Matt Mead (Matt Mead for Governor)
Matt Mead, a former Wyoming U.S. Attorney, will be one of seven candidates vying for the Republican nomination for governor. Friday marked the deadline for major party candidates to file with the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office.
The other Republicans in the race are Alan Kousoulos; state auditor Rita Meyer; former state Agriculture Director Ron Micheli; John H. Self; state House Speaker Colin Simpson; and Tom A Ubben.
Five Democrats filed paperwork to seek the nomination for the open seat currently occupied by Gov. Dave Freudenthal, who is term limited. They are Pete Gosar; Al Hamburg; Wyoming Democratic Party chairwoman Leslie Petersen; Rex Wilde; and Chris L. Zachary.
Both primaries will take place August 17.
The task force charged with determining the fate of Guantanamo Bay prisoners has recommended to Congress that more than half of the detainees be released, The Washington Post reported.
Of the 240 Guantanamo Bay detainees, only 10 percent were “leaders, operatives and facilitators involved in plots against the United States,” the Guantanamo Review Task Force found in its final report. The task force finished its report in January, but only released copies to members of Congress this week. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the report
According to the report, 126 detainees should be released to their home countries or a third-party country. Another 36 should be prosecuted and 48 should be held indefinitely under the laws of war, the task force found.
The task force’s yearlong review was conducted by officials from agencies including the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as the Departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security.
More than 60 career prosecutors, agents, analysts and attorneys picked through detainee files. Detainee transfers required a unanimous decision by all agencies on the task force.
“It is important to emphasize that a decision to approve a detainee for transfer does not reflect a decision that a detainee poses no threat or no risk of recidivism,” the report said, according to The Post. “The review participants nonetheless considered those detainees appropriate candidates for transfer from a threat perspective, in light of their limited skills, minor organizational roles, or other factors.”
Read the full Washington Post story here.
The Senate confirmed by voice vote Friday two more U.S. Attorneys.
They are:
- Stephanie Finley was tapped on Jan. 20 to replace acting U.S. Attorney William Flanagan in the Western District of Louisiana U.S. Attorney’s office. Flanagan has led the Shreveport, La.-based office since Donald Washington stepped down as U.S. Attorney in January. Flanagan’s son, Robert, made national headlines in January for allegedly tampering with the phones in the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) with three men including conservative documentary film-maker James O’Keefe. Finley has been an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana since 1995. Read more about her here.
- Laura Duffy was nominated on Feb. 24 to be U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California. She is the first Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney in the Southern District since Carol Lam, who was one of the U.S. Attorneys dismissed during 2006 by the Bush administration. Read more about Duffy here.
Laura Duffy (voiceofsandiego.org)
The Senate has now confirmed 51 of President Barack Obama’s U.S. Attorney nominees. The chamber has yet to consider another 16 would-be U.S. Attorneys who are waiting for votes in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Elena Kagan (Flickr Creative Commons photo by dsearls)
Justice Department officials are pushing back on reports that the White House has hijacked the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.
While the department often takes the lead on vetting and preparing judicial nominees, the White House has long steered Supreme Court picks though the confirmation process, said a senior Justice Department official.
“It’s not true that it’s changed,” the official said. “It’s the White House’s job with some input and help from the Justice Department.”
The division of labor in a Supreme Court nomination is a sensitive subject; such nominations are rare, receive gobs of attention and have potential to fuel the careers of individuals who work on them.
The department’s level of involvement has varied, reaching what was perhaps a high point in the Bush administration.
The department hosted mock confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees John Roberts Jr. and Samuel Alito Jr. in a fourth-floor conference room. The head of the department’s Office of Legal Policy a the time, Rachel Brand, ran the sessions, known as murder boards. The office was also tasked with document production and round-the-clock press monitoring.
Kagan’s murder boards are expected to take place in the White House, like those of President Barack Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Department officials will participate.
Christopher Schroeder (DOJ)
There are other, subtle differences that mark a shift in the department’s role from the previous administration. For instance, Brand held background briefings with reporters immediately following the nominations of Roberts and Alito. Ronald Klain, chief of staff to Vice President Joseph Biden, headed the press briefing after Kagan’s nomination this month.
