Cleaner Garland, hard at work

Cuddles

Cuddles

wtf.... this is what the 3rd, 4th time DOJ's batted for Trump under Garland?

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/do...defend-trump-defamation-suit-accuser-n1269917

Biden's Justice Department moves to defend Trump in defamation suit from accuser E. Jean Carroll
Carroll has accused the former president of sexual assault and defaming her by saying it "never happened."

The Biden administration's Justice Department filed court documents Monday that seek to defend former President Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit.

President Joe Biden criticized Trump on the campaign trail last year for using the department like his own "private law firm" in multiple instances, including in the case of E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s.

In September, Trump's Justice Department filed documents seeking to represent Trump against Carroll's claim in federal court.

Trump has denied Carroll's claim of sexual assault at a department store, saying "she's not my type" and it "never happened."

Carroll, a onetime columnist for Elle magazine who included the allegations in a 2019 book, filed a defamation suit in 2019. In October, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected the Trump administration's attempt to have the Justice Department represent him.

The Justice Department argued in a brief filed Monday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City that it should represent Trump, as nearly everything he said and did as president was a matter of government action.

"Speaking to the public and the press on matters of public concern is undoubtedly part of an elected official's job," the brief states. "Courts have thus consistently and repeatedly held that allegedly defamatory statements made in that context are within the scope of elected officials' employment — including when the statements were prompted by press inquiries about the official's private life."

The Justice Department lawyers wrote that Trump was "crude and disrespectful" in questioning Carroll's credibility and that comments attacking her appearance, impugning her motives and implying that she had made false accusations "were without question unnecessary and inappropriate." But, they said, they "all pertained to the denial of wrongdoing."

Carroll responded in a statement: "As women across the country are standing up and holding men accountable for assault — the DOJ is trying to stop me from having that same right. I am angry! I am offended! I and my attorneys Robbie Kaplan and Joshua Matz are confident that Judge Kaplan's decision will be affirmed by the Second Circuit."

Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan said in a statement: "The DOJ's position is not only legally wrong, it is morally wrong since it would give federal officials free license to cover up private sexual misconduct by publicly brutalizing any woman who has the courage to come forward. Calling a woman you sexually assaulted a 'liar,' a 'slut,' or 'not my type,' as Donald Trump did here, is not the official act of an American president."

Trump's legal team also responded to the Justice Department's move, saying that the suit "must be dismissed in a straightforward application of Congress’s decision not to waive sovereign immunity for defamation."

"This is not a case where a president, without prompting, randomly targeted a private citizen. Rather, Carroll, a public figure, accused Trump of terrible misconduct 20 years earlier in a book and magazine article for which she sought maximum publicity," they added in court documents. "He denied her accusations in precisely the manner she expected. A short time later, she sued him for defamation."
 
past gold nuggets:

Here4money said:
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profil...sy-devos-against-ripped-off-college-students/
Biden Admin Teams Up with Ex-Trump DOJ Official to Defend Betsy DeVos Against Ripped-Off College Students

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) under President Joe Biden is going to the mat for former secretary of education Betsy DeVos.

In a Monday filing with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton and other DOJ attorneys argued that students who were ripped off by for-profit scam colleges cannot depose the former Trump-era official.

“The [students’] demand for a former cabinet official’s deposition is extraordinary, unnecessary, and unsupported,” the filing alleges. “It is a transparent attempt at harassment—part of a PR campaign that has been central to [the students’] litigation strategy from the outset. It should be rejected and the court should quash the subpoena.”

Making common cause with the DOJ in the motion to quash is another Trump-era official: former acting associate attorney general Jesse Panuccio. Now an attorney with elite law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, Panuccio is acting as DeVos’s personal attorney “and is represented in her capacity as former U.S. Secretary of Education by the U.S. Department of Justice,” the filing explains in a footnote.

As a matter of law, the Biden administration does not have to take on DeVos’s representation here. The DOJ picks and chooses whether to represent present and former officials—but they are not bound by any rules, regulations or federal statues to do so. Additionally, there does not appear to be any extant legal authority for the DOJ to represent DeVos here in her personal capacity because she’s not actually a party to the underlying litigation. In order for DOJ to represent DeVos like this, the agency is supposed to initially file a statement of interest but no such document has been filed in the case.

The underlying case concerns hundreds of students who were defrauded by various for-profit colleges across the country. The students, all federal student loan borrowers who are currently in debt, sued the U.S. Department of Education because DeVos’s agency was accused of serially dragging its feet when asked to process student loan debt cancellation requests.

