June 11, 2007 – Page 1718
When he told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week about his accomplishments in 13 months as the interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., Bradley Schlozman listed the office’s work on gun cases, child exploitation and human trafficking.
But Schlozman — one of the nine recently appointed U.S. attorneys caught up in the furor over the Bush administration’s selective midterm purge of the Justice Department’s roster of regional federal prosecutors — neglected to note another fascinating case prosecuted on his watch. At the start of this year his office filed an unusual federal mortgage fraud case against Katheryn Shields, the former elected Democratic executive of Jackson County — and a sister of Donald Shields, who happens to be an author of a controversial study charging the Bush Justice Department with “political profiling” of Democrats in local corruption investigations.
Democratic senators grilled Schlozman for more than two hours at last week’s Republican-boycotted hearing, about the timing of a voting fraud indictment against four members of the liberal advocacy group ACORN. Schlozman obtained the indictment in the week before last year’s election, when one of the most hotly contested Senate races in the nation was the Missouri contest between Republican incumbent Jim Talent and the ultimate winner, Democrat
But Schlozman fielded no questions about his indictment of Shields — even though her brother has documented a roster of Justice corruption prosecutions that he says appears to reflect partisan bias, deliberate or otherwise.
On Jan. 4, Schlozman announced a 12-count federal indictment naming Shields, who was then running for mayor of Kansas City, and her husband, Philip Cardarella. The indictment alleged that the couple took part in a scheme to claim an inflated sale price for their home last fall so that one of the other nine defendants in the case could pocket the difference between the new loan and the true sale price.
Shields, who finished far out of the running in February’s mayoral election, has denied wrongdoing and labeled the prosecution politically motivated. The trial, initially set to start this week, has been postponed until October over Shields’ objections.
Donald Shields has compiled statistics showing that under Bush the Justice Department has initiated nearly four times as many local corruption investigations against Democratic officeholders as it has launched against Republican officials. Shields, a University of Missouri professor emeritus now teaching at the Kansas City campus, says the study “demonstrates that there’s selective investigation going on by political party.”
Justice dismisses the study as unscientific. Shields and his colleague — Illinois State University professor emeritus John Cragan — acknowledge that their Google-based research on prosecutions since January 2001 could be incomplete. They call on Justice to publish data on political corruption cases, showing the partisan affiliation of the targets. “We need transparency,” Shields says.
Shields, a Democrat, says he and Cragan started the study before his sister first came under investigation some three years ago. Katheryn Shields’ lawyer, Curtis Woods, says none of the other probes that targeted Shields while she was county executive resulted in any charges. As for the current indictment, Woods says the government claims Raymond Zwego Jr., the alleged mastermind of the scheme, carried out a host of similar transactions, but Shields and Cardarella are the only sellers to have been prosecuted.