SUMMARY: The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Wednesday on whether the federal agency tasked with enforcing the law is in fact breaking it. Two current Justice Department attorneys charged that department leaders -- including Attorney General William Barr -- ordered certain investigations and undermined others due to political motivations. Lisa Desjardins reports and talks to NPR’s Carrie Johnson.
SUMMARY: Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report says the special counsel found no evidence that the President or his campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. In response, the White House is claiming victory, while Democrats insist the full report be made public. Judy Woodruff talks to Yamiche Alcindor, Lisa Desjardins, and NPR’s Carrie Johnson for more.
SUMMARY: Republicans say the attorney general's four-page summary of the Mueller report exonerates President Trump on obstruction of justice. Democrats counter that William Barr’s analysis is not sufficient to answer that question. Judy Woodruff talks to Neal Katyal former acting solicitor general under President Obama, and Paul McNulty former deputy attorney general under the first President Bush.
SUMMARY: In his summary of the Mueller report, Attorney General William Barr concluded there was no evidence that President Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 Presidential campaign. But what does the report itself say? Judy Woodruff speaks to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md) about why it should be made public and how Barr’s pre-existing views might have come into play.
SUMMARY: The Mueller report remains the top story in Washington, but Republicans and Democrats are viewing it from two very different perspectives. Democrats are pressing for full disclosure of the special counsel's findings so they can make their own judgments of the facts, while President Trump and his allies insist the matter is concluded, with the President in the clear. Lisa Desjardins reports.
SUMMARY: A bipartisan effort from the House Judiciary Committee is pushing the Justice Department to explain why it began investigating President Trump for obstruction of justice. Judy Woodruff talks to the committee’s top Republican, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, about whether he’s satisfied with the attorney general’s summary of the Mueller report and eradicating “corruption” within the Justice Department.
SUMMARY: Debate continues over the meaning of Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, with Democrats arguing it’s impossible to draw conclusions about President Trump’s culpability without a first-hand examination of the report. Judy Woodruff talks to former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara about the “troublesome language” in Barr’s letter and investigating for truth vs. retaliation.
SUMMARY: Andrew McCabe, former FBI deputy director, says in an upcoming interview he feared President Trump would undermine the investigation into Russian election interference once Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. John Yang talks to NPR’s Carrie Johnson about McCabe’s claims of “panic and alarm” in the Justice Department, Trump’s reaction and the latest revelations in the Special Counsel’s probe.
SUMMARY: Based on new information, the Justice Department is reopening the investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the African-American boy whose brutal killing by two white men in Mississippi became a galvanizing event that helped spark the civil rights movement in America. William Brangham gets reaction from Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala).
SUMMARY: The much-anticipated report on the probe of Hillary Clinton's email practices was released Thursday. It runs hundreds of pages, finds fault with the FBI, and may be fodder for Republicans and Democrats alike. While the watchdog found that political bias did not influence the probe, the report found that former Director James Comey had been “insubordinate.” Lisa Desjardins joins Judy Woodruff.
SUMMARY: Thursday’s report from the Justice Department's internal watchdog goes into detail about how the department and the F.B.I. handled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. What does it mean for the bureau’s reputation and what changes might occur in the aftermath? Judy Woodruff gets analysis from former Justice Department officials John Carlin and Thomas Dupree.
SUMMARY: President Trump met with top Justice Department officials after demanding on Sunday that they investigate whether the FBI infiltrated his 2016 campaign. Last week, the Washington Post reported that a longtime U.S. intelligence source had contacts with several of Trump's advisors. Amna Nawaz learns more from Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post.
SUMMARY: The Justice Department has asked its internal watchdog to review President Trump's charge on Twitter that the FBI spied on his 2016 election campaign. Amna Nawaz gets analysis and reaction from former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith, and retired FBI agent Frank Montoya.
SUMMARY: President Trump's bid to bar travel from five Muslim-majority countries went before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Justices heard arguments on the third version of the ban, which the state of Hawaii argued is unconstitutionally discriminatory. Jeffrey Brown looks back on how it ended up at the high court.
