unless he found that, after getting the subpoena, Brott was disappearing-perhaps going to take a voyage to Europe-for we had witnesses. afterwards who went to Europe. member, that Mr. Brott had left the West to come here before the paIt turned out, however, as I now repers got there. At any rate, there was no apparent indication at that time that he had intended toeyade service. Mr. Brott came here. We wanted him. We were waiting for him. He came, but instead of staying here, he went off at once somewhere else, and we could not ascertain where. Mr. Woodward was not here. I thought the indications were that Brott had come here and had been I was a good deal worked up. run out of town-persuaded to go away. There had been a proceeding, a warrant issued, and a complaint made before Commissioner Bundy, at Colonel Cook's instigation, and we needed Brott as a witness and he had been here and had gone and we could not discover where he was. Colonel Cook went in and took charge of that case, and was incontinently turned out of court; had not, practically, any evidence. It was so little of a case that the commissioner would not even grant an adjournment. As I say, I was a good deal worked up at the disappearance of Brott, and, getting the best information I could get, and with the concurrence, and I think a good deal at the instigation of Mr. Cook and Mr. Gibson, I consented to institute proceedings against Brott for an indictment, and they were instituted. Mr. Woodward was brought back here, and, after many assurances, he consented to go as a witness before the grand jury, although he claimed that it was not right as to Brott. My theory of Mr. Brott's conduct was that he had not kept faith, and that therefore there was no obligation on the part of the Government toward him; but I afterwards became satisfied that he had not attempted to evade us; that his coming here and going off without communicating with anybody had been accidental, and that the refusal at his house to give us information as to where he was, arose from a misunderstanding there, and, therefore, I was satisfied Mr. Brott had kept faith; although I had been for a time very decidedly of the opinion that he had not, and had congratulated myself that my theory that in dealing with an accomplice you must always treat him as an accomplice and not as a witness, was shown to have been a wise one. Before this, however, indictments were ordered against Lilley and Brott. The question of the drafting those indictments has happened to be brought up here, and, in the mass of venom and misinformation which has been furnished to this committee, it has been asserted that the indictments were drawn up by Mr. Gibson and Mr. Cook. Now, in the first place, Mr. Gibson is so little of a lawyer that, having been employed as an attorney by the Department of Justice, when it became desirable to give him his pay, it required a good deal of investigation to ascertain that he came within the legal provisions as to counsel so that it would be proper to pay him as such; but it was finally discovered that some twenty years ago or more he had been admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania. As for Mr. Cook, I was determined that, if I could help it, he should never draw any one of the indictments for which I was to be in any way responsible; and for just this reason: Acting upon the suggestion that I had made that each one of us should draw a form of information, Mr. Cook drew up one and I drew another. I did not like Mr. Cook's, and I do not know whether he liked mine. I urged that there was a great deal in Mr. Cook's that should not be there, and finally it was arranged there should be two counts; that I should take one and Mr. Cook the other, and that I should nurse my baby and he should nurse his. He drew up the second count, and it was sent to

the printer, and after that I never paid any attention to it until, in the proof, I was looking over Mr. Cook's count, and I found that he had left out entirely the names of the parties; that it did not name any human being, but left the count to run back upon the persons named in my count. Now, I do not pretend to be a criminal draftsman, but I was a good deal shocked at that carelessness, as I thought it, and from that time on I did not wish that Mr. Cook should be allowed to draw an indictment in any of those cases, if I could help it, and therefore I always endeavored, in the other proceedings, to have something to do with drawing the indictments.

These gentlemen say I did not draw the Lilley and Brott indictments. All I have to say about that is, that when that testimony was given here there were present in this room Mr. Woodward, Mr. Cameron, and somebody else, and they went straight down to the Department and examined my papers, and there they found the original draft of the Lilley and the Brott indictments, which I have here now [producing them], and every iota of which is in my handwriting, with all the interlineations and changes. I was in New York at the time they found the papers, so had not any possible chance of "putting up any job" on you; and to avoid any such possibility, these gentlemen placed their names upon the drafts of the indictments, and there they are. I have compared them with the originals on file, and they are identical with the originals, and I think that if any inference can be drawn from the quality of the paper, the copies also must have been made by some of the clerks in the Post-Office Department who were detailed to do that work. I have not been able to get the clerks to ascertain that, but here are the original drafts of the indictment under each separate section of the statute.

Now, if there is any question as to who drew those indictments, I do not think the burden of proof rests any longer upon me; for you not only have here the draft of the indictments, with all the details, but if there is any desire to go to the originals you will find in my handwrit ing, interlined," and agent," and you will find it running right through. You will find all sorts of pencil memoranda and directions-"Insert so and so in the indictment"-you will find those memoranda running from the beginning to the end of the indictments, though there may be pos sibly a word dropped out here and there. Here are directions as to how the indictments shall be drawn-" Make this like the other," and so onall the directions for making up the indictments.

