Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has issued his most recent report on pork-barrel spending at the Department of Justice, titled “Party at the DOJ.” We were flipping through it and boy, the DOJ sure does look bad, hosting frivolous events like dances, trips to amusement parks and … a party for McGruff the Crime Dog.

Our original photo (photo by Christopher M. Matthews / Main Justice)

Wait – a party for McGruff? That’s our photo illustrating the senator’s report, right there on Page 13. The photo is from a recent event we covered on the rooftop at Venable LLP’s offices in Washington, featuring Assistant U.S. Attorney Laurie Robinson and the law enforcement canine mascot.

But our photo is copyrighted. And Sen. Coburn never contacted us for reprint rights.

Screen grab of Coburn's "Party at the DOJ" report.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on which Coburn sits oversees intellectual property rights, including copyright law. Surely the senator and his staff know better than to use a Senate-accredited news organization’s photo without permission?

There’s a roiling debate in the beleaguered news industry about erecting pay walls, how much of a copyrighted article is “fair use” for bloggers to reproduce, and other existential issues involving a lack of payment for our expensive content production.

We don’t mind that Coburn used our copyrighted photo for partisan political purposes. We do mind that he didn’t pay us for it.

A year after a major public corruption sting in New Jersey, Justice Department investigators have determined that public comments made by New Jersey’s former acting U.S. Attorney did not violate DOJ regulations, the Star-Ledger reported.

Ralph Marra (DOJ)

The department’s internal ethics probe centered on remarks in a news conference made by Ralph Marra Jr., as well as the former head of the FBI’s Newark Division, Weysan Dun. Democrats claimed the two unfairly politicized the sting to help the political chances of Marra’s ex-boss,  Chris Christie, the former N.J.  U.S. Attorney who successfully ran for governor last year.

Christie, the Republican challenger, defeated Democrat Jon Corzine last November.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility issued a letter last week, which was obtained by the Star-Ledger, clearing Marra and Dun of any wrongdoing in the wake of the high-profile corruption case.

“Based upon the results of our investigation, we concluded that you did not violate any professional obligation and thus did not commit professional misconduct or exercise poor judgment in this matter,” wrote Mary Patrice Brown, the office’s acting head.

The comments in question were made at a July 2009 news conference announcing the arrests of 44 people — 29 of which were public officials — in a far-reaching federal corruption probe.

In response to questions about state corruption, Marra said: “There are easily reforms that could be made within this state that would make our job easier, or even take some of the load off our job. There are too many people that profit off the system the way it is and so they have no incentive to change it. The few people that want to change it seem to get shouted down. So how long that cycle’s going to continue I just don’t know.”

Department guidelines restrict prosecutors from making “extrajudicial comments� that may have the effect of “heightening public condemnation of the accused.� In addition, critics argued the remarks implicitly endorsed Christie.

Corruption became a central issue in New Jersey, and Christie, the state’s former U.S. Attorney, leveraged his law-and-order background in the aftermath of the sting. His campaign vowed to clean up corruption, and he later associated Corzine with the sting despite the fact that the then-governor was not implicated in the case and had announced proposals for ethics reform.

Former Democratic assemblyman Louis Manzo, who was netted in the sting, also accused the FBI and federal prosecutors of choreographing the operation to propel Christie into office.

Upon winning the race, rumors surfaced that Christie would nominate Marra to be the state’s next Attorney General — an appointed position in New Jersey.

In fact, Christie nominated Marra for his current position as senior vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the state’s Sports and Exposition Authority — with a reported paycheck of $195,000.

Nine other former colleagues have also been bumped into the Christie administration since he became governor, including:

• Marc Larkins to be the executive director of the New Jersey School Development Authority Board
• Robert Hanna to be the director of the Division of Law in the Attorney General’s office.
• Stephen Taylor to be the director of Criminal Justice in the AG’s office.
• Deborah Gramiccioni to be director of the Authorities Unit in the AG’s office.
• Jeffrey S. Chiesa to be Christie’s chief counsel.
• Kevin M. O’Dowd to be deputy chief counsel.
• Charles McKenna to be head of the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.
• Michele Brown to be appointments counsel.
• Lee Solomon to be the president of the board of public utilities.

Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Christie, said the ethics allegations were “ridiculous.� Instead, he pointed to the question of who leaked word of the internal probe to the press last August.

“Ralph Marra was a professional, highly regarded federal prosecutor for more than 20 years,” Drewniak told The Associated Press on Sunday. “More offensive was that the allegations — now shown to be patently false — were leaked by officials in the Justice Department itself. To our minds, that raised much more serious questions about politicization of an important and successful criminal investigation.”

