A "smoking gun"

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said revelations that former President Trump told the Department of Justice (DOJ) to declare the election “corrupt” amounts to a “smoking gun.”

Former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection at its hearing on Thursday that Trump spoke to him by phone in late December 2020 to complain about the DOJ not acting on his claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Donoghue took detailed notes of the conversation.

“ ‘Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and Republican congressmen,’ ” Trump said on the call, according to Donoghue’s notes.

Holder, who led the DOJ during the Obama administration, posted on Twitter on Thursday that statement could be considered evidence of a crime.

“This is the smoking gun,” Holder wrote. “Coupled with other testimony demonstrates Trump’s substantive involvement and corrupt intent, requisite state of mind.”

  The Hill

UPDATE: New "smoking gun"

Start here for this thread:

Twitter war declared over McCabe firing

Attorney General Jeff Sessions's firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Friday night was reminiscent of the "Saturday Night Massacre" during the waning days of the Nixon administration, presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.

"This'll be known as the 'Friday Night Slaughter,' " Brinkley told CNN. "The very idea that Jeff Sessions hasn't released something to inform the public of what this is, it was done in sort of a cloak of secrecy late at night, bizarre fashion. The fact that he was about to have his pension and they couldn't let it go."

"It's something very cruel and sad that's occurred tonight," he continued. "And I hope our country is going to wake up, I mean, Donald Trump is struggling for his life. He's paranoid, he decided McCabe was too close to Comey, and he decided to get rid of anybody and anything that's standing in his way of kind of survival mode right now."

  The Hill

The timing is definitely nasty. McCabe had stepped down back in January. They had all this time to fire him, and decided to do it at the last possible moment to not only prevent him from getting his pension, but to make that as obvious as possible. Not only is it nasty, it's very childish. But, that's our president. And Sessions, who did the actual dirty work, is no better. Too cowardly and too lacking in morals to refuse.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Open Tweet from Eric Holder to DOJ/FBI

I wonder why he felt the need to say that now.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is raising questions about possible conflicts of interest with acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and the FBI’s investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Grassley released a letter Thursday to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in which he raised concerns about McCabe’s independence.

[...]

Grassley noted that the Justice Department inspector general is investigating whether McCabe should have recused himself from the Hillary Clinton email probe, since McCabe’s wife got donations from Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton ally, when she ran for a Virginia state Senate seat.

[...]

President Donald Trump's personal attorney Jay Sekulow also addressed the issue in a series of Tweets on Thursday, concluding: “The conflicts of interest are clear and the American people should not tolerate this.”

  Politico

Not clear to me what's going on here, but if Sleazy Trump's sleazy lawyer is complaining about somebody else's conflicts of interest, I'd be prone to take a very skeptical stance on the subject.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Uh-Oh, Eric

Just the admission has the likes of Mitch McConnell in apoplexy.   (Not to mention pretty much all reports leading with that admission as if it's something new and shocking.)

To be sure, Holder did not say Snowden shouldn't be tried. He pretty much said Snowden harmed our country and should face legal consequences, indicating the assumption of a guilty verdict that would lead to sentencing.

"I know there are ways in which certain of our agents were put at risk, relationships with other countries were harmed, our ability to keep the American people safe was compromised.”

[...]

“He's broken the law in my view. He needs to get lawyers, come on back, and decide, see what he wants to do: Go to trial, try to cut a deal. I think there has to be a consequence for what he has done,” Holder continued. "I think in deciding what an appropriate sentence should be, I think a judge could take into account the usefulness of having had that national debate."

  Politico

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Eric Holder's Best Tricks

Eric Holder has gone back to work for his old firm, the white-collar defense heavyweight Covington & Burling.

[...]

Holder will reassume his lucrative partnership (he made $2.5 million the last year he worked there) and take his seat in an office that reportedly – this is no joke – was kept empty for him in his absence.

[...]

Holder denied there was anything weird about returning to one of Wall Street's favorite defense firms after six years of letting one banker after another skate on monstrous cases of fraud, tax evasion, market manipulation, money laundering, bribery and other offenses.

[...]

