CNN reports;
“Sens. Patrick Leahy and Al Franken — Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee — sent the requests to Comey and, later, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe in three letters dated March 20, April 28 and May 12.
First on CNN: Sources: Congress investigating another possible Sessions-Kislyak meeting
First on CNN: Sources: Congress investigating another possible Sessions-Kislyak meeting
“We are concerned about Attorney General Sessions’ lack of candor to the committee and his failure thus far to accept responsibility for testimony that could be construed as perjury,” Franken and Leahy wrote to Comey in their first request.
Leahy and Franken both grilled Sessions during his nomination hearing about any contacts he had with Russian officials about the 2016 campaign. At the time, Sessions said he had none. But following a Washington Post report that showed Sessions had met twice with Kislyak, Sessions acknowledged the meetings and recused himself from oversight of the Russia probe.
CNN reported Wednesday that congressional investigators were now examining whether Sessions and Kislyak met a third time.
“Earlier this year, Attorney General Sessions provided false testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to our questions regarding his contacts with Russian officials,” Franken and Leahy said in a joint statement Thursday. “The attorney general never fully explained or even acknowledged the misrepresentations in his testimony, and we remained concerned that he had still not been forthcoming about the extent of his contacts with Russian officials.”
Leahy and Franken said that, if Sessions did perjure himself, he should resign.
“We served with the attorney general in the Senate and on the Judiciary Committee for many years,” they wrote. “We know he would not tolerate dishonesty if he were in our shoes. If it is determined that the attorney general still has not been truthful with Congress and the American people about his contacts with Russian officials during the campaign, he needs to resign.”
This story is breaking and will be updated.”*********
Wow! DOJ eventually will have a whole division investigating all the things that Ol’ Jeff seems to have forgotten. Stay tuned.
PWS
06-01-17
Category: Ethics
Colbert King Op-Ed In WashPost: Terror Threat On The Right!
King writes:
“As the Anti-Defamation League noted in a new report, “A Dark & Constant Rage: 25 Years of Right-Wing Terrorism in the United States,” the United States has experienced a long string of terrorist incidents, with many connected not to Islamist terrorists but to right-wing extremists.
The findings were startling.
The ADL analyzed 150 terrorist acts in the United States that were committed, attempted or plotted by right-wing extremists. “More than 800 people were killed or injured in these attacks,” the ADL said, noting that the attacks “surged during the mid-to-late 1990s and again starting in 2009” — the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The also looked at other acts of violence and determined that “from 2007 to 2016, a range of domestic extremists of all kinds were responsible for the deaths of at least 372 people across the country. Seventy-four percent of these murders came at the hands of right-wing extremists such as white supremacists, sovereign citizens and militia adherents.”
And, reported the ADL, the hate and terror mongers choose their marks carefully: Jews, Muslims and — the most common racial target — African Americans.
According to The Post, a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino showed an overall increase of 13 percent in hate crimes reported, with 1,812 incidents reported in 2016 — the year of our nasty, hate-filled presidential race.
So how about pivoting from Saudi Arabia to turn White House attention to our own homegrown terrorist problem? After all, right-wing extremism may be the predicate that led a hate-filled white student to pick up a knife in the middle of spring commencement celebrations and stab an innocent and promising young man of color to death.
Surely that is worth a presidential thought or two.
Manchester has prompted elevation of Britain’s threat level to its highest.
In light of Richard Collins’s murder, the discovery of a noose in a fraternity house this month, as well as white supremacist fliers posted on campus earlier this year, where is the University of Maryland’s threat level? How about America’s?
After all, haters seem emboldened as never before.”
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Read King’s entire op-ed at the link.
Food for thought, particularly in our gun-fueled society.
PWS
05-29-17
Kushner In Hot Water As Russia Investigation Heats Up — White House Caught Up In Web Of Deceit!
The NYT reports:
“President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, at the White House last week. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, spoke in December with Russia’s ambassador to the United States about establishing a secret communications channel between the Trump transition team and Moscow to discuss strategy in Syria and other policy issues, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion.
The conversation between Mr. Kushner and the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, took place during a meeting at Trump Tower that Mr. Trump’s presidential transition team did not acknowledge at the time. Also present at the meeting was Michael T. Flynn, the retired general who would become Mr. Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, the three people said.
It is unclear who first proposed the communications channel, but the people familiar with the meeting said the idea was to have Mr. Flynn speak directly with a senior military official in Moscow to discuss Syria and other security issues. The communications channel was never set up, the people said.
The three people were not authorized to discuss the December meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
News of the discussion was first reported by The Washington Post. The revelation has stoked new questions about Mr. Kushner’s connections to Russian officials at a time when the F.B.I. is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into Russia’s attempts to disrupt last year’s presidential election and whether any of Mr. Trump’s advisers assisted in the Russian campaign.
Current and former American officials said Mr. Kushner’s activities, like those of many others around Mr. Trump, are under scrutiny as part of the investigation. But Mr. Kushner is not currently the subject of a criminal investigation.
In the days after the meeting with Mr. Kislyak, Mr. Kushner had a separate meeting with Sergey N. Gorkov, a Russian banker with close ties to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.
American intelligence agencies first learned about the discussion several months ago, according to a senior American official who had been briefed on intelligence reports. It is unclear whether they learned about it from intercepted Russian communications or by other means.
Mr. Trump came into office promising improved relations with Russia on numerous issues, including greater cooperation to try to end the civil war in Syria. During the presidential campaign, he frequently criticized the Obama administration’s Syria policy as unnecessarily antagonistic toward Russia.
