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promoted primary on sessions baby jail and mueller 918

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monopoly merger fail 2017

Roper told ProPublica [2022] that when he was developing the YieldStar software more than a decade ago, he was concerned about avoiding both issues. He also said he didn’t want to misuse private data in pricing.

“I was highly sensitized to: You just don’t do it,” Roper said.

Despite differences in the software’s design, RealPage acquired LRO in 2017 after months of scrutiny by the antitrust division of the justice department. Federal regulators review mergers above a certain size — right now, it is transactions valued at $101 million — and typically allow them to proceed after only a preliminary review. But some are flagged for a more extensive look. The government can challenge a merger in court if it believes it could substantially harm competition.

RealPage’s purchase of LRO received such a second look, but the DOJ allowed it to proceed in late 2017. The department did not respond to requests for comment.

The approval allowed RealPage to acquire its only significant competitor, Roper said, adding, “I was surprised the DOJ let that go through.”

RealPage was pricing 1.5 million units, and the acquisition of LRO would double that, Steve Winn, RealPage’s then-CEO, said at a mid-2017 investor conference. “I don’t think there’s any concentration, enough concentration, of buying or pricing power here” to warrant DOJ concerns, he said. A third company had a substantial footprint in the market, Winn said, but property managers’ own manual pricing processes or proprietary systems were RealPage’s largest competitor.

“We expect our combined platform to drive accelerated, sustained revenue growth,” Winn said in a media release announcing the deal.

RealPage’s influence was burgeoning. That year, the firm’s target market — multifamily buildings with five or more units — made up about 19 million of the nation’s 45 million rental units. A growing share of those buildings were owned by firms backed by Wall Street investors, who were among the most eager adopters of pricing software.

RealPage renamed its combined pricing software AI Revenue Management. By the end of 2020, the firm was reporting in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that its clients used its services and products to manage 19.7 million rental units of all types, including single-family homes. The private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought the public company a few months later for $10.2 billion.

Winn, whose net worth Forbes estimates at $1.7 billion, stepped aside. He did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Thoma Bravo declined to comment.

Who Uses the Software and How It Works

Somewhere around 2016, according to one trade group, the industry’s use of the pricing software began to achieve “critical mass.”

The more property managers who sign on to RealPage services, the more data flows into the company’s repository. That in turn aids its pricing service, which the company says “leverages multifamily’s largest lease transaction database.”

RealPage’s clients include some of the largest property managers in the country. Many favor cities where rent has been rising rapidly, according to a ProPublica analysis of five of the country’s top 10 property managers as of 2020. All five use RealPage pricing software in at least some buildings, and together they control thousands of apartments in metro areas such as Denver, Nashville, Atlanta and Seattle, where rents for a typical two-bedroom apartment rose 30% or more between 2014 and 2019....

an 6 23

a new report in the Washington Post sheds some light on why it has taken so long to investigate former President Donald Trump's incitement of deadly riots at the United States Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Specifically, the Post reports that top officials at the United States Department of Justice and the FBI "quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature."

Although Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray were not the ones who quashed the plan by prosecutors, they did embrace the strategy that critics of the plan recommended by holding the rioters themselves and then slowly moving up the chain if the evidenced justified doing so.

"In the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump supporters boasted publicly that they had submitted fake electors on his behalf, but the Justice Department declined to investigate the matter in February 2021," the newspaper writes. "The department did not actively probe the effort for nearly a year, and the FBI did not open an investigation of the electors scheme until April 2022, about 15 months after the attack."

The Post's sources say that efforts to investigate potential Trump involvement in the riots was planned by J.P. Cooney, the head of thefraud and public corruption section at the U.S. attorney’s office, who wanted to start with Trump ally Roger Stone and "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander, whom he believed had planned a violent response to the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election.

However, others in the department viewed Cooney's efforts as "premature," reports the Post, because he could not turn up enough evidence to definitively link Stone to a crime.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/walmart-was-almost-criminally-charged-over-opioids-trump-appointees-killed-the-indictment/

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Walmart was almost criminally charged over opioids. Trump appointees killed the indictment

Written by Jesse Eisinger, James Bandler / Pro Publica March 25, 2020

On a Tuesday just before Halloween in 2018, a group of federal prosecutors and agents from Texas arrived in Washington. For almost two years, they’d been investigating the opioid dispensing practices of Walmart, the largest company in the world. They had amassed what they viewed as highly damning evidence only to face a major obstacle: top Trump appointees at the Department of Justice.

The prosecution team had come to Washington to try to save its case. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, led the group, which included Heather Rattan, an over-20-year veteran of the office who had spent much of her career prosecuting members of drug cartels.

They first went to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s headquarters to meet the acting administrator, Uttam Dhillon. There Rattan laid out the evidence. Opioids dispensed by Walmart pharmacies in Texas had killed customers who had overdosed. The pharmacists who dispensed those opioids had told the company they didn’t want to fill the prescriptions because they were coming from doctors who were running pill mills. They pleaded for help and guidance from Walmart’s corporate office.

Investigators had obtained records of similar cries for help from Walmart pharmacists all over the country: from Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Washington, and other states. They reported hundreds of thousands of suspicious or inappropriate opioid prescriptions. One Walmart employee warned about a Florida doctor who had a “list of patients from Kentucky that have been visiting pharmacies in all of central Wisconsin recently.” That doctor had sent patients to Walmarts in more than 30 other states.

In response to these alarms, Walmart compliance officials did not take corporate-wide action to halt the flow of opioids. Instead, they repeatedly admonished pharmacists that they could not cut off any doctor entirely. They could only evaluate each prescription on an individual basis. And they went further. An opioid compliance manager told an executive in an email, gathered during the inquiry and viewed by ProPublica, that Walmart’s focus should be on “driving sales.”

After they finished their presentation, Dhillon sat back in his chair and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ,” according to five people familiar with the investigation. “Why aren’t we talking about this as a criminal case?”

That’s precisely what had occurred seven months earlier: Rattan had informed Walmart that she was preparing to indict the corporation for violating the Controlled Substances Act. Indictments of Fortune 500 companies are unheard of, let alone of one with $500 billion in annual revenue and over 2 million employees. But Rattan, with support from her boss Brown, believed the evidence justified such an unprecedented step.

Before the Texas prosecutors could file their case, however, Walmart escalated concerns to high-ranking officials at the DOJ, who then intervened. Brown was ordered to stand down. On Aug. 31, 2018, Trump officials officially informed Walmart that the DOJ would decline to prosecute the company, according to a letter from Walmart’s lawyer that lays out the chronology of the case.

But the Texas prosecutors hadn’t given up. Now, two months later, they still thought they had a chance to bring the then-deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, and other top officials around. After the first presentation at the DEA offices that day, the Texas group — now accompanied by the DEA’s Dhillon — caravanned over to the DOJ.

They filed into a big, bright conference room, where they were received by Rosenstein and a collection of political appointees and career staff. Rattan and her team were given a half-hour to make their presentation. She explained that dispensing opioids without a legitimate medical purpose is legally akin to dealing heroin. Criminal law says if a person or entity is willfully blind or deliberately ignorant, they are as liable as if they had acted intentionally. Once Walmart’s headquarters knew its pharmacists were raising alarms about suspicious prescriptions, but the compliance department continued to allow — even push — them to fill them, well, that made the company guilty, the Texas prosecutors contended.

This was not a question of a few rogue employees, Rattan explained. Walmart had a national problem. Worse, the prosecutors contended, the company was a repeat offender. Walmart had agreed to a settlement with the DEA seven years earlier in which it had promised to improve its controls over the abuse of opioid prescriptions. Still the problems persisted. That’s why the prosecutors believed they needed to pursue the extraordinary path of a criminal prosecution. As they concluded, Brown was emphatic, telling Rosenstein: “We have to act.”

A fine would not be a sufficient deterrent, the DEA’s Dhillon added, since Walmart “has more money than it knows what to do with.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Rosenstein responded, according to five people familiar with the investigation. “We are all capitalists here.”

Rosenstein’s quip brought the prosecutorial team up short. They weren’t pursuing Walmart because it was profitable but because, in their view, the company had put its customers at deadly risk.

Not long after, Rosenstein’s assistant entered the room to say he had a call. He left. The prosecutors’ push to persuade Rosenstein to revive the criminal case had failed.

Still, there were multiple avenues left to pursue: After the meeting, the Texas prosecutors focused on bringing criminal charges against individual employees, as Rosenstein and other Trump DOJ officials directed them to do. But later, when the prosecutors sought to indict a mid-level Walmart manager, the Trump officials blocked that, too.

That left potential civil claims. After the meeting with Rosenstein, Brian Benczkowski, the head of the criminal division, had told Brown, “You have a whopper of a civil case,” according to four people familiar with the investigation.

But the civil case, too, was stymied by Trump appointees in the DOJ who continued to side with Walmart.

In its dealings with the DOJ, Walmart pursued a classic strategy. It relied on Jones Day, an influential law firm that has salted officials throughout the Trump administration. Walmart conceded mistakes and opened the door for a civil settlement. But the company consistently denied that any of its employees committed crimes.

In the view of many prosecutors and agents, Walmart never fully cooperated. (From the beginning of the investigation, Walmart said it was cooperating and taking action to fix its opioid dispensing practices. Still, the company acknowledged that it halted its cooperation in mid-2018 after it became convinced prosecutors were not acting in good faith.)

