Will F.B.I. Director Wray's Prosecutorial (Mis)conduct Finally Catch Up To Him?

Would a Perjury Coverup Disqualify an F.B.I. Director from Public Service?

F.B.I. Directory Christopher Wray (right) and former U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (left) at Wray’s 2017 installation ceremony (government photo; public domain).

Evidence has long suggested that F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray threatened a witness into providing false testimony vital to obtaining his first high-profile conviction as a federal prosecutor. The man he prosecuted has been in prison ever since, and has now served 27 years stemming from a crime that, according to Wray’s own star witness, never happened.

With Wray's career again under scrutiny, it may be time to revisit the question of whether he conspired for nearly three decades to railroad someone—and, if so, whether such conduct disqualifies Wray from continued public service.

Robert Ethan Miller told me without reservation that he spent the mid-1990s as a minority partner and manager of what others called America’s “most notorious” strip bar, Atlanta’s Gold Club. The club was known for its clientele of sports stars, Hollywood actors and multi-platinum musicians, including George Clooney, Madonna and Michael Jordan. The feds were eyeing the club and its owner Steve Kaplan for alleged ties to the Gambino family.

Back then Wray was a green federal prosecutor, just starting out in the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta. He indicted Miller on counterfeiting charges.

According to Miller, that was a pressure tactic.

“I literally was not committing crimes,” Miller said.

Wray’s aim, according to Miller, was to climb the organization by getting him to testify. Miller, who told me his childhood had been marred by the murders of his father and uncle in what he indicated were inter-family disputes, said he was looking to keep his name off anyone’s lists—the government’s or a family’s. Thus, he said, he refused Wray’s overtures.

I am unable, as yet, to substantiate or refute Miller’s connection to the Gold Club. Most of the relevant court records pre-date electronic filing. That said, one of the FBI’s earliest records of its “Preliminary investigation” of the Gold Club mentions a “subject” with a redacted name who was “either a partner or front man in the Gold Club [along] with members of the Gambino [La Cosa Nostra] family.”

(Government document; public domain)

In any event, Wray upped the ante. He reindicted Miller for soliciting the attempted murder of a federal witness. The new charges were based on the testimony of a jailhouse informant named Troy Plante. At the time Plante faced three years for grand theft and was looking for leniency.

Still, Miller did not testify for the government.

Despite the fact that Plante had a substantial criminal record, Wray presented him to Miller’s jury as credible. In June 1998, that jury found Miller guilty of the murder-for-hire plot. Plante got probation on the grand theft charge.

The next year the feds raided the Gold Club and indicted Kaplan and 16 others—but not Miller—on a slew of charges, including racketeering, money laundering, extortion, obstruction, police corruption and hiding payments to the Gambino family.

Those charges did not, however, include counterfeiting or soliciting attempted murder. Among the government’s witnesses at trial was another of the club’s managers, who had cut a deal with prosecutors. The government charged one of the defendants as a Gambino-family capo, but apparently felt unable to make a case against anyone higher.

Six more years later, in July 2005, Plante recanted his testimony against Miller.

Plante then swore that “none of” the “activities” that Miller had discussed “contemplated any violence or harm to any person.”

“On approximately ten (10) to fifteen (15) occasions,” Plante also said, “I was transported to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and instructed to listen to my previously recorded statement in order to refresh my memory in preparation for trial, so that there [would] not be a deviation in my testimony from the statements given on the recording.”

“Prior to the time of trial,” Plante continued, “I expressed my reluctance to the government to testify … based largely on the fact that my testimony was untrue.”

“The response from the government,” Plante said, “was that if I failed to testify in accordance with my previous statements, I would be sentenced to prison on the grand theft charges and would be charged as a co-conspirator in the contemplated and/or attempted murder.”

(Court filing; public domain)

The Justice Department, meanwhile, has never vigorously tried to get to the bottom of United States v. Robert Ethan Miller. The department’s inspector general has never investigated the case. Neither, apparently, has the department’s disgraced ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility (O.P.R.). (The O.P.R. has variously been described as a “Bermuda Triangle,” where prosecutorial-misconduct complaints enter, never to be seen again, and a “Roach Motel,” which “has become a whitewash organ for [the] DOJ that specializes in whistleblower intimidation and shoring up U.S. attorneys engaged in highly abusive, and sometimes criminal, practices.” “As a result” of the OPR’s track record, said former U.S. Attorney Joseph E. diGenova, the O.P.R. has “made a mockery of the accountability process, and every seasoned lawyer knows it’s a mockery.”)

Ethics inaction is not the only constant in the Justice Department’s treatment of Miller. For years while he fought to exonerate himself, the department held Miller in its secretive “communications-management units,” or “CMUs.”

