Not that any of this suggests impropriety either (from this morning's Washington Post):

By Paul Duggan Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, January 19, 2002; Page A06

AUSTIN -- After he was sworn in Dec. 13 as U.S. attorney for southern Texas, Michael T. Shelby, a career prosecutor who has specialized in white-collar corruption cases, wasted no time diving into what he thought would be the most intriguing criminal investigation of his life.

Eleven days earlier, in the largest corporate collapse in the nation's history, Houston-based Enron Corp. had filed for bankruptcy protection, raising numerous questions about the company's practices and top executives.

On the day he took office in Houston, Shelby said in an interview this week, he ordered the chief of his fraud division to issue subpoenas for Enron records and told prosecutors to arrange a meeting with Securities and Exchange Commission officials in Washington. "We wanted to peruse the SEC's files and basically get our investigation moving forward as quickly as possible," Shelby recalled.

But today, a month after gearing up to spearhead the Justice Department's criminal probe of the Enron debacle, Shelby, 43, and his 89-lawyer staff are out of the loop. In a move that legal experts called highly unusual, the entire U.S. Attorney's Office in Houston has been recused from the case because too many of its lawyers, including Shelby, have personal ties to current or former employees of the once-giant energy trading company.

The Justice Department's decision to assign the investigation to a task force of prosecutors from other jurisdictions illustrates the difficulties that law enforcement officials, members of Congress and others face in conducting clearly impartial inquiries into Enron. Before the company's demise, which wiped out many of its employees' retirement funds, Enron had long been a big financial contributor to politicians of both major parties, notably President Bush.