And Walmart and Jones Day added a Trumpian tactic: At a moment when the president had established a habit of attacking the investigators in his own government, the company followed a similarly aggressive approach. Walmart lawyers complained to Washington about the Texas prosecutors, accusing them of seeking to “embarrass” the company while using the threat of criminal charges to extort a larger civil fine. Criminal and civil investigations can run in parallel, but it’s an ethical violation for prosecutors to use the threat of criminal penalties to generate a higher civil settlement.

In a statement to ProPublica, Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove reiterated the company’s complaints: “The United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) engaged in misconduct multiple times as it investigated Walmart, including threatening to bring meritless criminal charges against Walmart in order to extort an unjustified civil settlement from the company. This behavior was clearly improper, violated the Department of Justice’s own internal policies and rules of legal ethics, and was entirely inconsistent with the Department’s long-standing policies.”

Hargove added that having failed to bring “baseless” criminal charges against the company, “It appears that one or more individuals familiar with EDTX’s investigation have violated Department of Justice rules in an attempt to achieve through leaks what they could not accomplish in a court of law.”

In response to the Walmart statement, the U.S. attorney, Brown, offered his own to ProPublica: “Drug Enforcement Agency investigations of multiple opioid overdose deaths in the Eastern District of Texas resulted in our office opening parallel civil and criminal investigations of Walmart’s pharmacy practices. These investigations have been handled appropriately, and according to Department of Justice policy. These investigations, which we would typically not confirm or deny, but do so now because of Walmart’s statement, continue. Accordingly, it would be inappropriate to comment further on the specific facts of the case.

“Walmart chooses now to attack the investigators, a tried and true method to avoid oversight. We are confident that once all of the facts in this matter are public the hollowness of this criticism will be apparent. It is not the goal of our office to embarrass Walmart. Walmart’s behavior in dispensing opioid medication in the middle of a public health crisis should embarrass Walmart.”

Walmart’s ability to go over the heads of the Texas office left the U.S. attorney’s team profoundly frustrated — so much so that the lead civil prosecutor on the case resigned in protest on Oct. 25, 2019. “I deeply regret that Department leadership prevented EDTX from filing its lawsuit in 2018,” Joshua Russ, then the head of the Eastern District’s civil division, wrote in his resignation letter, a copy of which (with Walmart’s name blacked out) ProPublica obtained. “Corporations cannot poison Americans with impunity. Good sense dictates stern and swift action when Americans die.”

The investigations of Walmart have not been previously reported. This account is based on hundreds of pages of Walmart internal emails and investigative documents, correspondence between the company’s attorneys and the Justice Department, and interviews with nine people familiar with the investigation. All of the conversations described in this article were recounted either in those documents or by multiple people with knowledge of the conversations. The DOJ declined to make anyone available for interviews and did not answer an extensive list of questions.

The news of the Walmart investigation comes at a time when the Trump administration is being assailed for legal favoritism and cronyism. Attorney General Bill Barr has inserted himself into multiple investigations of Trump friends and associates. In February, four prosecutors on the case of Roger Stone, a Trump friend and adviser, quit the case in protest after political appointees undercut their sentencing recommendation.

The Trump DOJ has also pulled back on white-collar and corporate investigations and prosecutions.White-collar prosecutions are at a record low. Walmart itself seems to have already benefited from the Trump administration’s approach to corporate misconduct. The company was the subject of a seven-year investigation into bribery allegations in Mexico and around the globe. The Obama administration sought $600 million in fines, according to The New York Times, which broke the story, but failed to reach a resolution with the company. The Trump DOJ settled the charges for $282 million in June 2019. (“Walmart took the investigation very seriously, cooperated with the DOJ and the SEC’s investigation, and took extensive steps that have established its comprehensive Global Anti-Corruption Program,” the company said.)

Even as Trump’s DOJ was preventing its own prosecutors from getting tough on Walmart, the Trump administration told the public it was confronting the nation’s opioid crisis.In March 2018, Trump said his administration would hold those responsible accountable, pledging that federal lawsuits against opioid drugmakers “will happen.” The same month that Rosenstein declined to revive the criminal case against Walmart, Trump signed legislation aimed at curbing the opioid crisis. A key element was a public-private partnership with several companies, including Walmart, to implement measures such as opioid addiction education initiatives. “Together we are going to end the scourge of drug addiction in America,” Trump said. (This month, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon appeared in the White House’s Rose Garden to pledge the company’s help in combating the coronavirus.)

For those who spent years investigating Walmart, the chasm between the public posturing and the behavior behind closed doors has been deeply discouraging. By the end of the experience, one said: “I wanted to ask for a Walmart greeter badge. It’s got much more stroke than a DEA badge.”

The case against Walmart originated in the summer of 2016, with an investigation of two Texas doctors, Howard Diamond and Randall Wade, who were prescribing opioids on a vast scale. Prosecutors would link each to multiple deaths. The lead prosecutor on the criminal case, Rattan, made it clear to the DEA agents on the case that this should be run like any drug investigation. They should focus on cutting off the dealers’ sources of drugs.

One of those was Walmart. In August, DEA agents, surveilling Wade’s clinic, followed three women to a Walmart in McKinney, Texas. Shortly afterward, all three walked out with large quantities of painkillers.

On Dec. 7, 2016, DEA agents raided that Walmart, seeking records about Diamond and Wade. The two doctors were eventually convicted of illegal distribution of opioids, with Wade sentenced to 10 years in prison and Diamond 20 years.

Walmart has the fifth-highest pharmacy revenue in the country and was the fifth-largest opioid distributor in Texas from 2006-14, according to the DEA. But Walmart pharmacies had not been raided before; raids of Fortune 500 companies are exceedingly rare. Alarmed, Walmart’s lawyers quickly asked the government to conduct no more raids and pledged full cooperation.

The Texas prosecutors broadened their investigation and began to amass evidence that extended far beyond Diamond and Wade. Between 2011 to 2017, they discovered, Walmart pharmacists repeatedly filled prescriptions that they worried were not for legitimate medical purposes, including large doses of opioids and mixtures of drugs the DEA considered red flags for abuse. Walmart pharmacists not just in Texas but in Maine, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Kansas and Washington state raised alarms to the company’s national compliance department about doctors.

Sometimes, these pharmacists requested permission to stop filling opioid prescriptions for certain doctors. In February 2015, a pharmacist wrote to the national compliance department about Diamond:

“We are all concerned about our jobs and about filling for a pill mill doctor. I’m in my 29th year with walmart and have never had a situation this bad with a doctor. Other chains are refusing to fill for him which makes our burden even greater. Please help us.”

Another wrote that same month:

“doctor Diamond is a problem and a liability on us…

Filling for him is a risk that keeps me up at night. This is a serious situation.”

But even after more than a decade of soaring addiction and deaths had transformed opioids into a national crisis, Walmart had a policy that pharmacists could conduct no “blanket refusals” that shut off prescriptions written by a particular doctor. Nor would Walmart put doctors on a prohibited list from headquarters, known as a “corporate block.”

Some of Walmart’s competitors had stopped filling Diamond’s and Wade’s prescriptions, company pharmacists told headquarters. Why wasn’t Walmart doing the same?In February 2014, for example, Kroger sent a letter to Diamond saying it would no longer fill his controlled substances prescriptions. Walmart pharmacists were telling headquarters that CVS, Walgreens and Target were doing the same. (A CVS spokesman said the company implemented a policy of corporate blocks several years ago but, citing privacy, declined to comment on whether the policy was applied to Diamond and Wade. Spokespeople for Kroger, Walgreens and Target did not respond to requests for comment. Walmart insists there is no evidence that competitors issued corporate blocks against Diamond and Wade.)

A Walmart pharmacist in September 2016 wrote an alarmed note about a Pennsylvania doctor who was “under investigation by the DEA for what we believe is a pill mill operation.” He added:

“Rite Aid has sent him a blanket denial letter. …

And since then we have seen our almost solely narcotic and controlled prescriptions from him double….

We are putting pharmacists and Walmart in a bad situation legally….”

Instead of blanket refusals or a corporate block, Walmart’s compliance department said each prescription had to be evaluated separately. To block a prescription and report the refusal, a pharmacist had to fill out a form that could take 20 minutes, a bureaucratic hurdle that pharmacists sought to avoid because they were under pressure to fill prescriptions quickly.

From early 2014 to when Walmart finally blocked Diamond in March 2017 — after the federal investigation had started — the company’s pharmacists filled over 13,000 controlled substances prescriptions from Diamond, an average of 11 a day, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica. That amounted to over 1.3 million doses. Walmart only blocked Wade in November 2016, a month after he was indicted. Between the first Walmart employee’s alarm and then, Walmart pharmacies filled an average of nine controlled substance prescriptions a day written by Wade, amounting to 875,000 doses. Between 2011 and 2016, over 100 different Walmart pharmacies in 17 different states filled Wade’s opioid prescriptions.

More troubling to the federal investigators, for much of this period, Walmart was operating under a secret settlement, known as a Memorandum of Agreement, with the DEA, reached in 2011 and running four years. (The existence of the MOA has not been previously reported.) According to that agreement, a Walmart pharmacy in California had been filling prescriptions “for other than a legitimate medical purpose and/or outside the usual course of professional practice in violation of federal and state law” and had “dispensed controlled substances to individuals that [the pharmacy] knew or should have known were diverting the controlled substances.”

As part of the agreement, in which Walmart did not admit or deny wrongdoing, the company agreed to install national procedures to identify bad prescribers and prescriptions not written for legitimate medical purposes and report them quickly to the DEA.

