Burnham, David. Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other
Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice. New York: Scribner, 1996.
444 pages.
David Burnham is the liberal establishment's showcase investigative
reporter. This means that he wins book awards, he gets Rockefeller money,
and he exposes his targets in a manner that doesn't reinforce the conspiracy
theories of the great unwashed. Lately he's been attacking bureaucracies:
his previous book was about the IRS, while this one looks at the Justice
Department. Burnham objects to inefficiency in some areas, and overzealous
surveillance that threatens privacy in other areas. More accountability is
needed, but seemingly the way to do this is with more committees and more
departments (and ultimately more government). The problem is not bad people
who build empires at the expense of others, but rather a well-intentioned
system that lacks the fine-tuning needed to make it fully rational.
One new wrinkle is that Burnham and colleague Susan Long created the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University in 1989.
TRAC was used to analyze Justice Department statistics in a way that hadn't
been done before. Based on this, Burnham shows that there is almost complete
autonomy for local U.S. attorneys to pick and choose the cases they want to
prosecute. The Justice Department, it turns out, is a loose collection of
independent fiefdoms that no attorney general has been able to control.
ISBN 0-684-80699-1
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