Jeff Sessions Will Reinstate the War on Black Men Drugs

WaPo  |  Cook and Sessions have also fought the winds of change on Capitol Hill, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers recently tried but failed to pass the first significant bill on criminal justice reform in decades.

The legislation, which had 37 sponsors in the Senate, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and 79 members of the House, would have reduced some of the long mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug crimes. It also would have given judges more flexibility in drug sentencing and made retroactive the law that reduced the large disparity between sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

The bill, introduced in 2015, had support from outside groups as diverse as the Koch brothers and the NAACP. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) supported it as well. The path to passage seemed clear.

But then people such as Sessions and Cook spoke up. The longtime Republican senator from Alabama became a leading opponent, citing the spike in crime in several cities.

“Violent crime and murders have increased across the country at almost alarming rates in some areas. Drug use and overdoses are occurring and dramatically increasing,” said Sessions, one of only five members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted against the legislation. “It is against this backdrop that we are considering a bill . . . to cut prison sentences for drug traffickers and even other violent criminals, including those currently in federal prison.”

Cook testified that it was the “wrong time to weaken the last tools available to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents.”

After Republican lawmakers became nervous about passing legislation that might seem soft on crime, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to even bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

“Sessions was the main reason that bill didn’t pass,” said Inimai M. Chettiar, the director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “He came in at the last minute and really torpedoed the bipartisan effort.”

Now that he is attorney general, Sessions has signaled a new direction. As his first step, Sessions told his prosecutors in a memo last month to begin using “every tool we have” — language that evoked the strategy from the drug war of loading up charges to lengthen sentences.

And he quickly appointed Cook to be a senior official on the attorney general’s task force on crime reduction and public safety, which was created following a Trump executive order to address what the president has called “American carnage.”

“If there was a flickering candle of hope that remained for sentencing reform, Cook’s appointment was a fire hose,” said Ring, president of FAMM. “There simply aren’t enough backhoes to build all the prisons it would take to realize Steve Cook’s vision for America.”

media silent when administration targets whistleblowers

miamiherald | Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented. His Justice Department has conducted six prosecutions over leaks of classified information to reporters. Five involve the Espionage Act, a powerful law that had previously been used only four times since it was enacted in 1917 to prosecute spies.

Some spies. We’re no longer in the era of Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen or Kim Philby, infamous Cold War turncoats.

Instead, there’s Thomas Drake, a career official of the National Security Agency, who faced 35 years in prison for telling a Baltimore Sun reporter about what The New York Times called “a potential billion-dollar computer boondoggle.” At stake was bureaucratic embarrassment, not national security. (The case against Drake collapsed last summer.)

Then there’s Shamai Leibowitz, a translator for the FBI, who believed he had intercepted evidence of illegal influence-peddling by the Israeli embassy. When his boss wouldn’t act, he leaked transcripts to a blogger. He got 20 months.

Ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou was indicted in January for allegedly identifying a Guantánamo interrogator (who was not working undercover;) Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst, allegedly told a reporter for Fox News — wait for it — that the U.S. was worried North Korea might respond to new U.N. sanctions by testing another A-bomb; and Jeffrey Sterling, who allegedly disclosed a botched CIA operation in Iran that was described in a 2006 book by a Times reporter.

And there’s the biggest case, the court martial of Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of engineering the mammoth dumps of U.S. military and diplomatic data that Wikileaks, the online whistleblower network, turned over to leading newspapers in 2010 and 2011.

The administration seems undeterred by the scanty evidence that any of these defendants was out to hurt the country, a mainstay ingredient of espionage, and the Manning judge has even warned prosecutors they must show he believed he was “aiding the enemy” or she would toss the most serious charge against him.

The public is generally unaware of how essential nominally classified information is to coverage of diplomatic and strategic news. As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, put it: “The administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than ‘authorized’ news.”

What’s behind the administration’s fervor isn’t clear, but the news media have largely rolled over and yawned. A big reason is that prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.

So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/07/2783978/media-silent-when-administration.html#storylink=cpy

yet another bogus "terror" plot....,

The Nation | By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur.

I've seen this movie before.

In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself. Noted the Los Angeles Times:

Prosecutors called it the latest in a string of homegrown terrorism plots hatched after Sept. 11.

"It's hard to envision a more chilling plot," Assistant U.S. Atty. Eric Snyder said in court Thursday. He described all four suspects as "eager to bring death to Jews."

Actually, it's hard to imagine a stupider, less competent, and less important plot. The four losers were ensnared by a creepy FBI agent who hung around the mosque in upstate New York until he found what he was looking for.

a matter of prestige...,

NYTimes | The incident has uncovered a gaping cultural disconnect between the world’s two largest democracies. While Americans reflexively came to the defense of a maid who the authorities said was subjected to abuse, Indians reflexively sympathized with the diplomat.

This is partly because middle- and upper-class Indians typically have their own servants, who often work long hours for far less than the $573 a month that Ms. Khobragade had promised to pay. But the bigger reason, especially compelling in an election year, is national pride. In the month that has passed since Ms. Khobragade’s arrest, she has been transformed into a symbol of India’s sovereignty, pushed around and humiliated by an arrogant superpower.

