Tag: Bill Barr

James Comey: Geoffrey Berman upheld the finest tradition of the SDNY office

Washington Post logoIn 1906, reform-minded President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to change the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. That office, which in its original form opened in 1789, was older than the Department of Justice itself. The court in which the office’s prosecutors worked was known as the “Mother Court,” because it began operating weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Southern District of New York had been around since the founding of the country, and Roosevelt didn’t like what it had become — a place of political patronage, uninterested in troubling the powerful.

Roosevelt changed that with a single appointment, of Henry L. Stimson, a young, Harvard-educated Wall Street lawyer, who would go on to serve as secretary of state and secretary of war for four presidents of both parties, including a brand-new chief executive, Harry Truman, who needed to know about the atomic bomb. (“I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter,” Stimson wrote his new boss.)

As the new U.S. attorney, Stimson immediately fired people. They were all hacks, in his estimation, careerist or corrupt or both. He replaced them with recent graduates from top law schools, whom he wanted only for a few years, after which they would go work for fancy law firms and be replaced by other idealistic and talented young lawyers. Continue reading.

Barr says US attorney who refused to resign is now fired — but this is all far from over

AlterNet logoOn Friday night, Attorney General William Barr issued a statement saying that the U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffry Berman, had resigned. That was a lie. Not only had Berman not resigned, he had told Barr repeatedly that he would not resign, and had turned down other roles at the Department of Justice. So, about an hour after Barr’s statement, Berman issued a statement of his own, telling Barr to stuff it. Actually, Berman stated that he had been “appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York” and that he would only step down “when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate.” Berman is in the middle of a number of highly sensitive investigations, including an ongoing investigation of Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani and his associates in Trump’s Ukraine scandal. So his removal clearly signals that Barr is, once again, placing Trump’s desires far ahead of such arcane ideas as justice, or the nation.

On Saturday afternoon, Barr produced a new statement. He’s given up the pretense that Berman has resigned. Instead Barr says, “I have asked the president to remove you as of today, and he has done so.” According to Barr, this makes assistant U. S. Attorney Audrey Strauss the new acting U. S. Attorney, but considering Barr’s knowledge and application of the law, odds are he’s simply lying again. Hilariously, Barr claims there’s no danger of there being an issue with ongoing cases because … the inspector general will see to that. As everyone knows, Trump and Barr just respect the hell out of inspectors general.

Nadler: House Judiciary Committee will open investigation into Berman firing

The Hill logoHouse Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) announced Saturday that the committee will immediately open an investigation into the Trump administration’s decision to fire Manhattan U.S. attorney Geoff Berman. 

“The House Judiciary Committee will immediately open an investigation into this incident, as part of our broader investigation into Barr’s unacceptable politicization of the Department of Justice,” Nadler said in a statement.

“On Wednesday, the Committee will hear from two whistleblowers who will explain why Barr’s attempt to fire Mr. Berman is part of a larger, ongoing, and wholly unacceptable pattern of conduct. If the President removes Mr. Berman, then we will take additional steps to secure his testimony as well.” Continue reading.

Barr says Trump fired Manhattan US Attorney Berman

The Hill logoPresident Trump has officially fired a U.S. attorney in Manhattan who led multiple investigations involving his associates, according to Attorney General William Barr. 

The Justice Department announced late Friday that it would replace Geoffrey Berman, a powerful prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, though Berman announced shortly afterward that he had no intention of resigning.

In a letter obtained by BuzzFeed News, Barr notified Berman that he asked Trump to officially fire him after his statement the night before in which he said he had not resigned and suggested he could not be removed until the Senate approved his replacement.  Continue reading.

Why the new case against Bill Barr could be a game-changer

AlterNet logoNo attorney general since John Mitchell has gotten away with assaulting the rule of law more than Bill Barr. But unlike Mitchell, who served 19 months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, Barr has yet to be held accountable for his ever-expanding laundry list of outrageous misdeeds and derelictions.

To be sure, there have been several efforts to bring Barr to heel. Last July, for example, the House voted to hold both Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt for refusing to turn over documents related to the Trump administration’s attempt to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census. But in an act of defiance that surprised absolutely no one, the DOJ, which Barr heads, refused to pursue charges against either cabinet member, leaving the House with no means of enforcement.

