The Department of Justice scored an important victory on Thursday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in its favor and against former Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who is being prosecuted in a corruption case.
Renzi was indicted in early 2008 on a variety of federal charges, including accusations that he pushed a land-swap bill to help a business associate pay a $700,000 debt that he owed Renzi, as John Bresnahan recounted on Politico.
“During the investigation, FBI agents taped Renzi’s phone calls, including those he made with an attorney, as well as other members of Congress not caught up in the probe, which angered leaders in both parties,” Bresnahan wrote.
So Renzi cited the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution, seeking to have the charges thrown out on grounds that he can’t be charged with a crime for anything linked to a legislative act. A lower court rejected his position, so he appealed to the 9th Circuit.
“We cannot agree” with Renzi’s position, Judge Richard C. Tallman wrote for a three-judge panel. To be sure, the panel noted, the Speech or Debate Clause is a powerful and necessary privilege. “But the Supreme Court has made equally clear that the Speech or Debate Clause does not ‘make Members of Congress supercitizens immune from criminal responsibility,’” the panel held.
Politico said some legal experts have speculated that the Renzi case could go to the Supreme Court.
The Department of Justice turned 141 on Thursday. On June 23, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law a bill creating the DOJ, elevating the office of Attorney General from a part-time post to a full-time job. Now, the Attorney General sits atop a vast bureaucracy of some 115,000 people.
The DOJ says its “true beginning” dates from passage of the Judiciary Act, passed by Congress in 1789 and signed by President George Washington on Sept. 24 of that year. Part-time employees though the early Attorneys General were, they were supposed to be “learned in the law.”
The present Attorney General, Eric Holder, is the latest of 82 “distinguished Americans” to hold the position, according to the DOJ website. Some were more “distinguished” than others, of course.
The first “modern” AG was Amos T. Akerman, who served under Grant until late 1872. One of his successors was Charles Joseph Bonaparte (1906-1909), a nephew of Napolean.
A decade later, the AG was A. Mitchell Palmer (1919-1921), best known for his “Palmer raids” that went after red, commies and other troublemakers, often without regard for little technicalities like civil rights. Palmer was succeeded by Harry M. Daughterty (1921-1924), who resigned amid questions over his integrity in connection with the Teapot Dome scandal.
Fast-forward to John N. Mitchell (1969-1972), who went to prison in connection with the Watergate scandal, and his successor, Richard G. Kleindienst (1972-1973), who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of testifying falsely to the Senate in a Watergate spin-off.
All right, some of the Attorneys General weren’t so distinguished. But it should be said that the list of 82 contains people of both major parties who became distinguished Supreme Court justices and were pillars of rectitude.
After 16 years of searching, on Wednesday the FBI has finally caught fugitive Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, one of the bureau’s most wanted men.
FBI agents arrested Bulger far from his hometown of Boston, where his criminal career has become a legend. Agents found him in Santa Monica, California, after they received a tip as to his whereabouts, the Los Angeles Times first reported. Bulger was reportedly taken without a struggle, though FBI wanted posters for him had long warned that he “is known to carry a knife at all times.” Agents did, however, find over 20 firearms in the the apartment where Bulger was staying.
The long sought-after arrest came on the second day of a new public outreach campaign by the bureau which provided a detailed description of Bulger’s female companion in the hopes that she would lead law enforcement to the crime boss. The companion, Catherine Greig, 60, who is wanted for harboring a fugitive and was believed to have been with Bulger since he fled, was arrested along with Bulger on Wednesday. The FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Boston Field Office, said at a press conference Thursday that the arrest was a “direct result” of that publicity campaign, the New York Times reported.
Bulger was a Boston mobster in the 1970’s and 80’s, and wanted for involvement in 19 murders, and for his role as the leader of the Irish-American Winter Hill Gang, a crime ring that allegedly engaged in violence, racketeering, extortion and drug dealing. When law enforcement closed in on Bulger in late 1994, a corrupt retired FBI agent alerted Bulger of his impending arrest and he fled. Police had not been able to find him since, despite offering a $2 million reward, putting Bulger on the famed 10 Most Wanted list and issuing frequent public service announcements asking for information as to his whereabouts. Bulger became a crime legend in his hometown, and multiple sightings of him across the country, and world, were reported, and the FBI says that it believes Bulger had traveled extensively in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
Then on Monday, the FBI’s Bulger Fugitive Task announced that it was starting a new publicity campaign looking for tips about Bulger, but with a new strategy: cherchez la femme.
