Important Scott Horton piece at Harper‘s:

The DOJ’s public-integrity prosecutions have careened in recent years from one humiliation to the next, with little thought for the damage the department is doing to the law or to its own reputation. First came the prosecutions of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, both cases in which the department secured convictions through false evidence, as prosecutors suppressed exculpatory materials that established the innocence of the defendants. Then came the $40 million Alabama bingo prosecution, touted by Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer as a demonstration of the department’s commitment to stopping bribery in the legislative process. That case ended with acquittals across the board, after the evidence demonstrated not corruption, but the duping of the DOJ by political hacks with racist motives—as the judge himself pointed out….

The DOJ’s political prosecutions demonstrate its exceptional vulnerability to political manipulation, its absence of professional independence, and its consistent failure to exhibit mature, detached judgment. The Edwards case perfectly encapsulates these qualities, and leads to an inescapable conclusion: that the upper echelon of the Justice Department, whether under Democratic or Republican administrations, is filled with political hacks eager to pad their résumés before launching their political careers.

I discussed the danger of political prosecutions, including in the Edwards case, in this recent Slate piece.