The Senate Judiciary has released the questionnaire that Judge Sonia Sotomayor has to fill out before her confirmation hearings begin.  You can read the questionnaire here.

Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli highlighted today what the Justice Department has done with the Recovery Act funds it received 100 days ago.

Here’s where the money is going, according to remarks Perrelli’s prepared for a speech at National Harbor, Md.

$4 billion – State, local and tribal law enforcement, and other criminal and juvenile justice programs.

$2.7 billion – Byrne Justice Assistance Grant Program, the Byrne Competitive Grant Program, Assistance to Rural Law Enforcement to Combat Crime and Drugs, grants for Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces and grants for victim compensation and assistance.

$1.1 billion – “Agencies in need,” with almost $70 million for Maryland, Virginia and D.C.

$1 billion – To create or save 5,5000 police jobs

$225 million -  Office on Violence Against Woman to support  STOP Violence Against Women Formula Grant Program, the Transitional Housing Assistance Program, the Grants to Tribal Governments Program, and  state and tribal Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Coalitions.

“We all know that the Recovery Act is helping to stimulate the economy by directly saving and creating jobs across the country,” Perrelli said in his remarks. ” But it is also helping the economy… by making our communities safe for our fellow citizens to keep their businesses open, get to and from work, and go about their daily lives. “

McGuireWoods has hired 18-year DOJ veteran and former Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Justice Department Patrick Rowan to be part of their government investigations department in D.C. You can read the BLT’s bio on Rowan here.

The District would house Guantanamo Bay detainees, if President Obama asked them to, D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said in an interview with The Washington Times today.

Nickles told The Times he hasn’t heard of any formal talks between District officials and the Obama administration about detainees coming to D.C., but said he would have some concerns to air out with Attorney General Eric Holder before any potential prisoner transfer.

“If he said he’d want us to do it, we’d do it,” Nickles told The Times. “But I think I’d sit down with Eric Holder … and say, ‘Now, let me ask you a few questions and see what the answers are here.’ “

The D.C. Attorney General told The Times his most pressing prisoner concern with the Justice Department is the housing of around 10 “narcoterrorists” in the District. Most were brought to D.C. on drug charges, and were allegedly involved with holding Americans hostage in Colombia, according to The Times.

“Some of these individuals have connections to the [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia], some of them may be lower level, some of them are probably higher level,” Nickles told The Times. “You put all those people together in one area and there could be mischief.”

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida R. Alexander Acosta will become the dean of Miami’s Florida International University law school on July 1, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Alex Acosta

We previously reported that 14 of the 26 FIU law professors deemed Acosta “not acceptableâ€� to be their new dean in a non-binding poll. The controversy stemmed from Acosta’s politics. He helped George W. Bush in the bitter 2000 Florida recount. Then in 2003, Bush nominated the Miami native to head the Civil Rights Division at Main Justice.

Acosta served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights from August 2003 to June 2005, presiding over a period of intense turmoil. During his tenure, the division approved then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s (R-Texas) extraordinary mid-decade redistricting plan that ending up giving the Texas GOP five new House seats. (The DOJ said at the time that Acosta had recused himself from the Texas decision but didn’t explain why).

Also during Acosta’s tenure, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Schlozman carried out his reign of terror against career staff attorneys perceived to be liberal Democrats. Read the Justice Department Inspector General report on Schlozman’s improper partisan hiring decisisons here.

After Harvard Law School, Acosta clerked for Samuel A. Alito, Jr., now a Supreme Court Justice, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He also worked in the Washington office of Kirland & Ellis.

The Southern District of Florida is one of the most prestigious U.S. Attorney offices in the nation, with one of its busiest workloads. As U.S. Attorney, Acosta focused on health care fraud (Miami, along with Los Angeles, launched a Medicare fraud “strike force”  in 2007. Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced May 20 the Obama administration is expanding those strike forces to Detroit and Houston). He also prosecuted accused al-Qaeda “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla and the Repubulican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

 

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The Department of Justice —  the battered plaything of political bloggers during the Bush administration —  has hired a ”new media” outreach expert to steer the Obama administration through online policy debates over torture, Guantanamo Bay and whatever else comes up, reports Greg Sargent at The Plum Line.

The new position will be filled by Democratic communications expert Tracy Russo. Russo was chief blogger (yes, that was her real title) and deputy director of online communications for the John Edwards presidential campaign. We’ve asked DOJ Public Affairs Director Matt Miller, himself a long-time Democratic political aide, to let us know more about what Russo will be doing beyond keeping an eye out for brewing on-line tempests.

Tracy Russo

Until we hear back, we’ll just whistle a few tunes from this “blogger outreach” show we remember from our own years as a political reporter. We’re not saying this is how it will work at the DOJ. But in campaigns, the blogger “outreach” people are something like zoo keepers. At regular intervals, they open the online cages and throw in policy papers or news releases. Sometimes the campaigns even hold special blogger-only conference calls. 

Sated and happy (it’s so cool to have access!), and dazzled to have information from a source other than Google, the bloggers start writing fewer conspiracy theories. They become less hostile when the campaign’s paid bloggers join their online conversations. The paid campaign bloggers then subtly start spinning their candidates’ talking points.

Soon, the bloggers are as tame as the mainstream media (“MSM,” in blogger speak). They start going on TV. And to the White House Correspondents Association Dinner.  Where they hobnob with the same Washington, D.C., insiders who once used to be the exclusive dates of the MSM. That’s right – the same MSM the bloggers once screamed were too close to their sources. Because they socialized with them. Just like the bloggers are now doing. And which the bloggers find is actually fun. And useful. So now it’s not so bad to go to the White House Correspondents Dinner, even if you’re a blogger.

