Agreed!

Sally Yates did not betray the Justice Department, she honored its greatest traditions by defending our Constitution. https://t.co/oOVAhKPXQK

— Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) January 31, 2017

KDKA: "Feds Won't Pursue Charges Against Officers" in Jordan Miles Case

KDKA News is reporting that the federal investigation into the brutal beating of CAPA honors student Jordan Miles is over and that the Pittsburgh police officers involved will not be charged.

They quote Justice Department sources as saying:

"We don't believe we can get a conviction."

[snip]

"It's three against one..."

So does that mean that if only one police officer had brutalized Miles that they'd be more likely to pursue charges? By that logic, if Miles had been attacked by five officers, they'd be handing out medals to them.

And speaking of handing things out, the three officers have not only been on paid leave since February, they've also been receiving overtime pay.

Even more depressing:

Sources close to the investigation tell the KDKA Investigators if the Justice Department will not pursue charges, the district attorney's office won't either -- and the criminal investigation will soon be closed.

A reminder that this is what Miles looked like after the attack:



.....
And, that the officers went after him in the first place because they claimed that Miles was standing against a building "as if he was trying to avoid being seen" and that they believed he had a gun which they later said was a a bottle of Mt. Dew in his winter coat pocket which they couldn't even produce.

Miles' attorney said, "We plan on filing a civil rights violation case against the Pittsburgh Police Department obviously."

It would be a crime if they didn't.
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Yoo claimed president had constitutional power to order a village to be "massacred"

Via Newsweek:

The chief author of the Bush administration's "torture memo" told Justice Department investigators that the president's war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be "massacred," according to a report by released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

The views of former Justice lawyer John Yoo were deemed to be so extreme and out of step with legal precedents that they prompted the Justice Department's internal watchdog office to conclude last year that he committed "intentional professional misconduct" when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects.

[snip]

Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:

"What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? ... Is that a power that the president could legally—"

"Yeah," Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. "Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief's power over tactical decisions."

"To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?" the OPR investigator asked again.

"Sure," said Yoo.

The Office of Professional Responsibility cleared Yoo of professional-misconduct allegations last month.

Jack Balkin at Balkinization explains why:

That is to say, rules of professional misconduct are aimed at weeding out sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems; they do not guarantee that lawyers will do right by their clients, or, in this case, by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. In effect, by setting the standard of conduct so low, rules of professional conduct effectively work to protect all those lawyers out there whose moral standing is just a hair's breadth above your average mass murderer. This is how the American legal profession simultaneously polices and takes care of its own.

[sigh]
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DOJ Misconduct Scandals NN09 Panel (The Selective and Wrongful Prosecution of Don Siegelman)

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman(after he let go of my arm)


Dr. Cyril Wecht takes one for the blog
The full title of the panel was Reporting DoJ Misconduct Scandals: Why Netroots Remains Last Hope for Justice and panelists included former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former coroner of Allegheny County Cyril Wecht, MD, JD.

Most Pittsburghers have some familiarity with Wecht's trial (read here if you don't) and some thought his case was an example of selective prosecution by the Bush administration and U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan.

Less Burghers may have followed the case of Don Siegelman. Way back in 2007, The New York Times in an editorial titled "Selective Prosecution" described it thusly:

Putting political opponents in jail is the sort of thing that happens in third-world dictatorships. In the United States, prosecutions are supposed to be scrupulously nonpartisan. This principle appears to have broken down in Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department — where lawyers were improperly hired for nonpolitical jobs based on party membership, and United States attorneys were apparently fired for political reasons.

Individual Democrats may be paying a personal price. Don Siegelman, a former Alabama governor, was the state’s most prominent Democrat and had a decent chance of retaking the governorship from the Republican incumbent. He was aggressively prosecuted by both the Birmingham and Montgomery United States attorney’s offices. Birmingham prosecutors dropped their case after a judge harshly questioned it. When the Montgomery office prosecuted, a jury acquitted Mr. Siegelman of 25 counts, but convicted him of 7, which appear to be disturbingly weak.

The prosecution may have been a political hit. A Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson, has said in a sworn statement that she heard Bill Canary, a Republican operative and a Karl Rove protégé, say that his “girls” — his wife, the United States attorney in Montgomery, and Alice Martin, the United States attorney in Birmingham — would “take care” of Mr. Siegelman. Mr. Canary also said, according to Ms. Simpson, that Mr. Rove was involved.

The Rove controversy is still ongoing.

You can watch the 60 Minutes expose on the front page of Siegelman's website: http://www.donsiegelman.org

Unfortunately, like many of the Netroots panels that I wanted to see, the DOJ one conflicted with two others (Torture, Accountability, and Prosecutions: Looking Back to Move Forward and Advocating for Reproductive Rights in the Age of Obama).