Days before Connecticut Assistant U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy started her investigation into the 2006 U.S. Attorney firing scandal, a case she oversaw collapsed amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct , the Nieman Watchdog investigative website reported Sunday.

Nora Dannehy (DOJ)

A federal appeals court ruled that the prosecution team, headed up by Dannehy, unlawfully held back evidence in a Connecticut political corruption case, according to Justice Integrity Project Executive Director Andrew Kreig, who is also a Huffington Post commentator. Last week, the Justice Department announced it had finished its investigation into the firing of nine George W. Bush U.S. Attorneys without filing criminal charges in connection with the scandal.

“The ruling didn’t cite Dannehy by name, and although it was publicly reported it apparently never came up in the news coverage of her appointment,” Kreig wrote. “But it now calls into question the integrity of her investigation by raising serious concerns about her credibility — and about whether she was particularly vulnerable to political pressure from within the Justice Department.”

Read more here.

Matthew Miller, head of the Office of Public Affairs (photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice)

Attorney General Eric Holder’s spokesman, Matthew Miller, married Megan Anne-Maura Bartley on Saturday, per the New York Times wedding announcements.

The bride, 29, is a law student at George Washington University. The groom, 36, heads the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs.

Politico’s Playbook published a rundown of the Minneapolis nuptials, including what Miller’s groomsmen wore: “Matching glass cufflinks with Johnny Cash emblazoned on them.”

Holder, meanwhile, is in Africa this week, speaking to the continent’s leadership at an African Union summit on Sunday, and will meet with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Tuesday.

A U.S. Attorney who was among those dismissed in the 2006 Justice Department firing controversy said Thursday that he was not surprised by the Justice Department’s recent decision not to file criminal charges in connection with the scandal.

John McKay (Seattle University)

John McKay, who was the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington from 2001 to 2006, told KUOW News that he has confidence in Assistant U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy — who was appointed in September 2008 by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey as a special prosecutor to probe the firings, particularly that of former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. But McKay said he was disappointed that the DOJ didn’t say who fired the nine George W. Bush administration U.S. Attorneys and why.

The former U.S. Attorney also said he was never questioned as part of the investigation into the scandal.

“I think it’s a little curious and somewhat disappointing that she didn’t bother questioning the United States Attorneys who were at the heart of the investigation,” McKay told the radio station.

McKay said he concluded from the probe that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who led the DOJ during the scandal, and other DOJ officials dishonored their offices and that their actions hurt the U.S. justice system.

“Those who wield the sort of power that the police and prosecutors wield have to be people who are free from politics,” McKay told KUOW News. “[The Republican and Democratic parties] can’t tell prosecutors who they should investigate, indict or send to prison. And I think we got dangerously close to that in Alberto Gonzales’s Department of Justice.”

Constitutional law professor and Justice Department Senior Counselor Laurence Tribe found himself unexpectedly imprisoned last Sunday in a sweltering elevator at the Social Safeway, the Washington Post Reliable Source blog reported.

Laurence Tribe, senior counselor for Access to Justice, speaks at the American Constitution Society National Conference. (photo by Channing Turner / Main Justice)

Tribe and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Westling, spent 13 minutes awaiting rescue in the hot elevator inside the chic Georgetown grocery store.

According to accounts, Tribe and Westling entered the elevator at ground level to go up but found themselves trapped inside with no cell phone signal and no help forthcoming. Attempts to alert store security using the elevator emergency button never got beyond an off-site dispatcher.

“We were getting short of air,� said Tribe, 68.

They banged on the door until an unidentified firefighter responded, saying a rescue squad was on the way. When the doors finally opened, the store manager apologized to Tribe and Westling, saying she didn’t hear the alarm.

Tribe, a former Harvard law professor with many Supreme Court cases under his belt, said he will not take official action against the store but was unsatisfied with Safeway’s response.

“They need to be publicly accountable,� he said.

Tribe joined the Justice Department as Senior Counselor to the Access to Justice initiative, which works toward more effective and affordable representation for indigent defendants.

Safeway public affairs manager Craig Muckle told the Post that overheated motor lubricant was probably to blame for the elevator’s failure. Safeway will also try to make amends with Tribe, Muckle said.

Attorney General Eric Holder will travel to Uganda and Egypt for meetings with foreign leaders next week, Justice Department officials said Friday.

Attorney General Eric Holder (file photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).

The purpose of the trip will be to “discuss joint U.S.-Africa efforts to promote peace, development and justice, including cooperation on fighting terrorism,” according to the Justice Department.

Holder will attend a meeting of the African Union and meet with leaders of various African nations in Kampala, Uganda on Sunday. He will travel to Cairo, Egypt on Monday and meet with Egyptian officials on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he will host a roundtable discussion with regional reporters at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

A spokeswoman said she could not say which Justice Department officials would be traveling with the Attorney General until after the trip is concluded.