Here's a man who just spent six years handing out soft-touch settlements to practically every Too Big to Fail bank in the world. Now he returns to a firm that represents many of those same companies: Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name a few.

Collectively, the decisions he made while in office saved those firms a sum that is impossible to calculate with exactitude. But even going by the massive rises in share price observed after he handed out these deals, his service was certainly worth many billions of dollars to Wall Street.

[...]

Britain's HSBC bank, which admitted to massive money laundering violations, and the Swiss bank UBS, which was caught manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark, were examples of firms that escaped vigorous prosecution because Holder and his lackeys were, ostensibly anyway, concerned about market-altering consequences.

Significantly, both banks were later caught up in even more serious scandals, leading to criticism that stiffer punishments the first time around might have prevented future damage. Holder's successor Loretta Lynch was even forced to rip up Holder's UBS deal for being insufficiently punitive. It's worth noting that Holder, before he became attorney general, represented UBS at Covington & Burling.

[...]

Britain's HSBC bank, which admitted to massive money laundering violations, and the Swiss bank UBS, which was caught manipulating the Libor interest rate benchmark, were examples of firms that escaped vigorous prosecution because Holder and his lackeys were, ostensibly anyway, concerned about market-altering consequences. Significantly, both banks were later caught up in even more serious scandals, leading to criticism that stiffer punishments the first time around might have prevented future damage. Holder's successor Loretta Lynch was even forced to rip up Holder's UBS deal for being insufficiently punitive. It's worth noting that Holder, before he became attorney general, represented UBS at Covington & Burling.

[...]

Holder also pioneered the extrajudicial settlement, striking huge deals with companies in which judges did not sign off on the agreements. [...] This essentially institutionalized the backroom deal. Everything was done in secret, and there was no longer any opportunity for judges or anyone else to check the power of the executive branch to hand out financial indulgences.

[...]

You might remember the Sinaloa cartel for their ISIS-style, unforgettably upsetting torture videos. HSBC washed their cash. They even created special teller windows to make their deposits easier. This is admitted, not alleged.

But Holder went out of his way to let them keep their U.S. charter. He gave their executives a grand total of zero days in jail, zero dollars in individual fines.

[...]

To reiterate: HSBC laundered money for guys who chop peoples' heads off with chainsaws.

[...]

When asked about this in testimony before the Senate, Holder told elected officials he was concerned harsher penalties against firms like HSBC would "have a negative impact on the national economy."

   Matt Taibbi @ Rolling Stone

Especially the CIA black ops part of it.

The most revolting [Holder invention] in my view was allowing banks like Chase the courtesy of calling their settlements "remedial payments" instead of fines for wrongdoing.

This seemingly insignificant semantic tweak allowed the bank to call $7 billion of their settlement a business expense, which meant they could claim it as a tax deduction, which in turn meant that taxpayers like you and me paid a whopping $2.45 billion of Chase's penalty.

[...]

Holder is a cynic of a type that's increasingly common in Washington.

[...]

In any civilized country, it'd be a scandal. In America, though, he's just another guy selling whatever he can to get by. It was just too bad that what Holder had to sell was the criminal justice system.

[...]

[Holder told] the National Law Journal that a big part of the reason he was going back to private practice was because he wanted to give back to the community.

Ha! What community? The community of banksters?  Hasn't he already given them enough?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Eric Holder Speaks to the National Press Club

Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday defended his agency’s record on unauthorized disclosures, saying that it could have pursued more whistleblowers than it has.

  District Sentinel

Just, WOW.  Now that's something to brag about, being the administration that has pressed more whistleblower charges than all other administrations put together. Apparently, they're proud of that distinction.

“We have turned away, I mean, turned away substantially greater number of cases that were presented to us where prosecution was sought.”

Excuse me? Who “sought” prosecution? Isn’t that your function?

In a related matter, the outgoing Attorney General declined to answer a query about a possible plea deal involving former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“I’ll simply say no comment,” he remarked, to laughter from the audience.

Yeah, hilarious, press agents (I’m loathe to call them journalists or reporters).

