The Courier Waterloo, Iowa Wednesday, January 27, 1993 - Page 13 (★)
Justice's pursuit of Bobby Fischer is embarrassing
Washington—Bobby Fischer, an American chess genius has been charged by the federal government with a crime that's never before been heard of.
The Justice Department, whose practice over the last decade was to excuse and ignore financial barracudas and blink at official misconduct in its lap, lodged a felony charge against Fischer, an orchestrated grand jury indictment that Fischer violated economic sanctions against Yugoslavia.
Fischer is a man so preoccupied with chess that he might still have to have his mittens pinned to his coat sleeves. Now he's a fugitive American desperado, the first ever charged in an oddball crime where there's not even a victim.
In Washington, U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens said he's got a warrant for Fischer's arrest and he might try to extradite Fischer from Yugoslavia, bring him back to America in handcuffs and leg irons to be put on trial.
What Fischer's done, the federal prosecutor explained, is to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. There's more: It's said Fischer entered a contract “in support of a commercial project” in Yugoslavia during the period in which former President Bush had imposed economic sanctions against Yugoslavia.
The sanctions were intended to bring influence to curb Serb atrocities and they were ordered by Bush last summer, before Fischer won $3.5 million in a high-stakes chess match against the former Russian champion, Boris Spassky, in Belgrade.
The Serbian atrocities were not curbed by the Bush sanctions. So the Justice Department laid on the lash. Not on the Serbs. Not on Yugoslavia. On Fischer. And now he's threatened with a fine of up to $250,000 and a 10-year-prison term for “trading with the enemy”?
Presumably, the legal wizardry of the Justice Department can link Fischer's play in the chess tournament with the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and, in that magic process, will prove Fischer was trading with an “enemy” that no one else in the entire federal bureaucracy has yet called an “enemy”.
This last-gasp business was carried on by an expiring Justice Department that spent much time and effort in recent years dodging its responsibilities to probe and prosecute genuine big-time crooks.
The savings and loan scandal flourished, an organized ring of Wall Street robbers collected immense illegal wealth and an international banking crime cartel operated freely, all of that going on for years before the Justice Department arrived late on the scene.
Right in Washington, Capitol Hill thievery and corruption went on unhindered by a timid Justice Department and suspicious official conduct inside the executive department was excused and explained away under a White House theory that there could be no charges since the White House had found no one was guilty.
Fischer, it now appears, might be the last notable scalp targeted for collection by the retiring Bush Justice Department. It is a bureaucratic act of dumbness that was actually put in its best perspective by an assistant prosecutor, mercifully unnamed in a Washington Post report of the criminal filing against Fischer.
Referring to the chess prize won in Yugoslavia, the prosecutor was quoted as saying: “People are really mad about Fischer playing over there for all that money.”
People are mad about that? Maybe so, considering Fischer has never thrown a touchdown pass or hit a major league home run.
A better guess, though, would be that people aren't nearly as mad at Fischer as they grew to be mad at their own government, including the Justice Department.
Fischer can't be blamed for the incredibly inept and criminal stupidity of government that saddled Americans with a $300 billion tab for the S&L collapse.
It was the government that was responsible for all that and much more. And if some flunky in the Justice Department actually believes that people have forgotten all that to be mad at Fischer, the flunky himself may be goofy enough to set out on the chess tour.
