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Law Enforcement & Legal |
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Deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division for twenty years; a Senate investigator's source said he knew of Lowell Jensen's conduct in the INSLAW matter, and he called INSLAW's charges slanderous. | 2009-05-23 | Washington, D.C. | 2026-09-22 | 2026-10-12 |
Mark M. Richard (died May 23, 2009, Charlottesville, Virginia, aged 69) was a career prosecutor of the Department of Justice for forty years, serving sixteen attorneys general from Ramsey Clark to Alberto Gonzales. Born in New York and raised in Brooklyn, he worked as a probation officer, graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1967 and joined the department the same year, becoming chief of the fraud section. In 1979 he was made deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division, a post he held for twenty years. He had a hand in the inquiry into Carter's budget director Bert Lance, the Billy Carter Libya lobbying case, the Jonathan Pollard espionage prosecution, the federal intervention at Waco and the mid-1990s investigation of Democratic National Committee contributions. From 1999 to 2007 he was the department's representative to the European Union, leading counterterrorism coordination after September 2001 and negotiating extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties. He received the Presidential Rank Award, two Attorney General's Exceptional Service Awards and the Central Intelligence Agency Director's Award; Attorney General Eric Holder spoke at his funeral, and the Criminal Division named a memorial award for him.1
Pollard and Iran-Contra
In December 1985 a United States delegation went to Israel to pursue the Pollard investigation. It included Abraham Sofaer, the State Department legal adviser, Joseph E. diGenova, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Edward S.G. Dennis Jr., the Assistant Attorney General who headed the Criminal Division, William J. Birney, second-ranking prosecutor in the United States Attorney's office, and Richard, then a deputy assistant attorney general.2
In 1986 Leonard Garment informed U.S. Attorney diGenova and Richard that he was withdrawing from the representation of the Israeli officer Aviem Sella in the Pollard matter. Richard's handwritten notes of a department briefing on the Iran-Contra figure Scott Weekly recorded: "Weekly posts on tape that he's tied into CIA and Hasenfus. Said he reports to people reporting to Bush."34
The INSLAW Inquiry
A career department source of Ronald LeGrand, chief investigator of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Richard, John Keeney and Philip White knew "all about" Lowell Jensen's conduct in the INSLAW matter and that Richard and White were "pretty upset" about it but would speak only under subpoena and oath. Interviewed by the special counsel Nicholas J. Bua, Richard said he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing by Jensen generally or of the kind described in Bill Hamilton's affidavit, and Bua found no credible evidence for the allegation. INSLAW also suggested that the Office of Special Investigations, the Nazi-hunting unit within the Criminal Division, was a covert intelligence arm distributing PROMIS. Bua's report records his reply: "Mr. Richard stated that INSLAW's charges are ridiculous. He said that OSI is only involved in its stated mission of locating and deporting Nazi war criminals and in related projects such as the analysis of Kurt Waldheim's role during World War II. He did, however, note that OSI does work with various intelligence agencies in fulfilling its mandate of locating war criminals. He categorically denied any involvement by OSI in covert operations, the dissemination of PROMIS or the death of Mr. Casolaro. He said that he considers these and other allegations made by INSLAW to be slanderous."5
Footnotes
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"Mark M. Richard, Career Prosecutor With the Justice Department, Dies at 69," The Washington Post, June 3, 2009. Archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20141225083941/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060303700.html ↩︎
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"Decade of the Spy," undated counterintelligence history extract, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 407, Doc. 14. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB407/docs/EBB-PollardDoc14.pdf ↩︎
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Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option, Random House, 1991, ch. 21. ↩︎
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Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance, Seven Stories, 1998, ch. 19. ↩︎
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U.S. Department of Justice. Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc., March 1993, p. 120 and the section on the Office of Special Investigations. https://archive.org/details/InslawPROMISBuaReport ↩︎