When you think about innocent people suffering at the hands of power-abusing authorities, usually it’s foreign thugs jailing dissidents, or maybe cops gone bad in urban America. On Thursday, a special counsel appointed four …
Crime
How Prosecutor Preet Bharara Is Bringing Mob Squad Justice to Wall Street
The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, announced some big mortgage fraud charges in New York on Wednesday, accusing three former high-level employees of Credit Suisse with jacking up the book value of bundled …
Bloomberg Investigates the Koch Brothers
Bloomberg has a good, old-fashioned investigative piece on the private business empire of David and Charles Koch, the billionaire conservative political activists who inherited their father’s small oil company and now produce everything from Dixie cups and Stainmaster Carpet to petrochemical equipment.
“Koch Industries tells all of …
Law Enforcement as a Counterterrorism Tool
David Kris, the former head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division and an expert in national security law, has published in a scholarly journal a lengthy defense of the use of criminal prosecution as one tool in the larger counterterrorism toolbox. Kris is universally respected on both sides of the aisle: he worked on …
In Second Trial, Blago Can’t Beat the Rap
TIME’s Dawn Reiss checks in from Chicago:
On Monday, June 27, the jury returned from 10 days of deliberation and everyone gathered to hear its decision. Blagojevich blew an air kiss to his weeping wife and then clasped his hands as courtroom deputy Donald Walker began reading the verdict. The first finding of guilt led Blagojevich to
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Secret Federal Grand Jury Investigating Alleged War Crimes at the CIA
Battleland’s Adam Zagorin with the scoop:
TIME has learned that a prosecutor tasked with probing the CIA – John Durham, a respected Republican-appointed US attorney from Connecticut – recently began calling witnesses before a secret federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, looking into, among other things, the lurid November 4,
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Cut Off from His Country, Another Foreign National Faces Execution in Texas
Two U.S. Presidents, the State Department and the Justice Department, an assortment of diplomats, military brass, and former judges all want the State of Texas to delay the scheduled July 7 execution of Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. But that may not be enough.
A Note on Edwards
I was never a big John Edwards fan. He seemed an “ice skater”–as Mario Cuomo used to say. He skimmed the surface, without ever really exploring or grasping the issues. It seemed that he became a politician because he thought he looked like a politician. But I think his indictment today is a big waste of time and money. If he did break …
Was John Edwards’s Haircut to Blame?
The just-released indictment of John Edwards reprints the text of a note allegedly sent from the elderly billionaire heiress and Edwards supporter Bunny Mellon to Edwards’ notorious aide, Andrew Young, in May 2007:
John Edwards Indicted
[Updated below, 11:25 am] As expected, federal prosecutors have lowered the boom on the former North Carolina Senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee for allegedly using political money to cover up an affair that led to a secret love child. The Associated Press reports:
The case of USA v. Johnny Reid Edwards contains six
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Three Reasons Mladic’s Trial Matters
Why should you care that former Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic has been extradited to The Hague, Netherlands, to be tried for war crimes that he and his troops allegedly committed more than 15 years ago?
First, the slaughter. As they arrived at a refugee camp in northern Bosnia in July 1995, Muslim survivors of the fall of …
Loughner Found Unfit to Stand Trial
Jared Loughner, the suspect in a January massacre that left six dead and 14 wounded in a Tucson shopping center, has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial by a federal judge. The ruling, issued Wednesday afternoon during a hearing in a Tucson courtroom, will send Loughner to a federal mental-health facility for treatment and delay …
Poker Sites To Refund Players’ Money
PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, two of the three sites shuttered in a Department of Justice crackdown on online gambling, will be allowed to reclaim their domain names in order to refund money to players, according to the DOJ.