Swamp Creature Swartz Slithers Out of DoJ

30 Years of Fixing Cases From Sandy Berger to Scooter Libby to Paul Manafort

Much to the chagrin of the media, Bruce Swartz, “globally renowned for representing the Justice Department in some of its most sensitive foreign dealings,” resigned rather than accept a demotion by President Trump.

For 30 years, “careerist” Bruce Swartz quietly worked to advance Democratic interests on one hot button case after another, but if Special Presidential Envoy Ric Grenell has his way, Swartz will be prosecuted for intrigue few even know about.

“Bruce Schwartz (sic) undermined Donald Trump and US foreign policy while he worked at DoJ,” Grenell tweeted on March 15. “I told him private information about negotiations (he has a TS clearance) and he used it to tip Jack Smith off at The Hague - and Jack indicted Thaçi because of it. He must be investigated and prosecuted.”

Hashim Thaçi was president of Kosovo in 2020 when Swartz and Trump tormentor Jack Smith allegedly sabotaged Grenell’s peacemaking efforts by arranging for Thaçi to be arrested for war crimes. At the time, Grenell was serving as Trump’s Special Presidential Envoy to that region.

The fate of Kosovo and Thaçi are of less immediate interest than the fate of US Department of Justice. Grenell’s accusation sheds new light on the DOJ’s long history of sabotaging justice on behalf of the Democratic Party. Over the years, no one fronted for the Party’s interests more dutifully than Swartz.

In 2019, the Inspector General’s Report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) highlighted Swartz’s dogged effort to railroad Trump advisor Paul Manafort before and after the 2016 election.

As Swartz himself acknowledged, he had a Javert-like zeal to bring Manafort to justice. “[Nellie] Ohr and Swartz both told us that they felt an urgency to move the Manafort investigation forward,” reported Horowitz, “because of Trump's election and a concern that the new administration would shut the investigation down.”

This urgency translated into frequent semi-covert meetings with the FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Strzok told the IG that Swartz wanted him to "kick that [investigation] in the ass and get it moving."

In December 2016, concerned that the DoJ’s money laundering division (MLARS) was not moving fast enough against Manafort, Swartz brought colleague Andrew Weissman into the act.

Swartz hoped to get the cooperation of an unnamed “foreign national” to help squeeze Manafort. According to Ohr, he and Swartz had “information that Manafort [was]... somehow... a possible connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign."

Swartz chose not to tell the incoming DoJ leadership of his scheme. He claimed the meetings were on the hush-hush to keep the Manafort investigation from being "politicized." More likely, Swartz hoped to pressure Manafort into rolling over on Trump and did not want Trump’s people to know about his intentions.

The "unusual level of interest" in the Manafort case by Swartz, Ohr, and Weissman caught the attention of some of their colleagues. Reported the IG, “The former senior Department leaders we interviewed expressed serious concern about Swartz's assertion that not informing Department leadership about case-related investigative activities somehow protected the Department.”

Although Swartz did not officially join the Mueller team, Weissman did. The case against Manafort that had been languishing in the money laundering division now got the kick in the ass that Swartz and Weissman wanted. Mueller took over the case in May 2017 and in October 2017 Manafort was indicted on twelve dubious charges, none of which had anything to with Russian collusion.

Horowitz scolded Swartz for his deception, but he could have made a much stronger bias charge against him had he been able to review Swartz’s extraordinary handling of the Sandy Berger affair.

Here’s the background. In 2002, according to a subsequent House report, former president Bill Clinton “designated Berger as his representative to review NSC documents” in relation to the 9/11 inquiry.

In that capacity Berger, Clinton’s ultimate fixer, made four trips to the National Archives. He did so presumably to refresh his memory before testifying first to the Graham-Goss Commission and then to the 9/11 Commission. Berger made his first visit in May 2002, his last in October 2003.

During those four visits Berger stole and destroyed an incalculable number of documents. “The full extent of Berger’s document removal,” reported the House Committee, “is not known and never can be known.”

