Tag: United States Department of Justice

"It is unacceptable that, after Special Counsel Mueller spent 22 months meticulously uncovering this evidence, Attorney General Barr made a decision not to charge the President in under 48 hours. The Attorney General did so without even interviewing the President. His unsolicited, open memorandum to the Department of Justice, suggesting that the obstruction investigation was ‘fatally misconceived,’ calls into question his objectivity on this point in particular. "Although we have confidence that Special Counsel Mueller made the right prosecutorial judgement in these two specific areas—notwithstanding the very public evidence of Trump campaign contact with and willingness to receive support from Russian agents—it will be vital for the country and the Congress to evaluate the full body of evidence collected by the Special Counsel, including all information gathered of a counterintelligence nature. "The only information the Congress and the American people have received regarding this investigation is the Attorney General’s own work product. The Special Counsel’s Report should be allowed to speak for itself, and Congress must have the opportunity to evaluate the underlying evidence. "These shortcomings in today’s letter are the very reason our nation has a system of separation of powers. We cannot simply rely on what may be a partisan interpretation of facts uncovered during the course of a 22-month review of possible wrongdoing by the President. "The American people deserve to see the facts and judge the President’s actions for themselves. "Earlier this month, the House passed a resolution calling for the release of the Special Counsel’s report by a vote of 420-0.

Trump and his allies are already seizing on that line of the summary released Sunday, and it's undoubtedly a major headline pushing back on two years of Democrats claiming they had evidence of collusion. Barr's summary includes a footnote that explains how Mueller defined coordination: an "agreement -- tacit or express -- between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference." The Justice Department decided not to prosecute the President for obstructing justice with his behavior -- both public and in private -- but Trump isn't fully cleared. Mueller said he thoroughly investigated the obstruction question, though he didn't interview Trump. CNN reported Sunday that Mueller had deliberated at length about subpoenaing Trump before deciding not to make a formal request within the Justice Department. "In light of the very concerning discrepancies and final decision making at the Justice Department following the Special Counsel report, where Mueller did not exonerate the President, we will be calling Attorney General Barr in to testify before ?@HouseJudiciary? in the near future," the New York Democrat tweeted Sunday. The four-page summary Barr released on Sunday is written in a lawyerly way in many cases, especially when it comes to the decisions made over the probe into obstruction of justice. Of course, Republicans have also said they want Mueller's report to be released and several have said the report should be out so that Democrats cannot claim the Justice Department is hiding anything. There are still many pages of documentation of Mueller's work -- plus discussions of his and the attorney general's decisions and findings -- that aren't yet public. (The ongoing investigations are "several" and other prosecutorial offices will be considering "further action," Barr wrote.)

With Robert Mueller's delivery of his report, and word from the Justice Department that he would have no more indictments, President Trump's legal team believes the immediate threat to the presidency has passed. What we’re hearing: "Sounds like it's over for us but of course it’s not over until it’s over," Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump's lawyers, texted me. "Cautious optimism. Still watchful waiting." No one named "Trump" will be indicted by the special counsel. But remember that, as Axios has outlined, what Mueller revealed in the course of his investigation was "highly damning and highly detailed." And remember that Trump's campaign chairman is behind bars, perhaps for life, and his longtime political fixer is going to prison. And numerous other federal state investigations are picking up steam. Over on MSNBC, Neal K. Katyal, acting solicitor general under President Obama, told Brian Williams: "Today what happened was the end of the beginning." There are two forms of "collusion delusion": The Trump/Fox victory dance because no one new was indicted for collusion or corruption involving Russia — and therefore claims of "witch hunts" and innocence were vindicated.