Multiple courts in the Northern District of California agreed with the students. DeVos herself ultimately admitted that student borrowers had paid for educational programs that were effectively “worthless.”

Still, DeVos continued to collect student loan payments from some 75,000 defrauded students who attended classes at the Corinthian Colleges chain. In May 2018, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California Sallie Kim barred the Department of Education from collecting payments on those student loans in the case stylized as Martin Manriquez v. Elisabeth DeVos.

After that, DeVos and the Department of Education continued to try and collect on thousands of those loans—eventually being found in violation of a court order. The Department of Education later admitted to “erroneously” violating that court order.

After being forced to reconsider student debt cancellation requests, DeVos’s agency took their time—ignoring new requests for some 18 months. A different group of students sued, alleging DeVos’s “delay to be unlawful stonewalling.” Judge Kim certified those students as a class in Oct. 2019.

Now those students want DeVos to sit for a deposition. That request was recently signed off on by U.S. District Judge William Alsup.

As Republic Report journalist David Halperin noted in that outlet’s original reporting, DeVos was subpoenaed on Jan. 26—some 19 days after she resigned. But the motion to quash offers a notable timeline: DeVos formally tendered her resignation the day after she was alerted that the students were intent on having her deposed. DeVos submitted her resignation on Jan. 7—the day after the Capitol siege. She blamed Trump’s “rhetoric” for the impacting the mob and the “situation.”

But the Biden administration and DeVos’s private counsel have other plans. In their motion, Boynton and Panuccio criticize the district court for its orders and accuse the students and their attorneys of being little more than media hounds intent on harassment.

“Plaintiffs appear to be more interested in the deposition itself (and the press attention that might come with it) than in the information they claim to seek,” the DOJ motion alleges.

The Biden administration DOJ repeatedly takes issue with a press release issued by the students’ lawyers after Judge Alsup okayed the DeVos deposition.

“Plaintiffs rebuffed Defendants’ offers to explore alternative sources, and instead hastily rushed to the district court in the underlying action (overlooking the need for a Rule 45 subpoena) to try to secure their sought-after deposition while also filing a celebratory press release,” the motion notes at one point.

The DOJ criticizes the press release again in a section complaining that the students declined to wait for the conclusion of an internal Department of Education investigation before filing: “Plaintiffs waited less than five hours before filing their request for the former Secretary’s deposition—followed by a celebratory press release.”

A lengthy footnote critiques the press release further:

In that press release, class counsel frankly reveal that they view a deposition of the former Secretary as necessary because she allegedly has a generalized “obligation to explain why defrauded student borrowers were ignored for years by the Education Department and then summarily denied their rights.” But the APA creates no such legal obligation, an dthe press release’s statement stands in stark contrast to Plaintiffs’ claim to the district court that they merely seek narrow categories of information that is unavailable from other sources. And, of course, the press release shows that Plaintiffs’ counsel is seeking, through this high-profile deposition, to get much more than the only thing sought in the Complaint: a “simple” order compelling the Department [of Education] to “start granting or denying their borrower defenses.”

A source familiar with the litigation said the language used by the DOJ in the motion to quash was unusually harsh and striking. They questioned the decision to cast admittedly defrauded students as harassers trying to attain a PR coup—as well as the general decision by the Biden administration to defend DeVos in the first place.

Jeff Hauser, an attorney and the executive director of the Revolving Door Project—an offshoot of the left-wing Center for Economic and Policy Research think tank—told Law&Crime that the decision to defend former executive branch officials is not entirely unlike a norm that should have lapsed when DeVos quit her job.

“My understanding is that it is a (problematic) norm if she were still Secretary and not a norm now that she is not,” Hauser said. “And we also think that figures like Trump and DeVos long ago forfeited the benefit of such norms.”

Some have questioned whether the abrasive motion was written by DeVos’s counsel and then signed off on by government line attorneys and the acting attorney general after a cursory read-through.

The motion to quash the subpoena was jointly authored by Obama administration alum Boynton and Panuccio as well as DOJ attorneys Marcia Berman, R. Charlie Merritt and Kevin P. Hancock.

The subpoena itself notes that the deposition is ” to be conducted via remote technology, with witness located in Vero Beach, Florida,” which is how the government and DeVos managed to file their stonewalling effort in the notoriously anti-government transparency Southern District of Florida.

The students, for their part, are hoping to get the case back where they say it belongs—which also happens to be much-friendlier ground.

