Linda Pence Continues to Be Clueless

The NWI Times has an article about the AG race:

Democrat Linda Pence on Friday accused the Republican Indiana attorney general and his chief deputy, Greg Zoeller, of dragging their heels on a region corruption case in furtherance of their political careers.

Pence, who is battling Zoeller to become the state’s next top lawyer, sharply criticized the progress GOP Attorney General Steve Carter has made in a 2004 federal civil lawsuit he filed to hold former East Chicago officials financially responsible for a 1999 sidewalks-for-vote scheme.

“If there’s a corruption case in Indiana, it will not take me nine years and still not have it done,” Pence said in a meeting with The Times. “I could have had this done in two years, easy.”

Linda Pence either just doesn’t get it, or she’s deliberately trying to be misleading. I’m disinclined to think she is stupid, so the latter must be operative here.

The East Chicago corruption case, involving Democrat Bob Pastrick’s “sidewalks-for-votes” scheme, has 27 defendants and is being pursued under the RICO statue. That’s a lot of defendants, and RICO cases tend to be more complex than the sort of average case that can be solved in an hour on Law & Order or be the subject of pithy snark by William Shatner on Boston Legal.

(Read more after the leap)

First of all, the case was filed in 2004, four years ago, not nine years ago. Steve Carter was not even in office nine years ago. This is a patently and demonstrably false assertion that she has made before, and (as I blogged at that time) it is utterly unsubstantiated by the facts at hand. Linda Pence was a lawyer for one of the defendants in the case; it is unthinkable that she does not know when the case against her clients was filed.

Second, the case was only approved to go to trial by a Federal judge in June of this year. All but one of the settlements thus far were obtained before a trial was even granted. Pastrick’s lawyers have spent a lot of time and effort trying to prevent the attorney general’s office from even being able to take the case to trial, which might perhaps also explain some of the time involved, but I digress.

Moreover, since filing the case four years ago, Carter’s office has settled with eight of the named defendants. That averages out to about one every six months. The most recent of these was in July of this year. The attorney general’s office has moved rather systematically, dealing with each defendant in turn. They’ve extracted settlements from most of them. The largest such financial settlement (at least in dollar value), of course, came from a client of Linda Pence.

Linda Pence says that she could handle a case with twenty-seven codefendants “in two years, easy.” Unless she intends to wave a magic wand and make the case go away (which would not surprise me at all, given how Democrats still love Bob Pastrick), I seriously doubt that. The average corruption case doesn’t have that many codefendants, and this one has seen almost a third of the defendants give up and settle at the rather impressive rate of one every six months.

The whole point of Carter’s strategy appears to be to reach settlements with as many of the defendants as possible (monetary if possible, but resulting in cooperation even if not), obtaining from them some of the documents and information needed to pursue the remaining defendants. A sort of court room snowball effect.

Carter’s steady grinding away seems to be a far better option compared to Linda Pence’s apparent inclinations, and one more likely to continue to take it to corrupt figures in northwestern Indiana. Pence continues to avoid making any promises to continue the case if elected.

Further, the one time she went up against Steve Carter and Greg Zoeller (who is now her opponent), she was forced to settle out of court. That sort of settles the argument about who is the better lawyer.

The East Chicago case, which seeks to recoup more than $24 million from former Mayor Robert Pastrick and members of his administration, has become a local flash point in the race between Pence and Zoeller. Pence represented Rieth Riley, a paving firm that paid $625,000 to settle out of the suit in 2006, and Zoeller has questioned her ability to prosecute the case.

“I think we’ve been very diligent with the case. We’ve been very aggressive with it,” Zoeller said. “I would characterize (Pence’s comments) as damage control. She’s clearly in damage-control mode.”

Damage-control mode doesn’t begin to cover it. Linda Pence has oscillated between misleading Hoosiers about her involvement in being a lawyer for a defendant in the Pastrick case to claiming she could have handled it faster. All the while, she has refused to say whether she would even continue the case if elected.

I guess it’s true that she might well handle cases against corrupt Democrats faster than Greg Zoeller; she might never bring them to court or charge them with anything in the first place.

Pence provided a copy of an August 2004 fundraising letter in which Carter referenced the East Chicago case and told potential donors, “It is important that I am re-elected to complete the job.”

Pence said Zoeller, Carter’s top lieutenant since 2001, continues to use the case, which has yet to be scheduled for trial, as electoral leverage.

“He’s using it as a political means, and it’s inappropriate,” Pence said.

Let’s get this straight. Steve Carter, when he ran for reelection, said in a fundraising letter that he would continue to pursue corruption. He has done so (at the rate of chewing up and spitting out one defendant in this case every six months or so). That’s keeping a campaign promise, which is hardly “inappropriate.”

When your opponents apparently want to sweep corruption under the rug and seem to ignore that it is going on (or defend people involved in corruption cases), it is hardly “inappropriate” to call attention to the fact that you are going to keep on pursuing the corrupt and they might not.

Pence has declined to comment on the merits of the civil suit, which came in the wake of a federal criminal probe that snared a half-dozen East Chicago officials.

Pence promised to state her position once the attorney general’s office complies with an Aug. 12 public records request. The attorney general’s office provided a copy of a letter indicating that 5,490 pages of documents from the East Chicago case have been ready for pick up since Sept. 3.

Got to love those Democrats; they file public records requests not because they want the records, or even that they care about what those records have to say, but because they want the press that inevitably comes with filing the request itself.

Why else wouldn’t they have claimed the records already?

Pence went on to say that recent conversations with Rieth-Riley convinced her that her defense work for the paving firm did not create a conflict of interest that would preclude her from pursuing the East Chicago case if elected attorney general.

Well, at least that’s out of the way. Previously, she had hid behind attorney-client privilege to avoid answering some of these questions.

It turned out that the settlement, which she signed, for her client waived that very privilege.

“You cannot be the attorney general on this case and pursue this case having been a defense attorney in the case,” Zoeller responded. “That’s outrageous.”

Yes. But she continues to obfuscate and mislead on this point, which is hardly reassuring.

Pence said Rieth-Riley never deserved to be a defendant and only agreed to settle because continued involvement in the case jeopardized $6.7 million in contracts with the Indiana Department of Transportation.

That’s great spin. The state wouldn’t want to give taxpayer dollars to someone that might be named as a defendant in a public corruption case. The fact that they settled out of court, in order to get back to getting government contracts, doesn’t say a whole lot one way or the other about the merits of them deserving to be a defendant.

Linda Pence knows that. Everything else is spin. Linda Pence does that a lot. She’s a trial lawyer. It’s probably second nature given some of the interesting clients she has taken over the years.

As I said above, I guess it’s true that she might well handle cases against corrupt Democrats faster than Greg Zoeller; she might never bring them to court or charge them with anything in the first place.

In that sense, she would be handling them in record time, by not handling them at all.