US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8298

The Justice Department must search for and release historical records pertaining to a “purge” of gay and lesbian federal employees by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled last week.

The documents are related to President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which ostensibly gave the heads of federal agencies the power to investigate and dismiss government workers if they posed a national security risk.

The lawsuit's plaintiff, along with LGBT historians, however, claim the actual purpose of the program was to allow the Hoover-led FBI legal authority to fire thousands of gay and lesbian employees across the federal government.

“This executive order in 1953 kicked off six decades of devastating discrimination against LGBT Americans, and these documents will reveal how that order was implemented and enforced,” Charles Francis, president of the Mattachine Society of Washington D.C., the lawsuit’s plaintiff, told NBC News.

“We’re talking about tens of thousands of people over the years investigated and ruined by this executive order; lives were shattered,” Francis added. “You were branded ‘immoral’ and ruined if you were labeled a homosexual in the 1950s ... and these papers remain locked away in federal vaults, and it’s time now for the Department of Justice and the FBI to work with us and release all of it.”

The district court ruled on Friday that the "FBI's response fails to demonstrate that their search was reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents."

Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., an LGBT advocacy group, sought documents related to EO10450 under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2013 and last year filed a lawsuit.

Lillian Faderman, an LGBT historian and author of “The Gay Revolution,” called the district court’s ruling “very significant,” but she noted Eisenhower's executive order wasn’t the beginning of the U.S. government’s weeding out of gay employees.

“Truman in 1947 had signed [Executive Order 9835, known as the “Loyalty Order”], and that gave enough ammunition to the State Department to begin witch hunting homosexuals,” she said. “Throughout the early 1950s there were firings, but [Eisenhower’s order] gave even more ammunition.”

Faderman said the purge officially continued until 1975, when the U.S. Civil Service Commission (the government entity that actually did the firing) ended it, but she said it unofficially continued afterwards. And it wasn’t until 1995 that President Bill Clinton signed an executive order barring the federal government from denying security clearance to gays and lesbians solely on the basis of their sexual orientation.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth in Friday’s ruling rejected arguments by the FBI that the search would produce a burdensome number of documents, and he was skeptical of claims that searches relating to Chief Justice Warren Burger — an assistant attorney general at the time who was tasked with enforcing EO 10450 — turned up no relevant results.

“The Government states that there is not a single responsive document amongst the results,” Lamberth wrote in the ruling. “Respectfully, this strains credulity.”

Lisa Linsky, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery, the law firm that has been working pro bono with the Mattachine Society for the past five years to get these documents released, said the files are part of a broader story.

“It’s important to the preservation of LGBT American history,” Linsky told NBC News. “But it’s also important that our allies and other fellow citizens understand what the government did so we could do our best to avoid repeating history."

“Given the current environment, we need to do everything that we can to identify these historic documents, preserve them and make sure that the public is aware of the story of the government animus and discrimination toward LGBT people,” she explained, “because we’re at a time when the government — this particular administration — is not supportive of the LGBT community and preserving the civil rights that we have obtained.”

Francis agreed, saying the case is of “extreme relevance” today. He cited as an example the amicus brief the Justice Department filed just last week taking the position that discrimination based on sexual orientation is not protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This brief was filed the same day President Donald Trump sent out a series of surprise tweets proposing a ban on transgender service members.

Linsky said while this recent court decision is a “tremendous victory” for LGBTQ advocates, she noted there is no way to accurately predict when, if at all, they will actually receive the documents they’re seeking.

A spokesman from the Department of Justice said the department has “no comment on this particular matter.”

On August 04 2017 07:58 crms wrote:

Amateur hour is apparently endless. I can't believe there are people that still defend these clowns as competent rulers of the nation.

On August 04 2017 06:42 Leporello wrote:


I'm always amazed at how dense Wall Street traders are. Like, they really didn't see this news coming, and this is their reaction to it? Amazing.

It does go to show that this is big news, even though it should've been easily predicted.

