Category: Justice

Obama agrees to release legal memos on Awlaki drone strike – latimes.com

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So, now that Michale Isikoff has released a leaked Department of Justice memo which summarized their legal opinion on drone strikes, it basically said that Obama can kill anyone he wants at any time, the White House has agreed top release the actual legal opinion to Congress:

President Obama, who has championed lethal drone strikes as a major part of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts, bowed to pressure Wednesday and agreed to allow the Senate and House intelligence committees to review classified legal memos used to justify a drone strike against a U.S. citizen in Yemen in 2011.

Senators had demanded for months to see the Justice Department opinions that provided the White House legal authority to order the targeted killing of Anwar Awlaki, a New Mexico native who became an Al Qaeda leader.

Complaints by several Democrats over not receiving the documents had cast a shadow on the Senate confirmation hearing Thursday of John Brennan, the White House counter-terrorism advisor tapped to be CIA director.

An administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified material, described the decision to release the classified Office of Legal Counsel material as “part of the president’s ongoing commitment to consult with Congress on national security matters.”

“I think this is an encouraging first step,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Intelligence Committee and was among those who had publicly complained about being denied access to the material. He said Americans must “understand the rules under which a president may make these consequential decisions.”

Wyden said Obama had “assured me that all of the documents concerning the legal opinions on the targeted killing of Americans will immediately be made available” to the intelligence committees.

By “made available” I’m sure that they mean that the Congressmen can look at it in a locked room, take no notes, and not discuss it with their staff.

That’s how they roll.

Patent Troll Loses Big

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Newegg has prevailed against a patent troll claiming patents on an online shopping court:

Anyone who visited Soverain Software’s website could be forgiven for believing it’s a real company. There are separate pages for “products,” “services,” and “solutions.” There’s the “About Us” page. There are phone numbers and e-mail addresses for sales and tech support. There’s even a login page for customers.

It’s all a sham. Court records show Soverain hasn’t made a sale—ever. The various voice mailboxes were all set up by Katherine Wolanyk, the former Latham & Watkins attorney who is a co-founder and partial owner of Soverain. And the impressive list of big corporate customers on its webpage? Those are deals struck with another company, more than a decade ago. That was OpenMarket, a software company that created these patents before going out of business in 2001. It sold its assets to a venture capital fund called divine interVentures, which in turn sold the OpenMarket patents to Soverain Software in 2003.

………

Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it has been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling [PDF] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.

………

For Newegg’s Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng, it’s a huge validation of the strategy the company decided to pursue back in 2007: not to settle with patent trolls. Ever.

“We basically took a look at this situation and said, ‘This is bullsh%$,'” (%$ mine) said Cheng in an interview with Ars. “We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we’d have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents.”

………

Soverain’s plans were always bigger than Amazon and Newegg. It wanted nothing less than to extract a patent tax from the entire retail sector, using three patents it claimed covered pretty much any use of “shopping cart” technology.

Just saying “do it on the Internet” isn’t a novel invention, the appeals court ruled [PDF]. The three-judge panel found that all of the “shopping cart” patent claims were rendered obvious in light of the CompuServe Mall.

I think that in the future, I’ll Newegg will be at the top of my list for shopping.

Iceland Wins in Court Over Icesave Deposite Guarantees

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I’m not particularly surprised:

A European court has cleared the Icelandic government of failing to guarantee minimum levels of compensation for UK and Dutch savers in the collapsed Icesave bank.

Icesave, run by the Icelandic Landsbanki, collapsed in 2008 along with all of Iceland’s banking system.

The UK and Dutch savers were bailed out completely by their governments.

The ruling may halt the UK’s attempt to get all of its money back from the Icelandic government.

………

The Icelandic government said it took “considerable satisfaction” from the ruling from the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA) Court.

“Iceland has from the start maintained that there is legal uncertainty as to whether a state is responsible for ensuring payments of minimum guarantees to depositors using its own funds and has stressed the importance of having this issue clarified in court,” it said.

………

The EFTA judgement stated: “The Court holds that the Directive does not envisage that the defendant itself must ensure payments to depositors in the Icesave branches in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, in accordance with Articles 7 and 10 of the Directive, in a systemic crisis of the magnitude experienced in Iceland.”

What’s the core issue here is that Iceland guaranteed these accounts up to £16,300, but the British and Dutch cover the whole account, and demanded that Iceland pay the whole amount.

This is separate from the attempts to make the bondholders whole, for which there is no legal obligation whatsoever.