Speaking more broadly on the issue of Espionage Act prosecutions and leaks, Holder said that policies formulated last summer and implemented during the case involving New York Times reporter James Risen and the now-imprisoned former CIA employee Jeffrey Sterling exemplified “how the Justice Department can proceed.”

[...]

[Freedom of the Press Executive Director Trevor Timm:] “New DOJ model: Harass and spy on journalist for years, make him spend a fortune in legal fees, drop case last second.”

[...]

“We are not in a time of war,” Holder added.

Because the War on Terror only exists when you’re justifying killing innocent people in the Middle East.

Good riddance, Eric. (Although I have no doubt your replacement will carry on where you’re leaving off.)  And thanks for the bank bailout settlements.

Par for the Course

Obama's choice for Attorney General to replace Eric Holder is reportedly on a fast track to be approved.

That will be no surprise once you get her drift.

 I think her name is probably quite apt for her new position. Loretta Lynch.

Good thing Holder dropped the charges against Jim Risen before leaving.

Shades of the Taking of Baghdad

We should have guessed.  We did see the real reason they were there (previous post), and we should have known security for such a march would have been a nightmare.  And, at the very least, we should have figured this bunch wouldn't be up for walking anywhere.

Maybe you did guess it.  Actually, I read an article that said the families of the slain led the march, and I wondered about that for a second, but figured it meant the families were at the forefront of the march.  I guess it meant exactly what it said.

Related:

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, is to travel to Paris this week following sharp criticism of the Obama administration for not sending a senior official to Sunday’s rally in the French capital that was attended by about 40 world leaders.

Kerry, who will be in France on Thursday and Friday, dismissed the criticism as “quibbling”, and noted that the assistant secretary of state for Europe, Victoria Nuland, was in Paris at the march, as was the US ambassador to France and many embassy staffers. The US attorney general, Eric Holder, was also in Paris, but did not march.

  The Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Loretta

President Barack Obama will announce on Saturday his nomination of Loretta Lynch to be the next Attorney General of the United States, succeeding Eric Holder. If confirmed by the Senate, Lynch would be the first black woman to hold the position.

In nominating Lynch, a 55-year-old US attorney, to be the nation’s top prosecutor, Obama is selecting an attorney experienced in cases involving police brutality, terrorism plots, mortgage securities fraud, and money laundering.

  RT

And she’s going to need every bit of that experience in this administration.

But that would be parting with the usual pattern of appointing people to positions who either have no experience or can be counted on to destroy everything the agency was intended for.

Maybe he likes her ears.

I wonder if she’s agreed to prosecute reporters.

The Second Leaker

The FBI has identified an employee of a federal contracting firm suspected of being the so-called "second leaker" who turned over sensitive documents about the U.S. government's terrorist watch list to a journalist closely associated with ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

[...]

The FBI recently executed a search of the suspect's home, and federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia have opened up a criminal investigation into the matter, the sources said.

[...]

Contacted Monday, [the Intercept reporter who broke the watch list story, [Jeremy] Scahill declined any comment about his source, but said neither he nor The Intercept had been notified by federal officials about the investigation. He added, however, that he is not surprised to learn of the probe: "The Obama administration in my view is conducting a war against whistleblowers and ultimately against independent journalism."

  Yahoo

This article also references a remark Eric Holder made regarding the persecution of New York Times reporter James Risen:

"As long as I am attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job will go to jail," Holder said at a meeting with news media representatives when asked about the Risen case.

And that immediately rung a bell for me. I’d asked why Eric Holder had decided to resign. Perhaps he wasn’t willing to do the administration’s bidding and was “asked” to leave.

Eric Holder's Legacy

For civil libertarians, Holder’s tenure as Attorney General under President Obama has been one of the most damaging periods in our history with a comprehensive attack on various constitutional rights and principles from free speech to the free press to international law.

[...]

Holder personally announced Obama’s “kill list” policy, in which the president claimed the right to kill any U.S. citizen on his sole authority without a charge, let alone a conviction. Holder’s department used the controversial Espionage Act of 1917 to bring twice the number of such prosecutions of all prior presidents under the Act. Journalists were placed under surveillance in a record that rivaled that of President Nixon. Holder led an appalling crackdown on whistle-blowers. Holder fought to justify massive warrantless surveillance and unchecked presidential authority to attack other countries without congressional approval.

