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Senators Press Justice Department on Fugitives Harbored in Cuba

capitolhillcubans

In light of President Obama’s decision to transfer three convicted foreign intelligence agents in federal custody to Cuba, U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), David Vitter (R-LA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) today pressed Attorney General Eric Holder for answers on the status of U.S. cop killers and other fugitives that the Castro regime is harboring, as well as the threats posed to the U.S. legal system by the administration’s unilateral concessions to Cuba, including its possible removal from the State Sponsors of Terrorism List:

January 23, 2015
The Honorable Eric Holder
Attorney General
Department of Justice
Robert F. Kennedy Building
Tenth Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20530

Dear Attorney General Holder:

We are writing to express our strong concern about the Department of Justice’s role in President Obama’s recent announcement of a change in U.S. policy toward Cuba and to pose several questions related to your Department’s actions on this issue.

As Attorney General, you serve as our country’s chief law enforcement officer. You are expected to ensure the credibility of the American legal system and as well as help to protect and defend the American people.

We were thus troubled to learn that you played a role in the President’s decision to transfer three convicted foreign intelligence agents from federal custody to Cuba. As you know, in addition to their infiltration of the Cuban-American community for espionage, one of the individuals in question was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder related to the downing of civilian planes operated by the U.S. humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue in international airspace.

We have several questions regarding their cases:

• Was there a formal assessment conducted of the consequences for the credibility of the U.S. justice system of releasing individuals that were not just convicted foreign intelligence agents, but also a convicted accessory to murder?
• Why was there no effort made by the U.S. government to provide an explanation to the families of the murdered victims about this prisoner release before it took place or in the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s announcement?

Related to the same 1996 incident, in a recent press report, a member of Congress recounted being told by Cuban President Raul Castro that, “I gave the order. I’m the one responsible,” for the shoot down. This information sheds new light on the 1996 events and bolsters previous evidence of Castro’s culpability in this heinous crime.

• Has the Justice Department discussed this conversation with the member of Congress in question and does the Justice Department rule out the indictment of President Castro for murder given his apparent admission of guilt for the murder of three American citizens?

Another issue that falls under your Department’s jurisdiction is the effort to seek the return of fugitives from justice who have fled to other countries. As you know, there are reportedly more than seventy such individuals who have sought refuge in Cuba and are currently being harbored by the Castro regime. These include such violent criminals as Joanne Chesimard, who the FBI regards as a “domestic terrorist” and was named to the FBI’s Most Wanted List in 2013, as well as Victor Manuel Gerena, Charles Hill and others. Chesimard and Hill were both involved in the murders of American police officers. There are numerous others guilty of lesser but still important crimes, including money laundering and health care fraud. While the United States government has publicly described the situation related to these fugitives in reports in the past, there is little definitive information about their cases available publicly. We agree with the President of the Fraternal Order of Police, who recently wrote to President Obama that, “The blood of American law enforcement officers doing their job on American soil is too high a price to pay for closer ties with the Cuban regime.”

We would like the following information and questions answered about these American fugitives from justice:

• Please provide a list of all fugitives from justice that the FBI considers likely to be harbored in Cuba.
• Please provide copies of the indictments of each of the individuals on this list.
• As the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, do you support the normalization of relations with Cuba without the return of fugitives from justice for prosecution who have the blood of Americans, including law enforcement officers on their hands?
• As the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, do you support the removal of Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism if the Castro government continues to harbor “domestic terrorists” such as Joanne Chesimard?

As the facts of these cases show, the actions of the individuals in question have deprived some Americans of their lives and affected the lives and well-being of countless others.  Attempting to gloss over the facts of their crimes against the United States is an insult to the values and ethics of our judicial system and those same ideals that you, as our nation’s chief law enforcement officer, are supposed to uphold.

We thus look forward to your answers to all of these questions, which we also intend to consider as part of the confirmation process of your successor.

Sincerely,

Senator Marco Rubio

Senator David Vitter

Senator Ted Cruz

Eric Holder Finally Throws In the Towel

breitbart

Attorney General Eric Holder will resign on Thursday, several media outlets have confirmed. “Attorney General Eric Holder will on Thursday announce his plans to leave his post at the Justice Department once a successor is confirmed, a Justice Department official said,” Politico reported. "Holder has been in the job for nearly six years, since the start of the Obama administration.”

“Eric Holder Jr., the nation's first black U.S. attorney general, is preparing to announce his resignation Thursday after a tumultuous tenure marked by civil rights advances, national security threats, reforms to the criminal justice system and five and a half years of fights with Republicans in Congress,” National Public Radio added.