Read Charlie Pierce

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He says it all on the recent DC Court of Appeals ruling:

David Sentelle Is A Hack

By Charles P. Pierce

The next time I hear some lefty mooing about the president’s having let down the side on something or another, it better be about something of substance, like the Keystone XL pipeline, or I’m going to boot said lefty’s hindquarters in the general direction of the federal appeals court of the District Of Columbia, which today laid down the most singular piece of partisan hackery to come out of a court since Antonin Scalia picked the previous president. For precise legal analysis, I’ll leave it to Scott at LG&M to explain. This, children, is what you get when you operate politically under the theory that They’re All The Same. You get 20 or 30 years of primarily Republican judges acting primarily as Republicans, drawn from the legal chop-shops in the conservative movement bubble, and doing their partisan duty like performing seals.

………

Read the rest.

Good Riddance

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Lanny Breuer, head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice and pimp for the banksters, has resigned:

Lanny Breuer is out as head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, according to the Washington Post. After his ratlike performance on Frontline (transcript here) it won’t be long before we find him at some creepy New York or DC law firm defending his best friends, the banks and their sleazy employees. His legacy is simple: too big to fail banks can’t possibly commit crimes, so minor civil fines and false promises of reform are punishment enough. Jamie Dimon couldn’t have put it better.

BTW, the Department of Justice has said that they would never work with the producer of the segment ever again:

He’s gone, but I’m certain that he’s going to a cushy Wall Street gig where he will make millions of dollars.

It’s how back loaded bribery works.

More on the 2nd Amendment and Its Relationship to Slavery

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I will direct you to The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, a 102 page article published in the U.C. Davis Law Review in 1998.  (Link is to the abstract, you can download the PDF from there)

This is a (obviously) a much longer, and much more extensively annotated, piece than either Thom Hartmann’s pro 2nd amendment/slavery patrol link article or Paul Finkleman’s argument against this.

I’ve read the full article, though it was a quick read, and while it clearly does not go as far as Hartmann, author Carl T. Bogus merely addresses the adoption of the 2nd amendment, rather than the whole Constitution as Hartmann does, but he does make a compelling case that the 2nd amendment was specifically a collective right granted to the states, and that the support for this amendment was driven by the fears of slave owners about an uprising, particularly in Virginia.

Bogus (I love that name) does admit that he no evidence that Madison, who wrote the Bill of Rights to preserve slavery, he does show that Madison’s compatriots and constituents in Virginia found the possibility that Congress would disarm the state slave patrols to be a concern of paramount importance.

In either case, it does make a slam dunk case for the 2nd amendment as a collective right assigned to the states, and not a personal right, which makes the so-called “strict constructionists” who voted for a personal right to firearms in District of Columbia v. Heller to be hypocrites and hacks.

Now Roll Up the Co-Conspirators

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Nechemya Weberman has been convicted of child sexual abuse and sentenced to 103 years:

An unlicensed therapist and respected member of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn was sentenced on Tuesday to 103 years in prison for repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman, beginning the attacks when she was 12.

The therapist, Nechemya Weberman, 54, a member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, did not react as the judge sentenced him. The victim, now 18, who delivered an impassioned statement asking for the maximum sentence to be imposed, dabbed away tears.

“The message should go out to all victims of sexual abuse that your cries will be heard and justice will be done,” Justice John G. Ingram of State Supreme Court said before imposing the sentence, which was close to the longest the law allows. Justice Ingram praised the young victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.”

The proceedings were closely watched, as this was the first high-profile case against child sexual abuse that the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, had brought against a member of the politically powerful Satmar ultra-Orthodox community during his more than two decades in office. This sentence is the longest a Brooklyn court has imposed on a member of the ultra-Orthodox community for sexual abuse of a child.

More significant, they managed to get some of the Satmar Jewish community who attempted to intimidate witnesses:

Critics have charged Mr. Hynes with not being aggressive enough in going after molesters in the politically well-connected community. But Mr. Hynes has attributed the lack of prosecutions on the intimidation to stay silent that ultra-Orthodox sexual-abuse victims and their families often face from their own community leaders.

Support for Mr. Weberman was strong in powerful circles of the Satmar community after his arrest in 2011, with hundreds turning out for a fund-raiser for his defense. But the courtroom on Tuesday was about equally divided between supporters for him and for his victim.

Mr. Hynes has said he believes the case may be a turning point for ultra-Orthodox victims of sexual abuse. In addition to convicting Mr. Weberman, his office also charged seven Hasidic men with bribery and intimidation of Mr. Weberman’s victim, who testified over four days. Prosecutors say they know of more victims who were too afraid to testify.

