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Nation Transfixed In Horror By Toy Bombs While Destroying Lives With Real Ones

Nation Transfixed In Horror By Toy Bombs While Destroying Lives With Real Ones

Media headlines have been dominated for the last two days by the news that pipe bombs are being sent to Democratic Party elites and their allies, a list of whom as of this writing consists of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, George Soros, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder, Robert De Niro, and the CNN office (addressed to former CIA Director John Brennan who actually works for NBC). As of this writing nobody has been killed or injured in any way by any of these many explosive devices, and there is as of this writing no publicly available evidence that they were designed to. As of this writing there is no evidence that the devices were intended to do anything other than what they have done: stir up fear and grab headlines.

And of course it is a good thing that nobody has been hurt by these devices. Obviously targeting anyone with packages containing explosive materials is terrible, even if those devices were not rigged with the intention of detonating and harming anyone, and it is a good thing that not a single one of them has done so. It is a good thing that none of America’s political elites were targeted by the sort of explosive device that America drops on people in other countries every single day. You know, the kind that actually explode.


Apparently some Acme comedy bombs mailed to a number of extremely rich people, which thankfully did not hurt anybody at all, are infinitely more newsworthy than the real bombs which maim and destroy children in Yemen on an industrial scale.


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Has Trump Made It Easier to Spy on Journalists? Lawsuit Demands Answers.

National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina (2ndR), US Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R) and bodyguards stand at the Department of Justice during an announcement about leaking of classified information on August 4, 2017 in Washington, DC.US Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday condemned the 'staggering number' of leaks emanating from President Donald Trump's administration, as he vowed a crackdown on people revealing classified or sensitive national security information. / AFP PHOTO / Brendan Smialowski (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

PRESS FREEDOM GROUPS filed suit today to force the government to disclose more about how and when it obtains journalists’ communications, amid reports that the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions is pursuing a record number of leak investigations.

The question the groups hope to answer is whether the Trump administration — openly hostile toward news media — has jettisoned or modified rules that limit the government’s ability to spy on journalists while they do their jobs.

Those rules were made more stringent by former President Barack Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder in 2014, after outcry when it was revealed that the administration had secretly obtained call records from the Associated Press and surveilled a Fox News reporter, naming him a co-conspirator in a national security leak case. Holder pledged that his department would go after journalists’ records in criminal cases only as a “last resort.”

Carrie DeCell, a staff attorney with Knight First Amendment Institute, which is bringing the suit along with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that “we have seen the DOJ media guidelines that Obama released, but we understand that Sessions is reconsidering those guidelines, and the way the government uses subpoenas against journalists.”

In August, Sessions announced that his department was reviewing the guidelines as part of a crackdown on leaks but did not specify what changes might be made. Sessions also told Congress this month that he has 27 investigations open into leaks of classified information to reporters – compared to just three last year. (Not all leaks are illegal, and many of the disclosures that Trump has publicly complained about would likely not be considered criminal.)

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Excellent Interview – A Brief History of Corporate Immunity

Excellent Interview – A Brief History of Corporate Immunity

Like so many other cases of egregious financial fraud over the past several years, regulators used softball tactics to go easy on the banks. No bank was even forced to admit wrongdoing in the orders by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Regulators avoided court and settled for cash, which the traders won’t pay – the bank’s shareholders will. Officials presented a minimal amount of evidence, lacking the full details of the traders’ misconduct. They sought no judicial review.

In short, banks got away with their crimes for a pittance; their stocks even rose on the news of the settlements because the market believes the trouble is over. 

The DoJ has increasingly used a relatively new and declawed method to deal with the aftermath of the financial crisis: the deferred prosecution agreement (DPA). 

No one goes to jail and no one ever gets prosecuted. Under a deferred prosecution agreement, the Justice Department allows corporations to pay a fine, then agree to some enhanced supervision and monitoring. The Justice Department appears to admit this in the US Attorney’s manual, when they describe these deals as “agreements not to enforce the law under particular conditions”.

Each deferred prosecution agreement is negotiated individually. There is no thought to creating a future record: no trials, no jury verdicts, no appellate court decisions, no case law and no binding precedent. This makes it impossible to determine the boundaries of the law. The same conduct can be treated differently, depending on the prosecutor.

–  From the post: The U.S. Department of Justice Handles Banker Criminals Like Juvenile Offenders…Literally

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jesse Eisinger is currently on leave from his day job as he finishes a book about “white collar crime & (non)punishment.” He recently sat down with ProMarket to discuss some of what he’s learned.

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James Risen, Obama, Holder and the NSA

James Risen, Obama, Holder and the NSA

“He made my life miserable for a long time.”

Earlier this year I did an hour long interview with James Risen. We discussed his case with the Department of Justice, where he was being threatened with incarceration for refusing to reveal his source who gave him insights about NSA activities. This was before Obama and Eric Holder decided to drop the prosecution against him.  I saw him give the keynote speech at the luncheon for the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2015 conference and after his talk, in which he lambasted former Attorney General Eric Holder, I asked him to do a brief interview, based on his comments on Obama, Eric Holder and their legacies.

Rob Kall: My guest is James Risen. He was just the luncheon speaker for the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference (1800 attendees)

***

Rob Kall: I was really hoping you would recap what you said to about 1500 journalists about your experience with the DOJ and Eric Holder and where journalism is today.

James Risen: I think the main point I was trying to make is the legacy of the Obama administration on press freedom issues is a bad one. They had, in my case, sought to eliminate what’s called the reporter’s privilege, which is the ability of reporters to protect their confidential sources in criminal trials and not be forced to testify and identify sources. In my case the judge sided with me and quashed the subpoena from the Justice Department against me. But the Obama administration appealed that to the appeals court and they overturned that decision by the lower court and in their appeal to the appeals court, they said, there is no such thing as a reporters’ privilege in a federal case. And the court sided with them and that had the effect of eliminating the ability, legally, of reporters to protect their sources in federal criminal cases.

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In Corporate Crimes, Individual Accountability Is Elusive

In Corporate Crimes, Individual Accountability Is Elusive

“We have never hesitated to investigate and prosecute any individual, institution or organization that attempted to exploit our markets and take advantage of the American people,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. proclaimed this month when the Justice Department announced that Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency, had agreed to pay $1.375 billion to settle civil charges that it inflated ratings on mortgage-backed securities at the heart of the financial crisis.

And this week, he pledged a renewed effort to bring cases against individuals responsible for financial fraud, calling on federal prosecutorsto “try to develop cases against individuals and to report back in 90 days.”

Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

 

Yes, plenty of people have been prosecuted for mortgage fraud and other financial crimes since the financial crisis: The Justice Department has charged over 4,000 people with mortgage fraud alone, according to a spokesman. And the department has filed 46,000 white-collar crime cases since 2009.

Yet almost all of these are low-level employees with little or no name recognition. Hardly any top executives at the financial firms paying multimillion- and billion-dollar-plus fines for engaging in criminal behavior have been charged or convicted. (One exception is Lee B. Farkas, former chairman of the mortgage firm Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, who isserving a 30-year prison term.)

 

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