Court memos detail unethical, unpunished leaks in case handled by potential Biden AG Preet Bharara
Preet Bharara knew about FBI leaks two years before his office denied them. No one has been punished.
Preet Bharara is often mentioned as a possible U.S. attorney general in a Joe Biden administration after building a reputation as a hard-charging federal prosecutor and self-proclaimed ethicist teaching law school and dispensing morality on Twitter. But one of the last cases he handled as the chief federal prosecutor in New York City cuts against the grain of his carefully manicured image, exposing widespread leaking by the FBI — and knowledge of it by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office — during the insider trading case of businessman and former Las Vegas sports gambler Billy Walters. The government's misconduct initially was hidden from the judge, and to this day remains unpunished despite the court's demands for accountability, according to legal filings reviewed by Just the News. Bharara personally had to admit the government's wrongdoing, filing under his name a lengthy report of misconduct with U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in January 2017, shortly before President Trump fired Bharara as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. After months of telling the court in 2016 that Walters' requests for evidence of grand jury leaks was "a fishing expedition," Bharara's office had to admit that a senior FBI agent in the case, David Chaves, and others in the FBI and U.S. attorney's office had contacts with the news media and one or more may have committed a crime by leaking grand jury evidence. "It is now an incontrovertible fact that FBI leaks occurred, and that such leaks resulted in confidential law enforcement information about the Investigation being given to reporters," Bhahara's prosecutors wrote in a Jan. 4 2017 ex parte memo to the court.
While prosecutors did not admit directly to a violation of the Rule 6(e) prohibition on leaking grand jury information, they wrote "we believe that the appropriate course is for the Court to assume that a Rule 6(e) violation occurred and proceed to consider the issue of remedy." It is extremely rare for prosecutors to acknowledge grand jury violations. Nonetheless, Walters was convicted and sent to prison, from which he was recently released to home confinement due to medical concerns related to the pandemic. Today, the case stands as the latest glaring example of the failure of the FBI and DOJ to punish its own wrongdoing, which some judges who reviewed the case suggested was worse than Walters' crime. Chaves was never charged with any wrongdoing and was allowed to retire from the FBI without penalty. He declined comment through his lawyer. Peter Carr, a DOJ spokesman, declined to say whether the leaks are still being investigated. Bharara declined to comment. In the court filing and in statements he has made since he left office, Bharara has repudiated the alleged conduct of Chaves and insisted he and his office weren't involved. "The available information uniformly indicates that the USAO was not a source of confidential information provided to reporters about the Investigation. Members of the USAO, at all levels, were distressed by the leaks," Bharara's memo to the court said. In a 2017 speech after he left office, Bharara added, "It came to the court's attention and our attention that a particular FBI Agent did what he should not have done, and that came to light because we brought it to the attention of the court." "The FBI Agent is potentially subject to criminal prosecution" and "will suffer consequences as he should and he absolutely should," Bharara told the audience in Nevada.
But internal emails gathered during the investigation show Bharara and others in his office were directly aware of the leaks as early as 2014, two years before the prosecutors portrayed to the judge that the defense request for leak evidence was an unwarranted fishing expedition. "Hey George, I know you agree these leaks are outrageous and harmful," Bharara wrote in a June 1, 2014 email to the head of the FBI office in New York City, George C. Venizelos, after the U.S. attorney was alerted to a Wall Street Journal article mentioning wiretaps. "Let me know what action you want to take together. Hope your weekend was good."
https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/hold-court-memos-detail-ethical-concerns-unpunished-leaks-case-handled#digital-diary
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-09/2017-01-04_exparte_memo.pdf
https://www.lit-wc.shearman.com/siteFiles/25138/U.S.%20v.%20Walters.pdf
https://twitter.com/PreetBharara/status/1290980881478250496