Now, as I have said, these Lilley and Brott indictments were based entirely upon the evidence of Brott; therefore, the moment it became elear that Brott had kept good faith it was perfectly clear that there could not be any proceeding against him based on this indictment depending upon his own testimony. But one of the difficulties was that, in consequence of the misunderstanding which I have mentioned, Mr. Brott ceased to be very friendly to us. Mr. Brott's wife had been subpoenaed by Colonel Cook to go before the grand jury. I don't know how she came to be brought there to testify against her husband; but she was, and there was a good deal of quite natural indignation about it, and the result was that Mr. Brott largely ceased to be an available witness, even against Lilley, and therefore that was not a case in which we could very well proceed. Again, the committee will bear in mind that when you came to Lilley you were dealing with one official, or late official, alleged to have been bribed by another person, your whole case resting entirely upon that. I don't say that you might not get a conviction in such a

case, but I do say that it would not be a wise thing to attempt to put that forward as a pioneer case.

A question has been raised here as to some statements which found their way out affecting Mr. E. John Ellis, a member of the House of Representatives from Louisiana, and it has been said that Colonel Cook testified that he never saw any such papers or had any such papers in his possession, or anything of the kind. Now, upon that point I have to say this, that the statements of Mr. Brott as to Mr. E. John Ellis were contained right in the midst of the papers giving his testimony against Mr. Lilley. They never were separated in the office so far as I know, and I am very confident that they never were separated there. Mr. Woodward kept the papers so carefully that I never was allowed to have possession of the originals. I got a copy, which was with the papers, and bore my memoranda, and if the indictments in the Lilley and Brott case were drawn by Colonel Cook and Mr. Gibson, then there was no possibility of their having any papers from which they could have prepared an indictment in that case except this statement of Mr. Brott, which, as I have said, included right in the midst of it the statement as to Mr. E. John Ellis. Therefore, either Mr. Cook and Mr. Gibson did not prepare those indictments, as they did not, or they prepared them from papers which contained the statement as to Mr. Ellis. But a copy of those papers was certainly in the possession of Mr. Cook at one time.

By Mr. STEWART:

Q. Is that a copy which you hold in your hand?-A. Yes, sir.

By the CHAIRMAN:

Q. Is that a copy of some of the papers which appeared in the New York Sun recently?-A. Yes, sir. Some of these have appeared in the New York Sun. I don't know that I desire to say anything more in connection with that.

During that fall we were interrupted in the course of the preparation of the Dorsey case by what were known as straw-bond cases. Messrs. Tidball and Shallcross, post-office inspectors, made a very careful and elaborate report (of which report, by the way, I see Mr. Gibson wants to take the credit largely to himself, when, to my personal knowledge, he is largely not entitled to it, for Mr. Tidball and Mr. Shallcross devoted a great deal of their time to it) against certain persons who had given fraudulent bonds on bids. The post-office law, as you gentlemen know, is somewhat defective. It provides that every bidder for a contract is to give a bond, which bond makes his surety liable not only down to the time a contract is obtained upon the bid, but liable during the entire time of the continuance of the contract. Bids come in in such numbers, thousands and tens of thousands, that it is, of course, impossible for any officer, and the law does not look upon the possibility of any officer doing it, to pass upon the question whether the bondsmen are good for anything or not. Any postmaster may certify the bond, and they used to get the postmaster at Culpeper or some other little place to certify the bonds, and that was the end of it. But when you come to the contracts, no bidder gets an average of one in thirty on his bids, and there the examination as to the bondsmen is more carefully made, and the result, in my opinion, of that provision of law is that it leads every bidder to start in with the idea of imposing on the Government. Thus, a bidder, Mr. Cabell, I think, got a man to go on his bond to the amount of $1,000,000, basing it upon land which he claimed to own in Virginia; then that property was transferred to others, and they went on another

