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A tragic suicide, a likely murder, wrongful imprisonment, and gripping courtroom scenes draw readers into this compelling story giving them a frightening perspective on justice corrupted and who should be accountable when evidence is withheld. Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice is the true story of the strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics used by headline-grabbing federal prosecutors in their narcissistic pursuit of power. Its scope reaches from the US Department of Justice to the US Senate, the FBI, and the White House. This true story is a scathing attack on corrupt prosecutors, the judges who turned a blind eye to these injustices, and the president who has promoted them to powerful political positions.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } A tragic suicide, a likely murder, wrongful imprisonment, and gripping courtroom scenes draw readers into this compelling story giving them a frightening perspective on justice corrupted and who should be accountable when evidence is withheld. Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice is the true story of the strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics used by headline-grabbing federal prosecutors in their narcissistic pursuit of power. Its scope reaches from the US Department of Justice to the US Senate, the FBI, and the White House. This true story is a scathing attack on corrupt prosecutors, the judges who turned a blind eye to these injustices, and the president who has promoted them to powerful political positions.

Editorial Reviews

Review

''Licensed to Lie reads like a cross between investigative journalism and courtroom drama. The takeaway is that both Bushies and Obamaites should be very afraid: over the last few years, a coterie of vicious and unethical prosecutors who are unfit to practice law has been harbored within and enabled by the now ironically named Department of Justice.'' --William Hodes, Professor of Law Emeritus, Indiana University, and coauthor, The Law of Lawyering

''When you ve finished reading this fast-paced thriller, you will want to stand up and applaud Powell's courage in daring to shine light into the darkest recesses of America's justice system. The only ax Powell grinds here is Truth.'' --Patricia Falvey, author of The Yellow House and The Linen Queen, and former Managing Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP

''Last year four government officials demonstrably lied under oath, and nothing has been done to them--two IRS officials, the Attorney General, and James Clapper-which caused Ed Snowden to release the fact that the US is spying on its citizens and in violation of the 4th amendment. That our government is corrupt is the only conclusion. This book helps the people understand the nature of this corruption-and how it is possible for federal prosecutors to indict and convict the innocent rather than the guilty.'' --Victor Sperandeo, CEO and author, Trader Vic: Methods of a Wall Street Master

Review

KIRKUS REVIEW

A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.

Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.

The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.

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Product Details

File Size: 3663 KB
Print Length: 370 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1612541496
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group; 1 edition (May 1, 2014)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B00KQ5EDA2
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

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Not Enabled

Lending: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,180 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > True Crime > White Collar Crime
- #63 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > True Accounts > True Crime

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More About the Author

Sidney Powell was an Assistant United States Attorney in three judicial districts under 9 United States Attorneys from both political parties. She represented the United States in 350 criminal appeals, and represented private parties in another 150, all resulting in more than 180 published decisions. She was the youngest Assistant U.S. Attorney when she began practicing. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and the past president of the Bar Association for the Fifth Federal Circuit and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.

Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice is a book she prayed she would never have to write. It's written in the style of a legal thriller to be enjoyable and understandable to non-lawyers, but it is the true, behind-the-scenes insider perspective on major litigation during the last decade. It tells a very human story that every informed citizen, lawyer, and judge should know. The foreword to the book is written by Judge Alex Kozinski, one of the most brilliant legal minds in the country. He is the Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but he wrote the foreword in his personal capacity.

She also writes for the New York Observer, and her opinion pieces at www.Observer.com have received over 16,000 facebook posts, countless tweets, and other methods of "sharing." Please check them out. They include 1. All the President's Muses 2. Holder Protects Corrupt Prosecutors 3. War on Wall Street 4. Meet Emmet Sullivan (the IRS Judge who scheduled a hearing for July 10); 5. One Two Punch (IRS faces Two Federal Judges), and others. Her news articles and opinion pieces may be found at http://observer.com/author/sidney-powell/ . These outstanding stories have been picked up multiple times by the Drudge Report, Investors Business Daily, Breitbart, Fox News, Greta Van Susternen, and countless other blogs and reporters. She is the only published authority on federal Judge Emmet Sullivan and former White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler.

