Category: Corruption

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, Fabulous Fab Found Liable

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Goldman Sachs mid-level minion Fabrice Tourre was found Civilly liable for fraud related to mortgage backed securities:

A federal jury found former Goldman Sachs executive Fabrice Tourre liable Thursday for duping investors about a shoddy mortgage deal on the eve of the housing market’s crash, the first major court victory for the Securities and Exchange Commission in its quest to hold Wall Street accountable for the 2008 financial crisis.

 After two days of deliberation, the jury decided Tourre — best known by his “Fabulous Fab” nickname — was liable for six of the seven claims pursued by the SEC. The agency had accused the 34-year-old Frenchman of defrauding investors out of $1 billion by selling them a financial product that was secretly designed to fail.

 The trial was one of the few to emerge from the financial crisis, and it cast Tourre as a symbol of Wall Street greed. Only twice before has the SEC brought individuals to trial in cases related to the crisis, and each time ended with lackluster results. The victory this time around is a boon for the agency, which is often criticized as a risk-averse regulator that shies away from court battles in favor of slap-on-the-wrist settlements.

 Tourre was only a mid-level executive at Goldman — not a marquee Wall Street figure, some legal experts noted. Still, the morale boost is likely to build momentum inside the agency as it pursues one of its most prominent targets yet: hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen. Last month, the agency charged Cohen with failing to properly supervise two employees who engaged in insider trading, a case that could potentially end the industry tycoon’s storied career.

Note that there is no possibility of jail time, just a fine, that will be paid after what will likely be endless appeals.

So no real possibility of  getting to testify against higher up.

There are two bits in the article that are particularly important in understanding this:

“You would think the SEC convicted the Al Capone of Wall Street today when all it did was scapegoat a single mid-level Goldman Sachs’ trader who bragged in emails to his girlfriend,” Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of a nonprofit group called Better Markets, said in a statement.

 John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School, said a question still remains: “Why didn’t they go after someone important and not this sacrificial lamb?”

 ………

 Jacob Frenkel, a former SEC enforcement lawyer and former federal prosecutor, said the SEC’s victory came just in time. The five-year statute of limitations is running out on cases from the time of the financial crisis.

So,this is not a beginning, this is an end, and as that it is almost less than nothing, because it allows the banksters and Their Evil Minions™ can point to this, and claim that not everyone skated, even though all they got was a 28 year French number cruncher.

Damn.

Linkage

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Finally a performance, by The Anarchists, my kids band at the Rock Star Jam Summer Music Camp:

Natalie was much more comfortable on stage this year.

Federal Court Rules that Federal Reserve Cannot Be the Banksters Bitch Over Swipe Fees

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U.S. District Judge Richard Leon just ruled that the Federal Reserve’s rules on debit card swipe fees are too bank friendly and ignore the statutory requirements of Dodd-Frank:

The Federal Reserve disregarded Congress’s intent when deciding how much banks can charge merchants for debit-card transactions, a judge ruled, rejecting Dodd-Frank-imposed regulations governing “swipe” fees.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington ruled today that the Fed didn’t have the authority to set a 21-cent cap on debit-card transactions. Leon said the rule, which has been in effect since October 2011, would remain in place pending new regulations or interim standards.

“The Board has clearly disregarded Congress’s statutory intent by inappropriately inflating all debit card transaction fees by billions of dollars and failing to provide merchants with multiple unaffiliated networks for each debit card transaction,” Leon said in his 58-page ruling.

The groups, in a lawsuit filed in November 2011, said merchants will be “substantially harmed” by the fees the Fed set under the Durbin Amendment, a provision of the Dodd-Frank legislation. The rule went into effect on Oct. 1, 2011.

“The board’s final rule permits banks to recover significantly more costs than permitted by the plain language of the Durbin Amendment and deprives plaintiffs of the benefits of the statute’s anti-exclusivity provisions,” the retailers argued in their complaint.

What?  The law is not friendly enough to the banks, and so the Fed draws up regulations ignoring the law? 

I am so (not) surprised.

The NSA Spying Gets Worse

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Now we have XKeyscore, which “collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’.”

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

 The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the internet.

 The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian’s earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

 ………

 The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

 “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.