“There is always this sense, since the end of the Soviet Union, that America is too big for its britches,” said Sandip Roy, senior editor at Firstpost, a news website. “What happened to Devyani is seen in a larger, cosmic sense as that kind of unilateral thing, like, ‘I will go and invade Afghanistan, and I don’t care what anyone thinks.’ ”

The dispute was brought to a rapid finish in the last 72 hours, in what appeared to be an effort by American officials to relax tensions.

Daniel N. Arshack, Ms. Khobragade’s lawyer in New York, agreed that once negotiations with prosecutors broke down last weekend, “this week turned into a focus on diplomatic solutions.” Mr. Arshack said that his client’s husband, a college professor, and two young daughters, ages 4 and 7, who are all American citizens, had remained in New York.

The domestic worker, Sangeeta Richard, told prosecutors that she was forced to work about 94 to 109 hours a week, with limited breaks for calls and meals, according to an indictment handed up in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Last summer, it said, Ms. Richard told Ms. Khobragade she was unhappy with the work conditions and wanted to return home, but her employer refused the request and would not return her passport.

Ms. Khobragade was arrested Dec. 12 when she was dropping off her daughters at school, and charged with misrepresenting Ms. Richard’s pay to obtain a work visa for a housekeeper. Indian newspapers reported that she was strip-searched, something Indians found especially offensive, and then kept in a police holding pen with drug addicts before being released on bond. India responded with a raft of retaliatory steps, including the removal of security barriers around the embassy in New Delhi, and the case was the lead story in the Indian news media for weeks.

On Wednesday, India granted Ms. Khobragade the full immunity and privileges of a diplomat, a set of rights not accorded those posted in consulates, as she was at the time of the arrest. Though the United States appealed to India to waive that immunity, India refused, and transferred her to a new position at the Foreign Ministry in Delhi. The State Department then told her to leave the United States, which she did Thursday night.

Ms. Khobragade’s father, Uttam Khobragade, said that his daughter was under strict orders not to give interviews, but told an anecdote that suggested she left with bitter feelings — toward Ms. Richard, toward Ms. Richard’s husband and toward the United States government.

“Devyani was seen off at the airport by an official of the State Department,” he told reporters Friday morning. “He told Devyani that, ‘Madam, I am sorry, and it was wrong.’ She told the official, ‘You have lost a good friend. It is unfortunate. In return, you got a maid and a drunken driver. They are in, and we are out.’ ” 

This Kneegrow's DNC Annointed and Protected Operative Status Still Very Much Intact

turcopelier |  Why does the name of Joe Biden's former Internet Technology guru, Warren Flood, appear in the meta data of documents posted on the internet by Guccifer 2.0? In case you do not recall, Guccifer 2.0 was identified as someone tied to Russian intelligence who played a direct role in stealing emails from John Podesta. The meta data in question indicates the name of the person who actually copied the original document. We have this irrefutable fact in the documents unveiled by Guccifer 2.0--Warren Flood's name appears prominently in the meta data of several documents attributed to "Guccifer 2.0." When this transpired, Flood was working as the CEO of his own company, BRIGHT BLUE DATA. (brightbluedata.com). Was Flood tasked to masquerade as a Russian operative?

Give Flood some props if that is true--he fooled our Intelligence Community and the entire team of Mueller prosecutors into believing that Guccifer was part of a Russian military intelligence cyber attack. But a careful examination of the documents shows that it is highly unlikely that this was an official Russian cyber operation.

Here's what the U.S. Intelligence Community wrote about Guccifer 2.0 in their very flawed January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment:

We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.

• • Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be an independent Romanian hacker, made multiple contradictory statements and false claims about his likely Russian identity throughout the election. Press reporting suggests more than one person claiming to be Guccifer 2.0 interacted with journalists.
  • Content that we assess was taken from e-mail accounts targeted by the GRU in March 2016 appeared on DCLeaks.com starting in June.

The laxity of the Intelligence Community in dealing with empirical evidence was matched by a disturbing lack of curiosity on the part of the Mueller investigators and prosecutors.

racketeering expert aiding atlanta public schools investigation

ajc | The state's leading expert in racketeering prosecutions has been hired by Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard to assist in the ongoing investigation into test cheating at Atlanta Public Schools, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.

Atlanta lawyer John Floyd, who has served as a special prosecutor in a number of high-profile cases, is working with the District Attorney's Office as a grand jury investigates the scandal, lawyers familiar with the probe said. The attorneys requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the grand jury proceedings.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act -- or RICO -- is often used by district attorneys to try to prove that a legal business was being used for illegal means. It allows prosecutors to sweep numerous defendants accused of committing various crimes into the same indictment and to allege they were all part of an ongoing enterprise. Racketeering convictions carry stiff punishment of up to 20 years in prison, much longer than what school officials might face under other possible charges.

Both Howard and Floyd declined to comment.

It is unclear how close Howard is to deciding whether to ask the grand jury to hand up indictments in the APS case. It also remains to be seen whether racketeering charges will be sought and, if so, who would be the possible targets. But bringing Floyd into the case shows the charges must be under consideration.