The idea behind the secret communications channel, the three people said, was for Russian military officials to brief Mr. Flynn about the Syrian war and to discuss ways to cooperate there. Neither side followed up on it. And less than two weeks later, the idea was dropped when Mr. Trump announced that Rex W. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil who had worked closely with Russian officials on energy deals, was his choice to become secretary of state.
The interactions between Mr. Trump’s advisers and Mr. Kislyak have been a constant source of trouble for the new administration.”
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Read all about it at the link.
No matter what Trump might say or do, this story isn’t going away. Obviously, the Administration from top down has been unwilling to “come clean” on exactly what was going on.
PWS
05-26-17
HISTORY: Paul Fanlund In Madison Cap Times: How We Got From Nixon To Trump!
Fanlund writes in an op-ed:
“When Roger Ailes died, essays about him ranged from adoring to vilifying. As creator of Fox News, he was perhaps the nation’s most influential political messenger — or propagandist — of the past 50 years.
One aspect of any honest obituary, of course, was his misogyny. Ailes was finally forced out at Fox in 2016 after years of sexual harassing women employees. His 17-year-old son threatened his father’s accusers at the funeral, warning mourners that he wanted “all the people who betrayed my father to know that I’m coming after them, and hell is coming with me.”
But what I found most interesting in immersing myself in analyses of Ailes’ life was how little his craft had to do with liberal versus conservative ideology.
Rather, Ailes was perhaps the master of the dark art of inventing and relentlessly reinforcing hateful caricatures of political opponents — in his case, people of color, bureaucrats, university professors and, of course, the media.
His brilliant execution of that art culminated in Donald Trump.
Ailes, as is widely known, learned from Richard Nixon, for whom he worked as a young television consultant. Nixon launched his political career much earlier by championing “forgotten Americans,” lunch-pail-toting working men whose fortunes, in Nixon’s telling, were stymied by taxes and regulations imposed upon them by far-away elites.
The rest, as they say, is history. Nixon appealed to his “silent majority” to stand against anti-war and civil rights protesters. Democrats opened the floodgates to Republican demagoguery by advancing civil rights. The GOP today has broadened its pool of villains to include Latino and Muslim immigrants.
The 1980s brought jolly Ronald Reagan with his fantastical stories about welfare queens, followed by George H.W. Bush’s law and order and patriotism themes, and so on.
“Individual issues would come and go — acid, amnesty and abortion in 1972, and immigration, political correctness and transgender bathrooms in 2016 — but the attacks on liberals as elite, out of touch and protective of the ‘wrong people’ came from the same playbook,” wrote David Greenberg, a Rutgers professor of history and journalism, in a New York Times op-ed on Ailes.
OK, but why does it always work?
Why are so many — especially older, white, middle-class people — so susceptible to this toxic narrative when it is clear that the trickle-down GOP policies that follow do them so little good?
Maybe, I theorize, it has something to do with how we were all taught.
I’ve talked with many friends about the flag-waving jingoism of our pre-college education, in which our nation was portrayed as perfect, our leaders without fault.
My formal education began when Dwight Eisenhower was president, an era of unfettered national pride. We were a paragon of liberty and justice and never fought in unjust wars. It was as if someone decided that American children could not process the slightest balance or shade of gray.
In this frame, Andrew Jackson was, as Trump likes to say, a glorious “swashbuckler” like himself, not a president who drove Native Americans from their homes, killing thousands in the process. Nor were we ever taught that Jackson, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other forefathers owned slaves.
It seems the goal was always to convey “American exceptionalism,” or, more bluntly, reinforce a cultish sense of American superiority.”
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Fanlund’s entire op-ed, at the above link, is well worth a read!
Lots of folks don’t like it when we put US history in perspective. For example, during the “glory days” of my childhood in the 1950’s millions of African Americans throughout the nation, and particularly in the South, were deprived of the basic rights of US citizenship. This was notwithstanding the clear dictates of the 14th Amendment, which had been added nearly a century earlier.
The US and many state governments merely decided not to enforce the law of the land. So much for all of the “rule of law” and “nation of laws” malarkey purveyed by right wingers today.
Indeed, many southern states enacted discriminatory laws that were directly contrary to the 14th Amendment. And, amazingly, for the majority of the 19th and 20th Centuries, courts of law at all levels were complicit in enforcing these unconstitutional laws and ignoring the14th Amendment!
PWS
05-26-17
Lisa Rosenberg: Trump Administration’s Misinformation Campaign Targets Immigrants!
Rosenberg writes in the Augusta (VA) Free Press:
“The Trump administration has yet to break ground for its promised border wall to keep the undocumented out of the United States, but by embarking on a campaign of misinformation and secrecy, it is rapidly moving forward with efforts to target and deport immigrants already here.
To advance the false narrative that the undocumented community includes an outsized and particularly dangerous set of criminals, the Administration ignores data that shows that high rates of immigration actually coincide with reduced crime rates, and that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than those born in the United States. As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute noted, “It is absurd to highlight the crimes committed by a small group of people without reporting on the crimes committed by everybody.” The misleading use of crime data not only results in questionable policy decisions, but also could lead to unwarranted fear of immigrants and an uptick in hate-crimes against them.
Such fear-mongering appears to be behind the new office for Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) recently launched by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). VOICE will share selective data about alleged criminals’ immigration and custody status, but will omit information on other crimes, including crimes in which immigrants are victims. VOICE stems from the President’s Executive Order on internal safety and immigration enforcement, which also decreed that Privacy Act protections do not apply to the undocumented. The result is that when VOICE shares information about immigrants, their right to legally challenge potentially erroneous disclosures may be curtailed. The implications could be devastating for individuals who are wrongly targeted, especially given administration’s track record with the facts.