In the Clinton administration, all the preparation for nomination of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took place at the White House, while the work on the nomination of Justice Stephen Breyer was divided between the Justice Department and the White House.
Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler disputed the notion that the Justice Department had lost ground on Supreme Court nominations, and she pointed out that the Office of Legal Policy’s top official, Christopher Schroeder, wasn’t confirmed until late April.
According to one Justice Department lawyer, the office lost some credibility with the White House after Republicans seized on holes in the Senate questionnaire of a controversial nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
Goodwin Liu (Berkeley Law)
The nominee, Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, was forced to supplement his nomination materials four times. Republicans reacted with outrage, accusing Liu of omitting publications and speeches to conceal his views. White House officials fumed.
The Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed Liu’s nomination, along party lines, earlier this month.
The lawyer said that some in OLP feel as though the Justice Department’s limited involvement in the Kagan nomination is punishment for the Liu omissions and that the office has come under increased supervision by the Office of the Associate Attorney General.
The senior Justice official said both assertions were false. OLP is playing the same supporting role in the Kagan nomination as it did in Sotomayor’s last year and continues to compile questionnaires and prep nominees to the lower federal courts, the official said.
The Liu paperwork did not lead to more oversight of the office, the official said, adding that the Associate’s involvement in nominations work fluctuates with the workload.
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility has cleared a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin in its investigation into the 2006 U.S. Attorney firings, according to a DOJ letter sent to members of Congress this week.
Steven M. Biskupic (Marquette University)
The DOJ’s internal watchdog concluded after two years that politics did not motivate former U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic to order the prosecution of a career state official, who was accused of directing contracts to a firm with connections to Democratic Party officials.
Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin procurement official, was convicted but her case was dismissed by a federal appeals court. One appeals court judge said the prosecutors’ evidence in the case was “beyond thin.”
The prosecution came as the Bush administration fired nine U.S. Attorneys. The case got the attention of Democrats who questioned whether Biskupic was currying favor with the Bush administration.
“OPR found no evidence that Mr. Biskupic was ever told his job was in jeopardy and no evidence that department personnel involved in the decision to remove certain United States Attorneys knew anything about the Thompson investigation,” Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote in a letter (below) to members of the House Judiciary Committee. “Accordingly, OPR concluded that Mr. Biskupic did not breach any professional obligation in this matter, but rather, acted appropriately under the circumstances.”
Biskupic, a partner at the Michael Best & Friedrich LLP law firm in Milwaukee, told the Wall Street Journal that “the letter speak[s] for itself.”
“I spent almost 20 years in the department,” he said. “I remain proud of the work I did under multiple administrations.”
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Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey (Getty).
Attorney General Michael Mukasey backtracked his earlier comments that the Justice Department should appoint a special counsel to look into the alleged White House job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), telling Fox News in an interview Friday afternoon that was “highly questionable if there’s any crime.”
Sestak has said the White House promised him a job if he did not challenge Sen. Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary for Senate. In a memo issued by the White House Friday, White House counsel Robert Bauer said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel enlisted former President Bill Clinton to persuade Sestak not to run. Clinton allegedly discussed getting Sestak an unpaid, advisory role with the White House, but nothing improper occurred, Bauer wrote.
Earlier in the week, Mukasey said the allegations warranted the appointment of a special prosecutor. But on Friday afternoon, Mukasey muted his previous comments, saying it would be “a stretch” to say what occurred was criminal.
“I think that as of now, this is something that could be looked at by someone in the Public Integrity Section,” of the Justice Department, Mukasey said. “It really is a stretch. It would have to be something much more direct than what we have here.”
“If it was some sort of direct offer to him… that’s very different, Mukasey added.
UPDATED:
The parties in the Cobell lawsuit have notified the judge they have agreed to give Congress until June 15 to approve the deal. If he agrees, it will be the fourth such deadline extension for the settlement.
“We have agreed to extend the deadline to June 15, and are in the process of informing the judge and the government,” lead counsel Dennis Gingold said. Gingold said he was “confident the [Senate] leadership will do what is necessary” to approve the settlement.
The House voted to pass the legislation around 2 p.m. Friday afternoon, but the settlement still needs Senate approval before it can go into effect.
Justice Department spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz also said Friday afternoon that she believed the deadline would be extended to allow the Senate time to approve the deal.
