Thanks to @apcbapcb for the shoutout, in his review of @nicholsonbaker8's Baseless in @nybooks, to a point I made in my review in @thenation. But I would like to clarify something about this, for the sake of others out there who are frustrated by unsuccessful FOIA requests. /1
Baker's years of requests to liberate more information about Korean War-era bioweapons from the National Archives were largely unsuccessful. His original plan to prove what happened morphed into a book that is partly about FOIA's shortcomings. /2
In the section of my review in which I focused on his critique of the Freedom of Information Act, I pointed out a puzzling failure of imagination: Baker never filed a FOIA lawsuit. That's very often necessary to make FOIA work./3
In his review, @apcbapcb suggests that I am oblivious to the fact that as a New York Times reporter, I work for an organization with the legal resources to file FOIA lawsuits, but many researchers are not so lucky./4
In fact, what I suggested was that Baker ought to have reached out to one of several organizations that provide free legal representation to journalists and researchers with righteous FOIA requests./5
A particularly good one, for any such diggers reading this, are the good people at Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic @MFIAclinic, including @MFIADave /6 law.yale.edu/mfia
I missed that DOJ has posted the individual certificates listing what offenses Trump pardoned for each person listed in his January 19 master clemency warrant, which had names but didn't spell out the covered crimes. justice.gov/pardon/page/fi…
Here's Steve Bannon's, for example.
Here's Elliot Broidy, a Trump fund-raiser who admitted to a role in a covert campaign to influence the administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests.
Here's Ken Kurson, a former Giuliani speechwriter and former editor of a newspaper Jared Kushner owned, who had been charged with cyberstalking nytimes.com/2020/10/23/nyr…
I took a deeper look at the Biden WH not restoring the ABA's traditional role of pre-nomination vetting and de facto vetoing of potential judges, which the WP scooped the other day in a story about the Biden team getting geared up to make nominations. nytimes.com/2021/02/05/us/…
The ABA's pre-nomination vetting dated back to the Eisenhower administration. Its peer review system had long been a serious constraint on which lawyers politicians could transform into life-tenured judges. /2
But both parties, when in power, have chafed at that constraint. When Republicans' preferred nominees got dinged as not qualified based on temperament/ethics/competence, the GOP insisted it was instead because the ABA harbored ideological bias against conservatives./3
The National Security Agency has just released an important set of rules and procedures for electronic surveillance by the DOD (of which NSA is a part)./1 int.nyt.com/data/documentt…
It is a big-deal doc but it also appears to be more a housekeeping update of the previous one rather something that makes major substantive changes, unless I’m missing something, so my current plan is to tweet for specialists rather than write a NYT article for general readers./2
These procedures govern, at a 30,000-foot level, DOD/NSA surveillance that is authorized by Executive Order 12333 because it uses techniques that fall outside the sort of national-security wiretapping that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) regulates. /3
New/exclusive: The government has used Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect logs of visitors to a website, according to an ODNI letter to @RonWyden. /1 nytimes.com/2020/12/03/us/…
Whether to preserve an ability to use this technique aimed at foreign web users (but necessarily risking collection of American web users) appears to map onto the Schiff-Lofgren negotiations over whether/how to narrow the Wyden-Daines amendment to the FISA bill in May. /2
FBI/ODNI disclosed that one of the 61 FISA court orders under Section 215 in 2019 involved collection of visitor logs for a particular (unnamed) web page from a foreign (unnamed) country. We don't know how often they do this, nor whether they always try to screen out Americans./3
New legal explainer: Trump has discussed potential pardons that could test the boundaries of his constitutional power to nullify criminal liability. nytimes.com/2020/12/02/us/…
Here are some highlights, with greater explanation at the link. 1. Can Trump prospectively pardon people before they have been charged with the crime, let alone convicted of anything? Yes. (Though still after the potential offense took place.)
2. Does pardoning necessarily eliminate all risk? No.
Trump can't stop state prosecutors, who can charge financial crimes. And it could eliminate a shield that lets witnesses avoid testifying before Congress or a grand jury.
Came across a weird claim in @mtaibbi's take on @ggreenwald. The NYT walked back nothing about our reporting that the CIA assessed that Russia offered $ to incentivize killings of US troops, it was in Trump's briefing & the WH developed response options but authorized no action.
When the WH defended its failure to do even a diplomatic warning (which Pompeo and DOD later did) by lying that the CIA's analysis was too iffy to tell Trump, we reported that it was actually in his Feb. 27 written briefing & reported broadly to the intelligence community May 4.
We went on to dig out details of the direct (detainee interrogations) & corroborative ($ transfers/seizures, travel data) evidence & the absence of sigint & explained that the CIA had medium confidence in its assessment based on this while the sigint-focused NSA wasn't as sure.