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However, since its inception, the OSI has been dogged by scandal. John Demjanjuk is a Ukrainian-American who was unjustly stripped of his U.S. citizenship, and deported to Israel, by the Office of Special Investigations for allegedly concealing his involvement in war crimes at the Treblinka death camp in order to immigrate to the United States. John Demjanjuk's ordeal began in 1978. It led him to death row in Israel. Demjanjuk's citizenship was restored in 1998.
All the while, the OSI had evidence, which it withheld from Demjanjuk's attorneys, demonstrating that they were knowingly targeting the wrong man with forged and falsified evidence. One OSI prosecutor resigned from the Department, when his repeated written warnings that Demjanjuk was not "Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka," were ignored.
When the Chief Judge of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals learned, through reading an article in the New York Times, of the prosecutorial abuses in the Demjanjuk case, he initiated a review of the case, after Robert Mueller, then the head of the Department's Criminal Division, refused to even reply to the Judge's letters and telephone calls, asking for corroboration of the New York Times allegations. The Sixth Circuit took the unusual step of appointing a Special Master to probe the conduct of the Justice Department, and, eventually, the Circuit ruled in November 1993 that OSI had "acted with reckless disregard of the truth," and had carried out "prosecutorial misconduct that constituted a fraud on the court.
Neither Attorney General Reno nor the Department has ever taken responsibility for -- or even acknowledged -- the prosecutorial misconduct. John Demjanjuk was retried and convicted of lying to enter the U.S., as he had served as a prison guard in several Nazi prison. He was again stripped of his citizenship in 2004.
Another scandal emerged in 2003. According to the September 5 edition of the magazine Forward, former OSI director Neil Sher was disbarred, as he admitted to embezzling funds for Nazi Holocaust victims through filing false expense accounts in his role as Chief of Staff of the Washington office of the
International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims . This complaint of padding expense accounts was brought by ICHEIC Chairman Lawrence Eagleburger.