Original post below.
A settlement in a long-running class action suit brought by American Indians against the Interior Department is on the edge of collapse after Congress failed yet again to meet a judge-imposed deadline for approving the deal.
Elouise Cobell (right) with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. (Getty)
The lead lawyer in the case said that no decision had been made about their next move, but he expected a decision by mid-afternoon Friday after the lawyers had a chance to talk with Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff, and discuss their options.
Justice and Interior Department officials announced in December that they had reached a deal with the American Indian plaintiffs on the mishandling of thousands of individual Indian trust fund accounts over more than a century. But the $1.41 billion deal required congressional approval. The deadline for Congress to sign off on the deal has already been extended three times.
Given that both sides had attempted to negotiate a settlement in the Cobell case nine times over the years, it “wouldn’t be a surprise” if this negotiation fell through, said Dennis Gingold, who represents the American Indian plaintiffs. The case is one of the largest class action suits against the government in the history of the U.S.
The House is set to consider legislation Friday that would fund settlements in two class action suits — the Cobell case and a case involving African American farmers who alleged discrimination in U.S. Department of Agriculture farm loan programs. The funding for the settlements was included in a package chock-full of unrelated items including extensions of unemployment benefits, Medicare reimbursements and several tax credits that expired at the end of last year.
After a contentious week of back-and-forth between Democrats and Republicans who opposed the cost of the measure, the House is set to vote on the bill Friday afternoon. (For procedural reasons, the House must vote on the bill first.)
But the Senate gave up waiting Thursday night and left for a one-week break in honor of the Memorial Day holiday. It is not expected to return until June 7 — more than 10 days after the May 28 deadline for congressional action imposed by U.S. District Judge James Robertson of the District of Columbia.
Gingold said members of Congress had taken the lead on pushing the settlement legislation through, but he had not seen evidence that the Obama administration was pushing the issue.
“I’m not aware of what the administration is doing,” said Gingold. “Who knows what they’re doing.”
Gingold said the government had assured them it could push Congress to meet the original deadline. Congressional aides later said that timetable was unrealistic.
“The government said it would take care of it, and it knew how to take care of Congress,” said Gingold.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel enlisted former President Bill Clinton to persuade Rep. Joe Sestak not to run in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary but nothing improper occurred, the White House counsel said in a memo issued Friday.
According to the memo, written by White House counsel Robert Bauer, Clinton asked Sestak if he wanted to take on an unpaid, advisory role with the White House and encourage him not to challenge Sen. Arlen Specter, who had switched the Democratic party last year.
The rebuttal represents the first substantive comments from the White House on the controversy. Dozens of Republicans — including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and all of the GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee — have pressed for the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to look into the White House job offer.
The full memo is embedded below.
The Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility is probing whether the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York leaked information on the insider trading case against the Galleon Group hedge fund to media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Dealbreaker.com reported this week.
Galleon founder, billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, was charged with insider trading which allegedly brought him more than $33 million in illicit profits. Rajaratnam has made several complaints about the supposed leaks and has waged a public relations war against the Journal, which used anonymous sources in its reporting of the case.
John Dowd, Rajaratnam’s lawyer, said that information in the media “could only have come from the government itself. In a number of cases, these leaks have included the identities of individuals who have never been charged with any crimes.”
The Journal has said that the use of anonymous sources isn’t unusual. But the newspaper said it does not elaborate on its reporting techniques.
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Oops!
Justice Anthony Kennedy (Stanford)
When the Supreme Court ruled last week that juveniles cannot be sentenced to life in prison without parole for crimes that don’t include homicide, it relied, in part, on bad information, the Blog of Legal Times reported Thursday.
The 6-3 opinion in Graham v Florida, authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, included statistics supplied by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons on the number of federal prisoners serving life without parole for crimes committed before they turned 18. The Bureau of Prisons found six individuals that fit that description based on its automated inmate records, and Kennedy included that detail in the opinion.
But in a letter to the court earlier this week, acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said that information was wrong. “[I]t appears that none of the six inmates listed … is serving a life sentence based solely on a non-homicide crime completed before the age of 18,” he wrote.
The Justice Department had initially stayed out of the case, according to the BLT, raising questions that may be an issue during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, who was then serving as Solicitor General.
