April 30th 2009
Obama’s Border Chief And The Cocaine King
Alejandro Mayorkas is President Obama’s pick for director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency that is particularly important as drug wars and swine flu epidemics ravage Mexico. So of course Prez-O picked a good candidate for the job, right? The White House thinks so:
At 39 he was the youngest U.S. Attorney in the nation and the first in the Central District of California to be appointed from within the Office. Mayorkas led an office of 240 Assistant U.S. Attorneys in the prosecution of cases in varied areas of law enforcement, including cases of public corruption, investment fraud, civil rights violations, high-tech and computer-related crime, organized crime, environmental crime, and international money laundering. The National Law Journal recently named Mr. Mayorkas one of the “50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America.”
But not so fast. This isn’t Mayorkas’ first stint in the admin of a Dem prez; he was a Clintonista earlier, and a rather notorious one at that, it turns out. Read this from Judicial Watch’s Corruption Chronicles and see if you’d pick this guy as the chief of the thin line that separates us from the Mexican drug wars:
As U.S. Attorney Mayorkas was largely responsible for freeing a drug dealer serving a 15-year prison sentence for operating a cocaine ring that stretched from California to Minnesota. The convicted drug dealer, Carlos Vignali, is the son of a wealthy political donor (Horacio Vignali) who convinced influential community leaders—mostly recipients of his generous contributions—to advocate for his son’s pardon. He also gave Hillary Clinton’s brother, Hugh Rodham, a couple hundred thousand dollars to lobby the president for a pardon.
Mayorkas’ intervention was the most crucial and by far carried the most weight, Clinton officials later revealed. Vignali was one of 140 pardons and 36 commutations that Clinton granted during his last hours as president. Outraged federal prosecutors in Minneapolis, where Vignali was convicted for trying to sell 800 pounds of cocaine, said Mayorkas called them several times inquiring about the case. The Minneapolis federal prosecutors subsequently wrote the Justice Department strongly opposing the commutation but they were ignored.
A congressional investigation into Clinton’s last-minute pardons blasts Mayorkas for intervening on behalf of Vignali, pointing out that senior law enforcement and political officials should have been precluded from supporting a commutation for such a criminal. Mayorkas resigned in disgrace and went into private practice at a big Los Angeles law firm.
One would assume this all would come up in Mayorkas’ vetting; it’s hardly private stuff. So we’re left to assume that our coke-experienced prez looked the file over and figured it was all OK with him. I mean, look at it this way: The Mayorkas matter was nothing more than the federal government intervening in the free market, right? And that’s comfortable turf for Obama.
Posted in Obama Drama | No Comments yet » | |
Leave a Reply
[The "Comment Box" is WYSIWYG except that you have to double space between paragraphs!
Type it the way you want it to look -- Just remember to double up those line spaces.]
You must be logged in to post a comment.
