Dawn Johnsen (Indiana University)

Women’s advocacy groups are pressuring Maine’s GOP Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to support Dawn Johnsen’s long-stalled nomination to head the Justice Department’s Office Legal Counsel.

The Indiana University law professor “deserves a confirmation vote,” Kate Brogan of the Family Planning Association of Maine told reporters on a conference call Tuesday. For months, Collins and Snowe have refused to say where they stand on the Johnsen nomination. Objections from Senate Republicans mean Democrats need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

Collins and Snowe are moderate Republicans in an increasingly conservative party. At home, they are popular. Collins was re-elected in 2008 with 62% percent of the vote and Snowe won re-election in 2006 with 74% of the vote. But on Capitol Hill, they stand nearly alone in the Senate Republican Conference as strong supporters of abortion-rights. The Maine Republicans have a 100-percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Back when NARAL was known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, Johnsen worked as a lawyer for the abortions-rights group. That’s one reason Senate Republicans have objected to her. She was also a vocal critic of the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, which authorized the use of waterboarding on terrorism suspects, which both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have called torture. Johnsen was nominated on Feb. 11, and the Senate Judiciary Committee forwarded her name to the full Senate in March.

And still, she awaits a confirmation vote.

Sarah Standiford, Executive Director of the Maine Women’s Lobby, said the OLC “play[s] a key role in protecting our constitutional rights,” including the right to privacy. She added that Johnsen’s nomination is “particularity important” because of Johnsen’s record of supporting privacy rights.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine)

State Rep. Cynthia Dill (D-Maine) told reporters Johnsen “is a constitutional expert” who “has the experience” needed to do the job. She touted Johnsen’s “sound and independent legal advice.” Added Dill: ”Dawn Johnsen has a reputation of being fiercely independent and does not let partisan politics get in the way of defending the Constitution.”

Also Tuesday, a coalition of liberal-leaning activist and civil rights groups sent this letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to protest lack of action on the nominations of Johnsen and Tom Perez, tapped by Obama to lead the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. The groups said they were “particularly troubled,” by the long delay on Johnsen.

Johnsen has come under criticism from Republicans for her outspokenness and her writings. The nominee has expressed skepticism over the legality of a Bush-era memo that carved out an exemption for faith-based groups seeking government contracts. She has written that the broad reading of presidential authority in the Bush administration was “outlandish,â€� and its constitutional arguments were “shockingly flawed.”

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) efforts to get 60 votes to move forward on Johnsen have been hampered in part by the long illness and recent death of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), who succumbed earlier this month to brain cancer. Kennedy’s replacement has not been named. Also, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who is 91 years old, has been absent from the Senate due to illness.

But with Collins and Snowe on board, Reid would have the votes to get Johnsen over the procedural hurdle and confirmed, according to Senate aides.

Brendan Johnson (from South Dakota Watch blog via Facebook)

As the Senate prepares to consider the nomination of Brendan Johnson for U.S. Attorney for South Dakota, the son of Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) is pulling double duty, The Sioux Journal reported. The younger Johnson continues to practice in his private law firm in Sioux Falls while also bulking up for his expected new job. He’s been traveling across the state meeting with “different constituency groups and learning about the state,” Johnson told the newspaper.

Johnson’s nomination is pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee. “There is no timeline yet to get out of committee and onto the Senate floor,” he told the newspaper.

Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.)

And the nominee can’t turn to his father for help. The senator has said he won’t’ intervene in any manner in his son’s confirmation process, The Sioux Journal reported.

If confirmed, much of  Johnson’s job will focus on tribal justice, the newspaper reported. The senior Johnson sits on the Committee on Indian Affairs.

Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission officials said today they will consider revising 17-year-old guidelines regulators rely on when judging whether proposed business mergers are anticompetitive.

Christine Varney

“In light of legal and economic developments that have occurred since the last major revision of the guidelines, it is an appropriate time for the antitrust agencies to conduct a review of the guidelines to determine whether any revisions should be made to better protect American consumers and businesses from anticompetitive mergers,� said Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department’s Antitrust Division, in a statement.

