 A federal judge in California has blasted federal prosecutors for willful and deliberate misconduct in handling a counterespionage case. U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper leveled the charges against the U.S. attorney's office as she dismissed all criminal charges against Chinese-American businesswoman Katrina Leung, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. Leung passed information to U.S. officials based on her frequent trips to China. Later, she was suspected of being a Chinese double agent. Cooper's ire focused on prosecutors' deal with Leung's FBI handler, James J. Smith, whereby he would not talk to Leung's lawyers in exchange for a guilty plea to a reduced charge of failing to report his 20-year-long sexual affair with Leung.
| FBI agents can't seem to keep their pants on around Chinese female spies |
Prosecutors may not obstruct a defendant's access to witnesses. "In this case, the government decided to make sure that Leung and her lawyers would not have access to Smith," said Cooper. "When confronted with what they had done, they engaged in a pattern of stonewalling entirely unbecoming a prosecutorial agency." She further called on prosecutors to come clean publicly: "Anything short of an admission and apology on the part of the government is hard to imagine." |
