{"id":200623,"date":"2021-02-15T19:11:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T00:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/02\/15\/i-never-realized-how-much-of-a-menace-she-was\/"},"modified":"2021-02-15T19:11:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-16T00:11:00","slug":"i-never-realized-how-much-of-a-menace-she-was","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/02\/15\/i-never-realized-how-much-of-a-menace-she-was\/","title":{"rendered":"I Never Realized How Much of a Menace She Was"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former Carmen Ortiz is perhaps best known for knowingly prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death, but it turns out that she was a corrupt piece of sh%$ on a par with Trump’s worst appointments<\/a>, though somehow she managed to stay in office throughout the entire Obama administration, probably due to her friendship with Eric “Place” Holder.<\/p>\n

Among other things, she prosecuted Teamsters for picketing the show Top Chef<\/i> for not using union drivers, and went after Mayor, now Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh for pressuring a concert promoter to hire experienced union workers as stage hands, claiming racketeering.  (She also made no secret of wanting to be Mayor, and Walsh’s actions followed a spate of injuries and deaths resulting from sloppy stage work, including a fire in Rhode Island that killed over 100)<\/p>\n

Particularly after her egregious behavior in the Shwartz case, there was a lot of pressure for Obama to fire her, but she stayed on through 2017.<\/p>\n

It is that Marty Walsh has been picked by Biden as labor secretary is a sort of nail in the coffin for whatever shred of a political career she hoped to have.<\/p>\n

It also might be a not so subtle way of throwing some (extremely mild) shade in Obama and Holder’s way:<\/p>\n

The last time Joe Biden was in the White House, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh seemed an unlikely nominee for a future labor secretary. Carmen Ortiz, President Barack Obama\u2019s U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, had Walsh in her crosshairs. One summer dawn in 2016 she sent FBI agents to arrest two of his staff under a federal racketeering indictment. <\/p>\n

The Boston Globe, New England\u2019s most powerful news outlet, known for its coverage<\/a> of the Roman Catholic Church child abuse scandals, laid siege to the mayor\u2019s office over his labor practices and union ties. The Globe had named<\/a> Ortiz its 2011 \u201cBostonian of the Year.\u201d Its reporters dug their foxholes wherever she pointed, and the paper cheered on her prosecution of Walsh\u2019s staffers. <\/p>\n

When \u201cTop Chef\u201d had filmed in Boston two years earlier, Walsh visited on set with the show\u2019s host Padma Lakshmi. Outside, the Teamsters picketed for union jobs. Ortiz indicted them, also for racketeering extortion. And in a city obsessed with haute cuisine, Ortiz leveraged star power: At trial, Lakshmi would take the stand for the prosecution. <\/p>\n

In Boston, Ortiz was considered a rising star and was expected to run for mayor herself, a task made easier by softening Walsh up. Hey, this is Boston. If you want finesse, watch a Bruins game; if you want blood, watch a City Council race. She was regularly talked of as a top-tier statewide candidate. The only question was whether she was destined for attorney general, the Senate, the governor\u2019s mansion, or beyond. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Between Kennedy\u2019s funeral and Holder\u2019s exile, Ortiz and her then-chief of cybercrime, Stephen Heymann, indicted internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz on 14 felony counts for allegedly downloading too many academic journal articles. Swartz had used a simple script to download academic journal articles from the platform JSTOR, which provided its articles free to anyone on the MIT network. It\u2019s not clear Swartz even violated the company\u2019s terms of service; finding a crime anywhere in what he did took an awfully creative prosecutor. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026 <\/p>\n

Looking to avoid a trial, Heymann compared Swartz to a rapist<\/a>. By refusing to plead guilty, the line went, Swartz had \u201crevictimized\u201d MIT. Swartz fervently resisted, but Ortiz and Heymann had a trump card.<\/p>\n

The Honorable Nathaniel M. Gorton is well known to the Massachusetts Bar, whose members whisper he rarely meets an indictment he doesn\u2019t like. He\u2019s noted as a hanging judge; prosecutors go out of their way<\/a> to get high-profile cases assigned to him. A legacy admission from the Gorton\u2019s Seafood family to Dartmouth and then Columbia Law School, he was appointed to the bench by President George H.W. Bush after Bush campaigned beside his brother Sen. Slade Gorton. <\/p>\n

After Swartz drew Gorton, his defense lawyers told Heymann the pressure of the case had rendered Swartz suicidal, his attorney later said<\/a> he told prosecutors. <\/p>\n

