Holder Signals Approval (Preference?) for SJC Bill
Just days after the House Judiciary Committee passed a PATRIOT Act Reauthorization bill that actually improved on PATRIOT, Eric Holder has decided to write Pat Leahy and DiFi to tell them how much he likes their bill.
Holder spends a lot of time boasting of the “provisions designed to enhance statutory protections for civil liberties and privacy, ” including provisions that the Administration gutted, courtesy of Jeff Sessions: “authorization for court-imposed minimization requirements for information obtained via pen register or trap and trace orders in exceptional cases.” Had the Committee been left to its Democratic majority, those minimization requirements would have been standard, not exceptional.
To this extent, Holder’s letter seems designed to signal his preference for the Senate bill over the House Judiciary bill.
But the Senate’s worse bill is not good enough for Holder. He makes demands for things that–apparently–they didn’t get to Jeff Sessions in time for him to submit.
While we are very please to be able to support the bill, we do have some concerns that we are working with the Committee to address before the measure reaches the floor. In particular, we are working with the Committee on provisions regarding procedures for the collection, use, and storage of information obtained through NSLs; certain public reporting and audit requirements; and provisions to ensure a smooth transition to the new law.
Which I take to mean there’s too much preventing the DOJ from creating a permanent database of material collected pursuant to NSL authority. And DOJ wants to avoid admitting how much of this data collection is actually going on, so they’re trying to limit the audits and IG reports.
So apparently, the worse Senate bill isn’t bad enough for Eric Holder yet. And it sounds like Pat Leahy continues to work to give Holder and Obama precisely the crappy bill they want.
Some might argue that we are fast approaching the slippery slope, but the truth is that our
overlordspublic servants decades ago grabbed their sleds and tobbogans and in their exuberant enthusiasm, willingly leapt headlong down that slope.I have my doubts that we’ll ever sufficiently get their attention to stop that slide, but I have no doubt that what they think is a slope is instead a cliff.
WTF is in the water in DC? And the air, and the food?
Has everyone in Congress lost their memory as well as whatever sense they had?
Long, long ago.
Leahy, Holder, Obama, Whitehouse “no one is above the law”
The peasants know it’s not the truth
I think Leahy has been so pliable because he thinks not enough people care. Can we change that? Can we generate enough letters to Leahy’s Senate committee? Would it make any difference to write letters to other senators?
Bob in AZ
I think he’s been paid for already.
Kinda off-topic (apologies), but a bit of positive news:
Yoo Withdrew: Amidst Growing Call for Criminal Investigation, Torture Memos Author John Yoo Withdraws from Federalist Society Panel
Link.
Um, yeah. Count on it.
They may be paying publicly traded corporations an awful lot to do some or all of the data collection and storage work; if so, this would let them keep all that business off the books, SEC-wise. Like that EO we’ve discussed before.
That clip of Feingold never gets tired. Never. Every time, it’s like the sane man came to town. And if it is Leahy saying “Oh, boy” at 0:17, I hope he wasn’t saying it about what Russ was saying.