Despite having never received concrete assurances from the Justice Department that it won’t pursue criminal charges, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced Tuesday he would allow the state’s medical marijuana law to move forward, Forbes reported.
Christie said the program was “a risk I’m willing to take as governor” and that he believes federal prosecutors have more important crimes to pursue than state-sanctioned marijuana dispensaries and users.
“It is my belief, having held that job for seven years, that there’s a lot of other things that will be more important as long as the dispensaries operate within the law,” he said at a news conference.
Christie had blocked his state’s program in June over concerns that federal prosecutors would bring charges under the Controlled Substances Act, which still lists marijuana as an illegal substance.
The governor sent two letters to Attorney General Eric Holder asking for clarification on the law and assurances that prosecutors wouldn’t go after state-approved medical marijuana businesses or the state employees implementing the program.
Several other states put the brakes on their programs as well, and Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne even filed suit against the department seeking a court judgment on whether his state could lawfully implement medical marijuana laws.
Some clarification came earlier this month. In a policy memo to federal prosecutors, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said that a 2009 memo by then-Deputy Attorney General David Ogden did not protect states from prosecution.
It would fall to individual U.S. Attorneys to decide whether to prosecute cases, the memo said. But Cole made clear that going after state-sanctioned users was not a priority.
To date, 16 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana use.
Tracy Schmaler, deputy Director for the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs, will be promoted to director when the current chief, Matt Miller, leaves next week.
Attorney General Holder praised Schmaler’s experience and welcomed her to the position in a statement Wednesday.
“Tracy has done an outstanding job as a member of the department’s senior leadership for the past two and a half years, and I look forward to her continued advice and counsel as she takes on this new assignment,” Holder said. “With background as a reporter and time on Capitol Hill, she brings invaluable experience and perspective to the issues the department faces day in and out.”
Schmaler has served as the deputy director since since the beginning of the Obama administration, and she previously worked on the Senate Judiciary Committee for Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Before that she was a reporter for the Vermont Press Bureau.
Miller announced his decision to leave the department for the private sector last month, but didn’t discuss his future plans.
“It’s been a real privilege to be here,” Miller said.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold another hearing as part of its ongoing investigation into Operation Fast and Furious on Tuesday – but this time investigators will focus on witnesses who worked across the border.
Witness at the hearing, called “Operation Fast and Furious: The Other Side of the Border,” will feature agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives working in Mexico and Arizona.
They include Carlos Canino, ATF acting Attaché to Mexico; Darren Gil, the former ATF Attaché; Jose Wall, ATF senior special agent for Tijuana, Mexico; Lorren Leadmon, ATF intelligence operations specialist; William Newell, former ATF special agent in charge of the Phoenix Field Division; and William McMahon, ATF deputy assistant director for field operations.
“The acting Director of the ATF has told congressional investigators that the Justice Department is attempting to shift blame in Operation Fast and Furious away from its political appointees,” said Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in a statement. “Examining the accounts of witnesses who did not participate in Operation Fast and Furious, but were nonetheless disturbed as they watched it unfold is critical to understanding the scope of this flawed program. This testimony is especially important in light of the Justice Department’s willful efforts to withhold key evidence from investigators about what occurred, who knew and who authorized this reckless operation.”
Several ATF agents from the Phoenix Field Division testifying at the previous committee hearing revealed that agents were ordered to stop surveillance on guns destined for Mexican drug cartels.
In all, Fast and Furious allegedly allowed about 2,000 firearms to be sold to straw purchasers and trafficked into Mexico.
Two guns sold in operation were recovered from the scene of a December 2010 shootout between Border Patrol agents and Mexican bandits that ended in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry. Others have been found at various scenes of violent crime and cartel violence in Mexico.
Members of Terry’s family also testified at the previous hearing.
The FBI announced an international crackdown against computer hacking yesterday, and 21 alleged hackers have been arrested in the U.S., Britain and the Netherlands.
The biggest part of the operation was the arrest of 14 hackers of the group called “Anonymous” who the FBI claims were responsible for a cyber attack of the eBay subsidiary PayPal in retaliation for the site’s actions against Wikileaks. The other two arrests made in the U.S. were of men accused of separate hacking operations, one of which allegedly stole confidential AT&T business information and one which allegedly hacked the site of an infrastructure protection group which is sponsored by the FBI.
Four more people were arrested for cybercrimes by Dutch police, and one by the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service, operations which the FBI says were done in coordination with U.S. authorities. And the FBI also says it conducted over 35 additional search warrants throughout the U.S. as part of another ongoing investigation into cybercrimes against major companies.
