Pastrick Case Going to Trial; Linda Pence Still Running Away from Her Record

Poor Linda Pence.

She’s still trying to run away from her record and from a certain interesting omission about her past history that she made in the first days of her campaign.

Pastrick’s sidewalks-for-votes case has been green-lighted to go to trial, and Pence is still denying that the case matters.

She is still refusing to take a strong stand on prosecuting corruption, even when the corruption might involve fellow Democrats.

(Read more after the leap)

From the NWI Times:

INDIANAPOLIS | U.S. District Court Judge James Moody cleared the way Friday for the state’s protracted civil racketeering lawsuit against former East Chicago Mayor Robert Pastrick to go to trial.

Moody dismissed arguments by Pastrick and other defendants, who said the case against them was so weak it shouldn’t go to court. But Moody also threw out most of the motions made by Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter, who argued the Pastrick administration displayed an undisputed pattern of corruption that undeniably harmed city taxpayers.

The ruling, which means the four-year-old lawsuit now will move before a jury, elicited applause from both sides of the case and triggered a political challenge in the race for Indiana attorney general.

Carter declared victory. He filed the 2004 civil suit in an attempt to hold the longtime Democratic mayor and other East Chicago officials responsible for more than $24 million drained from city coffers in a 1999 sidewalks-for-votes scheme.

“The court has unequivocally denied the motions of two primary defendants to have the case thrown out on legal grounds,” Carter, a Republican, said Friday. “This is a major step forward in the fight against public corruption and in restoring public confidence in local government in Lake County.”

Deputy Attorney General Greg Zoeller, who is seeking to succeed Carter, seized on the ruling. He called on his Democratic opponent, Indianapolis attorney Linda Pence, to match his vow to carry out the East Chicago case if elected attorney general.

“My question is whether this doesn’t make it clear that she would have a duty to move forward,” Zoeller said. “It’s not a question of reconsidering (anymore).”

Pence, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney, continued to insist she cannot make a pronouncement on the East Chicago lawsuit — or any other case before the attorney general office — without first seeing all the evidence.

“That is a very unfair question (by Zoeller) because without reviewing the file, I can’t answer,” Pence said Friday. “If I review the file and there is a case against Bob Pastrick, no one would be better than me to work on that. I do not, will not, and never have tolerated public corruption. Never.”

Pence previously represented Rieth-Riley, a paving firm that two years ago paid $625,000 to settle claims it colluded with East Chicago officials in an attempt to legitimize the paving spree that preceded Pastrick’s last re-election victory. Indiana Republican Party Chairman Murray Clark pointed to that defense work in the case as evidence Pence would abandon the financial pursuit of Pastrick, an icon among Hoosier Democrats.

“It’s time for Linda Pence to be forthright with Hoosiers and admit she will not continue this important fight against public corruption,” Clark said Friday in a statement.

I’m beginning to wonder how much longer Linda Pence can continue this delusional tap dance of pretending that she knows nothing about the case when she was involved as a litigator in it for over a year.

And for how much longer can she continue to make utterly ignorant criticisms of the case that fly in the face of all reason and all facts?

First, she complained about the use of outside counsel in the case.

It turned out that she had made her name as an outside counsel for the O’Bannon administration.

Then, she complained about the cost of the outside counsel in the case.

It turned out that the settlement she made for her clients was almost twice that of the legal fees incurred by the outside counsel; the settlement she reached for her clients more than made the outside counsel pay off.

Now, she has new criticisms, and they are just as absurd:

Pence went on to question whether Zoeller can match her 34 years of courtroom experience. And she questioned why it has taken Carter more than eight years to bring to trial a public works scheme first disclosed in a 2000 state audit.

First of all, just what proportion of Linda Pence’s “34 years of courtroom experience” has come from defending clients like Rieth-Riley, her client that settled out of the Pastrick case? An overwhelming proportion of it, if her own campaign website is any indication.

Save for her nine years at the start of her career as a litigator at the Justice Department and her brief stint as a high-paid outside counsel for the O’Bannon administration, Pence appears to have spent (with the exception of a handful of cases as we will see) pretty much her entire career in civil and criminal practice defending clients like Rieth-Riley.

Is that the sort of experience and record Indiana needs in the attorney general’s office?

Linda Pence would have Hoosiers believe that she has spent 34 years being a good guy from Law & Order, sort of a Jack McCoy with blond hair and abnormally white teeth, but she has actually spent most of that time on the other side of the courtroom.

You know, where the defenders of the bad guys sit.

In the 27 years since she left the Justice Department, she could find only five cases to cite on her website to tout for her record.

Linda Pence has either been not very busy for those 27 years, or she has mostly been defending people–like Pastrick’s co-defendants–that she’d rather not talk about.

I suspect we’ll hear about them soon.

As for the timeline of the case, and the time it has taken? It’s going to take more than Linda Pence crying about the speed of the Pastrick case to paper over the fact that she doesn’t seem to want to pursue it at all.

Moreover, as a former litigator in the case, she knows full well that it was only filed in 2004, not 2000 as she seems to imply above with her statements. Since that time, the case has seen a steady stream of settlements as the AG’s office has ground slowly but surely through Pastrick’s co-defendants as they build up the case against the former East Chicago mayor and sidewalks-for-votes kingpin.

One of those settlements, as has gotten much attention (mainstream, even), was a client of Linda Pence. It is also the largest of the settlements thus far. Another settlement happened just last week; so much for no progress.

Linda Pence also knows that the case is extraordinarily complex (from what I have seen, it is perhaps one of the most complex RICO litigations in the history of the statute). It had twenty-seven co-defendants at the start, and is so complex that the author of the RICO statute himself was brought in to work on the case. You know, he’s the outside counsel Linda Pence didn’t want to spend money on.

Another week goes by, and Linda Pence inserts her foot into her mouth yet again.

It’s becoming a real pattern.

(This post also available at the Hoosierpundit)