SC-01: Abusive Special Privileges for Henry Brown

I tell you, I’m just dumbfounded:

A senior federal official, fearful of incurring a congressman’s wrath, sent subordinates on a mad dash earlier this year to retrieve a certified letter demanding payment of $5,773 for starting a fire that burned 20 acres of a national forest.

Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources, said he didn’t want U.S. Rep. Henry Brown to receive the March 12 letter before he testified before a U.S. House committee on which the South Carolina Republican sits.

“I’d just as soon have him not take a chunk of hide out of me,” Rey said Wednesday.

Wow. Just wow. What kind of fucking banana republic bullshit is this? This is the sort of thing that must warm Dick Cheney’s corpse of a heart: A federal official responsible for enforcing the law lets a powerful congressman off the hook to avoid getting grilled in a congressional hearing. In his own words:

Rey defended his decision to intercept the letter as “a reasonable precaution” to prevent Brown from “stewing on it while he’s sitting up there on the dais” of the U.S. House Natural Resources subcommittee, which oversees management of national parks and forests.

What. The. Fuck. It’s now reasonable to ignore the law to save your own hide? I guess that’s been the Cheney Doctrine for the past eight years, so it should be little surprise that an incompetent, amoral bureaucrat would follow that path. What’s more, Brown didn’t just get his penalty reduced, he got the law changed:

As a result of Brown’s case, the Forest Service in June rewrote a criminal code to make it more difficult to prosecute people who negligently set fires on federal land – about 80 fires a year in the South alone.

“It will be much harder for us to go after people who allow fires to escape from their property onto the national forests,” said Jack Gregory, who was the Forest Service’s top law enforcement agent in the 13 Southern states at the time of Brown’s 2004 fire.

Not a surprise for a guy who clearly believes he’s above the law:

“I was so taken aback that I’d be treated so impersonal – like I was some kind of crook,” Brown said Wednesday. “Those were criminal charges that were filed against me. I felt like I was the victim.” …

Brown then went on a personal crusade in which he complained about his penalty in numerous e-mails, letters and phone exchanges with U.S. Forest Service employees in Washington, South Carolina, New Mexico and elsewhere.

Unsurprisingly, a whistleblower complaint charging Brown with obstruction of justice was dropped. We can only hope that Brown’s opponent this year, Linda Ketner, can make an issue of his special privileges and law-breaking ways, because in Dick Cheney’s world, there’s just no accountability.

(Thanks to vicupstate for the great find.)