webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

DOJ2

see main for earlier

SEE THREE 2 25

see wm barr

promoted primary on sessions baby jail and mueller  918

bak 1219

html [9]531

---

02/03/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Now it appears that [Ed] Martin is positioning himself to “investigate the investigators,” as Trump and his minions have promised, perhaps looking for words in charging documents that he can twist into a false narrative of prosecutorial malfeasance on the part of the government lawyers who charged the insurrectionists.

Engineers between 19 and 24, most linked to Musk’s companies, are playing a key role as he seizes control of federal infrastructure.

The ADL has condemned appointing Darren Beattie, who invoked the antisemitic trope that George Soros orchestrated efforts to oust President Trump

At his confirmation hearing, Kash Patel — President Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI — was grilled over his association with Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer Stew Peters. On a Friday livestream, Peters denied being a white supremacist, shortly before introducing former Klan leader David Duke as a “living legend.”

We might need to update that famous saying by German Lutheran theologian Martin Niemöller. First they came for the Episcopalians … then they came for the Catholics … then they came for the Lutherans.

This week, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a “joint memorial” (i.e. resolution) of the Legislature calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark decision that in 2015 established a constitutional right to marry for same-sex couples and insisting that “the issue of marriage and enforcement of all laws pertaining to marriage” be returned to the states. The state Senate is expected to take up the memorial shortly.

"Isn't she Jewish?" an unapologetic state Rep. Nico Rios asked when reached by phone. "Why is it wrong that I state a fact?"

---

an 11 24

Despite his unpopularity among the American electorate, dozens of felony convictions and a failed coup attempt, Donald Trump still managed to not only win the Electoral College but also the national popular vote. One former Republican White House staffer is offering three main reasons why Trump defied the odds in 2024.

In a Friday essay for the Atlantic, David Frum — who was a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush — noted Trump "waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him" in his third bid for the presidency. He also pointed out that Trump notched three "all-important successes" that paved the way for his eventual November 5 victory.

"First, he frightened [President Joe] Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way," Frum wrote. "Second, he persuaded the courts themselves — including, ultimately, the Supreme Court — to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him."

READ MORE:'Going to pay a lot more': Here's how Trump's deportations will lead to huge tax increases

"Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions," he continued. "Republican officeholders, donors and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring — one by one, Trump brought them to heel."

As if to illustrate Frum's point, Trump's sentencing in the New York hush money cover-up case has now been indefinitely postponed. Judge Juan Merchan issued a one-page ruling on Friday announcing that the late November sentencing date for Trump's 34 felony convictions had been scuttled, and did not announce a new date. His two federal cases will likely be officially dismissed once Trump takes office on January 20, and his Fulton County, Georgia election interference trial will likely be delayed until 2029, after Trump's final term ends.

Frum observed that because American institutions and the courts failed to hold Trump accountable, whether the ex-president (and now president-elect) would ever face any consequences for his actions ultimately came down to the election. He opined that regardless of how the American electorate may have felt about the importance of preserving democracy, a majority of voters viewed the economy as a higher priority — hence Trump winning with voters who ranked that issue as the most important.

"So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism," Frum wrote. "No quitting."

READ MORE: Day one: Trump planning 'largest mass deportation operation'

:{Click here to read Frum's essay in its entirety (subscription required).

---

---

doj sued illegal alien BS

msnbc 10 24

two states dumping sweater vest gov youngkin if discrepnancy in dmv recs; only possible b/c scotus gutted voting rts act which req pre-clearance of fuckery

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

an 12 22

MAGA Republicans, claiming that President Joe Biden and other Democrats have promoted an “open borders” policy, often blame them for the United States’ opioid problem. That problem, they claim, is aggravated by the Biden Administration being weak on border security — a claim that is contradicted by the fact that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have, during the Biden era, been very aggressive about trying to prevent people from entering the country illegally.

Another factor missing in Republican claims that an “open borders” policy is aggravating the opioid crisis is the role that Big Pharma has played in the crisis.

On Thursday, December 29, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against drug manufacturer AmerisourceBergen Corp. for, according to Politico, failing to report “at least hundreds of thousands” of suspicious opioid orders to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

READ MORE: ‘You gaslighting cartoon’: Kellyanne Conway brutally mocked for conflating opioid deaths with marijuana

Politico’s Kelly Garrity reports, “Under the Controlled Substances Act, pharmaceutical distributors must monitor the orders they receive for controlled substances, and are required to flag any they deem suspicious to the DEA. According to the filing, AmerisourceBergen repeatedly failed to do so since 2014, despite being made aware of significant ‘red flags’ at pharmacies across the country.”

Associate U.S. Attorney General Vanita Gupta, during a phone conversation with reporters on December 29, explained, “In the midst of a catastrophic opioid epidemic, AmerisourceBergen allegedly altered its internal systems in a way that reduced the number of orders that would be flagged as suspicious. And even up to the orders that AmerisourceBergen identified as suspicious, the company routinely failed to report those suspicious orders.In short, the government’s complaint alleges that for years, AmerisourceBergen prioritized profits over its legal obligations and over Americans’ wellbeing.”