But Siegelman wasn't having any of that. He stood outside his panel room and literally grabbed people in the halls (including me) to convince them to hear him speak with the line, "I'll be speaking during the first 10 minutes -- just stay for that."

I did just stay for his part (mostly because I already knew a lot about his case and the Wecht case), but if you're not as familiar, I urge you to check out his website, watch the 60 Minutes piece and then take action.

By the way, Siegelman did have something new to say in those first 10 minutes.

He had a chance to speak with Valerie Jarrett -- one of Obama's most trusted advisors -- that very day. He implored her to remove Rove's clones from the DOJ.

I found her reported response to be terribly discouraging. He said she told him that it was up to us to lobby for that reform.

[sigh]

You can contact Jarrett via Siegelman's website here.
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Obama's extension of same-sex benefits with all the asterisks

Last night David posted about the then breaking news that President Obama will sign an order extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.

That move comes with asterisks:

According to the New York Times, "While he will announce a list of benefits, officials said, they are not expected to include broad health insurance coverage, which could require legislation to achieve" because of (you-guessed-it) the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Also in that article, "...administration officials said the timing of the announcement was intended to help contain the growing furor among gay rights groups. Several gay donors withdrew their sponsorship of a Democratic National Committee fund-raising event next week, where Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to speak."

And what's the furor about? Obama's DOJ choosing not only to defend DOMA, but to defend it using some of the right wings' most disgusting and shameful talking points such as comparing same-sex marriage to incest. The New York Times in a Monday editorial called it a "A Bad Call on Gay Rights" and quoted Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, who said, “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings and as families when we read an argument, presented in federal court, implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

The Times also adds that, "There is a strong presumption that the Justice Department will defend federal laws, but it is not an inviolable rule."

I will add that Obama's DOJ has, for example, not prosecuted Bush/Cheney on torture or any other broken treaties and war crimes.

[sigh]
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Department of Injustice Scandal Roundup

Here's my list:

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales denies that there's a right to writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. Constitution.

The DOJ approves the unlawful detainment of terrorist suspects and argues for the legality of extraordinary rendition.

The DOJ authorized the CIA to torture prisoners in its custody.

The DOJ's investigation into eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without proper warrants was shut down to protect AG Gonzales.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has ruled in every case on the side of Republicans as "part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens."

The DOJ's selective prosecution of Democratic political figures.

DOJ job applicants were made to pass a political test ("What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?").

Even if a DOJ job applicant was a Republican, one could be rejected merely because they were married to a Democrat.

Of course even a rumor that you might possibly be gay could cost you your job at the DOJ.

And, even if you were a good Republican who was able to secure a job at the DOJ as a US Attorney, you would be fired if it was deemed you weren't acting sufficiently Republican enough.

All of which led to DOJ lawyers talking in code because they were afraid of being wiretapped by their own government and fired.

I'm sure I must have missed some -- hell, there's been nearly eight years of this shit.

Help me out!

What is your favorite Department of Injustice scandal?
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More Administration Lies

From the Washington Post:

In testimony on Jan. 18, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department had no intention of avoiding Senate input on the hiring of U.S. attorneys.

Just a month earlier, D. Kyle Sampson, who was then Gonzales's chief of staff, laid out a plan to do just that. In an e-mail, he detailed a strategy for evading Arkansas Democrats in installing Tim Griffin, a former GOP operative and protege of presidential adviser Karl Rove, as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.

"We should gum this to death," Sampson wrote to a White House aide on Dec. 19. "[A]sk the senators to give Tim a chance . . . then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in 'good faith,' of course."

Of course.

The part I'm having trouble grokking follows a few sentences later:

Democrats and Republicans are demanding to know whether Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and other Justice officials misled them in sworn testimony over the past two months.

Whah?? Isn't it obvious? AG Gonzales says one thing that is directly contradicted by an e-mail from his chief of staff. And they're still asking whether they've been misled?

Ok here's another:

The inconsistencies between Justice's positions and the documents are numerous. On Feb. 23, for example, a Justice legislative affairs aide wrote to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) that the department "was not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin." But internal Justice e-mails show that "getting him appointed is important" to Rove and was closely monitored by political aides in the White House.

Last week, senior Justice official William E. Moschella told a House Judiciary subcommittee that the White House was not consulted on the firings until the end of the process.

But the documents released this week show that the plan began more than two years ago at the White House counsel's office, which initially suggested firing all 93 U.S. attorneys. Gonzales rejected that idea, and Sampson wrote back in January 2006 that Justice and the White House should "work together to seek the replacement of a limited number of U.S. Attorneys."

How much more do we need to know before the default setting is changed to "Whenever the Bush Administration is defending itself on something, always assume it's lying."

How long?