Tag: doj

Blanche says DOJ won’t release full Epstein files by Friday deadline

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Department of Justice (DOJ) would not be releasing the full Epstein files on Friday as required under new legislation, instead sending over a partial batch.

Blanche told Fox News the Justice Department would release “several hundred thousand” documents on Friday, “and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.”

Blanche attributed the delay to the need to redact any names or identifying information about witnesses, but failing to turn over the full unclassified files could run afoul of the law, which gave the department 30 days to publicly share the documents.

“So today is the 30 days when I expect that we’re going to release several hundred thousand documents today. And those documents will come in in all different forms, photographs and other materials associated with, with all of the investigations into, into Mr. Epstein,” Blanche said.

“What we’re doing is we are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story, to the extent it needs to be protected, is completely protected. And so I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks.”

DOJ was compelled to turn over the files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein by a bill that got near-unanimous support in Congress, signed into law after President Trump reversed his earlier stance opposing their release.

While the bill does allow for redactions related to victims and for DOJ to withhold some information about the investigation, it does not provide a rolling deadline to turn over the documents.

Under the law, the DOJ has 15 days to turn over its rationale for any documents withheld.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said not releasing the required files in full amounts to breaking the law.

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Nevada is the latest of 18 states sued by US government for voter data

The lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division adds Nevada to a growing list of 18 states facing litigation over sensitive state voter data.

The suit comes after months of DOJ demands for complete state voting registration lists, which Nevada and other states have repeatedly denied and called intimidation in an effort to influence elections. President Donald Trump lost all 18 states in the 2020 election, with Nevada one of three states with Republican governors.

The Trump administration said in the filings that it would like to use the voting registrations to verify the states are following federal election law in an effort to strengthen voting security.

Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution says states administer elections and determine their “Times, Places and Manner.”

Nevada, along with most other states, had already denied a request to provide the sensitive voter data. The initial request by the DOJ Civil Rights Division in August called for complete voter registration lists – including Social Security numbers and information about driver’s licenses. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said at the time that the state needed more time to look over the “unprecedented” request.

“Despite our simple requests for information on how they’re going to keep this data secure, they’ve given us no clear answers,” Aguilar wrote in response to the suit filing announced Friday. “It’s my duty to follow Nevada law and protect the best interests of Nevadans, which includes protecting their sensitive information and access to the ballot.”

The DOJ Civil Rights Division announced similar suits in Colorado, Hawaii and Massachusetts on Friday. They also sued for 2020 voting records from Fulton County, Georgia after an ongoing election interference case against Trump and allies in the state was dismissed last month.

“At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”

Wyoming and Indiana provided complete voting registration lists with driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers. Ten other states responded to the DOJ Civil Rights Division with publicly available versions of the voter registration lists, with the sensitive information redacted.

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In rare public comments, career DOJ officials offer chilling warnings about online network 764

In striking and chilling terms, several career Justice Department officials on Thursday offered dire warnings about the online extremist network “764,” whose young followers around the world use popular social media platforms to target, groom and push vulnerable teens into harming themselves and others.

“I don’t think Stephen King is dark enough to come up with some of the stuff that these kids are coming up with,” said Justin Sher, a trial attorney with the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“It is as serious a threat as you can imagine,” Sher’s Justice Department colleague James Donnelly said. “[And] they’re trying to metastasize the evil.”

Their comments came during a panel about 764 hosted by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. It was a rare public appearance for two career prosecutors who the panel’s moderator described as “the point people” on 764 within the department’s National Security Division.

Sher and Donnelly both noted that 764 members are increasingly trying to push victims to take deadly actions, including suicide or school shootings and other mass-casualty attacks.

As ABC News has previously reported, 764 members find vulnerable victims on popular online platforms, elicit private information and intimate sexual images from them, and then use that sensitive material to threaten and blackmail victims into mutilating themselves, harming others, or taking other violent action — all while streaming it on social media so others can watch and then disseminate recordings of it.

“For them, content is currency,” Sher said. “So they are building their content inventory … and putting it out there to build their status within these groups.”

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Epstein files release in chaos as Trump officials scramble to redact thousands of documents hours before deadline

Donald Trump‘s Department of Justice is working around the clock to redact thousands of pages from the Epstein files before their legally required release Friday.

White House officials are bracing for the release of the files after Trump has been the subject of rampant speculation about his connection to Epstein. 

Also believed to be in the files are former President Bill Clinton, the former Prince Andrew, and others.

There are fears that the same rushed workflow and deadline could lead to similar mistakes to the release of the JFK assassination files, which unintentionally revealed the social security numbers of more than 200 people. 

Pam Bondi’s DOJ lawyers are worried that the the Justice Department’s National Security Division don’t have the proper guidance on how to provide the most information legally possible. 

Attorneys for the DOJ are reportedly working on over 1,000 documents per week to get the files ready in time to meet their deadline, CNN reported. 

They must be able to edit the files to protect the victims of the late billionaire pedophile and meet executive and legal privacy requirements. Many are preparing for more to be redacted than is legally necessary. 

‘Either they’re going to screw it up or they’re going to withhold things. It wouldn’t surprise me. Some of it may be incompetence as much as deliberate,’ a non-DOJ lawyer awaiting the release said. 

