FBI RUN AMOK

Anyone with even an idle eye on former New York Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno saga has
surely been taken aback by the FBI’s latest round of tasteless thuggery, which entailed the brazen
service of a witness subpoena on Mr. Kris Thompson at his place of employment, CMA
Consulting, after Mr. Thompson publicly characterized the prosecution as an overzealous witch
hunt.

The timing and manner of service were so heavy-handed as to prompt a letter of complaint from
Abbe Lowell, Mr. Bruno’s counsel, to the Department of Justice. Trial remains months away.
Pre-trial motions to dismiss must be decided. The judge has ordered oral arguments. The U.S.
Supreme Court is undertaking a review of the statute in two cases pending on its docket. Given
these circumstances, the FBI’s behavior is troubling, but not surprising.

Consider first that this indictment arose inauspiciously. After Gary Suddaby, the U.S. Attorney
for the Northern District of New York accepted a job as a judge, Andrew T. Baxter, an assistant
U.S.A, took over as the interim U.S. Attorney. Suddaby investigated Bruno for three years and
delivered no indictment. The Senator did not buck and kick when asked for his cooperation in
the matter; his office turned over thousands of documents. Therefore, it is fair to say the
investigation was thorough if not exhaustive. However, once Baxter took over, an indictment
abruptly materialized out of the Albany air.

It is a jarring and frightening legal inconsistency when one United States Attorney investigates
almost ad nauseam an individual and does not indict, yet another United States Attorney – given
the same set of facts – finds enough criminal evidence to indict and imprison the same individual
for high crimes with seemingly no effort.

Such ease underscores a law that is so open to subjective interpretation by individual prosecutors
as to be unconstitutionally vague. A criminal statute must speak with specificity or else it fails to
give the going public adequate notice of the behavior it outlaws. The right to notice is a
constitutional one embodied in due process of law and it prevents say, a king, or anyone else,
from making up crimes as defendants appear before the court. Or, as Justice Scalia
characterized the nature of the statute: “it is simply not fair to prosecute someone for a crime that
has not been defined until the judicial decision that sends him to jail.” And this is just for
starters.

What is now outrageous is the FBI’s witness harassment. The FBI has prematurely delivered a
small flurry of subpoenas in recent weeks, two of which are cause for concern. First, they have
subpoenaed Mr. Bruno’s youngest daughter. Ms. Catherine Bruno-Hines has no connection to
her father’s business; therefore her material relevance as a witness remains an unsolved mystery.
To serve a witness not even logically connected to the case, except that the defendant is her
father, amounts to intimidation.

Most recently, the FBI brazenly strode into CMA to serve a subpoena on Kris Thompson, Mr.
Bruno’s spokesman at CMA the day after Mr. Thompson, whom the FBI has never questioned
during the four year investigation, told the New York Daily News that the case exemplified “an
overzealous and out-of-control government prosecutor embarking on a political witch hunt.” A
Bureau nerve had obviously been struck. A simple phone call to Mr. Thompson could have
sufficed to arrange service, yet the FBI chose to confront him at his and Mr. Bruno’s place of
employment where all other employees could witness.

To think that the FBI could be so brashly arrogant as to slap a subpoena at an inappropriate time
and an inappropriate place on a witness heretofore of no interest to the investigation after he
exercised his First Amendment rights to defend Mr. Bruno only belies an attitude of harassment
and intimidation. The FBI should be called to account.

Lora Como is an attorney, a former Senate staff member under Joe Bruno, and a volunteer for
Justice for Joe Bruno. She is also a formal federal agent.