The launch of the VOICE office comes on the heels other efforts by the administration to manipulate facts to support misleading conclusions about immigration enforcement. In an apparent effort to name and shame, the White House ordered ICE to release weekly reports highlighting jurisdictions it claimed did not comply with requests to keep undocumented individuals in custody for up to 48 hours beyond their scheduled release—so-called “detainer requests.” Law enforcement officials in counties nationwide described the data as “unfair and misleading” and openly disputed ICE’s claims. Because complying with detainer requests has been held to be unconstitutional, jurisdictions also objected to the reports’ mischaracterization that they were not complying with federal law. Responding to pressure, ICE has temporarily suspended publication of its misleading weekly reports, but is now concealing data about its own immigration investigations and enforcement with its illegitimate decision to withhold information previously released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
To be sure, the immigration enforcement and deportation machine grew to new levels under a cloak of secrecy during the Obama administration, with serious policy consequences that resonate today. Rights groups litigated with ICE for years to obtain information about its controversial deportation and fingerprint program, known as Secure Communities, which required local law enforcement to forward the digital fingerprints of everyone they booked, regardless of citizenship. ICE then used the information to determine who could be deported. To this day, the FBI continues to expand the massive biometrics database that grew dramatically under the Secure Communities program, and ICE’s ability to issue detainer requests continues because local law enforcement still forwards biometric information about suspects in custody.”
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One of the biggest lies repeated by the Trump Administration and many GOP politicos is that the Obama Administration “didn’t enforce immigration law.” On the contrary, as those of us who served during that Administration know well, Obama enforced the heck out of immigration law — sometimes wisely, sometimes not. Most of today’s real immigration problems (such as the total mess in the U.S. Immigration Courts) stem from over enforcement, not any type of mythical “under enforcement.”
PWS
05-25-17
MOYERS & CO: Rachel B. Tiven Accuses EOIR Of Participating In Political Vendetta!
http://billmoyers.com/story/airport-lawyers-defied-trump-under-attack/
Tiven writes:
“While the country has been fixated on President Trump’s firings, leaks and outbursts involving the Department of Justice, that agency has itself been stealthily attacking our democracy by telling good lawyers to stop representing people. Four weeks ago, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) — a respected nonprofit in Seattle that represents immigrants in deportation proceedings—received a “cease and desist” letter from the DOJ threatening disciplinary action. The letter demanded that NWIRP drop representation of its clients and close down its asylum-advisory program. The reason: a technicality, perversely applied. NWIRP is accused of breaking a rule that was put in place to protect people from lawyers or “notarios” who take their money and then drop their case.
Last week, NWIRP filed a lawsuit to defend itself against the DoJ’s order—and on Wednesday, a judge granted a restraining order. So for now, the organization can keep helping immigrants who need legal advice. But what’s at stake extends far beyond NWIRP and the 5,000 people it serves every year. The outcome of this legal battle will profoundly impact access to legal representation for the tens of thousands of immigrants who apply for asylum in the United States every year and the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants whose cases are currently in front of an immigration judge.
The outcome of this legal battle will profoundly impact access to legal representation for the tens of thousands of immigrants who apply for asylum in the United States every year and the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants whose cases are currently in front of an immigration judge.
Before I explain more, let’s step back for the context: You have no right to counsel in immigration proceedings. If you are not a citizen — or if the government merely alleges you aren’t — you can be taken from your home, jailed and permanently deported without ever seeing a lawyer. This is perfectly legal. It happened to more than a million people under the Obama administration, which vastly expanded the machinery of deportation. (If you want this to be an “Obama was good, Trump is bad” story, sorry to disappoint.)
On the last day of President Obama’s term, nearly half a million people were in immigration court proceedings, which one judge describes as “death penalty trials in a traffic court setting.” Most of them had no lawyer, and the vast majority of them had committed no crime. They were prosecuted solely for being in the United States without authorization, which is a civil violation and not a crime. (That is the reason you don’t get a lawyer: The familiar promise of “if you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you” only applies to people accused of crimes.)
In the absence of a right to appointed counsel, a patchwork of underfunded nonprofits (like NWIRP) and attorneys do their best to help immigrants in court. These nonprofits leverage the volunteer work of lawyers at big law firms, who represent children and refugees in immigration and asylum proceedings for free. There are also a few thousand really good private immigration attorneys nationwide, which isn’t enough even for those who can afford to hire them.
There are thousands more unqualified and dishonest scoundrels who steal money from immigrants too vulnerable to report them. And it is these thieves and cheats that the DoJ’s rules were meant to protect immigrants from. But in Jeff Sessions’s DoJ, the Disciplinary Review office of the Executive Office of Immigration Review is instead pursuing NWIRP, and will soon come after other non-profits. The accusation is that because NWIRP provides advice and assistance to people in immigration proceedings without committing to full representation, it is violating the rules.
It’s a Kafkaesque system: The government won’t provide immigrant defendants with legal representation, and they are allowed to get help for free only if they find a lawyer who will commit up-front to a case that will stretch on for years. Otherwise, they’re not allowed to have any help at all, are required to submit complex legal documents with no assistance and lawyers who try to help them will be sanctioned.
Precisely because this would be a cruel and absurd result, NWIRP and its peers around the country have had longstanding agreements with immigration officials that permit them to run asylum-assistance programs without committing to permanent representation. Attacking them now is a shockingly cynical move, akin to sanctioning an emergency-room doctor for sewing up a bleeding patient without first promising to be their doctor for life.
NWIRP doesn’t know why it was singled out. But we do know that NWIRP has been at the forefront of resisting Trump’s travel ban. Its staff and volunteer lawyers were at SeaTac airport immediately after the White House launched the first Muslim ban, and in March it sued to block the second Muslim ban.