Shortly after the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told several of the highest-ranking managers of the bureau they should consider themselves possible witnesses in any investigation into whether President Donald Trump engaged in obstruction of justice, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials.

McCabe has told colleagues that he too is a potential witness in the probe of whether Trump broke the law by trying to thwart the FBI's Russia investigation and the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Two senior federal law enforcement officials have told me that the new revelations illustrate why they believe the potential case against Trump is stronger than outsiders have thought.

“What you are going to have is the potential for a powerful obstruction case,” a senior law enforcement official said. “You are going to have the [former] FBI director testify, and then the acting director, the chief of staff to the FBI director, the FBI’s general counsel, and then others, one right after another. This has never been the word of Trump against what [James Comey] has had to say. This is more like the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus Donald Trump.”

Trump and his supporters have long argued that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the special counsel to bring an obstruction case against Trump. The case would rely on the word of one man versus another, that of the president of the United States versus the FBI director he fired. But this was never the case.

Including Comey, as many as 10, and possibly more, of the nation’s most senior law enforcement officials are likely to be questioned as part of the investigation into whether Trump committed obstruction of justice, according to two government investigators with firsthand knowledge of the matter. Comey’s notes on his conversations could also be used as evidence, according to many reports.

The White House declined to comment. First contacted by email by on July 27, White House spokesperson Kelly Love responded late Wednesday saying, "This would be a question for outside counsel." Love did not name which of the president's many lawyers to contact. Marc E. Kasowitz, an attorney for the president, did not respond to a phone message Wednesday evening. The FBI also declined to comment.

FBI agents are experienced witnesses who routinely testify in high-pressure cases. Plus, the FBI itself is a rare public institution that is widely respected and trusted by the American public. The witness list and breadth of possible evidence, including notes Comey and several other senior FBI officials made at the time, could add up to a much stronger obstruction of justice case than Trump ever could have imagined.

Among those who McCabe and other law enforcement officials have privately believed are potential witnesses are six of the highest-ranking officials of the agency: They include McCabe himself; Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff; James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI; David Bowdich, who as the FBI’s associate director is the agency’s third-highest official; and Carl Ghattas, the head of the FBI’s national security division and a legal adviser to McCabe. McCabe was deputy director of the FBI until May, when he became acting director after President Trump fired Comey.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and a third senior Justice Department official are believed by law enforcement officials to be crucial fact witnesses in the obstruction probe. Their testimony is likely to support Comey and harm Trump, according to investigators and outside experts.

In May, Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate whether Trump colluded with the Russian government to help defeat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. A related area of inquiry for the special counsel is whether Trump obstructed justice when he allegedly asked Comey to shut down his inquiry of Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Trump made sure he and Comey were alone when he allegedly pressured the then-FBI director to curtail the FBI’s Russia investigation. At a private White House dinner on January 27, Trump allegedly pressed Comey to pledge his personal loyalty. The dinner came right after the president learned Flynn was under criminal investigation.

Later, on February 14, Trump allegedly leaned on Comey privately in an Oval Office meeting to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. Comey did not drop the investigation or take other steps Trump requested that the then-director of the FBI felt were improper. Trump then fired Comey on May 9.

Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s pressure on Comey to shut down his investigation — combined with other efforts to thwart the investigation, including firing Comey — are an obstruction of justice. As such, Comey is the central witness against Trump in any such obstruction investigation. That Trump was ordinarily alone with Comey when these various incidents occurred has led Trump and his surrogates to argue that it would be difficult for any obstruction of justice case to be brought because it would be based solely on Comey’s word.

“We have to keep in mind that is one person’s record of what happened,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said on Fox News in one typical comment repeated by White House surrogates. “The only two people who know what happened in these meeting are the president and James Comey.”

But even though Trump took great pains to try to be alone with Comey when they spoke, Comey regularly spoke to the six high-ranking FBI managers, often right after a distressing conversation with Trump about the Russia probe.

On August 04 2017 08:32 TheFish7 wrote:


Don't read too much into that move. 30 points is just some automatic algorithms seeing a negative headline and reacting. The Dow set a new all time record high today.

