Latest in Justice Department
The Justice Department sent a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler responding to the committee’s request for further information regarding U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the Russia investigation. The letter is available here and below.
Traditional organized crime, ranging from the Italian-American mafia to street gangs, has long been a target of American law enforcement efforts. Unlike purely domestic organized crime, transnational organized crime, defined by the Justice Department as groups that pursue criminal activities across geographic boundaries, has profound national security implications.
On Thursday, Justice Department Spokesperson Kerri Kupec released a statement, included in full below, regarding Attorney General Bill Barr's letter concerning the Mueller report.
When President Trump appointed the unqualified Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general on Nov. 7, 2018, many prominent people believed that the country faced yet another “constitutional crisis” point.
The executive branch has several ways of asserting exclusive presidential powers. Presidential signing statements, memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), legal briefs—these are well-studied tools of executive claims-staking. The use of these tools in the Trump administration has received plenty of coverage on this blog and others.
It isn’t every day that the Department of Justice acknowledges formally that the president of the United States lied in a speech to Congress. But that’s how I read a letter I received a few days ago from the department.
Late last year, in an interview with The New York Times, President Trump declared that he has the “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.” In a similar vein, the president’s personal lawyer John Dowd has said that a “president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every right to ex
The Justice Department is fighting for information on all of the visitors to the website disruptj20.org, as well as log files on when and from where the visitors logged onto the site, what they looked at, and emails related to the site. The site at the center of the storm bills itself as a platform connecting Trump protesters and "support[ing] the massive and spontaneous eruption of resistance across the United States that’s happened since the election."
This morning at 10:00 ET Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will testify on the Justice Department's FY2018 budget request before the Senate Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies of the Senate Appropriations Committee. I predict there is roughly zero chance that he will be asked zero questions about the FBI's Russia probe.
Watch the livestream here and follow along as we liveblog interesting moments below.
As Daphna Renan and David Pozen note, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memorandum to Attorney General Sessions on Comey’s action last summer, which was the ostensible basis for firing FBI Director James Comey, circumvented the ongoing investigation into Comey’s actions by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.