 US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”

 But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

So, either Rep. Rogers knowingly lied, or he was lied to by the state security apparatus.

Yeah, it just keeps getting worse, and there is more to come, at least that is what Senator Ron Wyden said yesterday when he said that, “U.S. intelligence agencies’ violations of court orders on surveillance of Americans is worse than the government is letting on,” which means that even with a incredibly compliant FISA Court (You need to keep them away from toilet paper, because they will sign anything), they be bothered to follow the “law”.

How Torture Comes Home, Part 55

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We now have a report that the CIA is hemorrhaging because its management sucks:

For the Central Intelligence Agency, he was a catch: an American citizen who had grown up overseas, was fluent in Mandarin and had a master’s degree in his field. He was working in Silicon Valley, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wanted to serve his country.

The analyst, who declined to be named to shield his association with the CIA, was hired in 2005 into the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, where he was assigned to dig into Chinese politics. He said he was dismayed to discover that unimpressive managers wielded incredible power and suffered no consequences for mistakes. Departments were run like fiefdoms, he said, and “very nasty internecine battles” were a fixture.

By 2009, he had left the CIA. He now does a similar job for the U.S. military.

CIA officials often assert that while the spy agency’s failures are known, its successes are hidden. But the clandestine organization celebrated for finding Osama bin Laden has been viewed by many of its own people as a place beset by bad management, where misjudgments by senior officials go unpunished, according to internal CIA documents and interviews with more than 20 former officers.

So, how does this relate to torturers?

Because the torturers are people who are not that good at their jobs. If they were good, they wouldn’t have to break the law to create the illusion of results. (A quick Google shows that torture does not work)

Of course, between the torture fetishists of Bush and His Evil Minions™, and the torture apologists of Obama and His Evil Minions™, torture has become a ticket that you need to punch to advance in “the agency”.

So, because successive White Houses have institutionalized torture, they have also institutionalized incompetent agents who become incompetent managers who are fearful that their lack of ability will be exposed.

We have incentivized torture, incompetence, and corruption for people who want to have intelligence as a career path.

This is Beyond Orwell’s Wildest Imaginings

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In his seminal work 1984, he coined the idiom, “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”

Well, Obama and His Evil Minions™ have done this one better, and they claim that the list of people that we are at war with is classified:

Back in May, we noted the oddity of the charges in Bradley Manning’s trial, in which he was accused of aiding three different “enemies,” with the last one being classified. Specifically, he was accused of aiding Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP, which is different than AQ itself) and… mystery enemy. Back at the beginning of July, the government quietly dropped the charge against the classified enemy, so that’s no longer in play in that case. That said, apparently this concept of classifying who we’re at war with wasn’t just limited to the Manning trial. ProPublica has the ridiculous and frightening tale of finding out that the answer to the simple question of who the US is at war with, is apparently classified as well.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

The Pentagon also went on to tell ProPublica that revealing who we’re actually at war with would do “serious damage to national security.” The main reason? They think those groups would use the info as good publicity and allow them to recruit more.………

If the UK were to hook up a generator to the grave of Eric Arthur Blair, they could power all of Europe, because he is surely spinning in his grave at unbelievable speed.

Linkage

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Libertarian Paradise:

Schadenfreude on 401(k) Plans

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Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale, has been reviewing 401(k) programs, and will publicize the really sucky plans that charge excessive fees:

A Yale Law School professor is causing a ruckus among U.S. corporations with plans to publicize a study of employers’ 401(k) plan costs.

 The professor, Ian Ayres, has sent about 6,000 letters to companies, saying he would disseminate the results of his study using Twitter, with separate hashtags for each company.

 Prof. Ayres has mailed out several different versions of the letter since June, and at least one said that he had identified an employer’s 401(k) specifically “as a potential high-cost plan.” He said that he and his research partner planned to publicize the results in spring 2014.

 Tri-City Electrical Contractors Inc., in Altamonte Springs, Fla., received one such letter on July 5. It said that the company’s plan ranked worse than 77% of plans of comparable size based on total plan cost.

 “As a reminder, fiduciary duties are the most stringent imposed by the law, and require administrators to act solely in the interests of plan participants,” continued the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

 The letters come as administrators of 401(k) plans have been under fire for what some workers and retirees say are excessive fees. Federal fee-disclosure rules went into effect last year requiring 401(k) administrators to better spell out the fees being charged to plan sponsors and participants.

