On Feb. 8th 2008, US Attorney Christopher J. Christie submitted a letter to the court in the matter of the United States vs Wayne Bryant. In the letter USA Christie attacks the Political Profiling study that is being done by Donald Shields, Ph.D., stating the study is "deeply flawed and inherently unreliable".

This is Dr. Shields' response.

For the Record: A Response to U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie's Brazen Critique of the Political Profiling Study of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales DOJ

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

(Often attributed to Edmund Burke, c1729 - 1797)

I recently came across a February 8, 2008 letter from the office of Christopher J. Christie, the then United States Attorney, District of New Jersey (Case 3:07-cr-00267-FLW Document 66 Filed 03/8/2008 Page 1 of 3). Mr. Christie[1] and his Assistant U.S. Attorney, Norman Gross, had written to federal judge Freda L. Wolfson in response to a motion for an evidentiary hearing on selective prosecution in the case of United States vs. Wayne Bryant [Hereafter, I will refer to the letter by its senior signatory, Christopher J. Christie].

In the letter, Mr. Christie describes my on-going longitudinal study[2] of political profiling (selective investigation and selective prosecution) in the Bush Department of Justice from 2001 to 2006 as “deeply flawed and inherently unreliable.” Mr. Christie attacks the study in such a manner as to demonstrate that it is either his misunderstanding of the study--or the ethical obligation of a U. S. Attorney not to mislead the federal court--that is “deeply flawed” or “inherently unreliable.”

For the record, the study tabulates publicly reported investigations/indictments of elected public officials and candidates for office. It does so of necessity, because the Justice Department keeps such information secret or mixes it with reports of non-elected individuals, thus precluding a random sample of the known population.

For the record, I will address the criticisms in the order presented:

• U.S. Attorney Christie: First, it [Shields' Study] purports to have tabulated Justice Department “investigations”, when no such information is publicly available to tabulate. Federal Grand Jury proceedings are kept secret by statute, thus the majority of investigations that do not result in charges never become public in any way.

Mr. Christie asserts that the majority of investigations remain unreported if criminal charges are not eventually filed as a criminal information or grand jury indictment. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that the "so called" secret grand jury proceedings are often revealed by the method(s) that the Justice Department chooses in obtaining information for a grand jury (for example, utilizing subpoenas that are certain to become public),  And let’s also look later at the fact that the choice of such method may in itself be a way of deciding which public officials to embarrass and which not.  What remains makes it clear that Mr. Christie’s line of reasoning is entirely irrelevant to the validity of a study that compares the respective percentages of the actually reported (by the media) investigations and indictments, as the longitudinal political profiling study does.

To support his claim and demonstrate that the study's results do not reflect accurately the percentage of investigations conducted against the respective political party elected officials or candidates, Mr. Christie would need to show that investigations of Republicans are somehow disproportionately kept secret (not reported in the media) and that those same investigations of Republicans somehow do not result in disproportionately fewer criminal charges. However, for him to do so would not refute the existence of a Bush DOJ policy of politically based selective investigations and prosecutions of elected officials and candidates.  Instead, it would reinforce the existence of such a selective policy at the DOJ.

For Mr. Christie to take such a position indicates a policy of political influence not just as to whether a particular investigation should be done, but how that investigation should proceed.  That is, how the evidence would be gathered and presented to a grand jury, and made known to the public media.

In some ways, Mr. Christie's response is more damning and more supportive of the existence of selective investigations and selective prosecutions (political profiling) than the evidence provided by my study, which shows that the statistical significance of the disproportion would have occurred by chance in less than 1 in 10,000 replications of the study. The significance of this disproportion is maintained over the years, whether the number of publicly reported investigations and/or indictments (including arrests via the use of criminal information) is reported as 129, 275, 309, 375, or 820 cases.

