Scope of HOA probe revealed
FBI investigation of commissioners did not pan out
FBI agents investigated bribery of county commissioners and the involvement of judges in the massive scheme to take over homeowners associations, a defense lawyer revealed in court Monday.
Attorney Chris Rasmussen would not disclose the names of the public officials but said allegations that the man accused of being the mastermind of the scheme, Leon Benzer, bribed commissioners did not pan out.
Rasmussen called Benzer, a former construction company boss, a “con artist,” and said the allegations will turn his federal trial next year into a “circus.”
Some politicians, he said, “will be thrown under the bus.”
It is obvious investigators targeted public officials because the lead FBI agent, Mike Elliott, is assigned to the FBI’s public corruption squad in Las Vegas, Rasmussen said.
Early in the long-running investigation, there was talk that judges might have been involved, but no judges have been charged.
No names of county commis- sioners have surfaced in the investigation.
Rasmussen made the bribery disclosure at a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge George Foley Jr. to suppress evidence against his client, Benzer’s halfsister Edith Gillespie, and get her
can was only passing through Russia on his way to an unnamed destination to avoid the reach of U.S. authorities. Julian Assange said Snowden had applied for asylum in Ecuador, Iceland and possibly other countries.
Despite its diplomatic tough talk, the United States faces considerable difficulty in securing cooperation on Snowden from nations with whom it has chilly relations.
The White House said Hong Kong’s refusal to detain Snowden had “unquestionably” hurt relations between the United States and China. While Hong Kong has a high degree of autonomy from the rest of China, experts said Beijing probably orchestrated Snowden’s exit to remove an irritant in Sino-U.S. relations. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping met earlier this month in California to smooth over rough patches in the countries’ relationship, including allegations of hacking into each other’s computer systems.
Secretary of State John Kerry urged Moscow to “do the right thing” amid high-level pressure on Russia to turn over Snowden.
“We’re following all the appropriate legal channels and working with various other countries to make sure that the rule of law is observed,” Obama told reporters when asked whether he was confident that Russia would expel Snowden.
Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, said the United States was expecting the Russians “to look at the options available to them to expel Mr. Snowden back to the United States to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged.”
Carney was less measured about China.
“The Chinese have emphasized the importance of building mutual trust,” he said. “And we think that they have dealt that effort a serious setback. ... This was a deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant, and that decision unquestionably has a negative impact on the U.S.-China relationship.”
Snowden has acknowledged revealing details of top-secret surveillance programs that sweep up millions of phone and Internet records daily. He is a former CIA employee who later was hired as a contractor through Booz Allen to be a computer systems analyst. In that job, he gained access to documents — many of which he has given to The Guardian and The Washington Post to expose what he contends are privacy violations by an authoritarian government.
Snowden also told the South China Morning Post that “the NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data” and is believed to have more than 200 ad- ditional sensitive documents.
Assange and attorneys for WikiLeaks assailed the United States as “bullying” foreign nations into refusing asylum to Snowden. WikiLeaks counsel Michael Ratner said Snowden is protected as a whistle-blower by the same international treaties that the United States has in the past used to criticize policies in China and African nations.
The U.S. government’s dual lines of diplomacy — harsh with China, hopeful with the Russians — came days after Obama met separately with leaders of both countries to close gaps on some of the disputes facing them. Also, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the United States has made demands to “a series of governments,” including Ecuador, that Snowden be barred from any international travel other than to be returned to the United States.
Ventrell said he did not know whether that included Iceland. Icelandic officials have confirmed receiving an informal request for asylum conveyed by WikiLeaks, which has strong links to the tiny North Atlantic nation. But authorities there have insisted that Snowden must be on Icelandic soil before making a formal request.
Ecuador’s president and foreign minister declared that national sovereignty and universal principles of human rights — not U.S. prodding — would govern any decision they might make on granting asylum to Snowden.
Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino made little effort to disguise his government’s position. He told reporters in Hanoi that the choice Ecuador faced in hosting Snowden was “betraying the citizens of the world or betraying certain powerful elites in a specific country.”
In April 2011, the Obama administration expelled the Ecuadorean ambassador to Washington after the U.S. envoy to Ecuador, Heather Hodges, was expelled for making corruption allegations about senior Ecuadorean police authorities in confidential documents disclosed by WikiLeaks.
American experts said the United States will have limited, if any, influence to persuade governments to turn over Snowden if he heads to Cuba or nations in South America.
“There’s little chance Ecuador would give him back” if that country agrees to take him, said James F. Jeffrey, a former ambassador and career diplomat.
Steve Saltzburg, a former senior Justice Department prosecutor, said it’s little surprise that China refused to hand over Snowden, and he predicted Russia won’t either.
“We’ve been talking the talk about how both these countries abuse people who try to express their First Amendment rights, so I think that neither country is going to be very inclined to help us very much,” said Saltzburg, now a law professor at George Washington University in Washington. “That would be true with Cuba if he ends up there.”
The United States formally sought Snowden’s extradition but was rebuffed by Hong Kong officials who said the United States request did not fully comply with their laws. The Justice Department rejected that claim, saying its request met all of the requirements of the extradition treaty between the United States and Hong Kong.
Snowden had been believed to have been in a transit area in Moscow’s airport where he would not be considered as entering Russian territory. Assange declined to discuss where Snowden was but said he was safe. The United States has revoked his passport.