RICO was first enacted to fight corruption and organized crime, but Georgia's law, passed in 1980, has allowed state prosecutors to seek it in cases involving gang leaders, former Cobb EMC chief Dwight Brown, the assisted-suicide group the Final Exit Network and, just recently, former DeKalb schools Superintendent Crawford Lewis.

The Fulton grand jury began investigating the cheating scandal after a scathing report was released in July, concluding a lengthy state investigation into the APS cheating scandal. The report described an enterprise where unethical -- and potentially illegal -- behavior infiltrated every level of the bureaucracy and that "thousands of school children were harmed by widespread cheating."

Three special investigators found cheating on standardized tests occurred at 44 Atlanta schools and involved 178 educators, including 38 principals. The probe was launched after multiple articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution raised questions about the validity of APS test score improvements.

"A culture of fear and a conspiracy of silence infected this school system, and kept many teachers from speaking freely about misconduct," the investigators' report said. "From the onset of this investigation, we were confronted by a pattern of interference by top APS leadership in our attempt to gather evidence."

When asked to comment on Floyd's involvement in the case, Mike Bowers, one of the three APS special investigators, said, "I am encouraged that Mr. Howard is getting someone of Mr. Floyd's ability and insight to look at this."

tax leak consequences depend on details

Video - former Swiss banker gives tax evasion data to Wikileaks.

NYTimes | The individuals and companies whose offshore account information may be detailed in Swiss banking documents disclosed to WikiLeaks could face American prosecutors — or go untouched, senior tax lawyers said on Tuesday.

Whether the more than 2,000 wealthy investors and companies from the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere get a knock on the door from the Internal Revenue Service or other American agencies will depend in large part on if the documents contain detailed records showing criminal tax evasion.

“It’s obviously tremendously worrisome for these people, because every time a whistle-blower has said he has the goods, he’s had the goods,” said Peter R. Zeidenberg, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at DLA Piper.

He was referring to internal bank documents and client names provided to American authorities in recent years by Bradley C. Birkenfeld, a former private banker at the Swiss bank UBS, and by Heinrich Kieber, a former data clerk at the LGT Group, the Liechtenstein royal bank. Mr. Birkenfeld’s disclosures underpinned a Justice Department investigation into UBS, which agreed to pay $780 million and admit to criminal wrongdoing with its offshore private bank.

But Mr. Zeidenberg added that “simply holding an offshore bank account is not a crime. If some of these people have already reported their accounts” on their American tax returns — if they were required to file them — “or voluntarily disclosed them to the I.R.S., they may have nothing to fear.”

The documents were handed over to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in London on Monday by Rudolf M. Elmer, a former senior private banker at Julius Baer. Mr. Elmer, who has a history of legal conflict with Julius Baer, one of the oldest and most secretive Swiss banks, ran the bank’s Caribbean operations as chief operating officer for eight years until he was dismissed in 2002.

Mr. Elmer is set to go to trial on Wednesday in Zurich on charges brought by Swiss prosecutors that he leaked client data around 2005 and engaged in threats against the bank and some employees. Julius Baer has previously said that Mr. Elmer has leaked falsified documents.

It is not clear what years are covered by Mr. Elmer’s WikiLeaks documents or if they concern years after he left the bank.

sigurdur thordarson: greazy grima wormtongue serving the all seeing eye...,

slate | When he met Julian Assange for the first time, Sigurdur Thordarson admired the WikiLeaks founder’s attitude and quickly signed up to the cause. But little more than a year later, Thordarson was working as an informant spying on WikiLeaks for the U.S. government—embroiling himself as a teenager in one of the most complicated international events in recent history.

In a series of interviews with Slate, Thordarson has detailed the full story behind how, in an extraordinary sequence of events, he went from accompanying Assange to court hearings in London to secretly passing troves of data on WikiLeaks staff and affiliated activists to the FBI. The 20-year-old Icelandic citizen’s account is partly corroborated by authorities in Iceland, who have confirmed that he was at the center of a diplomatic row in 2011 when a handful of FBI agents flew in to the country to meet with him—but were subsequently asked to leave after a government minister suspected they were trying to “frame” Assange.

Thordarson, who first outed himself as an informant in a Wired story in June, provided me with access to a pseudonymous email account that he says was created for him by the FBI. He also produced documents and travel records for trips to Denmark and the United States that he says were organized and paid for by the bureau.

The FBI declined to comment on Thordarson’s role as an informant or the content of the emails its agents are alleged to have sent him. In a statement, it said that it was “not able to discuss investigative tools and techniques, nor comment on ongoing investigations.” But emails sent by alleged FBI agents to Thordarson, which left a digital trail leading back to computers located within the United States, appear to shine a light on the extent of the bureau’s efforts to aggressively investigate WikiLeaks following the whistle-blower website’s publication of classified U.S. military and State Department files in 2010.

