Ferguson Fraud: City Spent Months Negotiating Deal On Policing Practices With Justice Department — Sued for Reneging at Last Minute

By Matt Pearce
The city of Ferguson, Mo., must now defend itself against a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice after months of negotiations failed to bring a compromise on a package of reforms designed to revamp the city's controversial policing practices.

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Ferguson's Official Criminals Running For Cover: Judge, City Manager and Police Chief Resign — What About The Prosecutor?

All Arrest Warrants Issued In Ferguson Prior to 2015 Withdrawn — Ticketing Blacks Was Key Source of Funds

U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch announced the action against Ferguson on Wednesday, a day after federal officials said Ferguson’s City Council tried to unilaterally modify and pass its own version of reforms.

A “disappointed” Lynch criticized Ferguson’s city leaders for trying to amend a package of reforms that had been hammered out between city and federal officials after seven months of what she called “painstaking” negotiations. The reforms include the mandatory use of body cameras and a repeal of city laws that allow police to jail people for not paying fines.

In a 6-0 vote Tuesday night, the City Council said it would only accept the package if the Justice Department agreed to several conditions that included limits on staffing mandates and longer deadlines.

“Every part of that document was discussed and was negotiated extensively,” Lynch said in a televised news conference in Washington, D.C.

Lynch added, “The city was well aware that had they decided not to accept it, they were choosing litigation.”

Ferguson became a national symbol of troubled policing after the August 2014 police shooting death of unarmed, black 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white police officer led to riots and lengthy protests in the predominantly African American St. Louis suburb.

An ensuing Department of Justice investigation found no reason to charge the officer who shot Brown, Darren Wilson, who said Brown had charged at him. Federal investigators could not prove activists’ claims that Brown had his hands up when Wilson shot him.

But a separate department investigation found that the city's police force systematically racially profiled and harassed black residents. The Justice Department report released last March found that the city’s overwhelmingly white police force set dogs on black residents and that officers were seven times more likely to use force on black residents than whites. Black drivers were almost twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during a traffic stop even though they were less likely to be found in possession of something illegal.

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Mass Incarceration Takes A Blow: Obama Administration To Release 6,000 Inmates — Citizens Given Pointlessly Long Drug Sentences

Photo by blue cheddar.

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
The Justice Department is preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prison as part of an effort to ease overcrowding and roll back the harsh penalties given to nonviolent drug dealers in the 1980s and ’90s, according to federal law enforcement officials.

The release is scheduled to occur from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2, and will be one of the largest one-time discharges of inmates from federal prisons in American history, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing matters that had not been publicly announced by the Justice Department.

The Bureau of Prisons is arranging for many of the inmates to initially move into halfway houses, one official said.

In April, the United States Sentencing Commission created guidelines that reduced the penalties for many nonviolent drug crimes and made some of those changes retroactive. Officials said at the time that the move applied to at least 50,000 federal inmates sentenced under the previous guidelines.

The new guidelines were issued amid increasing support for an overhaul of sentencing. The United States has a quarter of the world’s prison population and both Republicans and Democrats agree that prison spending, which accounts for a third of the Justice Department’s budget, needs to be reduced. News of the prison release was first reported by The Washington Post.

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Obama Grants Clemency to 22 Prisoners This Week — But the Frightened President Has Left Thousands in LImbo

A ProPublica review of Justice Department statistics in 2012 found that Obama granted fewer petitions for pardon than the four preceding presidents at similar points during their administrations. To date, Obama has granted only 3.4 percent of petitions for pardons and commuted less than one percent of petitions for clemency. He has denied more than 9,000 petitions.

Photo by Steve Jurvetson.

By Annie Waldman ProPublica
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."

A ProPublica review of Justice Department statistics in 2012 found that Obama granted fewer petitions for pardon than the four preceding presidents at similar points during their administrations. To date, Obama has granted only 3.4 percent of petitions for pardons and commuted less than one percent of petitions for clemency. He has denied more than 9,000 petitions.

According to the Justice Department, nearly 8,700 individuals are still waiting for their petitions to be reviewed.