“We will seek transfer of DeVos’s motion to quash to the appropriate court in California where we will continue to press for her deposition,” Eileen Connor, the legal director for the Project on Predatory Student Lending at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School and one of the students’ attorneys, told Law&Crime.

Read the joint DeVos-DOJ motion below:
More...
Here4money said:
WTF's Garland doing? Does this orange fuck get the "people's lawyer" to be his personal attorney ad infinitum?

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/25/9975...mo-on-trump-obstruction-decision-from-release
DOJ Moves To Block Full Memo On Trump Obstruction Decision From Release

https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...13c840-bfb3-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html
Justice Dept. asks judge to toss lawsuit against Trump, Barr for violent clearing of Lafayette Square

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/doj-judge-dismiss-lawsuits-trump-lafayette-square.html
Whatever the precedent may be for holding the president accountable for the actions of law enforcement, if the judge gives way to the DOJ request it would “authorize brutality with impunity” in the nation’s capital. If the cases are dropped it would suddenly make it impossible to hold officials accountable for similar offenses and the state-sponsored violence could escalate. Authorities “could have used live ammunition to clear the park, and nobody would have a claim against that as an assault on their constitutional rights,” said Scott Michelman, legal director for ACLU-D.C.
More...

Here4money said:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...13c840-bfb3-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html
Justice Dept. asks judge to toss lawsuit against Trump, Barr for violent clearing of Lafayette Square

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/doj-judge-dismiss-lawsuits-trump-lafayette-square.html
Whatever the precedent may be for holding the president accountable for the actions of law enforcement, if the judge gives way to the DOJ request it would “authorize brutality with impunity” in the nation’s capital. If the cases are dropped it would suddenly make it impossible to hold officials accountable for similar offenses and the state-sponsored violence could escalate. Authorities “could have used live ammunition to clear the park, and nobody would have a claim against that as an assault on their constitutional rights,” said Scott Michelman, legal director for ACLU-D.C.
More...
 
Last edited:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/11/biden-trump-hotel-documents/
Biden administration keeps long-sought Trump hotel documents under wraps
The Trump administration blocked Democrats’ efforts to unearth documents related to his leased D.C. hotel. Not much has changed under Biden.

Biden’s team has steadfastly defended some of the protections the Trump administration put in place to conceal Trump’s financial interests. The Justice Department under Biden is appealing a lower court judgment in favor of the congressional Democrats in their suit, another move by the agency to defend Trump-era legal positions. Biden’s General Services Administration, which holds the lease for the Trump International hotel, has provided only a portion of the documents Congress is seeking and asked that none of them be disclosed publicly.

Government watchdogs say they are disappointed at the Biden administration’s unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for a unique — and in their view highly problematic — arrangement in which Trump’s administration managed a contract to a business entity he still owned and that his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, oversaw.

Allowing Trump’s actions to go unscrutinized, advocates argue, would invite future presidents to repeat them.

“We think it’s really important to learn as much as possible about that contract and how it was administered, and whether there were special favors for Donald Trump because he was the president,” said Noah Bookbinder, president and chief executive of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.





 
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"Attorney General Merrick Garland did not comment"

Someone, wake up Joe and tell him what's going on with his DOJ.

Officials and employees of the DOJ that did Trump's evil bidding need to be held to full account; including the possibility of criminal charges, termination, and disbarment.

Also tell Joe to do something about citizen-education; so we stop trying to elect clowns, unqualified actors, criminals, racists, etc. into the most powerful position on the planet.
 
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/14/judge-keeps-second-part-of-memo-on-mueller-report-secret.html
Judge keeps second part of DOJ memo on Mueller report about Trump secret, for now
  • A federal judge declined to order the Department of Justice to release the second part of a memo about the Mueller report written to former Attorney General William Barr.
  • The memo argued that there was not enough evidence to prosecute then-President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice.
  • Judge Amy Berman Jackson said she wanted to allow the DOJ time to follow through on an appeal of her decision ordering the release of the entire memo by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
A federal judge declined Monday to order the Department of Justice to release the second part of a memo about the Mueller report written to former Attorney General William Barr, which argued that there was not enough evidence to prosecute then-President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in a ruling that she wanted to allow the DOJ time to follow through on its appeal of her earlier decision ordering the release of the entire memo by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

“While there may be some additional public benefit in revealing the contents of Section II, the Court will not deny the Department the opportunity to challenge its ruling in order to advance that interest at this time,” Jackson wrote in her new ruling, issued in U.S. District Court in Washington.
 
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