Philip Sellinger, a federal prosecutor for the District of New Jersey, told reporters that AmerisourceBergen knew that drugs sent to pharmacies in West Virginia and Florida “were likely being sold in parking lots for cash.”

Garrity reports, “In New Jersey, the company knowingly sent drugs to a pharmacy that has pleaded guilty to ‘unlawfully selling controlled substances,’ as well as one where the pharmacist in charge has been indicted on charges of drug diversion, according to prosecutors. And in Colorado, AmerisourceBergen supplied a pharmacy where it had identified 11 patients as potential ‘drug addicts’ with illegitimate prescriptions; two of those patients later died of overdoses, according to the Justice Department. AmerisourceBergen contends that the suit focuses too heavily on these five pharmacies, which it alleges were ‘cherry picked” out of tens of thousands it works with.”

READ MORE:**Fox News wants Halloween canceled over fentanyl**

flynn unmask BS durham sally Yates

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/michael-flynn/

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/arizona-ballot-audit/

the  Arizona Senate is ditching its controversial measure to knock on doors and ask Arizona residents about their voting history. According to AZCentral, Senate President Karen Fann (R) on Friday penned a letter U.S. Department of Justice detailing the decision.

The ditch effort comes as federal officials expressed concern about how the canvassing could infringe upon residents' civil rights and the laws enacted to put a stop to voter intimidation.

The Arizona Senate contract agreement with Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm tapped to conduct the audit, says that a "registration and votes cast team" has already completed work with a number "in order to statistically identify voter registrations that did not make sense, and then knock on doors to confirm if valid voters actually lived at the stated address."

However, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan refused to explain the company's methods for identifying voters but claimed their work was "based on a statistical analysis performed by someone else he would not identify and maintained that canvassers would not ask anyone how they voted."

On Wednesday, May 5, Fann also expressed concern about the nationwide overhauls being made to voting and election practices and how many of the measures appear to be aimed at predominately minority communities. Pamela S. Karlan, who serves as the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice's department's Civil Rights Division, also weighed in with her concerns.

"Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future," wrote Karlan.

Although the Arizona Senate has indicated that it will suspend canvassing for the foreseeable future, Fann did not say if the effort would not be revisited in the future.

Fann wrote, "If canvassing is necessary to complete the audit, we believe these protocols, which will be reinforced by thorough training programs, would permit the Senate to discharge its legislative oversight and investigation functions without compromising the rights or privacy of any voter."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/biden-doj/

drain swamp digby

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/william-barrs-bogus-voter-fraud-claims-are-part-of-a-long-history-of-republican-voter-suppression-reporter

alex h

With one national poll after another showing President Donald Trump losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in November, the president and Attorney General William Barr continue to obsess over "voter fraud." They baselessly claim the crime is promoted by mail-in voting, despite its history as a reliable practice. Journalist Pema Levy pointed out that Barr's actions are part of a long a seedy history in an article published in Mother Jones this week, describing them as thinly veiled attempts at voter suppression.

"A pattern has emerged in recent years that's easy to spot," Levy explains. "Right before an election, Republican officials in battleground states announce voter fraud investigations. The goal is obvious: suppressing turnout. But what's new this year is that this underhanded tactic is being employed by the president and the Justice Department."

Levy cites Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp as an example of a Republican who has used bogus voter fraud claims to suppress turnout, recalling that only two days before the 2018 midterms, Kemp — who was Georgia's secretary of state before becoming governor — "came out with an explosive announcement: he was investigating the state Democratic Party for attempting to hack into the state's voter registration system."

"At the time, Kemp was both the state's top election official and the Republican nominee for governor in a dead-heat race against Democrat Stacey Abrams," Levy notes. "Kemp had a history of bogus voter fraud allegations against his political opponents, and many recognized the brazen tactic this time. Election law expert Rick Hasen called it 'perhaps the most outrageous example of election administration partisanship in the modern era' and 'banana republic stuff.'"

But in May 2020, Levy adds, Georgia's Republican attorney general "confirmed what was suspected all along: there was no evidence of any crime." Republicans, Levy stresses, "have a long history of making false allegations of voter fraud, only to see their accusations fall apart once scrutinized. But airing such charges right before an election threatens to destabilize and delegitimize it."

This year, according to Levy, one is seeing "an increase in fraud allegations from the Justice Department itself — and it appears to be part of Barr's ongoing effort to transform the (DOJ) into an arm of the Trump campaign, ready to engage in a longstanding GOP voter suppression tactic."

Barr, Levy warns, is showing that he is ready to "possibly aid the Trump campaign's legal efforts to get ballots tossed during the vote-counting process."