SUMMARY: In arguments over President Trump's travel ban, Supreme Court justices were concerned with questions of the President's authority and whether it was his intention to discriminate against Muslims. Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal joins Judy Woodruff to review the travel ban's day in court.
SUMMARY: Sally Yates took a stand in refusing to defend President Trump's first travel ban. Could she defend the one now being argued at the Supreme Court? The former acting attorney general joins Judy Woodruff to offer her take on the case, her work to promote the importance of an independent judiciary in light of President Trump’s comments, and the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian interference.
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s news, including the news that President Trump had ordered the dismissal of special counsel Robert Mueller but dropped the request when the White House counsel refused, Republican efforts to undermine the FBI, Trump’s speech at Davos, and the latest immigration plan.
Judy Woodruff (NewsHour): Well, these reports that we have been discussing with Jack Goldsmith brings us to our weekly analysis of Shields and Brooks. That’s Mark Shields, syndicated columnist, and David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times.
You heard what Jack Goldsmith had to say. And I know you have been following this story all week.
Mark, what do we make of it?
Mark Shields, syndicated columnist: I would like to associate myself with the remarks of the previous speaker. I thought he spoke very informed and persuasively on the subject, Judy.
Just from a straight political perspective, you wonder why it took seven months. The idea that several months…
Judy Woodruff: You mean for this to come out.
Mark Shields: To come out. It’s just rather remarkable in Washington.
And so the first question we ask is, why now? And is it because there was a concern that the President was going to try and do something like this again to head him off at the pass, to try to vertebrae transplant for Republicans on the Hill, who have not stood up to the President or stood up for Robert Mueller as the special counsel?
It’s everything that Jack Goldsmith described it.
Judy Woodruff: How do you read all this?
David Brooks, New York Times: Yes.
First, it should be pointed out that White House staff has repeatedly said there was no effort to fire Mueller, when they clearly have been lying for months about that.
Mark Shields: That’s right. Yes.
David Brooks: And that’s…
Mark Shields: And the President.
David Brooks: It’s always kind of shocking when people just straight-up lie.
Mark Shields: That’s right.
David Brooks: It happens to us in our profession all the time, but it’s still kind of shocking.
I have to say, I was in Dayton, Ohio, this morning. And a friend said, in this presidency, I’m just stunned every day. I’m stunned every hour. And at some point, you get out of stunned. There’s no more stun.
And I found this when I saw our story. If I had seen that story seven or eight months ago, I would have been, oh, I can’t believe this is happening. Now I’m inured. I’m used to it. I have been numbed.
And I came to think, even if he fired Mueller, maybe we’re all just — we’re like, we have been numbed to the things that happen and nobody gets upset anymore. I think people would get upset if he actually did try to fire Mueller, but we have defined deviancy down and gotten used to a set of behavior that would have been shocking to us a year ago.
Judy Woodruff: Well, there is a lot of…
Mark Shields: Just to David’s point, deserved to be underlined, imagine any President, imagine George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, or Barack Obama, that The Wall Street Journal reported that his lawyer had paid $130,000 to a porn star not to reveal that they’d had an illicit adulterous sexual encounter.
And, you know, that’s The Wall Street Journal. I mean, that’s not some left-wing publication. And that would have been — it would have kept FOX going 24/7 if it was alleged of Barack Obama. And it does. It’s somewhere on page three.
David Brooks: Yes. That passed without a ripple, yes.
Judy Woodruff: But what we have here, though, David, or — and in addition to that, is an extraordinary situation, where there is just a lot of guessing going on about whether the President has given up on trying to fire Bob Mueller.
Is he going to talk to him or not? Are we just hanging in suspension while we wait for the Mueller investigation?
David Brooks: Yes, with Donald Trump, it’s really hard to distinguish sound from signal. Because he’s so impulsive, things are floating in all directions.
And are things a passing mood, or is it a designed intent to achieve some goal? What struck me about the story was that he didn’t just say, fire that guy Mueller. He had actually done some homework, or somebody had done some homework, and he had three 'legal' arguments about why it was the right thing to do.
That suggests it’s more than just a guy waking up in a bad mood and tweeting out something. It was an actual effort.
But as Jack Goldsmith said, it is striking how the White House staff seems to be getting better at sort of managing around him, and is devising strategies to keep him from self-destructing.
