President Obama has just filled four assistant attorney general slots: David Kris is assistant AG for national security. Tony West is assistant AG for the Justice Department’s civil division. Lanny Breuer is assistant AG for Justice’s criminal division. Christine Varney is assistant AG for the antitrust division. Kris was associate deputy attorney general from 2000 to 2003, where he supervised the government’s use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. But Kris had serious reservations about the Bush administration’s legal justifications for warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and residents, and went public with his concerns three years after leaving Justice.…
Browsing: Agencies
The Senate Finance Committee approved the nomination of Timothy Geithner to be Treasury secretary a few minutes ago by an 18-5 vote, according to our congressional reporter Rebecca Neal. The committee’s approval was expected despite concerns by many senators that Geithner failed to pay more than $30,000 in self-employment taxes earlier this decade when he worked at the International Monetary Fund. Geithner apologized for the error, repaid his owed amount, and said it was an unintentional mistake. Some senators including Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said it sends a bad signal to appoint a Treasury secretary — which oversees the IRS…
The Senate just voted to confirm Hillary Clinton as the secretary of state. The final vote was 94-to-2: Only Sens. David Vitter, R-La., and Jim DeMint, R-S.C., voted ‘nay.’ But the Senate Judiciary committee is postponing its vote on Eric Holder’s nomination as attorney general. The Republicans on the committee apparently asked for the delay. Holder has proved controversial because of decisions he made as a deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration.
… but he doesn’t blame the tax preparation software for his tax problems. Just one of many exciting facts from the Treasury secretary-designate’s confirmation hearing this morning. Geithner, by the way, is likely to be confirmed despite the tax issue. Senate Finance committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, plans to hold a vote tomorrow, despite objections from several Republican committee members. The nomination would then go before the full Senate.
President Barack Obama greeted his new White House staff this afternoon with a few announcements that he said “represent a clean break from business as usual.” According to this Associated Press report, President Obama said he’s instituting a pay freeze for the roughly 100 White House employees who make more than $100,000 a year. The move is a direct response to the economic crisis gripping the nation. In another move, Obama issued new rules that attempt to crack down on lobbyists influencing the administration. The rules restrict political appointees who leave the administration from lobbying former friends and colleagues for at least…
President Barack Obama’s Cabinet now has eight official members. The Senate voted by voice vote just before 4 p.m. today to confirm the following seven nominees: Steven Chu for Energy, Arne Duncan for Education, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Peter Orszag for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Ken Salazar for Interior, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs and Tom Vilsak for Agriculture. His Cabinet already included Robert Gates, whom Obama asked to stay on as Defense secretary. But things aren’t moving so quickly for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s secretary of state nomination. After her smooth hearing before the Senate…
In his last full day in office, President Bush has commuted the sentences of two Border Patrol agents jailed for the 2005 shooting of an admitted drug smuggler and illegal alien who was fleeing back to Mexico. Prosecutors said Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean did not report the shooting and removed evidence from the scene when they picked up their shell casings. But their prosecution angered many supporters of tough immigration policies, such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who turned their case into a cause celebre and said their sentences were excessive. Ramos was sentenced to 11 years in jail, and…
On this Inauguration Eve, President-elect Barack Obama has filled in a few more blanks at the Office of Management and Budget. Jeffrey Liebman, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor, was named executive associate director for OMB. Steve Kosiak, vice president for budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, was named associate director for Defense and International Affairs. Robert Gordon, a senior education policy fellow at American Progress, was named associate director for Education, Income Maintenance and Labor. Xavier de Souza Briggs, an associate professor of sociology and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was…
No, little green men have not been found on Mars and residents of West Windsor Township, N.J. have nothing to fear. But a team of NASA scientists have discovered something that could prove there is life on the red planet: methane. The gas is a byproduct of biological and geological activity. On Earth, much of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is released by organisms as they digest food. But geological processes, such iron oxidation, also release the gas. NASA observations of the Martian atmosphere over the last several years have shown that methane is being continually released into the air…
img.cabinetpic { float: left; border: 1px inset #aaaaaa; padding: 0; margin-top: 1em } div.cabinetdata { margin: 0 0 2em 200px; padding: 0; } div.cabinetdata h3 { margin: 0; padding: 0; text-indent: 0; } We’re camped out on Capitol Hill all week covering the transition hearings — and we thought you’d like a central place to follow our confirmation coverage. We’ll update this list as the week goes on. The full list is after the jump, and it’s sorted alphabetically by agency.