When the U.S. Senate confirmed Barr as U.S. attorney general in 2019, Levy recalls, he was hailed as "by-the-book institutionalist" — only to show how much of a Trump loyalist he was when he "misrepresented" the findings of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and "interfered" in the DOJ's investigation of long-time Trump ally Roger Stone. And during this year's presidential election, Levy predicts, Barr will to do whatever he can to help Trump win reelection.

"Since Barr has torched his credibility," Levy writes, "any allegations of fraud emanating from the Justice Department in the coming weeks should be viewed skeptically. Barr is using an old playbook. You've been warned."

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

no lnx

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

Image via Screengrab.

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

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

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.

...

==

==

an 220

trump’s DOJ functioned as a cross between ‘The Apprentice’ and Nazi Germany: Former legal staffer

Travis Gettys / Raw StoryMarch 2, 2020

A former Justice Department attorney compared her service under President Donald Trump as somewhere in between Nazi Germany and “The Apprentice.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/this-is-a-nightmare-trump-accused-of-weaponizing-doj-with-new-task-force-for-stripping-citizenship/

==

Barr installs outside prosecutor to scrutinize Michael Flynn case

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

Attorney General William Barr has reportedly installed an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

==

Pence chief of staff rants wildly about anti-Trump conspiracy at DOJ — gets promptly shut down on CNN

Tom Boggioni / Raw Story

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” with fill-in host Dana Bash, the chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence argued the Justice Department is rife with officials who are biased against Donald Trump.

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.

==

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

==

1/20

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10012020/emails-show-us-justice-department-working-closely-oil-industry-oppose-climate-lawsuits

david h

In early 2018, a few months after the cities of Oakland and San Francisco sued several major oil companies over climate change, attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice began a series of email exchanges and meetings with lawyers for the oil companies targeted in the litigation.

At one point, Eric Grant, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, sent an email to Indiana's solicitor general saying that his "boss" had asked him to set up a meeting to go over a plan for the government to intercede in the cases on the companies' behalf.

The cities were arguing that oil companies should be held liable for catastrophic flooding, sea-level rise and other harmful consequences caused by climate change. The DOJ was preparing an amicus brief in support of the industry, and the Indiana solicitor general was leading the charge by Republican attorneys general from 15 states to also file a court brief supporting the industry.

In another email, an assistant U.S. attorney general referred to the DOJ attorneys and industry lawyers—many of them former DOJ environmental lawyers—as a "team."

The  messages were among 178 pages of emails exchanged by government and industry from February through May 2018 as they worked together to oppose the cities' lawsuits. They were obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) under a federal Freedom of Information Act request and shared with InsideClimate News.

Although the emails do not reveal the substance of discussions that took place during the meetings, they bespeak the unapologetically close relationship between the Trump administration and the oil industry. They also provide a window into the closely coordinated efforts to block the climate lawsuits between industry and the Justice Department's environmental division, which touts itself as "the nation's environmental lawyer, and the largest environmental law firm in the country."

Legal experts say the conversations raise questions about the federal government's objectivity and whether the Department of Justice, in these cases, was acting in the best interest of the country's people.

The "boss" to whom Grant, the deputy assistant attorney general, referred in his email at the time was Jeff Wood, the Trump-appointed acting assistant attorney general leading the Environment and Natural Resources Division. Wood had landed at the DOJ after serving on the Trump-Pence campaign and after an earlier stint as staff environmental counsel to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, who would become Trump's attorney general.

Wood declined to comment, though he cited a footnote in the order by U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup dismissing the cases that the federal government's amicus brief supporting the oil industry had been submitted "at the Court's invitation." The dismissal is now being appealed.

Neither Grant nor his colleagues involved in the meetings with the industry responded to a request for comment. The Justice Department and industry lawyers also did not respond.

The climate lawsuits that grabbed Wood's attention argue that the companies created a public nuisance—climate change—by producing fossil fuels that become the principal cause of global warming when burned.

"The rapidly rising sea level along the Pacific coast and in San Francisco Bay, moreover, poses an imminent threat of catastrophic storm surge flooding because any storm would be superimposed on a higher sea level," the lawsuit filed by Oakland officials states. "This threat to human safety and to public and private-property is becoming more dire every day as global warming reaches ever more dangerous levels and sea level rise accelerates."

The emails cover a period beginning in February 2018, six months after climate cases were filed, and ending in May, a few weeks after the Justice Department filed the amicus brief on behalf of the five oil giants named in the lawsuits.

At one time or another, six attorneys—one-quarter of the attorneys assigned to division's Law and Policy Section—were brought into the loop with industry.

==

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:

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.

...

2x format

format messed up

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.”

“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,” the university said in a statement....

==

ref

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/politics/asian-students-affirmative-action-harvard.html

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.

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::(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.”

“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,” the university said in a statement.

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.

==

ref 404 -->

https://nerdica.net/search?tag=admissions

...

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

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 for the use of affirmative action in college admissions.

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.

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.”

[[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 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: [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.

==