• U.S. Attorney Christie: Second, the report’s main author, Donald Shields, has a substantial conflict of interest not disclosed in the study. His sister, Katheryn Shields, is a former Democratic public official under indictment for mortgage fraud. Katheryn Shields has raised claims of selective and vindictive prosecution in her own case, and submitted her brother's study to the Court in an attempt to have the fraud charges dismissed. Notably, the claim was rejected by the judge in the case. United States v. Zwego et al., 04cr0007 (W.D.Mo.2007).

For the record, Mr. Christie chose to mislead the court by claiming that on February 8, 2008 (the date of his letter) my sister was “under indictment for mortgage fraud.” Mr. Christie's statement is untrue.  By the date his letter was even written (2/8/08) (let alone submitted to the federal court [3/8/08]), Katheryn Shields had been acquitted of both counts of a two-count indictment by a jury of her peers in federal court.  In fact, her acquittal occurred some three months previously (11/7/2007) in a trial outcome reinforcing the political nature of the false charges filed against her as demonstrated by defense counsel through the testimony of both defense and prosecution witnesses and review of falsified (forged) government exhibits.

Next, I ask the reader to note that, in the study, I did not overlook any of the DOJ's publicly reported investigations (three) of my sister as the elected County Executive of Jackson County, Missouri. Nor did I overlook her one publicly reported indictment on a charge totally unrelated to her time in office and brought just a few days after she left office, the day before she was to file for the office of mayor of Kansas City, Missouri.  Also, I had previously disclosed that Katheryn Shields is my sister, and that fact should have been known to Mr. Christie.[3] I had also previously responded to media queries about her inclusion with a statement to the effect that, even though my sister's case had turned up in the sample, that fact didn't affect the study's conclusions.  If she were removed from the study, the disproportion noted in the study's results would not change.

Mr. Christie insinuates that the circumstance of my sister having been indicted through the use of political profiling somehow in and of itself invalidates the study's accuracy. To prove such a claim Mr. Christie would need to demonstrate that the use of 374 cases versus 375 cases or 819 cases versus 820 cases would somehow invalidate the results of my longitudinal study. Yet, Mr. Christie offered no expert witness on statistics to that effect nor did he cogently develop any line of reasoning to support such a claim. The reason of course is obvious – he could not. His insinuation is bogus.

Then, Mr. Christie boasts that in Ms. Shields’ case the Justice Department had avoided an actual pre-trial evidentiary hearing on selective prosecution (with accompanying discovery). This statement is factual. On the other hand, had such a hearing been granted it might well have established the DOJ's misconduct in her case .  For example, third-party forged documents were treated as if they were real; forged documents were submitted into the court record, leading a grand jury to believe they were real.  And a homeowner was selectively indicted solely for being deceived by a con artist known by the FBI (and allowed by the FBI and local U.S. Attorney to prey on innocent victims for nearly a year before arresting him and revoking his parole for mortgage fraud!). Such a pre-trial evidentiary hearing could have saved the taxpayers a long and expensive trial and a lot of homeowners and tenants financial grief. Katheryn Shields was the only home-seller prosecuted in Zwego's extensive mortgage fraud scheme.

Continually, I am struck by the fact that, for a governmental agency that claims to have nothing to hide, the G. W. Bush Justice Department consistently – some might say desperately and frantically  – opposed any attempt to impose judicial review on its behavior and policies across the past 8 years. Of course, given the very nature of the DOJ's political abuse of the power to investigate and prosecute (as indicated by my study), it would be a courageous federal judge both indeed and in deed, who took it upon her(him)self to order the Justice Department to disgorge information that it so anxiously wishes to keep secret. Until that day comes, the truth can only be known through independent, longitudinal studies such as mine.

• U. S. Attorney Christie: Third, a prime example of the study’s lack of reliability is the absence of three of the most well known and publicized prosecutions in recent years: Lewis “Scooter” Libby, David Safavian, Tony Rudy and Neil Volz. Despite the fact the study purports to have gathered a list of investigations from public media searches, these highest of high profile prosecutions were absent from the list.

