The former head of the FBI’s white-collar crime unit in Santa Ana, Calif., will plead guilty to charges that he illegally accessed an FBI computer, according to a plea agreement filed earlier this month.
Peter H. Norell Jr. faces a misdemeanor charge stemming from a 2005 incident in which he allegedly used a computer to retrieve information he was not authorized to obtain. According to the plea agreement, Norell accessed an FBI computer on three occasions in 2005 to look up information on an individual, named in court documents T.S., who owed a debt to an acquaintance of Norell’s. The FBI agent also threatened to initiate an investigation into T.S., the agreement said.
Norell, who resigned his position with the FBI earlier this month, faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.
The Orange County Register reported Monday that Norell was recently involved in a securities fraud case against Broadcom executives, who were accused of back-dating stock options. In December, a federal judge threw out the charges against the executives, saying that federal prosecutors improperly tried to intimidate witnesses. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating the case.
A former acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia was tapped to be the clerk of the area’s federal court, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.
Julia Dudley (DOJ)
Julia Dudley, who led the Roanoke, Va.-based U.S. Attorney’s office from May 2008 until October 2009, will succeed John Corcoran, who is stepping down as the clerk of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia on Aug. 1, 2010.
She currently holds the First Assistant U.S. Attorney, civil chief, crisis management coordinator and ethics advisoral responsibility officer posts in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Dudley has worked for the office since 1988. Read more about her here.
Win for FTC in pay-for-delay fight
The Federal Trade Commission scored a victory on Monday in its long-running battle against payments from brand-name drug manufacturers to their generic counterparts. A federal judge in Philadelphia denied Cephalon Inc.’s request to dismiss antitrust suits brought by the FTC and others over its sleep disorder drug Provigil. The company paid four generic drug makers about $200 million to settle patent litigation; the generic firms agreed to refrain from offering a generic version of Provigil until 2012. “Today’s decision seems to reflect a growing understanding — first in Congress now in the courts — that brand name drug companies must not be allowed to make pay-offs to their generic competitors to keep low-cost generic drugs off the market,” FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement.
…And one setback
Separately, a federal judge in Ohio dismissed a lawsuit filed by several pharmacies against Sanofi-Aventis SA and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. over its blood-thinner, Plavix. The companies cut a deal with generic firm Apotex in 2006, but the settlement fell apart and the two parties went to trial. The retail pharmacies sued and argued that the proposed settlement was anti-competitive.
Oracle spent $1.05 million lobbying on Sun deal
Oracle Corp. spent $1.05 million on lobbying in the last three months of 2009, according to the Associated Press, slightly more than the $980,000 it spent in the last quarter of 2008. Part of that money went to lobby Congress on the regulatory review of its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems. The deal cleared DOJ antitrust scrutiny but was delayed over European concerns. The lobbying seems to have paid off. In November, Sens. John Kerry, Orrin Hatch, and 57 others wrote a letter urging regulators in Brussels to approve the acquisition.
Judge Certifies Class in LCD Antitrust Suit
A federal judge in San Francisco certified a class of direct purchasers in an antitrust lawsuit against Samsung Electronics Co., Sharp Corp., and others alleging that the makers of flat-panel screens conspired with each other to fix prices and overcharge their customers. The Justice Department has obtained several fines and pleas in a similar investigation.
The federal government has reached an agreement with a New York school district accused of ignoring complaints that other students were harassing a teenager because he acted effeminate.
Suit marked the first time since Clinton DOJ interpreted Title IX to protect LGBT students (file photo by Ryan J. Reilly).
The student was teased and harassed by his classmates because he displayed feminine characteristics, according to the lawsuit, which alleged that school authorities did not do enough to intervene.
Under the terms of the settlement, the Mohawk Central School District will write a $50,000 check to a trust fund for the student and a $25,000 check for lawyers’ fees to the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The school district also will pay for counseling sessions for the student and retain a discrimination prevention expert to review the policies in place.
The settlement is not an admission of liability, but in a joint statement, the district and DOJ said they hoped it could “serve as a model for other school districts confronting the issues of bullying and intolerance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other gender non-conforming students.”