[...]

Holder is resigning the same week that a federal judge ordered the release of “Fast and Furious” documents after the Justice Department was accused of a pattern of delay and obstruction. Holder was previously held in contempt by Congress for his withholding documents and conflicting accounts to an oversight committee looking into the scandal.

[...]

Ironically, Holder came into office trying to distinguish himself from such disastrous predecessors as Alberto Gonzales but proved no less political or blindly loyal to his own president. Indeed, both men fought aggressively to expand the powers of the presidency and national security laws over countervailing individual rights and separation of powers principles. It will be civil liberties and not civil rights that will be the lasting, and troubling, legacy of Eric Holder.

[...]

When the president was confronted with demands to investigate and prosecute individuals for torture under the Bush administration, Holder faced an early test of principle. He failed. The Justice Department blocked any prosecution despite our obligation under international treaties and the president’s (and Holder’s) acknowledgment that waterboarding is clearly a form of torture.

[...]

He lost a series of criminal cases seeking massive reductions in privacy and due process protections for citizens.

[...]

In one of the great lost opportunities in history, Holder will finish his tenure as he began it: a man with great but still unrealized potential.

  Jonathan Turley

Eric Holder Needs to Spend More Time with His Family

Or maybe he just needs more money than he’s getting as AG.

(UPDATE:  10/28/14  This article reminded me that Holder once said, "As long as I am attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job will go to jail," in answer to a question about the case of New York Times reporter James Risen.  Maybe that gives us another clue as to why he's leaving.)

“I chose him to serve as attorney general because he believes as I do that justice is not just an abstract theory. It’s a living and breathing principle,” Mr. Obama said. He said Mr. Holder used the law to make people’s lives better. “That’s why I made him America’s lawyer, the people’s lawyer.”

  NYT

Whose lives did he make better?  Bankers, yes.  Thousands of poor mortgage holders who got shafted by the bankers?  Sorry.  Apparently, Mr. Obama doesn’t know what the word “justice” means. And neither did Holder.

Eric Holder, the United States’ first black attorney general, will announce later on Thursday that he plans to resign from his post as soon as a successor can be confirmed.

  The Guardian

That shouldn’t take long. Just look under another rock.

The telling sentence in NPR’s report that US attorney general Eric Holder plans to step down once a successor is confirmed came near the end of the story.

“Friends and former colleagues say Holder has made no decisions about his next professional perch,” NPR writes, “but they say it would be no surprise if he returned to the law firm Covington & Burling, where he spent years representing corporate clients.”

A large chunk of Covington & Burling’s corporate clients are mega-banks like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America. Lanny Breuer, who ran the criminal division for Holder’s Justice Department, already returned to work there.

[...]

In March, Covington highlighted in marketing materials their award from the trade publication American Lawyer as “Litigation Department of the Year,” touting the law firm’s work in getting clients accused of financial fraud off with slap-on-the-wrist fines.

Covington, American Lawyer says, helps clients “get the best deal they can.”

[...]

[If] you want to understand what [Eric Holder] did for the perpetrators of a cascade of financial fraud that blew up the nation’s economy in 2008, you only have to read that line from his former employer: he helped them “get the best deal they can.”

[...]

By the time the bubble collapsed, the recession hit and Holder took over the Justice Department, Wall Street was a target-rich environment for any federal prosecutor. Physical evidence to an untold number of crimes was available in court filings and county recording offices.

Financial audits revealed large lapses in underwriting standards as early as 2005.

[...]

In 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, giving $165m to the Justice Department to staff the investigations necessary to bring those accountable for the financial crisis to justice.

[...]

Any prosecutor worth his salt could have gone up the chain of command and implicated top banking executives.

[...]

Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal found last week that the Justice Department only collects around 25% of the fines they impose. So the banks may have gotten off even easier.

[...]

And Holder’s Justice Department has been guilty of cooking the books: they admitted last August to overstating the number of criminal financial fraud charges by over 80%.

[...]