And NWIRP isn’t alone; its nonprofit counterparts did the same at airports around the country, leveraging law-school clinics and large-firm lawyers working pro bono. The DoJ’s suspiciously timed cease and desist letter sends a chilling message to exactly these groups, and to volunteer attorneys. This attack by the government on a legal services-provider for immigrants could dissuade law firms from letting their lawyers volunteer for these cases, scaring those firms away by convincing them that immigration-related projects are too risky pro-bono projects.
If they succeed, they don’t just deprive people of scarce resources for volunteer counsel, they gradually muzzle the bar. They marginalize the heroic work of nonprofits like NWIRP and its peers around the country. They defang the big law firms that have been willing to stand up to this administration—like Davis Wright Tremaine, which is assisting NWIRP—and they make immigrant representation a more marginal part of the law.
When lawyers rushed to airports this winter to protect our friends, our neighbors and our Constitution, people cheered. The Trump administration took offense, and now those lawyers are in their cross hairs. The president is taking a sledgehammer to the pillars of our government: the FBI, the Justice Department, the federal courts. America, we are under attack.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that a restraining order enabling NWIRP to continue representing immigrants has been granted.”
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Don’t know if Tiven is right that Sessions and his folks put EOIR up to this, or whether it’s just another case of bad bureaucratic judgement on EOIR’s part.
But, either way, it illustrates the real problem that has been swept under the table for too long: you can’t have a due process court system operating an an agency of the Executive Branch, particularly the USDOJ, well known for its political shenanigans over a number of Administrations. In light of this colossal coflict of interest, the idea of having EOIR investigate ethical violations by private entities seems somewhat comical.
PWS
05-25-17
Sessions Omitted Russian Contacts On Security Forms — Claims He Was Advised Not To List Them!
Sari Horwitz reports in the Washington Post:
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not reveal meetings with Russian officials when he applied for his security clearance to serve as the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement official.
Sessions came under fire earlier this year for not disclosing to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing that, as the senator from Alabama, he met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential election when he was also serving as an adviser to the president. In March, Sessions recused himself from investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign after The Washington Post reported the two meetings.
That same information was omitted from Sessions’s security clearance form, which is known as an SF-86, as first reported Wednesday night by CNN.
“As a United States senator, the attorney general met hundreds — if not thousands — of foreign dignitaries and their staff,” said Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior. “In filling out the SF-86 form, the Attorney General’s staff consulted with those familiar with the process, as well as the FBI investigator handling the background check, and was instructed not to list meetings with foreign dignitaries and their staff connected with his Senate activities.”
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The Post reported elsewhere that other national security experts familiar with the security clearance process believe the contacts should have been listed.
PWS
05-25-17
AMERICA’S WORST PUBLIC SERVANT: Read Patrick S. Tomlinson’s NYT Op-Ed: “I’m From Milwaukee And I Oughtta Know, Sheriff David Clarke Has Gotta Go” (Screw Up DHS Like He Did Milwaukee County)!
Tomlinson writes:
“MILWAUKEE — When David A. Clarke Jr., the sheriff of Milwaukee County, announced last week that he’d been appointed to a senior position at the Homeland Security Department, Milwaukee residents like me felt two things: relief that we might finally rid ourselves of his disastrous leadership, and deep concern about what his reported new role will mean for the rest of the country.
Sheriff Clarke (whose appointment the Trump administration has not confirmed) has attracted national attention on several occasions over the past year. In July, he drew scrutiny when, writing for The Hill, he suggested there was a “civil war” between law enforcement officers and members of the Black Lives Matter movement. Last week, CNN reported that he had plagiarized portions of his 2013 master’s thesis from several sources, including the American Civil Liberties Union and President George W. Bush’s book, “Decision Points.” (Sheriff Clarke has denied this accusation, and called the CNN journalist who wrote the report a “sleaze bag.”) And with his image accompanying articles that have circulated online, Sheriff Clarke’s penchant for festooning his uniform with an abundance of pins and ribbons has drawn the ire of veterans and inspired comparisons to the over-adorned uniforms beloved by military dictators.
Locals have been aghast at his conduct for years, and our criticism goes far deeper than his outrageous statements, his bizarre fashion choices and even his academic dishonesty. Residents of this county have witnessed a series of embarrassing incidents and, much worse, human tragedy on Sheriff Clarke’s watch.
Many have seen the 2015 tweet in which he went as far as to say that the Black Lives Matter movement would “join forces with ISIS.” Less well known is the fact that a police union, on behalf of two deputies, successfully sued him in 2007 for religious proselytizing. A district court in Milwaukee found his actions unconstitutional, which a federal appeals panel upheld in 2009. Apparently, Sheriff Clarke thought it was appropriate to force his deputy sheriffs to listen to a Christian-themed presentation, without regard for the separation of church and state.
There’s more. Sheriff Clarke has exhibited petty vindictiveness in response to those who give him even the mildest rebuke. He’s been accused of harassment by Dan Black, a Riverwest resident who said he was detained and questioned by deputies after an interaction with the sheriff on an airplane in January. Mr. Black’s offense? Shaking his head as he walked by Sheriff Clarke, in his first-class seat, wearing Dallas Cowboys gear on the day the team faced Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers in the playoffs.
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More familiar to the national audience and more disturbing, especially to residents of Milwaukee, one of the most racially segregated cities in the country, is the story of Terrill Thomas, a 38-year-old inmate with bipolar disorder who died in 2016 while awaiting trial in solitary confinement in a jail Sheriff Clarke oversees. Mr. Thomas had gone seven days without water.