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

Department of Justice Covers Up Information on an Anti-Iran Neocon Front Group Likely Created by Israel and the CIA

The organization ran an "attack, discredit, and defame" operation against anyone advocating for better US relations with Iran

By Glenn Greenwald
A truly stunning debasement of the U.S. justice system just occurred through the joint efforts of the Obama Justice Department and a meek and frightened Obama-appointed federal judge, Edgardo Ramos, all in order to protect an extremist neocon front group from scrutiny and accountability. The details are crucial for understanding the magnitude of the abuse here. At the center of it is an anti-Iranian group calling itself “United Against Nuclear Iran” (UANI), which is very likely a front for some combination of the Israeli and U.S. intelligence services.

When launched, NBC described its mission as waging “economic and psychological warfare” against Iran. The group was founded and is run and guided by a roster of U.S., Israeli and British neocon extremists such as Joe Lieberman, former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and current CNN “analyst”) Fran Townsend, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and former Mossad Director Meir Dagan. One of its key advisers is Olli Heinonen, who just co-authored a Washington Post Op-Ed with former Bush CIA/NSA Director Michael Hayden arguing that Washington is being too soft on Tehran.

This group of neocon extremists was literally just immunized by a federal court from the rule of law. That was based on the claim — advocated by the Obama DOJ and accepted by Judge Ramos — that subjecting them to litigation for their actions would risk disclosure of vital “state secrets.” The court’s ruling was based on assertions made through completely secret proceedings between the court and the U.S. government, with everyone else — including the lawyers for the parties — kept in the dark.

In May 2013, UANI launched a “name and shame” campaign designed to publicly identify — and malign — any individuals or entities enabling trade with Iran. One of the accused was the shipping company of Greek billionaire Victor Restis, who vehemently denies the accusation. He hired an American law firm and sued UANI for defamation in a New York federal court, claiming the “name and shame” campaign destroyed his reputation.

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American 'Drug Enforcement' Agents (DEA) Engage in Sex Parties Paid for by Drug Cartels — That's Your 'War on Drugs'

Photo by Brett Neilson.

By Lindsay Dunsmuir
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents had alleged "sex parties" with prostitutes over several years, said a report published on Thursday and stemming from a review of allegations of misconduct by several DEA agents in Colombia.

The alleged parties were funded by local drug cartels, said the report by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, an agency internal watchdog.

The report raised concerns about inadequate reporting of allegations of misconduct and sexual harassment by several law enforcement agencies, including the DEA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Among the DEA allegations, 10 agents - an assistant regional director and nine special agents - had the alleged sex parties "at government-leased headquarters," and three of the special agents "were provided money, expensive gifts, and weapons from drug cartel members," according to the report.

After investigation, seven of the agents admitted attending the parties, and were suspended for between two and 10 days.

One special agent was cleared of all wrongdoing, the report said. None of the agents was named in the report.

The inspector general said it investigated allegations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct between October 2008 and September 2012. The Office of the Inspector General declined to confirm where the alleged "sex parties" took place.

The DEA declined to comment.

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Obama’s Selma Song: America Is Not Racist – It’s Just Ferguson

“Obama’s 2015 Selma paradigm meshes with his 2007 fiction that Blacks had already traveled 90 percent of the road to equality.”

Photo by dogsy.

By Glenn Ford, BAR
Barack Obama returned to Selma, Alabama, last Saturday, with an updated version of his speech on race delivered eight years ago, during another commemoration of the 1965 march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Back then, presidential candidate Obama told the crowd at Brown Chapel AME Church that Blacks had already come “90 percent of the way” to racial equality. He was implicitly predicting that the election of himself as the first Black president would propel African Americans to 100 percent equality, completing the journey and marking the end of racial politics in the United States. It was a bald-faced lie, by any statistical measurement. Blacks had never earned more than 66 cents on the white dollar, and would fall much further behind before Obama set foot in Selma, again. Catastrophically, Black median household wealth would collapse to one-twentieth that of whites under his watch.

A year after his first Selma speech, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright affair would force candidate Obama to give a widely acclaimed presentation on race, in Philadelphia. Obama trashed his former pastor for harboring a “profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic” – a term defined as “belonging or native to a particular people or country.” He denied that racism had ever been endemic in the U.S.

