DA Krasner Is in Deep Trouble

DA Larry Krasner’s desire to free murderers from prison may finally have gotten him into some trouble he can’t talk his way out of. Ed wrote about the big break in this story last week. A federal Judge just referred Krasner and his top lieutenant to the Department of Justice for an investigation, suggesting they may have lied to the court or worse. 

This sort of action is almost unheard of, but in this case Judge Diamond set aside the underlying case involving the convicted murderer and instead heard testimony on what had happened in Krasner’s office to spring him. Today I came across a timeline at the Inquirer that really walks you through the whole case against Krasner. 

It started with a man named Dennis Johnson who was convicted of second degree murder back in 2009. Johnson was sentenced to life in prison but maintained his innocence. After several appeals, he eventually appealed the case to federal court where it wound up with Judge Paul Diamond.

Prosecutors opposed Johnson’s release until 2022 when the case was handed to a new attorney in Krasner’s office who had zero experience with criminal law. 

[Jaclyn] Mason had only joined Krasner’s office a few months earlier, and Johnson’s case was her first in her new role in the federal litigation unit. Although she had extensive experience as a lawyer — working primarily on patent and trademark cases — she’d never before worked as a criminal litigator, and she said she received almost no training in the DA’s office before being asked to handle cases.

Because Mason didn’t know what she was doing, many of the details of the case were handled by her supervisor Matthew Stiegler. And here’s where things get interesting. Stiegler apparently did almost nothing to make the case for Johnson’s innocence. Instead he reportedly relied on claims made by the Innocence Project. According to Mason, “Matt told me: ‘If it’s good enough for the Innocence Project, it’s good enough for me.'”

A brief recommending that Johnson’s conviction be overturned was submitted by Mason and a federal judge agreed to overturn the case. However, that judge could only issue a recommendation. The final decision would be made by Judge Diamond. Judge Diamond must have smelled a rat because he ordered that an evidentiary hearing be held to walk through the information supplied by Mason’s brief.

Inside the prosecutor’s office, Mason (who again had no experience with this type of law) reached out to others who did have experience, asking them for help preparing for the hearing. But when those other attorneys looked at the brief Mason had submitted they found it was full of errors, some of them significant enough to raise doubts about whether Johnson really deserved to have his case overturned.

[Katherine] Ernst said when she reviewed Mason’s brief, she discovered it contained “significant errors” — issues that, in her view, contradicted the notion that Johnson’s conviction should be overturned.

The supervisors decided they needed to try to withdraw the brief.

Withdrawing a brief is a big deal because it’s basically an admission of significant error by the office. Mason was approached about signing on to the withdrawal but she refused and blamed her boss Stiegler who had done (according to her) significant work framing the brief.

Mason felt like she was being set up as a fall gal and resigned her position. And that may not have been true before she left, but once she was gone, Stiegler launched a campaign designed to blame the failure on her. 

According to Ernst, in the days after Mason quit, Stiegler told colleagues she must have “purposefully inserted false facts” into her brief, and that it was “100% her fault and 0% his fault.”

And he came up with a plan to try to support that narrative, proposing that her colleagues review all of her work to find other cases with errors, so that the office could file a brief with Diamond casting Mason as “an ADA who went rogue, basically.”

The supervisors said no.

And this is where Krasner entered the picture. He apparently repeated Stiegler’s proposal to blame everything on Mason calling it a “really good idea.” Judge Diamond would later say this was tantamount to obstruction of justice. He also said that Krasner and Stiegler’s apparent coordination on this plan could amount to criminal conspiracy.

Other attorneys in the office felt it was clear that with all that had happened inside the office, they could no longer handle Johnson’s case. Several attorneys asked that the case be transferred to the state attorney general’s office to avoid a conflict of interest. But Krasner was adamant that should not happen. He allegedly referred to the attorneys in the state AG’s office as “Nazis” and said he “hated” them.

Attorneys in Krasner’s office continued to insist the case be transferred and sent Krasner an internal memo outlining their reasons. Krasner was apparently furious that they had transmitted this over email because it meant it could be open to discovery later. He apparently rarely uses his official office email and instead uses a personal account for much of his office work as a way to avoid such scrutiny. 

In any case, Krasner suggested there would be “consequences” for anyone who bucked his decision not to transfer the case. And again, Judge Diamond would later decide this sounded like a threat to fire people who told the truth, another possible instance of obstruction of justice.

All of this led to a hearing where Judge Diamond took testimony from attorneys who are still working for Krasner. Those attorneys accused Krasner of more potential crimes.

Ernst and Wildberger filed a more detailed memo with Diamond about why they had stepped off the case, including by saying that Krasner had asked them to “protect the office” and potentially violate their ethical oaths…

All of the law division supervisors went on to testify before Diamond, and he said in his Sept. 16 memorandum that he found their testimony, as well as Mason’s, “compelling and corroborated by contemporaneous documents.”

I’m not an attorney but it sounds like Krasner’s response to all of this was pathetic.

…although he did not — and has not — denied saying he wanted to “protect the office,” he said in a later filing that he “plainly did not appreciate [his subordinates’] repeated, unsolicited, and wavering advice” to refer the case to state prosecutors, and that their recommendation was “inexpert and legally unsupported.”

He also said he’d hired an expert who agreed with him — Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham Law School — and later attached a memo written by Green to one of his filings. Diamond would go on to call Green’s memo “a disorganized mess and largely useless.”

The bottom line is that there are several potential crimes here and Judge Diamond took the very unusual step of referring both Krasner and Stiegler for investigation by the DOJ. 

What’s striking to me is how similar much of this sounds to the chaos that was happening in Los Angeles under former Soros-backed DA George Gascon who was also hated (and repeatedly sued) by his own staff. It’s almost as if these far-left DAs are working from a playbook.

Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.

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