By Eric Rich and Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 11, 2007; C06
As U.S. attorney for Maryland, it was Thomas M. DiBiagio's wish that he be remembered as a prosecutor who, in the pursuit of justice, was fearless and beholden to none.
"That's the one thing I hope they say when I leave," DiBiagio once said to a reporter, "because that's what it's all about."
Last week, DiBiagio seemed to try to cement that reputation by declaring he was forced from office because of political pressure over a corruption investigation that targeted close advisers to his one-time patron and friend, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., then the Republican governor.
It was a new explanation for his hasty departure in 2005, but it fit with a self-portrait that had long simmered. DiBiagio first hinted as much in a Baltimore Sun op-ed piece last year, in which he alleged being told he'd be "hurt" if he didn't back off from public corruption inquiries.
The weakness in that version of events is that DiBiagio's shortcomings as U.S. attorney were amply documented. A steady stream of leaked internal documents made clear that his management style had alienated many in the office. Some of those documents undermined the very view that DiBiagio sought to cultivate: that he used the power of his office judiciously, "without fear or favor."
Within the office, prosecutors have said, tension sprang as much from DiBiagio's manner as from his use of discretion and his prosecutorial goals.
He investigated an agency run by Ehrlich's opponent at the height of the 2002 governor's race. DiBiagio angrily berated a career prosecutor and he famously ordered his staff to produce high-profile corruption indictments by a date that coincided closely with the 2004 presidential election.
DiBiagio went public with the new claim about his departure after Congress began investigating whether eight other U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons.
Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) has raised the matter with officials at the Justice Department, but a Cardin spokesman said the senator has so far seen nothing that connects DiBiagio's dismissal to the treatment of the other former prosecutors.
Among those not persuaded by DiBiagio's claims was Stephen P. Amos, who was indicted and then cleared in the probe that focused on Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D), who lost the governor's race to Ehrlich in 2002.
"It bothers me that he thought he could redefine history and rewrite it in a way that he was a victim," said Amos, who said he had lost his home and savings by the time prosecutors dropped the case, days after DiBiagio left office. "He was not a victim."
In 2001, with Ehrlich's backing, President Bush appointed DiBiagio, a seasoned prosecutor with experience tackling money laundering and drug cases, to head the Baltimore U.S. attorney's office.
Quickly, he asserted his independence from his political sponsors by bringing a public corruption case against Edward T. Norris, Ehrlich's superintendent for state police, for Norris's abuse of an off-the-books expense account while he was Baltimore's police commissioner.
In 2002, DiBiagio sent a scathing letter to the lead agent in the FBI's Baltimore office. The letter was leaked, and it was soon widely known that DiBiagio considered the bureau "a marginal presence" that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks had been "distracted and almost useless" for the task of pursuing white-collar crime and public corruption. "This is completely unacceptable," he wrote.
In an August 2004 letter announcing her departure from the office, veteran prosecutor Lisa M. Griffin wrote that she was leaving partly because she could no longer tolerate DiBiagio's "aggressive management style."
"You have said your goals include creating a 'premier law firm,' but many excellent career prosecutors have left after unpleasantness that seems to arise from honest disagreements with you," Griffin wrote to DiBiagio. She wrote that she was "embarrassed to hear" that DiBiagio had lashed out at one of his prosecutors during a meeting, using crude and aggressive language. He later apologized and said he had lost his temper.
Among the most damaging missteps, said David Margolis, an associate deputy attorney general, was the internal e-mail that earned DiBiagio a public rebuke from his superiors in July 2004. DiBiagio urged his prosecutors to obtain "Three 'Front-Page' White Collar/Public Corruption Indictments" before Nov. 6, four days after the presidential election. Although DiBiagio has said the memo was taken out of context, he was told after it was publicized that he could bring no public corruption cases without high-level approval.
A performance review conducted later that year detected morale problems in the office and other issues that prosecutors felt could not be resolved with DiBiagio in place, Margolis said.
"I lost confidence in his abilities," said Margolis, a career Justice Department employee. He said he asked for DiBiagio's resignation after a performance review found concerns over his judgment, temperament and candor.
DiBiagio has declined repeated requests for interviews with The Washington Post but has been clear even before last week that he believes the problems he encountered stemmed from his tough approach to public corruption cases.
He often expressed frustration that the office had drifted from its tradition of probes such as those in the 1970s that led to the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew (R) and the fraud conviction of Gov. Marvin Mandel (D), which was later overturned.
DiBiagio seemed to foresee that his approach would create friction. In a 2000 law journal article, he described the "character, commitment and courage" to prosecute "a popular public official." Such a prosecution, he wrote, "will appear to some to be astonishingly principled, while to others it will appear to be stunningly ill-advised."
After he left the job, he hinted at such difficulties, with little elaboration, in the January 2006 op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun. "There was constant pressure to aim low and look the other way from potentially corrupt officials," he wrote, decrying "smear tactics" that he said were intended to deter the well-meaning from public service. "The pressure finally culminated in a threat that I would be 'hurt' if I continued doing what I was doing."
It might have ended there had the notion of politically motivated firings not resurfaced in the news. Last week, as Congress began pushing for details about the dismissals of several U.S. attorneys, DiBiagio declared himself another victim in a burgeoning Washington scandal, telling the New York Times that he, too, was forced out for political reasons. In the Times article, DiBiagio said he believed a 2004 probe into whether associates of the governor were improperly using money from gambling interests to promote the legalization of slot machines "played an integral role in what was done to me."
Ehrlich, who struck up a friendship with DiBiagio more than two decades ago, has said he was aware of the investigation but was not concerned about it. Attorney David Irwin, whose clients were among the recipients of subpoenas in that investigation, said the slots probe was an example of DiBiagio's tendency to "cast the net out too far" and "in an injudicious" fashion.
"I just thought he went way overboard with that," Irwin said.
DiBiagio's claim might bear out, but, absent corroborating evidence, his claim's merits will remain difficult to evaluate. He has not publicly identified the Maryland Republicans who he says pressed him to back away from his inquiries, despite requests from reporters for him to do so.
Ehrlich has denied the assertion that DiBiagio was offered a judgeship to back off or threatened with punitive action.
It was clear to some, though, that the administration "had soured on DiBiagio's performance," said Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert). "I think they felt that he had been one of their guys, and that all of a sudden he wasn't returning their phone calls. Investigations would continue even after he would get a call saying this person is a close friend of the governor."