Google. Inc. is asking a federal judge to keep confidential information about its business plans that it turned over to the Justice Department as part of DOJ’s investigation into the AT&T/T-Mobile deal.
In a motion filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., Google said that it turned over competitively sensitive information to DOJ and asks U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle to keep the material confidential. The company also asks Huvelle to give the company advance notice of possible disclosure of sensitive information.
“Google produced a substantial volume of documents of a highly confidential and competitively sensitive nature to the DOJ, such as internal product development and launch plans,” the company said in its filing. That information includes business plans for its Android mobile operating system.
In August, DOJ filed suit to block the merger of the nation’s second and fourth largest wireless telephone companies. In announcing the suit to block the $39 billion deal, DOJ officials said the merger would result in decreased competition, which, in turn would result in decreased quality and choices for customers.
Other companies may make similar requests to keep confidential information turned over to DOJ as part of the probe.
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Convening the second meeting of the inter-agency Federal Reentry Council, Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday announced the Justice Department has awarded $83 million in grants in an effort to reduce recidivism.
Holder and Assistant Attorney General Laurie Robinson, head of the Office of Justice Programs, said that the money – provided to DOJ under the Second Chance Act of 2008 — was awarded to 131 charitable organizations. More than 1,000 applications were received.
“We must use every tool at our disposal to tear down the unnecessary barriers to economic opportunities and independence so that formerly incarcerated individuals can serve as productive members of their communities,” Holder said at the second semi-annual meeting of the group.
“The Department of Justice today announced it is providing funding to local organizations whose critical work will reduce recidivism and victimization” Holder said. “At the same time, the council is ensuring these individuals and their families have the facts about federal policies and resources governing employment issues, veterans’ benefits and voting rights as they return home.”
The grants are designed to support include re-entry planning projects, substance abuse treatment programs, mentoring programs and technology career training projects for prisoners.
The House Oversight and Government Reform and House Judiciary committees will hold joint hearings on the Operation Fast and Furious Gun operation, oversight chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Monday.
Issa told ABC 15 in Phoenix Monday that Attorney General Eric Holder, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, head of the DOJ criminal division and former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke will be asked to testify. Burke resigned as a result of fallout from the failed operation.
“We want (the House Judiciary Committee) who has direct oversight over the Attorney General and of (the Department of Justice) to take a more active role, and we believe they will,” Issa told ABC 15.
Operation Fast and Furious was an ATF operation that allegedly resulted in the selling of at least 2,000 firearms to drug cartel members in Arizona via straw buyers. The ATF then allegedly permitted the guns to be trafficked to Mexico, where the bureau lost track of them. Two guns from the operation were recovered in December at the scene of a shootout between Border Patrol agents and Mexican bandits near Rio Rico, Ariz., that resulted in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry. Other guns sold during the operation have been linked to violent crime scenes in Mexico. The Justice Department’s Inspector General is investigating the operation.
Earlier this month, Holder said that he and “the upper levels of the Justice Department” were not aware of the operation, according to Politico.
Michael Sullivan, acting director of the ATF under President George W. Bush, said that Holder’s refutation of prior knowledge is plausible.
He told Fox News that Operation Fast and Furious was “well within the rights of the director [of ATF] to approve or reject,” and that he would have been “surprised” to learn that “authorities outside the ATF” would have had detailed knowledge about the program.
Sullivan added that it is possible that Holder was briefed about the operation, however, given the severity of gang violence in Mexico.
In the latest skirmish in the battle over the Defense of Marriage Act, House Democrats have criticized Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), asserting that lawyers hired by Boehner and his Republican allies to fight for the act lack credibility in their arguments.
A letter to the Speaker from Reps. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, Jerrold Nadler of New York, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Jared Polis of Colorado, David Cicilline of Rhode Island and John Conyers of Michigan declares that lawyers for Republicans “have filed pleadings containing arguments and assertions that are troubling.”
For instance, the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported on Monday, Democrats complain that the Republican lawyers have distorted research on sexual identity. “The United States House of Representatives should not be making harmful and unreasonable arguments that demean its credibility, and that of the American people,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote, according to the Roll Call account.
The 1996 law banning federal recognition of same-sex marriages has been a source of political discomfort and opportunity, depending on one’s perspective, and is likely to be an issue in the 2012 elections.
Earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would no longer defend the law in court. Previously, the DOJ under President Barack Obama had walked a tightrope, saying it didn’t like the law but felt legally obligated to stand up for it, as Main Justice reported.
House Republicans, perhaps seeing an opportunity to capitalize on “family values” issues, decided that they would defend the law, as Main Justice reported. Stay tuned.
The legal troubles and embarrassment for Jeffrey E. Epstein, a billionaire with a weakness for women (and young girls), may not be over. As a matter of fact, federal prosecutors in Florida may have reason to feel uncomfortable also.
U.S. Judge Kenneth Marra of the Southern District of Florida ruled on Monday that federal prosecutors were wrong in asserting that they had no obligation to notify Epstein’s victims before reaching a secret deal that spared the Brooklyn-bred financier serious federal prison time.
“Marra ordered that discovery in the case proceed, which means that the victims — and the public — may get access to previously secret correspondence between Epstein’s attorneys and the government,” Michele Dargan wrote in The Palm Beach Daily News.
Those who have been following the Epstein case may recall that lawyers for two of Epstein’s alleged victims asserted last March that the Miami U.S. Attorney’s office violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act by entering into a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein without notifying them, as Main Justice reported at the time. Monday’s ruling was a victory for lawyers for two young girls who have been trying to get the secret deal overturned.
The agreement meant that Epstein served just over a year in state prison from 2008 to 2009 for soliciting an under-age girl for prostitution and had to register as a sex offender. But the deal apparently spared him a much longer sentence in a federal prison. (Just to complicate things, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, accused Epstein’s defense team of trying to dig up dirt on federal prosecutors to discredit them, as Main Justice reported. Epstein’s lawyers denied the accusations.)
More than 30 under-age girls have been mentioned in the secret agreement. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami declined comment on grounds that “the matter is in litigation,” The Palm Beach Daily News said. (The present U.S. Attorney in Miami is Wifredo A. Ferrer, who was sworn in on April 22, 2010.)
The Justice Department has taken far to long to process criminal pardon requests, causing a huge backlog, the department’s Inspector General said in a report released Tuesday.
While the number of people requesting pardons has increased tremendously, that boost is not the only cause for delays, The IG said.
Instead, the IG said that DOJ offices take longer than “established timeframes” to make recommendations. As of February 2011, there were 4,194 pardon petitions pending. It took an average of two years for pardon petitions to be processed, the IG said.
It should be noted that the years examined by the IG were those of the George W. Bush administration.
The president is responsible for making pardons. However, DOJ officials make recommendations to the president, after the cases are reviewed by various department offices.
The IG said that between Fiscal 2005 and Fiscal 2101, the number of pardon requests reviewed by the Office of Pardon Attorney increased from 1,075 in Fiscal 2005 to 1,733 in Fiscal 2010. At the same time, the backlog of petitions pending at the department and the White House increased by 92 percent. It took an average of almost to years from the time the pardon office received a petition to the time a final decision was made by the president.
DOJ officials already have implemented several of the IG’s recommendation, including better record-keeping and tracking of clemency petitions.
However, the DOJ criminal division said the report “unfairly leaves readers with the misimpression that the Criminal Division fails to respond to referrals in a timely fashion.” Division officials said that in cases where it played a “primary litigating role,” the division responded in an appropriate timeframe.
The Senate confirmed six U.S. Attorney nominees last night–much to the chagrin of some Democrats.
While none of the nominees faced major opposition on the Senate floor, five of the nominees were endorsed by Republicans, with the White House overlooking Democratic Party preferences.
The Senate confirmed
- Robert Lee Pitman for the Western District of Texas;,
- Sarah Ruth Saldaña for the Northern District of Texas;
- John M. Bales for the Eastern District of Texas;
- Kenneth Magidson for the Southern District of Texas;
- David Barlow for the District of Utah; and
- S. Amanda Marshall for the District of Oregon
All but Marshall were recommended to President Obama by Republican senators — much to the dismay of Democratic congressmen like Reps. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) and Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas).
Barlow was recommended by Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee. Barlow served as Lee’s lead counsel after Lee took office in January.
The four Texas U.S. Attorney nominations were recommended to the White House by Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison. They were not on the list the Texas House Democrats, led by Doggett, sent to the president in October 2009. And Doggett was not pleased when the nominations were announced.