Judy Woodruff: It is speculation, Mark, but if the President were to fire or ask others in his administration to fire Robert Mueller, what would the reaction be, you think?
Mark Shields: I think there would be a firestorm at this point.
How long and how intense, I don’t know, because I remain just perplexed at the limit of the finite limits of our outrage, or our sense of outrage, Judy.
And, I mean, the three reasons that David mentioned, one was that Bob Mueller had a quarrel at a Donald Trump country club over the fees charged. Second was that Bob Mueller’s law firm had represented Jared Kushner, totally disassociated items.
And the third was that Donald Trump, the President, had invited Bob Mueller in to be interviewed for FBI director, and therefore there was a — there’s somebody there serving him up stuff, but it’s this kind of stuff.
But I think it really comes down to, who’s going to stand with him? And I look at the Republicans on the Hill and, you know, the lack, the tower of Jell-O that is the speaker of the House. As Jack Goldsmith pointed out, Devin Nunes is out of control.
Judy Woodruff: Well, that’s what I want to ask you both about.
I asked Jack Goldsmith, could this campaign, this effort by some Republicans in the House and with support from the White House to undermine the FBI, could that have a long-lasting effect on the Justice Department in the end?
David Brooks: Yes, I think so.
One of the things that people should know is that there are honest brokers in Washington. There are career people who really do their job, and they try to be good umpires. And some of those people, by the way, have private political opinions, but they leave that at the door when they go to work.
And the FBI is filled with honest brokers, the Congressional Budget Office. There are a lot of agencies that are filled with honest brokers, and the idea that everybody in this city is a politician is just not true. It’s always amazing to me that a lot of people in government, they are not actually that political. They believe in the public service and they try to do their jobs, but they’re not sort of super political people.
They just believe in public service. But there’s been a campaign to say, no, those doesn’t exist, it’s all politics, everybody is partisan.
And the people who are partisan have trouble understanding people who are not. There was an interesting moment on Sean Hannity's show last night. When it came out that this story came out, he said, oh, it didn’t happen, Sean Hannity said. He denied it ever happen.
And then some FOX journalists confirmed that it did happen. And so then he turned around, well, it did happen, but Trump was absolutely right to do it.
So there was one 180. And then Trump turned around and said, oh, it’s fake news, and then so Hannity did another 180, his third 180 — he’s getting — it’s like figure skating — and he said, it never happened.
And so FOX can do a party-line switch and do — are Republicans willing to stand up to that? That’s an open question.
Judy Woodruff: And the question is, what’s the effect on the public servants?
Mark Shields: It’s corrosive. And it’s corrosive.
How long has it been since the President has said, public service is a noble calling, that you’re doing the public’s business, that we’re grateful to you, that you’re a patriot for your public service and the contribution you’re making?
The idea, Judy, that the FBI, made up of professional law enforcement people, is a hornet’s nest of bleeding-heart, knee-jerk liberal lefties, which is what Trey Gowdy and these people are selling, is that somehow there is a great cabal, left-wing.
First of all, they’re not political. And the ones who have run for public office have overwhelmingly runs as conservative Republicans, as sort of law and order candidates. So it’s just — it’s not only harmful.
Donald Trump, to use the fake news — I mean, he is the boy who called wolf now on this. He’s calling fake news the charge today. And I think he’s overusing that term.
SUMMARY: Two dozen cities that shelter undocumented immigrants have been sent letters by the Justice Department, threatening to subpoena them over proof that they are complying with immigration rules. The news angered some mayors meeting in Washington for a conference. John Yang talks to Republican Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, and Democratic Mayor Kathy Sheehan of Albany, New York.
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) December 29, 2017
SUMMARY: The Justice Department is suing to block a $85 billion merger between media and telecom giants AT&T and Time Warner, in the first major antitrust case taken up by the Trump administration. Some observers have openly wondered if the decision is influenced by President Trump's ongoing battle with CNN. Lisa Desjardins learns more from David Shepardson of Reuters.
Previously unannounced directives will limit the Department of Justice's use of a storied civil rights enforcement tool, and loosen the Department of Education's requirements on investigations.
