James Inhofe

Inhofe Aide To Launch New Global Warming Denialist Website

Zachary Roth | April 10, 2009, 5:35PM

Remember Marc Morano?

He's the staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) who's turned himself into the go-to guy for climate change denialism, sending out an email barrage to activists, journalists, Hill aides and others, in which he aggregates every misleading and flat-out false piece of "evidence" he can find to support the notion that, despite what scientists say, global warming really isn't something to worry about.

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Barack Obama

Not Just State Secrets: Obama Continuing Bush's Stonewalling On Gitmo Cases, Lawyer Claims

Zachary Roth | April 10, 2009, 3:43PM

Yesterday we told you about the Obama Justice Department's invocation of a sweeping state secrets privilege in a warrantless wiretapping case. But that may not be the only area in which the new administration's war on terror tactics recall the worst excesses of the Bush years.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees at Guantanamo had the right to appeal their detentions in federal courts. But since then, only a few cases have been completed. And in an interview with TPMmuckraker, David Cynamon -- a lawyer for four Kuwaiti Gitmo detainees who are bringing habeas corpus claims against the government -- said that the Justice Department has been consistently dragging its heels in the case, denying detainees their basic due process rights and furthering what he called the "abandonment of the rule of law."

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Karl Rove

J. Edgar Rove? Bush's Brain Claims He Kept Loyalty File On GOP Rep

Zachary Roth | April 10, 2009, 12:46PM

Did Karl Rove compile a "loyalty file" on former GOP congressman Tom Feeney? That's what Rove himself has reportedly claimed.

Politico reports on a chance encounter at Charlie Palmer's Steak last night between Bush's brain and Jason Roe, a former chief of staff to Feeney, the Florida congressman who was defeated for reelection last fall*.

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Barack Obama

Feingold: "I Am Troubled" By Obama's State Secrets Claim

Zachary Roth | April 10, 2009, 11:28AM

Add the name of Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) to the growing list of observers who are deeply concerned by the Obama administration's invocation of the state secrets privilege in the Jewel v. NSA case.

Statement of Sen. Russ Feingold on the Obama DOJ's brief in Jewel:

I am troubled that once again the Obama administration has decided to invoke the state secrets privilege in a case challenging the previous administration's alleged misconduct. The Obama administration's action, on top of Congress's mistaken decision last year to give immunity to the telecommunications companies that allegedly participated in the warrantless wiretapping program, will make it even harder for courts to rule on the legality of that program. In February, I asked for a classified briefing so that I can understand the reasons for the Department's decision to invoke the privilege in another case, and I intend to seek information on this new case as well. I also encourage the greatest possible public accounting of the use of the state secrets privilege and welcome the Attorney General's statement that he hopes to share his review with the American people.

Beyond the particular case at issue here, it is clear that there is an urgent need for legislation to give better guidance to the courts on how to handle assertions of the state secrets privilege. The American people must be able to have confidence that the privilege is not being used to shield government misconduct. That is why I am working with Senators Leahy, Specter, and others to pass the State Secrets Protection Act as soon as possible.

Barack Obama

Justice: We Invoked State Secrets Only "After Careful Consideration"

Zachary Roth | April 10, 2009, 11:19AM

We told you yesterday about the developing consensus in opposition to the Obama administration's state secrets claim in the Jewel v. NSA case, in which the government is being sued over the warrantless wiretapping program.

Here's the Justice Department's statement on the matter:

The administration recognizes that invoking the states secret privilege is a significant step that should be taken only when absolutely necessary. After careful consideration by senior intelligence and Department of Justice officials, it was clear that pursuing this case could unavoidably put at risk the disclosure of sensitive information that would harm national security.

An examination by the Director of National Intelligence and an internal review team established by the Attorney General determined that attempting to address the allegations in this case could require the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods that are used in a lawful manner to protect national security. The administration cannot risk the disclosure of information that could cause such exceptional harm to national security.

While the assertion of states secrets privilege is necessary to protect national security, the intelligence community's surveillance activities are designed and executed to comply fully with the laws protecting the privacy and civil liberties of Americans. There is a robust oversight system to ensure this compliance.

Barack Obama

Obama Website Slams Secrecy Claim That Obama Now Invokes

Zachary Roth | April 10, 2009, 10:49AM

A great catch from our old friend Greg Sargent over at the Plum Line...

Barack Obama's campaign website still cites the fact that "the Bush administration has ignored public disclosure rules and has invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court." The site declares: "Secrecy Dominates Government Actions."

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Barack Obama

Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets

Zachary Roth | April 9, 2009, 6:20PM

Is the Obama administration mimicking its predecessor on issues of secrecy and the war on terror?

During the presidential campaign, Obama criticized Bush for being too quick to invoke the state secrets claim. But last Friday, his Justice Department filed a motion in a warrantless wiretapping lawsuit, brought by the digital-rights group EFF. And the Obama-ites took a page out of the Bush DOJ's playbook by demanding that the suit, Jewel v. NSA, be dismissed entirely under the state secrets privilege, arguing that allowing it go forward would jeopardize national security.