But what most Americans outside the Milwaukee metro area may not know is that Mr. Thomas’s death hasn’t been the only suspicious death during Sheriff Clarke’s tenure. Several people have died at a county jail since Sheriff Clarke took office in 2002, including a newborn baby who perished after her mother, Melissa Hall, gave birth on her cell floor. According to a federal lawsuit, Ms. Hall was shackled as she gave birth.
Perhaps the most bizarrely unhinged moment in Sheriff Clarke’s sordid career in Milwaukee came in March when he used a Facebook post to personally attack the city’s mayor, Tom Barrett. After Mr. Barrett criticized Sheriff Clarke for neglecting his duties in favor of Fox News appearances and book promotions, Sheriff Clarke became unhinged. Using the official page of the sheriff’s office, he mocked Mr. Barrett, saying, “The last time Tom Barrett showed up at a crime scene he got his ass kicked by a drunk, tire-iron-wielding man who beat him within inches of his life.” He was referring to a 2009 incident during which Mr. Barrett stepped between a deranged, tire-iron-wielding man threatening a grandmother and a 1-year-old child. Barrett was beaten and hospitalized after the assault, but the woman and child were saved from harm and the man taken into custody.
The timing couldn’t be better for him to step down from his post here. Milwaukee residents are fed up with our homegrown sideshow act. His job approval ratings have tanked in recent months. Were he to run in next year’s sheriff election, he would face an almost insurmountable primary fight for the Democratic spot.
The day we can finally rid ourselves of his malignant, sociopathic leadership can’t come soon enough. “Yippee, giddy up, and leave was my response,” said State Senator Lena Taylor of Sheriff Clarke’s possible appointment. But it’s little comfort because Sheriff Clarke’s power will only expand with his new role, which he has said will begin next month. As Representative Gwen Moore said of the sheriff in Mic, “I can think of few men more uniquely unqualified to liaise with local law enforcement at this juncture.”
The rest of the country should not have to suffer what Milwaukee residents have. David Clarke is not fit for public office. He is incompetent, dishonest, petty, vindictive and cruel. Take it from someone who has had a front-row seat to his antics: Do whatever you can to keep him out of public service, and public life, permanently.
Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) is a novelist, stand-up comic, and political commentator living in Milwaukee, Wis.”
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“Incompetent, dishonest, petty, vindictive, and cruel.” Hmmm, sounds like a perfect fit for the Trump Administration! On the other hand, he was elected to the position three times by the voters of Milwaukee County. So, someone out there must like his style.
PWS
05-24-17
ROGUE! — Will Push To Hire More DHS Agents Weaken National Security With More “Bad Apples?” — “Haste Makes Waste” Governing Has Real Life Consequences!
Ron Nixon reports in the NYT:
“BROWNSVILLE, Tex. — Joel Luna was just the kind of job candidate the Border Patrol covets. He grew up on both sides of the border, in Mexico and South Texas. He participated in the Reserve Officers Training Corps in high school and later served in the Army, seeing combat in Iraq.
Mr. Luna joined the agency as part of a hiring surge that began under the George W. Bush administration, patrolling a rural area about 100 miles north of Mexico. But six years later, his decorated career came to a shocking end: He was arrested and charged with helping to send illegal weapons to Mexico and ship drugs into the United States. He was convicted in January and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Now, as President Trump plans a similar hiring surge at the Border Patrol, Mr. Luna’s case is casting a large shadow. The president wants to make 5,000 new hires, under a streamlined process that critics fear could open a door to other rogue agents like Mr. Luna.
Agency officials, some members of Congress and the Border Patrol union say the current process has made it too hard to hire agents. It typically takes more than a year to vet candidates and get them on the job.
At the center of this notoriously slow and stringent process — which Customs and Border Protection, the patrol’s parent agency, put in place after a number of corruption cases — is a mandatory polygraph test. Officials are considering changing the test, and in some cases the agency would simply waive it.
“C.B.P. has a big problem in not being able to hire agents because of the polygraph test,” said Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, who has sponsored the legislation to make hiring agents easier and faster. “I’m not saying that we should get rid of the polygraph, but we want to make sure the process isn’t an overall detriment to good candidates.”
Three weeks ago, the agency began using a different lie detector test that takes less time than the current one and asks fewer questions. And legislation moving through Congress would grant the agency the authority to waive the polygraph for some former law enforcement officers and military veterans.
Top officials said the changes would allow the agency, which is losing agents faster than it can replace them, to compete for qualified candidates with other law enforcement agencies more effectively without sacrificing standards. Applicants would still undergo a background check in addition to the shorter polygraph test, officials said.
“No one wants corrupt agents inside the Border Patrol,” said Jayson Ahern, a former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. “What C.B.P. is proposing is a sensible way to weed out corruption but speed up the hiring.”
But some current and former Department of Homeland Security officials said the proposed changes could expose the agency to corrupt individuals who could use their position to help drug cartels or human smugglers. Border Patrol agents work largely by themselves in isolated areas and are routinely targeted by criminal organizations.”
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How many times have we seen this pattern: scandal, followed by reform? Time goes by, and we forget the scandal. But, “best practices” can be burdensome. So someone proposes a “streamlined” process which recreates the conditions for scandal. And the cycle begins again.
Ironically, the risk to American security from corrupt DHS agents probably exceeds the risk from the undocumented entries that additional hastily hired agents are supposed to be preventing. The border today is probably under better control than at any other point in my lifetime. But, corrupt border agents can be co-opted by terrorists, narco traffickers, and human smugglers, all of whom “pay” much better than the USG. So, taking time to make sure the folks we’re hiring for these key jobs have the “right stuff” makes sense to me. Also, how about raising their pay to reflect their important, challenging (and dangerous) mission and to reduce turnover?
PWS
05-21-17
BREAKING: WashPost Reports That Russia Probe Now Involves Trump Top Aide! — Is The “House Of Cards” Beginning To Wobble?
Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky Report:
“The law enforcement investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest, showing that the probe is reaching into the highest levels of government, according to people familiar with the matter.
The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president, according to these people, who would not further identify the official.
The revelation comes as the investigation appears to be entering a more overtly active phase, with investigators shifting from work that has remained largely hidden from the public to conducting interviews and using a grand jury to issue subpoenas. The intensity of the probe is expected to accelerate in the coming weeks, the people said.
The sources emphasized that investigators remain keenly interested in people who previously wielded influence in the Trump campaign and administration but are no longer part of it, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Flynn resigned in February after disclosures that he had lied to administration officials about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Current administration officials who have acknowledged contacts with Russian officials include President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tikkerson.”
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Read the complete story at the link.
I think “we’ve got trouble, right here in River City!” Stay runed!
PWS
05-19-17
State & Local Prosecutors “Just Say No” To Gonzo-Apocalypto’s Retrograde Agenda!
Lindsey Bever reports in the Washington Post:
“A week after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told federal prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” and follow mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, a bipartisan group of prosecutors at the state and local level is expressing concern.
Thirty current and former state and local prosecutors have signed an open letter, which was released Friday by the nonprofit Fair and Just Prosecution, a national network working with newly elected prosecutors. The prosecutors say that even though they do not have to answer Sessions’s call, the U.S. Attorney General’s directive “marks an unnecessary and unfortunate return to past ‘tough on crime’ practices” that will do more harm than good in their communities.
“What you’re seeing in this letter is a different wind of change that’s blowing through the criminal justice field,” said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution.
“There does seem at the federal level to be a return to the tough-on-crime, seek-the-maximum-sentence, charge-and-pursue-whatever-you-can-prove approach,” Krinsky said. But, she added, at a local level, some believe “there are costs that flow from prosecuting and sentencing and incarcerating anyone and everyone who crosses the line of the law, and we need to be more selective and smarter in how we promote both the safety and the health of our communities.”
Signers of the letter include Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and Karl Racine, attorney general of the District of Columbia.
The prosecutors say that there are no real benefits to Sessions’s May 10 directive, but they noted “significant costs.”
The letter states:
The increased use of mandatory minimum sentences will necessarily expand the federal prison population and inflate federal spending on incarceration. There is a human cost as well. Instead of providing people who commit low-level drug offenses or who are struggling with mental illness with treatment, support and rehabilitation programs, the policy will subject them to decades of incarceration. In essence, the Attorney General has reinvigorated the failed “war on drugs,” which is why groups ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Cato Institute to Right on Crime have all criticized the newly announced policy.”
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Read the complete article at the above link.
As mentioned in an earlier posting, a bipartisan group of Senators, led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is also pushing back against Sessions’s prosecution policies.
PWS
05-19-17
DOJ’s Location Of U.S. Immigration Courts At Obscure Detention Locations Helps DHS To Deny Due Process, Punish Lawyers!
Patrick G. Lee writes in ProPublica:
“One morning in February, lawyer Marty Rosenbluth set off from his Hillsborough, North Carolina, home to represent two anxious clients in court. He drove about eight hours southwest, spent the night in a hotel and then got up around 6 a.m. to make the final 40-minute push to his destination: a federal immigration court and detention center in the tiny rural Georgia town of Lumpkin.
During two brief hearings over two days, Rosenbluth said, he convinced an immigration judge to grant both of his new clients more time to assess their legal options to stay in the United States. Then he got in his car and drove the 513 miles back home.
“Without an attorney, it’s almost impossible to win your case in the immigration courts. You don’t even really know what to say or what the standards are,” said Rosenbluth, who works for a private law firm and took on the cases for a fee. “You may have a really, really good case. But you simply can’t package it in a way that the court can understand.”
His clients that day were lucky. Only 6 percent of the men held at the Lumpkin complex — a 2,001-bed detention center and immigration court — have legal representation, according to a 2015 study in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Nationwide, it’s not much better, the study of data from October 2006 to September 2012 found: Just 14 percent of detainees have lawyers.
That percentage is likely to get even smaller under the Trump administration, which has identified 21,000 potential new detention beds to add to the approximately 40,000 currently in use. In January, President Trump signed an executive order telling the secretary of homeland security, who oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, to “immediately” start signing contracts for detention centers and building new ones.
If history is any guide, many of those facilities will end up in places like Lumpkin, population 2,741. The city’s small downtown has a courthouse, the police department, a couple of restaurants and a Dollar General. There’s no hotel and many of the nearest immigration lawyers are based 140 miles away in Atlanta.
“It’s been a strategic move by ICE to construct detention centers in rural areas,” said Amy Fischer, policy director for RAICES, a San Antonio-based nonprofit that supports on-site legal aid programs at two Texas facilities for detained families. “Even if the money is there, it’s very difficult to set up a pro bono network when you’re geographically three hours away from a big city.”
ICE currently oversees a network of about 200 facilities, jails, processing centers and former prisons where immigrants can be held, according to a government list from February.
Unlike criminal defendants, most immigrants in deportation proceedings are not entitled to government-appointed lawyers because their cases are deemed civil matters. Far from free legal help and with scant financial resources, the majority of detainees take their chances solo, facing off against federal lawyers before judges saddled with full dockets of cases. Frequently they must use interpreters.
An ICE spokesman denied that detention facilities are purposely opened in remote locations to limit attorney access. “Any kind of detention center, due to zoning and other factors, they are typically placed in the outskirts of a downtown area,” said spokesman Bryan Cox. “ICE is very supportive and very accommodating in terms of individuals who wish to have representation and ensuring that they have the adequate ability to do so.” At Lumpkin’s Stewart Detention Center, for instance, lawyers can schedule hourlong video teleconferences with detainees, Cox said.