Last weekend, Obama returned to the subject of endemic racism. “What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic, or sanctioned by law and custom; and before the Civil Rights Movement, it most surely was,” he told the huge throng in Selma. Obama now admits that racism had once been endemic to the country but, apparently, the marching of Black feet had stamped it out, so that it is now limited to Ferguson-like localities. “We do a disservice to the cause of justice,” he said, “by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America.” How dare they malign the world’s first apartheid nation, a country that rose to superpower status on stolen land and labor, in such cruel fashion!

Obama tries to split the U.S. historical time-line in two: Before Civil Rights (BCR) versus After Civil Rights (ACR) – an exercise that allows him to dismiss today’s racial realities by dumping the endemic variety into the era before voting rights and scraping the leftovers into benighted places like Ferguson, Missouri. Obama’s 2015 Selma paradigm meshes with his 2007 fiction that Blacks had already traveled 90 percent of the road to equality and were one presidential vote away from completing the process – which is another way of saying that the Democratic Party will set you free.

“Before going to Selma, Obama took care to preserve the impunities of killer cops.”

The president’s reasoning also gives aid and comfort to the majority of whites, including youngsters, that now believe white people are the most discriminated-against class in America. If endemic racism has been all but eliminated and Black people have already achieved near-equal status, then Black protestations to the contrary are baseless and maliciously racist in intent. The real problem, therefore, is “reverse racism”: that Black Lives Matter too much. As anti-racist white scholars Paul Street and Tim Wise warned in the run-up to the 2008 election, many whites interpret Obama’s ascension as having removed any residual legitimacy from Black complaints. Obama’s rhetoric and behavior buttress that twisted worldview.

Before going to Selma, Obama took care to preserve the impunities of killer cops. He stands firmly by Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to indict former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson on civil rights charges in the death of Michael Brown. Wilson, "like anyone else who is charged with a crime, benefits from due process and a reasonable doubt standard," the president told a largely Black crowd in South Carolina. "If there is uncertainty about what happened, then you can't just charge him anyway because what happened was tragic."

For Obama and Holder, the routine killing of unarmed Blacks by police is “tragic,” but not evidence of anything endemic in American society – certainly, not something for the U.S. Justice Department to worry about.

The division of U.S. history into pre- and post-Selma eras is also a way of delegitimizing the struggles that continued after passage of civil rights legislation: the battles against domestic and global social injustice and the fight against what the Black Panther Party for Self Defense called the police “army of occupation.” Five years after the events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the national policy of mass Black incarceration had become fully operational. Over the space of two generations, an entire people would be criminalized by the Mass Black Incarceration State – what Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow” – a system so pervasive and unremitting that one out of every eight prison inmates in the world is now an African American. This is the system that Obama and Holder so vigorously defend.

Atlanta Black Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten senseless by the Alabama Highway Patrol on Edmund Pettus Bridge, told last weekend’s crowd: "If someone told me 50 years ago I'd be back on this bridge introducing a black president of the United States, I'd have said you're crazy."

Maybe. And, if someone had said, back in 2007, when Barack Obama spoke at Brown Chapel AME Church, that he would surpass George Bush in fomenting war and chaos in the world, including a 7-month bombing campaign against an African country; exempt “too big to jail” bankers from all criminal penalties; pass legislation effectively nullifying due process of law (except, apparently, for killer cops); and subvert public education in favor of privatized charter schools – in short, that the first Black president would become the “more effective evil” – few would have believed it. But now we know.

It is a bridge that Black people had to painfully cross, to arrive at the other side of the illusion.

_____________
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Police Killed Over 5000 People During The Past Ten Years — And Didn't Report It: Average of 545 Killings by Police Go Unreported Each Year

You’re 55 Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist: At least 194 people have been killed by U.S. police since January 1, 2015. At least 1,101 were killed in 2014. At least 2,059 have been killed since May 1, 2013. Source: killedbypolice.net

Photo by Global Panorama.

By Tom McCarthy
An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.

The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted “law enforcement homicides” exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate – an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data – amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government’s failure to track how many people police kill.

The revelation called into particular question the FBI practice of publishing annual totals of “justifiable homicides by law enforcement” – tallies that are widely cited in the media and elsewhere as the most accurate official count of police homicides.

