Government Executive - Authors - Garance Franke-Ruta

For Thanksgiving, Why Does the President Only Pardon White Turkeys?

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 09:51:05 -0500

When I was very young I lived in a big house in a small city in a rather rural, impoverished part of Southern Mexico . The house had a substantial flower and vegetable garden and, for a while, a turkey I'd sometimes find somewhere between the patch of sunflowers and the lettuce. Most of the food we ate came from the garden and the market stalls in town and the nearby holdings of Don Gustavo, who milked his cows into a bucket and left it to us to pasteurize on our own. But one of my earliest memories is of the turkey hen who lived in the garden, and the day she flew onto the red-tiled roof of the house and wouldn't come down.

Yes, turkeys are meant to fly .

We think of turkeys as a quintessential North American bird, but like corn they were first domesticated by the indigenous inhabitants of Central and Southern Mexico and Guatemala . Early Spanish explorers brought turkeys back across the Atlantic to Europe, and when the Pilgrims set sail for the new world they brought coops worth of the domesticated Mexican fowl with them from England. It was an accident of history they landed on territory where "ther was great store of wild Turkies," as Gov. William Bradford put it in 1621. Known for a time as the "forest turkey," today we call the type of bird the Pilgrims found the Eastern Wild Turkey .

I think about the first turkey I encountered -- yes, we eventually ate her -- whenever I see the annual turkey pardon at the White House. The sad, flightless, white-feathered American birds held down by men in suits amid the trimmed hedges of the Rose Garden look nothing like the creatures I recall being sold in markets in Mexico. And they bear only a passing resemblance to turkeys in the traditional Thanksgiving illustrations that we all know so well here in the United States.

Above is your iconic North American wild turkey tom, the type of bird you and I drew in elementary school along with men and women in black, buckled shoes. Below, a turkey pardoned in 2009 by President Obama:

Unless you have gone out of your way to order and buy a heritage bird, this is the type of turkey you just ate on Thanksgiving: a Broad Breasted White . It is the only turkey breed still widely raised for the market, and it is a troubled creature. Wild turkeys have feathers colored iridescent red, green, copper, and bronze -- colors memorialized in crayon and tempera-paint images on the walls of every elementary school in America each fall. Heritage breeds like the Jersey Buff , the Narragansett , and the Bourbon Red grow feathers in an array of striking patterns and can range from tawny to black. All those shades have been bred away by the turkey industry, because feather buds (the pin feathers) are less noticeable under the skin of a plucked bird if they are white. With short legs and wide breasts -- the better to serve up white meat -- Broad Breasted White turkeys do not fly and can't even reproduce on their own.

As the New York Times described it in 2001 :

After years of selective breeding, only one breed of turkey, the aptly named Broadbreasted White, remains in large-scale production in the United States. For about 30 years, it has been the breeding stock owned by the three major companies, Hybrid Turkeys of Ontario, Canada; British United Turkeys of America in Lewisburg, W. Va.; and Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms, Sonoma, Calif. A blowzy specimen with short stubby legs, its disproportionate supply of white meat has come at the expense of taste and texture. It's stupid to boot.

The joke about turkeys drowning in the rain may actually have some basis in fact. Glenn Drowns, secretary-treasurer of the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities, and owner of the Sand Hill Preservation Center in Calamus, Iowa, a preservation farm, is infuriated by the degradation of the turkey. ''The commercial guys say they have to keep the turkeys in buildings because they'd drown in the rain,'' he said. ''It makes my blood pressure boil. Next year I'm going to raise some of them to see if they are that far gone.''

Because most Americans aren't old enough to have eaten the old-fashioned turkey, they have no idea what they are missing. The rest of us just forgot over the years, lulled into thinking that new is improved. Tasting the four heritage turkeys against two Broadbreasted Whites, one of which was free range, reminded me why the Thanksgiving turkey was so eagerly looked forward to 50 years ago, and why, today, cooks have had to dream up dozens of ways of making it taste better.

