Archive for category: emptywheel

As you’ve no doubt heard, yesterday Pat Leahy pulled some superb parliamentary maneuvers to ensure that the SJC version of the FISA amendment came out of committee without immunity for telecoms. He basically just severed the part which permits the wiretapping from the part that gives immunity. Voila!

Unfortunately, it still seems likely that Harry Reid will let the SSCI bill–the one we don’t like–come to the floor of the Senate. Pat Leahy pulled some nice maneuvers, but Reid has a few more aces in his hand. And in any case, it may be utterly moot.

When Arlen "Scottish Haggis" Specter has discussed his "compromise" on immunity in the FISA amendment, he has said he thought the cases in CA would be thrown out on State Secrets grounds anyway; his compromise (in true haggis fashion) is really designed to save the telecoms money while they’re waiting for the courts to throw out the cases.

Turns out they might not have to wait that long–and immunity may be moot anyway. That’s because the 9th Circuit, in a unanimous decision, threw most of the most Kafkaesque illegal wiretap case out.

A federal appeals court dealt a near-fatal blow Friday to an Islamiccharity’s lawsuit alleging federal investigators illegally wiretappedit, saying a key piece of evidence the charity planned to use is aprotected state secret.

A top secret call log that the Treasury Department accidentallyturned over to the now-defunct U.S. arm of the Al-Haramain IslamicFoundation’s lawyers can’t be used as evidence, the 9th U.S. CircuitCourt of Appeals ruled.

[snip]

The charity’s lawyers voluntarily turned over the document to FBIagents after it was given to them. A lower court ruled that the lawyerscouldn’t use the actual document to support their lawsuit but could usetheir memories of its contents to go forward.

[snip]

"Such an approach countenances a back door around the privilege andwould eviscerate the state secret itself," Judge M. Margaret McKeownwrote for the unanimous three-judge panel.

So basically, these guys have proof they were spied on, they’ve seen it, but the government is requiring that they legally wash their minds of any memory of that proof, so as to preserve State Secrets.

The Appeals Court decision on the Hepting case is pending–it relies on some other kinds of evidence–but it’s a really amazing concept, this State Secret thing. The government, of its own accord, gave out the secret. But it expects individuals to be bound by it. Further, it expects defendants to forgo attorney-client privilege, apparently, because there’s going to be no way of proving the government deliberately violated privilege.

Swell.

Time to think of some novel ways to force the government to stop spying illegally. And it’s probably time to write some restrictions on spying on attorney-client privilege, too. Because the available options don’t appear like they’re going to work.

It seems the only thing Republicans do more consistently than troll for extra-marital sex in public places is delete their emails. Via CREW, ABC News is reporting that Congressman Feeney is spending a chunk of money in an attempt–apparently–to reconstruct some lost emails.

Since April, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., has paid over $90,000 to aWashington, D.C. office of FTI Consulting, through his re-electioncampaign and a separate legal defense fund he began in June, according to financial filings and a news account.

The payments were for helping Feeney "voluntarily cooperate" withfederal prosecutors, according to Pepper Pennington, the congressman’sspokeswoman.

Among its specialties, FTI provides "electronic evidence consultingfocused on time-sensitive situations," "computer forensic services" and"e-mail reconstruction," according to the firm’s Web site.

The Department of Justice has reportedly sought e-mails from Feeneyregarding interactions between the lawmaker’s office and Abramoff, thedisgraced former Republican superlobbyist who was arrested in 2004 andhas been cooperating with government investigators.

Now, granted, I’m extrapolating from the news that Feeney is spending $90,000 to a firm that reconstructs emails to the assumption that the emails in question disappeared. But if I’m right, it puts Feeney in the company of Bush and Cheney and Rove and Matt Blunt–all of them suspected of doing some not quite Read more →

The White House and DOJ gave a very curious "no comment" to Scott Shane for his article on the reopened investigation into the illegal wiretap program.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, and Brian Roehrkasse, a JusticeDepartment spokesman, declined to say whether Mr. Mukasey had pressedMr. Bush on the clearances for the department’s Office of ProfessionalResponsibility.