Late last month, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was convicted on counts of espionage, theft, and computer fraud for passing the group the secrets.  During the Manning trial, military prosecutors portrayed Assange as an “information anarchist,” and now it seems increasingly possible that the U.S. government may next go after the 42-year-old Australian for his role in obtaining and publishing the documents. For the past 14 months, Assange has been living in Ecuador’s London Embassy after being granted political asylum by the country over fears that, if he is sent to Sweden to face sexual offense allegations, he will be detained and subsequently extradited to the United States.

Meanwhile, for more than two years, prosecutors have been quietly conducting a sweeping investigation into WikiLeaks that remains active today. The FBI’s files in the Manning case number more than 42,000 pages, according to statements made during the soldier’s pretrial hearings, and that stack of proverbial paper likely continues to grow. Thordarson’s story offers a unique insight into the politically-charged probe: Information he has provided appears to show that there was internal tension within the FBI over a controversial attempt to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the whistle-blower group. Thordarson gave the FBI a large amount of data on WikiLeaks, including private chat message logs, photographs, and contact details of volunteers, activists, and journalists affiliated with the organization. Thordarson alleges that the bureau even asked him to covertly record conversations with Assange in a bid to tie him to a criminal hacking conspiracy. The feds pulled back only after becoming concerned that the Australian was close to discovering the spy effort.

secrecy has no place in our criminal justice system

silive |  Do grand juries really protect the public against overzealous corrupt prosecutors? Was the Fifth Amendment provision of the U.S. Constitution requiring grand jury presentment for felony crimes really included in the Bill of Rights in 1791 to protect the public? I truly believe that this provision was intended to protect the rich and powerful who wrote the Constitution and controlled the wealth of the new nation. Consider the fact that only white male property owners were permitted to sit on grand juries and that everyone non white and non-male was excluded from the judicial and legislative process. Thus, the rich, white and powerful were guaranteed that only their true piers would judge them and determine their criminal liability.

Now I didn't start this race business, I'm just dealing with reality. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney started it in 1857 when Dred Scott asked for his full rights of citizenship. Justice Taney denied his plea, stating: "The framers of the constitution believed that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect."

You remember the Central Park jogger defendants? Swiftly arrested and indicted by a grand jury based upon incomplete evidence and police coerced confessions. All defendants were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms before the guilty party confessed and exonerated them all. Its nice to believe that all prosecutors will be fair and honest, but we need only look at the record of former Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes.  Convictions by Hyne's office of 11, yes 11, black men have been overturned following the revelation that the testimony and evidence offered by the assigned detective and accepted by the courts, was false, shoddy and manufactured. None of these men benefited from a secret grand jury proceeding, an honest prosecutor or a courageous judiciary.

We have entered an era when more rather than less openness is sought in legislative, regulatory and judicial proceedings. Is a witness more inclined to tell the truth if his/her secrecy is guaranteed or are they more likely to lie and slip the truth if they know that their identity and testimony may never see the light of day or the eyes of a competent defense attorney? I'll take openness and transparency over protection and secrecy any day.

even nazi scum gets respect because it will fight you to the death

NYTimes |  The Nazi spies performed a range of tasks for American agencies in the 1950s and 1960s, from the hazardous to the trivial, the documents show.

In Maryland, Army officials trained several Nazi officers in paramilitary warfare for a possible invasion of Russia. In Connecticut, the C.I.A. used an ex-Nazi guard to study Soviet-bloc postage stamps for hidden meanings.

In Virginia, a top adviser to Hitler gave classified briefings on Soviet affairs. And in Germany, SS officers infiltrated Russian-controlled zones, laying surveillance cables and monitoring trains.

But many Nazi spies proved inept or worse, declassified security reviews show. Some were deemed habitual liars, confidence men or embezzlers, and a few even turned out to be Soviet double agents, the records show.

Mr. Breitman said the morality of recruiting ex-Nazis was rarely considered. “This all stemmed from a kind of panic, a fear that the Communists were terribly powerful and we had so few assets,” he said.

Efforts to conceal those ties spanned decades.

When the Justice Department was preparing in 1994 to prosecute a senior Nazi collaborator in Boston named Aleksandras Lileikis, the C.I.A. tried to intervene.

The agency’s own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked “under the control of the Gestapo during the war,” his C.I.A. file noted, and “was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna.”

Even so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany — paying him $1,700 a year, plus two cartons of cigarettes a month — and cleared the way for him to immigrate to America four years later, records show.

Mr. Lileikis lived quietly for nearly 40 years, until prosecutors discovered his Nazi past and prepared to seek his deportation in 1994.

When C.I.A. officials learned of the plans, a lawyer there called Eli Rosenbaum at the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit and told him “you can’t file this case,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in an interview. The agency did not want to risk divulging classified records about its ex-spy, he said.

Mr. Rosenbaum said he and the C.I.A. reached an understanding: If the agency was forced to turn over objectionable records, prosecutors would drop the case first. (That did not happen, and Mr. Lileikis was ultimately deported.)

The C.I.A. also hid what it knew of Mr. Lileikis’s past from lawmakers.

In a classified memo to the House Intelligence Committee in 1995, the agency acknowledged using him as a spy but made no mention of the records linking him to mass murders. “There is no evidence,” the C.I.A. wrote, “that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities.”

what will happen if the feds get warrantless access to phone location data?