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Alaska

Who Are The Stevens Six?

Zachary Roth | April 9, 2009, 4:25PM

Earlier this week, Judge Emmet Sullivan formally dropped the charges against former Alaska senator Ted Stevens, thanks to prosecutorial misconduct. And Sullivan also announced that he's appointed a special prosecutor of his own to investigate contempt charges against the six Justice Department lawyers whose string of missteps -- the most serious of which involved withholding key evidence -- doomed the case. That misconduct is also the subject of an internal DOJ probe.

Since then, there's been a tangle of competing claims from all sides. We've seen some critics of the Bush administration suggesting that Justice intentionally sabotaged the prosecution, in order to let Stevens, a Republican, off the hook. Meanwhile, some of the more paranoid figures on the right are arguing that the entire prosecution was an (ultimately successful) effort by liberal DOJ bureaucrats to use bogus charges to create a cloud of suspicion around Stevens and thereby win another Senate seat for Democrats.

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George Will

Robinson: Will "Cross[ed] the Line" With Climate Change Distortions

Zachary Roth | April 9, 2009, 11:11AM

Add Eugene Robinson to the rapidly growing list of Washington Posties who are sick of George Will's efforts to mislead readers about global warming science.

Via Mathew Yglesias, Asked by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow about the increase in "made up stuff" in the news lately, Robinson brought up his fellow Post columnist's string of distortions on climate change.

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Alaska

Alaska Lawmakers Want Government To Apologize To Stevens

Zachary Roth | April 9, 2009, 10:00AM

The Ted Stevens pity party continues.

The Associated Press reports:

Alaska lawmakers want the U.S. government to apologize to former Sen. Ted Stevens, whose corruption conviction was dismissed this week by a federal judge.

...

The Alaska House passed a resolution Wednesday calling for the apology to Stevens.

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Eric Holder

Justice Official Who Probed US Attorney Firings Will Now Lead US Attorneys Office

Zachary Roth | April 8, 2009, 4:22PM

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility -- which has lately been in a number of internal DOJ investigations into high-profile issues -- will soon have a new chief.

The Washington Post reports that Attorney General Eric Holder will name as the head of the office Mary Patrice Brown, a respected career prosecutor who currently leads the criminal division at the US Attorney's office for Washington DC. Brown will replace Marshall Jarrett, who has been there since 1998, and will shift over to lead the executive office of the US Attorneys.

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Bailout

Conflicted Sununu: The Real Problem Is That CEO Pay Limits Are Too Tough

Zachary Roth | April 8, 2009, 3:00PM

Yesterday, the panel overseeing bailout spending on behalf of Congress issued its latest hard-hitting report, which criticized the Treasury Department's approach to the program and called for top execs at major banks to be fired.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the report is the "alternative view" that accompanied it, from Republican panel member John Sununu.

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Alaska

Did Mukasey Ignore Evidence Of Misconduct In Stevens Case?

Zachary Roth | April 8, 2009, 12:58PM

Buried in the news about charges against Ted Stevens being dropped, there's an additional serious indictment (as if more were needed) of the Bush Justice Department -- and specifically, of Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Reporting from yesterday's hearing, at which Judge Emmet Sullivan formally announced that the charges would be dropped, the Washington Post notes:

When the judge heard that Stevens's attorneys sent three letters about prosecutorial misconduct to former Attorney General Michael Mukasey but received no response, he called it "shocking -- but not surprising."

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George Will

WaPo's Anti-Will Uprising

Zachary Roth | April 8, 2009, 11:36AM

Is there an anti-George-Will critical mass building at the Washington Post?

Just in the last few days, we've seen three separate efforts, from three separate sections of the paper, to push back against the bow-tied columnist's well-chronicled deceptions on global warming.

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AIG

Warren: Fire Top Management At AIG and Citi

Zachary Roth | April 7, 2009, 5:25PM

We're late to this, but it looks like Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor who chairs the Congressional Oversight panel for the TARP funds, is upping the ante.

After several months of raising the alarm about the Treasury Department's failure to attach strings to the bailout funds, to little apparent effect, Warren will issue a hard-hitting report this week that broadly indicts the Obama administration's approach to the financial crisis, reported the British paper The Observer over the weekend.

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Global Warming

Will's Global Warming Distortions Called Out ... By Washington Post

Zachary Roth | April 7, 2009, 4:22PM

It looks like some members of the Washington Post's news section are fighting back against George Will's efforts -- aided by the paper's editorial page -- to mislead readers about global warming.

Via Grist's Dave Roberts: Deep down in a story about the alarming thinning of Arctic sea ice, triggered by global warming, Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan write:

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Alaska

Keying Off Stevens Decision, Siegelman Steps Up Push To Have His Own Charges Dropped

Zachary Roth | April 7, 2009, 2:23PM

In the wake of the charges being dropped agaisnt Ted Stevens, is pressure building on the Justice Department to make a similar decision on behalf of Don Siegelman?

