Luke J. McCormack is joining the Justice Department as its chief information officer. He has served as the CIO of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the the Department of Homeland Security since 2005.
Luke McCormack
The Office of the CIO oversees information technology programs and supports the department’s technology-assisted law enforcement, according to a department news release.
Eric R. Olson, who served as acting CIO, will remain in the office as a deputy. Olson temporarily filled the position after Vance Hitch left the department in August.
McCormack served as acting director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection’s infrastructure services division from 2004 to 2005. He also was director of architecture and engineering and director of systems engineering within Customs and Border Protection. During his tenure with the Department of Homeland Security, he received the Secretary of Homeland Security’s silver award and presidential meritorious award.
“Luke has the expertise needed to oversee the Justice Department’s information management and technology programs, and I am pleased to welcome him in this new role,” Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole said in the news release. “I’m confident that under his leadership the department will continue to enhance its cybersecurity, enterprise network and law enforcement sharing programs in a cost-effective way – while fulfilling our most critical missions.”
The U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles announced Friday that cyclist Lance Armstrong would not be charged after a two-year investigation into his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs.
Lance Armstrong (Photo by Oddne Rasmussen)
The seven-time Tour de France winner and his teammates faced scrutiny after former teammate Floyd Landis accused him in 2010 of participating in a drug program. The 40-year-old cyclist has maintained he never failed a drug test, and he accused Justice Department officials of attempting to taint his legacy by releasing details of the grand jury investigation last summer. The Justice Department filed a sealed a response to these allegations shortly thereafter.
The probe, which began in May 2010, centered on his record seven consecutive Tour victories from 1999 to 2005.
Los Angeles U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte announced the investigation was closed on Friday and said the cancer survivor would not be charged with any crimes. In his brief statement, the prosecutor gave no reason for ending the investigation.
USA Today reports that Justice Department officials declined to disclose how much money was spent on the investigation.
Arnold & Porter LLP’s Bill Baer is the nominee to head the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, the White House announced Friday.
Bill Baer (photo by Aruna Viswanatha/Main Justice)
Baer, head of Arnold & Porter’s antitrust practice group, is one of the best known competition lawyers in Washington. He also maintains an active practice in Brussels before the European Commission.
Baer was reportedly considered for the top job at the beginning of the Barack Obama administration, but the nod went to Christine Varney, then of Hogan & Hartson LLP. Varney stepped down in August to join in Cravath, Swain & Moore LLP.
Fortunately for Baer, AT&T Corp. dropped its $39 billion bid for T-Mobile USA, which the Justice Department had filed a lawsuit to stop. Arnold & Porter represented AT&T, which would have made Baer’s nomination problematic. He likely would have had to recuse himself from decisions regarding the biggest antitrust action the Justice Department had taken under President Obama.
Arnold & Porter’s Richard Rosen and Donna Patterson handled the AT&T merger transaction.
Others who were reportedly under consideration included O’Melveny & Myers LLP antitrust chair Richard Parker; Seth Bloom, antitrust counsel to Wisconsin Democratic Senator Herb Kohl; David Turetsky, an antitrust lawyer with Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP and a former senior official in the antitrust division; and Leslie Overton, special adviser to the antitrust division’s acting head, Sharis Pozen, who also recently announced she will depart in April.
Baer joined Arnold and Porter in 1980 and made partner in 1983. he served as the Director for the Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission from 1995 to 1999, after beginning at the FTC as a trial attorney for the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC. Baer holds a B.A. from Lawrence University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School, according to the White House.
It remains to be seen whether his nomination will move through the Senate. This year is a presidential election, which always complicates nominations. Moreover, Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has said he will block Justice Department nominees because he believes the department has not fully cooperated in his investigation of the Fast and Furious gun-walking investigation that let weapons purchased by straw buyers in the U.S. flow over the southern border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
Grassley’s objections have stalled the nomination of Kathryn Keneally to head the Justice Department’s Tax Division, as well as the nomination of a long-time top adviser to Attorney General Eric Holder, Kevin Ohlson, who is nominated to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.
President Barack Obama has nominated Stephanie Rose, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, to be a federal judge.
Stephanie Rose
If confirmed, Rose would be the first woman to serve on the bench in the Des Moines-based Southern District of Iowa, where she’s been nominated.
This would be the second time she’s broke down such a barrier, according to a news release from her patron, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who also recommended her for the U.S. Attorney job. She was also the first woman to serve as U.S. Attorney in Cedar Rapids.