In addition, Walmart had repeatedly run afoul of the Controlled Substances Act.The company had received more than 50 “Letters of Admonition” from the DEA for its prescribing practices from 2000 to 2018, according to records obtained by ProPublica. And it had paid two small Controlled Substances Act settlements in 2007 and 2008, one for filling unlawful prescriptions and the other for recordkeeping violations.

Prosecutors believed that Walmart was not fulfilling the terms of its agreement with the DEA. The company had an internal system for compiling pharmacists’ “refusals to fill” that it would send to the DEA. They found that Walmart didn’t always send the DEA its alerts. When the company did so, the notices were not complete. The form included a comments field, where pharmacists might write notes flagging concerns about doctors whom they believed were operating pill mills. Walmart sent the DEA the information that a prescription had been refused but excised the employee comments.

On Feb. 13, 2015, when a regional manager received a list of “Refusal to Fill” prescriptions from headquarters, he asked, “Does your team pull out any insights from these we need to highlight?” according to an email reviewed by ProPublica.

Brad Nelson, then a director of Health and Wellness Practice Compliance at Walmart, wrote back:

“The MOA that requires the reporting of the Refusal to fills expires in 30 days. We have not invested a great amount of effort in doing analysis on the data since the agreement is virtually over. Driving sales and patient awareness is a far better use of our Market Directors and Market manager’s time.”

Walmart maintains that Nelson was expressing relief that the onerous burden of alerting the DEA to its refusals to fill was coming to an end, and that in urging the manager to “drive sales,” he was referring to immunizations. Walmart depicted Nelson as a popular middle manager who was the first in the office every morning. He’d come in at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and spend the next three hours faxing refusals to fill to the DEA. Then he would make popcorn for his colleagues.

On Jan. 8, 2015, Nelson emailed colleagues that a pharmacist had contacted him with concerns, indicating “that he is feeling pressured” by his supervisor to fill prescriptions for controlled substances. If the pharmacist doesn’t fill the prescriptions, Nelson added, “then that would be a significant issue.”

Walmart says this email shows that Nelson was consistent: Pharmacists could not issue blanket refusals but could refuse prescriptions on a case-by-case basis. (Nelson referred questions to his lawyer, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Walmart told the investigators that the evidence the Eastern District compiled was misleading. The company said the DEA never required “corporate blocks” or “blanket refusals-to-fill.” The DEA did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Meanwhile, some state boards of pharmacy and medical boards protected doctors from being cut off by pharmacies on the grounds that companies should not interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, Walmart says.

For its part, Texas has no rules that would prohibit a pharmacy chain like Walmart from instituting a corporate block or blanket refusal policy, said Allison Benz, executive director of the Texas State Board of Pharmacy.

In Texas, pharmacy chains may, indeed, impose corporate-wide blocks on doctors whom they suspect are running pill mills, according to Sherif Zaafran, president of the Texas Medical Board. Zaafran said the board has told Walmart and other pharmacies that if they have concerns about a doctor, they have a legal obligation to file a complaint with the board while providing information supporting their concerns. “We never weigh in on a corporate block,” he said. “The corporation can instruct a licensed pharmacist to do so. It is the licensed pharmacist who has the legal ability to not dispense something.”

For its part, Walmart says it was taking its responsibilities seriously. The company says it flagged over 60,000 concerning prescriptions its pharmacists refused to fill during the period the investigation covered. It maintains Nelson was vigilant in urging his pharmacists to refuse to fill if they saw prescriptions they did not like, and to fill out the forms so that the company could send the information to the DEA. In the case of Diamond, Walmart says one of its pharmacists alerted the Texas Medical Board of its concerns. The board allowed Diamond to continue practicing medicine, finding that his “prescribing was appropriate.” (It did place him on a “remedial plan” to fix his allegedly sloppy record-keeping.) The board did not revoke Diamond’s license until October 2017, after his arrest.

The company argues that, as the regulatory entity that licensed doctors to dispense opioids, the DEA, not Walmart, was responsible for the failure to shut down pill pushers like Diamond sooner. After the investigation started, Walmart reversed itself and began instituting corporate blocks, which suggested to prosecutors that the company could have been doing so all along. Since Walmart began the policy, multiple states have assailed and even investigated Walmart for improperly interfering with doctors’ decisions.

The prosecutors did not find Walmart’s many explanations convincing.The fact that the company had sent so many refusals to the DEA for a given doctor and yet would turn around and keep filling prescriptions for the very same sketchy physician suggested the problem was widespread. As far as federal prosecutors and the DEA were concerned, the MOA had placed Walmart on parole — and the company had violated its terms.

In the spring of 2018, the Eastern District of Texas informed Walmart that it was preparing criminal charges against the company. In traditional criminal investigations against individuals, indictments often come as a surprise. The government accumulates evidence and makes its arrest. The defense eventually sees the evidence and can respond then, sometimes only at trial.

Criminal investigations of big corporations don’t typically work that way in the United States. They have developed into a ritualized series of give-and-takes between prosecutors and the company. Prosecutors lay out their evidence and theories and the company gets the opportunity to respond in great detail — all out of public view. The Eastern District of Texas skipped this dance.

Stunned and worried, Walmart requested a meeting with the prosecutors. In April 2018, the two sides sat down.

Walmart had a powerful team. Karen Hewitt, the partner-in-charge of Jones Day’s California region, was the company’s lead outside lawyer. She had been the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California, appointed by George W. Bush and then serving under President Barack Obama, accumulating a record for prosecuting corrupt politicians and drug and border crimes. Walmart’s inside lawyer was Bob Balfe. Walmart’s chief counsel for global investigations, Balfe also had been a U.S. attorney, serving as the head of the Western District of Arkansas, which includes Walmart’s hometown of Bentonville. In the biggest case of his career, he’d successfully prosecuted a Walmart legend, then-vice chairman Tom Coughlin, for a bizarre embezzlement scheme. Since he’d come to Walmart, Balfe had helped steer the company through the seven-year bribery investigation.

Most of the interactions between the government and the Jones Day lawyers were politely choreographed. Hewitt and Balfe were the picture of affability. “When you meet with them, it’s like those two chipmunks,” said one person familiar with the investigation, referring to the Looney Tunes characters Mac and Tosh, gophers that speak with posh British accents. “‘After you.’ ‘No, after you.’ They are so polite.”

The two sides largely agreed on the facts, but differed completely on whether they justified a criminal charge. And a dispute over the use of a single word would poison relations between the two sides, with Walmart using the word as a cudgel to attack the prosecutors.

The word in question was “embarrass.” According to two people familiar with the prosecution, Rattan told the Walmart side that the company should feel embarrassed by its conduct. Walmart would portray it differently, claiming that Rattan said her goal was “to embarrass Walmart” with a criminal indictment. (Walmart’s account is captured in a letter of complaint Hewitt sent the next month to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.)

For the moment, though, the two sides maintained decorum. Walmart asked for 30 days to respond. Prosecutors agreed. On May 3 and 4, the two sides met again, this time in Plano, Texas, where the U.S. attorney’s offices are located.

By this time, Josh Russ had ramped up his office’s civil investigation. He did not plan to attend the May meeting, because it was a meeting led by the criminal side.

Walmart’s lawyers said they hoped to resolve any criminal or civil investigations in one shot and insisted on Russ’ presence. The prosecutors, leery of being accused of improperly coordinating the criminal and civil cases, demanded that Walmart make the request in writing. Walmart did, and Russ agreed to attend. Soon, however, Walmart would accuse the prosecutors of precisely the behavior they were attempting to avoid.

During the first six hours of the meeting, Hewitt and the Walmart lawyers described the results of their own internal investigation, saying the company’s outside lawyers had found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the company or its employees. They’d found no evidence of collusion or any improper financial relationships between doctors or customers and Walmart pharmacists. They also admitted that “Walmart could have and should have done more to voluntarily combat the opioid crisis,” according to the letter Hewitt sent to Rosenstein.

The Walmart lawyers outlined the risks to shareholders, employees and the public that could result from a criminal prosecution. But the prosecutors were unmoved. Rattan said that Walmart was no different from an individual criminal defendant who pleaded with the government for leniency by stating that her children would be harmed by her incarceration. Civil Chief Randi Russell took her remarks a step further, saying that Walmart’s size didn’t make it above prosecution. Balfe, becoming animated, touted Walmart’s opioid reforms and the company’s extensive cooperation with law enforcement.

“All of our defendants find Jesus in jail,” one person present recalled thinking. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t go to prison.”

The country was in a crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and major companies poisoning people like drug dealers, as the prosecution team saw it. To the prosecutors, Walmart’s attitude was not only that it hadn’t done anything wrong, but that Walmart didn’t even need to take the prosecutors seriously. That point was reinforced the next day when Walmart made its first settlement offer: $34 million. Calling the offer “insulting,” Russ said Walmart could do better. The parties, he said, were “in different solar systems.”

The discussions reached a crescendo after one of Walmart’s outside lawyers accused the prosecutors of unethically trying to use the threat of a criminal prosecution to leverage higher civil penalties. Russell, angry, demanded that the Walmart lawyer retract his statement. Russ left the room, saying he would not tolerate an attack on his ethics.

The Eastern District thought Walmart should pay an amount that was several times larger than the then-record $150 million civil penalty that McKesson, the giant pharmaceutical distribution company, had paid for its alleged violations of the Controlled Substances Act. Russell suggested a payment of $1.2 billion.

Later, Rattan pulled out her phone, announcing she’d received a “confidential text message” from her boss, U.S. Attorney Joe Brown, who was attending an NRA rally that day with President Donald Trump. According to Hewitt’s written account, Rattan read the text aloud to the slack-jawed Walmart lawyers: “Walk away, indict them, and then be willing to settle with them after the indictment.”