For the record, of all the people named by Mr. Christie as "well known and publicized prosecutions" that "were absent from the list," not a single one was an elected public official or candidate for public office.[4] Therefore, there was nothing for me to "miss."  Mr. Christie can say I missed them and be correct only by brazenly ignoring that such persons did not meet the criteria set forth in the study's design for inclusion.

Let me again stress that someone not meeting the criteria of being an elected official or candidate is why they were not included in my study. Mr. Christie is wrong to assume that it is because they were "high profile" (and Republican?) that I missed them. Certainly, were I to include his examples and add to them the 900+ cases of labor union officials that were indicted[5] (out of some 2700+ investigations) during the same period, or the number of Native American Tribal officials who were investigated and indicted, or the number of non-elected state and county political party chairs, I could have greatly swollen the numbers of Democrats in relation to Republicans.  Mr. Christie really does not want me to go there.

For the record, the exclusion of non-elected and non-candidate high and low profile cases does not make the study weaker. Such individuals were directly and purposely excluded from the study because they lack relevancy to the issue of the selective investigation and prosecution of elected office holders and candidates. As simply as I can put it, they are oranges left outside on the tree and not to be counted in my study of apples (elected officials and candidates).

Please note that Mr. Christie does not claim that I missed federal prosecutions of well-known elected officials and candidates seeking elected office; nor that I missed well-known Republican elected officials and candidates. What Mr. Christie does assert is that the study does not purport to cover all investigations of all persons that one could conceivably fit broadly under the term “public official."  Persons such as border patrol agent, or White House press spokesperson, or mail carrier, or jail guard, or deputy sheriff, or HUD manager, or Congressional aide, or Assistant U.S. Attorney, without end.

• U.S. Attorney Christie: Fourth, there is no evidence that this study was conducted according to academic or scientific standards, or that it has been accepted by any recognized publication.

Of course, Mr. Christie's brazen assertion aside, he offers no evidence to support that the study did not follow academic or scientific standards. Just the opposite is true. Allow me to demonstrate once again the study's design and method regarding sample selection, reliability, and validity (and please forgive me for sounding too much like a professor as I do it).

As indicated throughout the various academic write-ups across the years, the study made use of consistent search criteria, maintained a consistent design, checked for reliability (to insure that we accurately counted what we were trying to count) and validity (to insure that we did study what we were supposed to be studying), and appropriately used the Chi-square nonparametric statistic to establish significance in a 2 X 3 comparison design with 1 degree of freedom. As well the study used a comparison (control) group. Allow me to reiterate the details:

First, the study's author(s) recognized that political profiling of elected officials could not be studied using a randomly drawn probability sample for the very reason given by Mr. Christie in his first point above: The number of investigations is kept secret and the number of indictments of elected officials and candidates are not reported separately from other local, state, and federal government employees. Thus, to study the phenomena, the only procedure left was the use of availability (non-probability) sampling.

This fact did not bother us because we were not attempting to generalize to the population of elected officials about their likelihood of being investigated or indicted, but rather making a comparison within groups contained in the available sample. Plus, we knew that there was no reason on its face for availability samples to be biased. As well, we knew that there were ways to compensate for the lack of randomness. For example, we knew that the nature of our longitudinal design with its several sets of data to track the consistency of results would provide confidence in what we were finding. Then, too, we selected a higher than normal social scientific criteria for ascertaining the significance of the findings. Thus, statistical significance was established at the 0.0001 level (way beyond the .05 or .01 level commonly used in the social sciences and medical research). Then, too, validity was checked using four standard types of validity confirmation:

1. Content validity (for example not mixing apples and oranges): Here, we only looked at investigations and/or indictments of elected officials and candidates for elected public office;

2. Construct validity: Here we ascertained that inferences legitimately followed from our method of operationalizing the theoretical concepts; in other words, we made every effort (checking the appearance of multiple media stories over time, confirming through U.S. Attorney and Federal Bureau of Investigation web-sites, annual reports, and so forth) that the public report of a federal investigation and/or indictment obtained from the media reflected the theoretical constructs, that is, federal law enforcement investigations and/or indictments;

