In an interview that aired Sunday night, former FBI Director James Comey sat down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and offered an ominous assessment of the country under President Donald Trump’s leadership.
Stephanopoulos brought up Comey’s remarks that right now is a “dangerous” time in America.
“I think it is [dangerous],” Comey told Stephanopoulos. “And I chose those words carefully. I was worried when I chose the word “dangerous” first. I thought, is that an overstatement? And I don’t think it is.”
Indict That Bastard.
He expounded, “I worry that the norms at the center of this country — we can fight as Americans about guns, or taxes or immigration, and we always have, but what we have in common is a set of norms — most importantly, the truth. And if we lose that, if we lose tethering of our leaders to that truth, what are we?”
Lock all 3 of these POS’s up. Hell yes they are hypocrites.
The Justice Department’s inspector general said the department suffered from “systemic” problems regarding sexual harassment complaints over the last five years, according to a Washington Post report that peculiarly failed to mention former President Barack Obama or Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.
The DOJ requires “high level action” to solve the issue, which includes mishandling or ignoring complaints of sexual misconduct, according to the IG’s report. Over the last five years, the number of sexual misconduct allegations has increased and includes “senior Justice Department officials across the country,” according to WaPo.
Despite the issue increasing in severity during Obama’s second term, Washington Post reporter Sari Horwitz declined to mention senior administration officials, even though the “most troubling allegations” according to the IG, happened under their watch.
One woman, who was allegedly the victim of repeated groping and “sexually charged comments” became so distressed by her harasser that she “was terrified I was going to get in the elevator and he would be in there.”
On top of complete negligence in the handling of the complaint, the DOJ allowed “potential criminal assault violations,” according to the IG report. Despite these serious allegations, the IG’s office “found no evidence in the case file that a referral was made to the [Inspector General] or any other law enforcement entity.”
Theodore Atkinson, who worked in the DOJ as an attorney in the Office of Immigration Litigation under Holder according to his LinkedIn, admitted to stalking a female coworker, hacking into her personal email account and constructing a “fictitious online profile to entice her,” the IG wrote. For his behavior, Atkinson simply received a “written reprimand and reduction in title,” with no suspension or pay cut.
Atkinson was, however, recently given a “Special Commendation Award from the Civil Division.”
The WaPo investigation describes a number of other incidents that were reported but ultimately ended with no serious reprimands, including one sexual harassment case brought against a female top prosecutor in Oregon.
“Sexual harassment and misconduct is one of the very important areas we have to focus on and take seriously because of all the reasons the public is seeing now,” the IG said. “People’s attitudes have to change. Our interest is shining light on this kind of activity.”
Superficially, Lynch appeared to make gender and sexual harassment issues a top priority. In 2015, Lynch announced $2.7 million in grants to “strengthen the Justice System’s Response to Sexual Assault,” a DOJ press release stated at the time.
“The Department of Justice is committed to doing everything it can to help prevent, investigate and prosecute these horrendous crimes – including working to ensure that our greatest partners in this effort, the state and local law enforcement officers on whom we all rely, have the tools, training and resources they need to fairly and effectively address allegations of sexual assault and domestic violence,” Lynch said.
That same year, Lynch’s department issued new guidelines “to help law enforcement agencies prevent gender bias in their response to sexual assault and domestic violence, highlighting the need for clear policies, robust training and responsive accountability systems,” a press release reads.
WASHINGTON — In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.
The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.
The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch signed the new rules, permitting the N.S.A. to disseminate “raw signals intelligence information,” on Jan. 3, after the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., signed them on Dec. 15, according to a 23-page, largely declassified copy of the procedures.
Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information.
Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for “minimizing” privacy intrusions.
“This is not expanding the substantive ability of law enforcement to get access to signals intelligence,” said Robert S. Litt, the general counsel to Mr. Clapper. “It is simply widening the aperture for a larger number of analysts, who will be bound by the existing rules.”
But Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the move an erosion of rules intended to protect the privacy of Americans when their messages are caught by the N.S.A.’s powerful global collection methods. He noted that domestic internet data was often routed or stored abroad, where it may get vacuumed up without court oversight.
“Rather than dramatically expanding government access to so much personal data, we need much stronger rules to protect the privacy of Americans,” Mr. Toomey said. “Seventeen different government agencies shouldn’t be rooting through Americans’ emails with family members, friends and colleagues, all without ever obtaining a warrant.”
The N.S.A. has been required to apply similar privacy protections to foreigners’ information since early 2014, an unprecedented step that President Obama took after the disclosures of N.S.A. documents by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden. The other intelligence agencies will now have to follow those rules, too.
Under the new system, agencies will ask the N.S.A. for access to specific surveillance feeds, making the case that they contain information relevant and useful to their missions. The N.S.A. will grant requests it deems reasonable after considering factors like whether large amounts of Americans’ private information might be included and, if so, how damaging or embarrassing it would be if that information were “improperly used or disclosed.”
The move is part of a broader trend of tearing down bureaucratic barriers to sharing intelligence between agencies that dates back to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In 2002, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court secretly began permitting the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. to share raw intercepts gathered domestically under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
After Congress enacted the FISA Amendments Act — which legalized warrantless surveillance on domestic soil so long as the target is a foreigner abroad, even when the target is communicating with an American — the court permitted raw sharing of emails acquired under that program, too.
In July 2008, the same month Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act, President George W. Bush modified Executive Order 12333, which sets rules for surveillance that domestic wiretapping statutes do not address, including techniques that vacuum up vast amounts of content without targeting anybody.