After another counteroffer, Rattan read Brown’s reply aloud: “That doesn’t hurt Walmart in the least.” Walmart, which had earlier boasted to the group of giving $1 billion a year away to charities, could do much better, the government prosecutors said. Civil Chief Russell quoted the New Testament: “To whom much is given, much is required.”

Some of the prosecutors were willing to trade off a large fine, however, if they could add greater detail to the statement of facts that would eventually go public.Russell said Walmart had to admit it had “killed people.” Jones Day appeared to be eager to avoid such an admission, which would have brought bad publicity and made the company vulnerable in private and state lawsuits. (Walmart is a defendant in the massive opioid lawsuit brought by the states.)

On the way home, Walmart’s lawyers processed what had just happened. Balfe told his colleagues it felt like a hostage situation. A week later, Hewitt wrote to Rosenstein, reiterating the complaint about the office’s purported ethical violations. In a subsequent letter to the DOJ, she appeared ready to make a civil deal: “Walmart is a responsible corporate citizen and stands ready to engage in a principled and reasoned dialogue concerning any potential conduct of its employees that merits a civil penalty under the CSA.”

Rattan and her fellow criminal prosecutors insisted they were sincere. “The threat of indictment is real,” she said, as she concluded the May meeting. “I am not bluffing.” Rattan had amassed a highly successful record in her dozens of trials. “I’m telling you right now,” she would say around the office of the case against Walmart. “Swear in 12 people and present the evidence and they are in trouble.”

Josh Russ began preparing to file the Eastern District’s civil complaint. He sent it to the DEA, which signed off on it. In August 2018, the U.S. attorney’s office commenced planning to bring its civil charges; it began preparations for a press conference to make the announcement.

Meanwhile, Walmart continued appealing up the chain to top officials in Washington. On Aug. 10, Jones Day’s Hewitt sent a letter to Benczkowski, assistant attorney general and head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, complaining about the investigation. The letter argued that a conviction could harm “millions of low-income and elderly citizens” who rely on federal programs for food and medicine. A convicted corporation might not be permitted to participate in those programs any longer. She outlined what she said were Walmart’s “remedial” measures to become “an industry leader in the Nation’s fight against the opioid crisis.”

Soon after, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office called Brown and told him to halt the Texas office’s criminal investigation, according to five people familiar with the investigation.

Officials at DOJ in Washington then turned their attention to the civil probe. In a video conference call in late August, Stephen Cox, the deputy associate attorney general and a top official in the civil division, and Mary Daly, a daughter of Bill Barr and then the director of opioid enforcement, asked Russ’ team about its tactics and evidence. Cox, who had never been a federal prosecutor and joined the agency from Texas energy company Apache, appeared upset that the Texas prosecutors had sought emails between compliance officials and their bosses, senior executives at Walmart. He seemed to view that tactic as overly aggressive, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The Texas prosecutors said they did so to find out what top Walmart executives knew.

Russ and others contended the civil suit was ready to be filed. Cox said it wasn’t. To spur Cox and his colleagues to action, Russ began to send daily examples of what the prosecutorial team viewed as particularly egregious prescriptions Walmart pharmacists had filled. His message: People had died because of opioids Walmart had dispensed, and every day that passed meant another lost opportunity because of the ticking clock on the statute of limitations.

Meanwhile, Walmart exercised its PR and political muscle. Just days after the contentious May meeting with Eastern District officials, Walmart launched what it billed as a sweeping effort “aimed at curbing opioid misuse and abuse.” The cornerstone was that it would restrict initial opioid prescriptions to no more than a seven-day supply. In September 2018, Ivanka Trump visited a Walmart in Mesquite, Texas, very close to the Eastern District’s offices. She was there, the White House said, to learn how Walmart trains and retains workers. The trip seemed to indicate just how close the company was to the White House.

Then came the meeting with Rosenstein in October 2018.Asked about his comments that day, Rosenstein responded by email that he did not recall his comment about everyone being “capitalists” but said: “If you lack the courage to decline a proposed criminal prosecution when you conclude that it is a mistake, you do not belong in a leadership job. We reached every decision after considering the non-partisan factors set forth in the Justice Department’s principles of federal prosecution.”

Trump officials ordered a six-month cooling off period, directing the U.S. attorney’s office to try to reach a settlement with Walmart.

Meanwhile the DOJ formed a national Walmart Working Group, with four other U.S. attorney’s offices in New York, North Carolina, Florida and Colorado.State attorneys general were brought in. On the one hand, the creation of the group underscored the national character of Walmart’s opioid problems. On the other, it dispersed responsibility among different offices and Russ, who was appointed co-head of the group, told colleagues he thought his investigation was being taken away from him.

In January 2019, the DEA presented Walmart with a new, broad subpoena. Walmart had been furnishing what it contended were huge volumes of materials. But it had not handed over everything the government requested. Walmart complained to the prosecutors that the requests were too onerous and overreaching, and that the company needed more time.

Prosecutors felt Walmart wasn’t sufficiently cooperative. Walmart never furnished a full list of doctors its pharmacists were concerned about. Walmart did not give the government full information on its internal databases to analyze prescribing information and patterns. Perhaps most crucially, Walmart had not turned over the emails the Eastern District had subpoenaed between compliance officials and their bosses (the ones Cox had been so shocked about).

Russ begged Washington officials to take it to a judge to enforce the government’s subpoena. The Trump appointees refused, telling the Working Group to keep negotiating.

The Texas prosecutors worried Walmart had an even better inside track than it had already displayed. In June 2019, they learned that Hewitt and Balfe had met with Barr.

The company says the three met as part of a national conference of U.S. attorneys and that it amounted to a grip-and-grin photo op in the presence of several other U.S. attorneys. No one raised the investigation, according to Walmart: “Bob Balfe and Karen Hewitt did not have any discussions with Attorney General Barr or his staff about Walmart.”

In response to an extensive list of questions for this story, DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec responded with a statement that read in whole: “While the Department does not generally confirm, deny, or acknowledge the existence of investigations, it is worth noting that Pro Publica’s reporting in this piece is misleading and contains numerous inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions. As just one example, the meeting with Attorney General Barr that is cited was with eight former US Attorneys from the National Association of Former US Attorneys (NAFUSA) all acting in their capacities as NAFUSA officers, where no particular matters were discussed.”

Still, the prosecutors felt like the Walmart side attempted multiple end runs. For example, Cox’s predecessor, Rachel Brand, had left the DOJ in February 2018 to take a top job in Walmart’s legal department. About a year later, Brand’s attorney inquired as to whether she could appear before the DOJ. The Eastern District team got wind of the request and raised concerns. Walmart says Brand had no interactions with top DOJ or White House officials about the investigation.

On the criminal side, now that the corporate indictment was dead, the Texas prosecutors pursued the directive to focus on individuals. Rattan prepared an indictment of Brad Nelson, the former compliance manager who had told an executive that the company should focus on “driving sales.”

Walmart lawyers objected. Nelson was no criminal, they contended. Jones Day kept up its pressure. In another letter to Trump officials on Sept. 27, 2019, this time addressed to Gus Eyler, who was now the co-head of the national Walmart Working Group with Russ, Hewitt objected to the threat of a Nelson indictment and once again accused the prosecutors of trying to embarrass the company. Hewitt wrote: “We are concerned that either of the following may be true: the threat of an indictment of Mr. Nelson is being made to pressure Walmart in a civil proceeding in violation of DOJ procedures and the rules of legal ethics, or, just as concerning, EDTX actually intends to prosecute an individual not because the facts support it but in an effort to embarrass Walmart in retaliation for the previous declination of a criminal case against the Company.”

She added, “We also intend to suspend further production of documents under the Omnibus Subpoena until these issues relating to the status of this investigation are resolved.”

The government had issued a lawful subpoena. Walmart was treating it as optional.

Under other circumstances, the DOJ might have raced into a court to force a defiant company to comply with the subpoena. Instead, soon after receiving Hewitt’s letter, Washington informed the Texas prosecutors that they could not indict Nelson.

The civil investigation was still muddling on, however. In midsummer, as the six-month deadline approached, Russ told DOJ officials that Walmart was still not cooperating fully. Trump officials decided to give Walmart three more months. When the next deadline came up on Oct. 25, Washington wanted to extend the negotiations again.

Russ resigned that day. Walmart, he said in his resignation letter, “abused the Department’s fairness, largely ignored our subpoena, and scoffed at our larger work on behalf of all Americans.”

He added, “When I took my oath of office, I invoked God’s judgment and swore that I would support and defend the Constitution.”

The news reverberated throughout the office. “Josh was Captain America, well-respected, well thought of. It came as a big blow,” said a person familiar with the investigation, adding, “It seemed that maybe the country’s best interests were not at heart.”

On Nov. 7, the new deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, summoned the Texas prosecutorial team again to Washington for another meeting, gauging the progress of the Working Group’s negotiations with Walmart. The team reprised its presentation of the evidence that it had delivered to Rosenstein about a year earlier. Joe Brown, the U.S. attorney, asked Rosen: “Can you point out what’s wrong with our evidence?” Rosen did not respond.

In recent weeks, the DOJ’s inaction has begun to raise concerns on Capitol Hill. Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Dhillon and Barr expressing “concern regarding the Department’s inability to hold prescription opioid distributors and chain pharmacies accountable.” A hearing may follow.

Meanwhile, four years after the investigation first began, negotiations on a civil settlement between the government and Walmart continue.