This is really curious–and suggests to me that we (and the Democrats quoted in the article) are correct in giving Mukasey credit for forcing the issue. What other motivation would the Administration have in refusing to comment? After all, if Bush decided to give the clearances on his own, he’d get credit for doing so if he made it public. I can only guess that Mukasey did force the issue, and BushCo isn’t telling us because it would betray weakness on the part of Bush (in that he got forced to do something by someone besides Cheney) and it would suggest the Democrats (or at least Chuck Schumer) really did game the whole Muksaey nomination.

Which makes the language Mukasey used in his answer to this question all the more intriguing.

I have committed, however, to reviewing theover-all circumstances of this matter.

I’m still not holding my breath, Read more →

Via Noah Shachtman, I see that a woman with potential ties to Hezbollah got a job in both FBI and CIA.

How good are the FBI and CIA’s background checks?  Each agency requiresits own separate investigation and polygraph before people are signedup to sensitive jobs.  Each agency missed an absolute whopper…

A 37-year-old woman who previously worked as an FBI agent and a CIA analyst, pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges involving improper access of information…

Sources say Nada Nadim Prouty,a Lebanese national and resident of Virginia, entered the United Stateson a student visa and earned citizenship through a sham marriage.

While officials say there is no evidence of actual espionage andno evidence that she was working as a spy, she used her access as anFBI agent to look up information about herself and her relatives, someof whom may have ties to Hezbollah. She also is accused of improperlytaking classified information home with her.

This revelation follows closely on the news that the FBI itself was scouring lists of falafel joints in hopes of identifying Iranian agents (which may mean they were looking for Hezbollah agents with ties to Iran).

Call me crazy, but it strikes me that they’re looking in the Read more →

Today’s installment in the Denver Post’s series on justice on tribal lands is absolutely devastating to the Bush DOJ, starting with the anecdote from Paul Charlton describing a "high-level DOJ official" who had no clue that tribal justice was part of the US government’s obligation.

Talking with superiors about a gruesomedouble murder on the Navajo reservation, Charlton was stoppedmidsentence and asked by a high-level Justice Department official whyhe was involved in a case on the reservation in the first place.

To Charlton, it was suddenly clear that the official didn’tunderstand the most basic aspect of federal Indian law — that on mostreservations, U.S. attorneys are the sole authority empowered toprosecute felony crime there.

“If the first question is ‘Why are you even prosecuting this case?’ you’re starting far, far behind,” Charlton said.

Um, yeah, you could say that. You could also say the Bush Administration was failing in its duty.

You might say the same about Bill Mercer, who for much of the last several years served as Montana’s US Attorney while only showing up in Montana a few days a month. His response, to the description of a case that spanned several reservations and therefore had to be pursued by the US Attorney’s office, was a complaint that he hadn’t gotten a call.

On the Fort Berthold reservation inNorth Dakota, tribal prosecutor Bill Woods wrote a letter to federalprosecutors in late 2003 pleading for help with the case of an allegedserial rapist who preyed on intoxicated women. The suspect, an AmericanIndian man, allegedly had already struck twice on Fort Berthold andonce on Montana’s Crow reservation in a case dating from the 1990s. ButWoods was unable to investigate or charge a case from anotherreservation to help establish the pattern.

The tribal prosecutor kept the case open for three years, buthe never got a response from the U.S. attorney’s office in Billings.Just after the case was closed a few months ago, another woman reportedthat the man coaxed her into a car after the two were drinking andbegan driving her into the woods. Fearing she was in danger, the womanjumped from the vehicle, spending the night in freezing temperaturesuntil she could reach safety.

“I’m sorry to the extent that this wasn’t something that cameto my attention,” said Bill Mercer, the U.S. attorney for Montana,adding, “I just don’t know why in a circumstance like that people don’tpick up the phone and call me directly if they don’t believe they aregetting a response.”

Gosh. You think maybe the problem was that you were in DC the whole time?