In addition to doubling the reward for Greig to 100,000, the bureau ran ads in 14 media markets, which only began Tuesday, asking the public to look for Greig. FBI tidbits about Greig that agents felt would produce tips included that she loves animals, has well-kept teeth and likes to frequent beauty salons. In a statement Monday, FBI investigators said that they hoped appealing to a new audience—women—would produce fresh leads in the very cold case. Los Angeles, however, was not one of the areas targeted.
Bulger is set to appear in federal court in Los Angeles today.
“Never in a million years did I look to put a hit on you,” murderous mobster Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano recently assured a federal judge in Brooklyn.
Basciano’s words to U.S. Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York, uttered in a closed proceeding on May 6 and reported on Thursday by The New York Daily News, amounted to yet another bizarre tidbit in a case that has already produced more than its share of oddities.
It seems that Basciano, who acquired his nickname because he is (or was) a fashion-conscious hair stylist, wrote the name of the judge and that of Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Andres, now a high-ranking official in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, on a scrap of paper. Since the piece of paper also bore the name of three mob “rats” (we know how the mob deals with them), federal prosecutors suspected Basciano’s motives.
Not only that, but Basciano supposedly wanted to bump off Andres because Andres had the temerity to dine every week at a mob-connected restaurant, as Main Justice reported recently. (What did Andres do, put ketchup on his veal?)
Anyhow, not to worry, Basciano said in court as his fate for ordering the murder of a mob associate– the death penalty or life in prison –was being debated. The paper wasn’t a “hit list” but rather a “Santeria list,” meant to ward off bad vibes under the Afro-Caribbean religion, Basciano explained. “There was never, ever, ever at any time, judge, ever a plot to harm His Honor, Greg Andres, or three cooperating witnesses,” he emphasized.
Of course not. In any event, Basciano, 51, was spared from execution by jurors who concluded that life in a super-secure federal prison would suit him just fine.
Senate leaders Wednesday reached a deal to allow the nomination of James Cole to be Deputy Attorney General to come to the Senate floor and be voted upon.
In a unanimous consent agreement, Democratic and Republican leaders also agreed to vote on the nominations of Virginia Seitz to be Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel and Lisa Monaco to be national security Assistant Attorney General.
Senate Republicans have blocked Cole’s nomination from coming to the floor; he currently serves in the job under a recess appointment.
Senate leaders reached the agreement after hammering out various issues with the Justice Department, including concerns Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, had about his ability to effectively investigate Operation Fast and Furious, a controversial Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives gun smuggling program, Beth Levine, a spokeswoman for the senator, told Main Justice.
Grassley has expressed frustration that he did not receive the records and documents that House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) got from the Justice Department concerning the program which allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels in an effort to track them. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich of the DOJ Office of Legislative Affairs wrote in a May letter to Grassley that the DOJ will not provide the senator with access to documents that were made available to the House Oversight Committee because federal agencies usually respond to committee chairmen and Grassely is not one.
But Attorney General Eric Holder now has said the Department will give the senator the same access to information, witnesses and documents that is provided to Issa and the DOJ Inspector General, which also is probing the program, according to Levine. In return, Republican senators removed holds on the nominees, she said.
Votes on the nominees have yet to be scheduled. A representative for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Main Justice on the schedule for the votes.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved by voice vote legislation that is intended to bring all U.S. government contractors who commit crimes abroad within the reach of prosecutors.
Under current law, the United States only has criminal jurisdiction over contractors who do work supporting Defense Department operations. The Justice Department cannot prosecute individuals who do contract jobs for the State Department and other agencies unless officials can find a Defense Department nexus.
But Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the top committee Republican, expressed concerns that the bill did not go far enough to protect intelligence operations. He offered an amendment to address his worries, but it wasn’t adopted.
Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said members of the intelligence community reviewed the legislation and were supportive of the measure.
“I understand some of the concerns you’re raising,” Leahy said. “But I think that the concerns raised are unnecessary concerns.”
Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer of the DOJ Criminal Division told senators in May that the Department needs more tools from Congress to more effectively combat crime committed by U.S. government contractors abroad.
The Assistant Attorney General said many cases are not referred for prosecution because a Defense Department connection can’t be located. He added that the DOJ can spend “thousands of hours” trying to produce a Defense Department nexus to a case referred for prosecution.