For decades, the Department of Justice has used court-enforced agreements to protect civil rights, successfully desegregating school systems, reforming police departments, ensuring access for the disabled, and defending the religious.
Now, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the DOJ appears to be turning away from this storied tool, called consent decrees. Top officials in the DOJ civil rights division have issued verbal instructions through the ranks to seek settlements without consent decrees — which would result in no continuing court oversight.
The move is just one part of a move by the Trump administration to limit federal civil rights enforcement. Other departments have scaled back the power of their internal divisions that monitor such abuses. In a previously unreported development, the Education Department last week reversed an Obama-era reform that broadened the agency's approach to protecting rights of students. The Labor Department and the Environmental Protection Agency have also announced sweeping cuts to their enforcement.
“At best, this administration believes that civil rights enforcement is superfluous and can be easily cut. At worst, it really is part of a systematic agenda to roll back civil rights,” said Vanita Gupta, the former acting head of the DOJ's civil rights division under President Barack Obama.
Consent decrees have not been abandoned entirely by the DOJ, a person with knowledge of the instructions said. Instead, there is a presumption against their use — attorneys should default to using settlements without court oversight unless there is an unavoidable reason for a consent decree. The instructions came from the civil rights division's office of acting Assistant Attorney General Tom Wheeler and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Gore. There is no written policy guidance.
Devin O'Malley, a spokesperson for the DOJ, declined to comment for this story.
Consent decrees can be a powerful tool, and spell out specific steps that must be taken to remedy the harm. These are agreed to by both parties and signed off on by a judge, whom the parties can appear before again if the terms are not being met. Though critics say the DOJ sometimes does not enforce consent decrees well enough, they are more powerful than settlements that aren't overseen by a judge and have no built-in enforcement mechanism.
Such settlements have “far fewer teeth to ensure adequate enforcement,” Gupta said.
Consent decrees often require agencies or municipalities to take expensive steps toward reform. Local leaders and agency heads then can point to the binding court authority when requesting budget increases to ensure reforms. Without consent decrees, many localities or government departments would simply never make such comprehensive changes, said William Yeomans, who spent 26 years at the DOJ, mostly in the civil rights division.
“They are key to civil rights enforcement,” he said. “That's why Sessions and his ilk don't like them.”
Some, however, believe the Obama administration relied on consent decrees too often and sometimes took advantage of vulnerable cities unable to effectively defend themselves against a well-resourced DOJ.
“I think a recalibration would be welcome,” said Richard Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, adding that consent decrees should be used in cases where clear, systemic issues of discrimination exist.
Though it's too early to see how widespread the effect of the changes will be, the Justice Department appears to be adhering to the directive already.
On May 30, the DOJ announced Bernards Township in New Jersey had agreed to pay $3.25 million to settle an accusation it denied zoning approval for a local Islamic group to build a mosque. Staff attorneys at the U.S. attorney's office in New Jersey initially sought to resolve the case with a consent decree, according to a spokesperson for Bernards Township. But because of the DOJ's new stance, the terms were changed after the township protested, according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for the New Jersey U.S. attorney's office declined comment.
Sessions has long been a public critic of consent decrees. As a senator, he wrote they “constitute an end run around the democratic process.” He lambasted local agencies that seek them out as a way to inflate their budgets, a “particularly offensive” use of consent decrees that took decision-making power from legislatures.
On March 31, Sessions ordered a sweeping review of all consent decrees with troubled police departments nationwide to ensure they were in line with the Trump administration's law-and-order goals. Days before, the DOJ had asked a judge to postpone a hearing on a consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department that had been arranged during the last days of the Obama administration. The judge denied that request, and the consent decree has moved forward.
The DOJ has already come under fire from critics for altering its approach to voting rights cases. After nearly six years of litigation over Texas' voter ID law — which Obama DOJ attorneys said was written to intentionally discriminate against minority voters and had such a discriminatory effect — the Trump DOJ abruptly withdrew its intent claims in late February.
