Fumo Trial Post 9: It May Be Wrong, But It's Not A Crime -- What Have The Prosecutors Proven?
As the prosecution's case comes to a close, calling up supervising FBI Agents such as Vicki Humphreys to summarize and to distill the mountains of paper and weeks of testimony, it's time to take stock of what we've learned since October 2008.
We've learned, broken down into the four general categories of charges (fraud on the State Senate, fraud on Citizens' Alliance, fraud on the Independence Seaport Museum, and obstruction of justice):
Fumo lived well, financied partly by staffers and contractos paid by the Pennsylvania State Senate who performed substantial personal work for the Senator. Most everyone in the Senate apparently knew all of this, did not complain, and the Senate has not asked for Fumo for reimbursement.
Fumo received a little over $100,000 in power tools and consumer goods from Citizens Alliance, a nominally independent nonprofit set up to help out South Philadelphia neighborhoods. No one at Citizens Alliance objected to these payments, probably because the executive director, co-defendant Ruth Arnao, was the one who made the purchases, while the Board of Directors, whose job it was to oversee these things, never actually met until well after the FBI investigation started. Citizens Alliance has also not asked for any of this money back; it's also, despite being a "victim," now under investigation by the state.
Fumo took a number of voyages aboard yachts owned by the nonprofit Independence Seaport Museum without paying for them. The museum has not asked him to pay them back. It's unclear whether (and how) the museum's officers and directors were unaware that a state senator had repeatedly taken their historic yacht and its crew out for joyrides for free. The Museum was already investigated before, resulting in its director going to prison.
Fumo became extremely paranoid when he was under federal investigation and dramatically escalated efforts to destroy e-mails that he no longer needed around, including instructing his staff to delete (and thus have wiped by other programs) every e-mail to or from him. He did this in earnest up until he was actually served a subpoena, at which point he apparently continued some, but not all, of it, then stopped when his lawyers told him to. Despite these efforts, the US attorneys were able to uncover a wealth of information, including thousands of e-mails at the relevant times.
That is to say, we've learned about a bunch of "crimes" no one has complained about except the U.S. Attorneys, who did not subpoena Fumo's office until the second year of the investigation, long after the investigation was made public.
What are we doing here? Being greedy and paranoid is wrong, but isn't a crime. Nor is being thin-skinned, as ample evidence has shown Fumo was by his repeated efforts to retaliate against anyone who crossed his path. It's also not a crime to go on to Michael Smerconish's radio show and lie to the public about the benefits you receive from a nonprofit. It's similarly not a crime to have a horrible relationship with your daughter and her husband. It's probably illegal to hack into your ex-girlfriend's email, but Fumo wasn't charged with that. That's all just background.
It's also apparently not a crime to ask PECO and Verizon to secretly direct millions to particular nonprofits and law firms as part of a government settlement, and for them to cooperate, since the U.S. Attorney sure hasn't charged anyone with anything related to that.
What are we looking at here? A State Senator twisting the staffing rules into spaghetti in plain sight and having his luxuries paid for by two nonprofits that didn't care? That's outrageous, unseemly and greedy, but it's not criminal fraud.
Fumo's "wiping" of the computers certainly had the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, but so what? Every major corporation in America routinely scrubs their email system to obstruct later litigation, including prosecutions brought by the government. Does every CEO in America need to keep their email the moment they hear of a government investigation apparently related to their business?
We'll dive more into these issues as the defense progresses -- for now, think about the case you didn't see, the one where Fumo secretly pockets millions by abusing his government office, the "normal" corruption case.
That case was apparently so flimsy it wasn't even brought and the jury's supposed to convict on the leftovers?