Despite the broad focus on cybercrime in the crackdown, most of the arrests were part of the latest development in the Wikileaks controversy. The FBI claims that after Wikileaks released its State Department cables in November of 2010, PayPal suspended the organization’s account, preventing it from receiving donations through PayPal. “Anonymous” then attacked PayPal’s computer servers and tried to make the service unusable. The FBI says the group named the attack “Operation Avenge Assange,” after Wikileaks’ leader Julian Assange.
Those arrested will be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney Offices in the Northern District of California, which is dealing with the 14 Wikileaks-related defendants, and the middle District of Florida and New Jersey, which are handling the other two. The Justice Department said in a press release that the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section assisted in the operation. The main charge against the defendants is intentional damage to a protected computer and carries a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Those arrested are mostly young, nine of the 16 are 26 years old or under, and spread out across the country. Even in the 14 arrests made in the Wikileaks case, the alleged hackers were arrested in 9 different states and D.C.
President Barack Obama has signaled his support for a bill that would repeal the 1996 Defense Of Marriage Act, which banned the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage even when couples could marry under state law, the National Journal reported.
White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday that the president “is proud” to support the repeal effort, “which would take the Defense Of Marriage Act off the books for one and for all.”
Carney also said the president has “long called for a legislative appeal for the so-called Defense Of Marriage Act, which continues to have a real impact on families.”
A bill to repeal DOMA, called the “Respect For Marriage Act,” was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).
The Senate Judiciary Committee also held a hearing on the bill Wednesday featuring both representatives that support and oppose repealing DOMA.
Ronald Machen, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, explored the criminal justice system from a different angle Monday, when he was called for jury duty, the blog of Legal Times reports.
Not surprisingly, Machen, the district’s top federal law enforcement official, was not selected as a juror.
Machen told Main Justice last month that he hopes his recent community outreach efforts encourage D.C. residents to participate in basic civic duties, such as jury duty. So one could call Machen’s service Monday leading by example, or getting a taste of his own medicine.
Justice Department lawyers have called into question a key pillar of the FBI’s case against the late Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing anthrax letters that killed five people a decade ago, the McClatchy Newspapers, Propublica and Frontline reported.
Despite the circumstantial nature of the case against Ivins, federal investigators believed they had their man. His job at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Derick, Md., gave him the means and opportunity to make the specific strain of pure, powdered anthrax linked to the letters, investigators maintained.
But Ivins committed suicide shortly before investigators labeled him the mass murderer in 2008, and many still questioned whether he really was the one who sent letters to congressional buildings and post offices in 2001.
The department closed its investigation into the case last year. But now, DOJ lawyers say in court papers that the sealed area of Ivin’s lab that investigators say he used to make the spores did not have the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder used in the attacks.
The new court filings come from West Palm Beach, Fla., where the DOJ’s Civil Division is defending a wrongful-death case brought by Maureen Stevens, the widow of photo editor Robert Stevens, who was the first person killed by a letter while working at The Sun tabloid. The case faults careless procedures at the government lab for allowing the killer to make the anthrax that caused Stevens’ death.
But DOJ lawyers have sought to counter Maureen Stevens’ claims by arguing that the anthrax was not made in Ivin’s lab.
The papers were filed July 15 and uncovered by a reporter from PBS’s “Frontline” program.
And in a deposition made public in the case last week, USAMRIID’s Bacteriology Division Chief Patricia Worsham also said the machine used to dry the spores wasn’t kept in the lab.
“If someone had used that to dry down that preparation, I would have expected that area to be very, very contaminated, and we had nonimmunized personnel in that area, and I would have expected some of them to become ill,” she said.
Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, told McClatchy that the court filing didn’t contradict the government’s conclusion that Ivins sent the letters. Instead, he said the lawyers merely argued that “Ivins’ actions were not foreseeable to his supervisors at USAMRIID,” because he didn’t have equipment necessary to dry the spores in his containment lab.
But Paul Kemp, Ivins’ lead defense attorney, said that the department’s concession “invalidat[es] one of the chief theories of their prosecution case,” according to McClatchy.
UPDATE: In a statement Tuesday, DOJ spokesman Dean Boyd said the motion filed by the department and cited in the McClatchy report “contained inaccurate information.” The department amended its filing to make clear that it still stood behind its findings that Ivins mailed the anthrax letters and that “Dr. Ivins had the necessary equipment in the containment suite where RMR-1029 was housed to perpetrate those attacks and that a lyophilizer [a machine for dehydrating substances] which he ordered, and which was labeled ‘property of Bruce Ivins,’ was stationed in a nearby containment suite.”