Do you have information about the Trump Department of Justice or corporate malfeasance? Jesse Eisinger can be reached at jesse.eisinger@propublica.org or on Signal: 718-496-5233.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-roger-stone-debacle-is-a-true-crisis-and-the-house-must-force-bill-barr-to-testify/

no lnx

The Roger Stone debacle is a true crisis — and the House must force Bill Barr to testify

Written by Daily Kos February 11, 2020

by Hunter

This cannot go on. Three top prosecutors (which may turn into four) in the Roger Stone case have now withdrawn after Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice ordered them to revise their guideline-based recommendations on Stone’s sentencing. This happened the morning after Donald Trump tweeted that he “cannot allow” the prosecutors’ recommended sentencing of Stone, an ally and key stonewaller in the Robert Mueller investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian government hacking in the 2016 elections.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-justice-department-report-on-russia-probe-origins-is-actually-a-damning-indictment-of-trump-in-the-ukraine-scandal

no lnx

The Justice Department report on Russia probe origins is actually a damning indictment of Trump in the Ukraine scandal

Written by Cody Fenwick December 9, 2019

It’s a tale of two investigations. Neither is pretty, but one is, in the end, appropriate and warranted; the other is a grotesque sham. And the story of each investigation illuminates key aspects of the other.

The two investigations I’m discussing are, of course, the Russia investigation and the Ukrainian investigation of Vice President Joe Biden, which, as far as we can tell, never actually existed, despite Trump’s efforts.

Both stories, though, were front and center on Monday in a spectacular concurrence of American political news. The Justice Department inspector general released its review on the origins of the Russia investigation that targeted four members of the 2016 Trump campaign and their potential ties to the Kremlin. At the same time, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the report from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on the Ukraine scandal, which focused on President Donald Trump’s effforts to induce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations of Biden and the Democratic National Committee.

The central findings of the IG report were precisely what had been reported in recent days. While IG Michael Horowitz found significant errors and omissions in the FBI’s conduct and policies during the investigation, he determined that the Russia investigation was properly predicated and therefore not launched as a politically motivated hoax to take down Trump.

In some ways, this is to be expected. There was never any real indication that the Russia probe was an improper attempt to undermine Trump. And we should expect that any thorough review of any large project of an organization like the FBI will find errors and mistakes and will likely offer recommendations for improvement.

But Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr had repeatedly fed wild speculation that the Russia probe was a “hoax” — and apparently the IG report won’t even change their mind. Since they’ll continue to push this conspiracy theory, it’s significant that the IG has clearly concluded that it’s unfounded.

The errors that the IG found, however, are similarly quite signficant. Not because they prove Trump was perniciously targeted in a corrupt conspiracy (the IG also found issues in the Clinton email probe), but it shows that the FBI’s procedures warrant serious reform, which FBI Director Christopher Wray said Monday he is undertaking. It also emphasizes that inspector general investigations of this kind should be welcomed, and the fact that such errors can be uncovered by a thorough review should give us confidence that oversight mechanisms can provide some real accountability. Everyone, regardless of partisan affiliation or opinion about the Trump-Russia matter, should welcome that.

However, these key findings and conclusions from the report also shed light on what was so disturbing, wrong, and impeachable about Trump’s plot for Ukrainian investigations of Biden and the DNC.

Consider, first, the IG’s finds about the origins of the investigations into four Trump campaign officials. Horowitz found “that the quantum of information articulated by the FBI to open the individual investigations on Papadopoulos, Page, Flynn, andManafort in August 2016 was sufficient to satisfy the low threshold established by the Department and the FBI.” The report adds: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations.”

Now, most observers would almost certainly agree that, had then-President Barack Obama himself ordered the FBI to go after the Trump campaign in the heat of the election, this would be evidence for political bias in the investigation. This would especially be true if he directed the probe on an extremely flimsy basis. As Horowitz found, this did not occur.

However, we know this occurred in Trump’s efforts to obtain Ukrainian investigations. Trump himself was at the center of the effort to get Ukraine to investigate two rival entities in the 2020 campaign — the DNC and Biden. The fact that Trump cared about little else in Ukraine — Gordon Sondland reportedly admitted that Trump “doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine.” And Trump never mentioned general “corruption” concerns in Ukraine to Zelensky — just the investigations of his opponents. He clearly doesn’t care about foreign corruption in other countries, his own party, or his own Cabinet. If we also consider the fact that Biden’s actions in Ukraine and apparent conflict of interest with his son Hunter Biden’s work at the company Burisma had been known about publicly for years and yet were never a major focus until he entered the 2020 Democratic primary, then it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ask for the investigation was purely politically motivated.

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s attorney, even said as he pressed for Ukraine to investigate Biden that information from the probe “will be very, very helpful to my client” — adding as an afterthought that it “may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

And in his July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump asked for an investigation of the DNC’s server based entirely on a debunked and preposterous conspiracy theory. This clearly would not have satisfied the predication requirements for an FBI investigation.

So unlike the Russia probe, which Trump has called a “witch hunt” and “treason,” it’s clear the Ukrainian investigations he sought would have been both politically motivated and improperly predicated.

But it’s even worse than that. Consider the errors and failures of policy that Horowitz identified in his report. These failings are serious and need to be addressed.

And yet, while defending Trump’s ask for investigations by Ukraine, his defenders have repeatedly insisted that the country has extreme levels of corruption. It’s exactly this corruption, though, that makes it so dangerous and preposterous for a U.S. president to use his monumental leverage over Ukraine to aim its law enforcement at a domestic political opponent. Not only is it likely to have egregious errors and lapses in procedure many times worse than those at the FBI, but it could also have potentially resulted in an entirely sham investigation, if the Ukrainian authorities concluded it was necessary to frame Biden. (Thankfully, though, it seems Zelensky is genuinely working to fight corruption.)

But there also would have been no mechanism like a trusted and independent U.S. inspector general to provide a transparent report to the American people on the probe. So what Trump wanted was a politically motivated criminal investigation targeting his opponent in the heat of an election, with far less accountability and oversight than is provided for in the DOJ — which, it seems, was unwilling to pursue the investigations Trump wanted in any event.

The evidence shows, then, that what Trump did is far worse and more egregious than the Obama administration’s failures in the Russia probe, which the president claims amounted to “treason.”

We should thank Horowitz, because whatever his other failures may be, his report clarifies what’s at stake in the Ukraine scandal.

Cody Fenwick is a senior editor at AlterNet. He writes about politics, media and science. Follow him on Twitter @codytfenwick.

barr uses doj s protection racket/enforcer for trump, crim invest of origin of russia probe

barr disputes IG report on FBI looking a russia collusion (did find minor problems, fake docs?!) 12/19

DOJ says Congress can’t stop Trump Org from taking foreign payments — despite Constitution’s emoluments clause

Brad Reed / Raw StoryDecember 9, 2019

The so-called emoluments clause has been the center of a case that many legal scholars have been making that President Donald Trump is regularly violating the Constitution by continuing to…

no lnx

House committee sues AG Barr in wake of judge’s ruling that declared ‘presidents are not kings’

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement November 26, 2019

The House Oversight Committee wasted no time in filing a lawsuit against Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, suing both Trump appointees for failure to respond to subpoenas demanding documents.

Declaring “President Trump and his aides are not above the law,” Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney on Tuesday announced, “I am filing this enforcement action today because the Trump Administration’s brazen obstruction of Congress must not stand.”

Politico reports Maloney is seeking documents related to the 2020 Census, and the Trump administration’s attempts to add a citizenship question to the constitutionally-mandate survey.

That question was the brainchild of a Republican strategist, now deceased, who wrote it would depress participation in the Census by minorities, effectively granting Republicans greater representation in the House and other areas – including where $675 billion in federal funds are spent.

One federal judge declared if the citizenship question made it onto the census, “hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people will go uncounted.”

The Trump administration has ignored many subpoenas from House Democrats. On Monday a federal judge ruled former White House Counsel Don McGahn could not ignore a subpoena and must testify before Congress.

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her 118-page ruling Monday.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/23/critics-condemn-inclusion-anti-semitic-white-nationalist-blog-post-daily-briefing

no lnx

, August 23, 2019

byCommon Dreams

Critics Condemn Inclusion of Anti-Semitic, White Nationalist Blog Post in Daily Briefing Sent to Immigration Judges by Trump's DOJ

"There is no bottom," Rep. Ilhan Omar said of the Trump administration

byJulia Conley, staff writer

0 Comments

An immigration office in the U.S. Department of Justice sent an anti-Semitic blog post to the entire immigration court system this week, taken from an anti-immigration white nationalist website. (Photo: Ad DeCort/Flickr/cc)

A nationwide organization of U.S. immigration judges demanded immediate action to ensure that the U.S. Department of Justice operates without xenophobia, racism, and anti-semitism after the department sent an email with a link to a white nationalist website to employees of the immigration court system.

As Buzzfeed News first reported late Thursday, the DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) sent a link to a blog post from the white nationalist website VDare, attacking immigration judges and calling for the decertification of the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ), as part of a regular news briefing it sends to all court employees.

The blog post, sent in Monday's briefing, included the term "lugenpresse," German for "lying press," in relation to the New York Times, taking the word that was commonly used by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party regarding the press and Hitler's critics. It also referred to NAIJ leaders as "kritarch."

In a letter to the EOIR, NAIJ President Ashley Tabaddor wrote that the use of the term "kritarch" was anti-Semitic:

The reference to Kritarch in a negative tone is deeply offensive and anti-Semitic. The Kritarchy is a reference to ancient Israel during the time when there was rule by judges...VDare's use of the term in a pejorative manner casts Jewish history in a negative light as an anti-Semitic trope of Jews seeking power and control.