Attorneys who worked on the case for years were barely consulted about the change — many weren't consulted at all, according to two former DOJ officials with knowledge of the matter. Gore wrote the filing changing the DOJ's position largely by himself and asked the attorneys who'd been involved in the case for years to sign it to show continuity. Not all of the attorneys fell in line. Avner Shapiro — who has been a prosecutor in the civil rights division for more than 20 years — left his name off the filings written by Gore. Shapiro was particularly involved in developing the DOJ's argument that Texas had intentionally discriminated against minorities in crafting its voter ID legislation.
“That's the ultimate act of rebellion,” Yeomans, the former civil rights division prosecutor, said. A rare act, removing one's name from a legal filing is one of the few ways career attorneys can express public disagreement with an administration.
Gore has no history of bringing civil rights cases. A former partner at the law firm Jones Day, he has instead defended states against claims of racial gerrymandering and represented North Carolina when the state was sued over its controversial “bathroom bill,” which requires transgender people to use the facility that matched their birth gender.
All of the internal changes at the DOJ have left attorneys and staff with “a great deal of fear and uncertainty,” said Yeomans. While he says the lawyers there would like to stay at the department, they fear Sessions' priorities will have devastating impact on their work.
The DOJ's civil rights office is not alone in fearing rollbacks in enforcement. Across federal departments, the Trump administration has made moves to diminish the power of civil rights divisions.
The Department of Education has laid out plans to loosen requirements on investigations into civil rights complaints, according to an internal memo sent to staff on June 8 and obtained by ProPublica.
Under the Obama administration, the department's office for civil rights applied an expansive approach to investigations. Individual complaints related to complex issues such as school discipline, sexual violence and harassment, equal access to educational resources, or racism at a single school might have prompted broader probes to determine whether the allegations were part of a pattern of discrimination or harassment.
The new memo, sent by Candice Jackson, the Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, to regional directors at the department's civil rights office, trims this approach. Jackson was appointed deputy assistant secretary for the office in April and will remain as the acting head of the office until the Senate confirms a full-time assistant secretary. Trump has not publicly nominated anyone for the role yet.
The office will apply the broader approach “only” if the original allegations raise systemic concerns or the investigative team argues for it, Jackson wrote in the memo.
As part of the new approach, the Education Department will no longer require civil rights investigators to obtain three years of complaint data from a specific school or district to assess compliance with civil rights law.
Critics contend the Obama administration's probes were onerous. The office “did such a thorough review of everything that the investigations were demanding and very expensive” for schools, said Boston College American politics professor R. Shep Melnick, adding that the new approach could take some regulatory pressure off schools and districts.
But some civil rights leaders believe the change could undermine the office's mission. This narrowing of the department's investigations “is stunning to me and dangerous,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led the Education Department's civil rights office from August 2013 until January 2017 and currently chairs the United States Commission on Civil Rights. “It's important to take an expansive view of the potential for harm because if you look only at the most recent year, you won't necessarily see the pattern,” said Lhamon.
The department's new directive also gives more autonomy to regional offices, no longer requiring oversight or review of some cases by department headquarters, according to the memo.
The Education Department did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has also proposed cutting over 40 positions from the civil rights office. With reduced staff, the office will have to “make difficult choices, including cutting back on initiating proactive investigations,” according to the department's proposed budget.
Elsewhere, Trump administration appointees have launched similar initiatives. In its 2018 fiscal plan, the Labor Department has proposed dissolving the office that handles discrimination complaints. Similarly, new leadership at the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed entirely eliminating the environmental justice program, which addresses concerns that almost exclusively impact minority communities. The Washington Post reports the plan transfers all environmental justice work to the Office of Policy, which provides policy and regulatory guidance across the agency.
Mustafa Ali, a former EPA senior adviser and Assistant Associate Administrator for Environmental Justice who served more than 20 years, quit the agency in protest days before the plan was announced. In his resignation letter, widely circulated in the media, Ali suggested the new leadership was abandoning “those who need our help most.”
SUMMARY: The FBI's investigation into Russian meddling in the election, yet another politically sensitive case, has drawn scrutiny for the bureau. Last year Director James Comey was criticized for his handling of an investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email server. William Brangham talks to former FBI official Stephanie Douglas and former Justice Department official John Carlin.