TheAtlantic | On Tuesday prosecutors for the Obama administration argued that records of location data gathered by cell-phone companies should be available to law enforcement even when no search warrant has previously been issued by a judge.

In other words, If Uncle Sam wins on this argument, every law-enforcement agency in the country will be able to track your every move. More importantly, access to location data as comprehensive as that available to cell-phone carriers could allow law enforcement to determine everything from your complete social network and your your health status to how likely it is that you'll repay a loan.

The case at hand does not suggest that the Obama administration is attempting to gain this level of insight into the lives of every American citizen, but it's telling that the prosecutors seem ignorant of the power of the data they're requesting.

To understand how important location data is, especially of the variety gathered by smartphones, it's important to understand what academics have already accomplished with this data.

Sandy Pentland, a computer scientist at MIT who coined the term "reality mining" to describe the process of extracting and processing this data, put it this way in a recent essay for Edge.org:

The people who have the most valuable data are the banks, the telephone companies, the medical companies... Who you actually are is determined by where you spend time, and which things you buy... by analyzing this sort of data, scientists can tell an enormous amount about you.

In research published in 2009, Pentland and his colleagues were able to determine, for example, which students were friends based solely on mobile phone location records. Law enforcement could some day use such data to map entire criminal networks, but it could just as easily be used to visualize and contain networks of lawful protestors.

Knowing a person's location reveals their social network, which in turn reveals enormous amounts about who they are and how they are likely to behave.

elite gunsel monkey-bidness...,

WaPo |  The mysterious workings of a Pentagon office that oversees clandestine operations are unraveling in federal court, where a criminal investigation has exposed a secret weapons program entwined with allegations of a sweetheart contract, fake badges and trails of destroyed evidence.

Capping an investigation that began almost two years ago, separate trials are scheduled this month in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., for a civilian Navy intelligence official and a hot-rod auto mechanic from California who prosecutors allege conspired to manufacture an untraceable batch of automatic-rifle silencers.

The exact purpose of the silencers remains hazy, but court filings and pretrial testimony suggest they were part of a top-secret operation that would help arm guerrillas or commandos overseas.

The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents. The directorate is composed of fewer than 10 civilian employees, most of them retired military personnel.

Court records filed by prosecutors allege that the Navy paid the auto mechanic — the brother of the directorate’s boss — $1.6 million for the silencers, even though they cost only $10,000 in parts and labor to manufacture.

Much of the documentation in the investigation has been filed under seal on national security grounds. According to the records that have been made public, the crux of the case is whether the silencers were properly purchased for an authorized secret mission or were assembled for a rogue operation.

All The Perogatives Of Personhood With No Accountability: More Human Than Human

HuffPost |  In a 1999 memo entitled “Bringing Criminal Charges Against Corporations,” written when he was deputy U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder argued that government officials could take into account “collateral consequences" when prosecuting corporate crimes.

That memo has resurfaced at a time when Holder, now U.S. attorney general, faces increasing criticism for the Department of Justice's reluctance to bring charges against white-collar criminals.

“There’s all kinds of problems with the applications of this policy which began with the Holder memo and got more formalized,” said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University and an expert in white-collar crime. “You are going to send a message that we don’t really care significantly about misconduct within those institutions.”

Although it brought only a modest change in the way prosecutors evaluate whether to bring criminal charges against corporations, Holder's memo laid the groundwork for subsequent policies that allowed for more leeway when going after large firms, Coffee said.

Adora Andy Jenkins, a Justice Department spokeswoman, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post that under Holder's leadership, "this Justice Department has stood firm in our approach that no person and no corporation is above the law."

In 1999, Holder highlighted the possibility of deferred prosecution -- an arrangement now common in the wake of the financial crisis -- whereby prosecutors essentially give defendants amnesty in exchange for paying a fine, enacting reforms and cooperating with investigators. But later officials published further memos, turning the option into more of a recommendation, Coffee said.

He said the policy was strengthened in response to the Arthur Andersen scandal of the early 2000s. After the government brought criminal charges against the consulting firm, the company failed, causing 28,000 workers -- many of whom likely had no role in any wrongdoing -- to lose their jobs. A court later overturned the charges.

Holder told the Wall Street Journal in 2006 that he drafted the memo in response to complaints that there seemed to be no uniform rules for deciding whether to bring charges in corporate cases.

"[I] didn’t expect these issues would become as big as they were," Holder told the WSJ at the time. Indeed, they've only grown larger in the seven years since that interview, as the financial crisis wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy.

The government has yet to prosecute any big banks or major executives for their role in the meltdown, and critics have derided Holder and his Justice Department for using the collateral damage argument as an excuse for not doing enough to hold those institutions accountable. The DOJ came under fire last year after declining to prosecute HSBC for years of money laundering violations, saying that to do so would bring too much damage to the global economy.

“The government just backed down,” Coffee said of that case. “There were reasons in 2008 to say maybe we shouldn’t indict any bank we can because it will just add to the systemic risk. But we were in 2012 to 2013 with HSBC -- that risk wasn’t there and we weren’t dealing with something that was relating to the activities that produced the 2008 crisis.”

