The Obama Administration's Prosecutorial Overreach

The Cato Institute's Walter Olson highlights several recent high-profile losses suffered by the Obama Justice Department in its overzealous enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, "the law that criminalizes many of the sorts of official payments that alas typify the business climate across much of the globe." As Olson notes, "DoJ's most stinging embarrassment of all came last month" in a decision that included this rebuke from federal Judge Howard Martz:

it is with deep regret that this Court is compelled to find that the Government team allowed a key FBI agent to testify untruthfully before the grand jury, inserted material falsehoods into affidavits submitted to magistrate judges in support of applications for search warrants and seizure warrants, improperly reviewed e-mail communications between one Defendant and her lawyer, recklessly failed to comply with its discovery obligations, posed questions to certain witnesses in violation of the Court's rulings, engaged in questionable behavior during closing argument and even made misrepresentations to the Court.