But a ProPublica review found that access to free or low-cost legal counsel was limited at many centers. Government-funded orientation programs, which exist at a few dozen detention locations, typically include self-help workshops, group presentations on the immigration court process, brief one-on-one consultations and pro bono referrals, but they stop short of providing direct legal representation. And a list of pro bono legal service providers distributed by the courts includes many who don’t take the cases of detainees at all. Those that do can often only take a limited number — perhaps five to 10 cases at a time.
The legal help makes a difference. Across the country, 21 percent of detained immigrants who had lawyers won their deportation cases, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review study found, compared to just 2 percent of detainees without a lawyer. The study also found that 48 percent of detainees who had lawyers were released from detention while their cases were pending, compared to 7 percent of those who lacked lawyers.
Legal counsel can also speed up the process for those detainees with no viable claims to stay in the country, experts said. A discussion with a lawyer might prompt the detainee to cut his losses and opt for voluntary departure, avoiding a pointless legal fight and the taxpayer-funded costs of detention.
Lawmakers in some states, such as New York and California, have stepped in to help, pledging taxpayer money toward providing lawyers for immigrants who can’t afford their own. But such help only aids those detainees whose deportation cases are assigned to courts in those areas.
“What brings good results is access to family and access to counsel and access to evidence, and when you’re in a far off location without those things, the likelihood of ICE winning and the person being denied due process increase dramatically,” said Conor Gleason, an immigration attorney at The Bronx Defenders in New York.”
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Read the complete article at the above link.
Lumpkin is “at the outskirts” of what “downtown area?” Don’t all major metro areas have “metropolitan correctional centers,” city jails, county jails, or some equivalent located near the courts and hub of legal activities for criminal defendants awaiting trial? Why are civil detainees allowed to be treated this way?
For far too long, under AGs from both parties, the DOJ has participated in this disingenuous charade designed to promote removals over due process. Because cases often have to be continued for lawyers, even where none is likely to be found, the procedure actually adds to detention costs in many cases. Why not house only those with final orders awaiting removal or with pending appeals at places like Lumpkin? Why don’t the BIA and Courts of Appeals rule that intentionally detaining individuals where they cannot realistically exercise their “right to be represented by counsel of their own choosing” is a denial of due process?
Look for the situation to get much worse under Sessions, who envisions an “American Gulag” where detention rules as part of his program to demonize migrants by treating them all as “dangerous criminals.”
Meanwhile, as I pointed in a recent panel discussion at AYUDA, the only part of the immigration system over which the private sector has any control or influence these days is promoting due process by providing more pro bono lawyers for migrants. Eventually, if those efforts are persistent enough, the Government might be forced to change its approach.
PWS
05-18-17
DEATH WATCH: Average 1/MO Dies In ICE Custody — And It’s Only Just Beginning, As Another ICE Detainee Dies, This Time In Atlanta!
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/17/us/ice-atlanta-detainee-dies/index.html
Catherine E. Shoichet reports for CNN:
“Atlanta (CNN) A man in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has died after being hospitalized for shortness of breath, officials said Wednesday.
Atulkumar Babubhai Patel was pronounced dead at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital on Tuesday afternoon.
The 58-year-old Indian national’s death is the second death of a detainee in ICE custody this week — and the second this week in the state of Georgia.
Officials said complications from congestive heart failure were ruled the preliminary cause of death.
Patel arrived at the Atlanta airport on May 10 on a flight from Quito, Ecuador. Authorities denied him entry into the United States because he did not have the necessary immigration documents, ICE said.
He was transferred to ICE custody in the Atlanta City Detention Center on Thursday, according to the agency. An initial medical screening at the time determined he had high blood pressure and diabetes. Two days later, Patel was transported to the hospital after a nurse checking his blood sugar noticed he had shortness of breath, ICE said. He died on Tuesday afternoon.
In its statement announcing Patel’s death, officials said fatalities in ICE custody are “exceedingly rare.”
“ICE is firmly committed to the health and welfare of all those in its custody and is undertaking a comprehensive agency-wide review of this incident, as it does in all such cases,” ICE said.
Second death this week
Patel is the eighth person to die in ICE custody this fiscal year, which began in October.
Authorities are also investigating the death of another immigrant detainee in Georgia. Jean Jimenez-Joseph, 27, was found unresponsive in his cell on Monday with a sheet around his neck. The preliminary cause of death was self-inflicted strangulation.
He’d been in solitary confinement for more than two weeks at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.
The recent deaths have drawn sharp criticism from immigrant rights activists, who have long decried conditions in immigration detention centers and called on the government to close such facilities.
US President Donald Trump has called for increasing detention as part of his crackdown on illegal immigration. And Congress recently upped its funding for immigrant detention, approving a spending bill that pays for an average of more than 39,000 detention beds per day.
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“Exceedingly rare?” Like in two deaths in one week in ICE custody in Georgia? In addition to ruined lives, the Trump/Sessions/Kelly vision for an “American Gulag” is certain to cause more preventable deaths in DHS custody, in light of the well-documented substandard conditions in such facilities, particularly those run by private contractors and local jailers. I guess each member of the “Triumvirate of Death” is well enough off so a few million in civil judgments wouldn’t be a problem. But, the taxpayers are likely to be shelling out megabucks for some tort claims.
PWS
05-17-17
Betsy Woodruff In “The Daily Beast” — Mueller Likely To Question Trump!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/17/the-very-intense-man-probing-the-president
Betsy writes:
“Robert Mueller, the newly named special counsel investigating potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, may find himself in the extraordinary position of questioning President Donald Trump.