Anyway what's been driving the market up is Apple and Boeing. Volatility is at historic lows. When shit really hits the fan, it's going to be something to see.

On August 04 2017 08:43 Leporello wrote:


What I find weird about that, is there's a dozen stories about Trump today. Literally. And they're all bad, like the phone-transcripts.

But the market reacts, very sharply, to this one. Weird to me.

edit: and yeah, if this is a small reaction, well, it's a small story.
But if it's a sign of what's to come...

On August 04 2017 08:50 TheFish7 wrote:


Yea, it could be. The assumption that's being made is that Trump will deliver on tax reform and health care, and good times - 80's style. But really we're sitting on a precipice where any number of bad events could set the market off. Big drops are usually preceded by record highs and low volatility.

Federal prosecutors are investigating Kushner Companies, the real estate firm owned by the family of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, over its use of a program that grants visas to wealthy overseas investors.

The authorities, in part, are looking into the role of Mr. Kushner’s sister, Nicole Meyer, according to a person familiar with the matter who confirmed the inquiry.

The investigation centers on the real estate company’s use of the so-called EB-5 program, which offers visas to foreigners in exchange for a $500,000 investment. Critics say the program has weak oversight and lax rules.

At a marketing event in May, Ms. Meyer promoted the company’s connections to the Trump administration as she courted Chinese investors for a pair of luxury apartment towers being built by the Kushner Companies in New Jersey. The project “means a lot to me and my entire family,” she told prospective investors at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Beijing.

Mr. Kushner gave up his role running the family company in January. He still owns a significant piece of the business.

In a statement, Kushner Companies’ general counsel, Emily Wolf, said the company was cooperating with the authorities.

“EB-5 is a longstanding federal program that is frequently used by many large developers to raise funds and help create jobs,” Ms. Wolf said. “Kushner Companies utilized the program, fully complied with its rules and regulations and did nothing improper.”

She added: “Neither Kushner Companies nor Nicole Meyer have done anything wrong in connection with the EB-5 program, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply false. The company and Ms. Meyer are cooperating with all legal requests in order to show that they did everything properly and clear up any questions.”

The investigation was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, which said Kushner Companies had received a subpoena. The focus of the investigation is unclear.

The Kushners are seeking $150 million in EB-5 money for a pair of high-rise apartment buildings in Jersey City, known as One Journal Square. In May, Ms. Meyer marketed the development at events in Beijing and in Shanghai.

At the Beijing event, Ms. Meyer mentioned her brother’s former role at the family company, saying he left to serve in the Trump administration. The two events were hosted by Qiaowai, a Beijing immigration company that promised good returns and “guaranteed” green cards to investors in the Jersey City project.

Mr. Kushner has played an important role in United States-China relations, brokering meetings between Mr. Trump and top Chinese officials. About three-quarters of the roughly 10,000 investor visas issued last year went to applicants from China.

Ms. Meyer apologized for mentioning her brother and did not appear at later events on the trip.

This is not the first time Kushner Companies has turned to the program. In 2013, it raised $50 million in EB-5 financing for a Trump-branded luxury high-rise apartment building in Jersey City, which opened late last year.

Created in 1990, the program was intended to provide financing for projects in areas with high unemployment. It has turned into a popular source of cheap financing for luxury developments.

There are no federal standards to define the areas that qualify for the program. And developers have been accused of providing gerrymandered maps to qualify.

The Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, has criticized the EB-5 program, citing lax safeguards against illicit sources of funds.

Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have divested a portion of his stake in the family real estate empire, including the Jersey City project. But he has retained ownership in the bulk of the business, including the building that had received EB-5 funds.

Government ethics filings show the stake held by Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump in the family business and other investments is worth as much as $761 million to them.

Blake Roberts, a lawyer who is advising the couple on ethics issues, has said that Mr. Kushner will recuse himself from matters concerning the EB-5 program.

Qiaowai, the Chinese immigration company helping Kushner Companies find investors, did not respond to a request for comment.