in the office had been aware of his activities.

But last month, the scandal reignited with a vengeance, when Heebe filed a second defamation suit, this one claiming Mann had been commenting about federal targets and judges as “eweman” on NOLA.com.  Many of the comments by “eweman” were adjacent to comments made by Perricone under one of his online aliases, suggesting a coordinated campaign.

Mann soon admitted she had commented online at NOLA.com, but did not cop to a specific alias.  Letten, meanwhile, announced that she was being demoted from her ranking posts of First Assistant U.S. Attorney and chief of the office’s criminal division. Mann did not step down, however, and the problems for Letten’s office continued to mount.  Engelhardt — who had asked for a full investigation into leaks in the Danziger Bridge case earlier this year — issued a stinging order in late November in which he essentially accused Mann and Perricone of untruthfulness….

Ironically, Heebe — the architect of Letten’s downfall — had been a leading candidate for the U.S. Attorney post after George W. Bush was elected president in 2000.  But his nomination foundered amid allegations of domestic abuse, and Letten, who had been the acting U.S. Attorney, ended up getting a presidential appointment.  Years later, Heebe would become a target of the office.

I cannot help but react to this story by wanting to remind all my students (not to mention all others) that one should be extra sure to think twice (and then a couple more times) about any comments being made online if and whenever one needs a pseudonym to be willing to make such comments.