There is precedent for this. John Danforth, the only other person to be named a special counsel under the same statute as Mueller, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that he conducted a phone interview with Bill Clinton as part of his investigation into the Waco siege. He said it was the only contact he had with anyone in the White House during the investigation, and he did it “in the name of thoroughness.”
Mueller may need to be similarly thorough.
“That’s investigative procedure 101,” said Julian Sanchez, an expert in national security law for the libertarian Cato Institute. “Unless it’s a secret investigation, if you’re conducting an investigation, you interview its subject.”
“He would need to interview anyone who’s a subject of the investigation,” Sanchez added. “That’s Trump, and, at minimum, personnel associated with the campaign.”
“I can’t imagine he would not be interviewed,” said Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer.
Mueller has been charged to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” that the FBI has been conducting into alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian government officials. That would likely include the allegations from James Comey, who reportedly wrote in a memo that Trump asked him to curtail part of that investigation before firing him.
Like Comey, Mueller knows a thing or two about memos.
Mueller, who became FBI director a week before 9/11, was a colleague of James Comey during the Bush administration. And one of the most consequential moments in that relationship involves note-taking––a skill Comey has clearly adopted.
As Comey revealed in Congressional testimony in 2007, he and Mueller clashed with top Bush White House officials in March 2004 over an effort to reauthorize NSA surveillance. Comey was Deputy Attorney General at the time––second in command at the Justice Department. Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andy Card, then Bush’s chief of staff, tried to get then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to sign off on the continuation of a warrantless wiretapping program when he was gravely ill in the hospital.
When Comey learned what Gonzales and Card were trying to do, he let Mueller know and then raced to the hospital. He got to the attorney general’s hospital bed while Gonzales and Card were there, and managed to keep him from signing anything. Mueller got to the hospital room after the drama unfolded.
And, like any good FBI hand, Mueller took notes.
In 2007, when Alberto Gonzales was attorney general, he testified before Congress that Ashcroft was lucid and talkative on the night of the hospital visit. Comey later gave testimony countering what Gonzales said, saying Ashcroft was clearly sick and distressed. And Mueller’s notes became a pivotal piece of evidence to clear up the disparity, as the Washington Post reported at the time. He turned over a heavily redacted version of those notes to the House Judiciary Committee, showing Gonzales had misinformed the committee.
The news of Mueller’s notes broke on Aug. 17, 2007. Ten days later, Gonzales announced he would resign.”
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Can’t imagine that Trump is too happy about the Mueller appointment. But, he has nobody but himself to blame (something he never does, preferring to cast blame on others).
PWS
05-17-17
WANTED: Public Servants With Backbone To Stand Up To Trump & Sessions!
Former U.S. arrorney for the S.D.N.Y. Preet Bharara writes in an Washington Post op-ed:
“And in the tumult of this time, the question whose answer we should perhaps fear the most is the one evoked by that showdown: Are there still public servants who are prepared to say no to the president?
Now, as the country once again wonders whether justice can be nonpolitical and whether its leaders understand the most basic principles of prosecutorial independence and the rule of law, I recall yet another firestorm that erupted 10 years ago over the abrupt and poorly explained firing of top Justice Department officials in the midst of sensitive investigations. The 2007 affair was not Watergate, the more popular parallel invoked lately, but the lessons of that spring, after the Bush administration inexplicably fired more than eight of its own U.S. attorneys, are worth recalling.
When the actions became public, people suspected political interference and obstruction. Democrats were the most vocal, but some Republicans asked questions, too. The uproar intensified as it became clear that the initial explanations were mere pretext, and the White House couldn’t keep its story straight. Public confidence ebbed, and Congress began to investigate.
In response, the Senate launched a bipartisan (yes, bipartisan) investigation into those firings and the politicization of the Justice Department. Early on, the then-deputy attorney general — Comey was gone by then — looked senators in the eye and said the U.S. attorneys were fired for cause; although such appointees certainly serve at will, this assertion turned out to be demonstrably false. We learned that the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, David C. Iglesias, was fired soon after receiving an improper call from Republican Sen. Pete V. Domenici pushing him to bring political corruption cases before the election. We learned that Justice Department officials in Washington had improperly applied a conservative ideological litmus test to attorneys seeking career positions, to immigration judges and even to the hiring of interns.”
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As I personally experienced, the Bush DOJ was thoroughly politicized and compromised. U.S. Immigration Judges were among those affected by political hiring. Indeed, it did get all the way down to the level of interns. I knew well-qualified former interns who were “thrown out ” of consideration for permanent appointments under the so-called “Attorney General’s Honors Program” because their law schools or backgrounds were considered “too liberal.”
But, we don’t learn. Jeff Sessions is certainly on track to make the DOJ a mere suboffice of the White House staff. The idea that Sessions would act with integrity and/or say no to the President is beyond laughable.
Sadly, Rosenstein simply seems to be another in the long line of DOJ officials who have sacrificed principles and integrity for career advancement. He’ll likely ride his stint as Deputy AG to a partnership in a major downtown law firm defending white collar criminals and disgraced politicians. And, I have little doubt that the Trump Administration will produce lots off both. Nice work, if you can get it.
Closer to home, with the recent resignations of EOIR Director Juan Osuna and Deputy Director Ana Kocur, both well-respected apolitical career civil servants, we should be watching to see if a politico is appointed to oversee the crumbling U.S. Immigration Court system. At some point in the future, “good government” supporters will regain political control. It will then be important for those of us who believe in an independent immigration judiciary to have our documentation of the corruption and incompetence of DOJ mal-administration of our Immigration Courts ready to present along with a feasible plan for a new independent, due process focused Immigration Court.
PWS
05-15-17