Despite Promises To Fight Mortgage Fraud, DOJ Basically Ignored It, Then Claimed Success With Faulty Stats

from the terrorism-is-hot dept

A few months ago, we noted that the FBI had quietly admitted that its primary function was no longer law enforcement (as it was supposed to be), but rather "national security." Because fighting terrorism is hot. Putting bankers destroying the economy in jail? Not hot. As we noted at the time, the numbers showed that the FBI was putting a huge part of its budget towards "counterterrorism" (potentially doing much more to destroy your civil liberties than the NSA) and its efforts to take down white collar crime was dropping significantly.

A new report from the Justice Department's Inspector General confirms this finding. It also notes that, despite President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder promising (yeah, I know...) that cracking down on "mortgage fraud" was a top priority, the FBI has actually put it near the bottom of the list of actual priorities. Say one thing, do another. That sounds mighty familiar.

“In cities across the country, mortgage fraud crimes have reached crisis proportions,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said at a mortgage fraud summit in Phoenix in 2010. “But we are fighting back.”

The inspector general’s report, however, shows that the F.B.I. considered mortgage fraud to be its lowest-ranked national criminal priority. In several large cities, including New York and Los Angeles, F.B.I. agents either ranked mortgage fraud as a low priority or did not rank it at all.

Oh, and even better, because of all the hype and talk about mortgage fraud, Congress allocated more budget specifically for that purpose, though it appears to have gone elsewhere.

And that's not all. The DOJ then pretended that it had been fighting mortgage fraud and put on a whole presentation about its success -- based on totally faulty numbers. Numbers that it was pretty sure were faulty -- and then took nearly a year to admit that their claims of success were based on bogus stats:

We further found that, despite receiving significant additional funding from Congress to pursue mortgage fraud cases, the FBI in adding new staff did not always use these new positions to exclusively investigate mortgage fraud. Moreover, when we attempted to assess the effectiveness of the Department’s efforts in pursuing mortgage fraud cases, we found that DOJ could not provide readily verifiable data related to its criminal and civil enforcement efforts. The DOJ’s release of significantly flawed information at a highly publicized press conference in October 2012 regarding the purported success of the FFETF’s and the DOJ’s recent mortgage fraud initiative reflects the lack of accurate data maintained by the Department regarding its mortgage fraud efforts, as well as the Department’s serious failure to adequately vet information that it was presenting to the public. Only days after the press conference the Department had serious concerns over the accuracy of the reported statistics, yet it was not until August 2013 when the Department informed the public that the October 2012 reported statistics were indeed flawed. Moreover, during those 10 months, the Department continued to issue press releases publicizing statistics it knew were seriously flawed. We believe the Department should have been more forthright at a much earlier date about this flawed information.

Somehow, none of this is making me feel any safer.

Filed Under: doj, eric holder, fbi, mortgage fraud, national security, priorities

Eric Holder Officially Signs New Rules To Protect Journalists... But Fine Print Shows They're Meaningless

from the that's-a-mighty-big-loophole-you've-got-there dept

Last summer, after there were a few different revelations (pre-Snowden) of the DOJ using questionable means to spy on journalists -- including pretending one reporter was a co-conspirator in order to get his records -- Attorney General Eric Holder promised new rules that would be marginally more respectful of protecting journalists. While recent reports have suggested that these new guidelines were considered official policy in the DOJ for the past few months, last week they were officially signed by Holder.

As expected, the rules do suggest a slight nod towards respecting the privacy of journalists who are engaged in "ordinary news-gathering activities" but leaves open plenty of loopholes. The biggest, by far, is noted by Marcy Wheeler, who points out that the new rules don't cover FISA warrants or National Security letters. In other words, the DOJ can still make use of the massively abused process of national security letters (NSLs) to go on fishing expeditions against journalists. As Wheeler notes, this means that the new guidelines are "worth approximately shit in any leak -- that is, counterintelligence -- investigation."

The whole thing is a joke, but the problem is that the idea of a free and open press is the punchline.

Filed Under: doj, eric holder, fisa, free press, journalism, nsl

Eric Holder Should Condemn James Clapper Calling Journalists 'Accomplices'

from the and-obama-should-fire-clapper dept

We already pointed out James Clapper's ridiculous prepared remarks that referred to journalists as "accomplices" with Ed Snowden. In that post, we noted that Eric Holder had gone through a bit of controversy a year ago when it was revealed that the DOJ had claimed to a court that a reporter was involved in a crime in order to get access to his sources -- and that Holder had promised that the DOJ would not target journalists. As Holder said at the time:

"The Department has not prosecuted, and as long as I’m attorney general, will not prosecute any reporter for doing his or her job," Holder told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday.