The common ancestor for all heritage breeds is the wild turkey, native to these shores. Wild turkeys went from Central America to Europe with the first explorers. Then they were imported to North America by English settlers as the black Spanish turkey, which was bred with the wild North American turkey. The Standard Bronze was the result and the other breeds followed: the Narragansett from Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island; the Bourbon from Bourbon County, Ky., and the Jersey Buff from New Jersey.

Fifty years ago, when Americans were still eating turkeys raised nearby, there were millions of those birds....

Today, their flocks number in the thousands.

The White House pardons white turkeys because that's what the National Turkey Federation sends over. A nonprofit, NTF is "the national advocate for all segments of the turkey industry"; its president was registered as a lobbyist in 2012. It began sending the White House a turkey each year before Thanksgiving during the Truman administration. Presidents ultimately chose not to eat their gift, though the "pardoning" of the bird only formally began in 1989, during the administration of George H.W. Bush. (See also "The Definitive History of the Presidential Turkey Pardon," courtesy of the White House .) Since then all the pardoned turkeys have been white, according to the photographic record.

"We just pardon who they send us," an administration official explained.

The NTF sends the White House the only breed their members raise. "The turkeys that are pardoned and the ones that are raised for consumption are almost exclusively white breasted. That is the breed that growers have found have the most white meat, which is what Americans prefer," said Kimmon Williams, a spokesperson for the National Turkey Federation.

"True wild turkeys aren't grown too much for consumption because they are a smaller bird," she added. "None of our members produce wild turkeys and I'm not entirely sure what companies do."

Heritage birds are represented by a different group, the Heritage Turkey Foundation , while wild birds find advocates at the National Wild Turkey Federation , which works with sportsmen on conservation issues. (Apparently "Turkey hunting is the hand-knit doily of the hunting genres. Arcane, involved, complex, and to outsiders, never worth the trouble," according to a recent article in Garden and Gun . Who knew.) The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy works to preserve heritage turkey breeds, as does the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities .

Some think the goofy Washington tradition of the president pardoning a turkey has passed its prime . "Of all the indignities a president must endure, officiating at the annual turkey pardon is perhaps the most unbecoming," wrote Joe Heim midweek in the Washington Post , calling the practice "unforgivably silly" and something "no president should intentionally subject himself -- or the country -- to."

But like so many other practices Washington interest groups have managed to get the government to sign on to, it seems unlikely the president will be able to get rid of the turkey receiving and pardoning ceremony without a minor uproar. Besides, people love silly White House traditions precisely because they are so incongruous, providing light-hearted photos of the most powerful man in the world.

Given the Obamas' concern with food sourcing and healthy eating, though, it might be time to diversify the turkey-pardon pool. Some of those heritage breeds are gorgeous birds, and the cause of preserving them is certainly as worthwhile as the annual event with Big Turkey's trade association. Heck, it might even make for a better photo. At the very least, it would turn an annual bit of White House silliness in an opportunity to raise awareness about a tiny sliver of American agricultural heritage, and provoke thinking about its future.

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A Fox Is Living on the White House Grounds and No One Can Catch It Because of the Shutdown

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 14:23:20 -0400

Illustrators of children's books, here is your next story:

The U.S. government has shut down and the woodland creatures of Washington, D.C., use the decline in human presence to take over the grounds of the White House.

Squirrels frolic in the first lady's vegetable garden, feasting on overgrown tomato vines. Bees are left to their own devices, their waxy cells dripping with uncollected honey. The birds have a field day with plants left to go to seed. And at dusk and dawn there comes the fox, treading gingerly through the long grass of the South Lawn.

All this and more is happening in real life, according to Eddie Gehman Kohan, the author of the Obama Foodorama blog, which chronicles food (and foodie) policy as it relates to the White House. The government shutdown, now entering its third week, has sidelined groundskeepers at the White House, who are barred from tending Michelle Obama's kitchen garden and other White House plant life beyond the most basic acts of watering and taking out the trash.

"The wildlife that lives on the historic 18-acre campus—including a newly arrived fox now making a home at the White House—are having a field day," Kohan reports. "Thanks to the shutdown, groundskeepers have given up on their efforts to catch the elusive creature, who showed up to live inside the White House gates more than two weeks ago. [The fox] has been spotted many times at dawn and dusk" according to the White House sources she says are "highly reliable and multiple."