SUMMARY: In the wake of the FBI’s showdown with Apple last month, a new tech giant is taking up arms against government oversight. Microsoft sued the Department of Justice Thursday, arguing that it is unconstitutional for the government to request access to a customer’s data while banning Microsoft from informing the individual in question. Microsoft president Brad Smith joins Judy Woodruff for more.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A high-profile showdown between a tech giant and the U.S. government over accessing private data.
This time, it’s Microsoft. Yesterday, the company filed a suit against the Department of Justice in federal court. Microsoft argues it’s unconstitutional for the government to ask for customers’ personal data or e-mails in most cases without the individuals’ knowledge. The company says it’s received more than 5,600 requests for such data from the government in the last year-and-a-half, often from the cloud or remote servers. And nearly half of those requests come with a ban from the government on alerting customers.
Brad Smith is the president of Microsoft. He joins me from company headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
And welcome to the program, Brad Smith.
I do want to point out we invited the Department of Justice to join the interview, but they declined.
So, let me begin by asking you, what is it that the federal government is doing that Microsoft doesn’t like?
BRAD SMITH, President, Microsoft: Well, what gives us concern is the fact we have received almost 2,600 — almost 2,600 of these so-called gag or secrecy orders over the last 18 months.
Over two-thirds of them have no end date at all. So it means that we are permanently prohibited from telling customers that the government has accessed, read and obtained copies of their e-mails. We feel that infringes on the constitutional rights of consumers and businesses to be secure from unreasonable government searches.
It infringes on our First Amendment right to speak, to share information with our customers.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we know the Justice Department has not responded to the lawsuit. They have not said anything publicly, but we know that in the past they have said these are investigations that involve criminals, people who are breaking the law, that involve — that are perhaps involved in potential terrorist acts.
Why not work with the government when they’re trying to go after the bad guys?
BRAD SMITH: Well, this is an issue that we have discussed with various officials in government for some time.
And we readily recognize that there are many cases where there should be some kind of secrecy, that there is a real danger if information is disclosed. But we feel that these kinds of secrecy orders have been — become too routine. They’re being issued in cases that involve businesses, as well as consumers.
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SUMMARY: After recurring instances of excessive force by Cleveland’s police force, the Department of Justice and city officials announced a sweeping legal agreement that rewrites the rules for the police department. Gwen Ifill learns more about the efforts to rebuild relations between police and the city from Ronnie Dunn of Cleveland State University.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The Department of Justice and the city of Cleveland announced a sweeping legal settlement today that rewrites the rules for the city’s police department after recurring instances of the use of excessive force.
The U.S. attorney, the city police chief and Cleveland’s mayor all praised the agreement at a joint news conference.
STEVEN DETTELBACH, U.S. Attorney, Northern District of Ohio: Compliance with this agreement, which means taking on truly systemic change, is going to be — and I say this as a Clevelander — it’s going to be hard work.
CALVIN WILLIAMS, Chief, Cleveland Division of Police: We talked a lot about the nuts and bolts of this, but what it really comes down to is, we have to, I have to, as chief, make sure that community policing philosophy is part of the DNA of the Cleveland Division of Police. And that’s what I intend to do.
MAYOR FRANK JACKSON, Cleveland: I have expressed throughout this my major issue was twofold, one, that it didn’t go far enough, and, two, that we wanted to have substantive, real reform that was sustainable, not just, as the U.S. attorney said, some pretense of reform. So this gives us the tools.
GWEN IFILL: For more on what it took to get to this agreement, and what happens next, I’m joined by Ronnie Dunn, associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University. He also serves on the Ohio Task Force on Community-Police Relations.
SUMMARY: Five major banking institutions pleaded guilty to rigging currencies and manipulating the foreign exchange market in a case brought by the Department of Justice and other authorities. The banks were accused of manipulating the world's largest and least-regulated trading market, and have agreed to pay more than $5 billion in total. Judy Woodruff learns more from Keri Geiger of Bloomberg News.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Big banks and their behavior are again at the heart of a new criminal case brought by the Department of Justice and other authorities today. Five major institutions pled guilty to rigging currencies and manipulating the foreign exchange market.
