Last night Duin put online, and I assume in the paper today, an excellent column about our mayor and the Attorney General's report. The "logic" here is incredible:
- Adams' lawyers make what amounts to a nighttime raid to get Breedlove to agree to ignore the bathroom kissing incident in his first statements.
- Later Breedlove mentions the incident.
- Adams' lawyers, who got Breedlove to withhold info in the first place, use this "new story" as evidence that Breedlove isn't credible.
How much of this was planned from the beginning?
Sam Adams still shackled by the truth
by Steve Duin, The Oregonian
Wednesday June 24, 2009, 7:08 PM
Sam Adams, plain and simple, is lucky John Kroger is more disciplined than he is. I'm just not sure the rest of us share in the mayor's good fortune.
Given five months to deliver a verdict on Adams' veracity, Oregon's attorney general embraced the obvious, that Beau Breedlove has credibility issues.
The Department of Justice saw no reason to convene a grand jury in this criminal investigation. No one was asked to take a polygraph. No one was subpoenaed or testified under oath.
It's hard to escape the feeling, several Portland lawyers argued, that Kroger's investigation was one-sided and conclusion-driven, the conclusion being that Adams' failings are better addressed in the political arena than the legal one.
That judgment, of course, was shaped by Adams' attorneys, the only ones in this contest who displayed any prosecutorial passion. On the day Kroger politely announced his investigation, Adams' lead attorney, Robert Weaver, unleashed the bulldogs who cornered Breedlove at 11 p.m., boxing him in on a statement about his kissing games with the mayor that would cast doubts on the credibility of future testimony.
That deft maneuver -- Breedlove didn't have a lawyer and was still calling Adams for fatherly advice, for God's sake -- should have alerted Kroger that someone was deathly earnest about this investigation. Someone was playing to win.
Read the column.
1 comment:
Yes, indeed, Sam, you dodged those five bullets--legally. Now live with the knowledge you (may have) used an immature young man's instinct to protect YOU in the aftermath of your encounter to impeach his credibility and save yourself. Be sure to check in with him in the future (or have your friends/lawyers do so a la Goldschmidt) to see how this is all working out for him. Betrayal is a powerful poison. And now you can't even slip the kid a note, a call, a wink, a nod--Sorry, you understand, had to save myself--because the watchers will be watching you.
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