Leahy said a case involving Blackwater (now called XE Services LLC), a State Department contractor, shows why tougher laws are needed to govern U.S. contractors abroad.
The security operations company faced intense scrutiny from the DOJ and Congress after its employees were accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.
A U.S. District Court judge dismissed the case against the guards, citing prosecutorial errors. But a federal appeals court reinstated the case in April.
Leahy and Rep. David Price (D-N.C.) in the last Congress introduced bills designed to ensure the United States has criminal jurisdiction over federal contractors and employees abroad. But the bills died in committee.
Earlier this month, Price introduced another overseas contractor bill. The measure has yet to receive a vote in the House Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) office said Thursday that the congressman first learned about a controversial Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation this year, rejecting reports that he had known much earlier.
Spokesman Fredrick Hill said that Issa first learned about ATF’s “Fast and Furious” operation early this year after the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Issa had been briefed on specifics of the operation as early as April 2010 and had raised no objections. Hill criticized that report and said the anonymous information cited by the Post was most likely part of a Justice Department attempt to disrupt Issa’s congressional probe.
“They’re scared – they realize that they may have done something wrong and they’re desperate to avoid accountability,” Hill told Main Justice. “It creates a dangerous situation when the Justice Department is willing to go to this length – to talk falsely about things that were discussed in a classified meeting.”
Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have led a congressional probe into the ATF operation for the past three months.
During that investigation, Issa has subpoenaed thousands of documents from the department – which he says DOJ has been reluctant to deliver – as well as testimony from several ATF agents and DOJ officials. He has said he will hold high-level officials accountable for approving the operation.
Operation Fast and Furious had planned to track and build a case against Mexican gun-traffickers in Arizona, but the operation allegedly allowed thousands of firearms to escape law enforcement surveillance and be “walked” across the border into Mexico – a violation of federal law.
The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday that two guns involved in the operation were found at the scene of a shootout with the suspected killers of a well-known Mexican attorney. Investigators later linked the guns to suspects in the torture and killing of Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez, the brother of a former attorney general for the state of Chihuahua.
Two more guns involved in the operation were discovered after a firefight between Mexican bandits and Border Patrol agents near Rio Rico, Ariz., in December, which ended with the the death of agent Terry.
John C. Cruden, the departing legend at the Environmental and Natural Resources Division, received a sendoff gift in the true spirit of his division: a kayak.
The bright yellow boat, which four ENRD section chiefs carried on their backs through the Justice Department’s Great Hall to present to Cruden, was far from the only honor bestowed on the respected DOJ veteran during the ceremony. Current and former colleagues heaped accolades and awards on Cruden, describing Cruden as one of the best lawyers to ever work for the department, both for his efforts on environmental issues and for his mentorship of generations of DOJ employees.
Longtime ENRD leader John Cruden is honored upon his retirement.
“He has left an indelible mark on the Department. He has made the Department stronger” Attorney General Eric Holder said. Holder added that it is a testament to Cruden’s character that what he is most proud of is not his work on high-profile environmental cases, but his mentoring of those “whose lives he has touched and who have inspired his work.”
Holder was joined at the retirement ceremony by other top leaders of the DOJ, including Deputy Attorney General James Cole, Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, and Assistant Attorney General Ignacia S. Moreno, who all had words of high praise for Cruden.
Cruden’s ceremony packed the Great Hall with more than 450 friends, family and colleagues. Dozens of former ENRD employees returned to honor Cruden’s departure.
It is no wonder that so many ENRD workers know Cruden, as he has been with the division since 1991, when he joined as chief of the Environmental Enforcement Section, and has been a Deputy Assistant Attorney General since 1995. Prior to his DOJ service, Cruden had a long career in the military, graduating from West Point and serving in special forces units in Vietnam and as a military lawyer. He took his Law School Admissions Test in Saigon, and Holder joked that Cruden showed up to the test armed with hand grenades rather than the pencils and paper of more conventional budding lawyers.
Bruce Gelber, the current chief of the enforcement section, recalled that when the section’s attorneys first heard that their new boss was going to be an army man from West Point, “we were worried. Our section wasn’t used to taking orders and we had heard that he didn’t know a lot about environmental law.”
Cruden’s work ethic and desire to learn quickly fixed that, his colleague said, and he turned out to be the “best man for the job.”