"Our union certainly has the right enemies," said Peter Shearon, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), the parent union of the NAIJ. "This horrible attempt at ethnic intimidation shows exactly why immigration judges—like other highly skilled technical and professional workers—need a voice on the job. We are committed to stand together against any attempt to harass or threaten our members."

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who has been accused by conservatives of anti-Semitism because of her criticism of the Israeli government—was among those who decried the attacks on the judges.

"There is no bottom," she wrote of the Trump administration, calling on Congress to condemn the DOJ office's actions.

VDare is run by Peter Brimelow, who has ties to white nationalist Richard Spencer and who publicly said in 2017 that Latinos are "prone" to rape.

Immigration attorney Matthew Hoppock told The Washington Post that he has obtained every EOIR briefing since September 2018 through Freedom of Information Act requests, and that so-called "news" items from right-wing websites including the Daily Caller and Breitbart News have been commonplace in the briefings, which are meant to spread information about immigration, for at least a year.

"Sometimes they link to The Washington Post or BuzzFeed, but a lot of times it's just nonsense," Hoppock told the Post. "It feels like propaganda. It feels like they're being given an agenda, when they're supposed to be neutral."

Another critic, writer Molly McKew, wrote that evidence that DOJ employees who oversee immigration law view anti-immigration websites as news sources was "the real issue" at hand....

AH AN 619

DOJ money laundering probe of Deutsche Bank includes Kushner transactions

by Alex Henderson June 20, 2019

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is conducting a criminal investigation of possible money laundering violations by Deutsche Bank, and the New York Times is reporting that the probe will…

bernhardt?

US Sues California, Says Water Policy Violates State Law - The New ...

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/03/28/us/ap-us-california-water-wars.html

16 hours ago - The federal government has sued California over water policies it says violate ... The lawsuit filed Thursday in Sacramento federal court seeks to block a plan ... salmon by increasing water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. ... The U.S. Department of Justice said the plan was arbitrary and failed to ...

US Sues California, Says Water Policy Violates State Law

By The Associated Press

March 28, 2019

LOS ANGELES — The federal government sued California on Thursday over a water policy it said violates the state's environmental protection law.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit in Sacramento federal court to block a contentious plan approved in December to increase river flows in the San Joaquin River and three tributaries to help revive dwindling salmon populations.

It was part of a larger effort to protect the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which state officials called an "ecosystem in crisis." The delta supplies water for the majority of California's people and farms.

Once-thriving fish in the delta, which flows out to San Francisco Bay, have plunged from some 70,000 adult Chinook salmon returning to the San Joaquin basin in the fall of 1984 to just 10,000 in 2017.

Some environmental groups supported the plan, while other conservation groups and fishing groups said it fell short in providing enough water for habitat.

Farmers opposed to the plan because it would divert less water for irrigation protested last summer outside the state Capitol.

The U.S. lawsuit said the plan was arbitrary and the state failed to analyze impacts on the environment and would reduce water coming out of the New Melones reservoir for farms, businesses and hydroelectric operations.

The environmental analysis "hid the true impacts of their plan and could put substantial operational constraints on the Department of the Interior's ability to effectively operate the New Melones Dam, which plays a critical role in flood control, irrigation, and power generation in the Sacramento region," said Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark said in a statement. MFer

The federal government's lawsuit follows a suit filed last month in state court by the California Farm Bureau Federation to block the plan.

George Kostyrko, a spokesman for the water board, said the agency looks forward to defending the plan that involved years of analysis and public input.

The lawsuit was an unusual turn of events with the state of California as a defendant in a lawsuit with the federal government. The state's attorney general has sued the Trump administration more 47 times.

Attorney Doug Obegi of the Natural Resources Defense Council said it was ironic that the U.S. government was citing state law to sue California in federal court.

"The Trump administration has shown its flagrant disregard for state laws for some time, so it's not surprising in that regard," Obegi said. "I can't for the life of me see how a federal court lawsuit against a state agency for a claimed violation of state law doesn't get tossed out immediately for violating the U.S. Constitution."

The NRDC said the December decision was a step forward, but it wouldn't do enough to reach the goal to double the salmon population.

John McManus, president of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, said the plan approved in December had "re-balanced a badly out of balance water diversion scheme" and the suit was a "frivolous attempt to see more water diverted and more salmon industry jobs and families destroyed."

ref hmmn

the hill

ho would have thought that, this deep into the Russia collusion probe, we'd be learning about yet another dossier connected to Hillary Clinton? And, as it turns out, it was sort of a family secret.

By his own account, senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr played an essential — and unorthodox — role, carrying politically tainted allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion to the FBI during the 2016 election.

First, it was unverified intelligence starting in July 2016 from Trump-hating former British spy Christopher Steele,the author of the infamous Russia dossier.

Next, it was sketchy intelligence starting in August 2016 from Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, an opposition-research contractor who hired Steele and was paid to help Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign develop political dirt on Trump.

And now we learn, from testimony that is still being kept secret from the public, that Ohr admitted to Congress last year that he also took Russia information that his wife, Nellie, assembled against Trump on a computer drive and delivered that to the FBI in 2016 — a revelation that has raised fresh concerns in Congress about a possible conflict of interest.

Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion GPS and, for a time, worked on the same Clinton-financed Russian research project as Steele, according to the testimony.

DOJ ethics rules forbid department officials from working in cases where a spouse has a financial interest, a prohibition that Bruce Ohr said he knew about when he forwarded his wife’s evidence to the FBI.

The way Ohr described it, his wife’s research was like an additional dossier assembled from Fusion GPS research to augment what Steele was separately providing the FBI.

“She (Nellie Ohr) provided me with a memory stick that included research she had done for Fusion GPS on various Russian figures,” Ohr told congressional investigators.

“And the reason she provided that information to me is, my understanding was, it related to some of the same — it related to the FBI’s Russia investigation. And she gave me that stick to give to the FBI.”

Ohr’s revelation about his wife adds yet another example of people connected to the Clinton machine flooding the FBI with anti-Trump Russia research during the 2016 election.

Steele’s dossier was the opening salvo. A document sent to the State Department by Clinton proteges Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal was another. A thumb drive given by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman to FBI general counsel James Baker was a third. Simpson's thumb drive given to Bruce Ohr was a fourth. And Nellie Ohr’s thumb drive would be a fifth. At least three of those work products — those from Steele, Shearer/Blumenthal and Nellie Ohr — resemble what many people might consider a dossier.

https://corporatepresidency.org/enforcement/

In the “tough on crime” story President Donald Trump likes to tell about himself, he’s a “law and order” tough guy fighting to save “the forgotten men and women” from the scourge of “American carnage.”

But even as the Trump administration ramps up “zero-tolerance” policies against street crimes and immigration, it has gone soft on enforcement policies that protect Americans from lawbreaking corporations.

“Corporate Impunity,” a new Public Citizen report, finds that in 11 of 12 agencies led by a Trump administration official for most of 2017, total monetary penalties imposed on corporate violators plummeted.

At the Department of Justice (DOJ), penalties against corporate offenders plunged by 90 percent....

Similarly, in 10 out of the 12 agencies Public Citizen analyzed, the number of enforcement actions against corporate violators declined – in many cases quite dramatically. At the Transportation Department’s Aviation Consumer Protection Division, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission, the total number of enforcement actions brought against corporate wrongdoers declined by a third or more.

The only one of these agencies at which penalties increased was the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is responsible for blocking corporations from doing business with sanctioned countries, businesses and individuals.

The report was released in partnership with the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, whose Violation Tracker database documents penalties the federal government imposes on corporate offenders.

As the federal government’s chief law enforcement agency, the DOJ is especially powerful when it comes to setting enforcement policy. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” approach to immigration and street crimes has been widely reported. What has garnered less scrutiny is the DOJ’s maximum permissiveness policy toward corporate offenders.

Under Trump, the DOJ has:

Allowed corporations that engage in illegal bribery abroad to completely avoid prosecution. As long as they meet certain DOJ conditions, corporations that violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act never have to enter a plea, and their penalties are reduced by 50 percent.
Reduced corporate penalties by eliminating payments to third parties that help right corporate wrongs. In the past, corporate settlements often included payments to nonprofit organizations that repair corporate harms. For example, a penalty against Harley Davidson for alleged emissions cheating violations was reduced by $3 million because the funds would have gone to the American Lung Association.
Reduced corporate penalties by limiting how much a single corporate violation can trigger penalties from multiple enforcement agencies. The policy led to a bank accused of anti-money launderingdeficiencies seeing its penalty reduced by $50 million.
Limited the DOJ’s power to bring charges against corporations that defraud the government. Former Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand instructed DOJ lawyers to stop citing noncompliance with “guidance documents” as evidence that a violation has been committed. Guidance documents are interpretations of regulations that federal agencies provide to the industries they oversee to facilitate compliance. This change severely restricts the DOJ’s power to bring cases against corporations, especially for False Claims Act violations of defrauding the government. Brand’s former employer, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, celebrated the policy memo. Brand resigned shortly after releasing the memo to take the top legal post at Walmart.

The impact of these policies is predictable: The longer they are in place, the fewer corporate criminals and wrongdoers will be held accountable.

The rampant corporate crimes and wrongdoing cause real harm to Americans who are ripped off by banks, poisoned by polluters, deceived by drugmakers and have their data stolen and exploited by tech monopolies.