She has been featured on Fox News, the CATO INSTITUTE (broadcast on C-Span), NewsMax TV, and countless radio shows. She has spoken on the topic of prosecutorial misconduct for two federal judicial conferences and numerous bar associtions. Her website is www.LicensedtoLie.com.

Customer Reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars

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“
Sidney Powell's License to Lie is the tragic story of a criminal justice system askew. ”
Ralph Adam Fine| 11 reviewers made a similar statement
“
This is a scary story because it could happen to any of us. ”
Winthrop H. Smith Jr.| 13 reviewers made a similar statement
“
Its story is frightening. ”
Rebecca Fazzio| 12 reviewers made a similar statement

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars 2nd Scariest Book I Have Ever Read May 25, 2014

By Jim Paschal

Format:Hardcover

When I was a teenager I read the Exorcist, and until today, no book I have read since has come close to being as scary. Sidney Powell’s “Licensed to Lie” comes very close. Of course, the Exorcist is fiction and even though it’s scary, everyone knows that the danger is all in their minds. “Licensed to Lie” unfortunately is not fiction. The scary thought is that this book shows real examples of real people that are trusted with immense power to uphold the law; and that they have used that power to take away the freedom and fortune of defendants regardless of whether they have actually committed a crime or not. This book takes you through the process of prosecutors that have used unethical and illegal means to convict with the aid of sympathetic judges at each level of the trial and appeal process. Ms. Powell has demonstrated the courage to name names; and some of these names are still in high places within the government today. If this book doesn't scare the hell out of you, you’re not paying attention.

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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hear hear! May 28, 2014

By S. Dill

Format:Hardcover|Verified Purchase

As a federal criminal defense attorney for nearly 20 years, this book resounded LOUDLY with me. The acts of the U.S. Attorney that she describes are endemic. I have been lied to, threatened with bar complaints and had complaints made to judges behind my back, all for trying to provide a zealous defense to my client. Everything Sidney Powell says here is true.

Not only is it true, but it's a page turner, including back stories of people whose lives were ruined by aggressive prosecutors. If you are interested in justice and the corruption of the process designed to provide it, READ THIS BOOK.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Evil Truth Re DOJ Exposed By Expert - Book Content a Compelling Sample of an Endemic Issue: May 23, 2014

By Jim Treacy

Sidney Powell -– a DOJ prosecutor for ten years and then the last twenty as a private-practice, world-renown, federal appeals attorney -- has done the citizens of the United States a great service with his bold look at the rampant corruption in our supposed Department of Justice [“DOJ”]. Prosecutors specializing in coercion, subornation of perjury, witness-intimidation, witness tampering, illegal deep-sixing of evidence helpful to a defense, under no threat of real punishment even on rare occasion someone gets the goods on them…& the list goes on & on -- all done for career advancement. Worse, most federal judges helping them do it – acting more like heads of the prosecution team than neutral, truth & justice bound arbiters. In a word “DISGUSTING!” Jaw-dropping stuff all Americans should be aware of. I wasn’t surprised having lived it on the sharp-end myself -- "Innocents In Prison? No Kidding, Judge Rakoff!" -- [...] -- but I was strengthened that someone of Sidney’s stature was brave enough to expose the club! A club that specializes in inflicting gratuitous pain, while cowardly hiding behind robes & badges, to advance their own careers – in my book the real criminals. BTW: The white collar attorneys’ are a big part of the problem, most starting as prosecutors, many of whom themselves behaved this way to land their seven figure jobs & then make a fantastic living pleading out frightened people & suborning perjury vs or withholding witnesses from others. They should be the loudest voice for a DOJ cleansing but too much money is at stake. Thank you, Sidney! Everyone else, A must read!

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A good, if sometimes naive, read June 5, 2014

By Norman A. Pattis

I’ve never understood why some criminal defense lawyers feel the need to make a great public display about how they only represent those whom they believe are truly innocent. There’s a self-indulgent, almost moralistic quality to such declarations that render the lawyers untrustworthy. And hence my problem with Sidney Powell’s otherwise excellent book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (Brown. 2014).