DOJ's goal, Holder said, is to "identify and prosecute government officials who jeopardize national security by violating their oaths, not to target members of the press or discourage them from carrying out their vital work."

He has further stated (in a separate Congressional hearing) that the DOJ is already using these new guidelines, which make it clear they are not to target journalists.

And then Clapper makes his idiotic statement.

That leaves open the obvious question, asked by Trevor Timm at the Freedom of the Press Foundation: will Eric Holder condemn Clapper's remarks?

If Holder wants to stay true to his word, the Justice Department should repudiate Clapper’s remark immediately. Journalists do not become “accomplices” or “co-conspirators” by reporting newsworthy information. They’re just good journalists.

Oh yeah, and this:

Journalism is not a crime. On the other hand, lying to Congress is.

Filed Under: accomplices, chilling effects, ed snowden, eric holder, james clapper, journalism

FISA Court Waited Until After Snowden Leaks To Actually Explore If Bulk Phone Record Collection Was Legal

from the well-look-at-that dept

One of the most common defenses of the NSA's bulk phone record collection (in which they get access to the record of basically every phone call in the US) is that the program has been reviewed and reapproved by the FISA Court every few months. Especially after the ruling by Judge Richard Leon calling the program unconstitutional, defenders of the program kept insisting that "every other judge" who reviewed the program had found it legal, with basically all of those other judges being the FISA court. Just yesterday, for example, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that "at least 15 judges on about 35 occasions have said that the program itself is legal."

Except... that's not actually true. We already wrote about yesterday's release of the PCLOB's scathing report on how the program was both illegal and unconstitutional, but wanted to highlight one key point from early in the report, in which the PCLOB notes that the FISC never even bothered to look at whether or not the program was really legal until after it hit the press when Snowden leaked the details to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.

The Section 215 telephone records program has its roots in counterterrorism efforts that originated in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The NSA began collecting telephone metadata in bulk as one part of what became known as the President’s Surveillance Program. From late 2001 through early 2006, the NSA collected bulk telephony metadata based upon presidential authorizations issued every thirty to forty-five days. In May 2006, the FISC first granted an application by the government to conduct the telephone records program under Section 215. The government’s application relied heavily on the reasoning of a 2004 FISA court opinion and order approving the bulk collection of Internet metadata under a different provision of FISA.

On June 5, 2013, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article based on unauthorized disclosures of classified documents by Edward Snowden, a contractor for the NSA, which revealed the telephone records program to the public. On August 29, 2013, FISC Judge Claire Eagan issued an opinion explaining the court’s rationale for approving the Section 215 telephone records program. Although prior authorizations of the program had been accompanied by detailed orders outlining applicable rules and minimization procedures, this was the first judicial opinion explaining the FISA court’s legal reasoning in authorizing the bulk records collection. The Section 215 program was reauthorized most recently by the FISC on January 3, 2014.

We had noted earlier this week that the NSA had relied heavily on that 2004 opinion by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, which was not about the Section 215 program, but rather a different program to collect internet metadata (since discontinued). What many had suspected, but was not clearly stated until now, was that the FISA Court didn't actually bother to do any real analysis of the phone bulk collection data program until after it became public.

It was pretty clear when Judge Eagan's ruling was released in September, that it was written for a post-Snowden world, in which the FISC actually had to explain its bizarre contortionist explanation for how collecting every phone record could possibly be legal or Constitutional. But what wasn't quite known was that this was the first time a FISC judge had ever really bothered to look closely at the issue -- seven years after starting to reapprove the program, with no analysis at all, every three months.

So this idea that the program was approved by 15 judges on 35 occasions is not even close to accurate. What seems clear is that FISC judges more or less let this issue slide for seven years, assuming (based on nothing) that because of Judge Kollar-Kotelly's (already immensely troubling) ruling concerning internet metadata, involving a different authority, that the bulk phone records collection must also be legal under Section 215. It was only over the summer that Judge Eagan was given the unenviable task of trying to come up with an opinion to justify all of that in retrospect, which explains why the reasoning in the opinion was so laughable and easily poked full of holes by nearly everyone who looked at it -- including those more inclined to support the program.