Also having a field day are "the many squirrels who live at the White House," she notes.

"The squirrels are always a problem in the garden, eating the berry crop in the summer months. But they're now kids in a candy store, gorging themselves," Kohan observes. "The bushy-tailed residents are feasting on the ripe Sungolds on the vines, as well as on other tomatoes and peppers littering the ground, as are the many birds who call the White House home." These include "blue jays, wood thrush, mocking birds, crows, and some robins still lingering in what was until this week a very warm October."

This isn't the first time a fox has invaded one of the three branches of the federal government. In 2002 a fox dashed into the U.S. Supreme Court on a Sunday, leading to a full-on fox hunt with "two American foxhounds and a border terrier," as well as traps and animal-control specialists. And in 2009 a pack of raccoons briefly drew attention after taking up residence on the White House grounds.

(Main image via AngelaLouwe/Shutterstock.com)

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Analysis: Washington Is out of Step With America on Snowden

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 11:41:08 -0400

He went to China to reveal closely held America secrets, had his passport revoked and a warrant issued for his arrest, fled to Russia with the aid of an accused sex offender, and has been offered asylum by Venezuela, a country whose anti-Americanism is legendary.

"He's a traitor," House Speaker John Boehner told ABC's Good Morning America in mid-June. He articulated the views of many in official Washington when he added: "The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk. It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are. And it's a giant violation of the law." Said Senate Intelligence Committee Dianne Feinstein, also in mid-June: "I don't look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it's an act of treason."

And yet, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, "American voters" -- having had a bit of time to reflect on the question -- "say 55-34 percent that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, rather than a traitor."

"Almost every party, gender, income, education, age and income group regards Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than a traitor," the pollsters reported. "The lone exception is black voters, with 43 percent calling him a traitor and 42 percent calling him a whistle-blower."

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Analysis: The Real Problem With Hillary's Age

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Fri, 05 Jul 2013 10:33:07 -0400

Republican spinning that Hillary Clinton is too old to be president is the sort of bad messaging strategy you see when people are not coordinating with a campaign or a candidate, mainly because neither exists on the GOP side at this moment. What message do comments on age reinforce about the Republicans or their future nominee, except to send a tone-deaf signal to older women that the party thinks they are irrelevant?

Let's not forget that The Golden Girls, mentioned by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in his dig against Clinton, was a show about elderly female retirees in Florida, which is to say, a critical block of civic-minded voters in the tight-as-a-tick swing state. And if there's one thing such older women do not cotton to, it's any suggestion that they be put out to pasture instead of wooed by political figures. Be nice to grandmothers!

That said, Clinton's age may still be a relevant concern. But it's not because she's an older woman -- it's because she is an older politician. Democrats would need to worry about this even in the unlikely event she were to run and face someone her own age in 2016. As an older politician, Clinton has decades' worth of ties in the political consulting establishment. But she lacks a cadre of loyalists with fresh outside-the-Beltway experience and ideas who are eager to innovate the latest campaign techniques.

Read the rest at TheAtlantic.com.

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The New Front in the IRS Scandal: The Inspector General's Office

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 09:31:30 -0400

When the Treasury Department inspector general for tax administrationappeared before a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on June 3, he did not shy away from introducing a highly politicized framework for understanding the Internal Revenue Service's actions in targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

"This is unprecedented, Congressman .... During the Nixon Administration, there were attempts to use the Internal Revenue Service in manners that might be comparable in terms of misusing it," J. Russell George, the George W. Bush appointee who leads the IG's office, told the committee in the closely watched hearing.

"I'm not saying that ... the actions that were taken are comparable, but I'm just saying, you know, that the misuse of the -- causing a distrust of the system occurred sometime ago. But this is unprecedented," he continued.