3. Concurrent validity: Here, we compared the findings from the public media reports to other public reports of federal investigations and indictments such as to cases listed on the U.S. Attorneys’ web-sites, case study summaries presented in DOJ publicly reported annual reviews, and to other confirmations of the findings such as studies[6] conducted independently of us, and finally via checks on the consistency of the findings as the study was replicated over time; and

4. Predictive validity: Here, we compared the findings to the predictive capacity of symbolic convergence theory. This communication theory indicates that collectives of people, such as an organization like the DOJ, develop a composite rhetorical vision or view of reality in which they participate that has meaning, emotion, value, and motive for action for its participants. The theory predicted that with the merged neo-conservative and religious fundamentalist rhetorical vision launched by John Ashcroft and fostered by Alberto Gonzales (with its preemptive crime prevention plot line, view of public corruption as a top priority evil, and righteous deep structure that told its participants that their Republican pre-emptive view was the correct view) that there would be disproportionate treatment (selective investigations and prosecutions) by the DOJ. The data, as it turns out, did confirm what the theory predicted for the DOJ and what it didn't predict for the participants in the control group who were not caught up in a common rhetorical vision or culture.

Mr. Christie's brazen assertion that the study was not conducted according to academic or scientific standards flies in the face of these detailed procedures (previously included and identified in the various reports of the study's design and methods). The study from the onset set forth the search criteria to be used. The study reflects the consistent use of these same search criteria across what by the time Mr. Christie wrote his letter had become eight (8) interim reports and discussions of the data ranging from the initial report in David Roy's (October 2004) summary in the Daily Vidette [7] to refereed acceptance for presentation at two major academic meetings[8] (2005), to two electronic published reports in ePluribus Media  (February 2007[19] and October 2007[110), to a published interview in ePluribus Media[11] about the study's reliability and validity (April 2007), and to both a written[12] (2007a) and oral[13]report, the sample size had grown to 820. The next report, to be released shortly in 2009, concerns the extent of political profiling during the period November 9, 2007 to January 20, 2009 – the period during which Attorney General Mukasey served.[14] That interim report tracks an additional 270 publicly reported cases. That latest study again follows the same rigorous academic and scientific standards and again finds the same non-proportionate results. (2007b) report to the Homeland Security and Law and Commerce Subcommittees of the U. S. House Judiciary Committee.

 As well, regarding academic and scientific standards, the report of the 820 cases to the House Judiciary subcommittees also included a separate study of investigations and or indictments by state Attorneys General and local prosecutors of elected officials and candidates.[15] This comparison sample of 251 investigations and/or indictments revealed no political bias across the nation by state and local prosecutors.  The number of investigations and/or prosecutions reflected the normative distribution of Democratic, Republican, and Independent/Other politicians in the population studied.

This non-federal law-enforcement-comparison study, with its proportionate findings, provided stark contrast to the disproportionate findings from the studies of the federal investigations and/or indictments. The comparison study results helped to confirm the extent of the non-proportional selective investigations and/or selective indictments found in the federal cases conducted by the Bush DOJ.

Because the comparison sample didn't vary from the normative data and the multiple federal samples did vary when the same data collection and analysis techniques were used, what could have caused the difference? The statistical analysis, the comparison sample, and the concurrent validity arguments delineated above all point to political profiling (selective investigation and prosecution) on the part of the Bush DOJ. This was a conclusion that could only have been reached because of the academic and scientific rigor built into the study's design.

Finally, only if one is so academically or scientifically provincial as to dismiss the Government publication of both my oral testimony and written report to the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittees and the electronic publication of the pieces in ePluribus Media as not constituting being "accepted by any recognized publication," can Mr. Christie's fourth point be considered as anything but spurious.