After the revision, Executive Order 12333 said the N.S.A. could share the raw fruits of such surveillance after the director of national intelligence and the attorney general, coordinating with the defense secretary, agreed on procedures. It took another eight years to develop those rules.
The Times first reported the existence of those deliberations in 2014 and later filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for documents about them. It ended that case last February, and Mr. Litt discussed the efforts in an interview at that time, but declined to divulge certain important details because the rules were not yet final or public.
Among the most important questions left unanswered in February was when analysts would be permitted to use Americans’ names, email addresses or other identifying information to search a 12333 database and pull up any messages to, from or about them that had been collected without a warrant.
There is a parallel debate about the FISA Amendments Act’s warrantless surveillance program. National security analysts sometimes search that act’s repository for Americans’ information, as do F.B.I. agents working on ordinary criminal cases. Critics call this the “backdoor search loophole,” and some lawmakers want to require a warrant for such searches.
By contrast, the 12333 sharing procedures allow analysts, including those at the F.B.I., to search the raw data using an American’s identifying information only for the purpose of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence investigations, not for ordinary criminal cases. And they may do so only if one of several other conditions are met, such as a finding that the American is an agent of a foreign power.
However, under the rules, if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department.
The limits on using Americans’ information gathered under Order 12333 do not apply to metadata: logs showing who contacted whom, but not what they said. Analysts at the intelligence agencies may study social links between people, in search of hidden associates of known suspects, “without regard to the location or nationality of the communicants.”
Hearings regarding incoming cabinet appointments commenced on Tuesday, with the questioning of Donald Trump’s attorney general pick, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.
The duty of the U.S. attorney general is to uphold and enforce the laws of the nation — a role the NAACP and other civil rights groups argue the senator is not fit to assume.
As Republicans look to tout the senator’s extensive legal track record, Democrats aim to question Sessions’ history of racially insensitive comments, which are believed to have led to his 1986 rejection from a federal judgeship.
The 1986 nomination failure that occurred some three decades ago marks the senator’s last appearance before the Judiciary Committee. Sessions’ nomination failed, in part, due to allegations that he described the NAACP and other civil rights groups as “un-American” and alluded to a white lawyer’s being a disgrace to his race for representing African American clients.
In 1986, Sessions testified that he didn’t remember making these claims. On Tuesday, the senator denied owning these remarks, saying, “I never declared that the NAACP was ‘un-American’ or that a civil rights attorney was a ‘disgrace to his race.'”
He again pressed the matter later on Tuesday, saying allegations that he is in anyway sympathetic to groups like the Ku Klux Klan are “damnably false.”
Sessions has represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate since 1996, and responded to questions about his ability to transition from the legislative to executive branch, saying, “I don’t think I have any lack of ability to separate the roles that I’ve had.”
In regard to separating his political past from his role as attorney general, the senator stated on Tuesday that he would “recuse himself” from any prosecution that might emerge from investigations into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Sen. Chuck Grassley noted that current Attorney General Loretta Lynch had said she would “defer” to the FBI in regard to the Clinton Foundation email investigation, but never officially recused herself from the inquiry.
When asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal if he will also recuse himself from votes on other cabinet nominees while he is still serving in the Senate, Sessions said he will indeed recuse himself on the vote for his own confirmation but hasn’t decided on his plans for other nominees.
Leading up to and during Sessions’ opening remarks, audience members reacted audibly with chants, laughs and outbursts — after which they were removed from the hearing room.
When pressed on his past support for waterboarding as a military interrogation tactic, Sessions stood by the fact that there was once a determination that it was “proper,” but is now deemed “absolutely improper and illegal” by Congress.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, opened the committee hearing, saying the senator’s record “is a life of public service.”
The newest member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein also gave introductory remarks, in which she repeated her commitment to Sessions that the appointment approval process is going to be “fair and thorough.”
After introducing DREAMer Denisse Rojas as among those present in the audience, Sen. Feinstein recalled Sen. Sessions’ record in voting against the DREAM Act, which he called “a reckless proposal for mass amnesty.” Sessions also voted against attempts at immigration reform in 2006, 2007 and 2013.
In the wake of Trump’s focus throughout his presidential campaign on fixing American immigration policy and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, immigration and domestic security are expected to play a major roll in cabinet appointment hearings this week.
Sen. Susan Collins listed Sessions’ state-level record of working with civil rights voter fraud cases during his 12 years as U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Alabama, a post the University of Alabama graduate assumed from 1981 to 1993. She noted the senator’s history of backing African Americans, saying, “These are not the actions of an individual who’s motivated by racial animus.”
A Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire asked Sessions to list the 10 most significant litigated matters that he personally handled, and four of those listed involved voting rights and desegregation of public schools in Alabama.
In a questionnaire supplement, the senator clarified that his role in these listed cases was to “provide support for the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, attorneys. I reviewed, supported and co-signed complaints, motions, and other pleadings and briefs that were filed during my tenure as U.S. attorney. I provided assistance and guidance to the Civil Rights Division attorneys, had an open-door policy with them, and cooperated with them on these cases.”
Sen. Feinstein described a national, post-election climate of alarm in her opening remarks, saying, “There is a deep fear about what a Trump Administration will bring in many places, and this is the context in which we should consider Sessions’ record to be the chief law enforcement in America.”
In Sen. Sessions’ opening statement the cabinet nominee said he an “abiding commitment to pursuing and achieving justice and a record of doing just that.”
Reports emerged from independent ethics lawyers on Tuesday that Sessions failed to disclose his ownership of oil interests on more than 600 acres of Alabama land. While the holdings are reported to produce a small revenue in the range of $4,700 annually, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others have expressed concern over the omission.
WASHINGTON — In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.