The previously undisclosed move was driven by Justice Department officials in Washington, and reflects an eagerness within the department to prosecute violations of lobbying laws after the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, focused on foreign influence in his investigations. The unit falls within the Justice Department’s national security division, which investigated Skadden Arps’s Ukraine work and must approve any charges against Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig and the other Skadden Arps lawyers who worked on the account did not register as foreign agents under FARA, despite inquiries from the Justice Department at the time about whether they should have. The department initially concluded in 2013 that Skadden Arps was obligated to register, but it reversed itself the following year after Mr. Craig made the case that the law did not apply to his work on behalf of Ukraine. The special counsel had subpoenaed or requested documents from Skadden Arps and two lobbying firms recruited by Mr. Manafort’s team to help build support for Mr. Yanukovych’s government, and Mr. Mueller’s investigators had interviewed people who worked with all three firms, including Mr. Craig. But last year, Mr. Mueller’s team referred the matters related to the three firms to federal prosecutors in Manhattan for potential prosecution as FARA violations. The settlement accused Mr. Craig of working with Mr. Manafort to hide the funding from the Ukrainian oligarch for Skadden Arps’s work, and of making “false and misleading” statements to other partners at the firm and the Justice Department about his interactions with a reporter for The New York Times related to the Tymoshenko report. Those representations led the Justice Department’s FARA unit to conclude in January 2014 that Skadden Arps was not required to disclose the work under FARA, according to the settlement. In announcing the settlement, John C. Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, said Skadden Arps’s failure to register under FARA “hid from the public that its report was part of a Ukrainian foreign influence campaign,” depriving Americans of the ability “to consider the identity of the speaker as they evaluate the substance of the speech.” Neither the settlement nor Mr. Demers named either Mr. Craig or The Times and its reporter, David E. Sanger, but their identities are clear from the context. In the summer of 2017, Adam Hickey, an official in the National Security Division, told lawmakers that FARA was designed to make foreign influence campaigns transparent, “not to discourage that conduct itself.” His description of FARA focused largely on transparency through voluntary registration and ongoing records keeping.

The Justice Department "negotiated" an agreement with Hillary Clinton's legal team that ensured the FBI did not have access to emails on her private servers relating to the Clinton Foundation, former FBI special agent Peter Strzok testified during a closed-door appearance before the House Judiciary Committee last summer, according to a newly released transcript. Under questioning from Judiciary Committee General Counsel Zachary Somers, Strzok acknowledged that Clinton's private personal email servers contained a mixture of emails related to the Clinton Foundation, her work as secretary of state and other matters. "Were you given access to [Clinton Foundation-related] emails as part of the investigation?" "My recollection is that the access to those emails were based on consent that was negotiated between the Department of Justice attorneys and counsel for Clinton." Strzok did not elaborate on whether prosecutors made any effort to secure a search warrant, which could have delineated precisely what agents could and could not search. But Strzok later said that agents had access to the "entire universe" of information on the servers when using search terms to probe their contents. The DOJ's goal, Chaffetz said, was to "make sure they hear no evil, see no evil -- they had no interest in pursuing the truth." The Clinton Foundation did not respond to Fox News' request for comment. Strzok, who was fired from the bureau after months of scrutiny regarding anti-Trump text messages between him and Page, confirmed he was involved in an extramarital affair when asked about it during his interview before the committee on June 27, 2018. But Strzok was also asked by Art Baker, the GOP investigative counsel for the committee, whether that affair could have made him "vulnerable to potential recruitment" by "hostile intelligence service[s]."

The alleged college-admissions bribery ring exposed earlier this week has something to enrage everyone. Or, if that wouldn’t do the trick, parents could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe coaches at elite schools to designate applicants as desired athletes, thus circumventing the minimum requirements for grades and test scores. This scandal is a staggering indictment of higher education, and American education policy generally. For both groups, and for everyone between the two extremes, the pressure to get kids into the best college possible — and then figure out how to pay for it — is a source of incredible anxiety. But the scandal goes beyond just these issues. George Mason economics professor Bryan Caplan, in his book The Case Against Education, makes a compelling case that most of the value in diplomas from elite colleges isn’t in the education they allegedly represent but in the cultural or social “signaling” they convey. Would you rather have the knowledge that comes with taking a survival-training course, or just the piece of paper that says you took the course? Now, ask yourself: Would you rather have the Yale education without the diploma, or the diploma without the education? The more complex we make a system, the more it rewards people with the resources — social, cognitive, political, or financial — to navigate it. You’re never going to create a system where some parents won’t do anything and everything to help their kids.