Either way, it's fairly shocking that FISC basically didn't bother to explore the legal issue at all until called on it. It also shows (1) why what Snowden did was so important and (2) why having an adversarial process in place is also important.

Filed Under: claire eagan, colleen kollar-kotelly, eric holder, fisa court, fisc, legal justification, pclob, section 215

Eric Holder Admits That Feds Would 'Engage In Conversation' With Snowden, But Not Grant Him Clemency

from the yet dept

While some will argue this means nothing, it is worth noting that Attorney General Eric Holder has now admitted, at the very least, that his office would be willing to "engage in conversation" with Ed Snowden in an attempt to seek "some sort of resolution" to his case. Holder made it clear that he's not interested in offering clemency, and also says that Snowden should be called a "defendant" rather than a whistleblower, but it at least hints at a willingness to follow what the NY Times has suggested in working out some sort of plea deal with Snowden. Yes, many of us think that he deserves not just clemency, but to be celebrated for exposing what two government bodies have now described as lawbreaking by the NSA. However, it's still quite significant that a senior administration official will now even admit that the administration may be at least slightly open to cutting a deal. It suggests that the administration is starting to realize that the public simply isn't buying the claims against Snowden, and the strategy of demonizing him is failing as well. As the public becomes increasingly aware of how bad these NSA programs are, it seems likely that the government is going to have to realize that it will need to go much further in recognizing that Snowden did not just the right thing, but the honorable and courageous thing in exposing government malfeasance.

Filed Under: ed snowden, eric holder, plea bargain

Administration Calls For Schools To Limit Use Of Zero Tolerance Policies, Police Officers For Routine Student Discipline

from the still-a-long-way-to-go dept

The damage done by zero tolerance policies has been covered here several times. Recently, we noted more schools were dropping these policies in favor of something more nuanced and leaving fewer routine disciplinary problems in the hands of on-campus police officers. The positive effects of these actions were immediately noticeable. Broward County, Florida schools witnessed a 41% drop in arrests in a 66% drop in suspensions after their zero tolerance policies were abandoned.

Now, the administration itself is addressing the damage done by these policies. The US Department of Education has issued guidelines aimed at rolling back zero tolerance policies, which have made it even harder for at-risk students to have a shot at receiving an education.

The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., released a 35-page document that outlined approaches — including counseling for students, coaching for teachers and disciplinary officers, and sessions to teach social and emotional skills — that could reduce the time students spend out of school as punishment.

“The widespread use of suspensions and expulsions has tremendous costs,” Mr. Duncan wrote in a letter to school officials. “Students who are suspended or expelled from school may be unsupervised during daytime hours and cannot benefit from great teaching, positive peer interactions and adult mentorship offered in class and in school.”

The documents note that nearly 25% students with disabilities have been suspended, despite making up only 12% of school attendees. In addition, the DOE's research found that black students were being suspended three times as often as white students. The documents also point to the troubling rise of routine infractions being handed over to police officers, which has resulted in a steady stream of kids spending time in court, rather than in school.

A statement by Attorney General Eric Holder addressed this last issue specifically.

“A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” Mr. Holder said in a statement.

(A nice thought from Eric Holder, but perhaps he could consider extending that leniency to non-violent drug offenders, kids saying stupid stuff who get rung up on "terroristic threat" charges and others similarly trapped in an overbearing justice system.)

The DOJ and Dept. of Education have been pushing for changes along these lines since 2009, but this is first time the two have issued such direct guidance urging an overhaul of bad disciplinary policies. Unfortunately, plenty of resistance is expected from schools whose policies are deeply entrenched. (Not that this is completely their fault -- the government tied school funding to zero tolerance weapons policies years ago, which greatly encouraged the spread of "zero tolerance" to other, less potentially dangerous actions.)

“Resistance can make implementing alternatives a difficult course to chart for school leaders,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, which represents district superintendents. “Meanwhile, funds to improve school climate and train school personnel in alternative school discipline can be scarce in today’s economic climate.”

Further complicating this return to common sense are other roadblocks erected by the DOE itself.

Professor [James] Forman Jr. [clinical professor at Yale Law School] added that because school accountability systems focus on student test scores and other academic measures, rather than on reducing suspensions, schools might not have much incentive to keep troubled students in class.