More important, the settlements didn’t end the misconduct. Homeowners today continue to lose their homes based on false documents. Because the Justice Department just put a band-aid over the fraud, and didn’t convict any of the ringleaders, the problems went unaddressed, and the root causes never got fixed.

  Guardian

And you don’t believe in conspiracies.

The decision to protect banks instead of homeowners should be laid at the feet of the president and his administration, not one man in the Justice Department. But Holder certainly carried out the policy, even if he didn’t devise it.

Eric Holder Still Playing the Fool

U.S. officials offer conflicting accounts of how much they know about Snowden’s situation in Russia.

“It’s an ongoing investigation,” U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in an interview. “We have done the appropriate things at this stage of the investigation, and we know exactly where Mr. Snowden is.”

[...]

The burst of activity during that period [when Snowden was in Hong Kong] — including the White House meetings, a broad diplomatic scramble and the decision to force a foreign leader’s plane to land — was far more extensive than U.S. officials acknowledged at the time.

President Obama in particular seemed to strike a dismissive pose, saying on June 27 that he was “not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.”

[...]

[White House homeland security adviser Lisa] Monaco was convening meetings nearly every day at the White House. Among the participants were the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce and McFaul, who often took part by videoconference in sessions that got underway well after midnight in Moscow.

[...]

Then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III made more than half a dozen direct appeals to his FSB counterpart, Alexander Bortnikov [to have Snowden turned over to the US government], officials said, all for naught.

[...]

Others said the United States lacks answers to even basic questions about Snowden’s circumstances, including where he lives and — perhaps most important — the role of the Russian security service, the FSB, in his day-to-day life.

Asked whether the United States knows Snowden’s location, a U.S. official regularly briefed on the matter said, “That’s not our understanding.”

The gaps persist despite Snowden’s ability to meet with U.S. journalists in Moscow and make high-profile appearances, including during a call-in show with Russian President Vladi¬mir Putin.

[...]

“The FBI doesn’t have any capability to operate in Moscow without the collaboration of the FSB,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who served in the Russian capital.

  WaPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Time for Clapper to Emigrate?

A senior House Republican pressed Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday to prosecute Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for perjury over testimony he gave to a Senate committee last year denying that U.S. intelligence agencies were gathering data on large numbers of Americans.

“What more do you need besides an admission from Gen. Clapper that he lied?” Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) asked, pointing to Clapper’s later remark that his denial was “the least untruthful” answer he could give.

[...]

“I’m really not in a position to confirm whether the department is investigating any particular matter,” the attorney general said.

“Is there any circumstance under which you would prosecute a member of the administration for lying under oath to Congress?” Sensenbrenner shot back.

“Sure,” Holder replied, “…if the person lied and all the other legal requirements” were met.

  Politico

Quick. Obama has some executive orders and secret legal requirements to sign.

“Wouldn’t it be pointless for Congress to pass new laws limiting data collection if the Justice Department and other officials are at liberty to lie about enforcing them?” said Sensenbrenner, a co-author of the Patriot Act.

Why, yes. Yes it would.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This Is Your Government Addicted to Secrecy

[Attorney General Eric] Holder, in his April declaration, restated his own new state secrets policy, that “[t]he Department will not defend an invocation of the privilege in order to: (i) conceal violations of the law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (ii) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency of the United States Government”. Then he did exactly what he had said he wouldn’t do.

[...]

For nine years, the U.S. government refused to let a Stanford PhD student named Rahinah Ibrahim back in the country after putting her on the no-fly list for no apparent reason. For eight years, U.S. government lawyers fought Ibrahim’s request that she be told why. Last April, despite his promise in 2009 to do so only in only the most extreme cases, [Holder] tried to block Ibrahim’s case by asserting the state secrets privilege, declaring under penalty of perjury that the information she wanted “could reasonably be expected to cause significant harm to national security.”

Last week, a federal judge publicly revealed the government’s explanation for Ibrahim’s long ordeal: an FBI agent had “checked the wrong box,” resulting in her falling under suspicion as a terrorist.

