At 10, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider the extension of Robert Mueller’s term at FBI by two more years. You’ll no doubt hear Ranking Member Chuck Grassley make all sorts of complaints about FBI in his wonderful grouchy Iowa voice. You’ll hear Jim Comey recount the dramatic hospital confrontation from 2004. But you’re unlikely [...]

There is a report today that the Obama White House is ready to offer the FBI Director’s job to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly; if it does, it would be a profoundly negative comment on the Administration’s craven handling of the civilian trials in Article III courts issue.

Maris Taylor has an important update on the OLC exigent letter opinion. Last year, DOJ’s now-retired Inspector General Glenn Fine released a report revealing how the FBI had used exigent letters to get call data information from telecoms with no oversight. Ryan Singel noted a reference to an OLC opinion that basically melted away the [...]

In a post I’ll write some day, I will show how the WikiLeaks cables show that every time a partner government threatens to use the high tech intelligence toys we share with it–notably our telecommunication wiretapping–to spy on domestic opponents, the Obama Administration makes a very concerted effort to disavow such efforts (if not end [...]

The NYT has a very long profile on their interactions with Wikileaks, about which I will have more to say. But I wanted to point to this meeting, which Bill Keller describes as the NYT’s effort to give the government a “heads up” on the diplomatic cables. Because of the range of the material and [...]

Earlier Tuesday, I did a post aiming to understand the timing of Monday’s bust of 11 alleged Russian spies. Later in the day, Mark Hosenball did a post–heavily reliant on DOJ press spokesperson Dean Boyd–that doesn’t make any sense. First, Boyd states on the record that the reason DOJ had to move now on the busts [...]

As a number of you have commented, DOJ announced the arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies yesterday (with one person, based in another country, remaining at large). The alleged spies are basically people living under false identities tasked to network with influential Americans to learn specific information. One of the most interesting questions about the [...]

EFF catches Robert Mueller playing fast and lose with the facts on a National Security Letter.

What if the 9/11 Commission had described just how responsible Condi was for 9/11? What if it had more aggressively tried to fix the problems with the FBI?

Some of the journalists who reported Steven Hatfill as a “person of interest” in the anthrax investigation have revealed their sources. Thing is–I think this might actually make this case more interesting, because I’m not sure knowing the journalists’ sources helps make Hatfill’s case.