Writer's cramp for DOJ lawyers defending FBI's Bulger handling

Department of Justice attorneys, determined not to pay a dime to the families of people murdered by the FBI's most infamous informant James "Whitey" Bulger, are working overtime this month.

Federal Judge William Young has ordered DOJ's legal team to review rafts of judicial findings in civil and criminal cases about Bulger and other murderous top informants' exploits under FBI cover and note which facts they reject.

On June 17, three weeks before trial in the next round of these cases, Young told the government's lawyers to put a big "D" -- for deny -- next to each fiction they detect in other judges' rulings. Ouch.

"Otherwise, the court will deem these facts not marked (as) admitted," Young said from the bench. (Cases on behalf of two women Bugler tortured and killed are slated for trial in July.)

DOJ begged Young to back off. "The United States requests that it be relieved of this unprecedented burden imposed at the eleventh hour and during a period of intensive trial preparation," said a brief signed by the assistant director of DOJ's torts division Mary Leach.

The judge this week softened his order. The feds still have a lot of marking up to do but they don't have to mark all those "D's" on Judge Mark Wolf's 661-page 1999 decision finding that Bulger and fellow informant Steve Flemmi could not invoke their FBI status as defense against an indictment. It's a good bet DOJ has already read that one.

The biggest fiction of all may be Leach's claim that the government's motivation for spending years on these cases is a desire to protect the public coffers or "the public fisc," as she writes, "from claims that are not well grounded in fact or law."

How many millions of dollars has the government already spent on its lawyers in the last seven years to defend the Boston FBI for protecting murderous informants instead of some citizens?











Iof having the Justice Department step up to the chalk board and write the mantra of the FBI's Top Echelon informant program 500 times: "The end justifies the means."

With its
Several judges in the First Circuit have repeatedly urged the government to settle these lawsuits but the Justice Department refused to have serious discussions with any of the families.