After a period of public comment, the agencies will host five workshops, scheduled to take place in December and January. (The FTC will post a series of questions on its Web site later today to jump-start the discussion. They can be found here.) Varney said the regulators’ goal is to provide businesses “greater certainty when making merger decisions,” creating a more competitive marketplace that benefits consumers.

Dow Jones’ Brent Kendall nicely summarizes the arguments for revision:

Advocates for revising the merger guidelines, published in 1992, say the government’s written merger policies no longer accurately reflect the real-world practice of how U.S. antitrust agencies review mergers, which creates uncertainty for companies considering merger and acquisition transactions.

Critics also say the merger-guideline numbers used for measuring business-market concentration are too low and flag too many mergers as having possible anticompetitive effects.

Jon Leibowitz (FTC)

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said the 1992 guidelines include language anticipating revision from time to time. ”We think the time has come to do that,â€� he said a statement.

According to a DOJ news release, the regulators will consider the following topics:

the overall method of analysis used by the agencies; the use of more direct forms of evidence of competitive effects; market definition; market shares and market concentration; unilateral effects, especially in markets with differentiated products; price discrimination; geographic market definition; the relevance of large buyers; the distinction between uncommitted and committed entry; the distinction between efficiencies involving fixed and marginal cost savings; the non-price effects of mergers, especially the effects of mergers on innovation; and remedies.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider President Obama’s nominee for the Justice Department Environment and Natural Resources Division at a meeting Thursday.

Ignacia Moreno

Ignacia Moreno testified at a nomination hearing before the panel earlier this month. She said her work as a counsel on environmental programs at General Electric Co., along with her time in the Clinton Justice Department as a prosecutor in the Environment and Natural Resources Division, will be assets to her if she is confirmed.

Some Environmental Protection Agency attorneys have said they were concerned about Moreno because of her work at GE, according to a report by ProPublica, a non-profit investigative Web site. Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said he does not have concerns about Moreno’s job at GE.

The panel will also consider U.S. Attorney nominees Jenny Durkan for the Western District of Washington, Paul Fishman for New Jersey, Deborah Gilg for Nebraska and Florence Nakakuni for Hawaii.

Last week, Sessions postponed panel votes on Durkan and Fishman until the Thursday meeting. Gilg and Nakakuni are appearing on the panel agenda for the first time this week.

Northern District of Alabama prosecutors failed to disclose exculpatory information about a government contractor who stood trial in 2007 on arms control charges, defense lawyers said in a court filing last week, citing newly disclosed emails.

Alice Martin (DOJ)

Lawyers for Alex Latifi wrote in a motion filed Sept. 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama that former U.S. Attorney Alice Martin and two Assistant U.S. Attorneys violated their Brady obligations by withholding information from the defense. Latifi was acquitted in October 2007 of charges that he violated the Arms Export Control Act.

Prosecutors alleged that Latifi falsified a report to the Defense Department and sent a drawing of a Black Hawk helicopter part to China. He is CEO of Axion Corp., which manufactured military equipment, including Humvee machine-gun mounts. Axion has struggled to secure contracts since the case was brought.

The defense team of Henry Frohsin, James Barger Jr. and J. Elliott Walthall from Frohsin & Barger said they have “explicit, unequivocal evidence” that Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Estes and Angela Debro and Army investigators David Balwinski and Marcus Mills allegedly conspired with trial witness James Oglesby to conceal evidence and defraud the court.

“All of these individuals sought to present false evidence to the court with the hope of convicting defendants of a crime they knew defendants had not committed,” the defense filing says.

The testimony of Oglesby, a plant manager for the Tungsten Products unit of metal manufacturer Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, was central to the false report charge, the defense team said. Oglesby told the Army investigators that Axion did not receive parts from Tungsten Products until January 2004, and that if Latifi said otherwise he was “lying,” according to court documents.