Hopefully, this won’t stop here.

The harassment and coverups within the ultra-Orthodox community on this matter is endemic, and it will not stop until prosecutors go after people who do this.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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The DC Court of Appeals has just ruled that almost all recess appointments are unconstitutional:

Strictly curbing the President’s power to temporarily fill government posts to keep an agency in operation, the D.C. Circuit Court ruled Friday that the constitutional authority to fill a vacancy can only be used when one Congress has ended and before a new Congress comes to town, or when there is a formal break at the end of one session, but not during any other mid-session break. That part of the ruling by the three-judge panel was unanimous. On a second part, a two-judge majority ruled that the vacancy-filling power only applies to vacancies that actually open up during a formal recess, between sessions or between Congresses. Because lower courts are split on both issues, this historic controversy over the constitutional separation of powers is likely to go on to the Supreme Court.

 In the current atmosphere of partisan gridlock, which often involves thwarting of presidential nominations, the ruling provides a major new opportunity for a minority in the Senate to deny the President the authority even temporarily to put a new government officer to work in a vacant spot. When a vacancy arises while Congress is in session, and the Senate does not act on it, the President will not be able to fill it during the next time the Senate takes a break. The ruling came one day after the Senate chose not to make a major change in its filibuster rule, which is the main weapon of a Senate minority seeking to challenge presidential action.

I expect an appeal to the Supreme Court, though they may ask for an en banc hearing by the whole court of appeals first.

Unsurprisingly, David Sentelle, the right winger who gave us Ken Starr, is a part of this.

The 2nd part of the ruling ruling, where they say that the only recess that counts is the few days every two years when the old Congress has ended, and the new Congress is sworn in, flies in the face of over 150 years of precedent.

As to the pro-forma sessions, Obama needs to go Article 2 Section 3 of the Constitution on Congress:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of
Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

(emphasis mine)

So, with the House refuses to adjourn, which is what led to the pro-forma sessions, Obama can adjourn them.

As to the claim that recess appointments can only be made during intercongress recesses, and not intracongress recesses, I cannot believe that the Supreme Court could support that, but since Bush v. Gore, I’ve made it a point of never underestimating the politicization of the right wing of that body.

This is One Way to Deal with Proprietorial Overreach

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A petition at the White House has Called for the firing of United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz for her wildly disproportionate prosecution of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while facing decades in prison for downloading public documents.

It is now about 80% of the way to reaching the 25,000 signatures to require a response from the Obama administration.

Needless to say, the administration response will be either to do nothing, or to promote her, because they see “tough on crime” as a political winner.

I called it “Murder by Prosecutor” last night, which is (of course) rhetorical excess, but this was proprietorial excess.

Of course, we don’t know why he committed suicide, he did have a history of depression, but it’s fairly certain that this did not help.

On the bright side, I think that this is driving a discussion of overzealous prosecutors, and even if Ms. Ortiz keeps her job, her political career beyond this, she is/was seen as a rising star in the Massachusetts Democratic Party Establishment, has been detoured if not ended, which should hopefully make prosecutors think twice when they decide to destroy someone just to make an example.

Over the past 30 years, US laws have been changed to grant enormous power to prosecutors.

Based on how they file, and what they choose to present at sentencing, they now have the ability to dictate sentences to an unprecedented degree.

This has been corrupting the operation of the federal justice system for decades.

Murder by Prosecutor

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Aaron Swartz, age 26, suicide.

We cannot know all the reasons behind this, but his harassment by prosecutors was likely a contributing factor.

He was probably targeted because of his high profile opposition to SOPA (see vid). (To its shame, the New York Times does not mention this in the obit)

We have developed a regime where anyone can be harassed, and likely convicted, basically for being “troublesome.”

The term I used a while back, “Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen,” describes this phenomenon.

Self Entitled, Self Deluded Assholes

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Robert Bork, at least later in his life, was a classic example of how the modern Republican Party has deliberately become a manufacturer of narcissistic fantasists:

Even before Robert Bork died last month, he had achieved something close to martyrdom. In the quarter-century since the Senate rejected his Supreme Court nomination, successive generations of conservative lawyers and activists have carried the torch, depicting his defeat as an injustice of historic proportion. Following his death at the age of 85, liberals mostly maintained a respectful silence while conservatives dusted off old complaints about the conduct of the confirmation hearing and the unfairness, in their view, of the “borking” the nominee received. Clearly, the Bork Battle survives Bork.