This Investigation Proves the FBI's Statistics on
Police Killings Are A Sham

The new estimates added crucial framing to a criminal justice crisis in the US that was coming into sharp focus this week. A Justice Department report expected to be published on Wednesday exposed serial civil rights abuses by police in Ferguson, Missouri. On Monday, the president’s taskforce on policing issued recommendations for better data collection as part of a call for top-to-bottom criminal justice reform.

“There was a great emphasis on the need to collect more data,” Barack Obama said after a meeting with the taskforce. “Right now, we do not have a good sense, and local communities do not have a good sense, of how frequently there may be interactions with police and community members that result in a death, result in a shooting.”

The president’s warning of a national blind spot on police killings significantly amplified growing calls for policing reforms and for a revolution in crime statistics. Yet Obama did not, perhaps, capture just how bad the information was that the country has been working with. Independent tallies had previously indicated that the FBI’s “justifiable homicide” counts were flawed. But until recently, the FBI discouraged challenges to its numbers, insisting that they were carefully audited – and pointing out that the bureau, in any case, was required by law to publish them.

Tuesday’s bureau of justice statistics (BJS) report, produced in collaboration with RTI International, the research institute, explodes the notion – if its findings are accurate – that the figures the FBI publishes annually are anything other than hugely misleading.

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The Report On The Ferguson Police Department — Read the Entire Report for Yourself

Photo by All-Nite Images.

Highlights of the report include: 1) African-American drivers are twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during traffic stops, but 26% less likely to be found in possession of contraband; 2) Cops use their dogs to attack blacks for no reason and without warning; 3) Blacks are treated as sources of revenue; 4) Racism is rampant in the police department, with officers and court officials circulating racist emails; 5) Arrest warrants were routinely issued for blacks for non-payment of fines for minor traffic or parking violations; and 6) Blacks accounted for 90% of officers' use of force.

Another Wall Street Firm That Helped Crash Economy Pays a Bribe — And No Executives Jailed

Photo by Jim Larrison.

By Michael J Moore, David McLaughlin
Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $2.6 billion to settle probes into its creation and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities, as the U.S. Department of Justice holds another large Wall Street firm to account for the 2008 financial crisis.

The firm increased legal reserves related to mortgage matters by about $2.8 billion, cutting 2014 income from continuing operations by $2.7 billion, or $1.35 a share, Morgan Stanley said Wednesday in an annual regulatory filing. It’s the fourth time in the past five quarters that the New York-based bank reduced earnings in the weeks after announcing them.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. -- the three biggest U.S. banks -- previously settled with federal and state authorities over the probes, agreeing to pay a total of more than $35 billion in cash and consumer relief. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. disclosed this week that it received a letter from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento, saying a civil lawsuit may be brought against the firm.

__________________

RELATED STORY: JP Morgan Chase Paid A $9 Billion Settlement (Bribe) To Keep A Witness From Testifying: Justice Department Helped Silence Whistleblower

RELATED STORY: Another Corporation Caught Stealing Millions — 'Fearless' Attorney General Let's Them Off With a Bribe and NO Jail Time

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RELATED STORY: The Wall Street Tobacco Deal Scam — Left States With Billions in Toxic Debt: Some States Promised to Repay $64 Billion On Just $3 Billion Advanced

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__________________

Patrick Rodenbush, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to immediately comment about the settlement.

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Eric Holder — Patron Saint of Killer Cops: A Long and Documented History of Letting Killer Cops Walk

He Put Police Above the Law

Photo by North Charleston.

By JAMES BOVARD
Attorney General Eric Holder is collecting buckets of accolades in his final weeks in office. Newspapers are especially praising Holder’s suggestion that the feds begin keeping tabs on shootings by police across the nation. But Holder’s own career shows his devotion to ignoring or covering up law enforcement killings unless a bonanza of profitable publicity awaited him.

As the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia from 1993 to 1997, Holder was in charge of policing the local police. When police violence spiraled out of control, he did little or nothing to protect D.C. residents from rampaging lawmen.

The number of killings by D.C. police quadrupled between 1989 and 1995, when 16 civilians died owing to police gunfire. D.C. police shot and killed people at a higher rate than any other major city police department, as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post investigation revealed in late 1998. But Holder had no problem with D.C.’s quick-trigger force: “I can’t honestly say I saw anything that was excessive.” He never noticed that the D.C. police department failed to count almost half the people killed by its officers between 1994 and 1997.

