Archive for category: Law

I believe it was just the other day when I was saying it was more urgent to implement whistleblower protection than to write a new journalist shield law. This doesn’t change my opinion in that regard.

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effortto collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department.The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in theDepartment, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committeehad set up a formon the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privatelyabout abuses there. Although the panel said it would not acceptanonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identitywould be held in the "strictest confidence."

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent theemail addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who hadwritten in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters whohad used the website form, including presumably whistleblowersthemselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentallyincluded in the "to:" field — instead of concealing those addresseswith a so-called blind carbon copy or "bcc:".

See, if we didn’t force our whistleblowers to sneak around so much, this wouldn’t be the monumental fuck Read more →

Two words about this update. First, to clarify from my earlier post: the WaPo article refers to a filing written in February 2007 that was just unsealed yesterday. So in fact, there are several more recent filings from Nacchio that rebut the claims made in this newly unsealed document.

Here’s the important part. From reading the available filings, it’s unclear whether Nacchio is right that he lost the Groundbreaker business because he refused to participate in activities the Qwest General Counsel deemed to be illegal. But as far as I can tell, there is no dispute that NSA asked Qwest to do something the latter judged to be illegal (though the government has redacted many of the references to this purportedly illegal request). In other words, while I can’t address Nacchio’s central question of whether this material might be enough to refute his insider trading charges, I can say that the record appears to support Nacchio’s claim that he was asked to do something he believed to be illegal (which we’ve assumed was domestic spying).

Update: Actually, let me revise that. The government is not disputing with this filing that Qwest was asked to do something illegal and Payne’s testimony appears to support that claim. It’s unclear whether the government is simply trying to refute charges by directing attention to the contracts or whether they’re trying to distract away from the claims about an illegal request.

Here’s the filing that appears to be the basis of today’s WaPo article claiming that the government’s filing refutes Nacchio’s claims. While I can’t speak to the veracity of Nacchio’s central claims, the filing unsealed yesterday doesn’t do what Carrie Johnson says it does. For starters, this appears to be a clear attempt (successful, in the case of Johnson) to refute claims made in July and later by unsealing a document written in February.

Johnson lists two ways in which the filing unsealed yesterday refute Nacchio’s claims. First, that Qwest was included among the consortium that eventually won the Groundbreaker business.

Qwest was one of more than a dozen "strategic vendors" that providedservices to the Eagle Alliance, which won a contract in July 2001 toupgrade computer systems and equipment at the National Security Agency, according to a document that prosecutors attached to their court filing yesterday.

And second, that the testimony of James Payne refutes Nacchio’s claims about the February 2001 meeting. Let’s take these in order.

The WaPo reports that more documents have been unsealed in the Nacchio case–and they show (Prosecutors claim) that Nacchio’s claim to have lost business don’t hold up.

Qwest Communicationsbelonged to a business alliance that won a rich national securitycontract in the summer of 2001, undermining claims that authoritiesretaliated against its former chief executive for refusing to supportan unidentified government program earlier that year, prosecutors saidin documents released yesterday.

I’m on two deadlines for other things, so I’m not going to sort through the unsealed documents until later. But understand this: the document released today was filed in February 2007, at about the mid-point of discussions about the purported deals with the US government. This filing was filed in April 2007–it was one of the final filings on the subject and addresses some of the objections raised in the earlier filing.

For example, it points out that Payne’s claim (which appears to be cited in the Prosecutor’s filings) that the February 2001 meeting did not pertain to big contracts happened in July 2006; in a statement made in October 2006, Payne affirmed that the meeting pertained to Groundbreaker (and a contemporaneous Payne email backs up that claim).

Similarly, the later filing explains that Read more →

Amanda marks the expiration of the PATRIOT Act appointees as USA.

These 11 prosecutors now “find themselves at the mercy of the same U.S. district courts that the Justice Department saw fit to cut out of the U.S. Attorney appointmentprocess last year.” The courts today will decide whether to reappointthese prosecutors who were handpicked by Gonzales and the White House.

Many judges and former U.S. attorneys believe that the federal courts today will be “less inclined than they have been in the past to rubber-stamping the attorney general’s interim picks.”

She’s following some of the same USAs as I am:

Jeff Taylor, DC. It’d be awfully nice to ensure that the USA overseeing DC would be willing to take a criminal referral from Congress or the DOJ IG. You know–just in case someone was held in contempt by Congress? But I’m not sure Taylor would do that. Unfortunately, the DC judges seem to like him anyway.

Early next month, a committee of active judges at the U.S. DistrictCourt for the District of Columbia will meet to discuss Taylor’sappointment, according to a spokesman for Chief Judge Thomas Hogan. Thelast time the judges convened for a U.S. Attorney appointment was inSeptember 2004, when they extended Kenneth Read more →