This is a step back on a path towards true accountability in school discipline, something some administrators are in no hurry to implement. The agency's guidance removes the safety net of handing the decision-making over to broad policies and law enforcement officers in order to claim any overreaction is "out of their hands."

There's no easy fix here, even with the agency's suggestions. On paper, students who are truly problematic don't appear much different than students who occasionally do stupid things. Subtleties will continue to be overlooked as policies are adjusted, occasionally taking out the good with the bad. But this is an important step to take. It's been obvious for years that making discipline decisions using the binary of zero tolerance (and turning it over to police officers as swiftly as possible) has done little to make schools better or safer. Instead, it has resulted in hundreds of cases of inappropriate punishments and kids with court records rather than diplomas.

Filed Under: eric holder, law enforcement, schools, zero tolerance

Members Of Congress Ask Eric Holder To Try Again In His Explanation Of The Prosecution Of Aaron Swartz

from the this-time,-with-some-reality-involved dept

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the unfortunate passing of Aaron Swartz. Senators John Cornyn and Al Franken, along with Rep. Darryl Issa, have now sent Attorney General Eric Holder yet another request for an explanation concerning the investigation and prosecution of Swartz. This follows on a similar request from last year, but these elected officials note both that the DOJ's response was inadequate, and that it was also contradicted by the eventual report on the prosecution that came out of MIT.

We regret that the information your Department has provided to date has not been satisfactory -- among other things, it painted a picture of prosecutors unwilling or unable to weigh what charges to pursue against a defendant, something which you have instructed federal prosecutors is "among [their] most fundamental duties."

The account also is inconsistent with findings in the report prepared by MIT about the prosecution of Mr. Swartz, dated July 26, 2013 ("MIT Report"). A letter provided by the Department in May states that "the charging and sentencing decisions made by Department. lawyers were properly based on the law and the facts of the case . . . and not on inappropriate considerations, such as Mr. Swartz's exercise of his legal rights as a citizen." The MIT Report indicates that Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann considered other factors in advance of the return of the superseding indictment. He told MIT that "the straw that broke the camel's back" was an internet webpage soliciting signatures on Mr. Swartz's behalf by Demand Progress, an activist group founded by Mr. Swartz.

In other words, despite the claims from Holder that the charges against Aaron were not based on Swartz exercising his right to free speech, Stephen Heymann has since admitted that, in fact, Swartz's friends speaking out on his behalf were what made him decide to try to throw the book at Swartz. The letter points out further claims from Holder that appear to be contradicted by the MIT report and note:

Inconsistencies such as these require serious responses to the original letter, and indeed raise more questions about the prosecution of Mr. Swartz. One year ago, we sought the basis for the U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz's determination that her office's conduct was "appropriate." We have received no such information, not even the sentencing memoranda that surely were prepared in a case such as this.

In March, you testified that Mr. Swartz's case was "a good use of prosecutorial discretion." We respectfully disagree. We hope your response to this letter is fulsome, which would help re-build confidence about the willingness of the Department to examine itself where prosecutorial conduct is concerned.

Given how Holder and the DOJ have responded to these issues in the past, I wouldn't expect any real response to be forthcoming any time soon.

Filed Under: aaron swartz, al franken, darrell issa, doj, eric holder, john cornyn, prosecution, stephen heymann

Seven House Judiciary Members Demand DOJ Investigate James Clapper For Lying To Congress

from the now-we're-getting-somewhere dept

Since the Snowden revelations first started coming out, forcing James Clapper to admit that he flat-out lied to Congress, we've been somewhat perplexed as to how Clapper could come out of the whole thing "unscathed." Congress seemed willing to look the other way, and the President didn't appear to have any interest in firing Clapper or Keith Alexander, so as not to "let Snowden win." But, it's never made much sense. Lying to Congress is a pretty serious crime -- and considering the lying was to cover up a program that just this week was found to be unconstitutional, it seems even more serious. The fact that anyone in Congress thinks that Clapper can even be remotely trusted to tell the truth going forward when he got away with lying, seems bizarre.

Hopefully that will be changing now.