Even when police-review boards ruled that shootings were unjustified or found contradictions in officers’ testimony, police were not prosecuted. In one case an officer shot a suspect four times in the back when he was unarmed and lying on the ground. But Holder’s office never bothered interviewing the shooter.

[...]

At 9 a.m. on May 15, 1995, a D.C. policeman pursued a car that he claimed he had seen moving recklessly on Florida Avenue NW. The policeman walked up to the vehicle and shot 16-year-old Kedemah Dorsey in the chest. The car began pulling away, and the policeman hopped alongside and shot the boy again in the back, killing him. Lawyer Doug Sparks, sitting in a nearby car, told the Post, “It was basically at point-blank range. I thought it was some kind of drug shooting.” The policeman claimed that he fired because Dorsey, who was scheduled to start his shift at Burger King later that morning, was trying to run him down. Attorney Michael Morganstern, who sued the District government and collected $150,000 for the family, commented, “It’s somewhat difficult to use the car as a weapon when it is wedged in rush-hour traffic and the officer is standing to the side of it, not in front of it.” A police department investigation concluded that the shooting was unjustified, but Holder’s office refused to file charges against the policeman.

Holder was feckless even when a policeman confessed to lying about killing an unarmed teenager. After Roosevelt Askew killed a 19-year-old motorist during a 1994 traffic stop, he claimed he fired because the driver was trying to run over another policeman. But that story soon collapsed. In early 1995, Askew admitted to Holder’s office that he had lied and then claimed he shot the teenager accidentally. No charges were filed against Askew until a year and a half after his confession. The case lingered on the back burner until after Holder moved on to become deputy attorney general under Janet Reno. The U.S. attorney’s office eventually signed off on a deal that let Askew plead guilty merely to filing a false police report; he received two years probation and a $5,000 fine.

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Top Ratings Company That Gave Bogus Mortgage Securities Triple-A Ratings Given 'Get Out of Jail Card' for $1.5 Billion Payoff

Standard & Poor's  claimed that their defrauding of pension funds was "legal" because their lies about the "high quality" of toxic mortgage securities was "free speech." The ratings corporation also claimed the Justice Department sued them to revenge the downgrading of the United States' credit rating.

Apparently you can package garbage as securities and those securities can get high ratings from S&P — If you know
the right people.

S&P reaches $1.5 billion deal with U.S., states over crisis-era ratings

By Aruna Viswanatha and Karen Freifeld
Credit rating firm Standard & Poor's will pay $1.5 billion to resolve a collection of lawsuits over its ratings on mortgage securities that soured in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, concluding one of the U.S. government's most ambitious cases tied to the housing collapse.

The settlement comes after more than two years of litigation as S&P tried to beat back allegations that it issued overly rosy ratings in order to win more business.

S&P parent McGraw Hill Financial Inc (MHFI.N) said it will pay $687.5 million to the U.S. Department of Justice, and $687.5 million to 19 states and the District of Columbia, which had filed similar lawsuits over the ratings.

Late Monday, the firm reached a separate $125 million settlement with public pension fund California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which had sued S&P in 2009, claiming its inaccurate ratings caused the firm hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

The United States sued S&P in 2013 after initial settlement talks broke down, seeking $5 billion and accusing the ratings agency of defrauding investors. S&P argued that its ratings were protected under the First Amendment right to free speech, and described the lawsuit as retaliation for the firm downgrading the credit rating of the United States.

Under the settlement, S&P acknowledged it has not uncovered evidence to support the allegations of retaliation. "This was important to me," Attorney General Eric Holder said, referring to the allegation as "utter nonsense."

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JP Morgan Chase Paid A $9 Billion Settlement (Bribe) To Keep A Witness From Testifying: Justice Department Helped Silence Whistleblower

Illustration by Tim Hunkin with Joanna Lumley.

By Matt Taibbi
She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn't take it anymore.

"It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street," she says. "I thought, 'I can't sit by any longer.'"

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She's had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

Fleischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" in the bank's mortgage operations.

Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she's kept her mouth shut since then. "My closest family and friends don't know what I've been living with," she says. "Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview."

Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it's not exactly news that the country's biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That's why the more important part of Fleischmann's story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.

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Cops Execute Mentally Ill Homeless Man in Barrage of 46 Bullets: Cops Lined Up Like A Firing Squad Before The Kill (Video)

The mentally ill homeless man pulled out a tiny pocket knife to protect himself from a lunging police dog. The cops didn't bother trying to use their tasers — They were anxious to use their guns to shoot somebody. That was two years ago. Barack Obama's Justice Department found no "sufficient evidence of willful misconduct."—Ronald David Jackson

The video was released two years after the incident by the ACLU. (Screen capture from video)

Lauren Walker
On a quiet Sunday in July 2012 in broad daylight, six police officers in Michigan repeatedly shot an African-American man struggling with homelessness and mental illness. While the killing of Milton Hall prompted local outrage and a federal investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in February that it failed to find “sufficient evidence of willful misconduct” to prosecute the policemen.

This Monday, more than two years later, the ACLU released footage obtained from the Hall family’s lawyers and used it as part of its testimony before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an organ of the Organization of American States, in order to put pressure on the federal government. While a bystander video was shown on CNN shortly after the shooting, the newly released dashcam video shows the incident with unprecedented detail.

In the video, Hall, 49, is seen standing in a Saginaw, Michigan, parking lot surrounded by eight police officers with their guns drawn and pointed at him. During the short stand-off, a police dog began to growl and lunge toward Hall, who took out a small pocketknife in response. It was when he turned to the dog, the ACLU says, that police showered Hall with a stream of bullets.

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Activists Demand Full Data on Americans Killed By Police — What's Obama's Justice Department Hiding?

Illustration by DonkeyHotey.

By Renee Lewis
Activists who mobilized after the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown said they have collected 200,000 signatures backing their demand that federal agencies address a nationwide trend of police violence with major reforms — including the collection and release of comprehensive data on how many Americans are killed by law enforcement officers each year.

In the aftermath of Brown’s Aug. 9 death following what police say was an altercation with an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, rights groups and researchers have complained of a startling lack of official national figures on police killings.

A coalition of activists said they were set to deliver the signatures and demands to the White House, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice on Wednesday — which they have declared a “national day of action” against police brutality and alleged racial discrimination in law enforcement.

Protesters in cities across the United States planned to use the day to call for justice for victims of police violence, said Matt Nelson, organizing director for Color of Change, a group that says it works to strengthen black America’s political voice.

“Police targeting of primarily black and brown youth and adults has been elevated to the level of a national crisis, a civil and human rights crisis,” Nelson said. “Color of Change believes that the government needs to step in and take the necessary leadership to make sure peoples’ rights and lives are protected in encounters with police.”

Wednesday’s events included one in New York City related to the July choke-hold killing of Eric Garner. In Ohio activists were calling for justice for John Crawford, a black man killed for holding an air gun in a Walmart where the gun was for sale. And in Ferguson, demonstrators planned to call for Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, to be held accountable for the shooting.

Brown’s death sparked weeks of racially charged protests, and elevated to national debate the issues of discriminatory policing — which refers to law enforcement targeting individuals based on factors including race, religion, or age — and whether minorities are more often killed by police officers.

But activists and researchers say the way the FBI collects data under its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program makes it impossible to know exactly how many Americans are killed by law enforcement officials each year. Local and state departments only report such information on a voluntary basis, according to an emailed statement from FBI Relief Media Liaison Billy Estok.

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Eric Holder: The Reason Why Wall Street Criminals Are Not Behind Bars

Eric Holder testifies before Congress: Republicans grilled him on everything except his
willingness to let criminal bankers go free and grow richer. (Screeen capture from
YouTube video)

By Dean Baker
The big news item in Washington last week was Attorney General Eric Holder decision to resign. Undoubtedly there are positives to Holder’s tenure as attorney general, but one really big minus is his decision not to prosecute any of the Wall Street crew whose actions helped to prop up the housing bubble. As a result of this failure, the main culprits walked away incredibly wealthy even as most of the country has yet to recover from the damage they caused.