Good Friday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today. _____________________ • The Senate voted to overturn President Trump’s national emergency declaration at the southwest border, delivering a bipartisan rebuke for what lawmakers in both parties deemed executive overreach. The 59-41 vote on the House-passed measure sets up the first veto of Mr. Trump’s presidency. • Three votes in Congress this week — rebuking Mr. Trump over Saudi Arabia, blocking his national emergency declaration and demanding a public release of the Mueller report — demonstrated a newfound willingness among some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies to stand up to him. • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been personally pushing China to give the American film industry greater access to its markets. That has raised ethical questions, given his ties to Hollywood. • New evidence suggests that Russian spies used networks run by Aleksej Gubarev, a tech entrepreneur, to hack the Democratic Party in 2016 — much as the so-called Steele dossier, which purported to detail Russian interference in the election, alleged. • Facing billions of dollars in cleanup costs, the Pentagon is pushing the Trump administration to adopt a weaker standard for groundwater pollution caused by chemicals that have commonly been used at military bases. • Afghanistan’s national security adviser accused the American special envoy of seeking personal benefit by sidelining the Afghan government in peace talks with the Taliban, “increasing the legitimacy of the Taliban” and “decreasing the legitimacy of the Afghan government.” _____________________ Today’s On Politics briefing was compiled by Isabella Grullón Paz in New York.

New York (CNN Business)Former Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur, whose hiring by CNN stirred controversy last month, is no longer taking a job as a political editor in the Washington bureau. She tweeted on Friday: "It's been a great vacation but I am back on twitter! And news: I will go to CNN as a Political Analyst instead. Isgur is a longtime Republican political operative who previously worked for Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney. She served as the DOJ's top spokeswoman during Jeff Sessions' tenure as attorney general. Earlier this year she met with television network executives and showed an interest in moving from politics to journalism. Even once it was clarified that she'd be reporting to political director David Chalian, and would be one of several people involved in coordinating 2020 coverage, there were still deep concerns about the role -- including from inside CNN. She was set to start working at CNN next week. But a network spokeswoman indicated that Isgur proposed a shift away from the editor role. "We can confirm that when Sarah came to us and proposed her role be adjusted to a political analyst instead, we agreed and we look forward to her starting in that role," the CNN spokeswoman said Friday afternoon.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, who would oversee any impeachment proceedings against President Trump, announced that he will submit more than 60 document requests to the White House and Justice Department on Monday -- a barrage that Nadler called the opening salvo in new and wide-ranging investigations. “Tomorrow, we will be issuing document requests to over 60 different people and individuals from the White House to the Department of Justice, Donald Trump, Jr., [Trump Organization CFO] Allen Weisselberg, to begin the investigations to present the case to the American people about obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power,” Nadler, D-NY., said on ABC News' "This Week." He added that the goal of the probe was "to present the case to the American people about obstruction of justice, corruption and abuse of power." The evidence, Nadler maintained, was that Trump called the Mueller probe a "witch hunt," allegedly "tried to protect [fired national security adviser Michael] Flynn from being investigated by the FBI," and supposedly admitted that he had fired FBI Director James Comey "to stop the Russian thing" in an NBC interview. And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. When pressed by Stephanopoulos as to whether Nadler would accept a possible report by Mueller finding no improper or illegal collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia, Nadler suggested he would not -- and then proceeded to unload a litany of unrelated complaints against the White House. We’ve seen all the democratic norms that we depend on for democratic government attacked by the administration." Nadler added that "the Mueller investigation, No. Nadler's committee has also called in the former acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, and plans to question him again in the coming weeks. Last month, Neal held a hearing in which experts discussed the authority under current law for Neal to make a request for any tax returns to the treasury secretary.

Greenbelt, Maryland (CNN)The current "political environment" is so toxic that a large number of minorities may not reply to the 2020 Census, the Trump administration admitted in court Thursday, even without the addition of a controversial question asking about citizenship status. "That has nothing to do with the citizenship question per se," Gardner told a federal court in Maryland. "They may be less inclined to trust the government" or the Trump administration. Judge George Hazel probed Gardner's logic to see if he was conceding a key argument for the plaintiffs who want the question nixed: that the citizenship question would contribute to a less accurate count and the resulting disenfranchisement. "It seems like the macro environment is going to exacerbate the impact of the citizenship question," Hazel said. At the end of the day, it's entirely possible that the plaintiffs will be right," Gardner said. But it's also possible, he added, that "the macro environment is just so challenging" that minorities and non-citizens would not respond anyway. "Secretary Ross was a banker and the notion that he came up with this on his own is preposterous," said Denise Hulett, an attorney representing the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the plaintiffs. Gardner, the government attorney, said conversations about the issue were a normal part of the policy-making process, and that Ross had ultimately and reasonably decided to include the question based on a request from the Justice Department. Judge Hazel appeared to bristle at a suggestion he wait for the Supreme Court to decide a separate lawsuit over the citizenship question before issuing his ruling.