It seemed a needlessly inflammatory statement. The impartial investigator within the Treasury Department had just, unprompted, introduced the historic specter of presidential involvement in directing abusive tax treatment of White House enemies, despite a total lack of evidence that such a thing had occurred under President Obama, according to his own findings thus far. It was the first mention of Nixon at the hearing, albeit delivered with a deliberative caveat. He wasn't saying, he was just saying, you know?

Read the rest at TheAtlantic.com.

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Proof the IRS Didn't Target Just Conservatives

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:00:00 -0400

Close to a third of the advocacy groups named by the Internal Revenue Service as recipients of special scrutiny during tax-exempt application reviews were liberal or neutral in political outlook, a leading nonpartisan tax newsletterreported after conducting an independent analysis of data released by the agency.

All told, around 470 groups were flagged as "potential political cases" between 2010 and 2012, including 298 whose experiences were analyzed in a Treasury Department inspector general's report. Because the IRS by law must not name groups that have not yet been approved or which were rejected, only a subset of their names was made public in May by the agency -- 176 cases.

Of these, "the majority of the groups selected for extra scrutiny probably matched the political criteria the IRS used and backed conservative causes, the Tea Party, or limited government generally," wrote Martin A. Sullivan in a June 3 piece in Tax Notes, a newsletter published by the Tax Analysts group. "But a substantial minority -- almost one third of the subset -- did not fit that description."

See the chart and read more at The Atlantic.

(Image via Perry Correll / Shutterstock.com)

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This Is Why People Hate the Government

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:55:00 -0400

The Treasury Inspector General report on the IRS mishandling of conservative advocacy group applications for tax exempt status between March 2010 and February 2012 was released Tuesday, and it is a doozy.

The report, conveniently titled "Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review" -- in case you had any question as to its conclusions -- points the finger at "ineffective management" as the cause of the improper selection of groups using the words "Tea Party," "Patriot" and "9/12" for additional review and questioning.

The report fills in some important blanks in our knowledge about how the groups were selected and how their applications were managed. Most intriguing to me is the apparent case of this one guy in an office in Cincinnati who sat on the selected applications for 13 months because he or she was waiting for assistance from the Washington, D.C., office, which took forever to arrive. Talk about your bureaucratic cul-de-sacs!

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Joe Biden, White House Id

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:39:03 -0400

If Barack Obama has a bit too much restraint about his persona for the commentariat, Joe Biden is the White House's exuberant and impassioned id. From "This is a big fucking deal!" to remarks that fall in Onion territory, the tactile, voluble vice president has stepped forward at key moments in White House history to say what everyone is thinking (and also, sometimes, to step in it).

Today's example was Biden unleashing a stream of wholly warranted invective at the Boston Marathon bombers. Speaking at memorial services for slain M.I.T. police officer Sean Collier, he called bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev "two twisted, perverted, cowardly knock-off jihadis."

Read more at The Atlantic.

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When America Was Female

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 11:16:34 -0500

The photos of the historic suffragette March on Washington on March 3, 1913, that were all over the place over the weekend were a reminder of how far America has come in the last century, and of how much American women have been at the forefront of pushing the international rights of women forward. But as I admired their bonnets and their courage, their side-buttoned boots and hooded woolen cloaks and looks of fierce determination, the women in the 100-year-old images also raised for me some slightly more prosaic questions.

Why were some staging tableaux wearing breastplates and laurels? Who were they dressed as? And -- perhaps more importantly -- why can't contemporary feminists have costumes that are as regal and classical as those of 1913 -- instead of Code Pink's vulgar giant magenta lady bits?

Susan Rice learns what it's really like to be Hillary

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 10:16:53 -0500

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice has withdrawn her name from consideration for nomination to be secretary of state. "If nominated, I am now convinced that the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly," she said in a letter formally taking herself out of consideration.

And with that admission, the woman who would succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state has revealed she's gotten just a small taste of what it actually has been like to be Hillary Clinton over the years.

