.
.
.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DAG
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 26, 2011 (202) 514-2007
WWW.JUSTICE.GOV TDD (202) 514-1888
DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL JAMES COLE APPOINTS STUART M. GOLDBERG AS CHIEF OF STAFF
AND LISA O. MONACO AS PRINCIPAL ASSOCIATE DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL
WASHINGTON – Deputy Attorney General James Cole today announced the appointment of Lisa O. Monaco as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General and Stuart M. Goldberg as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Attorney General.
“Lisa and Stuart are veteran career prosecutors who have served the department in a number of capacities over the years and I am grateful that they will continue their service in the Deputy Attorney General’s office,” said Deputy Attorney General Cole. “Stuart and Lisa have demonstrated an unrivaled commitment to this institution and I am confident they will be key assets in our efforts to keep the American people safe, ensure the fairness and integrity of our financial markets, and protect the traditional missions of the department.”
Since 2010, Monaco has served as the acting Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General and before that served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General since 2009. Prior to joining the Deputy Attorney General’s office, Monaco was the Chief of Staff to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, working on a wide range of national security and law enforcement issues. She also served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to Director Mueller during her tenure at the FBI.
From 2001 to 2007, Monaco served as a federal prosecutor. She was appointed to the Enron Task Force, serving as a co-lead trial counsel in the prosecution of five former executives of Enron Broadband Services. For her work on the Enron Task Force, Monaco received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service, the Justice Department’s highest award. Prior to her appointment to the Enron Task Force, she served as the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Monaco served as Counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno from 1998 to 2001, providing advice and guidance on national security, law enforcement, budget and oversight issues.
Before joining the department, Monaco clerked for the Honorable Jane R. Roth, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She earned her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and her B.A. from Harvard University.
Since 2005, Goldberg has served as the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, where he oversaw the work of over 85 Assistant U.S. Attorneys involved in criminal prosecutions and civil litigation. In December 2010, he was awarded a Director’s Award for his superior performance as a manager at the 2010 Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys Director’s Awards ceremony.
Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Goldberg was Principal Deputy Chief of the Public Integrity Section, the office that oversees the federal effort to combat corruption through the prosecution of officials and employees at all levels of government. Goldberg began his career with the Department as a trial attorney at Public Integrity in 1988. He also served the section as Deputy Chief for Litigation and Senior Litigation Counsel.
Before joining the Department, Goldberg worked as a civil litigator at Rogers & Wells LLP, focusing largely on securities and commodities fraud, First Amendment and antitrust cases.
Goldberg has been a member of the adjunct faculty at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching courses on professional responsibility. He received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and his B.A. from the University of Virginia.
On a personal level, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are friends. But when it come to politics, the president now has literally given Holder the cold shoulder at two consecutive State of the Union addresses.
After last year’s address, we noticed that the president pointedly skipped greeting Holder during his post-speech walk into the well of the House of Representatives. He greeted other Cabinet members in the front row with hand shakes, back slaps, laughs and grins. When he got to Holder – who was then mired in controversy over trying terrorism suspects in federal court and other national security matters – Obama acted as if the attorney general were invisible.
Last night, Obama repeated the performance. He clearly doesn’t want to be caught on camera warmly greeting his top law enforcement officer, whose policies have upset conservatives. An anonymous YouTube user uploaded the video, which you can see below:
Witnesses testifying before a House panel Tuesday on how to combat Internet child pornography differed on how long Internet service providers and cell phone carriers should be required to retain data that could aid investigators.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein told the House Judiciary subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security said that a uniform standard on data retention is necessary. But while he and other witnesses agreed that Internet crimes involving minors should be a top priority, they did not agree on how long the ISPs and phone carriers should have to retain data.
Six to 18 months was the recommendation of John Douglass, the chief of police in Overland Park, Kan., who is chairman of the Mid-Sized Cities Section of the International Association of Chiefs. Douglass was responding to a question from freshman Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ark.).
Other witnesses included the Executive Director of the United States Internet Service Provider Association, Kate Dean, and the General Counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, John Morris Jr., whose organization focuses on law enforcement compliance and security issues of concern to ISPs.
Despite questioning from several subcommittee members, Weinstein didn’t offer any specific numbers on retention times or specific solutions on how to combat premature deleting of potentially useful phone and Internet records.
Morris concluded that such a mandate would raise a number of growing concerns about privacy, identity theft and the misuse of personal data, and that Congress should be very hesitant to require mandates involving day-to-day activity.”
The proposal would force law enforcement to retain any data from most Web sites and online services including all Web 2.0 sites, all social networking sites, all blogs and almost all modern news sites, he said.
