Miers Led Law Firm Repeatedly Forced to Pay Damages For Defrauding Investors

In case anyone thought Harriet Miers wasn’t a corporate-shill-in-White-House-clothing, take a gander at how Miers did her best Ken Lay impression while heading a major Texas corporate law firm. That’s right, according to the 5/1/00 newsletter Class Action Reporter, Miers headed Locke, Liddell & Sapp at the time the firm was forced to pay $22 million to settle a suit asserting that "it aided a client in defrauding investors."

The details of the case are both nauseating and highly troubling, considering President Bush is considering putting Miers at the top of America’s legal system. Under Miers’ leadership, the firm represented the
head of a "foreign currency trading company [that] was allegedly a
Ponzi scheme." The law-firm admitted that it "knew in March 1998 that $ 8 million in [the company’s] losses hadn’t been reported to investors" but didn’t tell regulators.

This wasn’t an isolated incident, either. The Austin American-Statesman
reported in 2001 that Miers’ lawfirm was forced to pay another $8
million for a similar scheme to defraud investors. The suit, which
dealt with actions the firm took under Miers in the late 1990s, was
again quite troubling. As the 9/20/00 Texas Lawyer reported,
Miers’ firm helped a now-convicted con man "defraud investors and
allowed the firm’s [bank] account to be used as a ’conduit.’" The suit
said "money from investors that went into the firm’s trust account was
deposited into [the con man’s] bank accounts and was used to pay for
his ’expensive toys.’"

If you think Miers wasn’t involved in any of this — think again.
Miers wasn’t just any old lawyer at the firm. She was the Managing
Partner — the big cheese. True, she could claim she had no idea this
was going on. But that would be as laughable/pathetic/transparent as
the Enron executives who made the same ones after they ripped off
investors.

I wrote earlier today
that Democrats must focus on the fact that Miers’ defining career
experience up until her nomination was being a Bush crony. These new
details about her career only enhance that case, in that it shows she
is just like the other corrupt corporate cronies like Enron’s Ken ("Kenny Boy")
Lay that Bush has surrounded himself with over the years. There is no
room on the Supreme Court for people like Miers who are clearly
entirely compromised by partisan/corporate loyalties — loyalties that
might make her an attractive candidate to the a corrupt elitists who
run today’s Republican Party, but a danger to the interests of ordinary
Americans.