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 [...]

The Department of Justice has just sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee answering early questions about how many terrorists have been convicted or plead guilty in civilian courts. Between those convicted of terrorism-related crimes (150) and individuals with ties to international terrorism convicted of other crimes (like obstruction or perjury–the total here is [...]

A bunch of former DOJ bigwigs just wrote a seemingly pointless letter to Pat Leahy to assure him that David Margolis does not have a partisan–and they mean Left-Right partisan–bias. (h/t Main Justice) I say “pointless,” to begin with, because after last Friday’s flaccid hearing on the OPR report, is anyone actually imagining that Pat [...]

Back in September, I put together a timeline of everything we knew about the “Legal Principles” document created by the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center and lawyers from OLC in 2003. The OPR Report has additional information on the document (starting at PDF 107), which it refers to as the “Bullet Points,” so I wanted to update [...]

A DOJ oversight hearing that is likely to focus on the Gitmo trials.

As I noted last night, DiFi appears to have used the Najibullah Zazi investigation as justification to make the language surrounding Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act worse. Using that as cover, she is arguing that Congress must authorize the kind of investigative fishing expeditions she opposed four years ago.

Mark-up for the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act will being on Thursday.

Some comments on Holder’s new state secrets policy.

Holder visits SJC.