Yet in addition to the HSBC deal, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and others have criticized Holder for statements he made to senators -- and later walked back -- indicating that he thought big banks had gotten too large to prosecute.

two kinds of due process in America -- one for overseers and another for the overseen...,

tomdispatch |  In the simplest terms, there is no war on the police. Violent attacks against police officers remain at historic lows, even though approximately 1,000 people have been killed by the police this year nationwide. In just the past few weeks, videos have been released of problematic fatal police shootings in San Francisco and Chicago.

While it’s too soon to tell whether there has been an uptick in violent crime in the post-Ferguson period, no evidence connects any possible increase to the phenomenon of police violence being exposed to the nation. What is taking place and what the police and their supporters are largely reacting to is a modest push for sensible law enforcement reforms from groups as diverse asCampaign Zero, Koch Industries, the Cato Institute, The Leadership Conference, and the ACLU (my employer). Unfortunately, as the rhetoric ratchets up, many police agencies and organizations are increasingly resistant to any reforms, forgetting whom they serve and ignoring constitutional limits on what they can do.

Indeed, a closer look at law enforcement arguments against commonsense reforms like independently investigating police violence, demilitarizing police forces, or ending “for-profit policing” reveals a striking disregard for concerns of just about any sort when it comes to brutality and abuse. What this “debate” has revealed, in fact, is a mainstream policing mindset ready to manufacture fear without evidence and promote the belief that American civil rights and liberties are actually an impediment to public safety. In the end, such law enforcement arguments subvert the very idea that the police are there to serve the community and should be under civilian control.

And that, when you come right down to it, is the logic of the police state.  

Due Process Plus

It’s no mystery why so few police officers are investigated and prosecuted for using excessive force and violating someone’s rights. “Local prosecutors rely on local police departments to gather the evidence and testimony they need to successfully prosecute criminals,” according to Campaign Zero . “This makes it hard for them to investigate and prosecute the same police officers in cases of police violence.”

Since 2005, according to an analysis by theWashington Post and Bowling Green State University, only 54 officers have been prosecuted nationwide, despite the thousands of fatal shootings by police. As Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green, puts it, “To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way. It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”

The State Goes To Great Lengths To Protect Itself - You Taxpaying MF'ers Are On Your Own

mises  |  In all the media and regime frenzy over the Janaury 6 riots and the Pentagon Leaker in recent months, it is interesting to examine the contrast between how the regime treats "crimes" against its own interests, and real crime committed against ordinary private citizens. 

Witness, for example, how the Biden administration and corporate media have treated the January 6 riot as if it were some kind of military coup, demanding that draconian sentences be handed down even to small-time vandals and trespassers. Regime paranoia has led the Justice Department to ask for a 30-year sentence for Enrique Tarrio, a man who was convicted of the non-crime of "seditious conspiracy" even though he wasn't even in Washington on January 6. In recent months, Jacob Chansley, the "QAnon Shaman," received a sentence of three-and-a-half years, even though prosecutors admit he did nothing violent. Riley Williams was given three years for simply trespassing in Nancy Pelosi's office. Members of the Capitol Police force have been lionized in the media as great protectors of "sacred" government buildings, and any threat to the property or persons of Washington politicians has been equated with an assault on "democracy." 

Yet, had these supposed insurrectionists inflicted these same actions against an ordinary private individual, there's a good chance the perpetrators would not even be arrested, let alone given years of prison time. Consider, for example, the mobs that ransack private businesses in American cities, stealing tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise while police and prosecutors consider it all to be low priority.  Violent crime and property crime surge in many areas of the United States, with violent crime rising 30 percent in New York City in 2022. Unsolved murders in the US are at a record high. Meanwhile, progressives and social democrats are looking for ways to reduce criminal penalties against violent criminals. Police departments often devote only tiny portions of their budgets to homicide investigations, and if your property is stolen, odds are good you can forget about ever seeing it again. 

The situation is quite different when it comes to protecting the state, its agents, and its property from any threat. During urban riots, such as those which occurred in Ferguson, Missouri and Minneapolis, Minnesota, the police went to great lengths to protect themselves and government property. If you were just a private shopkeeper or ordinary citizen, however, you were on your own. At the Uvalde School shooting in 2022, hundreds of law enforcement officers from all levels of government chose to protect themselves rather than the children who were being murdered inside. When Uvalde parents demanded the police act, the police attacked the parents. 

We find similar phenomena at the federal level. There are, of course, special federal laws against violence perpetrated against federal employees. Ordinary taxpayers receive no such consideration. Note how federal agencies move to arm themselves to the teeth while also seeking to disarm the private-sector. Federal agents will spare no expense finding someone who put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk, but it's another matter entirely when we're talking about serious violent crime against regular people.  Federal agents, of course, allowed 9/11 to occur right under their noses, they refused to investigate known rapist Larry Nasser, and shrugged off reports about the man who would end up slaughtering children at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Contrast this with how long the federal government has been conniving to get revenge on Julian Assange for merely telling the truth about US war crimes.  