Rose was appointed in 2010 by Attorney General Eric Holder to serve on his Advisory Committee, a coveted position for U.S. attorneys across the country.
Before being elevated to the U.S. Attorney in Cedar Rapids, she was a prosecutor in the office for 12 years. She had worked as the office’s deputy criminal chief since 2003.
Rose attended the University of Iowa and graduated from the University of Iowa College of Law in 1996.
Conspiracy theorists have been known to focus on inconsistencies or uncertainties in asserting that, say, President John F. Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy, or that American astronauts didn’t really land on the moon. Now, there is food for those who say the 2001 anthrax attacks are still unsolved — and it has been served up by the Department of Justice.
The DOJ concluded that Bruce E. Ivins, an Army biodefense expert who worked at Fort Detrick, Md., carried out the attacks that killed five people and caused 17 others to become ill as the nation was still reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks. No, maybe he didn’t, the DOJ asserted recently.
How can this be?
As reported recently in The Washington Post, which credited a joint report by McClatchy newspapers, PBS’s “Frontline” and ProPublica, the latest confusion in the anthrax case seems to have been created by lawyers acting too much like lawyers.
Indeed, investigators and prosecutors in the DOJ concluded that Ivins was the anthrax mailer, and that he committed suicide in 2008 as the law was closing in on him. If some people who had followed the case were not entirely convinced, it was partly because investigators initially focused on the wrong man, and had to pay him several million dollars as a result.
The suggestion that maybe Ivins was not the killer was raised by DOJ civil attorneys defending the government against a lawsuit brought by Maureen Stevens, widow of a tabloid photo editor, Robert Stevens, who died in his Florida office as the first anthrax victim. The widow contended that the government’s handling of the anthrax had been negligent, and she settled her case last October (see Main Justice’s report).
But buried deep in the settlement documents were assertions by DOJ lawyers that the anthrax that killed Stevens was different from that in Ivins’ lab, that maybe a lab in Ohio was involved in the attacks, and that many people insisted that Ivins was innocent. If the Stevens case had gone to trial, it would have offered the spectacle of one arm of the DOJ wrestling with the other arm.
DOJ prosecutors and FBI officials said they stand firmly behind their conclusions that Ivins was the culprit. They said the civil filings were “legal hypotheticals designed to shield the government from a negligence lawsuit filed by the family of an anthrax victim,” The Post said.
“I cannot think of another case in which the government has done such an egregious about-face,’’ said Paul Rothstein, a law professor at Georgetown University, according to The Post. “When there have been so many public statements about Ivins’s guilt, someone higher up in the department should have seen this collision coming down the tracks.’’
Now, there has been a train wreck of sorts (and some shouting matches between colleagues) in the halls of the DOJ, where officials have blamed imprecise wording for the confusion and insist that the attorneys in the Florida case were just doing their jobs. But all in all, the episode calls up the old Washington saying, “If you have to explain it, don’t bother.”
It could also give rise to more lawyer jokes. As Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) once told a gathering of attorneys, “The trouble with lawyer jokes is that lawyers don’t think they’re funny, and non-lawyers don’t think they’re jokes.”
The botched prosecution of the late Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, once one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate, has cost the Department of Justice a lot in terms of time, energy and embarrassment. It is also costing the taxpayers, to the tune of some $1.8 million in legal fees so far to defend prosecutors from allegations of wrongdoing.
The DOJ has paid about $1.6 million since 2009 to private lawyers representing six prosecutors accused of misconduct and about $208,000 to defend three prosecutors accused of civil contempt of court, USA Today’s Brad Heath reported, citing data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The consolation to the taxpayers is that the tab would have been much worse, had the cast of big-time white collar defense lawyers been allowed to charge their usual fees. But the Justice Department limits the hourly rate it will pay, and also limited the monthly hours of work it would reimburse to around 200. To borrow a line from Mitt Romney, the several hundred thousand dollars each firm pulled in on the case is “not very much,” relatively speaking.
That’s not how Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa sees it.
“Unfortunately, it’s the taxpayers who are losing twice,” the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, according to the newspaper. “First, the Justice Department committed serious legal errors and ethical missteps in its taxpayer-funded investigation and trial against Senator Stevens. And second, this is an unseemly high amount of money being spent by the taxpayers to defend what appears to be egregious misconduct.”
DOJ spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said the “government’s long-standing practice has been to provide or make representation available to federal employees for legal proceedings arising out of the performance of their official duties,” according to USA Today.
