Ondray T. Harris (photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).
The mandate of the agency known as the Justice Department’s “peacemakers” has expanded beyond its original goal of soothing racial tensions to extend to conflicts involving discrimination on the basis of sex, religion and disability, according to Community Relations Service Director Ondray T. Harris.
Harris said the Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed last year broadened the jurisdiction of the agency exponentially, adding five additional protected categories that can trigger the division’s involvement in an incident: gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or disability.
“Our role historically has been someone reactionary in dealing with race, color, national origin matters,” Harris said in an interview last month. “Now we have more of a preventative role.”
The agency, which celebrated its 45th anniversary last August, was created under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is the only federal agency that exists to assist state and local governments, organizations and community groups in preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions.
“The underlying assumption of what CRS does is that when we get into a room and get single or multilateral talks with parties who have opposition to one another, that they will develop some understanding. At the core of all this is the faith in the American people,” Harris said.
Mediators come from a variety of backgrounds, said Harris, including lawyers, police chiefs, people with military backgrounds and those who have worked for civil rights organizations. Mediators do not force an outcome in reconciliations or negotiations. Instead they act as a third party, providing a process to allow communities to come together and reach an outcome that works for all parties, Harris said.
“It can be difficult in our culture, as we’ve gotten there through television and a lot of other media, that people think shouting at each other is always the answer,” Harris said. “That’s not what we need in a conciliator. We need someone who can show empathy but still be objective.”
Recently, U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke asked the Community Relations Service to help with the civil rights forums. The agency also has been on hand at meetings with Somalian refugees in Colorado to help them integrate into the community. The agency was present when Justice Department officials informed the parents of a 14-year-old boy who died at a Florida boot camp that DOJ would not pursue civil rights charges in the case.
Map of CRS office locations (DOJ).
While its mission has expanded, over the past few decades the number of agency employees has shrunk. At one point, more than 350 employees worked for the agency. That number stood at around 100 in the early 1990s, but a budget cut in 1997 slashed the agency to just 41 employees. For the past several years, the agency has had about 59 employees. Today, a staff of 34 full-time employees man four field offices and 10 regional offices.
“They make a Herculean effort to get it done. My hats off to them, they do a great job, they make me proud,” Harris said. “Is it a challenge? Yes.”
Harris was nominated as Director of Community Relations Service by President George W. Bush in May 2007 and confirmed by the Senate in March 2008. The position is a four-year term. Before becoming director, Harris served as Deputy Chief of the DOJ’s Employment Litigation Section in the Civil Rights Division.
Secrecy, Impartiality Key to Success of CRS
The congressional mandate of the Community Relations Service includes a confidentiality agreement that bars officials from revealing the identity of parties taking part in negotiations without their permission, Harris said.
“Part of that is the reason that is some of those groups wouldn’t even come to the table if they feel that what they say to us or even that we’re talking to them will go public or will be shared with other federal agencies. Some of these groups aren’t very trusting of federal agencies,” Harris said.
That secrecy, Harris said, allows for frank and open discussion and participation. It also can ease the concerns of local elected officials who may worry how their work with the agency would be viewed by the public.
“They want to be seen as strong and not caving in to another side or a party, but they’re willing to talk behind closed doors to solve the issue,” he said. “They don’t want to read about it in the paper tomorrow that the mayor and the police chief met with civil rights activist X at the table with some federal agency.”
Not taking sides on an issue is also important to the work of the agency’s mediators. Harris said that lesson hit home when he traveled to Jena, La., in the summer of 2007 after a series of racial incident, including one where nooses were hung from a tree at a local high school. Six black teens were charged with attempted murder for beating a white teen, and they became known as the Jena Six.
“I didn’t go to Jena as a black man,” Harris said. “I went as the director or an agency working on an issue. I can’t afford to have a dog in that fight. It’s not about me, it’s not about the conciliators.”
Harris said some of the parties the agency works with would not agree to meet if they did not feel that the conciliators are objective.
“When you’re helping a community with a dispute, that’s not your fight,” Harris said. “So you cannot take into consideration your race, gender, national origin and side with one choice or another because as soon as you do that your impartiality is shot, your credibility is shot.”
Agency Adapting to New Issues, Expects Rise in Immigration Related Incidents
As the issue of immigration takes the national stage, the agency expects to see a rise in incidents tied to the debate, Harris said. The agency’s fiscal 2011 budget request states that if immigration reform moves forward, “experience suggests that we will see an increase in discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin” against either immigrants or those perceived to be immigrants.