When Justice Department lawyers joined the case in January, it marked the first time since President Bill Clinton was in office that DOJ lawyers argued that the protections against sex discrimination in Title IX apply to gender identity as well.
The government said it had “authority to intervene to seek relief from denials of equal protection if the matter is certified as a matter of general public importance,” as certified by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez.
UPDATED: “All students have the right to go to school without fearing harassment based on sex, including stereotypes about appropriate gender behavior,” Perez said in a statement released Tuesday. “Such conduct has no place in our schools, and the Justice Department looks forward to working with the District and the NYCLU to ensure that all students enjoy educational opportunities without discrimination or harassment.”
The settlement is embedded below.
The Justice Department is fighting to keep secret the names of 9,200 individuals denied clemency by President George W. Bush, Politico’s Under The Radar blog reported Monday.
Last year, a judge for the U.S. District Court for D.C. ruled that the Office of Pardon Attorney, a DOJ component, must disclose to former Washington Post reporter George Lardner Jr. the name of thousands of individuals whose applications for pardons and commutations were denied. But the Justice Department appealed.
“Pardon and commutation applicants have a substantial privacy interest in nondisclosure of the fact that they have unsuccessfully sought clemency,” the DOJ wrote in a brief opposing Lardner’s request. “The substantial privacy interest of the clemency applicants outweighs the negligible public interest in disclosure of their names.”
Although the DOJ is fighting against disclosure of the complete list, it has verified the names of pardon applicants and the standing of their applications, including denials. The DOJ argued that releasing all of the names would be an invasion of privacy and could harm the applicants.
“Disclosure of the fact that individual offenders have unsuccessfully sought pardons or commutations unquestionably will re-stigmatize the applicants and draw renewed attention to their offenses, thereby harming their prospects for successful rehabilitation and reintegration into the community, as well as possibly subjecting them to the risk of retaliation,” the DOJ wrote.
After announcing that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged 9/11 co-conspirators would be tried in federal court, Attorney General Eric Holder assembled a team of prosecutors from Alexandria, Va., and Manhattan — an elite squad for which “failure is not an option,” as Holder put it during a congressional hearing in November.
But as the possibility of a civilian trial grows more remote, the team’s participation in the trial of the century has become an open question. If President Barack Obama decides to place the defendants before a military commission, the Defense Department will have final say on the composition of the trial team. Moreover, several members of the original military trial team remain at the two agencies.
Holder and his national security adviser, Amy Jeffress, reportedly decided who would be part of the civilian trial team. Current and former Justice Department officials told Main Justice that team includes John Davis, Ray Patricco and James Trump of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia; and Michael Farbiarz, David Miller and David Raskin of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The Justice Department’s National Security Division is supporting their efforts.
The offices declined to comment on the composition of the 9/11 prosecution team, as did a spokesman for the National Security Division.
“This is still a Justice Department case,” said Joe DellaVedova, military commissions spokesman. ”Whatever decision the administration comes to, we will fully support and stand behind it.”
Davis and Raskin were named in January as likely candidates to lead the team. Davis, head of EDVA’s Criminal Division, has worked on several high-profile terrorism cases, including the prosecution of John Walker Lindh, who was convicted in 2002 of aiding the Taliban. He was an Associate Deputy Attorney General from 2004 to 2006.
Raskin stepped down as chief of SDNY’s terrorism unit last year — presumably, to work on the 9/11 cases full time — and is now the office’s Senior Trial Counsel. He was one of the prosecutors in the death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only defendant convicted in connection with the 9/11 attacks. More recently, Raskin has been overseeing the prosecution of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first Guantanamo Bay detainee transferred into the criminal justice system.
Of the others on the team, Patricco is Deputy Chief of the EDVA’s Criminal Division, and Trump is the office’s Senior Litigation Counsel. Farbiarz is co-chief of SDNY’s new Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit, and Miller is a line prosecutor in the General Crimes Unit and a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Counterterrorism Section.