The trip marks Holder’s second visit overseas in recent months. On June 30, Holder flew to Afghanistan, where he met with top officials and sized up the country’s justice system.

Holder’s trip was announced less than two weeks after two attacks in Uganda during the World Cup, which were believed to have been carried out by the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Attorney General Eric Holder at a news conference on Thursday (photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).

The National Urban League will honor Attorney General Eric Holder along with musician Stevie Wonder and poet Dr. Maya Angelou at the group’s upcoming centennial conference.

Holder will receive the League’s “Legend Award� for his influential work within the African American community during the 2010 National Urban League Centennial Conference next week, according to the conference’s website.

The conference will run from July 28 through July 31 and host many prominent civil rights activists and speakers, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, President and CEO of BET Debra Lee, American activist Marian Wright Edelman, political strategist Jamal Simmons and former Ambassador to the U.N. Andrew Young.

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have also been invited to the centennial celebrations.

The National Urban League is a civil rights organization that works to improve the standard of living in underserved urban communities. Founded in 1910, it now operates in 36 states and the District of Columbia.

This year’s theme, “Empowerment Time: Past, Present and Future,� represents the movement’s progress and future promise, Urban League Board Chair John Hofmeister wrote in an open letter.

The story was first reported by Politics 365, a blog covering African American political news.

Former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez and Attorney General Eric Holder (photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).

Justice Department officials past and present celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act Friday, the same day as the Civil Rights Division announced it was considering new accessibility rules for movies, equipment and furniture, 911 services and websites.

Attorney General Eric Holder, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas E. Perez, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.) — the primary sponsor of the law — spoke at the ceremony.

Thornburgh recalled how when he was Attorney General in the early 1990s, the Justice Department planned to hold an event in the Great Hall to announce new ADA regulations. Shortly before the event they realized that the Great Hall itself wasn’t handicapped accessible, but engineers got to work and made it so in time for the event.

Since the passage of ADA, the Justice Department has  “had some problems in the courts,” which Thornburgh said came from judges with a “woeful lack of understanding about what it meant to have a disability.” He also urged state and local governments not to cutback on compliance with ADA regulations because of the recession.

Holder touted the work of the Justice Department on access for the disabled, saying that the department has returned to a model of aggressive enforcement actions.

“At every level of our work – and in cooperation with our partners across the administration – we have placed a renewed focus on enforcing the ADA,” Holder said in prepared remarks.

But the Justice Department had not done enough within its own house to offer work opportunities to those with disabilities, he said.

“Put bluntly, we do not have sufficient numbers of people with disabilities who serve as our colleagues in this great agency,” Holder said.

As part of the Justice Department’s Diversity Management Plan, Holder said, the new position of Special Assistant for Disability Resources would be filled in the coming weeks. The Attorney General’s Committee on the Employment of Persons with Disabilities is also making recommendations for improving the recruitment, retention and accomodation of persons with disabilities, he said.

Former Assistant Attorneys General for Civil Rights Stephen Pollack, John Dunne and Jim Turner attended the ceremony Friday, along with representatives from the disability rights movement.

The event came the same day as Justice Department officials announced new ADA regulations are in the works to address the accessibility of movies, equipment and furniture, 911 services and websites.

Being unable to access websites “puts individuals at a great disadvantage in today’s society, which is driven by a dynamic electronic marketplace and unprecedented access to information,” the department said in an advanced notices of proposed rulemaking.

Many websites “fail to incorporate or activate features that enable users with disabilities to access all the site’s information or elements. For instance, individuals who are deaf are unable to access information in Web videos and other multimedia presentations that do not have captions.”

Making websites friendly to disabled users is neither difficult nor especially costly, and often does not require changes to the format or appearance of a website, the DOJ said.

In another advanced notice of proposed rulemaking concerning video and movie captioning, the DOJ said representatives from the movie theater industry had strongly urged the government not to issue regulations regarding movie captioning at theaters, noting that new advances in digital cinema will make it much easier to provide closed captions or video described movies.

While the Justice Department is aware that costs associated with providing equipment “may indeed constitute an undue burden” on some movie theater owners and operators, the notice said the DOJ “believes that it may be unnecessary and inappropriate to wait to establish rules pertaining to closed captioning and video description for movies.”

The regulations are available here: ADA 1, ADA 2, ADA 3, and ADA 4

Newsweek Managing Editor Daniel Klaidman is among a handful of journalists who has covered Eric Holder so long that his access to the Attorney General can only be described as extraordinary.

It’s not unheard of for the Attorney General to call Klaidman directly to talk about what’s on his mind. (Shortly after he took the job, in fact, Holder called Klaidman — only to be put on hold for two minutes when the reporter’s assistant didn’t realize who was on the line.)

