Whitey Bulger and the Endlessly Corruptible Ruling Class

There's nothing to celebrate in the Bulger verdict, David Lewis Schaefer writes at NRO.

The fact that Bulger got away with his crimes for so long thanks to collusion with and bribery of the FBI constitutes a major black mark on that widely esteemed organization. In addition, it is shameful for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that Bulger’s brother Bill served for a record 18 years as president of the state senate, immediately followed by appointment to the presidency of the state university – despite remaining in periodic contact with his brother and concealing whatever knowledge he had of Whitey’s whereabouts from the authorities. (One of Mitt Romney’s finest moments as Massachusetts governor was his forcing Bill to resign from his lucrative university position.)

Andy, @theh2, earlier linked this Jeff Jacoby piece on the government's own collusion with Whitey. And I don't just mean Bill Bulger, president of the Massachusetts state senate and then president of the University of Massachusetts.

But Bulger wasn’t the only one on trial in Boston’s federal courthouse. So was the government trying him. Bulger and his henchmen may have been the degenerates who physically committed the gruesome murders and other crimes that jurors learned about during 35 days of sometimes stomach-churning testimony. But it was other degenerates, in the FBI and the Justice Department, who for so long enabled Bulger’s bloody mayhem. They enlisted Bulger as an informant, protected him from police investigations, and warned him to flee when an indictment was imminent. “If the FBI had not made Whitey its favorite mobster, broken the rules, and rigged the game to his benefit,” reporter David Boeri has concluded, “Bulger would never have reached as high as he did.”

...

It would be comforting to believe that this was a one-off, that law enforcement agencies never abuse their authority, that the immense powers of the federal government are always deployed with scrupulous integrity. But no one believes that.

He then links the government's behavior in the Bulger case with the generalized lawlessness of the current administration.

posted by Ace at 06:55 PM

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