The Stevens case has had elements of politics, sex and tragic deaths. At its core, it focused on charges that Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in Senate history, was much too cozy with Alaska oil tycoon Bill Allen, happily accepting gifts and favors from him and failing to disclose them. He was convicted in federal court in 2008 of lying about the gifts and lost his Senate seat that fall.
But that was hardly the end of the episode. Attorney General Eric Holder was forced to seek dismissal of the case in 2009 when it became known that the prosecution had withheld evidence that might have helped the defense. Nor, in the opinion of the judge who presided over the Stevens trial, were the prosecutors’ lapses the result of mere carelessness.
The prosecutorial misconduct “permeated the proceedings before this Court… to a degree and extent that this Court had not seen in twenty-five years on the bench,” Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia observed in November. He ordered an investigation by Washington lawyer Henry Schuelke that found that prosecutors had engaged in willful and intentional misconduct, albeit without enough accompanying evidence to bring criminal charges against them (see Main Justice’s report).
The prosecutors who came under scrutiny were William Welch, then head of the Public Integrity Section at Main Justice; and Justice Department trial attorneys Brenda Morris and Edward Sullivan, along with Alaska Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph Bottini and James Goeke. Justice Department prosecutor Nick Marsh was also under investigation, but took his own life in 2010.
Bill Welch (© 2009 The Republican Company)
Sullivan has said he intends to release the Schuelke report publicly after the Justice Department responds.
The former senator died in a plane crash in 2010, and weeks later, Marsh committed suicide (see Main Justice’s report). In the following months, Alaska cases linked to the episode had to be thrown out or failed to gain any traction. They included an investigation of Ben Stevens, former president of the Alaska State Senate and son of Ted Stevens (see Main Justice’s report).
Finally, there is the issue of Bill Allen, the oil tycoon who became the key witness against Ted Stevens. It seems that Allen has a weakness for young girls, a failing that has been widely publicized because some people, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), have questioned why Allen escaped prosecution for transporting a minor prostitute across state lines (see Main Justice’s report).
Amid the continuing fallout from the Stevens case, it is fair to note in passing that the DOJ smoothly handles and prosecutes many, many cases each year. But the Stevens case is surely one the DOJ would like to forget and put behind it, if and when it can.
George E. B. Holding, the former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, is out raising his chief rival for the Republican nomination in the race to represent the state’s 13th Congressional District.
Holding has raised $465,000 for his campaign, nearly four times as much as Paul Goble, a Wake County commissioner and former mayor of Raleigh, according to a report in The News & Observer of North Carolina. They are vying for the seat now held by Rep. Brad Miller, a Democrat who is not seeking re-election.
Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C), the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has accused Holding of prosecuting him to advance his own political career. Holding was associated with the late Sen. Jesse Helms, a combative conservative whose North Carolina political network often battled Edwards. Indeed, the man Edwards beat in 1998 to win his Senate seat, Lauch Faircloth, is among the recent donors to Holding, giving $2000 to Holding’s congressional bid, the newspaper reported.
Edwards is accused of using about $1 million in undisclosed payments from his campaign finance chairman and a wealthy 98-year-old widow to cover up an affair during his 2008 run for the White House, as Main Justice has reported. Holding has touted the criminal case he built against Edwards in his campaign.
Edwards has pleaded not guilty. His trial has been delayed as he receives treatment for a heart ailment.
The probability of more drawn-out litigation between the Department of Justice and the combative Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, seemed to increase with the latest exchange of messages between the parties, messages that were anything but conciliatory.
Roy Austin
Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General Roy Austin wrote Arpaio’s lawyer on Thursday that the sheriff’s position on resolving the discrimination allegations against his office “makes litigation inevitable in the very near term,” The Arizona Republic reported.
Not to be intimidated, Jack MacIntyre, a deputy chief in the Sheriff’s Office, described Austin’s letter as brinksmanship and vowed that the Sheriff’s Office would not yield to DOJ’s “saber rattling.”
The latest round of sharp exchanges are no surprise, given recent assertions by the DOJ that the Sheriff continues to stonewall any attempts to resolve charges of discrimination against Latinos (see Main Justice’s report).
“We are still planning to meet with you in Phoenix on February 6,” Austin wrote to the Sheriff’s office, alluding to a sit-down scheduled for Monday. “But if the purpose of the meeting is solely for you to tell us in person that you do not agree with our findings, there is no reason for us to meet.”
To which MacIntyre replied in part, “Litigation is only a threat if you’ve never done it before.” Perhaps he was trying to avoid the cliche, “See you in court.”
