Browsing: Justice

Ramon Davila is one name in a growing list. He’s among the nearly two dozen federal background check investigators to face criminal charges in recent years for falsifying his work on investigations performed on contractors and employees seeking government clearances. But more than year after charging Davila, the Justice Department only just learned that he had a troubling past that went unnoticed during his own background investigation. It turns out, officials at another federal law enforcement agency decided nearly a decade ago to keep out of his personnel folder serious misconduct findings against Davila stemming from his years as a…

The Washington Post says President Barack Obama is planning to deploy hundreds of diplomats and other federal employees to Afghanistan as part of a major effort to bolster reconstruction efforts in the war-torn country. The Post reports that aside from senior State Department diplomats, “other civilian officials are to be drawn from government departments such as Agriculture and Justice, and hundreds of new ‘full-time, temporary’ positions are planned” under a new strategy expected to be approved next week. During last year’s presidential campaign, Obama promised to refocus U.S. attention on Afghanistan, where the Taliban is regaining strength and Afghan president…

After weeks of tough questions from Republicans, the Senate confirmed Eric Holder as attorney general this evening. The vote was 75-21. A few Republicans took to the Senate floor before the 6:15 p.m. vote, questioning changes in Holder’s stances on counterterrorism and detaining terrorist suspects without Geneva Convention rights. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Holder once supported detaining suspects without those rights but is now strongly against the Bush administration’s counterterrorism stances. “His contrasting positions from 2002 to 2008 make me wonder if this is the same person. It makes me wonder what he truly believes.” The Senate Judiciary Committee’s…

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.…