Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said Tuesday he intends to stay in his job as head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

Asked if he had any intention to comply with a demand from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) that he resign, Breuer said on a conference call with reporters: “None whatsoever.”

Breuer was participating in a conference call with Securities and Exchange Commission Enforcement Division Director Rob Khuzami to discuss foreign bribery-related charges that were unveiled Tuesday against former executives of German engineering giant Siemens AG.

Grassley has said the highest-ranking Justice Department official who knew about a botched gun-tracing operation called Fast and Furious should resign. Last week, Grassley singled out Breuer, saying he should step down after his involvement in a letter to Congress that contained inaccurate information about the investigation, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed guns purchased in the U.S. to make their way across the border and into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

“I have been clear and transparent and continue to lead this division,” he said.  The Siemens arrests are an example of that work, he said.

A Brooklyn man has been sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for masterminding a credit card-fraud operation that stretched from the East Coast of the United States to Russia and resulted in more than $700,000 in fraudulent charges, the Department of Justice announced.

Jonathan Oliveras, 26, was sentenced by U.S. Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria.  Oliveras was ordered to forfeit $770,646 and to serve three years of supervised release. Oliveras pleaded guilty in August to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, as Main Justice reported. He could have been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

When federal and local law enforcement officers searched Oliveras’s apartment in July 2010, they found damning evidence, including credit card encoding equipment and more than 2,300 stolen credit card numbers, the DOJ said.  Several thousand fraudulent charges have been linked to his operation, the DOJ said.

Oliveras managed a ring that used stolen credit card account information in New York, New Jersey and the Washington, D.C., area, the DOJ said.  Oliveras sent payments to individuals he believed to be in Russia for the stolen account information, then distributed the stolen account information, which was re-encoded onto plastic cards and used to buy gift cards, investigators said.  The gift cards were used to buy items that were returned for cash.

Offices of the FBI and Secret Service in New York, Washington and New Jersey investigated.

David B. Barlow, who was sworn in on Friday as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah, said he finds it “profoundly satisfying to wake up each morning and to know my job is to see that justice be done.”

Barlow

Barlow, 40, was sworn in at Salt Lake City’s federal courthouse by U.S. District Court Judge Ted Stewart as Barlow’s wife, Crystal, and their four children looked on, according to an account in The Salt Lake Tribune.

Barlow had the strong backing of Utah’s two Republican senators, Orrin Hatch and Mike S. Lee. Indeed, Barlow was an aide to Lee, a Tea Party insurgent who replaced Sen. Robert S. Bennett, a Republican who was ousted in the state’s nomination contest in 2010.

Barlow worked as an attorney at the Chicago-based firm Sidley and Austin for 10 years before jumping into politics, according to the Tribune.

“He takes work seriously but doesn’t take himself seriously,” Michael W. Davis, an attorney at Sidley and Austin, told the Tribune. “Our loss is your gain. He will serve the bench … and the people of Utah very well indeed.”

In his swearing in, Barlow used a line from George Sutherland, the only Utah-native to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.  In his role as U.S. Attorney, he will “see that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer,” Barlow told the Tribune.

President Barack Obama disappointed Democrats when he decided to nominate Barlow instead of pushing for someone from his own party, as Main Justice reported recently.  In July, Todd Taylor, executive director of the Utah Democratic Party, told the Tribune that Obama seemed to be ignoring the many qualified Democratic attorneys in the state.

Operation Fast and Furious, the controversial gun-tracking effort that has prompted calls for some heads to roll at the Department of Justice, is having another side-effect: delaying a Senate vote on Kathryn Keneally, who has been nominated to be Assistant Attorney General to head DOJ’s Tax Division.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, says Keneally seems qualified and that he’s prepared to vote for her. “However, given the lack of cooperation I’m getting from the Department of Justice, I can’t commit to moving forward with her nomination on the Senate floor,” Grassley said last week as the furor over Fast and Furious seemed to peak.

Grassley has been among the loudest critics of Fast and Furious, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed straw buyers to acquire hundreds of guns so that they could be tracked across the U.S.-Mexican border, helping law enforcement root out Mexican gangsters. The endeavor backfired mightily, as the ATF lost track of many of the weapons, two of which were found at the scene of a shootout a year ago in which a Border Patrol agent was killed.

Grassley has zeroed in on Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, accusing the Criminal Division chief not only of  “incredibly poor judgment” but of being intentionally misleading in his statements about Fast and Furious. Grassley demanded last week that Breuer step down, or be fired by Attorney General Eric Holder (see Main Justice’s report).

Grassley has demanded that DOJ officials who are interviewed in the inquiry over Fast and Furious not double-team their questioners by being accompanied by both DOJ and personal lawyers.  Until the DOJ cooperates, Keneally’s nomination may languish, even though Grassley said she demonstrated an impressive command of tax issues — impressive, at least, when compared to those of Mary Smith, whose nomination to head the Tax Division was withdrawn after her critics complained her main qualification was not expertise in tax matters but her political connections (see Main Justice’s report).

The Fast and Furious controversy could also stall the nomination of Kevin A. Ohlson, a high DOJ official and longtime aide to Holder, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, as Main Justice noted recently.

Even by health care-fraud standards, the amount was staggering — some $205 million — and it has just resulted in the longest prison sentences ever in a Medicare Fraud Strike Force Case, the Department of Justice has announced.

Judith Negron, 40,  was sentenced on Thursday to 35 years in prison for orchestrating the fraud, the DOJ said. Two other conspirators, Lawrence Duran and Marianella Valera, were sentenced earlier to 50 years and 35 years respectively, the DOJ said.

In sentencing Negron, U.S. Judge James Lawrence King of the Southern District of Florida ordered her to help her co-defendants pay more than $87 million in restitution and to undergo three years of supervision after she is released from prison, which could be when she is about 70 years old, assuming she gets time off for good behavior.

As Main Justice reported when the defendants were indicted last October, they were accused of setting up companies that would arrange with the owners of assisted-living facilities to bring patients to a mental health center for medically unnecessary therapies. The companies would bill Medicare for the services and pay the assisted-living facilities and some patients kickbacks for their roles in the enterprise.

On Aug. 24, 2011, Negron was found guilty of 24 felony counts, including conspiracy to commit health care fraud, health care fraud, conspiracy to pay and receive illegal health care kickbacks, conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering and structuring to avoid reporting requirements, the DOJ said.

Duran and Valera, who were romantically involved, pleaded guilty earlier. According to an account in The Palm Beach Post, they used their illicit earnings to finance a life style that included travel, beachfront condos, a fleet of luxury cars and other privileges of wealth.

Negron’s sentence was announced by Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney Wifredo A. Ferrer of the Southern District of Florida; Special Agent-in-Charge John V. Gillies of the FBI’s Miami Field Office, and Special Agent-in-Charge Christopher Dennis of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, the DOJ said.