Back in October, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of the PATRIOT Act, argued that Clapper should be fired and prosecuted, but hadn't done anything to move that forward. However, with Monday's ruling now making it pretty clear that the program that Clapper lied about (in response to a question from Senator Ron Wyden), Sensenbrenner, along with six of his colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee have sent a letter to Eric Holder, demanding an investigation into Clapper's lying to Congress. The letter is quite a read. They're pretty direct about calling out Clapper for lying, how this is against the law, how others in government have been prosecuted for the same thing, and even how allowing this to go unpunished contributes to "cynicism" about the government.

Congressional oversight depends on truthful testimony--witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress. Accordingly, we request you to investigate the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's "erroneous" statements to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence earlier this year.

[....] 18 U.S.C. § 1001 makes it a crime to "knowingly and willfully" make any "materially false" statement in the course of any "investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee." One of the hallmarks of American democracy is that no one is above the law...

[....] Director Clapper has served his country with distinction, and we have no doubt he believed he was acting in its best interest. Nevertheless, the law is clear. He was asked a question and he was obligated to answer truthfully. He could have declined to answer. He could have offered to answer in a classified setting. He could have corrected himself immediately following the hearing. He did none of these things despite advance warning that the question was coming.

The country's interests are best served when its leaders deal truthfully with its citizens. The mutual sense of good faith it fosters permits compromise and concessions in those cases that warrant it. Director Clapper's willful lie under oath fuels the unhealthy cynicism and distrust that citizens feel toward their government and undermines Congress's ability to perform its Constitutional function.

There are differences of opinion about the propriety of the NSA's data collection programs. There can be no disagreement, however, on the basic premise that congressional witnesses must answer truthfully.

It seems unlikely that Holder will do anything, but this is the first official move we've seen towards actually punishing Clapper for lying to Congress. It would be nice if others in Congress supported this effort as well.

Filed Under: eric holder, house judiciary committee, james clapper, jim sensenbrenner, lying to congress, nsa, nsa surveillance, ron wyden

Read This If You Want To Understand Just How Far The NSA Has Gone, And The Political Mess Behind It

from the must-read dept

I cannot say enough good things about Ryan Lizza's comprehensive article about the NSA's surveillance programs and the legal mess and political fights they've created. There's nothing particularly new in the article, but it does an astoundingly good job putting everything that we've learned into context. Even as someone who's been following all of this very closely, it was still a bit of a jumbled puzzle in my mind, but Lizza's piece took all of it and laid out the entire picture. It goes through all of the details of how and why the NSA began the program, its regular and repeated (often egregious) abuses, and the questionable legal defenses to protect the program. It goes into great detail on Senator Ron Wyden's long fight against these programs and in favor of civil liberties and the Constitution. It details how and why President Obama flip-flopped from his position as Senator and kept the programs, despite multiple opportunities to dump them. Even crazier, it discusses how a proposal Obama made as Senator might have stopped these programs years ago:

Even without a full picture of the programs, two senators who were not on the Intelligence Committee became intense critics of N.S.A. domestic surveillance: Barack Obama and Joe Biden. In May, 2006, after the USA Today article appeared, Biden said it was frightening to learn that the government was collecting telephone records. “I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing,” he told CBS News. “If I know every single phone call you made, I’m able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.”

Obama’s objections to domestic surveillance stretched back even further. In 2003, as a Senate candidate, he called the Patriot Act “shoddy and dangerous.” And at the 2004 Democratic Convention, in the speech that effectively launched his eventual campaign for President, he took aim at the “library records” provision of the law. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states,” he declared. In 2005, when he arrived in Washington, Obama became one of Wyden’s new allies in his attempts to reform the law. The Patriot Act was up for reauthorization, and, at Wyden’s urging, the Senate was trying to scale back the “library records” section. One of the first bills that Obama co-sponsored, the Security and Freedom Enhancement Act, would have required that the government present “specific and articulable facts” if it wanted a court order for records, a much higher standard than the existing one.

Obama and several other senators, including John Kerry, now the Secretary of State, and Chuck Hagel, the current Secretary of Defense, laid out their legal case against the provision in a letter to colleagues on December 14, 2005. The government could “obtain library, medical and gun records and other sensitive personal information under Section 215 of the Patriot Act on a mere showing that those records are relevant to an authorized intelligence investigation,” they wrote. It allowed “government fishing expeditions targeting innocent Americans. We believe the government should be required to convince a judge that the records they are seeking have some connection to a suspected terrorist or spy.” The following day, on the Senate floor, Obama said that the provision “seriously jeopardizes the rights of all Americans and the ideals America stands for.”