• U. S. Attorney Christie: Fifth, a co-author of an earlier version of Professor Shields’ “study,” Professor John F. Cragan, has stated that he was “publicly disassociating himself” from that earlier version of the study due to flaws in its methodology. See ePluribus Media, Letter to the Editor, April 30, 2007, www.epluribusmedia.org/letters/20070430 Cragan letter.  In that letter, Professor Cragan conceded that the study included public officials as targets of federal investigations solely based, in some instances, upon statements made by the public officials in the media that they would cooperate in any investigation if asked to do so.

 Here, Mr. Christie provided a broken URL making verification of his claims difficult. Therefore, I reproduce Dr. Cragan's letter to ePluribus Media in its entirety so that the reader may judge its content unfettered by the interpretive filter employed by Mr. Christie's summary of what Dr. Cragan said:

Letter to the Editor from Dr. John Cragan, 30 April 2007[16]

Dear Editor:

I am publicly disassociating myself with the longitudinal study, The Political Profiling of Elected Democratic Officials: When Rhetorical Vision Participation Runs Amok, published on February 18, 2007, in your journal in which Professor Donald C. Shields is the senior author. My new professional duties and on-going health problems will not allow me to continue to work on this study. In my judgment, the tables need to be re-formatted to sort out officials who say they cooperated and were not charged, from those who were charged. Although this restructuring will not affect the findings of the study, it will make the tables clearer. Since this reformatting is very time-consuming, it will further aggravate my health problems, thus I must remove myself from the study.

I wish Professor Shields the very best as his important study goes forward to completion.

John F. Cragan, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus

Illinois State University

As the reader will quickly note, at no point in his letter did Professor Cragan state that "he was 'publicly disassociating himself' from that earlier version of the study due to flaws in its methodology," as Mr. Christie claimed. Neither did Professor Cragan say anything about erroneously "including public officials as targets of federal investigations" as Mr. Christie also claimed.

Rather Professor Cragan said, "In my judgment, the tables need to be re-formatted to sort out officials who say they cooperated and were not charged, from those who were charged. Although this restructuring will not affect the findings of the study, it will make the tables clearer." [Emphasis added.]

Just so the reader understands how far Mr. Christie stretched truth to make his erroneous claim about Professor Cragan's motive(s) for ending his association with the longitudinal study, the October publications from the House Judiciary Committee and ePluribus Media included tables that separated investigations from prosecutions.[17] Don't forget: Mr. Christie cited by name that House Judiciary Committee submitted testimony and study in his letter to Federal Judge Wolfson.

Nonetheless, even with Professor Cragan's suggested improvement, a reader needs to understand that a person saying that they are co-operating does not mean they were not investigated or not indicted. As I learned from more than one specific example from the data-set, a person could say they were told that they were not being investigated or were not a target and after a period of time there would be a federal indictment or a new federal investigation launched. So, while readers seemed to appreciate the separation of investigations from indictments in the data report for aesthetic reasons, such reformatting of the tables did not result in a reduction in the number of publicly reported cases of federal investigations and/or indictments as obtained from public reports in the media.

• U.S. Attorney Christie: Sixth, the study intentionally excludes entire categories of public officials. It purports to examine investigations of candidates and elected public officials, but not executive branch employees, congressional staff or employees of the judiciary. Given that some of the most well known and publicized prosecutions in recent years were against executive branch employees (Libby, Safavian, Griles) and congressional staffers (Rudy, Volz, and Heaten [sic]), it is hard to imagine how any study of alleged partisan profiling would not take these prosecutions into consideration.

Here Mr. Christie again complains that the study has limited scope because it does not include employees of the executive branch (J. Steven Griles, former deputy secretary of the interior), congressional staff (William Heaton, former chief of staff for Congressman Ney) or employees of the judiciary. Au contraire! The study's scope is all publicly reported elected officials and candidates – from dog catcher to President. Thus, Mr. Christie is not offering a genuine criticism of the study, its methodology, or its results. He is merely expressing his desire that a different study had been conducted.