That is where I met Miller in 2019. Back then I was learning firsthand what the Justice Department means by “communications management.”

During my first month in the CMUs, I tried to help another prisoner serve a civil summons in time for a court-imposed deadline by writing my wife to look-up a defendant’s address. C.M.U. staffers blocked that message and revoked 27 days of my earned sentence credits. A little while later I submitted papers to sue the staffers running the CMUs. Those same staffers threw me in solitary and took another 27 days.

(Government document; public domain)

The folks running the CMUs took another 27 days when an international media outlet quoted me about these and other unlawful practices pervading the CMUs in general and my case in particular (I was widely considered “a political prisoner”). And when I tried to mail Forbes a manuscript, reporting that the warden had served party mix when the prison resumed lethal injections, they yanked the mailing and took another 27 days.

(Court filing; public domain)

In each instance my conduct was protected by both the First Amendment and the federal regulations meant to control the federal prison system (see here, here, here and here).

Perhaps nowhere else in America do prison staffers so regularly and blatantly break the Constitution, lest they face litigation, administrative discipline and adverse publicity.

When it comes to the CMUs, however, the federal government, including the judiciary, has seemingly come to an unspoken agreement: the CMUs are where Washington sends those it finds politically inconvenient—especially those whose free speech may end careers—and they are loathe to vindicate the rights of C.M.U. prisoners to express their opinions or expose misbehaving federal employees in courts or the media. Thus, C.M.U. staffers act almost without concern for accountability. Former C.M.U. prisoners include John Kiriakou (the former C.I.A. Chief of Counterterrorism Operations in Pakistan, who blew the whistle on the Bush-Cheney torture program) and Daniel Hale (the former Air Force intelligence analyst who exposed Obama’s drone-assassination program). Washington also seemed poised, had it won its extradition case, to send WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to a C.M.U.

And, had Trump lost the election, the Justice Department likely would have used the CMUs to render him effectively incommunicado.

By the time I experienced each of the CMUs’ constitutional violations firsthand, Miller had endured them for years. C.M.U. staffers ruined his court filings and his attempts to solicit legal counsel, foster outside support, inform the public about his case and, perhaps most important of all, reach relevant witnesses.

Miller readily admitted the toll the CMUs took on his sanity. It is easy to imagine an innocent person’s torment, locked in a vacuum as every effort to exonerate himself is unconstitutionally and sadistically thwarted with total impunity. In contrast, even The Shawshank Redemption’s murderously corrupt Warden Norton mailed Andy Dufresne’s letters.

I am no psychologist, but it was apparent to me that the CMUs’ administrators had tormented Miller past his or any other person’s breaking point. Thereby, they had provoked him to do things that, to a reasonable journalist, reflect negatively on his credibility. For instance, Miller presented a journalist with what he purported to be an affidavit attesting to his innocence, apparently unaware that the supposed affiant—a man Miller could not reach from the CMUs—had died before the date of his supposed signature.

Whether these kinds of things are a deliberate design element of the CMUs, I know not. But three facts must be noted: (1) Plante’s recantation is a matter of court record, not just Miller’s word; (2) Miller’s conviction relies on what is perhaps the least reliable kind of evidence—jailhouse snitching; and (3) at the relevant proceedings, Miller told the truth to his detriment.

In the years between Miller’s arrest and the creation of the CMUs and his placement therein, Wray’s star continued to ascend. He served as the assistant U.S. attorney general from 2003 through 2005.

Miller, meanwhile, relentlessly tried to exonerate himself. He managed to exchange letters with Plante, beseeching him to come clean. After delays and a false start, Plante eventually agreed.

At Miller’s behest, a friend on the outside hired an attorney to take Plante’s affidavit and record an audio tape of his recantation. Another attorney was hired to bring the matter to court.

Miller’s fate hinged on timing. He had a one-year deadline under federal law to file newly discovered evidence. The government argued he missed that deadline. A judge convened a hearing to decide the issue.

Cognizant of the one-year rule and that his attorney had filed on July 14, 2006, Miller testified that he first learned of Plante’s crisis of conscience in early 2005.

The judge ruled against Miller. The Justice Department then made Miller one of its first C.M.U. prisoners.

Miller still languished in the CMUs in 2017, when former federal prosecutor and corrupt New Jersey governor Chris Christie recommended Wray to replace James Comey as F.B.I. director.

Now that a new administration and Senate majority ponder Wray’s future, will they look into his past, and Robert Miller’s?

20050714 Plante Affidavit

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United States V Miller, Ecf No 220

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19980623 United States V Miller, Partial Transcript

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