As the White House reviews Holder’s decision to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in federal court, it has signaled its intent to invigorate the military tribunals. Last week, the Pentagon tapped Bruce MacDonald, a retired three-star admiral with national security and international law bona fides, to run the war court.
And now that the health care bill has been signed into law, Obama’s advisers are turning their attention to shuttering the Guantanamo detention center. Obama appears open to a deal that would see Mohammed prosecuted in a military tribunal in exchange for Republican support for the prison’s closure, but negotiations are ongoing — and could be for some time.
In the meantime, lawyers in both agencies are waiting to find out whether and to what extent they’ll be a part of history.
The Defense Department and the Justice Department work closely on the military commissions, and several military prosecutors double as federal prosecutors. The chief war crimes prosecutor, Navy Capt. John Murphy, is an Assistant U.S. Attorney from New Orleans. He would decide the makeup of the prosecution team if Obama chooses a military tribunal over a civilian trial.
Before it disbanded in November when Holder decided to prosecute the accused 9/11 plotters in federal court, the military prosecution team reflected the inter-agency partnership. Justice Department lawyers accounted for four of the trial team’s seven members and included George Toscas, now a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the National Security Division, and Ed Ryan, now the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. The top military prosecutor on the team, retired Army Col. Robert Swann, remains in the military commissions office.
“Could that team be reassembled? It’s possible,” said a Defense Department official. “But right now, we’re waiting for information like everybody else.”
Eric Bruce, a former federal prosecutor who worked on military prosecutions of high-value detainees in the Bush administration, said each side brought strengths to the 9/11 team. Military prosecutors had a firm grasp of the structure of the commissions and the rules, while Justice Department prosecutors brought a keen sense of how the case should be assembled and presented to the panel of jurors, said Bruce, who later served as Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s national security adviser.
The Justice Department provided “a wealth of historical knowledge” because the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force and federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York had investigated Mohammed for several years, added Bruce, now a partner at Kobre & Kim LLP.
“If you’re a DOJ prosecutor, and you’ve never stepped foot in a military commission, of course it’s natural to rely on military prosecutors who’ve done 45 courts martial,” he said. “But they probably haven’t spent the last nine years tracking KSM’s movements around the world.”
Military prosecutors, several of whom have experience prosecuting complex drug and violent-crime cases, bristle at the notion that the 9/11 cases are beyond their talents. But few would disagree that Raskin and Davis, the leaders of the Justice Department team, are at the top of the list of a select group of experienced counterterrorism prosecutors. One Justice Department official said there’s no doubt they’d assist in a military prosecution — if they’re willing.
“It’s a pretty big request to ask people to give up their lives to move to Cuba for a trial in a system that they are not intimately familiar with,” said Christopher Morvillo, a former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
Added Morvillo, now counsel at Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, Anello & Bohrer P.C.: “It would be above and beyond the call of duty — but it’s also the case of a lifetime.”
Said Bruce: ”It would be tough, but I think they have made a lot of sacrifices so far, and they’re dedicated prosecutors. I would think that if they could do it, they would do it.”
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March was shaping up to be a happy month for the members of the Hutaree Christian Militia in Michigan.
Joshua Stone married Shannon Stone earlier this month (Facebook).
Joshua Stone, the son of the organization’s leader David Brian Stone, wed his fiance Shannon in a small service on March 13.
The honeymoon didn’t last long. This weekend Josh’s father, his father’s wife Tina Stone, his brother David Brian Stone Jr. and five others — Joshua Clough, 28; Michael Meeks, 40; Thomas Piatek, 46; Kristopher Sickles, 27; and Jacob Ward, 33 — were arrested by the FBI. Josh is currently a fugitive, wanted in connection with an alleged plot to kill law enforcement officers.
In indictments unsealed on Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan alleged that they planned to kill an unidentified member of local law enforcement and then attack other law enforcement officers when they gathered for the funeral.
The nine individuals were charged with seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosives materials and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence.
According to a Web site affiliated with the organization, the group was preparing to face the anti-Christ.