Rice, like Clinton before her, has been attacked relentlessly by the GOP for what she's said, for her temperament, and over her financial ties; she's been attacked by left and right alike for her foreign-policy views (the criticism of Rice's ties to African despots has been nothing compared to the intra-party criticism Clinton got for backing the authorization of military use force in Iraq, launching Bush's war there); and she's been denied an upsurge of support from her party just when she positioned herself or her ideas as most inevitable (from Hillarycare to the 2008 presidential contest, Clinton's never been so vulnerable as when she's been inevitable). Like Clinton, Rice also has been subjected to a steady stream of rough questioning in the MSM and excoriated on Fox. But unlike Clinton, Rice has experienced all of this only on a small scale and for a only few months.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Susan Rice's Senate opponents voted for resolution on Benghazi protests

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 11:16:28 -0500

Is voting for something in the Senate a less significant statement of beliefs than saying the same thing on a Sunday talk show?

That's the standard the troika of GOP senators leading the charge against U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice is using today. Their comments come in the wake of revelations that they voted by acclimation to sign a measure in September asserting a similar account of the events in Benghazi on September 11 and 12 as laid out by Rice on the Sunday talk shows the weekend after the attack.

The issue might partly be due to bad wording in Senate Resolution 588, which stated in the process of honoring the four Americans who lost their lives in the attack in Libya that "the violence in Benghazi coincided with an attack on the United States Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, which was also swarmed by an angry mob of protesters on September 11, 2012."

That "also" suggests that the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi was swarmed by a mob of protestors like the ones who breached the U.S. embassy in Cairo, rather than a mob of armed militants, some of whom had been inspired to action that evening by media coverage of the protests in Cairo, as has since been reported.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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What will Hurricane Sandy do to early voting?

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:13:14 -0400

Snow, wind and rain could keep voters in the path of Hurricane Sandy from early- or in-person absentee voting, delay mail delivery of absentee ballots, and cut into early-voting days by forcing states battered by the storm to halt early balloting. Here's what we know about what's happening so far:

Connecticut: Voter-registration deadline extended.

Maryland: Early voting suspended on Monday. "Due to the potential impact of Hurricane Sandy, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley has declared a State of Emergency and ordered all Early Voting Centers in Maryland closed on Monday, October 29, 2012." Early voting had only opened on Saturday, the 27th.

Washington, D.C.: Early voting suspended Monday. The federal government is closed Monday for all non-emergency personnel. All Metro service for Monday -- rail and bus lines -- has been suspended. Early voting across the city had begun on Saturday, but the D.C. Board of Elections has "has suspended the operation of its early voting sites on Monday October 29, 2012 due to the forecast arrival of Hurricane Sandy."

Read more at The Atlantic.

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Did Biden hang State out to dry at the debate?

Garance Franke-Ruta, The Atlantic — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:26:25 -0400

Everyone loves Hillary Clinton these days. She's got an approval rating way higher than that of Joe Biden or of President Obama, who can barely muster 50 percent on a good day.

But what if the most politically significant foreign-policy failure of Obama's presidency is actually due to a failure of the diplomatic-security strategy at the Clinton-run State Department?

That's certainly what all the evidence suggests.

Charlene Lamb, deputy assistant secretary for international programs at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomat Security, told a House committee Wednesday that she personally rejected a request for additional diplomatic security in Libya, though what she rejected was not a request for Marines (as Paul Ryan mistakenly appeared to suggest during in the vice presidential debate last night in Kentucky) but extending the presence of a different kind of military personnel specifically detailed to the State Department, asForeign Policy's Josh Rogin makes clear. As well, the forces were requested for the U.S.'s Tripoli outpost, not the satellite consulate in Benghazi U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens so fatefully was visiting on September 11. The U.S. Embassy to Libya is based in Tripoli, the nation's capital.

Read the entire story at The Atlantic.

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Low Crimes and Misdemeanors

Garance Franke-Ruta — Tue, 24 Mar 1998 00:00:00 -0500

The possibility of high crimes and misdemeanors has received lots of attention of late, given the investigations of President Clinton, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros and others. But what about misconduct at lower levels of government? The annual report to Congress by the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section (PIS) is instructive.

