Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig will discuss the potential legal and political fallout of the McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission case on Thursday. During an event hosted by Constitutional Accountability Center, the duo will explain why the case is being called “Citizens United 2.0.”
http://www.youtube.com/user/WeActRadioDC?v=6D7ctYVol0g&feature=share
Four American citizens were killed in drone strikes. In other news:
Several hours ago, Barack Obama nominated David Barron, author of the notorious OLC memos authorizing the assassination of an American citizen with the kind of “due process” the Executive Branch gives, by itself, in secret, to serve on the First Circuit.
Yet even while Obama moved to make Barron a lifetime appointed judge, the FOIA suits to liberate the troubling opinion Barron authored continues at a snail’s pace. CIA filed an intransigent opinion back in August in the more general suit (that would, however, probably return Barron’s opinions). In a response a few weeks ago, the ACLU suggested that such frivolous claims could only serve to forestall the time when it will have to release the assassination-related documents.
http://youtu.be/b0ieHxvUX34
And no one’s learned anything. I wonder if that’s because no one went to prison the last time?
Several big life insurers are going to have to set aside a total of at least $4 billion because New York regulators believe they have been manipulating new rules meant to make sure they have adequate reserves to pay out claims.
The development stems from contentions by insurance companies that states’ regulations are forcing them to hold too much money in reserve. Many of them have engaged in secretive transactions to artificially bolster their balance sheets, often through shell companies in other states or countries. Regulators, who want to be sure companies have enough real liquid assets to pay all claims, have struggled to find a solution that all 50 states can agree on, and decided to test a new framework of rules.
On Friday, New York State plans to drop out of that agreement, according to a letter from Benjamin M. Lawsky, the financial services superintendent, to his fellow state insurance regulators. In the letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Lawsky said the test, which started in 2012, showed that the new framework did not work and was, in fact, making the “gamesmanship and abuses” in the industry even worse.
The move appears to be another attempt by Mr. Lawsky to address the much broader potential problem of the life insurance industry’s use of the secretive transactions. He has derided them as “financial alchemy” because they seem to create surplus assets out of thin air. In June, Mr. Lawsky called on other state insurance regulators to join him in blocking any more of these transactions. But other regulators said they wanted instead to keep pursuing a test of the new regulatory framework. The test covers a narrow segment of the life insurance business, but state regulators, through the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, are committed to extending the framework to all parts of the life insurance industry over the next few years.
So all a Wall Street banker has to do is deny that he knows what someone else says he knows, and the SEC folds? Oy:
Mr. Fuld’s role was harder to ferret out. Bart H. McDade, another Lehman executive, told Mr. Valukas that Mr. Fuld “was familiar with the term” Repo 105 and “knew about the accounting.” But Mr. Fuld told the S.E.C. that he had never heard of Repo 105, officials said, undermining a potential case. A lawyer for Mr. Fuld declined to comment.
The S.E.C. team also concluded that Repo 105 would not have been “material” to investors because the firm’s leverage ratio was trending downward regardless of Repo 105.
That conclusion set off a wave of dissent inside the S.E.C. Senior accountants and the head of the S.E.C. unit that oversaw corporate disclosures questioned the findings. Ms. Schapiro urged Mr. Canellos to keep digging.
But Mr. Canellos, a former federal prosecutor who is now the co-head of the S.E.C.’s enforcement unit, did not budge. Despite the political pressure, he told colleagues at one of the meetings, they could not bring a case if the evidence was lacking.
“Our job is to seek justice,” he said.
This is a glimmer of sanity:
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal judge ruled that people placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list have a constitutionally protected interest in traveling by air, and the right to due process when it’s denied.
U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown of Portland, in an opinion released late Wednesday, rejected the government’s assertion that people on the no-fly list can travel by other means, and that being on the list does not deprive them of their liberty. She said it ignores “the realities of our modern world.”
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of 13 people on the no-fly list. The plaintiffs want to be removed from the list or told why their names appear.
“This decision is a critically important step towards vindicating the due process rights of Americans on the no-fly list,” said Nusrat Choudhury, the ACLU lawyer representing the plaintiffs. “For the first time, a federal court has recognized that when the government bans Americans from flying and smears them as suspected terrorists, it deprives them of constitutionally protected liberties, and they must have a fair process to clear their names.”
Brown’s decision, however, is only a partial one. She asked the government for more information about its redress procedure to help her determine whether it satisfied due process requirements for the plaintiffs.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A state judge issued an order Friday that is expected to block enforcement of Pennsylvania’s strict voter-identification law in the Nov. 5 general election.
Local poll workers can ask voters to show IDs if they have them and distribute written material about the law, but they may not tell voters at the polls that photo IDs could be required in future elections, Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard McGinley said.
“There is no value in inaccurate information, and the court does not deem inaccurate information ‘educational.’ It is not a matter of confusion — it is a matter of accuracy,” McGinley wrote.
McGinley’s ruling marked the third consecutive election in which enforcement of the law has been blocked by court order.
After legal jousting that reached the state Supreme Court, a judge blocked enforcement in last year’s presidential election and again in this year’s municipal and judicial primary because of lingering concern that it could disenfranchise voters who lacked a valid photo ID.
The preliminary injunction will remain in effect until McGinley decides the case and rules on a request for a permanent injunction. Although his order does not mention the Nov. 5 election, both sides in the case sought to block enforcement of the law in that election.
I don’t understand this grand jury decision.
This might turn out to be good news:
JPMorgan Chase said Wednesday it’s under federal criminal investigation over its sale of mortgage securities, potentially making the biggest U.S. bank by assets the first large financial institution to face criminal sanctions over securitization practices that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.
The Justice Department told JPMorgan in May that prosecutors had “preliminarily concluded” that the bank violated civil securities laws related to mortgage securities it packaged and sold from 2005 to 2007, the bank disclosed in a quarterly securities filing. JPMorgan has already been sued over similar practices by Eric Schneiderman, New York attorney general, and has settled similar cases brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Other large financial groups also have disclosed in securities filings they’re under U.S. investigation for their dealings in mortgage securities. Criminal investigations are underway against some banks, according to people familiar with the probes, introducing the possibility that criminal charges against a major financial institution for mortgage-related conduct could be filed — a potentially surprising development given prosecutors’ and securities regulators’ past statements suggesting that pre-crisis bad behavior didn’t necessarily equate to criminal wrongdoing.
H/T Seth Price.
A high school senior talks about it:
I know I sound like a broken record, but this shit is just plain unAmerican:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
Today, much of the SOD’s work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.