Naturally, law enforcement officers rarely face any sanctions for their failures to bother themselves with private property, life, or limb. The federal courts have made it clear that law enforcement officers are not obligated to actually protect the public. In other words, the taxpayers must always pay taxes to hold up their end of the imagined "social contract" or face fines and imprisonment. But the other side of that "contract," the state, has no legal obligation to make good on its end. This, of course, is not how real contracts work.

attacking wikileaks assange...,

thiscantbehappening |  While I periodically have written commentaries dissecting and pillorying news articles in the New York Times to expose their bias, hypocrisy half-truths and lies, I generally ignore their editorials since these are overtly opinions of the management, and one expects them to display the elitist and neo-liberal perspective of the paper’s publisher and senior editors.

That said, the August 17 editorial about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has spent four harrowing years trapped in the apartment-sized Ecuadoran embassy thanks to a trumped-up and thoroughly discredited political rape “investigation” by a politically driven Swedish prosecutor and a complicit right-wing British government, moves far beyond even the routine rampant bias and distortion of a Times editorial into misrepresentation and character assassination. As such it cries out for criticism. 

Headlined “A Break in the Assange Saga,” the editorial starts off with the flat-out lie that “Ecuador and Sweden finally agreed last week that Swedish prosecutors could question Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has been holed up since 2012.”

The casual reader fed only corporate media stories about this case might logically assume from that lead that such an interview has been held up by a disagreement of some kind between Ecuador and Sweden. In fact, Ecuador and Assange and his attorneys have stated their willingness to allow Swedish prosecutors to come to London and interview Assange in the safety of their embassy for several years now. The prosecutor in Sweden, Marianne Nye, who has been pursuing Assange all that time like Ahab after his whale, has not only never taken up that offer, but by her refusal to go to London in all this time, demanding instead Assange’s enforced presence in Stockholm, has allowed any possible rape charges, if any were even appropriate, to pass the statute of limitations. The paper doesn’t mention this. Nor does the editorial mention that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Working Group on Arbitrary Detention last February found that Assange is effectively being held in arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish governments, and called for his release, and for the lifting of British government threats to arrest him and extradite him if he leaves the safety of the embassy.

Asset Forfeiture As Collective Punishment

americansforprosperity  |  What happens when the federal government blatantly violates a court order and takes the property of citizens who are not under criminal suspicion?

Why should innocent property owners have to prove their innocence in order to get their property back from the government?

These are a few of the questions that have come into play when law enforcement agencies seized private property through the most recent horror story involving civil asset forfeiture.

In this ongoing case in California, federal agents exceeded their authority, took property from citizens not even under criminal suspicion, and are refusing to give it back unless they can successfully navigate the government’s demands.

The stories of these people are unfortunately not the first example of the government violating our rights in this manner, but they are certainly not any less shocking.

The raid on U.S. Private Vaults

On March 22, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Agency acted under a warrant to shut down a Beverly Hills, California business called U.S. Private Vaults.

USPV provided bank-style safety deposit boxes to customers who wanted anonymity. Through biometric identifiers, or a nondescript key, boxholders could store valuables without ever having to identify themselves by name.

Prosecutors say it was a criminal business however, and a grand jury indicted the company on charges of conspiracies to launder money, distribute controlled substances, and structure transactions.

The warrant authorizing the raid allowed investigators to seize a list of items, including deposit box keys, money counters, biometric scanners, security cameras, and computers.

There’s no public indication however, that law enforcement had specific information about criminal suspects with boxes there or had identified boxes that held ill-gotten gains from specific crimes. And the warrant specifically prohibited law enforcement from seizing the contents of the more than 800 privately held safe deposit boxes at the business:

This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of safety deposit boxes … in accordance with their written policies, agents shall inspect the contents of the boxes in an effort to identify their owners in order to notify them so that they can claim their property.

That restriction was ignored. Prosecutors seized the contents of the boxes, intentionally casting a wide net that took in all customers, innocent or otherwise. The FBI now says it intends to hold onto $85 million in cash, and an unspecified haul of gold, silver, and precious metals.

On June 22, U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner found that the FBI “provides no factual basis for the seizure of Plaintiffs’ property,” and issued a temporary injunction against the seizures.

hush, hush, strictly on the q.t.....,

Guardian | "It seems an unusual time to embark on a career of multiple rape," said Guardian journalist David Leigh, who has worked closely with Assange over the recent WikiLeaks Afghanistan documents. "He certainly didn't come across as a violent man, not in the least. Julian was clearly preparing to release more sensitive documents."

Julian Assange, the secretive founder of WikiLeaks, the website behind the biggest leak of US military documents in history, was the subject of conspiracy theories last night after prosecutors withdrew a warrant for his arrest in connection with rape and molestation allegations.

On Friday a spokeswoman for the Swedish prosecutors' office in Stockholm confirmed an arrest warrant for Assange had been issued in absentia and urged him to "contact police so that he can be confronted with the suspicions".