Public Citizen aims to amplify these concerns and ensure that corporations that put profits over people are held accountable.

https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/steven-brill-corporate-liberals-corporate-crime/

phrma:

There is a pivotal corporate crime scene in Steven Brill’s new book – Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty Year Fall – and Those Fighting to Reverse It (Knopf, 2018).

Brill is sitting in a conference room with federal prosecutors in Philadelphia trying to understand why no executive was charged with Johnson & Johnson’s criminal off label marketing of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children and the elderly. The prosecutors had secured a misdemeanor plea from a subsidiary and collected a $2.2 billion fine.

Brill wanted to know – why wasn’t the key Johnson & Johnson executive – the current CEO, Alex Gorsky – charged?

“Why instead was Johnson & Johnson allowed, like other drug companies, to pay a fine and have the corporation – actually only its subsidiary – plead guilty to one crime, a misdemeanor associated with its marketing to the elderly?” Brill asked.

In the conference room, “prosecutors who had worked on the case seemed surprised by the question,” Brill writes.

“As we sat in their conference room in Philadelphia, they looked at me blankly, as if I didn’t understand that getting the $2.2 billion fine and the misdemeanor guilty plea was a big victory, squeezed out over months of tense negotiations,” Brill says. “One of the lawyers involved later said that prosecuting Gorsky had been mentioned casually by the prosecutors at the start of the negotiations, but that it was never brought up again as the talks continued, and that no one on either side had considered it a serious possibility.”

Are you saying that the reason is the fundamentally corrupt nature of the system – where you have the prosecutors swinging through the revolving door to the big corporate firms?

“I don’t think it’s corruption like that,” Brill told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “It’s more a state of mind. Take the Johnson & Johnson case. Eric Holder has a press conference and says – we are getting a $2.2 billion fine. What these people did was despicable. They put the children and the elderly at risk for their lives. And that’s the end of it. Everybody feels good. The government gets a big fine. Johnson & Johnson could care less about that fine. It’s a fraction of their earnings. The stock doesn’t even take a hit the first day. And nobody is held personally responsible. That dynamic happens over and over again.”

“Look at the press release involving JP Morgan and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in China. You read that entire press release and the statement of facts behind the press release. Not a single person is named.”

“There is a scene in the Johnson & Johnson piece. I’m sitting in a conference room at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Philadelphia asking them about the case. And I say – what about Alex Gorsky? And they looked at me like I was a Martian. What does Alex Gorsky have to do with this? We have this big fine. We have this corporate integrity agreement. And I said – he and others are the people who did this. And the prosecutors actually didn’t seem to understand the question.”

“And you report that Judge Rakoff says that when he was a prosecutor, they would actually treat corporate crimes like street crimes, like mob crimes – go after the individuals, start at the bottom, flip witnesses, move up the corporate ladder. Indicting the corporation wasn’t in the equation. It was indicting the responsible executives. Now that has been flipped.”

You say state of mind. But isn’t it more insidious? When you were in that room at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Philadelphia, you were facing prosecutors who were looking at their career choices. Isn’t it true that to upend the apple cart, to start criminally prosecuting executives at Johnson & Johnson, would adversely affect their career paths?

“Call me naive. You are reading too much venality into it. They have gotten into this rhythm of – this is the way the game is played. It’s not like the prosecutor woke up that morning and said – if I don’t hold Alex Gorsky responsible I’m going to get a much better job.”

“What he could be thinking is – if I try to hold Alex Gorsky responsible, I’m never going to see a settlement. The people in Washington are going to be pissed off at me. There is going to be a long trial. They are going to have the best lawyers in the world. And we may lose everything. I think they are wrong, but that is what they may be thinking.”

In your book, you seem to be looking at what we call corporate liberals. They are generally liberal lawyers who went to liberal Ivy League law schools and come out to work for the corporate state in one way or another – either corporate law firms or for a stint as a prosecutor then to return to the law firm.

“In part, yes,” Brill says. “The best example goes back a ways. The law firm Paul Weiss working for JP Stephens. And Munger Tolles, a classic example of the relatively new firm with people from Yale, Harvard and Stanford law schools. They wrote the legal briefs that argue that Wells Fargo should be able to rely on a compulsory arbitration clause for all of those people whose customers were screwed by having the phony accounts set up for them.”

Those are two examples, but it’s pretty much the norm. The graduates of the top liberal law firms go to work for big firms that represent corporations and corporate criminals.

“Yes. In fact, Ralph Nader sent me a study done about six months ago of Harvard Law School alumni that said the same thing.”

You do raise exceptions in your book. One you raise is Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets.

“He got out of Harvard Law School, but also served in the Air Force and worked for Ted Kennedy. He then went to Skadden Arps, then left Skadden Arps and went in the opposite direction. He set up the Better Markets organization, which is a non profit that lobbies against the corporate lobbyists.”

Your book focuses on what you call moats – liberal elites representing corporations who try and protect themselves and their self-interests, but at the same time undermining the common good.One area that you know better than most are these corporate lawyer moats. But why are there so few exceptions – like Dennis Kelleher?

“There are lots of exceptions. And there is also the model of people going in and out of corporate law firms and working in public service. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a binary thing. But the main reason is that people tend to do things for incentives. And one of the major incentives in our world is money.”

What is the way out of it?

“More people ought to be thinking about a balance in their lives between their personal achievement and the common good. That’s why I have in my book so many examples of people and organizations who are defying the stereotypes. Max Stier runs the Partnership for Public Service. He went to Stanford Law School. He then went to Williams & Connolly. Then he decided he wanted to do public service. And so far, he hasn’t looked back.”

You have a section in your book on the corporate crime moat and you ask why we are unable to hold corporate executives accountable for their crimes.

“Corporations and CEOs have hit the trifecta. First, they established that they were too big to fail so the country has to bail them out. Then they established that they were too big to jail, because if you took their license to operate away, the economy would also crash. And finally, they established the last leg. The CEOs who run them can’t be held responsible because the corporations are too big to manage. Any CEO can always say — you cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this was going on in my company. My company is all around the world. I have hundreds of thousands employees. How are you going to prove that I knew it?”

“That is the story of what happened after the crash. No CEO of any respectable company was held responsible. And even the CEOs of less respectable companies were not held personally responsible. Look at the CEO of Countrywide.

He paid a bit of a fine. But it might have been a fraction of the money he made.”

“The whole idea of the book is what we have lost at the top is any sense of responsibility for the common good and any mechanism of accountability for those who hurt the common good.”

For the complete q/a format Interview with Steven Brill, see 32 Corporate Crime Reporter 25(13), June 18, 2018, [print edition only.]

The war on the southern border, the Muslim ban, and mass detention of immigrants—President Trump seems determined to claw America back into the nation’s racist past one executive order at a time. In its crusade against educational equity, the Justice Department has emerged as the White House’s stealth weapon against civil rights. It is now moving quietly to dismantle the policy of affirmative action: Supposedly aiming to combat “reverse racism,” the administration has rescinded key Obama-era policy guidance that upheld the principle of encouraging diversity in K-12 and higher education. Although the removal of this guidance does not alter past court precedents or repeal any laws directly, veteran civil-rights advocates are wary that, under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the administration has been moving steadily to work “separate but equal” back into the nation’s classrooms.

Dennis Park,head of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, described the move as an attempt to “reverse the progress achieved over the more than half century since Brown v. [Board] of Education.” But he added that the law would ultimately “be determined by the Supreme Court and not an Administration which seems bent on promoting division.”

The problem is that “separate but equal” persists in our public schools, if not in the letter of the law, then in the structural and cultural barriers driving de facto school segregation. And in the larger war for equitable education for all, some right-wing Asian Americans have been enlisted to provide a demographic twist on the escalating affirmative-action culture war. The Trump administration’s rollbacks parallel a major lawsuit against Harvard University, led by right-wing groups, claiming that Asian Americans and whites have been victimized by admissions policies that unfairly favor black and Latino applicants. Last fall, the Trump administration shifted its focus in civil-rights enforcement to scrutinizing what it called “intentional race-based discrimination.” The Justice Department officially backed the suit this week, while the university was filing final briefs in the hopes of avoiding a trial, further bolstering right-wing arguments that programs supporting black and Latino academic advancement are anti-meritocratic and unfairly discriminatory.

The Harvard case also echoes a debate unfolding in New York over school-diversity policies, where some Asian-American community advocates have assailed efforts to promote racial diversity in the city’s prized magnet schools by altering the testing protocols for acceptance to these schools.

The Trump administration’s political reversal on affirmative action, and the advancement of conservative legal attacks in the courts, reflects a generally reactionary climate in the politics of education. As with welfare reform and “zero-tolerance” policing, the pushback against affirmative action cloaks its racist subtext in a rhetoric of “defending” the civil rights of whites and Asian Americans.

Progressive Asian-American groups warn that their communities are being used a political cudgel in the affirmative-action debate. Thirty-five Asian-American civil-rights organizations and many academics filed amicus briefs defending affirmative action this week in the Harvard case. Racial barriers remain pervasive in both the K-12 education system and in higher education, and the real problems lie in discrimination on many levels, from social background, to different levels of academic preparedness, to unequal funding, and housing segregation—not simply whether the admissions officer at an elite school sees an Asian surname on the application.

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But the Trump administration is turning the same tool against affirmative action in college admissions, a major — and highly contentious — legacy of the civil rights era, and one that white conservatives have opposed for decades. In the past few years, the anti-affirmative action cause has been joined by Asian-Americans who argue that they are being held to a higher standard, losing out on coveted slots at places like Harvard as African-Americans, Latinos and other groups get a boost.

