Giffen Update

When your case has slogged along for over seven years, a two week delay is a minor occurence.

In any event, James Giffen's court hearing scheduled for last week has been delayed until July 29th reports Bloomberg's David Glovin in this interesting piece. For more on the Giffen case (see here).

As Glovin notes, the long delay in the Giffen case has spawned "conspiracy theories" and open guessing "whether the U.S. remains committed" to this case.

For starters, Giffen is accused of funneling payments to foreign officials in Kazahstan, including its current President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a U.S. ally who met with President Bush in 2006 "to discuss ways to expand U.S. access to Kazakh oil," according to Glovin.

Adding to the intrigue, Giffen has claimed, as Glovin notes, that "U.S. intelligence services, including the Central Intelligence Agency, authorized him to pay off Kazakh leaders." Giffen's public authority defense has caused most of the delays in the trial as the government has fought to withhold or redact many classified documents.

Over at Harper's Magazine (see here) Scott Horton asks the question - "why is this case languishing?"

Horton states:

"Over the past decade, I discussed the case many times with Kazakhstani officials and businessmen. They were uniformly intrigued by it and keen to learn the details of their government’s darker practices—details that have steadily emerged from the case. They were also all of the same view: this case would ultimately go nowhere because it was not in the interest of the United States to expose damaging information about President Nazarbayev. Moreover, several offered that the Kazakhstani government fully understood how to 'spin' the American system by hiring prominent lobbyists and consultants and engaging the right political figures. It would be able to forestall the case, they assured me. I would reply that the American system didn’t work that way—that our Justice Department was independent and that prosecutorial decisions were insulated from such lobbying. Truth is, I was never myself absolutely convinced of that, and I always felt a bit naïve saying it."

Horton concludes with this statement:

"Today, Justice Department spokesmen tell Congress that battling corruption in foreign business dealings is a high priority. They argue that corruption is undermining the war on terror, costing taxpayers billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the handling of the Giffen case provides skeptics with plenty of reason to doubt the sincerity of the Justice Department’s claims. Within the government there are no shortage of career personnel who believe that a properly delivered bribe to a foreign government official is a necessary sort of compromise. A government that winks at corruption in the supposed name of national security may have a hard time prosecuting it in a commercial setting."