During his tenure, the division was at the forefront of the legal responses to both the Exxon-Valdez and the BP oil spills, as well as the Love Canal case in Niagara Falls, New York. And in 2009, the ENRD was rated as the #1 best place to work in the federal government, at a time when Cruden was serving as the Acting Assistant Attorney General.
Cruden did not speak until near the end of the 2-hour ceremony.
“It’s been quite a ride. I see my whole life here before me,” Cruden said.
Still, Cruden’s career with environmental law is not over. He is retiring from the DOJ, but will continue work on environmental issues at the research and education center, the Environmental Law Institute. Starting Thursday, Gelber will be taking over as Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Division.
The administration’s push on anti-fraud prosecution and consumer protection has transformed the DOJ’s Office of Consumer Protection Litigation from a small, subordinate office into a broadly focused branch of its own – and Assistant Attorney General Tony West wants to keep it that way.
The office has taken on a wider range of litigation under West and the Obama administration, including areas it has historically neglected like mortgage and immigration services fraud.
“I’m trying to strengthen it, certainly,” West told Main Justice in an interview. “To give it the strength institutionally to be a permanent, vibrant part of the Civil Division.”
And with that unprecedented strength, the office could become the force for consumer protection it was originally meant to be, said John R. Fleder, a former director at the office from 1985 to 1992.
“They are cases that did not fit within the bailiwick – the jurisdiction – of the office,” Fleder said. “There has been various efforts in time to make that office into an overall consumer protection office. Now it appears that that’s what the Civil Division has recently been doing.”
If all this seems unremarkable given the office’s stated goal of protecting consumers, it takes on a new significance after a look back at the office’s history.
Since its establishment in 1971, the office’s mission has always been to protect consumers, but the breadth and scope of its efforts have varied widely. Initially named the “Consumer Affairs Section” and housed within the Antitrust Division, it was moved to the Civil Division in the early 1980s and was renamed the “Office of Consumer Litigation.”
The office narrowed its focus to enforcing consumer protection laws governed by its four client agencies – the Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Product Safety Commission, and National Highway Safety Administration. It enforced the laws of those agencies and protected them from suits.
But it remained at the mercy of the politicians who control the resources needed to take on cases, West said.
“Those resources were often treated like an accordion according to the different administrations that would come through the building,” West said. “What we’re trying to do is expand the resources in order to fulfill the office’s mission.”
Recently broadened casework simply reflects the greater resources and personnel at the office’s disposal, West said, and will not affect the office’s handling of other agency cases.
But Fleder said he sees a definite shift in priorities.
“The fact that they’re sort of branching out into general fraud is new,” Fleder said. “Now it sounds like they’re affirmatively going out on their own to bring cases to protect consumers.”
And the office’s name will soon reflect that shift. In addition to the recent addition of the word “protection,” West said another yet-unannounced name change is in the works – the brainchild of attorneys within the office.
The name has already been approved by Attorney General Eric Holder and will become official if approved by Congress, West said.
Changes are also coming to the office’s leadership. Last week, the Civil Division announced that Michael Blume, currently an Assistant United States Attorney in Philadelphia, will soon head the office. He will replace Kenneth Jost, who served as acting director for just less than two months after the previous director, Eugene M. Thirolf, retired in April.
Blume will be the first director to head the office without first working there, Fleder said, and could be another part of West’s campaign to shake things up.
The FBI seized several Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday morning, causing several websites to go offline, The New York Times reported.
The raid occurred round 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by Switzerland-based company DigitalOne.
“This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company,” said DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, in an email to clients Tuesday afternoon. “In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.”
Ostroumow told The Times that the FBI was only interested in one of the company’s clients, but seized entire server racks used by tens of clients. He did not name the targeted company.
DigitalOne was apparently notified by the data center’s operator about the raid three hours after it started. It had no employees on-site when the raid took place.
The motivation behind the raid remains unknown, and the FBI didn’t comment, according to The Times.
One of the sites affected belonged to Curbed Network, the New York publisher behind the blogs Curbed, Eater, Racked and Gridskipper. Those blogs remained down through Tuesday evening but were not the target of the raid, Curbed Network’s president Lockhart Steele told The Times.
The raid also disrupted the bookmarking site Pinboard and a server used by Instapaper, a digital service that saves articles for users to read later.