I would ask the reader to note especially that Mr. Christie does not question the accuracy of the number of apples reported in the media (in fact the Justice Department has never even attempted to demonstrate that the numbers or names cited in the study are in any way inaccurate).  Rather, Mr. Christie attempts to obfuscate (confuse and disguise the results of the study) by alleging that if one were to include all other fruits in my study of apples the conclusions drawn would be different. It is as if he is saying that if we investigated and indicted 67 Republican captains of industry (an unlikely enough event) then each one of them should count 10 of your lowly Democratic politicians. Also, recall my response to Mr. Christie's third point about the need to include investigations and/or prosecutions of union officials, non-elected political party chairs, and Native American tribal officials such an expanded study would again produce results Mr. Christie would not like.

Certainly the very aim of the study was to look at the political use of the Justice Department to selectively investigate and prosecute against primarily state and local officials – the very officials that would not likely draw national attention. Indeed, it wasn't until the publication of my longitudinal studies that disproportionate, politically motivated, selective investigations and prosecutions at the local level began to receive the scrutiny of the national press.[18] That was because 800 or so disparate investigations and prosecutions constitute only 800 or so disparate local stories, when considered one at a time. The individual stories for the most part remained under the radar of the national press. The national implications of what the Bush DOJ conspired to do became evident when all of the “local stories” were shown to be a major national scandal due to the near statistical impossibility of all of them together adding up to an isolated instance.

• U. S. Attorney Christie: Seventh, the search terms used by Professor Shields which attempt to gather public information were inadequate to capture even the limited amount of publicly available information. The results reflect the inadequacies: The study purportedly gathered, through its flawed research, 375 corruption “investigations and/or indictments” between January 2001 and December 2006. The Public Integrity Section’s Report to Congress for the same time period reflects nearly 7,000 officials charged. The number of investigations during that time period would be much larger.

Of course the Justice Department has always had the option of refuting this study – if it can be refuted – by releasing all of the relevant information. Instead, it has fought, successfully so far, to keep such information out of the hands of the public, the Congress, and the courts. But to claim there were 7000 officials charged is only true if one first adds on dozens of gross of those oranges (non-elected public officials) to the apples (elected public officials) that I studied, as Mr. Christie did.

The reader should know that the DOJ’s annual reports on public corruption investigations given to the Congress also do just that – they lump together all government employees (city, county, state, and national) whether elected or not.  Such a procedure may tell the Congress about the extent of public corruption among all Americans (as Mr. Christie purports to deem important), but it does absolutely nothing to tell the public and the Congress about the extent of political profiling (the selective investigation and prosecution) of elected officials and candidates.

Again, my longitudinal study dealt only with present and former elected public officials and candidates typically known by their political affiliation as Democratic, Republican, or Independent/Other.

The Justice Department has consistently misled both courts and the public by citing its Public Integrity Section Reports to Congress since they were inaugurated in the mid-1970s. To use this misleading argument to claim that my study only “found” a few hundred of the “7000 officials charged” from 2001 to 2006 and is therefore unreliable is a spurious claim on its face. This conclusion is reached again because their 7000 figure includes a much broader definition of “officials” including everything from indicted lobbyist for a state or local government (non-elected) to pilfering mail carrier (non-elected) to dope-stealing Drug Enforcement or Border Patrol Agent (non-elected) to Deputy Sheriff (non-elected).

Once again the Justice Department seeks to attack this study not by demonstrating any error in the study itself, but by seeking to misdirect attention to all of the things to which the political profiling study does not deal and should not deal. The political profiling study sought only to use a longitudinal design to answer the important research question about the existence, degree, and extent of selective investigations and prosecutions of elected Democratic officials and candidates by the G. W. Bush DOJ as gleaned from a Google search of the public media.

