ROANOKE'S POLITICAL US ATTORNEY

Roanoke's political U.S. attorney Before John Brownlee travels further down
the political road on which he appears to have embarked, he might consider
improving his performance in his day job.

JOHN Brownlee is not the first U.S. attorney in Roanoke to show signs of
political ambition. He probably won't be the last. But why be so blatant
about it?

In January, you may recall, Brownlee held a news conference to announce he
had been called to active duty as part of his Army Reserve unit. That
mildly weird event took on a seriously weird flavor when Brownlee - who
spent a few weeks at Fort Eustis, in Tidewater, as an Army lawyer - showed
up in combat fatigues for the occasion.

This week, Brownlee again found the spotlight when he took it upon himself
to fan the flames of opposition to a proposed methadone clinic at Colonial
Avenue and Ogden Road in Roanoke County. His comments to the county
supervisors struck us as not very relevant, and in some ways incoherent,
but the bigger question is: Why was the chief federal prosecutor for the
western half of Virginia intervening at all in a local zoning controversy?

It's not as if Brownlee as U.S. attorney has been performing so superbly
that he has time on his hands for other ventures.

Take, for example, the fraud case against Richard Burrow, former president
of the nonprofit National D-Day Memorial Foundation. Did Burrow's
fund-raising corner-cutting, from which he did not personally profit,
amount to criminality? In December, the majority of a hung jury said no,
which should have ended the matter. Instead, Brownlee has dragged out the
case and insisted on a new trial, which presumably will garner as extensive
news coverage as the first.

Or consider the FBI investigation of vague charges against the nonprofit
Southwestern Virginia Second Harvest Food Bank. After a full year under an
investigatory cloud, in February the Food Bank - and the public - got no
explanation from Brownlee other than that his office had "declined
prosecution."

And just last week, in the highly publicized trial of Roanoke pain
specialist Cecil Byron Knox and some of his associates, U.S. District Judge
Samuel Wilson found the charges against therapist Kathleen O'Gee so flimsy
that he took the rare step of dismissing them before her attorneys even
mounted a defense. Yet Brownlee's office for months had been pressuring
O'Gee to plead guilty, under threat of a long prison term, to those same
charges.

If you're going to be a political U.S. attorney, at least be so in a way
that doesn't do disservice to the cause of justice.