  Intercept

Let Them Eat Cake - and Platitudes

Once or twice a year Eric Holder and/or the president discover police brutality, racial profiling, or the injustice of the drug war, or mass incarceration. Black America gets some sound bytes of “drive-by” concern, some noises about a study or a “policy change." But 55 months into the Obama administration, when we compare the prez and attorney general's words with their actions, black America looks like it's been played. Again.

[...]

This very week Eric Holder uncovered the fact the US locks up too many people for too long, and that mass incarceration (though he won't use that term unless quoting the title of a certain book) ravages and punishes entire communities. But it's all talk.

[...]

Let's stand Eric Holder's and this administration's expressions of concern over mass incarceration alongside its actual record of exercising the power in its hands. When we do, Eric Holder looks a lot like a lying hypocrite, and the administration looks like it's playing black America for a nation of chumps.

  Black Agenda Report

Of course, it’s not just black America getting the chump treatment.

What Holder and the Obama administration will NOT discover is a way to reduce the budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which grew 4% in this year of budgetary austerity. They won't find a way to NOT open that new federal supermax prison in Illinois, or a way to close existing torture facility like the one Florence CO. They aren't looking for ways to use federal law enforcement and corrections funding to pressure states to close their supermaxes, or encourage them to provide educational opportunities and decent medical care to the 2 million plus in state and local prisons and jails. These are practical measures Holder and his boss have had the power to do for 55 months now, and haven't done, haven't even discussed.

[...]

At no time in this 55 months have the White House, its Attorney General, or its allies in Congress ever seriously pushed for the repeal of mandatory minimum drug sentences, and there is no full court press on this now either. Holder merely says that he'll instruct federal D.A.s not to file drug charges which under federal law invoke the mandatory minimum sentences in small scale cases where the feds see no violence or gang affiliation. For all kinds of reasons federal D.A.s don't exactly and often will not follow these instructions. More importantly they can be quietly revoked at any time by this or any future attorney general, and none of it affects drug prosecutions under state law.

But it sounded good, didn't it?

The Ongoing Shame That Is the Obama Administration

They lie about EVERYthing, don’t they?

The Justice Department made a long-overdue disclosure late Friday: Last year when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder boasted about the successes that a high-profile task force racked up pursuing mortgage fraud, the numbers he trumpeted were grossly overstated.

[...]

When Holder first trotted out these figures last October, he bragged during a press conference about the results of the government's "Distressed Homeowner Initiative," which he called “a groundbreaking, yearlong mortgage-fraud enforcement effort” and “the first ever to focus exclusively on crimes targeting homeowners.”

[...]

We're not talking small differences here. Originally the Justice Department said 530 people were charged criminally as part of a year-long initiative by the multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. It now says the actual figure was 107 -- or 80 percent less. Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.

The government restated the statistics because it got caught red-handed by a couple of nosy reporters.

[...]

After [the] initial story, I asked a Justice Department spokeswoman, Adora Andy, several times over the course of a month for a list of the people charged and their case details so I could look them up myself. She promised repeatedly to provide one, until she finally stopped responding to my requests.

  Bloomberg

Same experience I had with FEMA and my toxic-bacteria-infested apartment after the hurricane.

Speaking of FEMA, although personally, they did come up with a decent amount of money immediately to provide living quarters, which I certainly appreciated and wasn’t expecting, there is an elderly black woman who comes into the library’s public computer lab several times a week trying to get her FEMA claim processed. The hurricane was five years ago. Her house was destroyed, and FEMA recently finally admitted they lost her claim and all her paperwork. She is sometimes near tears by the time she walks away from the computer.

This was the second time, mind you, that Holder's Justice Department had pulled a stunt like this. In December 2010, Holder held a press conference to tout a supposed sweep by the president’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force called "Operation Broken Trust." (The mortgage-fraud program was part of the same task force.) As with the mortgage-fraud initiative, Broken Trust wasn’t actually a sweep. All the Justice Department did was lump together a bunch of small-fry, penny-ante fraud cases that had nothing to do with one another. Then it held a press gathering.

At least on that occasion, the Justice Department promptly provided me with a list of the defendants’ names and case details when I asked for them. [...] The Justice Department still hasn't restated the Broken Trust numbers -- even though those statistics clearly were in error, too.