CRS Director Ondray Harris with Rep. John Lewis at an event celebrating the 45th anniversary of CRS (Lonnie Tague/DOJ).
Immigration often masks other issues concerning race and national origin, according to Harris.
“We’re not really looking at the immigration question. We’re looking at the allegations of discrimination,” Harris said. “We’re comfortable with that because we have traditionally done race, color, national origin. So while we’re seeing an increase, the work itself isn’t new to us.”
As the agency reaches out to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community, there are lessons to be learned from how it handled outreach to Muslim and Arab-Americans communities in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Harris said.
“Some of those communities, with reason, weren’t necessarily very trusting of state, local, federal government,” Harris said. “We don’t expect for it to happen overnight. But I think we’ve turned a corner in building rapport in those communities, and part of making it work with those communities is allowing them to have access to us and other federal agencies.”
Muslim and Arab-American communities in recent years have worked with the government to address their concerns instead of feeling ostracized, Harris said.
“Are there criticisms? Sure,” said Harris. “I’m not going to paint a picture that everything is perfect in those communities, but I think that most of those communities, if you talk to them, think that they can talk to the government, that the government is appreciative of them. The process that CRS provides allows them to come to the table.”
A Shift to Proactive Prevention
With the passage of the hate crimes law last year, the agency is reaching out to new communities.
“Disabilities are something we’ve haven’t done historically, because that overlaps with housing issues. Different communities see disabilities differently. Even the language, you have to be careful in how you address those communities because you don’t want to offend people in those communities,” Harris said.
The agency hopes to prevent hate crimes by facilitating educational meetings in response to conflicts or incidents. But predicting where hate crimes may occur “is not like reading the entrails of an owl” Harris said.
“There’s no barometer for measuring the tension. Generally we rely on the public,” Harris said. “It’s a little difficult in some of the rural communities in measuring the tension. It’s different if you’re talking about a city like New York City, for example, where there’s a civil rights or activist infrastructure in that community. You get into some of the rural areas, those communities don’t have the infrastructure.”
In the area of LGBT-related hate crimes, the agency has gotten high marks thus far. Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said last month that DOJ has been conducting “spectacular” community education around the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
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The Department of Justice sent several letters in May to companies connected to the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, instructing them to preserve documents relating to the spill.
Among them, Cameron International Corporation and Mitsui Oil Exploration Company, Ltd., received letters May 5 ordering them to retain all “potentially relevant information,” Bloomberg reported. The letters were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Cameron, a Fortune 500 company based in Houston, Texas, specializes in pressure control systems. It manufactured the Deepwater Horizon oil rig’s blowout preventer, which was designed to stop the flow of oil and gas during a pressure surge.
But for unknown reasons, the blowout preventer failed to close during the disaster, and BP’s underwater robots could not close it manually in the days immediately following the spill.
Mitsui Oil explores new areas for crude oil and natural gas production, operating in Southeast Asia, the U.S., Middle East, North Africa and the North Sea. It won an open bid to participate in an “ultra deep gas exploration project” in the Gulf of Mexico in conjunction with BP Exploration & Production Inc.
Naoki Ishii, assistant secretary at Moex USA — which is owned by Mitsui Oil — told the Justice Department in a May 10 letter, “we had already made arrangements to preserve possibly relevant materials, including paper and electronic documents,” according to Bloomberg.
Read the full story here.
The government’s corruption case against former Jack Abramoff-associate Kevin Ring is doomed in light of new restrictions on prosecutors’ use of the honest services fraud statute, attorneys for the ex-lobbyist said in a motion to dismiss filed in D.C. federal court Monday.
Kevin Ring worked with lobbyist Jack Abramoff in the early 2000s. (Getty Images)
The filing pushed for acquittal on eight honest-services counts based on the “common-place nature” of the lobbyist’s actions and insufficient evidence to prove honest service fraud after a June Supreme Court decision limited the law’s scope.
In Skilling v. United States, the court ruled that prosecutors can only use the honest services law for strict cases of bribery and kickbacks. In the past, prosecutors took a more expansive view of the law, with some alleging they used the statute as a “catch-all” tool to prosecute white collar crime.