The panel’s ranking Democrat, Bobby Scott of Virginia, pushed Morris on how costly it would be to create and maintain data retention databases, but Morris could not pinpoint dollar amounts.
Dean proposed data preservation, which is specific data-saving for a certain time in response to a law enforcement request, as more cost-effective than data retention, the automatic archiving of data. The Stored Communications Act of 1996 allows law enforcement to require service providers to preserve records or other electronic evidence. Once requested, the records are kept for 90 days and can be renewed.
The drawback, Weinstein said, is that investigators have to request the information on a case-by-case basis, assuming they know the records are relevant to their case before the provider deletes them. ISPs have also been inconsistent in their cooperation, making things more difficult for investigators, and there is no standard time requiring them to hold on to the records before destroying them.
Data retention, however, requires ISPs to automatically store information, allowing law enforcement to gain access to records without having to request them during a specific time window before the ISPs delete the data.
The panel Chairman, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), concluded the hearing directing his message to ISPs on behalf of Dean. Working voluntarily is preferred, but a mandatory solution is not out of the question, he said.
Posted in News | Comments Off
David Kappos (Marquette University Law School)
The Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, David Kappos, asked for more funding in a hearing on Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee’s new subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet.
Kappos, who is also the undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property, emphasized the role of the patent office as “the greatest job creator no one has ever heard of.”
“I’ve talked to CEOs, small companies that come up to me and say I recently got a patent from your agency, and when I got that patent, I was suddenly able to get my next round of venture funding,” Kappos said. “I was able to build my business on it and put people to work.”
The panel’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), observed that, “Today, knowledge moves the world.”
“In 1947, IP derived less than 10 percent of all American exports,” Goodlatte said. “Today, that figure is well over 50 percent. We all understand the link between the PTO and the protections afforded inventors that drive this information economy. We must work with the director to make it even more efficient and productive.”
Through a “broad-based, aggressive effort” he hopes to reduce the patent backlog that currently hovers around 700,000 utility patent applications, continued hiring of experienced former patent examiners and IP professionals, and reorganizing the office’s application classification system.
Despite Kappos’s argument for more money, Reps. Ted Poe of Texas and Jason Chaffetz of Utah, both Republicans, remained unconvinced. Chaffetz said it was “scandalous” that the patent office had spent a lot on information technology in recent years and gotten too little for its money — a situation he said was all too common in the federal government.
Posted in News | Comments Off
The former Chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Louis Pichini, was chosen to perform an audit on the Philadelphia Sheriff’s office by the city controller’s office, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Tuesday.
Pichini serves as director of Deloitte Financial Advisory Services and was chosen over about 15 other names.
City Controller Alan Butkovitz said the contract was for $462,000, and Pichini’s team is to complete the work by June. He called for outside help after his auditors couldn’t document accounts with assets of $53 million.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, Kenyen Brown, has named John Cherry to be the office’s new criminal chief, the Mobile Press-Register reported.
Cherry replaces Maria Murphy, who has served in the position since 2008.
Most recently, Cherry played multiple roles in the office, serving as the Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council coordinator, crisis management coordinator and in other functions.
He has been an Assistant U.S. Attorney since 2002 and previously was in private practice and worked in the Mobile County District Attorney’s office.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office, Tommy Loftis, told the newspaper he did not know whether Cherry would continue to serve in several capacities, as the posts “take up a ton of time.”
Brown was sworn in a year ago this month, as Main Justice reported, and is the first black U.S. Attorney in Alabama.
Posted in News | Comments Off
Former Justice Department official Luis A. Reyes has been named a partner in the Austin office of The Ashcroft Group.
Luis A. Reyes with President George W. Bush (Facebook)
Reyes worked at DOJ from 2001 to 2006. Initially, he served as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Division. In October 2003, he worked as counselor to the Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division. His final position at DOJ was Deputy Associate Attorney General from March 2005 to February 2006.
He left DOJ to work in the White House, first as special assistant to the president from January 2006 to October 2008, then as deputy assistant to the president from October 2008 to January 2009.
Since May 2009, Reyes has served as general counsel in the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The office is responsible for investigating, auditing and inspecting fraud, waste and abuse of the funds appropriated for the reconstruction of Iraq.
Before joining DOJ, Reyes served as assistant attorney general in Texas from October 1998 to March 2001.
In a prepared statement, John Ashcroft, who was Attorney General for the majority of the time Reyes was at DOJ, said, “Reyes’ extensive and varied experience in positions of public trust at both the federal and state levels make him a strong addition to the Ashcroft Law Firm.” He added, “Luis has a record of infusing integrity into any operation he is involved in. Our clients will benefit from his experience with government investigations, regulatory compliance, corporate governance, government relations and public policy development.”
