Joint Hearing Of The House Committee On the Judiciary's Subcommittees- Federal Justice System's Selective Prosecution
Interview
Joint Hearing Of The House Committee On the Judiciary's Subcommittees- Federal Justice System's Selective Prosecution
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REP. MAXINE WATERS (D-CA): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to first just congratulate you for this hearing. This is extremely important and I would think that all the members of this committee from both sides of the aisle would be supportive of this hearing and work that should be done to ensure that the citizens of this country can depend on the criminal justice system and the Justice Department to be impartial, to be fair and not single out or political profile elected officials and basically politicize the process. So I'm very thankful to you.
I would just like to turn to Mr. Shields -- Professor Shields. Earlier you were asked whether or not you were an attorney and you were also asked if you had a degree in statistics. I'd like to debunk the notion that being an attorney would somehow make you a better researcher, would make you a better professor --
MR. SHIELDS: Thank you.
REP. WATERS: Or would somehow give you more credibility than the professor emeritus that you are -- the Department of Communications, University of Missouri, St. Louis and lecturer, Department of Communications, the University of Missouri, Kansas City. You are indeed professor emeritus, Department of Communications, University of Missouri, St. Louis. Is that true?
MR. SHIELDS: That's true.
REP. WATERS: And you are published --
MR. SHIELDS: Yes.
REP. WATERS: Have you ever been accused of having sloppy research or having published something that proved to be untrue or statistically incorrect?
MR. SHIELDS: Not to my knowledge.
REP. WATERS: Is it true that when you started out the work that led you to where you have come in looking at the political profiling that that's not where you started out? You were looking for something else. Is that correct?
MR. SHIELDS: That's correct.
REP. WATERS: Would you tell the committee what it was you were researching when you stumbled upon this political profiling?
MR. SHIELDS: Yes. As I said in my opening statement, I was studying rhetorical visions and had noted that the -- with the end of communism, why there was not a dominant conservative theme -- piece of rhetoric around. And then John Ashcroft, who happens to be from my state Missouri and was once our attorney general, was once our governor, was once our United States senator before becoming attorney general for the nation -- began a public corruption initiative. And so I was studying to see if people were caught up in this new vision. And he was running around not only the country giving speeches on public corruption, but he was running around the world giving speeches on public corruption. So I was studying this.
REP. WATERS: And as you described this, this was a kind of new approach to preemptive strike on corruption --
MR. SHIELDS: Yes, that's right.
REP. WATERS: -- that Mr. Ashcroft was involved in.
MR. SHIELDS: It was a move away from investigating and in prosecuting actual crimes to kind of ferreting them out before they happen.
REP. WATERS: And in your research, you had discovered that there have been 375 investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials brought by U.S. Attorneys since 2001.
MR. SHIELDS: Yes.
REP. WATERS: Would you reiterate again for us -- and would you give us the percentages of indictments relatives to Democrats and Republicans?
MR. SHIELDS: Yes. As I also said in my opening remarks, the written statement that I provided for the public record for here now had 820 investigations, not just 800 -- 300 -- not just 375. So I'll just give you the new numbers. And the new numbers are 5.6-to-1 Democrats investigated versus each Republican. So for every Republican in this room, if you were investigated, there'd be 5.6 Democrats that were investigated along with you by this Justice Department.
REP. WATERS: You did much of your research from news reports and you mentioned that you were Googling and --
MR. SHIELDS: Yes.
REP. WATERS: -- going on the Internet. Did you find it odd that so much was being written about what appeared to be the political profiling of elected officials?
MR. SHIELDS: Now what's interesting is by looking at investigations at local level, what I was really looking at was little newspaper stories from all over the country about little local candidates and those stories didn't get publicized in other newspapers. So if you weren't reading the Birmingham News, you didn't know what was happening in some community around it in Alabama. But by doing the Google search, you could find those articles and you would know. So it was the collective unity of all those small newspapers across the country that was able -- that enabled me to come up with 120 cases through September 16th, which was when Attorney General Gonzales stepped down.
REP. WATERS: Aside from questions that have basically, I think, attempted to discredit you and your work, do you find it odd that the Justice Department has refused to give information to this committee or to you or anybody else who would request it that would further help to illuminate exactly what has been going on? And if in fact they have not been profiling, they could clear up the questions that are being raised. Or if they are, we would have more information by which to do our oversight and do the corrections. Do you find that odd?
MR. SHIELDS: Yes, I do find that odd. There's no doubt that the Justice Department has this data and if they would release it, we'd know the answer as to just how accurate my study is tomorrow morning. I can tell you that in New Jersey, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey is very proud of the fact that he goes after elected officials and he announces this periodically -- an update on the number of actual elected officials that he has investigated and prosecuted. And his last statement was on September the 24th and he said he had 124. Well, I have 116 of those in my database. And so it would seem to me that I'm within about 10 percent of having a census of the investigations that are out there.
REP. WATERS: Thank you.
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