Legal Reformer
Andrew Kreig is a prominent advocate of cutting-edge approaches to legal reform. Building on his long career in Washington policy, law and investigative reporting, he led a group of distinguished professionals from diverse fields in 2010 to found the Justice Integrity Project.
The Project is a research and educational effort to improve oversight of decisions by authorities that undermine the justice system. Its primary focus is revealing political and other arbitrary prosecutions, particularly in official corruption cases.
The Project researches questionable cases, and advocates for reform. The focus is mainly but not exclusively on domestic federal investigations. Sample areas of concern include warrantless surveillance, intimidation of families and witnesses, suppression of evidence, appearance of judicial bias, and irregular financial incentives. Also, the Project examines oversight by higher courts, congress, and the news media that permit abuses that undermine the foundations of democracy.
The project has published pioneering investigative reports available to the public on a variety of major scandals by federal authorities unfairly prosecuting targets in high-profile cases. Among them have been Democrats Don Siegelman (former governor of Alabama) and Dr. Cyril Wecht (a forensic specialist and former county coroner in Pennsylvania) and such Republicans Ted Stevens (the late Alaskan senator) and Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner and Bush nominee to become Homeland Security secretary).
revealed highly dubious federal investigations of government officials blowing the whistle on serious crime or
other misconduct within their ranks, including former National Security Agency employees Thomas Drake, as well as misconduct by the news media. Further, the project has published several breakthrough reports showing how the Justice Department has refused to undertake good-faith investigations of their own misconduct even in some of its highest profile scandals, and that a number of judges and congress have declined to provide the required oversight.
Currently, the Project’s emphasis has primarily moved beyond documenting individual case histories of government misconduct. Having shown that such injustices exist without adequate remedy, the Project is increasingly focused on system-wide reasons for such delinquency.
Kreig’s background includes law degrees from both the University of Chicago School of Law (J.D.) and from Yale Law School, where he was a Ford Foundation fellow and honors student in obtaining an M.S.L. degree. Later, he was law clerk to U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf, currently chief judge for the district of Massachusetts, during the early stages of the judge’s long-running oversight of a historic racketeering case against leaders of the New England Mafia. Kreig was an associate attorney in the Latham & Watkins office in Washington, DC before becoming vice president and then president of the Wireless Communications Association from 1993 to 2008. In that work, he compiled in 1993 and presented to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission extensive documentation on suspected scam promoters of wireless investments who were defrauding the public, resulting in a series of SEC enforcement actions that shut down the boiler-rooms sales promoters and imprisoned the ring-leader on racketeering charges after he admitted fleecing the public of $70 million in league with well-connected Washington-based attorneys and former federal officials.
Previously, Kreig covered the federal courts fulltime for the Hartford Courant newspaper from 1976 to 1981, authoring hundreds of bylined articles about all facets of federal criminal and civil law enforcement for Connecticut’s largest newspaper. His stories there and as legal columnist for Connecticut magazine resulted in two federal judges losing their jobs. Later, he authored the 1987 book, Spiked, documenting serious shortcomings in the news media’s coverage of public affairs. He has been listed in Who’s Who in America Law and Who’s Who in America for many years, and is active in law-related professional groups.