The defense lawyers said a series of e-mails about the purportedly false report contradict Oglesby’s testimony and allegedly show of a conspiracy by the government. The e-mails were obtained last month through a related lawsuit.

The government did not disclose to the defense that there were Tungsten Products records endorsed by Oglesby that contradicted his testimony, the motion said. The defense said it was not made aware of alleged conversations between Debro and Oglesby about the records before the trial began, according to the motion, which cited emails between the prosecution and a lawyer for Allegheny Technologies Incorporated.

“The … e-mails demonstrate that the government was well aware of the import of these documents and was desperate to have them explained before the trial,” the motion said. “Yet, upon receiving whatever explanation was forthcoming, the Government elected to bury this evidence. Instead, the government called Oglesby not once, but twice, to offer misleading half-truths as well as outright lies.”

You can read the e-mails h e r e and here.

Frohsin told Main Justice that the actions allegedly perpetrated by the government in his client’s case “cannot be condoned in our society.”

“We think that the pending charges are extremely serious,” Frohsin said.

Joyce Vance (DOJ)

Martin’s successor, Joyce Vance, has been ordered by the court to respond to the motion by Sept. 28.

Vance’s office emailed the following statement to Main Justice:

This office recently learned that defense counsel for former defense contractor Alexander Latifi and his company, Axion Corporation, intended to file accusations against former U.S. Attorney Alice Martin and two current assistant U.S. attorneys, as well as two U.S. Army criminal investigators and a prosecution witness, U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance said.

Latifi and Axion were indicted and subsequently acquitted in a 2007 trial.

This filing by defense counsel is, of course, an advocate’s point of view, Vance said.  The United States will file its response, as ordered by the court, within 14 days, explaining why we disagree with defense counsel’s interpretation of events, she said.

Martin told Main Justice the motion is “baseless” and that she will file a written response with the court. The former U.S. Attorney added in a brief interview that she has no regrets about the case.

The DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility is currently reviewing an earlier complaint from defense lawyers regarding a meeting Martin attended in which AUSA Estes allegedly said: ”We don’t care if Latifi is innocent. Our goal is to put him out of business,” according to an ABA Journal report.

Some Alabama lawyers have raised questions about whether politics motivated the prosecution against Latifi.

The Internal Revenue Service investigated Latifi for a donation he made in 2005 to an an Iranian charity for medical evacuation helicopters. Latifi, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Iran, pledged the money because he had a nephew who was unable to make it to a hospital in time, the ABA Journal reported.

Jerome Gabig, Latifi’s business lawyer, told the ABA Journal in an October 2008 interview that the “check rang warn­ing bells with Dave Estes at exactly the wrong moment.” There were heightened concerns about national security in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Barger also told the ABA Journal last year that the first entry in the lead investigator’s official notebook identified Latifi’s political affiliation and said that he “gave $30,000 to a Demo­cratic politician’s charity for abused children.”

Martin’s critics have accused her of targeting Democrats. Matin, who served as Northern District of Alabama U.S. Attorney from 2001 to June 2009, has denied the allegations.

One controversy involved her attempt to prosecute ex-Gov. Don Siegelman (D) in a bid-rigging case, which her office dropped after a judge barred crucial evidence. Middle District of Alabama U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, however, later successfully prosecuted Siegelman on corruption charges. The former governor is attempting to appeal his conviction, alleging prosecutorial misconduct.

Vance became the interim U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in June, two months before she was confirmed by the Senate. Martin told Main Justice in June that the Obama administration did not force her out early, and that she recommended Vance to be her successor. Vance was an Assistant U.S. Attorney and head of the appellate section in the Birmingham office.

Attorney General Eric Holder made a special trip to attend Vance’s swearing in ceremony last month and kissed her on the cheek at the event.

Northern District of Alabama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance made three promotions in her office, her spokesperson said last week.