Just to be clear, it is not against the law to be foolish and undoubtedly many of the Wall Streeters were foolish. They likely believed that house prices would just keep rising forever. But the fact that they were foolish doesn’t mean that they didn’t also break the law. It’s likely that most of the Enron felons believed in Enron’s business model. After all, they held millions of dollars of Enron stock. But they still did break the law to make the company appear profitable when it wasn’t.

In the case of the banks, there are specific actions that were committed that violated the law. Mortgage issuers like Countrywide and Ameriquest knowingly issued mortgages based on false information. They then sold these mortgages to investment banks like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs who packaged them into mortgage backed securities. These banks knew that many of the mortgages being put into the pools for these securities did not meet their standards, but passed them along anyhow. And, the bond-rating agencies rated these securities as investment grade, giving many the highest possible ratings, even though they knew their quality did not warrant such ratings.

All three of these actions - knowingly issuing mortgages based on false information, deliberately packaging fraudulent mortgages into mortgage backed securities, and deliberately inflating the ratings for mortgage backed securities - are serious crimes that potentially involve lengthy prison sentences. Holder opted not to pursue criminal cases against the individuals involved.

In the last couple of years Holder did bring civil cases against these banks that led to multibillion settlements. These settlements won big headlines that gave the appearance of being tough on the banks.

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The Terrible Tenure of Eric Holder: Civil Rights Deteriorated, Police Militarized, Whistleblowers Pursued, Not A Single Bank Exec Jailed

Illustration by DonkeyHotey.

By DAVE LINDORFF

Good riddance!

Eric Holder has announced that he is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.

A corporate lawyer with the Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights, his overseeing. and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation’s police forces, his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them, threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face US treason charges), and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.

But Holder, who came into his position as the nation’s top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation’s biggest so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the US but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.

Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street’s banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes; he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes — civil cases that in almost all cases allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks’ stocks and hurt “innocent” shareholders!) Nor was this legal benevalence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions — even billions — of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive.

It is being suggested that Holder may opt to go back to his old post as a partner at Covington & Burling, which would be the final, though hardly surprising, insult to the American people, providing a particularly galling example of Washington’s revolving door between government regulators and enforcers and the industries that they were supposed to be regulating or keeping honest.

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Justice Department Refuses To Compile Police Brutality Statistics — 20 Years After Federal Law Requiring Them To Do So

Attorney General Eric Holder once called Americans "cowards" for not confronting racism.  Tuns out he's the coward.

Attorney General Eric Holder. (Photo by North Charleston)

Scofflaw Justice Dept Refuses To Comply With Federal Law Requiring It To Gather National Police Brutality Stats.

By Bruce Dixon, BAR
We're all supposed to be impressed with the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder parachuted into Ferguson MO the other day to wrap his arms around the local top black cop and get briefed on the pending federal investigation into the police killing of Michael Brown. But we shouldn't be.

For the last 20 years, since 1994, Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act obligates the Department of Justice to collect statistics on the extent of brutality and excessive force used by police officers, and to make those findings available to the public. 20 years down the road no such stats exist, because the Justice Departments of the Clinton, the Bush and the Obama administrations have all simply ignored the law and refuse even to try to gather the information. Let me say this again: the Clinton Justice Department defied the law and refused to gather national stats on police misconduct. The Bush Justice Department thumbed its nose at the law and also refused to gather national stats on police misconduct, and now the first black attorney general, who sometimes even utters the phrase “mass incarceration”, which he recently discovered, selected by the first black president who says if he had a son, his son could be Trayvon Martin – Eric Holder and Barack Obama have likewise shown no interest whatsoever in fulfilling their legal duty when it comes to assembling a national database of police misconduct.

This should not surprise the president's apologists, who will surely counsel us that he has to be president of all the people, including the police. Everybody knows black and brown people are the disproportionate targets of police violence, so enforcing laws which particularly benefit black and brown communities are something we must not expect. Perhaps after the president leaves office, they'll tell us, he'll speak out more forcefully on this. Maybe the “My Brothers Keeper” initiative can get some charitable dollars to organizations like , or PUSH or the Urban League to help more of our young boys to pull their pants up so they won't get beat down.