“Skilling’s effect on this prosecution is clear: The days in which the honest services fraud statute could be contorted to reach ‘bribery-esque,’ ‘bribery-lite’ or any other arguable dishonest conduct are now over,” wrote defense counsel Andrew Wise and Timothy O’Toole of Miller & Chevalier.
A former associate of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Ring was charged last September as part of a probe that has led to the conviction of 18 lobbyists and public officials. Ring is one of only two defendants fighting the charges.
The government alleges he provided public officials with free event tickets and meals in exchange for “official actions” that spanned January 2000 to October 2004 and involved 11 public officials.
In its first case against Ring, the government brought 10 charges, six of which alleged violations of the honest services statute and a seventh for conspiracy to commit honest services fraud. The trial ended in a hung jury last fall.
The motion, filed this week at the request of U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of the District of Columbia, sought to rebuff the government’s allegations by calling into question prosecutors’ ability to prove honest services fraud under the now-limited criteria. Huvelle will hear arguments on the motion August 5.
Depending on that hearing’s outcome, the Justice Department may need to decide whether to pursue a second trial that includes honest services fraud. Should prosecutors decide to drop those charges — or if they are found unsupported by Huvelle — the Justice Department could still proceed with the case on charges of illegal gratuity.
In the Ring case, prosecutors must prove material misrepresentation — or intent to deceive the public — and clear bribery of public officials if they wish to continue on honest services fraud.
But according to the defense, Ring’s position as a private-sector lobbyist precludes any duty to disclose his activities to the public. In fact, they say Ring’s gift-giving represents the norm for lobbyists in Washington and took place in “plain public view.”
“Any interested member of the public would have already known that the officials were interacting with Mr. Ring at these events,” they said in the filing. “While many people might find this traditional practice distasteful, there was nothing deceptive or fraudulent about this conduct; it is how lobbying has been practiced for many years, and nothing presented at trial showed otherwise.”
The lawyers also said evidence presented in the first trial fails to show direct quid-pro-quo bribery — the standard now required for honest services fraud.
“The government spent the first trial disclaiming any obligation to prove bribery … but the Supreme Court has now made clear … that the government’s honest services fraud must include evidence of, among other things, bribery,” they wrote. “Mr. Ring’s [first] trial ignored the need to prove a promise or agreement by the public official, instead focusing on unilateral conduct — gifts of meals and tickets — that has long been viewed as part of traditional lobbying.”
The full motion is embedded below.
Marty Lederman, a top official in the Office of Legal Counsel, is leaving the Justice Department to return to teaching.
Marty Lederman (Georgetown)
A Deputy Assistant Attorney General who joined the OLC in January 2009, Lederman will resume his teaching post at Georgetown University Law Center this fall, where he will teach a class on separation of powers, according to the Blog of Legal Times
Lederman is the second official to announce his departure from OLC in the past few weeks. Last month, acting Assistant Attorney General David Barron said he was leaving the office and would return to teaching at Harvard Law School.
Jonathan Cedarbaum, formerly a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, will take over as the acting head of OLC. The office has been without a Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for six years.
Lederman, who will remain at the Justice Department through August, said that he and Barron did not plan to stay at OLC for more than two years.
Lederman told BLT he is confident that Cedarbaum will do a “terrific” job and said OLC is fully staffed for the first time since the transition to the Obama administration, with about 20 line attorneys.
President Barack Obama’s nominee to head OLC, Dawn Johnsen, withdrew in April. Obama has not made a new nomination since Johnsen withdrew.
Additional reporting by Joe Palazzolo.
Scott Burns (NAAG)
The former deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy is in the running to be the next U.S. Attorney for Utah, ABC 4 News in Salt Lake City reported Wednesday. The catch? He’s actually a Republican.
Scott Burns served as deputy director from 2002 to 2007. Before that, he served for 15 years as the district attorney in Iron County, Utah.
Burns currently serves as the executive director of the National District Attorneys Association in Alexandria, Va.
According to ABC 4, Burns is the leading contender for the job and some congressional Democrats are less than thrilled at the prospect of a Republican U.S. Attorney. In most cases, the president selects U.S. Attorney candidates who belong to his party.
David Schwendiman, a longtime career prosecutor in the Utah U.S. Attorney’s office had been the leading candidate. But the Utah U.S. Attorney’s office released a statement earlier this month saying the White House decided against nominating Schwendiman for the top spot and instead the prosecutor would return to the office as a senior litigation counsel. Since then, the U.S. Attorney’s office and the White House have been tight-lipped on what scuttled Schwendiman’s chances.