According to Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, the 39-year-old Australian had been wanted in connection with two separate incidents. The first involved a woman from Stockholm who reportedly accused him of "molestation". The second involved a woman from Enköping, about an hour's drive west from Stockholm, who had apparently accused Assange of rape. The warrant was withdrawn yesterday afternoon.

Assange claimed he was the victim of a smear campaign. He denied the charges on WikiLeaks's Twitter page, saying they were "without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing".

It is believed that Assange, who has no known address and spends much of his time travelling to ensure a low profile, knew both women well. The pair had been reluctant to go to the police with their complaints, according to sources in Sweden. But the news that Swedish police were investigating the affair was leaked to Expressen, prompting further claims that a smear campaign had been orchestrated by foreign interests keen to discredit him.

you know who else has a judicial system that is hard to fight and extracts money from citizens?

reason |  The Department of Justice threatens defendants with dozens of federal charges that could put them behind bars for decades unless they accept plea deals and avoid a trial, a punishment for trying to defend themselves. Department of Justice prosecutors, working with other agencies like the IRS, seize assets from Americans and resist giving it back even when there's little evidence such Americans have done anything wrong. The DOJ engages in a lot of the same misbehavior found in the Ferguson system of justice—it's just not motivated by race.

Even though the Department of Justice may attack Ferguson's revenue-generating, they are quick to defend the role of their own "Equitable Sharing Program," which encourages law enforcement agencies to seize property and assets by allowing the agencies to keep 80 percent of what they take in the program.

A White House report crafted in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown and the police's militarized response to protests defended the program, along with others, as "valuable and have provided state and local law enforcement with needed assistance as they carry out their critical missions in helping to keep the American people safe." Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch defended asset forfeiture as a useful tool for law enforcement at a Senate hearing.

Ferguson's police department participates in this federal program. According to research by The Washington Post, the city has spent more than $100,000 on equipment and weapons paid for with assets seized by police in Ferguson (this also means the federal government has also received money from law enforcement activities in the community as well). The DOJ's press office has not returned calls to find out whether Ferguson would be booted from the program due to its behavior. Ferguson officials have said they will attempt to settle with the Department of Justice, not fight, so probably not. The DOJ has only cut off access to the Equitable Sharing Program to a handful of law enforcement agencies. One of them, Maricopa County in Arizona, is infamous for resistance to attempts by the DOJ to reform the way it deals with immigrants and Latino citizens. It's easy to look at the program and see the DOJ using access to its funds as a carrot/stick to influence the behavior of local law enforcement agencies. This is not inherently a bad thing, but all of this knowledge about how the DOJ operates should cause anybody to look askance at the agency's credibility when it comes to evaluating the accessibility of fiscal propriety of any justice system in the country.

For that matter, the DOJ, just like Ferguson, brags about the millions—billions—of dollars it brings in from settlements and enforcement activities in its annual reports. They put out press releases and hold press conferences. The difference may be that its targets are often rich corporations (but not always, as their actions against a small Long Island vending business shows). The DOJ and state-level prosecutors are looking for big paydays, too, to help bolster the budgets of the governments they serve. My story in Reason's April issue, titled "The Settlement Shakedown," helps explain how this all works out (It's available online now to digital subscribers).

None of this is to dismiss what is clearly racist animus by the people in power in Ferguson. But if every victim described in the DOJ report on Ferguson had been white and the racist comments and e-mails hadn't happened, these incidents would still have been huge violations of the rights of the citizens. Many would argue that these incidents wouldn't have happened at all absent the racial component. I cannot possibly say they're wrong. Every single government in the country is driven to bring in revenue to perpetuate itself, and their targets will most likely be those who will have the hardest times protecting or defending themselves. This often means poor minorities and immigrants, but don't confuse the symptoms with the cause. Racism just one sorting tool for governments to decide who they're going to plunder.

Robert Kraft Walked While Trafficked Asian Women Got The Book Thrown At Them

palmbeachpost |  After the arrests, prosecutors and several law-enforcement agencies said they believed the spas may be linked to human trafficking. To date, no one has been charged with human trafficking in relation to these cases, according to court records.

Once the case was brought to court, the recordings were challenged by lawyers and barred by judges from being used as evidence because of the controversial means in which law enforcement obtained the video, known as "sneak-and-peek" warrants. 

MORE: Search warrant used to catch Robert Kraft built for terrorists, not johns, critics say

After prosecutors spent a year fighting the charges, an appeals court ruled in August that the lower court was correct and that "total suppression was the appropriate remedy under the circumstances of this case."

"The type of law enforcement surveillance utilized in these cases is extreme," the 23-page opinion read. 

Florida's Attorney General Ashley Moody said she wouldn't take an appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, so the prostitution solicitation charges were dropped in September.

Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said he and his office were forced to drop the charges after the rulings.

"Without these videos, we cannot move forward with our prosecutions, and thus we are ethically compelled to drop the cases against all the defendants," he said in September. 

When asked why the charges against the women were not dropped, Aronberg said there was still enough evidence without the recordings to prosecute them. 

"Orchids of Asia Day Spa was a notorious brothel in a family shopping center," Aronberg said.

"Rich guys from a local country club lined up to receive sex acts throughout the day until the place closed around midnight," Aronberg said.