The problem is that there are a lot of 401(k) administrators who over-promise returns to justify inflated fees.

Call me old fashioned, but I think that there should be (low) statutory limits on 401(k) and IRA because otherwise, the tax breaks are simply going straight into Wall Street’s pockets (expense ratio is largely unrelated to plan returns).

If you want to blow your money on a mutual fund manager who charges high fees, it’s your business, until Uncle Sam starts supplying tax benefits, at which point, it becomes a matter for the public to discuss.

Even in Bankruptcy, Detroit Must Pay for a Millionaire’s Toys

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Bankruptcy, Schmankruptcy, billionaire Mike Ilitch’s new stadium must get its $450 million:

When Detroit filed for what is the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history, one of the items immediately placed on the potential chopping block was pensions for current retirees who had worked for the city. A pension shortfall accounts for $3.5 billion of the city’s $18 billion in debt, and the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has called for “significant” pension cuts.

But even with pensions possibly getting the axe – along with who knows what else in terms of services for the already downtrodden city, or even masterpieces at the Detroit Institute of Art – Detroit still seems ready to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to help pay for a new arena for the National Hockey League’s Detroit Red Wings………

This is not The Onion.

Detroit is in bankruptcy (sort of, long story), but this billionaire has to get a shiny new stadium for his team.

It buggers the mind.

Just When You Thought that Obama’s Secrecy Fetish Could Not Get Any More Reprehensible………

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I present to you the case of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was imprisoned at the demand of the US government because he revealed that it was a US drone strike, and not a Yemeni army attack, that killed 41 civilians in al-Majalla in 2009.

His “trial” was condemned as a kangaroo court by numerous human rights group, and when the President of Yemen wanted to pardon him because of internal protests, Barack Obama personally called him to brow beat him into extending his detention.

Well, Shaye has now been released, but the official wheels in the Obama administration continue to try to grind him to dust:

News broke yesterday afternoon that, after a nearly three-year-long imprisonment, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye had been released by the Yemeni government. Shaye’s work drew international attention in 2009 when he reported on a U.S. airstrike in the Yemeni village of al-Majalla that killed 41 civilians. He also conducted multiple interviews with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

 U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, have told journalists that Shaye facilitated AQAP attacks, but his accounts of his arrest detail press intimidation by the Yemeni government, then still headed by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who resigned amid mass protests in November 2011. Shaye’s five-year prison sentence has drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Yemen-based Freedom Foundation.

 The U.S. government is still concerned about Shaye. Bernadette Meehan, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told FP this morning by email, “We are concerned and disappointed by the early release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who was sentenced by a Yemeni court to five years in prison for his involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Meehan did not comment on whether the United States advocated against his release.

This is so repulsive on so many levels.

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banksta

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Because as a bankster you can break into someone’s house, and take all their stuff, and not only are not arrested, you don’t have to pay them anything for this:

An Ohio bank is refusing to reimburse a Vinton County woman whose house they unjustly repossessed while she was out of town.

 Katie Barnett recently returned home after being away for two weeks to find that the lock on her door had been changed. She crawled in through the window to find all of her stuff missing.

 Barnett suspected she had been robbed — and she wasn’t too far off.

 It seems that, while Barnett was gone, the First National Bank of Wellston arrived at her place of residence, broke in, and took possession of all her belongings, including the house.

 Except, as it later turned out, they had the wrong address.

 “They told me that the GPS led them to my house,” Barnett told 10TV. “My grass hadn’t been mowed and they just assumed.”

 Phoning the local police to report the incident did Barnett little good, as the McArthur Police Chief refused to investigate and considered the case closed.

But for Barnett, the ordeal is very much ongoing.

With all of her stuff either sold off by the bank or thrashed, the homeowner presented the bank’s president with an $18,000 estimate for restitution.

He refused to pay up.

“He got very firm with me and said, ‘We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is,’” Barnett recalled. “I did not tell them to come in my house and make me an offer. They took my stuff and I want it back.”

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, will no one prosecute these rat bastards?

