The Case of the Persecuted Prosecutor
As an assistant U.S. attorney, my friend Bill Johnston had done more than any man in America to reveal how the FBI lied about its actions in the Branch Davidian siege. So why did the government try to send him to prison?
by Gary Cartwright
It was a scene suspended between a Kafka nightmare and the lunacy of Lewis Carroll, a bizarre conclusion to the long national tragedy that began with the raid of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in February 1993. Bill Johnston, the defendant who stood before a black-robed judge in a St. Louis courtroom awaiting sentencing, was charged, in effect, with concealing evidence of his knowledge of the FBI's use of pyrotechnic weapons in its final assault on the compound. The former assistant U.S. attorney in Waco, who had helped prosecute eleven surviving Davidians for conspiring to murder federal agents during the initial raid on the compound, Johnston was the improbable villain turned up by a $17 million investigation led by special counsel John C. Danforth—making him the only person to be indicted as a result of all the hearings and investigations into
federal misconduct at Waco. Everything about the courtroom scene was upside down and backward. Far from being guilty of covering up what happened at Waco, Johnston, more than any person in America, was responsible for exposing the truth. At the time when the FBI was still denying that it had fired the kind of ammunition that could have caused the fire that killed 82 men, women, and children at the compound, Johnston had broken ranks with his own superiors in the Department of Justice to write Attorney General Janet Reno that there was evidence that the FBI had used pyrotechnics. And yet here he was, a strapping six-four hunk of rawhide—a man who looked more like a rodeo cowboy than a dedicated professional lawman—standing with his shoulders sagging and his head bowed in shame and humiliation, certain that he was on his way to prison.
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