bond to the amount of a million or two million more. It was a most extraordinary condition of things. That report of Messrs. Tidball and Shallcross came in, and the President decided, with the concurrence of the Postmaster-General, that the attention of Congress ought to be called at once to that state of things, and he sent a message to Congress suggesting certain changes in the law. His object was to provide for a large letting which was to take place a month later; the advertisement was already out for it, and his desire was to get the law changed in time so that it might be applicable to the bids then to come in. There was no power under the law in the Postmaster-General to reject any of those bids, and the desire was to have that done, and the President decided, late in December, I think, to send a message of that sort to Congress. When the President decided to send in that message and to send with it the report of Messrs. Tidball and Shallcross, the result of such action would be necessarily to give notice to all those parties who it was believed had been guilty of wrong-doing in connection with what the Government was investigating, and there was danger, as it seemed to me, that they might escape, and therefore I thought there was no other course to pursue except to go into the police court and get warrants. I learned of the President's decision quite late in the day, and I remember that I sat up the entire night for the purpose of getting the papers so as to go promptly into the police court, in order that we should not be exposed to the charge that the Administration had sent to Congress a paper showing that A, B, C, D, or E had been guilty of certain crimes, and that it was designed as a notice to them to run away. I thought if it was conceivable that any party would seek by any investigation to make a political point, that if we had allowed that to be done it would have given an opportunity for a very strong charge against us, and I think it would have put the counsel for the Government in a position where it would have been very difficult for them to make a satisfactory explanation. The result was that we went into the police court and made complaints. I may say that there was another incident which made that course not disagreeable to me, and that was that there seemed to be a good deal of talk circulating here about "Star Chamber" business; that we were not giving the defendants in the Star-route cases a fair chance; that we were going to rush in before a grand jury and indicting them behind their backs, without giving them any chance to explain or defend, that we were blackening them, and so on. So we did go into the police court. We had to prove there two or three thousand bids, and we were met by this difficulty: We were required by the defendants, in the exercise of their legal rights, to prove each one of those bids, and to prove it technically and squarely. We were not allowed to produce it as from the Department solely. We were required to get the notary before whom it had been taken, and have him testify as to each one; and the defendants undertook to require the notary there in court to sit down and take each one of those papers separately and go over it, and we had a very long and very tedious time of it. There has been some criticism here, I observe, as to the length of time it took. Well, it did take a great deal of time. It did not, however, take anything like two months in any such sense as has been stated here. We would go along for a time, and then there would be an adjournment, and the matter would go over for some days. Finally, I got ahead of the gentlemen on the other side by just hiring the notary and setting him down in the Post Office Department, where these files were, and having him carefully examine each one of those bonds-examine them and mark them-and then when he

went into court with the whole batch, he had made his examination out of court instead of taking time to do it in court, and the judge let them in in that way, although at an earlier stage, when that plan was contended for, he had rather indicated that it was not a proper thing to do. Now, if there is any question as to whether those cases were unduly prolonged by the prosecution in the police court, I will ask this committee to send for Judge Snell. I have not seen Judge Snell for months, or for a year; but I am perfectly willing to let that matter rest upon his opinion. The cases were pressed as strongly as possible, but they were elephants, because we were forced into the police court by the decision of the President that it was necessary for the public good to call the attention of Congress to this straw-bond matter; and when got in there, the defendants, in the exercise of their legal rights, interposed all these delays. At certain stages, I think some of the defendants did talk of waiving an examination and being bound over for the grand jury; but that was at a stage when we thought it not wise that that course should be taken. We had not proved the bad features of our case, and there had been such a general hullabaloo through the press that we had "no case," and various statements of that kind, that we thought it wise, having got into the police court, to continue our case and prove it, so as to show the general features of it.

Now, you have asked me, Mr. Chairman, to give a statement of what I did in the star-route cases. Well, I lived, and breathed, and ate those cases for two years. I ought to say, at this point, that quite early the question came up about some of the counsel going before the grand jury. I was a good deal embarrassed, because, from sources which I was bound to respect, from sources which I never could state without permission and which I have no right to state now, I ascertained that leave would not be given for Colonel Cook to go before the grand jury. Colonel Cook had been sworn in on the appointment of the AttorneyGeneral, and I always felt, and feel now, that the question as to whether an assistant district attorney, appointed by the Attorney-General, has a right to go before the grand jury, is a very doubtful one; and a very different one from the question whether one of the assistant district attorneys, selected by the district attorney himself, has a right to go before the grand jury. Though, even that question, whether even an assistant, appointed by the district attorney himself, has such a right, was very seriously litigated in New York, and finally settled by a decision of Judge Nelson. When I came here I found that the district attorney was not in the habit, ordinarily, of being represented before the grand jury. Colonel Cook was anxious to go before the grand jury in this case; but from time to time L.objected and dissuaded him. I thought it was a very doubtful question whether he had any such right. The committee will see that if you recognize the right of the AttorneyGeneral sitting here in Washington to appoint an officer who shall be authorized to go before the grand juries over the heads of the local dis trict attorneys throughout the country, you are giving the AttorneyGeneral a very great power over proceedings; and a power as to which I think there may well be doubt whether it was intended to be given. But if the district attorney of a given locality chooses to swear any body in as an assistant, that is his matter; he is the officer immediately responsible, and there is much less likelihood of abuses arising from that. At any rate that, was the difficulty that I had in my mind.

By the CHAIRMAN:

Q. Was there any difference between the terms of your appointment