The banks also agreed to pay more than $5 billion combined in new penalties. The fines were some of the biggest brought to date by the federal government. The banks were accused of manipulating the world’s largest and least regulated trading market, where trillions of dollars change hands. Among those pleading guilty, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS.
At a press conference in Washington, Attorney General Loretta Lynch spelled out how the rigging worked.
LORETTA LYNCH, Attorney General: Starting as early as 2007, currency traders at several multinational banks formed a group that they dubbed the Cartel.
It’s perhaps fitting that they chose that name, as it aptly describes the brazenly illegal behavior that they were engaged in on a near five-year basis. Almost every day, for more than five years, traders in this cartel used a private electronic chat room to manipulate the spot market’s exchange rate between euros and dollars, using coded language to conceal their collusion.
SUMMARY: Last December, Brandon Tate-Brown was killed by Philadelphia police after being pulled over for driving with his headlights off. His family is not alone in their pain -- there have been 394 shootings involving the police in Philadelphia since 2007. Despite efforts to review and reform police training and transparency, the changes are far from reality at this point. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The death of a 25-year-old black man, Freddie Gray, in Baltimore is the most recent in a string of stories spotlighting use of force by police.
Many cities across the country are trying to improve relations between police and the citizens they protect. In Philadelphia, a recent Justice Department report found nearly once a week over the past eight years Philadelphia police opened fire on suspects, who are almost always African-American.
Hari Sreenivasan has more.
TANYA BROWN-DICKERSON, Mother of Brandon Tate-Brown: On December 15, 2014, I was going to work. I got to work a little late. I got there, I want to say 6:26. And I was getting ready to cut my car off. And I heard a black male, on the radio, a black male, 26 years old, gunned down by police at the 6600 block of Frankford Avenue, driving a white Dodge Charger.
So when I heard that, unfortunately, I knew that it was my son.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Last December, Tanya Brown’s son Brandon Tate-Brown had been killed, shot by Philadelphia polices, after being pulled over for driving with his headlights off.
TANYA BROWN-DICKERSON: To know that my son suffered like that and that I wasn’t there to protect him or lay my body on him, and them probably kill me too, it breaks my heart. I’m his mother. And I couldn’t do nothing to help him.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Tanya Brown is not alone in her pain. There have been 394 shootings involving the Philadelphia police since 2007. In many years, the department saw more police shootings than New York City, a city that is five times its size.
SUMMARY: The Justice Department and FBI formally acknowledged that FBI forensic investigators routinely gave flawed testimony overstating evidence against criminal defendants during the 1980s and 1990s. In more than a dozen cases, defendants were later executed or died in prison. Spencer Hsu of The Washington Post joins Hari Sreenivasan from Washington to discuss.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): News from Washington tonight that, for nearly two decades, during the 1980s and ’90s, top FBI forensic investigators routinely gave flawed testimony, overstating the evidence they had against criminal defendants.
In more than a dozen cases, the defendants were later executed or died in prison.
Spencer Hsu broke the story in today’s Washington Post. He joins us now.
So, you said that this is a watershed moment in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals. Break this down for us.
SPENCER HSU, The Washington Post: What has been found has been, as you say, that, for more than two decades, nearly every examiner and nearly every criminal trial in which FBI experts gave testimony against criminal defendants, they overstated the strength or the significance of a match.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, you said that about a quarter of all the wrongful convictions, the people who have been exonerated later on, the testimony of hair examiners or bite mark comparisons have actually helped sway juries or judges.
SPENCER HSU: That’s right.
Out of about 329 DNA exonerations, a quarter, more than a quarter have involved invalid forensic science. One of the issues here is that, unlike DNA, which has a — was developed, you know, by scientists for scientists, a lot of the earlier pattern-based techniques, comparing hair, fiber, bite marks, even tracing bullets to — being fired from specific weapons, were developed in the lab by law enforcement.
President Obama commuted the sentences of 22 people on Tuesday, doubling the number of commutations he has granted during his administration in just one day. The decision follows a push from the Justice Department last year to grant clemency to nonviolent prisoners, many of whom had been sent to prison under the harsh sentencing laws and aggressive anti-crime policies that were originally implemented during the 1980s and 1990s.
Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and the founder of the nation’s first law school clinic on federal commutations, said that the President’s action is not only historic, but also represents a commitment. “This is intended to be a message of hope,” Osler told ProPublica. “There are thousands of Americans who are going to read this and say that’s like my case or my father’s case. Now, the President has to follow through and take that seriously.”
In April 2014, the Justice Department announced a new initiative to fast-track clemency petitions for prisoners who, under today’s sentencing laws, would have received a substantially lower sentence for the same offense. To speed up the application process, the Justice Department introduced new criteria to help prioritize the petitions, stating that the agency would prioritize non-violent offenders who had served more than 10 years of their sentences.
Alongside the announcement of the new initiative came the removal of the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney, Ronald Rodgers. In 2012, ProPublica and the Washington Post revealed that Rodgers had failed to disclose critical information in recommending that the White House deny the petition of Clarence Aaron, who was sentenced to three life terms for minor involvement in a drug deal.
Following our reporting, Obama granted Aaron clemency, after he spent two decades in prison.
Like Aaron, all of the individuals who were granted clemency this week were serving sentences longer than 10 years for non-violent drug crimes. The White House reported that President Obama penned letters to each of them.
“Thousands of individuals have applied for commutation, and only a fraction of these applications are approved,” the President wrote in one letter to Terry Andre Barnes, who was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison in 2005 for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
“I am granting your application because you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around. Now it is up to you to make the most of this opportunity.”
Margaret Love, who served as U.S. Pardon Attorney for the Justice Department from 1990 to 1997 and now represents petitioners, recognizes the need for further action. “I know that the President is committed to redressing some of the wrongs of federal sentencing,” she said, “but I think he is going to need to put a system in place for handling hundreds as opposed to dozens of cases that deserve a sentence reduction.”
SUMMARY: A U.S. Justice Department investigation into law enforcement in Ferguson discovered many disturbing incidents that helped drive distrust and hostility between the community and police. Gwen Ifill discusses the report’s findings with Rev. Starsky Wilson and Kevin Ahlbrand of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police, two members of an independent commission set up by the state of Missouri.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): We turn now to two members of the independent commission set up by the state of Missouri to look into the events in Ferguson. Starsky Wilson chairs the commission and is pastor of Saint John’s Church in Saint Louis, and Kevin Ahlbrand is a police detective in Saint Louis and president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police. Tonight, he’s in San Diego.
Reverend Wilson, that was just scraping the surface of the findings in that Department of Justice report. What surprised you the most about what you read?
REV. STARSKY WILSON, Co-Chair, Ferguson Commission: Quite frankly, while the report was disheartening, the overall findings were not surprising.
We knew, based on the testimony we have heard from people not only in the streets, but through our commission’s work over the first 100 days, that people experience racialized policing, that they believed in their truth that this was driven by profit. We now see the evidence of that.
The things that surprised me, quite frankly, were the kind of salacious narrative of the fact that we have an e-mail from the finance director of the city directly to the chief of police suggesting that revenues be raised through direct policing practices. These are the kinds of things that should never be in public — in the public administration of justice, quite frankly, and they’re the kind of things that undermine the trust in governance that we need for the project of inclusive democracy to work.
GWEN IFILL: Kevin Ahlbrand, what struck you, especially this part about policing for profit that Reverend Wilson just brought up? What struck you the most about that report?
KEVIN AHLBRAND, Ferguson Commission: Well, and — basically that, the whole municipal court system.
We have known for a long time that it’s been a problem. We have never condoned ticket quotas. We are vehemently opposed to them. We are supporting a bill that is currently making the way through the Missouri legislature which would reduce the percentage that cities could use fees and fines for their budget. And we have always been opposed to that.
Part of the big problem is, if the police officer has to write X-number of tickets, that’s time that he can’t be out there in the community doing community-oriented policing. And that’s what we have gotten away from, and I think really that is what we need to get back to.
SUMMARY: An extensive federal investigation into police practices in Ferguson, Missouri, uncovered new details about the department's racially based and profit-driven enforcement and prosecution. While the U.S. Justice Department declined to bring a civil rights case against former policeman Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, Brown’s family to filed a wrongful death suit Thursday. Gwen Ifill reports.