National Incident Commander Thad Allen briefs reporters at the Justice Department on Tuesday (photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).
Thad Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who has become the federal government’s point man on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, briefly met with Attorney General Eric Holder and his staff at Justice Department headquarters on Tuesday to update the nation’s top federal prosecutor on the latest developments in response to the spill.
After the meeting, Allen held his daily news briefing in the conference room on the seventh floor of the Robert F. Kennedy building. Employees removed the Justice Department emblem on the front of the podium, raised the insignia that hangs in the backdrop and the moved the department’s flag offstage.
Thad Allen (photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).
“If you’re wondering why I’m in the DOJ building, I like to…circulate among the cabinet officers and make sure that there aren’t any issues that I need to be dealing with,” Allen said. “I had a brief meeting with the Attorney General and his staff, it was a very, very good meeting.”
There was no particular focus to the meeting with the Attorney General, Allen said, but they discussed issues the government faces in the Gulf Coast region.
They did not talk about the criminal investigation during the meeting, Allen said.
“We did not discuss the investigation per se,” Allen said, noting there were “a number of areas where our interests cross” on the issue of the oil spill.
“I’m not indicating there’s anything being walled off,” Allen said. “We just had a very general discussion about the issues that are going on down there. It just was a private discussion between myself and the Attorney General.”
Holder has been criticized in recent weeks for his announcement last month that the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into those responsible for the oil spill. The Washington Post editorial board called his handling of the probe “odd.” But Holder has defended his announcement, arguing the extraordinary circumstances made it “appropriate to let the American people know that the federal government was understanding what was going on.”
The Attorney General visited the Gulf Coast region for the second time since the spill last week.
Allen, who as National Incident Commander reports to President Barack Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said at the briefing that the government would allow BP to extend for 24 hours a pressure test on the capped well after they determined that a nearby seepage of oil is not related to the test.
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Christopher Graveline (Potomac Books)
For Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Christopher Graveline, the gray area many see surrounding the military interrogations at Abu Ghraib during the fall of 2003 contrasts sharply with the full-color photos depicting the soldiers he prosecuted.
Graveline recently partnered with former Army investigator Michael Clemens to author “The Secrets of Abu Ghraib Revealed: American Soldiers on Trial,” a book that delves into the events at the Baghdad prison and the prosecution of 11 soldiers for detainee abuse that occurred there.
Graveline first took his experience beyond the courtroom in a 2006 Washington Post op-ed, which argued that a lack of clarity and training led soldiers to believe they were exempt from Geneva Convention restrictions on prisoner treatment.
The book, Graveline said in an interview with Main Justice, is a reaction to the continued misrepresentation of what happened at Abu Ghraib.
“The incidents and what happened there had a strong impact on the Iraq War, on U.S. policy.” Graveline said. “What prompted Mike and I to want to put it into a book was all the misinformation out there.”
Attention focused sharply on Abu Ghraib in 2004 after accounts of physical, psychological and sexual abuse first surfaced in the media. Photos of smiling U.S. soldiers standing over naked and injured detainees drew international outrage.
As an army JAG officer, Graveline was lead prosecutor in the case against U.S. Army reservist Lynndie England — best known for posing thumbs-up and pointing at a detainee’s genitals or stoically pulling at a leash attached to a sprawling prisoner. He also helped prosecute the 10 other soldiers ultimately convicted of charges related to the prisoner abuse.
Graveline said the widespread reaction to the case and its unanswered questions about the culpability of soldiers and their superiors caused many to jump to conclusions — himself included.
“I was convinced [the photos] must be connected to interrogation,” Graveline said. “My initial notion and my initial beliefs, when presented with all the facts, had to change.”
(Potomac Books)
According to Graveline, there are two main theories about Abu Ghraib. One holds that the mistreatment resulted directly from interrogation policies set by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The other believes the soldiers acted without sanctions from higher up.
The truth, Graveline said, involves a combination of both.
“By in large, 90 percent of the infamous photos had nothing to do with interrogation … so you can’t say that any of these photos were at the prompting of anyone up the chain of command,” he said. “On the other hand, there are some photos that were connected with interrogation.”
The majority of mistreatment at Abu Ghraib furthered only the entertainment of the guards, he said. The few that did involve interrogation were the result of vague interrogation instructions and inexperienced soldiers.
The Army’s adoption of universal interrogation guidelines in 2006 did much to clarify techniques and ameliorate the potential for future problems, he said.
