Amid a metastasizing scandal in his office, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten announced his resignation at a news conference Thursday morning, ending an 11-year run in the post. He was the nation's longest-serving U.S. Attorney, having been kept in the job by President Barack Obama despite his Republican Party affiliation.
Letten said his resignation would be effective Tuesday, but that he would stay on briefly -- not as head of the office -- to aid in the transition. He delivered an emotional, 10-minute speech in which he spoke of his pride in having served for more than a decade as the region's top federal law enforcement officer.
"Make no mistake: I stand here before you... with enormous, unabashed pride in everything we've accomplished and in the tremendous successes we've forged over the years," Letten said.
Letten, who has been with the Department of Justice 28 years, said he planned to take some time off to spend with his family. Numerous lawyers told The Times-Picayune that he has been in discussions with the Kean Miller law firm, which has offices in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lake Charles.
Steve Boutwell, a spokesman for Kean Miller, said he could not confirm or deny those reports, but added: "Any law firm in New Orleans would be lucky to have Jim Letten."
Dana Boente, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, will serve as Letten's interim replacement, the Justice Department announced in a? release issued shortly after Letten's news conference. Boente has been a federal prosecutor for 28 years, according to the release.The news release also said that John Horn, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, will investigate leaks and other matters in the Danziger Bridge case, a probe that U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt requested in a tartly worded Nov. 26 order.
The series of moves comes eight months into a scandal revolving around anonymous online commenting by high-ranking prosecutors in his office, including the shocking revelation that Letten's longtime First Assistant, Jan Mann, was involved.
The troubles for Letten began in March, when landfill owner Fred Heebe -- the target of a sprawling federal probe -- filed a civil lawsuit alleging that prosecutor Sal Perricone had been using an online alias to savage him and other federal targets in comments posted at NOLA.com.
Perricone, the office's senior litigation counsel and a member of Letten's inner circle, quickly admitted his sins and resigned. The matter was referred to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility for investigation, and the scandal seemed to die down.
In an interview with New Orleans magazine published in August, Perricone insisted the commenting brouhaha started and ended with him, saying no one else in the office had been aware of his activities.
But last month, the scandal reignited with a vengeance, when Heebe filed a second defamation suit, this one claiming Mann had been commenting about federal targets and judges as "eweman" on NOLA.com. Many of the comments by "eweman" were adjacent to comments made by Perricone under one of his online aliases, suggesting a coordinated campaign.
Mann soon admitted she had commented online at NOLA.com, but did not cop to a specific alias. Letten, meanwhile, announced that she was being demoted from her ranking posts of First Assistant U.S. Attorney and chief of the office's criminal division.
Mann did not step down, however, and the problems for Letten's office continued to mount. Engelhardt -- who had asked for a full investigation into leaks in the Danziger Bridge case earlier this year -- issued a stinging order in late November in which he essentially accused Mann and Perricone of untruthfulness.
In particular, the judge was upset by a letter Mann sent him in October in which she wrote: "Prior to the Perricone incident, I was not a follower of NOLA.com postings and had no real sense of what was happening there."
In his order, Engelhardt strongly urged the Justice Department to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the problems, saying Mann's earlier inquiry had been insufficient. The judge also questioned the ability of the Office of Professional Responsibility -- a subset of the Justice Department -- to get to the bottom of the matter.
In a Dec. 4 letter to Engelhardt, Horn said he was "confident that I will accomplish a thorough and objective review of the matters pending in this case."
U.S. District Judge Hayden Head, meanwhile, who is overseeing the case of former Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard, expressed his annoyance with Letten for sending him a private letter disclosing that Mann was in fact "eweman." Head posted the letter in the case's online docket earlier this week after a phone conference with the attorneys involved.
Head had earlier denied a motion to recuse Letten's office from the Broussard case, in part based on assurances he had received from Mann after he, like Engelhardt, ordered an investigation into the online-posting flap.
Ironically, Heebe -- the architect of Letten's downfall -- had been a leading candidate for the U.S. Attorney post after George W. Bush was elected president in 2000. But his nomination foundered amid allegations of domestic abuse, and Letten, who had been the acting U.S. Attorney, ended up getting a presidential appointment. Years later, Heebe would become a target of the office.
Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/12/us_jim_letten_announces_resign.html
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