They break into your house, they steal and trash all of your stuff, and when caught, they refuse to make you whole.

I would suggest that Katie Barnett lawyer up, put a lien on the f%$#ing bank’s HQ, and then start foreclosure proceedings.

A Patent Troll Bites the Dust

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One of the worst of the parasite, Eolas, has had its patents invalidated:

The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, had never testified in court before last year. In February 2012, he left Cambridge to fly down to Tyler, an East Texas city of about 100,000, to testify at a patent trial. It was the culmination of a bold campaign by a man named Michael Doyle to levy a vast patent tax on the modern web.

Berners-Lee was one of several web pioneers who came through the court during the course of a four-day trial, which ultimately convinced a jury to invalidate two patents owned by Eolas, the tiny patent-holding company that Doyle and his lawyers transformed into one of the most fearsome “patent trolls” of all time.

Now Eolas appears to be gone for good. The company mounted a lengthy appeal, but it was all for naught; this morning, a three-judge appeals panel affirmed the jury’s verdict without comment.

………

Pei-Yuan Wei created the pioneering Viola browser, a key piece of prior art, while he was a student at UC-Berkeley in the early 1990s. Scott Silvey, another UC-Berkeley student at that time, testified about a program he made called VPlot, which allowed users to rotate an image of an airplane using Wei’s browser. VPlot and Viola were demonstrated to Sun Microsystems in May 1993, months before Doyle claimed to have conceived of his invention.

Eolas claimed an tremendously broad patent on all forms of interactive web products.

Why the f%$# has Eolas been able to blackmail people for so long?

Seriously.

What Stefan Svallfors Said

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He has nominated Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize as a way for the Nobel committee to atone for giving the aware do Obama:

In his letter addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Stefan Svallfors praised Snowden for his“heroic effort at great personal cost.” He stated that by revealing the existence and the scale of the US surveillance programs, Snowden showed “individuals can stand up for fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“This example is important because since the Nuremberg trials in 1945 has been clear that the slogan ‘I was just following orders’ is never claimed as an excuse for acts contrary to human rights and freedoms,” Professor Svallfors wrote.

He emphasized that the decision to award the 2013 prize to Edward Snowden would also “help to save the Nobel Peace Prize from the disrepute incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision to award US President Barack Obama 2009 award.”

Not being George W. Bush is an insufficient reason to give someone a f%$#ing Nobel f%$#ing Peace prize.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever

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So, a judge rules that guards grabbing the genitals of Guantánamo prisoners who want to talk to their lawyers is interfering with their right to counsel, so they are appealing:

A federal appeals court is allowing Guantánamo guards to resume searching detainees’ genitals on their way to and from legal meetings while the Obama administration challenges a federal judge’s ruling that the searches unfairly impede attorney-client interaction.

 The order Wednesday by a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit capped 24 hours of legal wrangling: The Justice Department asked a New York lawyer to let guards search her client’s genital area, the lawyer refused and the Southern Command’s top general joined the fray with a sworn declaration that a federal judge got it wrong.

 Groin searches aren’t intended to prevent legal meetings, said Southcom’s Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, noting that his Guantánamo soldiers similarly search captives meeting with Red Cross delegates.

 Past practice of shaking a captive’s trousers to see if “nails, shanks, ragged scraps of metal” fall out “posed an unacceptable risk to the safety and security of detainees and guards,” Kelly said.

 Last week, detainee lawyers persuaded U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth that the invasive searches, adopted amid a widespread hunger strike, were discouraging some of Guantánamo’s 166 captives from voluntarily leaving their cells for meetings with their lawyers. Lamberth ordered the guards to stop it, and resume the practice of physically shaking the waistband of the pants of a prisoner to see if any contraband comes out.

 ………

 In his ruling last week, Lamberth concluded that the motivation for the searches was not to enhance security but to deter the detainees’ access to attorneys by implementing search procedures that are “religiously and culturally abhorrent” to devout Muslims.

 Lamberth’s ruling had sought to reset the search procedures to an era before Latif’s death. The judge noted that there was no proof that Latif hid the drugs in his genital area.

………

In London, detainee attorney Crider, who works for a non-profit law firm Reprieve, called the refusal to follow Lamberth’s order “contempt of court, pure and simple. Why is it suddenly essential for the government to grope my clients in a way that been off-limits for years?”