England has also received some sympathy after the release of her biography last year, which argues she was only following direction from her fiance and torture ringleader Charles Graner, who later married another soldier who served with them at Abu Ghraib. England has said she cannot find work because of the publicity surrounding her trial and only finds solace in raising the child she had with Graner.
Graveline, however, remains unsympathetic, saying her romantic inclinations had no bearing on the facts of what happened at Abu Ghraib.
“There are incidents that fall in that gray area, and then there are other incidents that are clear-cut criminal,” he added. “None of her actions fall into that gray area.”
As for the role policy guidelines, Graveline said he and Clemens strove to present unbiased facts and witness testimony to avoid writing an “opinion book.”
“It would be foolish to say that your role as a prosecutor doesn’t somehow color how you see something or what you believe,” he said. “But in this book, we tried to take our opinion out of it. You draw your own conclusions.”
Gray Tollison (Tollison Law Firm)
A state senator from Oxford, Miss., is among those being considered for U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Mississippi, The Daily Journal reported.
U.S. Rep. Travis Childers (D-Miss.) confirmed to the paper that state Sen. Gray Tollison is in the running for the post. Tollison, a member of the state Senate since 1996, is chairman of the committee that considers changes to the state’s criminal laws. He is also the son of Oxford attorney and well known local Democrat Grady F. Tollison, according to the paper.
The Obama administration also considered Southern District of Mississippi Assistant U.S. Attorney Felicia Adams and Oxford, Miss., criminal defense attorney Christi McCoy for the post. Northern District of Mississippi Assistant U.S. Attorney Curtis Ivy has also been mentioned as a candidate for the position.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) is taking the lead on selecting U.S. attorney candidates for Mississippi’s congressional Democrats. Thompson formally recommended McCoy for the post last summer. But McCoy was dogged by controversy because of her affiliation with a local private investigator who was under investigation for his billing practices. The Northern District U.S. Attorney’s office, which was handling the case, dropped its probe earlier this year, clearing McCoy.
Thompson told Main Justice in March that the White House was considering both Adams and McCoy, though he was not certain if Ivy was still in the running.
The Oxford-based U.S. Attorney’s office is currently headed by acting U.S. Attorney Bill Martin, who took over the position when Bush-era U.S. Attorney Jim M. Greenlee stepped down in January.
In the Southern District, Natchez attorney Deborah McDonald has been mentioned as a candidate for U.S. Attorney, the Journal said. Other candidates reportedly include Kathy Nester, a Jackson attorney, and Dorsey Carson of Jackson. Mississippi bloggers have also mentioned Constance Slaughter-Harvey of Forest
Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, pledged on Tuesday to install a new anti-corruption watchdog in his government, the Associated Press reported.
The move comes after several high profile bribery scandals in that country, including one that put a former president and his wife behind bars and led the U.S. Justice Department to try to confiscate the couple’s Manhattan condo and suburban Virginia home last week.
The former president, Chen Shui-bian, and his wife, Wu Shu-Jen, were convicted in Taiwan in 2009 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for accepting bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye on certain deals.
In a separate scandal, three High Court judges and a prosecutor were taken into custody last week for allegedly accepting bribes from a former lawmaker in exchange for a not guilty verdict, according to the AP.
“I have the utmost determination to build a clean government,” Ma said at a press conference where he detailed the new commission, to be housed in the justice ministry. “We will not allow a handful of corrupted officials to humiliate all civil servants and damage the government’s image.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved by voice vote the nomination of the North Dakota U.S. Attorney at its meeting Tuesday.
Tim Purdon (Vogel Law Firm)
The panel initially scheduled a vote on U.S. Attorney nominee Tim Purdon on June 24. But his nomination was held over at the request of committee Republicans. Panel members can request to hold over a nominee one time.
Purdon is a partner at the Vogel Law Firm in Bismarck, N.D. President Barack Obama nominated him on Feb. 4 to succeed Drew Wrigley, who stepped down as U.S. Attorney in Sept. 2009. Obama has been criticized for tapping Purdon, who was on the executive committee of the North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party and has no prosecutorial experience.
Read more about Purdon here.
The panel has now approved 60 of Obama’s U.S. Attorney nominees, 57 of whom have won Senate confirmation. The committee has yet to schedule votes for another 14 would-be U.S. Attorneys. There are 93 U.S. Attorney posts.