Tracking Extremist Movements
A U.N. flag burns in a Hutaree video (YouTube)
Attorney General Eric Holder called the arrests of of the Hutaree members a “severe blow to a dangerous organization.”
“The indictment unsealed today outlines an insidious plan by anti-government extremists to murder a law enforcement officer in order to lure police from across the nation to the funeral where they would be attacked with explosive devices,” Holder said. “Thankfully, this alleged plot has been thwarted and a severe blow has been dealt to an dangerous organization that today stands accused of conspiring to levy war against the United States.”
The indictment does not mention how the FBI tracked the group, but it does mention that leader David Stone used the Internet and e-mailed diagrams of improvised explosive devices to a person he believed capable of manufacturing them. He also organized a meet up in February of several militia groups in Kentucky, but weather prevented them from reaching their destination.
“This is an example of radical and extremist fringe groups which can be found throughout our society,” FBI special agent in charge Andrew Arena said. “The FBI takes such extremist groups seriously, especially those who would target innocent citizens and the law enforcement officers who protect the citizens of the United States.”
An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment on how the agency investigated the group.
But the group’s online presence would have been a good place to start – the membership of a Facebook group associated with the organization includes several of those indicted. The group also had a Myspace page and posted highly stylized YouTube and Facebook videos set to background music.
Earlier this month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained an internal Justice Department document through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that demonstrates that federal law enforcement have begun to use social networking sites to gather information for investigations.
That makes sense, said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, because the Internet has made it easier than ever for extremist groups to organize. The SPLC, a nonprofit civil rights organization, has tracked the rise in militia organizations for several years.
“It’s a more efficient way for these people to share their ideas, to get their ideas out there, to recruit, to interact,” Beirich said. “It’s much harder in the 90s when you had to send faxes to tell people what the government is doing bad.”
Joshua Stone and his father David Brian Stone (Facebook).
Law enforcement must have some indication of violence before they can keep files on groups, Beirich said. But the Internet makes that easier.
“It provides intelligence in a way that it didn’t before,” Beirich said.
Beirich attributed the rise of militia movements to several factors, including the economic downturn, the Democrats’ control of Congress and the presidency and changes in the racial dynamics of the country.
According to Beirich, there has been a 240 percent rise in the Patriot movement — extremist groups that see the federal government as their enemy – of which militias are a part, from 2008 to 2009.
But Beirich said the Hutaree group was a bit out of the ordinary.
“That’s a little different than your typical militia,” said Beirich. “These groups usually profess to be Christian, but that type of apocalyptic rhetoric is something quite different. It’s not something typical you see in these types of groups. It almost looks more like a cult than your classic militia.”
The Justice Department’s top antitrust cop, Christine Varney, joined New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer in upstate New York on Monday to discuss the state of the dairy industry with farmers from the region.
The meeting in Batavia, arranged at Schumer’s request, attracted about 200 people, according to WCBS television.
The session follows a formal workshop in Iowa earlier this month that is part of a series hosted by the DOJ and the Department of Agriculture exploring competition in agricultural industries.
Schumer and other critics have complained that the prices paid to dairy farmers have dropped, but consumers haven’t seen any parallel decrease in the price of milk at the store. Schumer said prices paid to dairy farmers are the lowest in nearly four decades
“For too long farmers have been receiving rock-bottom prices for their product, while prices have not dropped commensurately for consumers at the stores. … It just doesn’t add up,” Schumer said in a statement according to The Buffalo News.
A Catskills-based Web site called the Watershed Post, along with several farmers and farm advocates, blogged about the event. Some highlights:
*Schumer went after Dean Foods, hard.
“Dean Foods is the largest fluid milk buyer in the country. … They dominate too much of the dairy industry, they thwart competition, and both farmers and consumers are hurt. … Dean Foods’ profits went up by a third while milk prices to farmers crashed,” Schumer said, according to Lissa Harris from Watershed Post.
The Justice Department sued Dean Foods in January alleging that the dairy processor’s acquisition of two plants in Wisconsin eliminated competition in the milk industry. In a filing last Thursday, Dean Foods argued that the DOJ did not define the geographic market in its complaint in a manner required by its own guidelines for challenging a merger.