Holder was voted on a bipartisan basis into both criminal and civil contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a congressional investigation into the gun walking program Operation Fast and Furious, run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) with oversight from senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials. A total of 130 members of the House of Representatives called for him to resign in 2011 and 2012, as did eight U.S. Senators and every GOP presidential candidate in 2012, including the eventual presidential nominee Mitt Romney and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

As the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Holder in contempt on both the criminal and civil citations, President Barack Obama asserted executive privilege over the Fast and Furious documents that Holder refused to provide to Congress pursuant to subpoenas from chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ron Machen, declined to prosecute Holder on the criminal contempt of Congress citation, but the House of Representatives is currently pursuing ongoing legal action against the administration using the civil contempt citation to fight to have the president’s executive privilege overturned.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Issa have both argued the president’s privilege assertion over those Fast and Furious documents is invalid and illegal because he used the lower form of the two types of executive privilege—deliberative process privilege—rather than presidential communications privilege. If Obama used the higher form, it would have meant that either he or his senior White House staff was aware of the gun walking tactics employed in Operation Fast and Furious, something that both Obama and Holder have denied. Usually, deliberative process privilege claims are considered invalid when there is even a suspicion of government wrongdoing—something Issa and Grassley have noted time and again—and in this case the government has admitted to wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, President Obama continues to hide these documents from the American people and from Congress.

Holder accused this reporter in November 2011 at a White House press conference of being “behind” the calls for his resignation because this reporter had contacted various members of Congress, asking if they agreed with the surging calls for him to resign.

"You guys need to — you need to stop this. It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening. You guys are behind it,” Holder said of this reporter’s efforts while working for The Daily Caller.

Calls for Holder’s resignation have continued since 2011 for reasons other than Operation Fast and Furious.

Holder’s press team also coordinated against various media outlets using far left-wing advocacy groups like the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America (MMFA). MMFA, which is led by pro-Hillary Clinton activist David Brock, used talking points and direction provided by then-Holder spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler to smear this reporter, Issa, Breitbart News reporters, ex-DOJ officials and whistleblowers, and reporters from across the media.

Emails recently uncovered via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by The Daily Caller found that Holder's press aide Schmaler specifically singled out and targeted this reporter.

“As revealed in the FOIA docs, Media Matters Deputy Research Director Matt Gertz sent a post concerning the NRA’s growing contributions to Holder’s critics to DOJ spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler, Holder’s top press flack who resigned in March, 2013,” the Daily Caller’s Betsy Rothstein wrote.

In response to that email, Schmaler wrote back to Gertz: “Thanks, you know boyle has been doing robo calls to top members right? This is campaign mounted by daily caller. He has called 60 offices and gotten to 8 last week.”

“Yeah, that was what my original piece on the story was about,” Gertz replied.

The terminology that was provided to Media Matters by the Department of Justice about this reporter—the word “campaign” specifically—appeared in subsequent Media Matters posts about this reporter.

The efforts to silence reporting on Fast and Furious are not the only questionable activity Holder and his team have been involved in with regards to the media. The DOJ labeled Fox News’ James Rosen a “co-conspirator” in an effort used to monitor him and targeted the Associated Press by monitoring the news agency’s communications.

Holder has been a lightning rod for scandal since he was confirmed in 2009. Right off the bat, he declined to prosecute the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) for voter intimidation at voting stations in 2008 in Philadelphia, despite efforts by career prosecutors at the DOJ to do so. He has been involved in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida in 2012, the Michael Brown case in Missouri this year, and in allegations by whistleblowers that Holder stopped the prosecution of alleged financial criminals, politicians, and DOJ officials who are accused of having taken bribes in connection with a U.S. Virgin Islands telecom cooperative. Just like how the DOJ originally denied guns were walked in Fast and Furious and has since retracted that denial, the DOJ denied the Virgin Islands scandal’s early report.

Eric Holder Gets Serious About Limiting Speech

Mary Greeley

Whistleblower exposes truth about 'Fast & Furious'

MUST READ: A Warning For All Verizon Customers! Obama Regime Secretly Seizing Your Phone Records

Fox Nation

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Read more at The Guardian

===

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

Read more at The New York Times

===

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration on Thursday defended the National Security Agency's need to collect telephone records of U.S. citizens, calling such information "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats."

While defending the practice, a senior administration official did not confirm a newspaper report that the NSA has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order.

The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.

The newspaper said the document, a copy of which it had obtained, shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.

The Associated Press could not authenticate the order because documents from the court are classified.

The administration official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to publicly discuss classified matters.

Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden said Wednesday the company had no comment. The NSA had no immediate comment.

Verizon Communications Inc. listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April — 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. The court order didn't specify which type of phone customers' records were being tracked.

Under the terms of the order, the phone numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as are location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered, The Guardian said.

The administration official said, "On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls."

The broad, unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is unusual. FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. NSA warrantless wiretapping during the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks was very controversial.

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of "all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls," The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the USA Patriot Act.

More at The Associated Press

===

ACLU STATEMENT:

Massive NSA Phone Data-Mining Operation Revealed
ACLU Calls for End to Program, Disclosure of Program’s Scope, Congressional Investigation
NEW YORK – Using the Patriot Act, the U.S. government has been secretly tracking the calls of every Verizon Business Network Services customer – whom they talked to, from where, and for how long – for the past 41 days, according to a report published by The Guardian.
“From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It’s a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents,” said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. “It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies.”
The program was put in place under the Patriot Act’s Section 215, a controversial provision that authorizes the government to seek secret court orders for the production of “any tangible thing” relevant to a foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation. Recipients of Section 215 orders, such as telecommunications companies, are prohibited from disclosing that they gave the government their customers’ records.
“Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation,” said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the public’s and the government’s understandings of the many sweeping surveillance authorities enacted by Congress. Since 9/11, the government has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open government and accountability.”
The first information about the government’s use of Section 215 was made public in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation filed by the ACLU 10 years ago. More recently, members of Congress have warned that the government has secretly interpreted Section 215 in a way that would shock Americans. In 2012, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) wrote, “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.”
In May 2011, shortly before Section 215 was scheduled to expire, the ACLU filed a new FOIA request in an effort to learn more about the “secret interpretation” to which Sens. Wyden and Udall had referred. Congress reauthorized Section 215 without amendment until 2015, and for the last two years, the government has refused to describe its secret interpretation. Whether or not the program described by The Guardian reflects that “secret interpretation,” today’s disclosure confirms that the government has interpreted Section 215 extraordinarily broadly.
This disclosure is likely to have significant implications for the ACLU’s pending FOIA lawsuit. The Department of Justice is scheduled to file a brief in that case on June 13; the ACLU’s response is due on June 28, and oral argument is scheduled for July 11 in the Southern District of New York.
Click here for more information on the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit requesting information on Patriot Act Section 21

O'Reilly: Pressure mounting on Attorney General Eric Holder

Eric Holder: My Position Deserves More Respect from Congress

breitbart

Attorney General Eric Holder: "I respect the oversight role that Congress plays. This isn't always a pleasant experience; it's one that I recognize that you go through as an executive branch officer. The one thing I've tried to do is always be respectful of the people who've asked me questions. I don't frankly think I've always been treated with a great deal of respect, and it's not even a personal thing. If you don't like me, that's one thing, but I am the Attorney General of the United States." 

Benghazi, IRS and AP Scandals Reveal Obama's Culture of Corruption

Fox Nation

By Peter Morici

News that the IRS targeted conservative groups for intense scrutiny is just one in a series of revelations pointing to a culture of expediency and intolerance in the Obama White House that corrupts this administration.

Consider the September slayings of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other U.S. diplomats in Benghazi. If the attack were revealed to be undertaken by terrorists, it posed a grave embarrassment to the president’s anti-terrorism strategy—eight weeks before the election.

On September 12, the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs wrote in an email, “The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.” 

Yet, just days later on the Sunday talk shows, UN Ambassador Susan Rice characterized the incident as the result of spontaneous street demonstrations inspired by an anti-Muhammad YouTube video.

Obama Care, having passed through the Senate on a slight-of-hand, has been contentious from the start, and the Congress has not appropriated as much funds as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius would like to implement the law.

To do the work of HHS, she has sought large contributions from private health care companies to liberal non-profit groups. With health care so heavily regulated, it is hard to characterize these donations as voluntary.

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/barack-obama/2013/05/14/benghazi-irs-and-ap-scandals-reveal-obamas-culture-corruption?cmpid=NL_foxnation#ixzz2TNrrtYTz

Holder faces questions on Capitol Hill

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Eric Holder: Soft on Terror, Again

breitbart

By Joel B. Pollak 

On April 27, Attorney General Eric Holder defended a federal judge's decision to read confessed terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights after only 16 hours of interrogation, saying: “Everything was done appropriately, and we got good leads.” Holder's statement confirmed earlier reports that he had foreknowledge of, but failed to object to, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler’s decision to "mirandize" Tsarnaev.