The Bush White House fought Obama’s changes, but offered a few minor concessions. Most notably, a business that received a demand for records could challenge in court a nondisclosure agreement that accompanied the demand. That was enough to placate some Democrats, including Obama. Wyden objected that the change did nothing to address Obama’s concerns, but the reauthorization of the Patriot Act passed the Senate on March 1, 2006. Wyden, eight other Democrats, and one Independent voted against it; Obama and Biden voted for it. Bush signed the law on March 9th.

Wyden later learned that, while he and Obama were fighting to curtail Section 215, the N.S.A.’s lawyers were secretly arguing before the FISA court that the provision should allow the N.S.A. to legally collect the phone records of all Americans. The lawyers, encouraged by their success in retroactively legalizing the Internet-metadata program, believed that they could persuade the FISA court to force phone companies to regularly hand over their entire databases. At the FISA court, there are no lawyers challenging the government’s arguments; all the N.S.A. needed to do was convince a single judge. Had Obama’s language been adopted, the N.S.A.’s case would have collapsed.

It's a long but fascinating article that you owe it to yourself to read, no matter where you stand on these issues. It paints the whole picture that hasn't been clear to many, and highlights just how dysfunctional the oversight has been of the NSA. And, if you weren't already impressed enough by Senator Wyden, the article presents even more reasons to be impressed by him (and depressed that there's only one of him).

On Twitter last week, after the Snowden leaks showing that, yes, as Wyden had been hinting all along, the NSA has been collecting location data on tons and tons of people, there was a great tweet by Kade Ellis, saying:

New rule: when Ron Wyden asks "NSA, do you do this spying?" HE ALREADY KNOWS THE ANSWER AND THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS YES

Unfortunately, as the article details, Wyden very rarely is even allowed to ask these questions, and the intelligence community stonewalls at every opportunity. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who should be managing oversight of the intelligence community appears to believe her job is rather to defend and support the intelligence community.

Still, the most disappointing aspects of the article really focus on how President Obama and his advisors, many of whom had spoken out against the Patriot Act and various aspects of the program now in place, suddenly changed positions once they were in power, and it was their power to abuse. The repeated stories of intelligence industry insiders coming up with the flimsiest of reasons why these programs must continue are plenty troubling. However, the fact that no one in the government seems to think that the American public can even be trusted with their basic reasoning and interpretations of the laws of the land is just ridiculous.

Either way, as stated, you owe it to yourself to find some time to read the whole thing -- but prepare to be outraged.

Filed Under: barack obama, dianne feinstein, eric holder, james clapper, joe biden, nsa, ron wyden, ryan lizza, surveillance

Eric Holder Doesn't See Any Basis To Prosecute Glenn Greenwald... For Now

from the probably dept

It's not a complete promise, but in an interview with the Washington Post, Attorney General Eric Holder suggested that, while he disagrees with some of what Glenn Greenwald is doing, he still thinks it's legitimate journalism and he's not looking to prosecute him for anything related to the Ed Snowden NSA leaks:

Holder indicated that the Justice Department is not planning to prosecute former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who received documents from Snowden and has written a series of stories based on the leaked material. Greenwald, an American citizen who lives in Brazil, has said he is reluctant to come to the U.S. because he fears detention and possible prosecution.

“Unless information that has not come to my attention is presented to me, what I have indicated in my testimony before Congress is that any journalist who’s engaged in true journalistic activities is not going to be prosecuted by this Justice Department,” Holder said.

“I certainly don’t agree with what Greenwald has done,” Holder said. “In some ways, he blurs the line between advocate and journalist. But on the basis of what I know now, I’m not sure there is a basis for prosecution of Greenwald.”

That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of freedom of the press, nor is it probably enough to make Greenwald feel comfortable. There are enough caveats in those statements that I probably wouldn't trust it if I were Greenwald. As he noted in response to Holder's comments, just the fact that the question is out there shows how little the US government respects press freedom these days. Furthermore, he notes that Holder's statements are hardly reassuring as they're "caveat-riddled oral assertions."

Elsewhere in the interview, Holder notes that they're still looking to inform more defendants in criminal cases if warrantless data was used to arrest and prosecute them, and that he's still trying to get Snowden back from Russia -- something that seems unlikely to happen.

Filed Under: doj, ed snowden, eric holder, free press, free speech, glenn greenwald, journalism