Crony, You're Doing a Heckuva Job
Harriet The Judge

My blogging partner, Mrs. F's Mom (we need a better handle for her, but we're working on that), just made this comment about Harriet Miers in an email:

Our best hope is that she was picked for the same reasons as Brown and not her ideology.

Indeed, we don't have to hope--that's standard operating procedure at BushCo. And looky what David Sirota over at The Huffington Post just dug up:

In case anyone thought Harriet Miers wasn't a corporate-shill-in-White-House-clothing, take a gander at how Miers did her best Ken Lay impression while heading a major Texas corporate law firm. That's right, according to the 5/1/00 newsletter Class Action Reporter, Miers headed Locke, Liddell & Sapp at the time the firm was forced to pay $22 million to settle a suit asserting that "it aided a client in defrauding investors." The details of the case are both nauseating and highly troubling, considering President Bush is considering putting Miers at the top of America's legal system. Under Miers' leadership, the firm represented the head of a "foreign currency trading company [that] was allegedly a Ponzi scheme." The law-firm admitted that it "knew in March 1998 that $ 8 million in [the company's] losses hadn't been reported to investors" but didn't tell regulators. This wasn't an isolated incident, either. The Austin American-Statesman reported in 2001 that Miers' lawfirm was forced to pay another $8 million for a similar scheme to defraud investors. The suit, which dealt with actions the firm took under Miers in the late 1990s, was again quite troubling. As the 9/20/00 Texas Lawyer reported, Miers' firm helped a now-convicted con man "defraud investors and allowed the firm's [bank] account to be used as a 'conduit.'" The suit said "money from investors that went into the firm's trust account was deposited into [the con man's] bank accounts and was used to pay for his 'expensive toys.'" If you think Miers wasn't involved in any of this -- think again. Miers wasn't just any old lawyer at the firm. She was the Managing Partner -- the big cheese. True, she could claim she had no idea this was going on. But that would be as laughable/pathetic/transparent as the Enron executives who made the same ones after they ripped off investors.