Judge Bowler's sudden appearance at Tsarnaev's hospital bedside prompted alarm from the FBI agents who were questioning him. Holder is correct that the FBI had managed to obtain "good leads"; what he does not acknowledge is the leads they might yet have uncovered. 

The failure to insist on as full an interrogation as possible fits a pattern of Holder standing up for terrorists' rights despite the danger to American lives.

During his confirmation hearings in 2009, Holder came under scrutiny for his role as President Bill Clinton's Deputy Attorney General in granting clemency to terrorists from the radical Puerto Rican radicals in the FALN organization. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Holder “instructed his staff at Justice's Office of the Pardon Attorney to effectively replace the department's original report recommending against any commutations.”

The FALN case was not the only troubling evidence of Holder’s sympathy for terrorists. Holder served as senior partner in the Covington and Burling law firm, which took on the cases of 17 Yemeni terror detainees being held at the Guantánamo Bay prison. Holder also represented Chiquita Brands International in a plea bargain over payments to the AUC, a Columbian terrorist paramilitary organization, as Michelle Malkin noted in 2009.

In 2010, Liz Cheney and her Keep America Safe organization pointed out that Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ) included nine lawyers who had previously represented Al Qaeda terror suspects. Critics charged, falsely, that Cheney was arguing that terrorists did not deserve lawyers. She did not dispute their right to counsel, but did question whether those who volunteered to provide it could be trusted with the nation’s security.

Indeed, over and over again, Holder has placed his left-wing political agenda ahead of national security. He insisted on trying 9/11 master plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in New York City until he was forced to back down under political pressure. Shortly after the 2012 election, Holder seized the opportunity to bring Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law to New York City for a civilian trial, again regardless of the risk.

One of Holder’s top priorities at the DOJ was to investigate the CIA for interrogations of terrorists conducted under the administration of President George W. Bush. Ultimately, Holder decided not to bring any charges, but the investigation had reportedly damaged morale at the intelligence agency. Intelligence-gathering from terror detainees has since become a repeated source of trouble, from the Christmas Day bomber in 2009 to Tsarnaev.

Holder famously promised that bin Laden would not be read his rights because he would be killed first. As with much of the Obama administration’s policy on terrorism, however, bin Laden has proved to be an exceptional case. Holder has shown enthusiasm for the expansive use of executive powers, such as the use of drones, but has shown less enthusiasm for his fundamental responsibility of enforcing the law and keeping America safe.

Marc Thiessen, writing at the Washington Post, notes that Holder suggested in mid-2010 that the rules around Miranda warnings should be reformed to reflect the realities of international terrorism. Such changes were a "top priority," Holder promised. Yet despite Democrats holding control of both houses of Congress, Holder "failed to deliver," Thiessen observes, leaving the U.S. unequipped to deal with Tsarnaev.

Celebrated defense lawyer and civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz was calling for Tsarnaev to be mirandized even before Judge Bowler had done so, largely because he believed the public safety risk had passed once both suspects had been neutralized. But others called Holder's move premature, and Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence went further, calling it "absolutely disgraceful."

After the Boston Marathon bombings, President Barack Obama promised: “But make no mistake, we will get to the bottom of this, and we will find out who did this, we'll find out why they did this." The DOJ had advance warning of the judge’s intent and did not dissuade her. At best, Holder’s conduct reflects appalling incompetence and confusion. At worst, it is part of an effort to place the rights of terrorists above the lives of Americans.

Holder: No drone strikes on Americans in US, except in ’extraordinary circumstance’

Michael Reynolds / EPA

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

openchannel

By Michael Isikoff
National Investigative Correspondent, NBC News

The Obama administration has no intention of carrying out drone strikes against suspected terrorists in the United States, but could use them in response to “an extraordinary circumstance” such as the 9/11 terror attacks, according to a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder obtained by NBC News.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who received the March 4 letter from Holder, called the attorney general’s refusal to rule out drone strikes in the U.S. “more than frightening.” 

The letter from Holder surfaced just as the Senate Intelligence Committee was voting 12-3 to approve White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan to be CIA director. The vote came after the White House agreed to share additional classified memos on targeted drone strikes against U.S. citizens overseas.

Paul had threatened to hold up Brennan's confirmation on the floor of the Senate if the administration did not clarify whether targeted drone strikes could be used inside the U.S.

In his letter, Holder called the question of drone strikes inside the U.S. "entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur and we hope no president will ever have to confront. … As a policy matter, moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat."

But Holder then appeared to leave the door open to such strikes in extreme circumstances.

Read the full letter

"It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could  conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on Dec. 7, 1941 and Sept. 11, 2001."