Probe of a DOJ ran by Holder and Lynch.
A mistrial in the federal prosecution of a family of ranchers who led an armed standoff against government agents prompted Attorney General Jeff Sessions to launch an investigation into the case and renewed calls for a broad review of U.S. attorneys in Las Vegas.
“You can bet that, suddenly, Sessions is asking, ‘Who’s our U.S. attorney in Nevada?’” Rory Little, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, said Friday. “And somebody says, ‘Well, we don’t have one.’ And they put it on a fast-track.”
Nevada has been without a top federal prosecutor since March, when Sessions, President Donald Trump’s appointee, sought the resignations of 46 U.S. attorneys remaining from Barack Obama’s administration.
The acting U.S. attorney led the troubled prosecution against states’ rights activist Cliven Bundy, his two sons and another man in the 2014 confrontation that stopped a federal roundup of Bundy cattle from public lands.
The case has local defense lawyers urging a review of the U.S. attorney’s office in Nevada. Big federal cases have collapsed in the last 15 years over prosecutors’ failure to share evidence with defendants.
“There’s been a pattern of failure to turn over potentially exculpatory material for more than a decade,” said Robert Draskovich, a defense lawyer involved in a $14 million securities fraud case that was dismissed in 2006 and the failed racketeering prosecution that year against 42 Hells Angels members.
The latter case stemmed from a 2002 shooting in a casino in the resort town of Laughlin between rival motorcycle gangs that left three dead and more than a dozen injured.
This week, Chief U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial in the Bundy case. She blamed prosecutors, led by Acting U.S. Attorney Steven Myhre, for “willful” due process violations in failing to properly share evidence that could have helped defense attorneys.
The judge cited 3,300 pages of previously undisclosed FBI and Bureau of Land Management records relating to the standoff that should have been provided to the defense and set a Jan. 8 hearing to decide whether charges should be dismissed outright.