[...]

Holder needs to come forward and explain exactly how this happened and why. He used a press conference with the cameras rolling to give out numbers that proved to be false -- and they appear to have been willfully false. He should be just as eager to hold another press conference to set the record straight, answer any questions about his apparent sleight of hand when it comes to financial-fraud metrics and apologize to the American people.

But somehow, I don’t think he will be.

Suddenly, Our Drug Laws Need Reform

Attorney General Eric Holder is set to announce Monday that the Justice Department will no longer press mandatory minimum sentences against many low-level drug crime offenders, according to reports.

  The HIll

I wonder how this will play out.

Obviously, this was needed a long, long time ago. That it is only coming now makes me wonder if this is part of the desperation of the Obama administration to regain the black support they have been losing. That is not a racist remark on my part. That is an acknowledgment that our draconian drug laws have inordinately affected the black community. It’s certainly not going to gain any Republican support. I can hear the screeching now. I’m not sure it’s a wisely calculated political move on the administration’s part. We shall see.

And besides, it doesn’t mean that local and state judges won’t continue to hand down mandatory minimums.

“While the aggressive enforcement of federal criminal statutes remains necessary, we cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation,” he will say.

But we CAN squelch whistleblowers, Guantánamo, and  drone bomb our way there, apparently.

While Russia Calls Our Bluff

The US State Department does not believe that imposing international sanctions because of Snowden would be of any use, said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

  RT

What? Nobody trembled at the possibility? Where’s that super power?

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has recently proposed that the US State Department set penalties against those nations that seek to help former NSA contractor Edward Snowden avoid extradition to the US.

The Senate Appropriations Committee has already approved the proposal unanimously by voice vote as an amendment to 2014 diplomacy and international aid bill.

“We have not seen the text of the proposed bill, but we feel that in general legislation imposing sanctions under these circumstances would not be helpful,” Psaki shared, adding that she is not going “to make a prediction about any step we may or may not take.”

“Our focus in this specific case is having Mr. Snowden returned to the United States, and we still feel Russia has the opportunity to do that and to take the right steps,” the spokesperson stressed.

And Holder is reduced to making like Cruella DeVille. “I just love puppies and children. No harm could ever come to them in my care. Trust me. Give me the puppy.”

Jesus

I thought our government couldn't possibly make me say "unbelievable" again. But I was wrong.

US Attorney General Eric Holder has promised Moscow that Snowden will be given a fair trial, and will not be tortured or sentenced to death. The pledge was made in a diplomatic letter Holder sent earlier this week.

“The United States will not seek the death penalty for Mr. Snowden should he return to the United States. The charges he faces do not carry that possibility, and the United States would not seek the death penalty even if Mr. Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes,” said the missive, which was addressed to Russian Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov.

In the letter, the US also promised that Snowden would receive a public jury trial in the civil courts, and would not be subjected to anything but “voluntary questioning” in the lead-up to his trial.

“Mr. Snowden will not be tortured. Torture is unlawful in the United States,” wrote the attorney general.

  RT

Unbelievable. 

That should reassure everybody.  Give him back, now.   We promise we won't hurt him. 

Twisted.  Evil.  Gives you the creeps, doesn't it? 

Eric Holder and his boss are the dark heart of devil slime, and I'm sorry, that insults the devil. 

Good luck, Edward. 

UPDATE:

Holder said that it wasn’t true that, with his passport revoked, Snowden couldn’t go anywhere without asylum: the government would gladly give him “a limited validity passport good for direct return to the United States.”

  New Yorker

Gee, that’s mighty white of you.

What is striking, though, reading his letter, is how non-obvious these very obvious things have become. The United States has tortured, as much as the Obama Administration has disowned the practice. It has played fast and loose with the question of venues, keeping both American and non-American citizens out of the civilian courts where they belong.

[...]

[T]he Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has, as it stands, been shaped above all by the legal imagination of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has named all of its members. What was once a check on illegal domestic wiretapping has become a workshop where words are re-defined and precedents are strung together, all out of public view—to the point where one can get a letter from the Attorney General, written in plain language, and not have any idea what it means.