Here they are, with biographies from office spokesperson Peggy Sanford:

• Ramona Albin (Appellate Chief)
  Albin graduated with honors from Wesleyan University and received her law degree from the University of Texas School of Law.  After law school she was a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office in San Antonio, Texas, and later joined the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts. During her tenure as a trial attorney, she tried numerous jury and non-jury trials ranging from DWI to rape to murder cases. In January 2007, Ms. Albin joined the appellate division of the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Alabama.

• Pat Meadows (Criminal Division Deputy Chief for Public Corruption)
  Meadows has a BA from the University of Alabama. His JD is from Cumberland School of Law and his LLM in taxation from the University of Alabama Law School. He was a law clerk and staff attorney for the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. Meadows worked as an assistant district attorney for Jefferson County, Bessemer Division. He was hired as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Alabama in 1987. His primary areas of experience have been white collar crimes and public corruption. He is presently the district election officer and senior litigation counsel for the Northern District of Alabama. Meadows several times has lectured at the Department of Justice National Advocacy Center and at Ballot Integrity Voter Access Symposiums.

• Bill Simpson (Senior Litigation Counsel)
  Simpson is a veteran prosecutor in the Northern District office. Sanford did not provide further biographical information on him. She is working to obtain it. We will add his biography when we get it.

The Justice Department Office of Inspector General will review whether ACORN applied for or obtained any DOJ grant money, according to a letter from the Inspector General to the House Judiciary Committee’s top Republican.

The activist group, which helped register voters for Barack Obama in last year’s presidential election, has been at the center of a media and political storm after ACORN staffers were caught on hidden camera allegedly instructing a couple who posed as a pimp and a prostitute how to obtain housing aid for a purported brothel.

The sting operation was staged by conservative activists, and conservative media and bloggers have been most vocal in their criticisms of ACORN. But the embarassing episode, combined with allegations of embezzlement at the group, have caused many Democrats to abandon ACORN as well. The House voted last week to cut off federal funds to ACORN in a bipartisan tally, 345-75.

“I am pleased that Inspector General [Glenn] Fine has agreed to investigate whether the Justice Department provided federal funds to ACORN through its grant program,” said House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-Texas) in a statement. “The IG’s report will help Congress ensure that money allocated to support law enforcement efforts is not instead used to support criminal conduct.”

Read Fine’s letter here and the initial letter from Smith to the Inspector General here.

ACORN is the acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

A former Bush interim U.S. Attorney in Arkansas will file papers to run for Congress, The Associated Press reported today.

Tim Griffin (DOJ)

Tim Griffin, who was a key player in the U.S. Attorney firings scandal, is seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Rep. Vic Snyder (D) for his Little Rock-area House seat next year. He previously decided not to run for Senate against Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D).

He was appointed interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas in December 2006 by then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales following the dismissal of U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins.

Griffin resigned from the post after six months amid reports that his former boss, Bush White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, helped orchestrate Cummins’ firing to make way for Griffin. Read our report about Griffin’s relationship with Rove here.

Mark Shurtleff

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff plans to appeal a ruling ordering him to release a letter he sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in which he complained about Brett Tolman, the U.S. Attorney for Utah, The Associated Press reported.

Last June, Shurtleff sent an apparently angry letter to Holder about Tolman. At the time, state officials were upset about a federal round-up of Utahans suspected of illegally selling Indian artifacts plundered from burial grounds. More than 100 armed federal agents conducted raids on the homes of 24 suspects, which state officials argued was over the top. Shurtleff took aim at Tolman, whom he accused of not cooperating with state and local counterparts.

Brett Tolman (DOJ)

While Shurtleff and his staff have talked in general terms about the letter, they have refused to release copies of it to The Salt Lake City Tribune. The newspaper appealed Shurtleff’s denial to the Utah Records Committee. The committee on Sept. 10 ordered the state attorney general to release the letter. This is the ruling Shurtleff has announced he will appeal.

An attorney for The Tribune criticized Shurtleff for being “willing to waste taxpayer time and money” to appeal the decision. According to Shurtleff,  disclosing the letter would invade Tolman’s privacy.