The report describes the 48 cases, of 1,051 public corruption cases nationwide, that the PIS prosecuted in 1995. Most of the crimes are strikingly unspectacular. Punishments are accordingly minor: Parole, community service, fines, restitution of pilfered goods and funds, and resignation were all common. Jail time and home confinement were less so, occurring in about a third of cases. Even then, half those jailed or confined got less than a year.

What follows is a rough typology of the kinds of crimes for which corrupt public officials--and citizens who try to corrupt them--are commonly prosecuted by PIS.

Dangerous liaisons. Clinton and Cisneros aren't the only ones who've gotten into hot water over women. Consider Richard N. Ashby, a U.S. Customs Service resident agent, convicted of "paying [$17,000 in] government funds to his wife as a confidential informant." This represented a conflict of interest, and he received two years' probation and a $500 fine. In contrast, William D. Lanning, a program manager with the Defense Intelligence Agency, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government of $400,000. He induced a defense contracting firm to hire his girlfriend as a consultant and travel companion for $500 a day, even though she had less than a high school education and "no military or technical experience." Lanning was ordered to make restitution and sentenced to three years in jail.

Garden-variety graft. Include Leonidas P. Emerson's deeds in the category of petty but costly crimes: An Agriculture Department senior manager, he admitted in a plea agreement that he had made "extensive personal use of long-distance telephone service provided by USDA" while he was based in Ecuador and Peru. He resigned from office and reimbursed the department $18,932. Peter L. Collins, an intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was convicted in 1993 of using a "computer system and government photocopiers to surreptitiously do unauthorized work related to his personal activities." He was apparently running "his amateur ballroom dance association" from the defense office. His conviction was upheld on appeal. He received one year's probation.

Expense reports. Peter R. Davis, an adviser to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, pled guilty to "theft by false pretenses" after requesting reimbursements "for a house which he fraudulently claimed was being used primarily as an office for ... business." In fact, his son lived in the house, which was 400 miles away. He got a year of unsupervised probation, was fined $3,000 and was ordered to pay $4,280 restitution. Also guilty was William Howard Evans of Georgia, who falsely claimed to own a mobile home and "applied for government rent subsidies to be paid him on behalf of a purported tenant." He was trying to cheat HUD of some $4,000.

Embezzlement. Loibwij K. Kabua, an area supervisor with the Agriculture Department in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, pled guilty to embezzling $15,600 from the Farmers Home Administration (FHA; now called the Rural Housing Service) over a two-year period. A Marshall Islands citizen, Kabua fraudulently endorsed and cashed FHA checks intended to help 16 other citizens restore their homes following "intense weather damage." For this, he was sentenced to five months in prison, three in home detention and three years of supervised release--and was ordered to make restitution.

Bribery. Phillip McLaughlin, a former assistant vice president of the Bank of New England, was sentenced to two months in prison, plus a fine and probation, for accepting $40,000 in payoffs to influence the awards of FDIC-related contracts. While under contract from the FDIC to liquidate the bank's assets, McLaughlin hired and took kickbacks from employees of towing and yachting companies.

Varying the theme are those who get money by promising to influence a third party's decision, but who then pocket the funds and do nothing. Cleveland attorney Sanford I. Atkin was convicted on 28 felony counts for a "rainmaking" scheme in which he accepted $550,000 from international pornographer Reuben Sturman on the promise of bribing the federal judge overseeing Sturman's criminal tax trial. There was no evidence that the judge received money or was corrupted; Atkin was sentenced to a $12,500 fine and more than five years in jail.

Similarly, Vincent B. Lambert, a private citizen, got nearly two years on obstruction of justice charges stemming from a scheme in which he told a prison inmate awaiting sentencing on drug charges that, for $50,000, Lambert could persuade an assistant U.S. attorney to go easy on the inmate. The inmate paid up, but Lambert later admitted "the entire scheme was a scam, and he had not contacted anyone in the U.S. Attorney's Office."

It's hard to tell from Justice statistics, said department spokesman John Russell, whether political corruption has significantly increased since Watergate. What is clear is that the vast majority of those whom the PIS and U.S. attorneys prosecute as "corrupt public officials" are unelected career government employees--not elected officials.

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