More recently, more than 2,000 former Justice Department lawyers signed open letters demanding Barr’s resignation after he intervened in the cases of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn to overturn the sentencing recommendations of career prosecutors. And in a scathing rebuke published May 9, the editorial board of the New York Times accused Barr of using the DOJ as a “political weapon” to advance and protect the personal interests of the president. And yet despite the denunciations, Barr remains, in effect, the country’s top cop. Continue reading.

Justice Department seeks emergency order to block publication of Bolton’s book

Washington Post logoThe Justice Department on Wednesday night sought an emergency order from a judge to block the publication of former national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming White House memoir, escalating a legal battle against the former Trump aide even after many of his book’s most explosive details had spilled out into public view

The move came after the administration filed a civil suit against Bolton on Tuesday, targeting the proceeds of the book and asking a court to order him to delay its scheduled June 23 release. Less than 24 hours later, the Wall Street Journal released an excerpt of the memoir, and lengthy accounts were published by other news organizations.

Wednesday’s move sought to formally enjoin Bolton from allowing his book to be published, a legal strategy experts said was unlikely to succeed, particularly given that the book has already been printed and shipped to warehouses and copies distributed to the media for review. Continue reading.

DOJ proposes crackdown on tech industry’s legal shield

The proposal unveiled Wednesday would pare back some of the protections that digital companies have enjoyed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The Justice Department proposed a major update Wednesday to the law that shields internet companies from liability for content on their sites — a move that is even broader than President Donald Trump’s attempts to hold platforms like Twitter and Facebook to account for decisions found to be politically biased.

DOJ’s proposal, which would need Congress’ blessing, would address a wide range of criticisms of the protections that digital companies have enjoyed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that has been critical to the online industry’s wealth and power.

Among the changes: Sites or platforms that facilitate third-party content that violates federal law would no longer be able to claim immunity from lawsuits. Users could sue companies in cases that involve child sexual abuse, terrorism and cyberstalking. It also would be easier for users to sue over platforms’ decisions to take down their content, a change intended to push companies to be more fair in removing content they find objectionable. Continue reading.

Barr Threatens Suit To Stop Bolton’s Book Because The First Amendment Is, Like, More Of A Suggestion Really

I’ll take PRIOR RESTRAINT for $600, Alex!

“Any conversation with me is classified,” President Trump insisted at a press conference yesterday. Because once we had a scholar of constitutional law as president, and now we have … the opposite of that.

The president’s voluminous knickers are in a twist this week over the upcoming release of Ambassador John Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” which is scheduled to hit the shelves on June 23.

As a former federal employee, Bolton had to submit his manuscript to the National Security Council to ensure it contained no classified material. Since December 30, when he dropped the 592-page tell all about his time as Trump’s National Security Advisor on the NSC’s doorstep, Bolton undertook multiple rounds of revision in coordination with Ellen Knight, the agency’s senior director for prepublication review. Continue reading.

Trump administration sues to block publication of John Bolton’s book

Axios logoThe big picture: The memoir by Bolton, a prolific note taker, is expected to shed light on alleged misconduct by President Trump related to his dealings with foreign countries. Trump claimed on Monday that Bolton would have a “very strong criminal problem” if he proceeded with publishing the book, stating: “I will consider every conversation with me as president to be highly classified.”

The other side: Bolton’s lawyer Charles Cooper said in a statement in response to the lawsuit, “We are reviewing the Government’s complaint, and will respond in due course.”

  • Cooper claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that his client has already undergone four months of “perhaps the most extensive and intensive prepublication review in NSC history,” before the White House official who Bolton was coordinating with suddenly stopped responding.
  • The attorney claims that the White House has purposely stalled the process as a “transparent attempt to use national security as a pretext to censor Mr. Bolton.”
  • Bolton pointed on Twitter to the following statement from the ACLU: “50 years ago, SCOTUS rejected the Nixon administration’s attempt to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, establishing that government censorship is unconstitutional. Any Trump administration efforts to stop John Bolton’s book from being published are doomed to fail.” Continue reading.

Federal Government Set to Begin Executing Inmates in July

WASHINGTON, DC — The Justice Department has set new dates to begin executing federal death-row inmates following a months-long legal battle over the plan to resume the executions for the first time since 2003.

Attorney General William Barr directed the federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule the executions, beginning in mid-July, of four inmates convicted of killing children. Three of the men had been scheduled to be put to death when Barr announced the federal government would resume executions last year, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the issue receded from the public domain.

The Justice Department had scheduled five executions set to begin in December, but some of the inmates challenged the new procedures in court, arguing that the government was circumventing proper methods in order to wrongly execute inmates quickly. Continue reading.