Yet another federal prosecutor is running for Congress.
Susan Brooks, who served seven years as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, from 2001-2007, is challenging Congressman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) in the Republican primary, the Associated Press reports.
Brooks has also served as a deputy mayor in Indianapolis and is the second challenger that Burton will face in the May primary.
George E. B. Holding, a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina who gained notice for his decision to prosecute former presidential candidate John Edwards, declared his intent to run for Congress last week.
In a historic first, the Senate by an overwhelming majority Monday confirmed the nation’s first openly gay federal judge.
J. Paul Oetken, 45, won Senate confirmation by a vote of 80-to-13, and will become a federal judge in Manhattan after President Barack Obama signs his commission.
Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York recommended Oetken to the White House last year, and applauded his confirmation Monday.
“When there are so many qualified gay and lesbian people and none of them get on the bench, you scratch your head and wonder way,” Schumer told the New York Times. “But the old barriers that existed in society are crumbling. That’s what this will say.”
Oetken received his J.D. from Yale Law School and was a judicial clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. After his clerkship, he worked at the Justice Department and served as associate counsel to President Bill Clinton.
Oetken currently works as a senior vice president and associate general counsel at Cablevision.
Documents withheld by the Justice Department could provide a “smoking gun” for congressional investigators by implicating the department’s political appointees and their role in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Operation Fast and Furious, two senior Republican congressmen say.
In a letter sent to Justice Monday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) described an interview with ATF acting Director Kenneth Melson in which he acknowledged the existence of a report on the operation held by the department and said the DOJ has withheld it and other documents in an effort to protect senior officials.
“It was very frustrating to all of us, and it appears thoroughly to us that the department is really trying to figure out a way to push the information away from their political appointees at the department,” Melson said on July 4, according to the letter.
The letter also suggested a rift between Melson and department officials over the handling of congressional requests for information regarding the operation.
“I think [the department] was doing more damage control than anything,” Melson said. “My view is that the whole matter of the Department’s response in this case was a disaster. That as a result it came to fruition that the [House Oversight] committee staff had to be more assertive in attempting to get information from the department, and as a result, there was more adverse publicity toward the ATF than was warranted if we had cooperated from the very beginning.”
According to passages cited by the letter, Melson told investigators that the Justice Department advised him not to raise concerns with Congress about “institutional problems” within Fast and Furious or even explain the operation to ATF agents in January following the first of the public controversy.
“Earlier on, I wanted to do a broadcast that just talked about the case, because everybody was wondering what’s this case about?” Melson said. “And I was told not to do that.”
The letter is latest in a series of back-and-forth accusations between the Republican congressman and the department over the operation. Issa and Grassley have repeatedly used testimony provided by Melson in a July 4, closed-door interview to impugn the DOJ’s cooperation with investigators and to suggest a rift within the department.
But the full text of Melson’s interview has not been released, and in a Main Justice interview with Melson’s personal attorney Richard Cullen, who attended the interview on July 4, Cullen denied any apparent rifts between Melson and the department.
Yet, testimony cited in the most recent letter highlighted disagreements Melson has had with the department’s response. For example, when Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich sent a letter explaining that the department would not provide Grassley with documents because he wasn’t a committee chairman, Melson described his reaction during the letter’s drafting.
“I sat there across the desk from [the Associate Deputy Attorney General with responsibility for ATF], as I recall, and said this is really just poking [Grassley] in the eye,” Melson said. “What’s the sense of doing this? Even if you say you can’t give it to him, he’s going to get it through the back door anyhow, so why are we aggravating this situation.”
The letter also took issue with assurances from the department that documents and information had been provided to investigators. While more 2,000 documents had been provided, the letter said, the DOJ has ducked more specific requests and primarily provided only publicly available documents.
To back up that claim, the congressman cited a request that targeted documents from a meeting between ATF, Arizona U.S. Attorney’s Office officials and a cooperating gun dealer on December 17, 2009. The meeting was critical to their investigation, they wrote, because it occurred immediately after a spike in activity by straw buyers – in which a few buyers purchased 212 guns in six days – from one cooperating gun dealer.
Officials held the meeting to convince the gun dealer to continue cooperating with the agency despite “misgivings caused by the high volume of purchases,” the letter said.
The department has withheld records regarding the meeting, and Melson’s told investigators that key records within the file describing the meeting were dated after controversy over the operation broke – suggesting the department was engaged in “after-the-fact rationalization,” the congressmen wrote.
“This should not be a public relations project,” Issa and Grassley wrote. “It should be a mutual effort to understand why the department allowed American guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels with deadly consequences.”
