The Journal reported that the U.S. Justice Department is considering whether to allow Assange to plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information. The newspaper cited people familiar with the matter.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment on the report.
The Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Mr Ronald Lamola (MP) will lead South Africa’s delegation to Peace Palace (International Court of Justice) in the Hague.
The South African delegation comprises of South Africa’s distinguished diplomats and officials namely:
Director General in the Presidency Ms Phindile Baleni Director General of the Department of International Relations and Co-operation Mr Zane Dangor;
Director General of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development Advocate Mashabane; (former Deputy Ambassador for South Africa to the United Nations); and
Special Advisor to the President of the Republic of South Africa Advocate Nokukhanya Jele.
The South African delegation will be joined by senior political figures from progressive political parties and movements across the globe which include amongst others Jeremy Corbyn the Former leader of the opposition in the United Kingdom.
(27.06.2022)
„Today, it is already clear to everyone who really controls this state and leads it to destruction. Levin may have hijacked the country, but we will free the state from his hands,“ protest organizers declared in a statement.
On October 8, 2022, supporters of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in England will join hands to form a human chain surrounding Parliament in London. In solidarity, US-based supporters will hold a rally at the Department of Justice in Washington DC, calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the charges against Assange.
Incumbent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has won the Republican primary over George P. Bush, the Texas General Land Office commissioner, according to a race call from The Associated Press.
In addition, a few moments before Netanyahu announced his decision to back Gantz for the position, he apparently was made aware that Bennett held his first meeting with Mansour Abbas – the leader of the Islamist Ra‘am party – in an effort to form a unity government.
Hours before the High Court of Justice was due to decide on the legality of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s attempts to install a justice minister from his own party, the premier announced Wednesday afternoon he supports the appointment of Blue & White leader Benny Gantz for the position.
In a statement Netanyahu said, „The prime minister submitted a detailed response to the High Court that completely rejects the court‘s claim that yesterday‘s vote was illegal.“
„However,“ Netanyahu said, „after the prime minister‘s attempts at compromise were rejected again this morning, and in order to extract us from this dead end situation and allow the Justice Ministry to function, the prime minister decided to appoint Benny Gantz to the post of Justice Minister for the tenure of the interim government.“
Netanyahu‘s refusal to appoint a justice minister is a direct assault on this nation. It is that simple.
His reasoning is also simple: Netanyahu does not want to fill the role with someone who is not subservient and willing to go along with coordinated efforts to escape his bribery trial.
Rather, it is the public danger he constitutes and his conspiring to topple state institutions. Ordinary criminal defendants who behaved as Netanyahu has would have long since been ordered to remain in custody for the duration of legal proceedings, lest they obstruct the investigation and trial, and for disobeying a court order. But we can’t complain to Netanyahu about it, when the court itself gives him license to harm it.
The High Court of Justice was to convene at 5pm Tuesday after the government failed to appoint a justice minister within the time frame allocated by the court.
The latest attempt to end the deadlock over the appointment of the minister failed when the government voted down a move by Blue & White leader Benny Gantz to return to the ministry on a permanent basis.
The justice minister post has remained empty since Gantz‘s term as acting justice minister lapsed on April 1. The appointment of a justice minister is a particularly sensitive issue, given that Netanyahu is currently amid an ongoing corruption trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
According to the FT, Bellenhaus, a Wirecard vet who claims he was oblivious to the fraud, told prosecutors that one of the biggest accounting frauds in modern European corporate history began in 2010 when he created a string of shell companies based in Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands at the behest of Jan Marsalek, the mysterious Wirecard COO who remains on Interpol‘s most-wanted list.
Senators voted 70-30 on Garland’s nomination to lead the Justice Department, easily topping the 50 votes needed.
(01.01.2021)
In a weekend interview with Yediot Aharonot, Gantz said „I felt him stabbing me in the back and turning the knife.“
Nissenkorn, whose resignation took effect Friday morning, wrote on Facebook afterward that Gantz made „crazy concessions“ that would have emptied the justice minister post of authority in an effort to keep the government together.
(30.12.2020)
After leaving Blue & White and joining Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai‘s new The Israelis party, Avi Nissenkorn Wednesday resigned from his position as justice minister.