Attorney General Eric Holder scored a victory on Tuesday when al-Qaeda member Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was sentenced to life in prison by a federal judge.
Ghailani was convicted of participating in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. From 2004 to 2009, he was held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He was the first former Guantanamo detainee to be tried in the civilian court system.
Holder has come under fire for his pledge to try certain detainees in federal courts,as opposed to military tribunals. Conservatives also attacked Holder when Ghailani was convicted recently on only one of 285 counts.
“Today’s sentencing of Ahmed Ghailani shows yet again the strength of the American justice system in holding terrorists accountable for their actions,” Holder said in a prepared statement. “Ghailani will now rightly serve the rest of his life in prison for his role in the attacks against American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that left 224 dead, including 12 Americans.”
He added, “Ghailani is the fifth person to be convicted in federal court in connection with the embassy bombings, and we hope this life sentence brings some measure of justice to the victims of these attacks and their families and friends who have waited so long for this day. Hundreds of individuals have now been convicted in federal court of terrorism or terrorism-related crimes since Sept. 11, 2001. As this case demonstrates, we will not rest in bringing to justice terrorists who seek to harm the American people, and we will use every tool available to the government to do so.”
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara also expressed satisfaction. “Today, in Manhattan federal court, justice was served,” Bharara said. “Ahmed Ghailani is a remorseless terrorist, mass murderer and al-Qaeda operative, and now he will spend the rest of his life in prison.” Bharara said the sentence was fitting for “those devastating and despicable attacks.”
He continued, “This was a difficult case for a number of reasons. Our goal all along was to hold Ghailani accountable for his heinous conduct, and, no matter the obstacles, to see to it that he would receive the punishment he deserved. Today, our goal was achieved, as Ahmed Ghailani will never again breathe free air.”
The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Western District of North Carolina, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies have created a securities-fraud task force in Charlotte to fight insider trading, accounting fraud and other finance-related crimes, the Charlotte Observer reported Friday.
The task force is in part due to Charlotte’s role as the No. 2 banking center and home to Fortune 500 companies and securities and brokerage firms, David Brown, the first assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District, told the Observer.
The U.S. Attorney’s office held the first meeting discussing a new whistleblower provision included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in July, Kurt Meyers, Assistant U.S. Attorney and deputy criminal chief on white-collar crime, told the newspaper.
The other agencies involved in the task force are the FBI, the state Attorney General’s office, the securities division of the North Carolina Secretary of State’s office, the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal division, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office.
Posted in News | Comments Off
Deputy Attorney General James Cole used his first major appearance in the Justice Department Great Hall on Tuesday to praise a former Assistant Attorney General who played a major role in the civil rights movement.
James Cole (Andrew Ramonas/Main Justice)
The No. 2 official at the DOJ lauded John Doar for his service to Civil Rights Division as a First Assistant from 1960 to 1965 and Assistant Attorney General from 1965 to 1967. Doar was intimately involved in some of the biggest civil rights matters of the 1960s, often appearing in the streets and courtrooms of Mississippi to fight for the rights of blacks.
Cole noted that Doar accompanied James Meredith in 1962 as he became the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi and successfully prosecuted members of the Ku Klux Klan for the lynching of three civil rights activists in 1964. The lynching case was the inspiration for the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”
“I’m thrilled at the opportunity I have to be here to celebrate the history of the Civil Rights Division and to honor a man who frankly was one of my heroes growing up — John Doar — for what he has done,” Cole said.
Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez of the Civil Rights Division also paid tribute to Doar, thanking him “for setting the bar so high for everyone.” He said he was “mesmerized” by “The Manual of the Civil Rights Division,” which Doar penned in 1965. Perez said he would make the tome available to those interesting in reading it.
“I think in order for us to understand our job and understand our critical mission, it’s important for us to understand our legacy,” Perez said.
The Civil Rights Division was established in 1957 after the enactment of that year’s Civil Rights Act. Doar said the division had only about 35 lawyers in its first couple of years. And a lot of those lawyers worked on matters that weren’t part of division’s core mission, he said.
But the former Assistant Attorney General said the division was beefed up in the 1960s and renewed its focus on protecting civil rights. Doar recalled at a tribute to Robert F. Kennedy on Friday that the former Attorney General was a driving force behind the federal government’s increased involvement in civil rights issues in the 1960s.
Doar, who helped draft the Voting Rights Act of 1965, said he was proud that the work of the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s made it possible for a black person to be elected president in 2008 and for black people to freely participate in that election.
“And [the 2008 election] to me proved that through the work of everybody who worked from ‘60 to ‘65 on voting that did something that was very worthwhile in this country because it converted a dishonest to an honest system of self-government,” Doar said.
