Federal Court: People Who Work for a Living Have Rights Too

A New York federal court judge has finally done what should have happened sooner, which is slap down the infamous "Thompson Memo." Named for its author, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, the memo has been used by thuggish prosecutors to pressure companies into abandoning employees accused by the government of wrongdoing, treating corporate funding of employee legal bills as evidence of failure to cooperate with the government's investigation.

The predictable consequence of Thompson's overreach was that corporations, not known for an abundance of scruples in the first place, have proven all to happy to treat individual employees as scapegoats. These employees in turn, finding themselves in the midst of what are often complicated and convoluted cases involving thousands of pages of background information and a phalanx of attorneys representing both the government and their (usually former) employer, have no choice but to plead guilty to some version of whatever they've been accused of doing. It's a classic bootleggers and Baptists coalition: the prosecutor gets his scalp, and the people responsible (in the cases where an actual crime has been committed) for contributing to the culture, incentives, and measurement systems that helped induce the crime get to blame a hapless employee.

Now a federal judge has finally said what should have been obvious, which is that in wielding the Thompson Memo as a weapon the federal government "has violated the Constitution it is sworn to defend." The U.S. attorney arguing for the government contended that the actions of his masters, in this instance during an investigation of accounting firm KPMG, were entirely consistent with U.S. Justice Department policy.

Well, that would seem to be the bloody point, now wouldn't it?

The bottom line is that regardless of one's opinion about people and companies accused of crimes, if one has a shred of commitment to constitutional principles one has to admit that this is long overdue. If the government is going to bring armies of attorneys to bear on whomever it is currently targeting (and those on the Left, please at least admit that if you can't trust the federal government to target the right national enemies overseas, you probably shouldn't trust they government's contentions every time you read about a company being hauled into federal court), then the employers of these targets ought to be free to defend their people, rather than threatened with additional punishment should they do so.

At a simpler level, ask yourself whether the Thompson Memo would be favored by the governments of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, and Massachusetts.

Yes? Well then.