You can read Russo’s bio from the Huffington Post below:

Tracy Russo, President of Russo Strategies,LLC, is well known for her online outreach work and her ability to integrate online communications and new media opportunities with all aspects of traditional campaigns and organizations. Advocating an approach that involves all aspects of the organization, she devises online communications strategies that exceed goals, enhance operations, and regularly engage a wide audience of activists, stakeholders and supporters.

As the Chief Blogger and Deputy Director of Online Communications for the John Edwards for President Campaign, she directed and executed an online communications and outreach strategy that targeted national, niche and local bloggers, online media outlets, social networks and activists. Her work has been routinely praised as the best in the field. She also helped to develop and execute an aggressive online fundraising strategy and mobile media plan.

Prior to joining the Edwards campaign, Russo worked at the Democratic National Committee where she wrote and edited the DNC blog and implemented a 50-state online outreach strategy. She advised Democratic candidates and state parties on ways to enhance their online communications and outreach capacities and effectively connect with the progressive blogosphere.

Russo is also the founder of WIPT, Women in Politics and Technology, an all women, member-driven organization that seeks to connect women working at the crossroads of politics and technology, provide support and resources to women in these industries and, encourage more women, especially young women, to enter the fields of politics and technology.

She has been a featured speaker at the Personal Democracy Forum, the YearlyKos Convention, the Take Back America Conference and the Center for American Progress’ Internet Advocacy Roundtable. In addition, she has trained hundreds of individuals in the best practices of online engagement in partnership with a variety of organizations, including the DNC, DLCC, EMILY’s List, George Washington University, the New Organizing Institute and Campaign and Elections Magazine. She is also a regular contributor to the award-winning blog at TechPresident.com.

Russo has a diverse professional background – she has worked in both the political and non-profit worlds, in a variety of roles from field organizer, to fundraiser, to press secretary – all of which inform her current work. She is a native of Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Boca Raton, Florida where she first began blogging in 1999.

UPDATE: Mary Jacoby wrote through an earlier version of this post by Farhan Daredia. The byline on it has since been changed.

A human rights group is claiming that an Afghan detained at the Guantanamo Bay  military prison was only about 12 years old when he was brought there by U.S. officials, Reuters reported today.

Official records indicate Mohammed Jawad, who was brought to the military brig almost seven years ago, was 16 or 17 when he came to Guantanamo Bay, Reuters said. His family does not have official documents that give his exact birth date, but Afghan human rights commissioner Nader Nadery said his group has determined that Jawad was born around 1991, according to Reuters.

The Defense Department has denied the claims, but Major Eric Montalvo, a Pentagon-appointed U.S. Marine Corps lawyer representing Jawad, wants him released, Reuters said.

“We have a child of Afghanistan that was wrongfully taken from this country and he needs to be returned,” Montalvo said at a press conference. “He was tortured, he was abused over seven years of custody.”

Want to be a Guantanamo Bay detainee without leaving the comfort of your home? Scottish software company T-Enterprise is working on a video game to do just, the Deadline Scotland blog reported this week.

Starring in “Rendition: Guantanamo” will be Moazzam Begg, a British Muslim who spent time in the military brig before he was released in 2005, according to the blog. He will provide sound and have a 3D rendering of himself in the video game. The object of the game will be to escape from the prison, the blog said.

“It’s been in production for a year and two months. You start the game with the orange boiler suit, cuffs and earmuffs,” Director of T-Enterprise Zarrar Chishti told Deadline Scotland. “There are certain rules we can’t break after meeting politicians so we are not making the game too extreme.”

The game is slated for release in January 2010, according to the blog.

This is not the first virtual adaptation of Guantanamo Bay. The prison already has a presence on virtual world of  Second Life, where “visitors are shackled to the floor of a C-17 military transport plane, hooded, berated, given an orange jumpsuit and placed in a cell,” according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The GOP candidates vying to run against New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine in the next election had an interesting debate last night.  Not only was it the last debate before the primary, but it was also off-camera.  Steve Lonegan, who is now trailing former New Jersey U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie by 23 points, showed up to the debate almost 7 minutes late.  Had he shown up a few seconds later, he would not have been allowed to participate.  The debate offered some details about the candidates; for example, Lonegan bought liverwurst last time he went to the supermarket and Christie drives a Lincoln Navigator.

And here’s some quotes from the debate, courtesy of The Star-Ledger:

“This is the type of foolish hyperbole we’ve come to expect from you,” Christie told Lonegan after Lonegan called Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, who once worked for Christie, “the most liberal state supreme court chief justice in the nation.”

“I’m sure that you like to hear that coming out of your mouth,” said Christie, a former U.S. attorney and Morris County freeholder. “You just make things up as you go along.”

Lonegan, the former mayor of Bogota in Bergen County, snapped back during later segments, talking over his opponent’s answer with “cute, cute” and questioning why Christie kept silent when Lonegan opposed a plan to raise tolls on state highways.

“Chris had nothing to say whatsoever,” Lonegan said.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) wants Attorney General Eric Holder to give him more information about the funding of the Pennsylvania-based National Drug Intelligence Center backed by Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), The Hill reported last night.

Congress tried to strip funding for the center two years ago, The Hill said. Coburn previously commissioned a report that found the NDIC did not have a consistent mission over its 15 year existence, and “its data was not very useful to the other drug control agencies,” according to The Hill.

But the money is still slated to flow into the NDIC with $44 million set aside for the center in the proposed fiscal 2010 DOJ budget. The NDIC, however, is now called the Center for Strategic Intelligence in the budget,  The Hill said.

“I am concerned about both the costs and the motivation of this proposed name change,� Coburn wrote in his letter, according to The Hill.

We previously reported that the Justice Department is already investigating Murtha for giving earmarks to defense contractor Mountaintop Technologies for them to issue grants and monitor small Pennsylvania police departments.