A lawyer for the former Alabama governor -- who last week told TPMmuckraker that the misconduct in his own case "dwarf[s]" that in Stevens' -- sent a letter Friday to Attorney General Eric Holder, asking that Holder review the evidence of "serious and pervasive" prosecutorial misconduct in Siegelman's case.

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Alaska

Stevens Judge Seeking Contempt Charges

Zachary Roth | April 7, 2009, 1:37PM

It looks like Judge Emmet Sullivan didn't just leave things at a few harsh words for those government prosecutors who botched the Ted Stevens case by failing to hand over evidence.

Politico reports that the judge will seek contempt charges against the six-person prosecution team for their misconduct. That team includes William Welch, the head of the Public Integrity Section, Brenda Morris, the lead prosecutor in the case, and trial lawyer Nicholas Marsh, all of whom were replaced earlier this year, as a result of the missteps.

Sullivan also appointed a lawyer, Henry Schulke, to investigate the Justice Department in relation to the contempt issue. DOJ has said that its Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting its own probe of the misconduct, but clearly Sullivan wants an independent inquiry.

This could get interesting...

Alaska

Dismissing Charges, Stevens Judge Slams Government Misconduct

Zachary Roth | April 7, 2009, 12:51PM

The judge in the Ted Stevens case has granted the government's motion to drop the charges against the former Alaska senator -- but not before slamming the government prosecutors on the case.

"In nearly 25 years on the bench, I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said at a hearing on the government's motion, reports the Associated Press.

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Bernard Madoff

Times Editor: Lack Of Disclosure On Merkin Op-Ed Is No Big Deal

Zachary Roth | April 7, 2009, 12:25PM

Here's another one to add to the growing list of "newspapers acting badly"...

Late last month, the New York Times published an op-ed by Daphne Merkin, a contributing writer to the Times Magazine, on the Bernie Madoff mess. The curious premise of the piece seemed to be that Madoff's "victims" (the quote marks are Merkin's) aren't really blameless, since "no one was holding a gun to anyone's head, saying sign up with Mr. Madoff or else."

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CIA

Red Cross: CIA Interrogation Program Was "Inhuman"

Zachary Roth | April 7, 2009, 9:12AM

The journalist Mark Danner has obtained the entire report on torture by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which he published excerpts from last month. The report has been posted on the website of the New York Review of Books. Danner's new writeup of it is here.

The major new revelation concerns the active participation of medical officers in the interrogation of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons. The report, written in 2007, concludes that these officers committed gross violations of medical ethics, and in some cases participated in torture. The report called the CIA program "inhuman."

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Allen Stanford

In Interview, Stanford Plays World's Smallest Violin

Zachary Roth | April 6, 2009, 3:34PM

Texas billionaire Allen Stanford has given ABC News his first interview since being charged by the SEC with orchestrating a massive Ponzi scheme. And he doesn't offer a sympathetic portrait.

Amid protestations of innocence -- "I would die and go to hell if it's a Ponzi scheme," and "if it was a Ponzi scheme, why are they finding billions and billions of dollars all over the place?" -- Stanford revealed he expects to be indicted by a federal grand jury in the next two weeks. (A senior official at the Justice Department told ABC News the case is "moving along rapidly.")

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Allen Stanford

Lawyer: Stanford Number 2 Helping To Probe Billionaire's Money Trail

Zachary Roth | April 6, 2009, 1:44PM

The walls around Allen Stanford appear to be closing in ever tighter.

David Finn, a lawyer for Jim Davis, the number 2 man at Stanford Financial, tells Bloomberg that Davis is helping investigators track Stanford's European assets, focusing on Swiss banks.

In addition to potentially helping to build a criminal case against Stanford, tracking the assets could help repay victims of Stanford's alleged fraud.

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Bernard Madoff

Madoff Associate Who Ran Feeder Fund Is Charged With Fraud

Zachary Roth | April 6, 2009, 12:14PM

The high-profile proprietor of a second feeder fund has been charged in connection with Bernie Madoff's multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme.

A civil fraud lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo charges Ezra Merkin, the former chairman of GMAC, and a prominent Madoff associate and New York philanthropist, with "betraying hundreds of investors" by placing billions with Madoff without their knowledge, reports the Wall Street Journal.

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Eric Holder

Stevens Judge Weighing Sanctions Against Prosecutors

Zachary Roth | April 6, 2009, 9:14AM

The charges against Ted Stevens may be about to be dropped -- but the fallout isn't over.

The judge in the case yesterday ordered the Justice Department to hand over documents relating to allegations of prosecutorial misconduct in the case, reports the Washington Post.

It was because of this misconduct that Attorney General Eric Holder last week decided to ask the judge, Emmet Sullivan, drop the charges against Stevens.

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