*Varney, who grew up outside Syracuse and went to college in Albany, said she milked cows and is familiar with family farms.
*One speaker said the prices paid to dairy producers dropped more than 30 percent in 2007 and 2008, and 25 percent last year.
*Some speakers stressed the role that large retailers play — saying they pressure the processors, who in turn pressure producers to lower prices.
*One farmer with 1,800 cows lost half a million dollars last year. He said he used to sell to five processors, but they’ve all gone out of business or been sold to Dean Foods.
A local television news station in Rochester reported before the session that some farmers in the area are paid $5 per hundred pounds of milk, while others received more than $16 for the same amount.
“Our problem really is that we are getting a shrinking dollar … but the consumer is not seeing a lower price,” one farmer told the station, WHAM.
A woman who is charged with impersonating an FBI agent allegedly hired an assistant to help her transcribe interrogations and write condolence letters to deceased CIA agents out of her Arlington, Va., apartment, according to an FBI affidavit.
Brenna Marie Reilly, 29, could face up to three years in prison for allegedly claiming she was an FBI Assistant Director and FBI Director of Forensics. She has been released to her mother’s custody and has been ordered to have her mental health evaluated, according to a court document.
She made job offers to two people, according to the affidavit. One person turned down the assistant position. The other person agreed to take the job, which was set to start on Dec. 15, 2009. The man who accepted the job resigned as a manager for the National Trade Productions so he could work for Reilly.
Reilly didn’t pay the assistant a salary, but gave him about $800 worth of Christmas presents for his fiance, the affidavit said. She also purchased a Smith & Wesson knife for him.
She told the assistant in December that they were going to visit Germany and Iraq to complete FBI work, according to the affidavit. Reilly went to pick the assistant up at his parents’ house in New Jersey to travel to Germany. The parents bought her a $50 silk scarf from Rockefeller Center in New York and a set of engraved cards to thank Reilly for employing their son.
Reilly contacted the parents on Jan. 3 to let them know the assistant was in Germany and that they were not permitted to contact him and they shouldn’t worry, according to the affidavit.
But he didn’t go to Germany. He told his parents a week later that he stayed in Reilly’s apartment and a hotel “all under the threat that if he were to contact and tell anybody that he was actually in the United States, Reilly would terminate his employment,” the affidavit said.
One of his parents submitted a complaint to the FBI on Jan. 20.
Reilly’s attorney, a federal public defender, did not immediately return a request for comment from The Washington Examiner, which first reported the story Monday.
Former Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel official John Yoo told The Los Angeles Times in a report published Monday that he relishes being a conservative law professor in “the People’s Republic of Berkeley.”
John Yoo (Getty Images)
Yoo, who is a tenured professor at University of California, Berkeley, teaches a constitutional law course and seminar at the predominantly liberal university. He has often been the target of protests around campus for his role in drafting the George W. Bush administration’s so-called “torture memos,” which authorized harsh interrogation methods against terrorism suspects.
“I think of myself as being West Berlin during the Cold War, a shining beacon of capitalism and democracy surrounded by a sea of Marxism,” Yoo told the newspaper.
A Justice Department report released last month cleared Yoo of any misconduct in authoring the memos. DOJ veteran David Margolis said in the report that Yoo only showed “poor judgment.”
Christopher Edley, the law school’s dean, has faced pressure from Yoo’s critics to fire the tenured professor ever since the memos were released last year. The dean dismissed the possibility of taking action against Yoo after the DOJ report was released last month.
“I hope these new developments will end the arguments about faculty sanctions, but we should and will continue to argue about what is right or wrong, legal or illegal, in combating terrorism. That’s why we are here,” Edley said in a statement, according to the L.A. Times.
Although Yoo told the newspaper he might be tempted to return to public service if a Republican becomes president, he said he likes working at a college campus and bringing a new perspective into the discussion.
“Then [my law students] can always say, ‘I’ve met a conservative.’ They can tell their family and friends,” Yoo told the L.A. Times.
