Tag: Jan Mann

One month after Jim Letten, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Lousiana, announced the demotion Jan Mann, his first Assistant and Chief of the Criminal Division for anonymously commenting online about an ongoing criminal investigation, he resigned as U.S. Attorney.

Abruptly ending an 11-year run highlighted by the convictions of more than a dozen crooked politicians, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten resigned Thursday morning amid a metastasizing scandal in his office that started with prosecutors posting anonymous screeds on NOLA.com. Letten was the nation's longest-serving U.S. attorney, having been kept in the job by President Barack Obama despite his Republican affiliation.

Also this week, the Justice Department appointed John Horn, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, as a special assistant to the attorney general to "prepare the required responses and to ensure the government's compliance with [the court's] instructions."

It wasn't just Mann who was commenting anonymously online. Another AUSA, Sal Perricone, was outed for his comments and resigned in May. One of the cases Perricone commented on was the Danziger Bridge case, involving the officers charged and convicted in the shooting deaths of unarmed individuals during Hurricane Katrina. Another news article with background is here. [More...]

Jim Letten, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana (which includes New Orleans) today announced the demotion of his First Assistant and Chief of the Criminal Division, Jan Mann.

The news came six days after landfill magnate Fred Heebe alleged in a civil suit that Mann had repeatedly used an online alias to slam him and other federal probe targets in comments posted on NOLA.com. Mann's demotion marks the second high-profile takedown of a federal prosecutor engineered by Heebe, who in March unmasked Sal Perricone, the office's senior litigation counsel, as a prolific and intemperate online ranter.

The Complaint in Heebe's lawsuit against Mann, filed in state court, is here. Among Heebe's lawyers filing the suit: Brendan Sullivan of Williams and Connelly.

How Heebee's attorneys linked the online comments posted under a pseudonym to Mann: They used a forensic linguist, who found numerous identical typographical errors in the online comments, pleadings Mann filed in court and e-mails. For example, there were multiple instances in which the online comments and Mann's pleadings contained an extra space after a quotation mark and before the final punctuation mark. Other similarities included the lack of spaces before and after the dots used to designate an ellipsis. (See the complaint if this sounds confusing, I may not have this exactly correct.) [More...]