“The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appear to have increasingly abused emergency authorities to justify the use of force against Americans exercising their right to peaceful assembly,” wrote House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.).
Germany has decided that it wants to take advantage of the present sentiment towards Facebook and not let off. This week, Berlin called for more action at a meeting on Monday of the bloc’s justice ministers.
“We cannot accept the public debate being distorted and poisoned,” said German Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht. “Voluntary commitments and self-responsibility are not enough.”
(…)
Netanyahu’s strategy is transparent. He doesn’t have a scrap of evidence that would support his claims about Mendelblit. If he did, he wouldn’t need the campaign of mudslinging and lies that he’s conducting.
All Netanyahu wants is to cast doubt on Mendelblit’s motives, strengthen the doubt and cultivate it, until it casts a pall on the integrity of the legal proceedings against him.
Earlier, Hebrew-language broadcaster Channel 13 reported that Justice Ministry officials slammed recent comments of Netanyahu and Likud ministers, saying “They continue the delegitimization campaign against law enforcement authorities when next up will be the judges.
“They [Netanyahu, Likud] repeat the same farcical mantras and lies, and knowingly lie to the public,” they added, according to Channel 13.
Berman leaves behind a string of high-profile prosecutions and investigations. Since he became US attorney in early 2018, the office has prosecuted Trump‘s former attorney Michael Cohen, is investigating top Trump confidante Rudy Giuliani and indicted the former New York mayor‘s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
President Trump on Saturday fired the federal prosecutor whose office put his former personal lawyer in prison and is investigating his current one, heightening criticism that the president was carrying out an extraordinary purge to rid his administration of officials whose independence could be a threat to his re-election campaign.
„I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‚stepping down‘ as United States Attorney,“ the statement reads. „I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position … I will down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate. Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption.“
A coalition of civil rights groups including the ACLU of the District of Columbia is suing President Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and other federal officials over the brutal police assault on peaceful demonstrators near the White House Monday that cleared the way for the president‘s photo-op at St. John‘s Episcopal Church.
n a federal lawsuit, the groups asserted that U.S. and military police officers’ use of horses, batons, shields and riot control agents — including pepper spray, smoke canisters and rubber or plastic projectiles — violated largely peaceful protesters’ constitutional rights of free speech and assembly 30 minutes before a citywide curfew took effect Monday.
The suit — which also names Attorney General William P. Barr as a defendant — was brought by the ACLU of the District of Columbia, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Judiciary Committee with oversight of the FBI, noted that “we’ve got a problem at the FBI.”
“Clearly, we had some people, and maybe still have some people, that don’t understand the rule of law, and nothing’s been done,“ Kennedy said.
In a two-page memorandum to the country’s 93 U.S. attorneys, Barr cautioned that some state and local directives could be infringing on protected religious, speech and economic rights.
“If a state or local ordinance crosses the line from an appropriate exercise of authority to stop the spread of COVID-19 into an overbearing infringement of constitutional and statutory protections, the Department of Justice may have an obligation to address that overreach in federal court,” Barr wrote.
When the pandemic erupted and a state of emergency was declared, Justice Minister Amir Ohana was the first of the ministers to act, and in a rather suspicious manner ordered the work of the courts frozen only a few days before the prime minister’s trial was meant to begin. It later emerged that the move was coordinated with Supreme Court President Esther Hayut and the courts administrator, Yigal Marzel. The state of emergency declared for the courts was then extended to May 10.
WASHINGTON – The “central and essential” evidence used to justify invasive surveillance of an American citizen in the FBI’s probe into Russian interference was, itself, an example of Russian interference, according to once-secret footnotes declassified at the urging of two U.S. Senators. The footnotes, part of the Justice Department Inspector General’s postmortem of the FBI’s flawed operation to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, were released just hours after Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) renewed their push for transparency. The senators expect a fuller declassification in the coming days.
(…)
“It’s ironic that the Russian collusion narrative was fatally flawed because of Russian disinformation. These footnotes confirm that there was a direct Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and there were ties between Russian intelligence and a presidential campaign – the Clinton campaign, not Trump’s.”
