By Trevor Timm/Freedom of the Press Foundation

On Monday we revealed – for the first time – the Justice Department’s rules for targeting journalists with secret FISA court orders. The documents were obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
While civil liberties advocates have long suspected secret FISA court orders may be used (and abused) to conduct surveillance on journalists, the government – to our knowledge – has never acknowledged they have ever even contemplated doing so before the release of these documents.
The FISA court rules below are entirely separate from – and much less stringent – than the rules for obtaining subpoenas, court order, and warrants against journalists as laid out in the Justice Department’s “media guidelines,” which former Attorney General Eric Holder strengthened in 2015 after several scandals involving surveillance of journalists during the Obama era.

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Posted on September 18, 2018

By Julia Conley/Common Dreams

By releasing new documents late Tuesday previously marked “committee confidential,” Sen. Dick Durbin doubled down on accusations that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed perjury in his 2006 confirmation hearing for his seat on a federal appeals court.

We continue to find more evidence that Judge Kavanaugh misled me and the Judiciary Committee under oath. I’m posting important documents that Senate Republicans didn’t want the American people to see. We deserve transparency about this nominee.

— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) September 11, 2018

In defiance of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Durbin shared with the public two pages of e-mails showing that Kavanaugh was involved in discussions regarding the nomination of William Haynes for a judicial seat in 2002.
Four years later, Durbin said, Kavanaugh misled the Judiciary Committee about his involvement while under oath.
“It is clear now that not only did Judge Kavanaugh mislead me when it came to his involvement in the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies, but also regarding his role in the controversial Haynes nomination,” Durbin said.

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Posted on September 13, 2018

By Steve Rhodes

“A poll bankrolled by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s close friend, business adviser and largest political donor shows Emanuel in relatively decent shape to win a third-term if he chooses to pursue it,” Fran Spielman reported for the Sun-Times on August 20th.
This was an odd – but ultimately unsurprising – report. Unsurprising because, as I’ve written frequently over the life of this site, Spielman is wholly untroubled by acting as a stenographer to power in the service of “scoops” – and in fact is sought out by City Hall to serve as such even as some of her colleagues praise her “access” to “insiders.”
To wit:

Is it newsworthy when a politician’s friend pays for a poll and then releases it, and it makes the politician look good? If it made the politician look bad, would his friend have released it? https://t.co/aZsYA5K4T8

— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) August 20, 2018

And:

Ding, ding, ding. Rhetorical question, of course. I’d also note that Emanuel folks keep polls like this in their back pocket to release when other polls comes out, i.e. the not-so-favorable Vallas one reported by Politico today. Sadly, not a lot of independent polling these days. https://t.co/ywexuhpaOM

— Bill Ruthhart (@BillRuthhart) August 20, 2018

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Posted on September 11, 2018

By Robert Reich

The only way I see the end of Trump is if there’s overwhelming evidence he rigged the 2016 election, in which case impeachment isn’t an adequate remedy. His presidency should be annulled.
Let me explain.

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Posted on September 3, 2018

By The Uptown People’s Law Center

Illinois Department of Corrections officials ended Stateville prison’s debate program because officials did not like the prisoners being in close contact with, and thus having an influence on, state legislators. On Tuesday, lawyers with Uptown People’s Law Center will file a lawsuit on behalf of Katrina Burlet, who headed this successful program, to get the program reinstated.

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Posted on August 27, 2018

By Jesse Sharkey/CTU Vice President

It’s not every day that I read American Banker, but then again, not every day does a story involving Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the trial of President Donald Trump confidant Paul Manafort and a Chicago bank CEO pop up.
And, to be honest, I don’t even care about the Manafort part. The real bombshell are the shamefully creative ways that Chicago’s mayor shovels cash to the connected at the same time he cuts funding for schools, mental health facilities and city services for the rest of us.
This particular Chicago bank CEO, Stephen Calk, received $3.6 million in tax increment financing (TIF) funds from Emanuel for creating “new” jobs. In effect, Calk received the money for laying off people from a bank he was closing and hiring them at a new bank he was building. Naturally, the mayor took this opportunity to crow at a press conference – as is his style – about all the new jobs he and the bank were creating.

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Posted on August 18, 2018

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

Anyone who was expecting Democrats to aggressively and intelligently grill FCC chair Ajit Pai over his egregious lies about his agency’s fabricated “cyberattack” story or his deeply unpopular net neutrality repeal was disappointed after the Senate Commerce Committee’s much-anticipated oversight hearing on Thursday, which ultimately ended up being a “complete joke” that produced little of substance and few answers to important questions.
“You’d hardly even know three FCC staffers were just proven to have repeatedly lied to the press, public, and Congress about a DDoS attack that never happened,” freelance technology writer Karl Bode noted in a series of tweets during the hearing, as senator after senator passed up opportunities to press Pai on his false claims that a cyberattack – and not a flood of pro-net neutrality traffic – brought down the FCC’s public comment system last year.
“Democrats at the FCC ‘oversight’ hearing could have easily pressed Pai on his bullshit ‘I knew nothing’ DDoS claim by pointing out his press shop actively maligned and misled reporters, and at least three staffers gave false statements Congress and FBI investigators. But nah.” Bode added. “That the FCC lied repeatedly to the press, public, and Congress about a bogus DDoS attack is a complete afterthought at this ‘oversight’ hearing. Even in this corrupt mess of a country, that’s fucking incredible.”

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Posted on August 17, 2018

By Jake Johnson/Common Dreams

The mainstream media seems to have decided that the worst part about President Donald Trump signing this 2019 National Defense Authorization Act was his failure to acknowledge that it is named after Sen. John McCain.
“Trump snubs John McCain during bill signing intended to honor him,” NBC News complained in a headline that was repeated almost verbatim in Business Insider, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, Bloomberg and many other major news outlets.

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Posted on August 16, 2018

By Helen Marie Berg, Abigail DeHart, Leah Litman and Lark Turner/Take Care

It’s been just under a month since President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Before Trump announced the nomination, he created something of a pageant between the possible nominees. As Trump feigned uncertainty about whom he would ultimately select, supporters of the various nominees took the opportunity to make their case to the president (usually via Fox News), or to fellow members of the president’s caucus (usually via other conservative media outlets).
It’s useful to look back at these statements, chiefly because – as Lawrence Hurley and others have suggested – the case made for Kavanaugh before the president officially announced the nomination differs markedly from the case made for Kavanaugh after the president officially announced the nomination.

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Posted on August 13, 2018

By Aaron Tang/TakeCare

Shortly after I posted my initial take on the headline-grabbing set of class action lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in refunds from public sector unions after Janus, two interesting things happened.
First, Will Baude posted a thoughtful account on the Volokh Conspiracy explaining why he and Eugene Volokh believe “unions are likely to be liable for their pre-Janus conduct, for better or worse.” Then, a high-level DOJ attorney e-mailed me raising similar counter-arguments to the ones advanced by Baude. (Whether the DOJ attorney did so out of intellectual curiosity or because the administration is planning to stake out a position on these suits in amicus filings, I cannot say).
In light of these developments, I thought I would post a lengthier discussion (trigger warning for all those who are not fans of § 1983 arcana!) of the relevant legal questions.

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Posted on August 8, 2018