Alberto Gonzales loses $100 million of your money
While the U.S. government has done everything but create a constitutional amendment stating that they aren’t responsible for a god damned thing, the rest of the planet operates on the concept that those in positions of responsibility, must take responsibility.
So in the real world, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lost at least $100 million of our money because someone in the Justice Department can’t type:
Judge can’t fix government’s $100 million boo-boo
It was a $100 million mistake, and a federal judge said Friday he does not have the power to fix it.
The U.S. Justice Department erred last year and cited the wrong law in a binding plea agreement with telecommunication entrepreneur Walter Anderson, the largest known tax evader in U.S. history. That mistake made it impossible for the government to recover between $100 million and $175 million, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman said in March.
Prosecutors urged him to reconsider, but Friedman reluctantly said Friday that his hands were tied.
“The court is not free to read something into a contract that is not there or to interpret uncertain language in the government’s favor,” Friedman said.
Although prosecutors described the error as “a typo” — typographical error — and not “something that the court should be getting wrapped up about,” Friedman said he could do nothing else.
He said he would have worked around the problem by ordering Anderson to repay the money as part of his probation. But prosecutors omitted any discussion of probation, a common element of plea deals, from Anderson’s paperwork.
Friedman sentenced Anderson in March to nine years in prison and ordered him to repay $23 million to the District of Columbia but ordered no restitution to the federal government.
Luckily for Gonzales, personal responsibility was effectively outlawed in 2000. So he’ll continue on as Attorney General, because of President George W. Bush’s loyalty to him, and because he has the least amount of pride ever registered in any type of humanoid, including robots and Ken dolls.
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–WKW