• U. S. Attorney Christie: Eighth, even if the 375 cases gathered were an adequate sample, the “study” does not even attempt to differentiate between investigations and indictments. The two are simply lumped together with no indication as to how many of the investigations resulted in actual indictments. Moreover, the study offers no information on the impetus for the opening of investigations, such as citizen complaints, media reports of wrong-doing, and whistleblower law suits.

Mr. Christie implies that one should dismiss 375 cases as an inadequate sample, conveniently ignoring the fact that more than twice as many cases were included in the study by the time he sent his letter – the same study that he entitles verbatim in lines 5 through 8 of his opening paragraph: “An Empirical Examination of the Political Profiling of Elected Officials: A Report on Selective Investigations and/or Indictments by the DOJ’s U. S. Attorneys under Attorneys General Ashcroft and Gonzales.” As Mr. Christie knew, or should have known, the report that he named includes 820 cases and those cases include all of the 375 cases to which he alludes and 445 new cases. As well, all 820 cases in the report he specified by name did differentiate investigations from indictments (when sufficient intervals had passed for this to occur). Where appropriate for those 820 cases, I also indicated publicly reported acquittals.

The reader should note that for purposes of examining whether or not there were disproportionate investigations and or prosecutions, it makes absolutely no difference whether or not the investigations were prompted by citizen complaints, media reports of wrong-doing, or whistleblower law suits if elected Democratic office holders and candidates are disproportionately selected for follow-up investigation and/or indictment.

Again, any issue with distinguishing between mere investigations – no matter how energy robbing and image destroying such investigations might be from a political point of view of the victim – and indictments has been resolved by making such distinctions in the revised study. Through it all, and regardless of the way the data were formatted, the politically disproportional investigations and/or indictments have remained the same.

Of course, the Justice Department has always had the option of making such a distinction between investigations and indictments. Perhaps they understood that doing so would not change the result in terms of evidence of political profiling. Similarly, the Justice Department has always had the option of providing apparently innocent explanations for its behavior: Perhaps, quite suddenly during the Bush Administration, there had been an inordinately large number of unsolicited citizen complaints against Democrats rather than Republicans. Or, perhaps there had been an overwhelming abundance of media reports of wrongdoing by Democrats but not Republicans that were the impetus, not the result, of federal investigations. Perhaps more whistles have been blown against Democrats than Republicans. If the Justice Department could confirm that such was the case, I would have readily reported that fact.

The problem is that the Justice Department asks us to take it on faith that there is an innocent explanation for what clearly appears as the statistically demonstrated political profiling (selective investigation and prosecution) of elected Democrats and candidates. The DOJ chooses not to respond with any actual data, of course. It has taken this position, the reader should recall, despite the clearly demonstrated political impropriety involved in replacing sitting US attorneys with loyal "Bushies" directed to file politically motivated charges. It has taken this position despite the public testimony that it used a litmus test to fill DOJ open positions with "good Americans," that is, good Bush supporters. It has taken this position despite its role in slipping a provision into the Patriot Act II at the eleventh hour that allowed the DOJ to:

1. Circumvent the recommendation of a State's Senators as to whom would be nominated for U.S. Attorney replacements. 

2. Avoid the "advice and consent" of subsequent Senate confirmation regarding a replacement U.S. Attorney.

3. Appoint Department of Justice pre-selected individuals as permanent interim U.S. Attorneys.

 “Pay no attention to the little Karl Rove behind the curtain,” we are told.

 Of course, Mr. Christie's shameless reaction to my study is no different from the Bush Administration’s attitude towards any other inconvenient facts or inconvenient science. For eight years Americans have been asked to take all on faith and ignore science.  For eight years scientific research has been doctored by the Bush Administration to fit its political agenda. But facts are, indeed, stubborn things. The data contained in my political profiling study constitutes a damning indictment of the political misuse of the Justice Department by the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales/Mukasey DOJ. The letter from Mr. Christie to Judge Wolfson provides one more unfortunate example of the extent to which the Bush Justice Department has been willing to mislead both the courts and the public in order to hide – or to discredit – the evidence of its misdeeds.