I’m beginning to think that the Bush/Cheney regime of overt lawlessness is preferable to the protestations by Obama and His Evil Minions™ that they “respect” the rule of law and due process.

Where is the outrage?

Those Whom the Gods Destroy, They First Make Weird(er)

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So, Michelle Bachmann is under investigation for campaign finance violations, one of her staff has been charged in petty thefts in other Congressional offices, and now its been revealed that aa Conservative Christian group mailed vibrator to Michele Bachmann:

.Hundreds of pages of email and text message correspondence made public last week shed new light on the infighting and organizational disarray that have plagued America’s leading conservative Christian political consulting firm in recent months.

As BuzzFeed reported in June, the Columbus-based Strategy Group for Media — which has represented dozens of tea party and religious right Republicans, including Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich — has been mired in lawsuits and internal tumult since last spring, when seven of the firm’s managers staged a religious intervention with their CEO, Rex Elsass. After the managers made their demands in a dramatic meeting that culminated with them laying hands on their boss and praying for his soul, Elsass fired three of his top lieutenants, including his longtime protégé and Strategy Group President Nick Everhart.

The series of emails and text messages, made public on the Franklin County Court website in the ongoing lawsuit between Everhart and Strategy Group, adds further detail to that meeting, and shows the extent to which the company’s managers were worried about Elsass’ psychological and spiritual health. They also reveal potentially embarrassing anecdotes for the company, including one incident in which an executive said Elsass accidentally mailed a “female pleasure machine” to Rep. Michele Bachmann.

………

And an email thread from May 29 — after the three managers were fired — featured Strategy Group’s former voter-contact consultant P.J. Wenzel making reference to Elsass sending “female pleasure machines” to Bachmann. The emails don’t elaborate on the incident, but one person familiar with the story told BuzzFeed that Elsass had intended to give Bachmann a vibrating head massager to help alleviate her migraines, and that the employee he sent to buy the gift accidentally purchased something that more closely resembled a sex toy — and sent it to her office.

Tyler said the item in question was purchased at Brookstone and was not a sex toy, but he declined to provide further information about the product. (Brookstone announced in 2011 that it had begun selling “pleasure objects.”)

The person familiar with the story said the firm successfully retrieved the gift before Bachmann could open it.

Seriously, have you noticed that when a political figure’s career is in a death spiral, that there suddenly emerge a plethora of stories that are even weirder than before?

By this benchmark, I think that Michelle Bachmann will be sent to Gitmo.

Damn, This is Weird

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There have been rumors of a corruption investigation f Representative Michelle Bachmann for some time. Well, now a senior staffer of hers has been arrested for petty thefts from other Congressional offices.

Have you ever noticed that just before a political figure is frog marched out of the building in handcuffs, their staff starts getting busted for the weirdest crap?

Well, it looks like Bachmann is on the hit parade:

That’s Javier Sanchez back in June of this year with his then-boss, Michele Bachmann. [Not bothering with the picture here] They’re headed for a closed briefing on the NSA disclosures. Javier Sanchez was a high-level legislative director for Michele Bachmann, assisting her with issues such as immigration reform, the farm bill, and her oxymoronic assignment to the House Intelligence Committee.

On July 11, Mr. Sanchez was arrested on charges that he burglarized several offices belonging to other House members. From news reports, it appears that some thefts took place back in 2012 and others in 2013.

It has been noted that, “Sanchez has been charged with Theft II,” which is for amounts less than $1000.00.

If this is the indicator that I think that it is, then Michelle Bachmann is toast.

Crap

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The Commodities Futures Trading Commission could have instituted real and effective rules on swaps trades by doing nothing, but they caved to the banks, because the banks refused to prepare for the deadline:

I’m going to be brief, in part because the CFTC’s probable demonstration of lack of gumption is still in play, while the SEC’s was expected but nevertheless appalling. But the bottom line is that even though we seem some intermittent signs of the officialdom recognizing that big banks remain a menace to the health and well-being to the general public*, the measures to constrain them continue to be inadequate.

