| Amid March madness, a team of attorneys – "Lawyers for Bruno" – announced a strategy to cast doubts about the criminal charges against former Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno.
The group asserted the case against the GOP icon — that he violated federal law by denying the public of honest services — is so weak it is not winnable by the prosecution. The group is being hyperbolic, an expert on the honest services statute says, but the case is going to be a challenge for the Department of Justice.
"The prosecutors are going after a case that is at the outer limits of honest services," said Peter Henning, a former federal attorney who now teaches at Wayne State Law School in Detroit. He has studied 200 honest services decisions, and the majority of them are wins for the prosecution. He is monitoring the Bruno case and may include it in a book he plans to publish on public corruption in a year. "It's a hard case to win, but it is winnable . . . Whether they can keep it on appeal is another matter."
The case is unusual, he said, because the federal attorneys are bashing the Senate ethics rules instead of alleging bribery, kickbacks or skimming. The case against the senator is more of a favoritism argument, he said.
If the Bruno supporters are putting on a full-court press to force the next U.S. Attorney for the Northern District to shelve the prosecution, that is an unlikely outcome, Henning said. "You don't want to play with a public corruption case, you're playing with fire," he said. He estimated Bruno's legal fees are astronomical. Bruno's new counsel, Abbe Lowell of Washington, D.C. doesn't work cheap. "I'd be shocked if he is less than $750 an hour," Henning said.
Lowell called the charges against his client "an unprecedented expansion of the 'honest services' theory that should trouble every part-time legislator because of its attempts to make criminal a person's need to have an outside job."
Henning said public officials already are on guard to keep work and public business separate.
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