………

Some time after the Senate vote, I was invited to a conversation with Judge Bork at the offices of The New Republic magazine. He was hurting and angry. When my turn came to ask a question, I asked him whether, at any time during the hearing, he had felt that a member of the Judiciary Committee had met him on his own level in serious constitutional conversation.

“No,” he answered.

“Not even Arlen Specter?” I asked.

“Specter had his mind made up from the beginning,” he snapped.

I knew that wasn’t true, although Judge Bork clearly believed it. Senator Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, had in fact agonized over his vote, as I knew from having talked with him almost daily. A Yale Law School graduate and former prosecutor, the senator went head to head with the nominee through several rounds of questioning, hours of mesmerizing constitutional debate in which he probed for any sign of flexibility in Judge Bork’s view that the entire course of modern constitutional law was profoundly mistaken. Finding none, Senator Specter, who had assumed at the start of the hearing that he would vote for confirmation, decided to vote No, fully recognizing the price he would pay within his own party. Five other Republicans followed. (Judge Bork and Senator Specter, whose paths crossed at such a significant moment in their lives, died within months of each other; Arlen Specter, who eventually became a Democrat, died in October at 82.)

………

I should explain this column’s title, “Robert Bork’s Tragedy.” I see him as a tragic figure: not because he was dealt an unjust hand – he wasn’t – but because of his inability to understand what happened. He spent his final decades surrounded by acolytes who stoked his sense of victimhood, and there seemed to be no one around him to provide a reality check as his rants about the Supreme Court’s depredations and the collapse of Western civilization (he portrayed the two as inextricably linked) became ever more extravagant. (In a symbolic gesture aimed at the Republican base, Mitt Romney named him co-chair of his campaign advisory committee on law.)

What is interesting here is not Robert Bork, but rather how the production and support of this sort of (for lack of a better term) insanity has increasingly become the primary product of the right wing noise machine.

I’m not entirely sure how to fix this rather poisonous and self-reinforcing dynamic.

Truth be told, I’m not sure that would I want to fix this dynamic. 

Maybe I’m an optimist, but seems to me that this dynamic has gotten to the point they are choking on their own bile, and I see that as a good thing.

H/t Brad Delong.

Quote of the Day

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The only problem is, the suit is being filed by maybe the biggest douchebag of all time, Hank Greenberg (and his company, Starr International), a man who has not only been proven to be corrupt and a fraud, but who perhaps more than anyone else was responsible for the galactic balance-sheet goat-f%$# that caused AIG’s implosion in the first place. If there is such a person as an innocent AIG shareholder who was harmed by the government’s conduct, it sure as hell isn’t Hank Greenberg.

—Matt Taibbi, on Greenberg’s suit against the US because he did not get well paid enough for running AIG into the ground.

(%$# mine)

FWIW, In an unexpected outbreak of sanity AIG has decided not to join Greenberg’s lawauit.

Still, “Galactic Balance Sheet goat f%$#,”  that is good, even by Matt’s high standards.

Go read.

But of Course

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The very first person goes to jail over CIA torture, and it’s the whistle-blower:

Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.

In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.

“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.

Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.

Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”

On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.

In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.

This is about scaring people out of being whistle-blowers.

This is about the “most open administration in history” doing its level best to create a completely secret and unaccountable executive.

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Richard Nixon was the worst president the US had from 1933 to 1973 1974, and the best president the US had from 1969 through 2013.

If that does not make you depressed, then I want whatever it is that you are smoking.

More Financial Fraud Enforcement Theater from the Obama Administration

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Yesterday, I heard the news that the 271 year old Swiss bank, Weglin, was shut down following a US Department of Justice investigation into their actions supporting tax evasion and money laundering.

It sounded too good to be true, and , as Yves Smith so eloquently points out, it was too good to be true.

The Nickel version is that the bank’s asserts were transferred to another entity, Raiffeisen, and the proceeds likely given to the owners in the weeks power to its being shut down.

Finally, the DoJ is saying NOTHING about whether the got information about the accounts, and the people who used them too avoid taxes.

This its a pretty good tell that they hour no data:  If they had, they would be trumpeting it to the heavens, because they would thereby induce people to turn themselves in.

Go read the while thing, including the reader comments.

Posted via mobile.