The IG report detailed how the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Page relied heavily on an unverified dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele on behalf of Fusion GPS, which was conducting opposition research for the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. According to Footnote 302, in October 2016, FBI investigators learned that one of Steele’s main sources was linked to the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS), and was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer. However, the FBI neglected to include this information in its application, which the FISA court approved that same month. Two months later, investigators learned that Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, told a Justice Department attorney that he assessed the same source “was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.” In January, the FISA warrant was renewed.
(10.04.2020)
Declassified footnotes to a Justice Department inspector general report show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation team investigating members of the Trump campaign received classified reports in 2017 identifying key pieces of the Steele dossier as products of a Russian disinformation campaign. This might be only the tip of the iceberg because other recently declassified information demonstrates that even more disinformation may have been planted in Christopher Steele’s reporting.
(July 2, 2019)
Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska said he previously employed Christopher Steele, the author of the Trump dossier.
Deripaska said he hired Steele through his attorneys in London to work on an unspecific legal proceeding.
Steele investigated the Trump campaign on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.
(10.04.2020)
Footnote 350 in the IG report addresses the FBI‘s knowledge of Russian contacts with Steele and the potential for disinformation. Steele had „frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from (redacted) indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele‘s election reporting.“
The footnote also indicates that warnings to the FBI‘s Russia probe became more pronounced over time.
(31.03.2020)
The FBI’s surveillance of Americans including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page isn’t exactly the issue du jour amid a global pandemic. But on Tuesday, a brutal inspector general’s report suggested that this will be something that the bureau and Congress will have to reckon with in the near future.
Schumer, D-N.Y., called for the investigations on MSNBC Saturday after Burr, R-N.C., Feinstein, D-Calif., as well as Sens. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., were hit with allegations of selling large amounts of stocks before the coronavirus crisis rocked Wall Street.
“The answer, in one word, is yes. There should be and there will be,” Schumer said on MSNBC. “I don’t own any stocks. I think it’s a very bad idea for senators to own stocks.”
(30.03.2020)
Financial disclosure statements indicated that Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C.; Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.; Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga.; and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; their spouses or advisers sold large chunks of stock around the time lawmakers received behind-the-scenes briefings about the severity of the coronavirus, which has claimed more than 3,600 lives in the USA.
Expected live at 5:30 p.m. ET: The Coronavirus Task Force holds a daily briefing at the White House.
But the Justice Department’s request doesn’t stop there. Instead, the department has also included an idea that should be immediately rejected: letting federal court chief judges halt all court proceedings during an emergency. This provision would apply to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings.”
“Not only would it be a violation of that, but it says ‘affecting pre-arrest,’” said Norman L. Reimer, the executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.”
I have previously objected to how the Justice Department uses grand juries to punish certain individuals who refuse to cooperate with federal investigations.
Horowitz discovered premeditated fraud on the FISC by a DOJ attorney. In 2016, the attorney „altered“ email from „the other U.S. government agency“ (CIA) and submitted a fraudulent application for a warrant to the court. So the FISC approved the warrant.
The target: Carter Page, a Naval Academy graduate and a former Trump presidential campaign associate. Spying on Page — an innocent man — opened a door to spying on President Donald Trump.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, the presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), issued an order Wednesday setting out an additional framework for the Justice Department and FBI to follow in future FISA proceedings. The order specifies that „no DOJ or FBI personnel under disciplinary or criminal review relating to their work on FISA applications shall participate in drafting, verifying, verifying, reviewing or submitting such applications to the court.“
While official records linking the ATFC to the CIA do not appear widely in available government documents, their collaboration is an open secret. One early report by the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, an advocacy organization for the US intelligence community, noted “the cell has about two-dozen members drawn from the Drug Enforcement Administration, US Central Command, the Treasury Department and the CIA. The FBI is expected to join soon.”
Global news wire Agency France-Presse characterized ATFC as “a multi-agency organization currently comprising about 30 specialists on loan from the Department of Drug Enforcement, Department of the Treasury, Department of Justice, Department of Defense’s CENTCOM, the CIA and the FBI.”
The FBI obtained a warrant in 2016 to eavesdrop on former Trump national security aide Carter Page on suspicions that he was secretly a Russian agent. The Justice Department renewed the warrant three times, including during the early months of the Trump administration.
(25. Dezember 1992)
Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger‘s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush‘s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.