Beginning with the third of Berger’s four visits to the Archives in September 2003, when Berger was first caught in the act of stealing documents, Paul Brachfeld, the Inspector General of the National Archives, tried to alert the Justice Department to the scope and seriousness of the theft.

Brachfeld wanted assurance that the 9/11 Commission knew of Berger’s crime and the potential ramifications of it. He did not get it. On March 22, 2004, two days before Berger’s public testimony, senior DoJ attorneys Swartz and John Dion got back to Brachfeld. They informed him that the DoJ was not going to notify the 9/11 Commission of the Berger investigation before Berger’s appearance.

The House report singled out Swartz as the one attorney most adamantly protective of Berger. Swartz refused to admit that Berger could have stolen documents in his first two visits despite Brachfeld’s insistence that he had the means and the motive to do so.

Frustrated, Brachfeld called DoJ’s Inspector General Glenn Fine on April 6 and again expressed his concern that the 9/11 Commission remained unaware of Berger’s actions. Again, nothing happened.

Brachfeld never did succeed in persuading the DoJ of the potential seriousness of Berger’s sabotage. As the House report concluded, “The lack of interest in Berger’s first two visits is disturbing.” The DoJ also declined to submit Berger to a polygraph exam as required by his plea agreement.

If these DoJ attorneys were “unacceptably incurious” across the board, one could write off their inaction to bureaucratic sloth. But at the same time Dion and Swartz were protecting Sandy Berger, they were hotly pursuing the Republican rascal who blew the imagined cover of CIA agent and Deep State pin-up, Valerie Plame.

“Those who have worked with Dion say he will not shy away from advocating charges against any high-level Bush administration official if that's where the investigation leads,” read a hopeful AP piece.

Among the colleagues quoted was Dion’s immediate supervisor, Bruce Swartz. Even after Patrick Fitzgerald took over the Plame investigation, Dion and Swartz stayed on the team, Swartz reportedly as second-in-command. When the leaker proved to be deep stater Richard Armitage, a friend of the Democrats, the DoJ chose not to indict him. Instead, they indicted the hapless Scooter Libby, adviser to the then hated Vice-President Dick Cheney, on a series of process crimes.

Swartz, Fine, and Dion were all careerists held over from the Clinton administration. Although Dion has no obvious record of federal contributions, Fine and Swartz had only contributed to Democratic candidates in federal races.

Swartz is the textbook swamp dweller. If proof were needed, Swartz and his boys recommended a $10,000 fine for Berger and three-year loss of security clearance for a crime that would have put a Republican in prison for decades. Happily for the Deep State, Berger regained his clearance just in time to serve as a Hillary Clinton adviser in the 2008 campaign.

As to Richard Armitage, he got off with an apology for leaking Valerie Plame’s CIA status. The otherwise innocent Scooter Libby was convicted in a DC kangaroo court of the usual folderol—one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and one count of making false statements—and sentenced to 31 months in prison. President Trump finally pardoned him in 2018 after the feckless President George W. Bush refused to.

Manafort was indicted by a federal grand jury in a city that gave Donald Trump 4 percent of its vote. True, the Russia collusion fears that inspired the Manafort investigation were imaginary, but the six-year prison sentence was real. Manafort, then nearing 70, descended into a Kafkaesque journey from one federal pen which ended only by grace of a Trump pardon in December 2020.

Swartz is hardly unique. For the last 30 years or more, no matter who presided as attorney general, these seemingly respectable subversives worked to protect the progressive Deep State and punish those who would threaten it. Supplied leads by a complicit media and shielded by that same media from exposure, people like Swartz have been perverting justice for decades.

I cannot imagine these activists will passively wander off to pasture. Neither, apparently, can Ric Grenell.

Starting soon, as a special bonus for paid subscribers, I will be rolling out in serial form my current book-in-progress: THE EMPIRE OF LIES: THE LEFT’S 30-YEAR WAR ON TRUTH, 1994-2024.