Now, the former Legal Times senior reporter is writing his first book, in which Holder is set to be a key figure.

The book, temporarily named “The Arc of Justice: Obama, Terrorism, and the Struggle over American Ideals,” is slated for publication by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the spring of 2012. It will probe the Obama administration’s shaping of national security policy and counter-terrorism efforts in the wake of the controversies of the George W. Bush administration.

Dan Klaidman, managing editor of Newsweek, is working on a book about the terrorism policies of the Obama administration (Newsweek).

“The Justice Department is obviously a significant part of this story, and Holder therefore is an important character,” Klaidman said in an interview. “But I’m as focused on other advisers to the president as I am on the Attorney General.”

Klaidman said the book “will chronicle in narrative fashion the goals and desire of rolling back some of the controversial policies from the previous administration and how big a challenge that is, how really difficult that turns out to be for a variety of reasons.”

Holder is aware he is working on the book but has not yet sat down for a formal interview, Klaidman said.

Klaidman began covering Holder for Legal Times in the late 1980s, when Holder was a District of Columbia Superior Court judge. He continued to follow Holder during his tenure from 1993 to 1997 as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and when he served as Deputy Attorney General from 1997 until the end of the Clinton administration.

Klaidman joined Newsweek in 1996. He was a key member of the investigative team whose coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal earned a National Magazine Award. He also served as Jerusalem bureau chief, was named Washington Bureau Chief in 2000 and managing editor in 2006.

In July 2009, after a long interview at Holder’s kitchen table in his Northwest Washington home,  Klaidman broke the news that Holder was leaning towards appointing a special prosecutor to conduct a preliminary review of whether CIA officers had gone beyond the guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel when interrogating terrorism suspects. (Last month, Holder told law students that Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham of the District of Connecticut is close to a decision). Holder gave Klaidman and Newsweek another interview in December.

Obama, like Holder, is “trying to navigate between the left and the right here to try to come up with sensible, prudent, tough and just policies in an extremely difficult, extremely polarized environment, so I want to try to tell that story,” Klaidman said.

Holder and the Obama administration’s handling national security issues hasn’t gone as planned. The administration has yet to make a final decision on where to hold the trial of alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed . Holder announced last year that KSM would face a civilian trial in New York City, but the plan faced significant political opposition.

The administration also took flack for reading Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underpants bomber,” his Miranda rights and placing him in the civilian justice system. Efforts to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay also have stalled because of congressional opposition. Those issues have caused strain between the White House, most notably Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and the Justice Department.

Klaidman said there’s no question that Justice Department officials are frustrated with the extent to which politics have hampered their efforts.

“These are people who’ve obviously served in the government before and are not Pollyanna-ish about the impact that politics has in carrying out your agenda,” Klaidman said. “But on the other hand, I think that there’s a sense that things have gotten to a point where it’s just very frustrating, very difficult to do the things that people in this administration think are the right things to do.”

Holder Wants To ‘Stick It Out’ For At Least First Term

While some D.C. observers previously thought Holder’s job was in peril, Klaidman said he gets the impression that the Attorney General “certainly wants to stick it out” for the first term of the Obama administration.

“These jobs are huge grinds. Whether or not he wants to serve out two terms, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be surprised that, assuming Barack Obama is re-elected, he goes back into private practice or does something else. On the other hand, I’ve been surprised before. It may be that he would serve a second term if he had the opportunity,” Klaidman said.

Ultimately, said Klaidman, the Attorney General and his top national security officials in the Justice Department are pragmatic.

“I think that he’ll bide his time and look for him moments. I think he understands that the perfect is the enemy of the good and hope to get as much as he can,” Klaidman said.

Although Holder expected to be dealing with terrorism and national security issues for much of his tenure as Attorney General, he was still surprised by how much of his time was dominated by those issues, Klaidman said. Holder told his aides that something like 70 percent of his time is spent on national security, according to Klaidman.

While Holder has faced criticism from some at the White House for being too independent — one administration official told Klaidman for a previous piece that Holder had “overlearned the lessons of Marc Rich” — he has also taken criticism from some for being too close to the President.

“I think he’s got a good relationship with the President; he’s got some good chemistry. Eric Holder is not as close to this President, or as close as might be troubling, in terms of how close relationships between AGs and Presidents have been,” Klaidman said.

Historically, former Attorneys General have been some of the president’s closest political advisers, even running their political campaigns, Klaidman said.

“That’s when you have to start worrying… when an Attorney General has a dual role [of] watching out for the president’s politics on a daily basis while trying to carry out the responsibilities of being the country’s top lawyer, where you have to exercise a certain amount of independence,” Klaidman said.