FBI, Federal Prosecutors Use Aggressive Tactics to Clean Up State, Local Politics

The Wall Street Journal reports:

A string of federal corruption cases involving officials in Charlotte, N.C., San Francisco and other cities shows the fruits of an increased use of aggressive tactics by the Justice Department to root out state and local corruption.

In Charlotte, an undercover agent cultivated a relationship with an up-and-coming city councilman who became mayor, and allegedly gave him a briefcase filled with $20,000 in cash as a bribe. In New York, lawmakers caught up in investigations wore wires in an effort to catch their colleagues talking about corruption.

On Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation made a series of high-profile arrests and raids in separate moves, taking Charlotte Democratic Mayor Patrick Cannon and a California state senator into custody, and raiding the offices of another New York assemblyman under investigation. An attorney for Mr. Cannon, who resigned Wednesday, didn’t respond to requests for comment. An attorney for the state senator said he planned to plead not guilty, and the assemblyman denied wrongdoing.

Those moves follow a series of other high-profile indictments of public officials, including former Republican Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, whom prosecutors charged with accepting gifts in return for using his position to promote a dietary supplement. He says he did nothing illegal and is fighting the charges.

Public corruption has long been an FBI priority, but investigations in recent years have involved tactics like wiretaps and stings that some officials say fell out of favor after controversial cases like the Abscam inquiry in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Brian Nadeau, chief of the FBI public-corruption unit, said, “The reason why public corruption is such an important priority for the bureau is those people are put in a position of trust.”

“There’s a real need for federal resources because of the structural difficulty of having state prosecutors pursue state officials,” said Daniel Stein, the former head of the public-corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. “Federal prosecutors bring a degree of independence that can sometimes help make those cases.”