A state’s senators traditionally recommend U.S. Attorney and federal judicial candidates to the White House for nomination. But if neither senator is a member of the president’s political party, the White House often defers to House members from the state who share his same political affiliation.
The Obama White House has shown a pattern of backing down when it gets push-back from Republican senators over Democratic choices for U.S. Attorney.
A sentencing hearing in the case of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, which had been scheduled for Oct. 6, has been put off indefinitely, apparently because the judge is to preside over a related corruption case beginning Oct. 3.
Blagojevich was convicted in June of a number of charges. Basically, he was found guilty of putting his office up for sale, most sensationally in trying to capitalize on his power to fill the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama after he was elected president in 2008.
A delay in Blagojevich’s sentencing became a certainty when U.S. Judge James Zagel of the Northern District of Illinois was scheduled to hear the case of William Cellini, a longtime political power broker in Illinois who is accused of trying to pressure a businessman into giving a campaign contribution to Blagojevich, according to an account on Federal Courts Reporter.
Sentencing Blagojevich now “would taint the Cellini jury,” Blagojevich’s lawyer Shelly Sorosky explained.
Blagojevich was found guilty on 17 of the 20 charges against him after prosecutors, learning from their mistakes in an earlier trial that ended in a hung jury on all but one minor count, sharpened their case and trimmed their witness list.
On Monday, to nobody’s surprise, Zagel denied the ex-governor’s 158-page motion for a new trial. The judge had observed earlier that the motion raised no new issues.
Blagojevich, 54, could be sentenced to decades in prison, but legal observers have speculated that the actual sentence will be between 6 1/2 and 15 years.
The second judge in one of the ugliest scandals in modern Pennsylvania history has been sentenced to 17.5 years in prison for his role in putting young offenders into private detention centers, sometimes over the objections of prosecutors, so he could share in kickbacks from the builder of the detention facilities.
Michael Conahan, a former jurist in Luzerne County, was sentenced on Friday to 210 months in custody by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Edwin M. Kosik II. Conahan was also ordered to pay $874,000 in restitution.
Assistant U.S. Attorney William Houser of the Middle District of Pennsylvania said Conahan “abused his power to enrich himself along with his friend Mark Ciavarella,” the Wall Street Journal Law Blog reported. “The judicial system in Pennsylvania was shaken to its very foundation.”
As Main Justice reported in August, Ciavarella, former president judge of the Court of Common Pleas and former judge of the Juvenile Court for Luzerne County, was sentenced to 28 years in prison and ordered to make restitution of $965,930.
Conahan had pleaded guilty to racketeering charges. Ciavarella chose to go to trial and was found guilty on a dozen counts of money laundering and conspiracy.
Conahan’s role in the “cash for kids” scheme was to order the closing of a county-run detention center, clearing the way for Ciavarella, once known as a strict “law and order” judge, to send young offenders to private facilities. This arrangement worked out well for Ciavarella and Conahan, as well as the builder of the facilities and a developer, who pleaded guilty to lesser charges.
The arrangement didn’t work out so well for the young offenders, some of them sent away for offenses that were little more than pranks and would have merited probation, or perhaps just scoldings, if the judges had tried to live up to their oaths.
Conahan, 59, was troubled by abuse as a child and more recent problems with alcohol, his lawyer said, adding that his client suffered from “insidious feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.”
The lawyer didn’t say so, but such feelings are what plague many adolescents, like some of those sent away by the actions of the corrupt judges. The records of the young offenders were erased after the scandal came to light. Their collective disillusionment with the legal system will doubtless take longer to erase.
Bloomberg Law and SCOTUSblog announced today that they have entered into an exclusive sponsorship agreement.
SCOTUSblog’s content will be available on Bloomberg Law’s website and SCOTUSblog founder and publisher Tom Goldstein will provide exclusive business analysis for the media giant, the two partners announced in a news release.
Bloomberg says it will help SCOTUSblog maintain its independence and allow it to continue its “high-quality coverage of issues pertaining to the Court”, according to the release.
The new partners also intend to create new features designed to help law students learn about the Supreme Court and will cooperate on the development of webinars, conferences and similar meetings for business and legal professionals.
Goldstein praised the deal, saying it will allow SCOTUSblog “to reach new readers and give existing readers new features and enhanced information.”