Let Us Start the Year the Way that Iceland Ended Theirs

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And by that, I mean throwing our f%$#ing bankers into f%$#ing jail:

Two former executives at an Icelandic bank which collapsed in the 2008 financial meltdown were sentenced to jail on Friday for fraud which led to a 53 million euro loss, in the first major trial of Icelandic bankers linked to the crisis.

All three of the small North Atlantic island’s top banks collapsed in quick succession in October 2008 due to big debts incurred during a rapid overseas expansion.

Glitnir was the first to fall after the collapse of Lehman Brothers caused international credit markets to freeze up.

A Reykjavik court sentenced Glitnir’s former chief executive, Larus Welding, and former head of corporate finance, Gudmundur Hjaltason, each to nine months in jail, of which six months were suspended for two years. They had denied the charges.

Prosecutors said the two approved a loan to a company which owned shares in Glitnir so that the company could in turn repay a debt to Morgan Stanley.

The decision, taken outside the regular decision-making process, meant Glitnir was too exposed to the company and cost the bank at least 53.7 million euros (43 million pounds), the prosecution said.

It’s a good idea, even if it force me to spell Reykjavik properly.

H/t Americablog.

It;s the Hypocrisy, Stupid

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Me Like Republican Mug Shots

Senator Mike Crapo was just busted for drunk driving:

Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho was arrested early Sunday and charged with driving under the influence in a suburb of Washington, D.C., the authorities said.

Mr. Crapo, a Republican, was pulled over after his vehicle ran a red light, the police in Alexandria said. He failed field sobriety tests and was arrested about 12:45 a.m., said a police spokesman, Jody Donaldson, and then was taken to the Alexandria jail and released on an unsecured $1,000 bond about 5 a.m.

“There was no refusal” to take sobriety tests, Mr. Donaldson said, and “no accident, no injuries.”

“Just a traffic stop that resulted in a D.U.I.,” he said.

The police said Mr. Crapo, who was alone in his vehicle, had registered a blood alcohol content of 0.11 percent. The legal limit in Virginia is 0.08 percent.

Mr. Crapo, 61, has a Jan. 4 court date.

“I am deeply sorry for the actions that resulted in this circumstance,” he said in a statement on Sunday night. “I made a mistake for which I apologize to my family, my Idaho constituents and any others who have put their trust in me. I accept total responsibility and will deal with whatever penalty comes my way in this matter. I will also undertake measures to ensure that this circumstance is never repeated.”

So, why is hypocrisy an issue?

It’s not because he’s a Mormon. There is no reason to expect anyone to observe all the manners of observance of their religions, bur rather it is because he describes described himself as a Mormon who abstains from drinking alcohol.

It was a politically expedient lie about a moral position, and as such it is appropriate to invoke the “H-word”.

The DoJ Admits that the Banksters are too Big to Prosecute

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We don’t need no water let the Motherf#$%er Burn Burn Motherf#$%er Burn

Case in point, HSBC, which was literally laundering drug cartel money.

It will not be criminally prosecuted because it is too big to fail:

State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system.

Instead, HSBC announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to a record $1.92 billion settlement with authorities. The bank, which is based in Britain, faces accusations that it transferred billions of dollars for nations like Iran and enabled Mexican drug cartels to move money illegally through its American subsidiaries.

While the settlement with HSBC is a major victory for the government, the case raises questions about whether certain financial institutions, having grown so large and interconnected, are too big to indict. Four years after the failure of Lehman Brothers nearly toppled the financial system, regulators are still wary that a single institution could undermine the recovery of the industry and the economy.

But the threat of criminal prosecution acts as a powerful deterrent. If authorities signal such actions are remote for big banks, the threat could lose its sting.

Behind the scenes, authorities debated for months the advantages and perils of a criminal indictment against HSBC.

Some prosecutors at the Justice Department’s criminal division and the Manhattan district attorney’s office wanted the bank to plead guilty to violations of the federal Bank Secrecy Act, according to the officials with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The law requires financial institutions to report any cash transaction of $10,000 or more and to bring any dubious activity to the attention of regulators.

Given the extent of the evidence against HSBC, some prosecutors saw the charge as a healthy compromise between a settlement and a harsher money-laundering indictment. While the charge would most likely tarnish the bank’s reputation, some officials argued that it would not set off a series of devastating consequences.

A money-laundering indictment, or a guilty plea over such charges, would essentially be a death sentence for the bank. Such actions could cut off the bank from certain investors like pension funds and ultimately cost it its charter to operate in the United States, officials said.

Seriously. Burn, motherf%$#er burn.

If there is no rule of law, the banks don’t matter.

H/t Matt Stoller.