A handful of states already ban public universities from relying on affirmative action, pushing several toward a model that takes socioeconomic factors into account instead of race. Public universities in California and Washington have tried to engineer class-based diversity in their student bodies, believing that giving a lift to lower-income students will end up bringing in more minority students as well.

But these methods have not produced classes with an ethnic makeup that mirrors that of the states where they have been used, and many selective private universities continue to admit students partly on the basis of race — though, until Harvard was forced to detail its internal admissions policies recently, few could say how elite universities actually weighed applicants’ race.

Now, universities that factor race into admissions have found a powerful new opponent in the Trump administration, which argued in its filing on Thursday that the court should deny Harvard’s request to dismiss the case before trial.

The government said that Supreme Court rulings require that universities considering race in admissions meet several standards. They must define their diversity-related goals and show that they cannot meet those goals without using race as a factor in admissions decisions.

The department argued that Harvard does not adequately explain how race factors into its admissions decisions, leaving open the possibility that the university is going beyond what the law allows.

[Read: Harvard’s admissions officers maintain a culling system in which factors like where applicants are from, how much money they have and how they fit goals for diversity may be just as important as perfect scores.]

“Harvard has failed to show that it does not unlawfully discriminate against Asian-Americans,” the Justice Department said in a statement Thursday.

Harvard said it was “deeply disappointed” but not surprised “given the highly irregular investigation the D.O.J. has engaged in thus far.”

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WASHINGTON — The Justice Department lent its support on Thursday to students who are suing Harvard University over affirmative action policies that they claim discriminate against Asian-American applicants, in a case that could have far-reaching consequences in college admissions.

In a so-called statement of interest, the department supported the claims of the plaintiffs, a group of Asian-Americans rejected by Harvard. They contend that Harvard has systematically discriminated against them by artificially capping the number of qualified Asian-Americans from attending the school to advance less qualified students of other races.

“Harvard has failed to carry its demanding burden to show that its use of race does not inflict unlawful racial discrimination on Asian-Americans,” the Justice Department said in its filing.

The filing said that Harvard “uses a vague ‘personal rating’ that harms Asian-American applicants’ chances for admission and may be infected with racial bias; engages in unlawful racial balancing; and has never seriously considered race-neutral alternatives in its more than 45 years of using race to make admissions decisions.”

:{:(style="font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline"):}:[:{Read the statement of interest.:(style="font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{]}:

The Justice Department has increasingly used such statements of interest to intervene in civil rights cases. Before 2006, such statements appeared only seven times in civil rights-oriented disputes, according to a recent paper by law school student Victor Zapana. From 2006 to 2011, they were drafted in at least 242, almost all by the Obama administration on issues such as videotaping police brutality and ensuring that blind people and their service dogs have access to Uber.

The department argued that Harvard does not adequately explain how race factors into its admissions decisions, leaving open the possibility that the university is going beyond what the law allows.

:{Read::(style="font-style:inherit"):}: [:{Harvard’s admissions officers maintain a culling system in which factors like where applicants are from, how much money they have and how they fit goals for diversity may be just as important as perfect scores.:(style="font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;text-size-adjust:100%;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{]}:

“Harvard has failed to show that it does not unlawfully discriminate against Asian-Americans,” the Justice Department said in a statement Thursday.

Harvard said it was “deeply disappointed” but not surprised “given the highly irregular investigation the D.O.J. has engaged in thus far.”

A broad coalition of Harvard supporters filed briefs in support of the school Thursday condemning the lawsuit and saying that it would effectively threaten diversity at all American colleges.

Those groups include 25 alumni and student groups represented by the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, a group of economists who criticized the experts whose work was used in the original lawsuit and a group of 531 social scientists and academics who study access to college.

“Eliminating race-conscious admissions would disproportionately harm applicants of color, including some Asian-Americans,” Harvard alumni said in their filing.

“Applicants’ opportunities to amass credentials that make for a competitive college application are greatly affected by race,” alumni and students wrote. “Given racial bias in standardized testing and endemic racial inequities,” they said the school must continue to consider race.

The Harvard case, which was brought by an anti-affirmative-action group called Students for Fair Admissions, is seen as a test of whether a decades-long effort by conservative politicians and advocates to roll back affirmative action policies will ultimately succeed. The Education and Justice Departments said in July that the administration was abandoning Obama-era policies that asked universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying their campuses and would favor race-blind admissions instead.

Officials from both departments said that the Obama administration had used guidelines to circumvent Congress and the courts to create affirmative action policies that went beyond existing law.

Civil rights leaders and others argue that this stance effectively undermines decades of policy progress that created opportunity for minorities.

The department typically files statements of interest in cases that it believes directly affect the federal government’s interests.

“As a recipient of taxpayer dollars, Harvard has a responsibility to conduct its admissions policy without racial discrimination by using meaningful admissions criteria that met lawful requirements,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

In briefs filed in support of Harvard at the end of July, students and alumni said that they “condemn” the plaintiffs’ “attempt to manufacture conflict between racial and ethnic groups in order to revive an unrelenting agenda to dismantle efforts to create a racially diverse and inclusive student body through college admissions.”

“It’s alarming that Trump is aligning himself with anti-civil rights activist Edward Blum in this subversive attempt to say that civil rights protections cause discrimination,” said Jeannie Park, the head of the Harvard Asian-American Alumni Alliance and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, referring to the founder of Students for Fair Admissions. “Trump does not speak for Asian-Americans, just as Blum does not.”

At the heart of the case is whether Harvard’s admissions staff hold Asian-Americans to higher standards than applicants of other racial or ethnic groups, and whether they use subjective measures, like personal scores, to cap the number of Asian students accepted to the school.

“Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s,” Students for Fair Admissions said in a court filing.

Harvard, which admitted less than 5 percent of its applicants this year, said that its own analysis did not find discrimination.

A trial in the case has been scheduled for October.

If it winds its way to the Supreme Court, it could be heard by Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump’s nominee for the vacant seat once held by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. The case could have far-reaching implications for the nation’s colleges and universities that consider race in their admissions processes. T

The Justice Department is pursuing its own investigation into Harvard’s admissions policies based on a complaint it received.

The Obama administration used statements of interest in novel ways to further its civil rights agenda, sometimes by making the unusual move of intervening in local cases.

In 2013, the Justice Department intervened in a local case in Burlington, Wash., where poor people contended that their public lawyers were too overworked to adequately do their jobs. The Obama administration also intervened in local legal disputes over legal aid issues in New York, juvenile prisoners in California and transgender students in Michigan.

The Trump administration has filed statements of interest on other charged topics this year. In February it supported the plaintiffs who are suing pharmaceutical companies and drug distributors in a sprawling, prescription opioids lawsuit in Ohio. This month it supported the merits of a suit that says Facebook abets discriminatory housing practices.

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“Harvard has failed to show that it does not unlawfully discriminate against Asian-Americans,” the Justice Department said.The New York Times

In a so-called statement of interest, the department supported the claims of the plaintiffs, a group of [1]Asian-Americans rejected by Harvard. They contend that Harvard has [2]systematically discriminated against them by artificially capping the number of qualified Asian-Americans from attending the school in order to advance less qualified students of other races.

“Harvard has failed to carry its demanding burden to show that its use of race does not inflict unlawful racial discrimination on Asian-Americans,” the Justice Department said in its filing.

[[3]Read the statement of interest.]

In recent years, the Justice Department has increasingly used such statements of interest to intervene in civil rights cases. Before 2006, such statements appeared only seven times in civil rights-oriented disputes, [4]according to a recent paper by law school student Victor Zapana. Between 2006 and 2011, they were drafted in at least 242, almost all by the Obama administration on issues such as videotaping police brutality, ensuring that blind people and their service dogs have access to Uber or preventing the police from arresting homeless people who cannot find beds in shelters.

But the Trump administration is now turning the same tool against affirmative action in college admissions, a major — and highly contentious — legacy of the civil rights era. In the past few years, affirmative action has faced a fresh barrage of scrutiny from Asian-Americans who argue that they are being held to a higher standard, losing out on coveted slots at places like Harvard as African-Americans, Latinos and other groups get a boost. Universities that factor race into admissions have also seen a powerful new opponent of the policies emerge in the Trump administration, which argued in its filing on Thursday that the court should deny Harvard’s request to dismiss the case before trial.

The department argued that Harvard does not adequately explain how race factors into its admissions decisions, leaving open the possibility that the university is going beyond what the law allows.

[Read: [5]Harvard’s admissions officers maintain a culling system in which factors like where applicants are from, how much money they have and how they fit goals for diversity may be just as important as perfect scores.]

“Harvard has failed to show that it does not unlawfully discriminate against Asian-Americans,” the Justice Department said in a statement Thursday.

Harvard responded, saying it was “deeply disappointed” but not surprised “given the highly irregular investigation the D.O.J. has engaged in thus far.”

“Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group, and will continue to vigorously defend the legal right of every college and university to consider race as one factor among many in college admissions, which the Supreme Court has consistently upheld for more than 40 years. Colleges and universities must have the freedom and flexibility to create the diverse communities that are vital to the learning experience of every student,” the university said in a statement.

A [6]broad coalition of Harvard supporters filed briefs in support of the school Thursday condemning the lawsuit and saying that it would effectively threaten diversity at American colleges.

Those groups include [7]25 alumni and student groups represented by the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, a group of [8]economists who criticized the experts whose work was used in the original lawsuit and a group of [9]531 social scientists and academics who study access to college.