Let's get real. The Republicans haven't stopped Obama and Holder from doing this, they stopped themselves. Like every cop on the beat, the Obama administration chooses which laws to enforce, which ones to bend and in what direction, and which ones to ignore. Obama's DOJ has resurrected the century old Espionage Act, not to prosecute spies, but to threaten and to imprison whistleblowers who tell the truth to reporters, and to journalists themselves if they do not reveal their sources with decades in prison, like Chelsea Manning, and on so-called “secret evidence.” So when you think about it, it's entirely logical that a president and attorney general who place such a high priority on protecting their torturers, their bankster friends, and the official wrongdoers of past and future administrations should want to protect the police from scrutiny as well.

It's time to shed some illusions, not just about this president but about the whole political class that claims he or any president can be “held accountable.” Barack Obama and his Justice Department are no more interested in justice than the administrations of ten presidents before him, and uncritical black and brown support has made this president less accountable to black and brown people than any in living memory.

__________________________
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the GA Green Party. He can be reached via this site's contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Affluenza: Citibank Execs Pay $7 Billion Bribe to US Justice Dept to Avoid Jail Over Multi Billion-Dollar Mortgage Ripoff

Illustration by DonkeyHotey.

By CNN Wire
Citigroup agreed to pay $7 billion to settle charges that it packaged bad mortgages during the run-up to the financial crisis.

It includes $4 billion in penalties, $2.5 billion in mortgage modifications and other relief to homeowners, and $500 million going to five states and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The settlement means Citi will be able to avoid a civil suit by the Justice Department and mirrors similar agreements with JPMorgan Chase and other lenders in recent years.

While Citi took a $3.8 billion hit because of the deal, which essentially wiped out its earnings for the quarter, it can afford it. Last year, the bank earned $14 billion and had $35 billion of cash on its balance sheet as of June 30.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Citigroup misled investors about the quality of risky mortgages it bundled into securities during the housing boom, allowing it to increase profits and market share.

“Under the terms of this settlement, the bank has admitted to its misdeeds in great detail. The bank’s activities shattered lives and livelihoods throughout the country,” he said. “They contributed mightily to the financial crisis that devastated our economy in 2008."

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Attorney General Eric Holder Protects Corrupt Prosecutors - Says Longtime Federal Attorney: Prosecutors Who Suppressed Evidence Promoted, Promised Reforms Not Instituted

Photo by North Charleston.

By Sidney Powell
As Attorney General Eric Holder prepares to enter the penultimate year of his tenure leading the Department of Justice, the time to honor his sweeping promise to “clean up” the Department of Justice is rapidly diminishing. For many, the time can’t pass quickly enough—and be sure he will stay until the bitter end. Awaiting his departure from the Department is a subpoena from Congress that he would no longer be able to avoid.

Not only has Mr. Holder failed to make any of the reforms he promised in the wake of his forced dismissal of the indictment against former Senator Ted Stevens, the changes he has made have been for the worse. Absent a dramatic about-face, Holder will leave the Department of Justice littered with corrupted prosecutions and prosecutors, his own contempt of Congress, numerous Supreme Court reversals, and scathing rebukes from federal judges.

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Everyone Should Know Just How Much The Government Lied To Defend The NSA

Photo by Tony Fischer.

A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA's dragnet. Why?


By Trevor Timm
If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here's what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have "standing" – in other words, that the ACLU couldn't prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn't challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden's historic whistleblowing to prove it.

One of the most explosive Snowden revelations exposed a then-secret technique known as "about" surveillance. As the New York Times first reported, the NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance." In other words, the NSA doesn't just target a contact overseas – it sweeps up everyone's international communications into a dragnet and searches them for keywords.

The Snowden leaks also pushed the Justice Department to admit – contrary to what it told the court – that the government hadn't been notifying any defendants they were being charged based on NSA surveillance, making it actually impossible for anyone to prove they had standing to challenge the Fisa Amendments Act as unconstitutional.

It's unclear how much Solicitor General Donald Verrilli knew when he told the government's lies – twice – to the justices of the supreme court. Reports suggest that he was livid when he found out that his national security staff at the Justice Department misled him about whether they were notifying defendants in criminal trials of surveillance. And we don't know if he knew about the "about" surveillance that might well have given the ACLU standing in the case. But we do know other Justice Department officials knew about both things, and they have let both lies stand without correcting the record.

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