\u201cFine, we\u2019ll lock him up,\u201d Heymann responded<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Swartz killed himself shortly thereafter, in January 2013. <\/p>\n

Within days of Swartz\u2019s death, over 61,000 people digitally signed a White House petition<\/a> to fire Ortiz \u2014 a singular distinction for a U.S. attorney. The Senate and House judiciary committees pilloried her. <\/p>\n

Ortiz told the media<\/a> that she and Heymann hadn\u2019t known Swartz was on the brink of suicide and that if they had known, things might\u2019ve been different. (Heymann\u2019s knowledge only surfaced much later, along with his \u201cFine, we\u2019ll lock him up\u201d response.) <\/p>\n

Ultimately Obama refused to sack Ortiz<\/a>. She in turn refused to sack Heymann, though she did pick a new chief of cybercrime. Obama thus allowed Ortiz to save face, but she never recovered politically. Try as she might, it all went downhill for her from there, eventually culminating with Biden nominating Walsh for labor secretary.
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Refused to sack Ortiz, because as I have noted, Barack Obama was the worst Constitutional law professor ever. \u2122<\/p>\n

Outside the Boston Globe and Ortiz\u2019s few remaining allies, the racketeering charges against Walsh\u2019s staff garnered Ortiz all the wrong attention. <\/p>\n

Merriam-Webster defines a racketeer as \u201ca person who obtains money by an illegal enterprise usually involving intimidation.\u201d <\/p>\n

But Ortiz never accused Walsh or his staff of pocketing anything for themselves, or for his campaign, or for his administration. The indictment instead alleged that Walsh\u2019s staff required a producer to hire local union stagehands for an outdoor rock concert. That\u2019s business as usual for many in the heavily unionized capital of America\u2019s bluest state. <\/p>\n

\u201cIs this illegal now?\u201d mused <\/a>CBS Boston anchor Jon Keller. <\/p>\n

Legality aside, requiring experienced stagehands familiar with the particular outdoor venue was arguably a prudent public safety measure. A few years earlier, an outdoor stage collapsed during a Sugarland show in Indiana, killing seven<\/a>. <\/p>\n

A much deadlier incident eight years before that hit closer to Boston. One hundred people perished in smoke and flames in nearby West Warwick, Rhode Island, when a nightclub named The Station burned to the ground; over 200 were injured. The blaze started when the manager of a rock band ignited indoor stage pyrotechnics<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Yet when Walsh\u2019s office insisted on better-vetted stagehands, Ortiz tried to make a federal case out of it. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Those cases would continue for years after Ortiz left office. Ortiz, however, had more immediate concerns. She had to find a job outside government. The Senate was no longer in the cards. <\/p>\n

At or near the top of Ortiz\u2019s list was Harvard Kennedy School. Philip Heymann, Ortiz\u2019s mentor and the father of her former cybercrime chief, was a longtime Harvard professor. And of course the school is named after the family of her late supporter, Theodore E. Kennedy. Harvard nonetheless rejected <\/a>Ortiz.
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You have to f%$# up pretty badly for the Kennedy School to reject a former US Attorney. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

A while later, Padma Lakshmi failed to fully convince a Boston jury. All four Teamsters tried were acquitted.
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because picketing people who hire non-union workers is not, or at least should not be a crime. <\/p>\n

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin at first threw out the separate case against Walsh\u2019s staff. It required a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals before it made it to trial. The second time around Sorokin deep-sixed it beyond any likely reinstatement<\/a>. He ruled <\/a>that the aides hadn\u2019t received anything of benefit, so couldn\u2019t be charged with anything. <\/p>\n

Now Biden has driven the final nail into Ortiz\u2019s political coffin by nominating Walsh for labor secretary despite Ortiz\u2019s indictments \u2014 or perhaps to signal his loyalty to union organizers, he nominated Walsh because of her indictments. Either way, Ortiz is now the former prosecutor who is linked to the suicide of a once-in-a-generation talent and who fought Biden\u2019s labor secretary nominee over his labor practices and lost. Not exactly where one wants to start a Democratic primary or confirmation hearing.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I do think that Joe Biden is sending a message with this, both about support of union activities and that he is less naive about the intersection of politics and prosecutions than was Barack Obama.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former Carmen Ortiz is perhaps best known for knowingly prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death, but it turns out that she was a corrupt piece of sh%$ on a par with Trump’s worst appointments, though somehow she managed to stay in office throughout the entire Obama administration, probably due to her friendship with Eric “Place” Holder. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,1011,1023,1041,978,1022],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-history","category-labor","category-law-enforcement-misconduct","category-politics","category-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200623"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}