Mark Rathbun: on Gerald Feffer (May 28, 2013)

My presentation horrified the team of criminal attorneys. They were hired because of their conservative, Reagan administration contacts. They did not want anything to do with such an aggressive investigative move. They were concerned about the propriety of the means Ingram and I had utilized to obtain the evidence, and thought it would reflect badly on their own reputations. One attorney who represented Miscavige personally took me aside, though. He said he did not know how to use it at the moment, but that the evidence I had obtained would ultimately save the day for Hubbard, Miscavige and the church. Gerald Feffer was the former Assistant Deputy Attorney General for taxation during the Carter administration. He was becoming a dean of white-collar criminal case dismissal prior to indictment. He would become a senior partner in the venerable D.C. law firm Williams & Connally. Gerry told me to work with some of our more aggressive civil counsel to figure out a way to make the information public, and he would use it to make the IRS criminal case go away.

Rathbun, Mark (2013-05-28). Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior (pp. 260-261). Amazon Books. Kindle Edition.

Ultimately, our aggressive investigation and litigation tactics resulted in the demise of all criminal prosecution threats. The most serious of them, the IRS Criminal Investigation Division probe, lived two years beyond Hubbard’s death . The IRS continued to attempt to make a case against Broeker , Miscavige and the church. Miscavige convinced himself that that case died because his personal attorney, the late Gerald Feffer of the D.C. law firm Williams & Connally, had called in chips with his friend, then Assistant Attorney General Roger Olsen. But later freedom of information act request documents revealed otherwise. The case died because when Department of Justice lawyers studied the Armstrong op videos we had obtained and publicized, they concluded that Armstrong, and Flynn’s stable of witnesses by association, were worthy of the lowest credibility ratings possible. They could not make a credible case when their critical witnesses had such a lack of credibility – at least not under a criminal standard of proof. ¹

Rathbun, Mark (2013-05-28). Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior (pp. 313-314). Amazon Books. Kindle Edition.

Notes