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 [...]

Back during the FISA Amendment Act, Jay Rockefeller tried hard to prevent DOJ’s Inspector General, Glenn Fine, to have any role in overseeing the revamped domestic surveillance program. I always assumed that was because Fine, unlike the other Inspectors General (except perhaps John Helgerson, whom Michael Hayden had thoroughly neutralized by that point anyway) was [...]

A month ago, the Financial Fraud Task Force first started to get around to investigating the systemic fraud in our foreclosure system. Federal investigators are exploring whether banks and other financial firms broke U.S. law when using fraudulent court documents to foreclose on people’s homes, according to sources familiar with the effort. The criminal investigation, [...]

Glenn Fine–DOJ’s Inspector General–is usually one of the most credible agents of oversight in the federal government. But his last report–examining whether the FBI investigated the First Amendment activities of lefty groups as terrorism–is a masterpiece of obfuscation. It manages to look at three different investigative efforts of the Thomas Merton Center’s anti-war activism, all [...]

I’m still working on a big post on the DOJ IG Report on domestic spying. But for the moment I wanted to call attention to a footnote that seems to suggest the emails from FBI employees in Pittsburgh who had conducted surveillance of the Thomas Merton Center and/or invented an excuse for doing so after [...]

There’s an interesting detail in the IG Report on FBI’s investigations of peace groups that suggests FBI was asking OLC for an interpretation of the approval required before conducting a riot-related investigation. The Attorney General’s Guidelines on “Reporting on Civil Disorders and Demonstrations” were in effect from 1976 until they were repealed and partially incorporated [...]

I realize the odds of Democrats keeping the House are not all that great. But I also know that the DCCC is far more competent than the RNCC; DCCC has managed to win just about every challenging election of late. So let’s just say Democrats keep the House and with it John Conyers his gavel. [...]

Main Justice reports that Pat Leahy and DOJ’s Inspector General Glenn Fine have been chatting about further IG review of the FBI’s use of the several PATRIOT provisions that were contentious issues in last years attempt to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act. This means that Fine is going to do what the legislation would have mandated–conduct [...]

Remember the OPR Report? No, not the OPR Report on John Yoo’s laughably bad torture memos. I’m talking about the OPR Report on John Yoo’s even worse memo(s) authorizing domestic surveillance. The Torture OPR Report notes that it was the domestic surveillance memo, and not the torture memos, that first clued Jack Goldsmith into how [...]

I my last post, I showed that the CIA asked DOJ to approve the use of mock burial, but DOJ refused. I noted that the ICRC report doesn’t appear to show that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to mock burial (though he was subject to confinement in both a small and a larger box). But what [...]