WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Justice threatened to strike Straus Professor of Business Administration Max H. Bazerman from its witness list if he refused to weaken his testimony advocating for the appointment of outside officials to review the companies’ business practices and possibly to remove senior tobacco company executives, Bazerman said last week.

The government’s six-year-old lawsuit charges the nation’s six largest tobacco companies with having conspired over the past 50 years to deceive the public about the dangers and addictiveness of smoking.

Bazerman, who is a professor at Harvard Business School, refused to change his testimony but was ultimately allowed to testify without altering it.

Bazerman said that a trial attorney told him shortly before his appearance in front of the court that two major Justice Department officials wanted him to alter his testimony.

According to Bazerman, the attorney said in their conversation, which took place less than a week before Bazerman was set to take the stand on May 4, that the demand had come from Justice Department attorney Frank Marine and Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum Jr.

Bazerman, who would not discuss the identity of the attorney who had passed on that information, said that McCallum had threatened to remove him from the witness list if he did not water down his recommendations.

Specifically, Bazerman said he was asked to amend his testimony to note that some of his recommendations might be “legally inappropriate” under certain circumstances.

Bazerman said he is still unsure why the Justice Department officials apparently backed off.

Bazerman also noted that he does not know for certain why he was asked to moderate his testimony in the first place.

“The only explanation that I can come up with…would be political interference,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that it’s the reason, but I can’t come up with another logical explanation.”

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller told The Washington Post last week that Bazerman’s evaluation of the government’s motives was inaccurate.

“The issues discussed with Dr. Bazerman regarding his testimony were focused on ensuring that the department’s proposals in this case complied with the long-standing department policies that apply to all racketeering cases the government brings, policies that substantially predate this administration,” Miller told the Post.

He would not comment further when contacted by The Crimson this week.

On June 20, Reps. Martin T. Meehan, D-MA, and Henry A. Waxman, D-CA, sent a letter asking the Office of Professional Responsibility, a branch of the Justice Department, to investigate Bazerman’s claims.

“The attempt to undermine this critical part of the Department’s case cannot possibly be justified,” they wrote. “But it did directly benefit senior tobacco executives—many of whom are major donors to the Republican Party—whose jobs could have been threatened by the remedies proposed by Professor Bazerman.”

“The evidence is mounting that the Justice Department sabotaged its own case for political reasons,” they added.

Waxman and Meehan, who are both prominent House Democrats, also allege a conflict of interest in McCallum’s involvement in the case. They note that McCallum, who is a political appointee, is a former partner of Alston and Bird, an Atlanta-based law firm that has represented R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, one of the defendants in the case.

McCallum, the congressmen write, is believed to be responsible for the government’s decision to cut its demand for penalties against the tobacco industry in a related case from $130 billion to $10 billion, a move that infuriated antismoking activists and members of Congress.

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine ’79 wrote in a June 13 statement responding to an earlier letter from Waxman and Meehan that the Office of Professional Responsibility “intends to initiate an investigation” into the claims of political interference in the case. The two congressmen want an inquiry into Bazerman’s statements to be added to that investigation.

In the ongoing case, the government must prove both that there was a conspiracy on the part of the tobacco companies to commit fraud and that such misconduct will continue if the government does not intervene, Bazerman explained.

In early March, the Justice Department asked Bazerman, who is reputed to be an expert on decision making and negotiations, to testify in the case. His testimony was intended to show that there is a conflict of interest between profitability and misconduct in this instance and that tobacco executives are inclined to act in self-serving ways.

In his written testimony, which the Justice Department approved in late March, Bazerman recommended that the court consider several major structural changes in the tobacco industry, including eliminating economic incentives for companies to sell cigarettes to young people, modifying compensation policies for tobacco executives to encourage compliance with the law, removing senior executives, requiring that all research for those companies be contracted out to independent companies monitored by the court, and forcing the companies to sell all their research concerning the manufacturing and marketing of safer cigarettes.

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.