Powell is a former Justice Department lawyer who has, for the past twenty years, devoted her private practice to federal appellate work. Although she has handled upwards of 500 appeals, little of this work, she says, has been on behalf of criminal defendants. Her representation of Jim Brown, a senior Merrill Lynch investment banker convicted of white-collar offenses related to Enron’s implosion, represents a watershed moment late in Powell’s career.

Powell’s client was convicted for his role in a transaction involving barges serving as energy plants in Africa. Enron strong-armed Merrill Lynch into financing part of the transaction. The bank went along, but only because it felt it had to in order to secure the long-term relationship with Enron. The government contended that there was a secret deal between the bank and Enron in which Enron guaranteed to buy the barge back after a brief period, thus rendering the initial investment of Merrill’s risk-free, and making fraudulent any reporting of the transaction as a bona fide venture. Parsing these distinctions is the sort of high-stakes tedium that makes the white-collar criminal defense bar wealthy.

The same high-flying group of prosecutors in Washington prosecuted Brown as had prosecuted former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, Arthur Anderson and Jeff Skilling. Most of them went on to stellar careers in private practice, academia or in the Justice Department itself. I say most, because one, Nicholas Marsh, killed himself amid an investigation of whether the Justice Department willfully withheld exculpatory evidence in the Stevens trial.

The investigation of the prosecutors in the Stevens case was ordered by United District Judge Emmet Sullivan because he found a shocking failure on the part of prosecutors to turn over material to Stevens’ defense team. The charges against Stevens were dismissed, and a special prosecutor appointed. Judge Sullivan defined, if only for a moment, what a truly independent judiciary looked like.

Powell discovered the same pattern of withholding evidence in the prosecutors handling her client’s case. She chronicles her efforts in the District Court, the Fifth Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court, to overturn her client’s conviction. She names names in this book, calling out for special scorn United States District Judge Ewing Werlein, Jr., in the Southern District of Texas. Her contempt for Judge Werlein is obvious: she portrays him as a jurist incapable of standing up to the government when the government errs.

In a table at the end of the book, Powell illustrates the exculpatory material the government failed to provide her client’s counsel at trial by means of a chart. In one column are the contents of how prosecutors described exculpatory material in a summary letter they provided to the defense before trial. An adjacent column reflects what was actually in the documents. The prosecutors clearly hid the truth from the defense. Jim Brown deserves a new trial.

I read the book with a brooding sense of wonder: All those trips around the country; the thousands of hours studying documents. Not once did she ever mention fretting about a fee. It must be nice, I thought, to have clients with seemingly infinitely deep pockets. The rich really do live differently.

Near the end of this 400-page book, Powell wonders whether she can remain in the practice of law. She’s lost confidence in the courts, in the integrity of the Justice Department, and even the rule of law. One wonders how she practiced law for 30 years and remained untouched by cynicism: ours is a profession of high aspirations constantly shattered by the gritty reality of the cases – we come to call them “fact patterns” – that consume us.

Sidney Powell’s career as a lawyer is, apparently, about to begin. She now knows that the government lies. Let’s see if she is radicalized by this insight or if she becomes so disillusioned she leaves the trenches for the safer confines of commentary. Whether factually guilty or not, defendants stand daily in the well of courts nationwide looking for lawyers with the courage to fight. Powell ought not to give up now that she realizes just how desperate those fights can be. Read more ›

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Great insights and bad writing June 28, 2014

By T. Magnuson

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

You'd think a professional wordsmith would produce better copy or professional publishers would provide adequate editing, but neither happened in this case. A good deal of redundancy and enough excruciating detail to demonstrate the tedious nature of the practice of law. Still, Powell gets full points for authoritatively exposing DOJ abuses. This book can be fairly compared with Matt Tiabbi's book (_The Divide:.....) and may be read as a companion to that work. Tiabbi wrote the book from the victims' perspective while Powell wrote as a participant observer. Together they provide and insider and outsider view of one of our least transparent institutions.