They Really Wanted Obama Care

The left reached Shambala when they ramrodded ObamaCare through Congress.  But The Road to Shambala took a lot of work to pave.  For one thing, someone had to write the nearly 3,000 page bill, a bill that no one in Congress read, before working to get it passed.

 We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, (Then) Speaker Nancy Pelosi

or

 What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” Representative John Conyers

No, getting the bill read isn’t really much of an impediment.  But getting it passed might be.  That requires votes, and planning to get those votes.  To get them, you might even have to tamper with a few close senatorial races – what other explanation is there for a Senator Stuart Smalley, er, Senator Al Franken?

But that is old news.  Until this week, when the news of Justice Department shenanigans in the smear campaign against popular Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, broke.

A recent article in the WSJ, entitled Department of Injustice, doesn’t pull any punches, opening with the following:

Something is very rotten at the U.S. Department of Justice.  No other reasonable conclusion can be drawn from an independent report on the 2008 prosecution of then-Senator Ted Stevens.

According to the exhaustive study ordered by Judge Emmet Sullivan, government attorneys engaged in a “systematic concealment” of “significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens’s defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness.”

The article continues, explaining the ramifications of the actions of a handful of partisan bureaucrats, in the conduct of the Stevens case.  The article argues for more public scrutiny of,

… the roles they played in a prosecution that not only trampled on the rights of the accused, but denied the people of Alaska a fair election and literally shifted the balance of power in the U.S. government.

The Justice lawyers were not all equally culpable — some withheld evidence; others failed to ensure that their subordinates honored the defendant’s basic rights.  And while prosecutors acknowledge the violation of Stevens’s rights, they generally blame them on communication problems and other process errors rather than on any intent to mislead the judge and jury.

Of course not, it was all just a process error (emphasis WWTFT).  Friday’s WSJ story, Report Excoriates Stevens Prosecutors, quotes Henry F. Schuelke III, the lawyer appointed by Judge Sullivan to investigate the actions of the DOJ.  According to his report, the lapses of memory cited by members of the prosecution team, are hard to swallow.  According to the report, four prosecutors and an FBI agent said they “forgot” earlier statements of the government’s key witnesses for the prosecution.

“the complete and simultaneous long-term memory failure byt the entire prosecution team” was “extraordinary” and “strains credibility.”

The report found that the prosecutorial misconduct perpetrated by the Obama Bush DOJ was “intentional.”

Of course it was.

Guilty verdicts against the Republican Stevens arrived less than two weeks before Election Day in 2008, causing the previously popular Senator to lose a close race to Democrat Mark Begich.  Mr. Begich would go on to provide the 60th Senate vote to pass ObamaCare in 2009.

Yup, The Road To Shambala took some paving.