As readers may recall, CFTC chairman Gary Gensler was in a position to stare down bank efforts to water down critical provisions of Dodd Frank on derivatives (see here for details of the issues at stake). The short version is that Gensler did not have the votes among his commissioners to support his position since the Administration had managed to appoint a bank stooge as one of the Democrats. However, Gensler controlled the agenda. That meant he had the option of not putting the matter to a vote of his fellow commissioners at all, which meant Dodd Frank would become effective as written (mind you, normally legislation does legitimately require some tweaking since the legislative language may be imprecise or not mesh well with existing rules).

What appears to have forced Gensler to relent was not the CFTC politics, but bank refusal to prepare, which meant they could stamp their feet and say if Gensler did not back down, the markets would blow up and it would all be his fault.

Read the rest, and you will not just be disgusted by the CFTC, you will want to replace the SEC with a trained monkey as well.

Back Loaded Bribery

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If you play ball with the monied people who want law and regulation structured to ensure that their wealth increases even more, then they reward you with lucrative jobs, like a high paid lobbyist, or, as in the case of Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, an absurdly lucrative speaking gig:

During his tenure as Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner was constantly dogged by the belief that he was spawned from Wall Street. This thinking was false: If you need a refresher, Geithner had actually spent most of his career in government, and none of it at a bank. When he left office this year, Geithner said that it would be “extremely unlikely” for that to change.

But as it turns out, Geithner is now being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by massive financial organizations. It’s just that he isn’t being paid to work on Wall Street; he’s just being paid to talk every now and then.

The Financial Times reports that Geithner, like countless former public servants before him, has hit the highly lucrative speaking circuit. He’s already made about $400,000 in just three engagements. And that tab is being footed by financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank and Blackstone, which paid him about $200,000 and up to $100,000, respectively.

No one ever explicitly told Geithner that if he protected the banksters, he woud get a payoff, but this is explicit in Washington, DC’s revolving door.

He knew that he would get rewarded, and he has not been disabused of this belief.

H/t Gaius Publius.

Former FISA Judge Criticizes the Court

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Well, now we have a retired FISA Court Judge saying this court has been reduced to a joke and a fraud:

A retired judge who once served on a secretive U.S. intelligence court said on Tuesday it should not be able to approve broad government data-gathering requests without hearing from outside parties who could warn of potential civil liberties concerns.

 Currently, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court makes its decisions on government surveillance requests without hearing from anyone but U.S. Justice Department lawyers in its behind-closed-doors proceedings.

 James Robertson, a retired federal judge in Washington who served on the court for three years ending in 2005, said that if the court is required to approve broad data-collection programs, the judges should be able to hear from other parties.

 Speaking at a public meeting in Washington on privacy and civil liberties, he said the process would work better if some approximation of an adversarial system existed.

 “I submit this process needs an adversary,” he said.

 Robertson suggested the possible reforms during the public meeting held by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a bipartisan government entity set up in 2004 to advise the White House on civil liberties concerns raised by intelligence gathering. He said the privacy board itself could possibly be a party in the intelligence court’s proceedings.

 The actions of the court have come under new scrutiny following the disclosure of previously secret telephone and internet surveillance programs conducted by the U.S. government.

 The British Guardian and the Washington Post newspapers disclosed the details of the data collection in June based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, the fugitive U.S. National Security Agency contractor believed to be holed up in Russia.

 Since the U.S. Congress amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 2008, the court “now approves programmatic surveillance,” Robertson said, meaning it was acting more like a government agency than a court.

 “That’s not the bailiwick of judges,” he said. “Judges don’t make policy.”

 Robertson said that when he served on the court, the judges’ role was to decide whether to grant government requests for individual warrants, he said. Granting approval to entire programs is not a “judicial function,” he said.

(emphasis mine)

While he does say that he is not suggesting the law is being broken, this sort of talk from a judge about his court (with the possible exception of Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia) is very rare.

Note also that he is not criticizing the judges, he is criticizing the role of the court under new laws.

Understanding just how vehement this seemingly mild speech is a bit like reading Nathanial Hawthorne,* he cannot express his outrage explicitly.  It is a circuitously oblique way to to express his views, but this is as befits a judge.

*The phrase, “Then, all was spoken!” refers to physical passion (probably sex) in The Scarlet Letter.