The DOJ has asked additional counter-intelligence specialists to drop everything else they were doing to process the files. Some refused the assignment.  

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FBI repeatedly warned DOJ didn’t have probable cause to raid Trump home: ‘Not been corroborated’

he FBI in summer 2022 raised repeated objections to raiding Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, warning agents did not believe the Biden Justice Department had enough evidence to establish “probable cause” that the then-former president had broken the law in handling classified documents, according to bombshell memos turned over Tuesday to Congress.

“WFO [FBI’s Washington Field Office] has conducted approximately [Redacted] interviews related to this matter. Very little has been developed related to who might be culpable for mishandling the documents,” a June 1, 2022 FBI memo declared. “From the interviews, WFO has gathered information suggesting that there may be additional boxes (presumably of the same type as were sent back to NARA [National Archives] in January) at Mar-a-Lago.”

“WFO has been drafting a Search Warrant affidavit related to these potential boxes, but has some concerns that the information is single source, has not been corroborated, and may be dated. DOJ CES [Counterintelligence and Export Control Section] opines, however, that the SWs [search warrants] meet the probable cause standard,” that memo read.

Over a month later, FBI agents raised more concerns, including about the legality of searching Trump’s personal residence at the Mar-a-Lago residence, the memos show.

“DOJ has inquired as to an Ops Plan for a SW of MAL [Mar-a-Lago]. I let them know we are not in agreement for PC [probable cause] on the SW [search warrant] and that we already had an Ops Plan in place that will [sic] can be quickly updated between FBI/MM [Miami Field Office] and FBI/WF [Washington Field Office],” a redacted FBI agent in the nation’s capital wrote in a July 12, 2022 email. “However, WF-[Redacted] does not believe we have PC for the 45 Office or the bedroom due to recency and issues of boxes versus classified information. Therefore, as we are in disagreement on the SW and its scope, we are not yet finalizing a SW as we are missing relevant logistics and details.”

Just the News obtained a copy of the memos after Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel declassified them and turned them over to Congress.

“Received shocking new docs 2day from DOJ & FBI showing FBI DID NOT BELIEVE IT HAD PROBABLE CAUSE to raid Pres[ident] Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, but Biden DOJ pushed for it anyway,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley tweeted on Tuesday afternoon. “Based on the records, Mar-a-Lago raid was a miscarriage of justice.”

The emails were turned over to the Senate and House Judiciary committees, ahead of a planned deposition Wednesday from ex-special prosecutor Jack Smith, who inherited the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case just months after the August 2022 raid of Trump’s home that rocked the political world ahead of the 2024 election.

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DOJ Sues Four States for Violating Federal Election Law

The Department of Justice announced Friday it has filed federal lawsuits against four states, which were all accused of election law violations.

According to a press release from the DOJ Office of Public Affairs, the suits target Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada.

The department says the states failed to produce their statewide voter registration lists upon request.

The filings bring the Justice Department’s nationwide total of such lawsuits to 18, the release said.

In addition to the four states, the Civil Rights Division is suing officials in Fulton County, Georgia.

The lawsuit against Fulton County seeks records related to the 2020 election.

The DOJ said the actions are being handled by its Civil Rights Division.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon addressed the lawsuits in a statement.

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John Lott Fires Back at Critics of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Defending 2A

Saying that gun rights are civil rights shouldn’t be controversial. After all, most of what we term as civil liberties are enshrined in the Bill of Rights, from freedom of speech and religion to protection against illegal search and seizure, and many others. The Second Amendment is smack dab in the middle of all of those. Saying the right to keep and bear arms is a civil right isn’t controversial; it’s obvious.

But some people can’t seem to wrap their gray matter around that.

Among them are some critics of the Department of Justice actually treating gun rights like civil rights, and John Lott has some words for those folks.

“The Civil Rights Division’s new focus on the Second Amendment, which is far outside its longstanding mission, is moving us even further away from our nation’s commitment to protecting all Americans’ civil rights,” said Stacey Young, a former division attorney who resigned shortly after the current administration took office.

The investigation into Los Angeles’ reluctance to grant concealed-carry permits has already drawn sharp criticism. “This is a gross misuse of the government’s civil rights enforcement authority,” said Christy Lopez, who served as deputy chief of the division under the Obama administration.

But poor black Americans — who face the highest risk of violent crime — gain the most from having the ability to protect themselves.

For women, the safest response when confronted by a criminal is to have a gun. Women who rely on passive behavior are 2.5 times more likely to suffer serious injury than women who use a firearm to defend themselves. Because criminals are overwhelmingly men, a woman attacked by a man faces a much larger strength imbalance than a man attacked by another man. A gun dramatically shifts that balance. It increases a woman’s ability to protect herself far more than it does for a man.

Background Check Errors Mostly Affect Blacks, Hispanics

Consider something as seemingly uncontroversial as background checks for gun purchases. Gun-control advocates often claim that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has stopped 5.1 million dangerous or prohibited people from buying guns since 1998. But more than 99 percent of these denials are false positives, and the errors fall disproportionately on law-abiding black and Hispanic men.

The impact of gun laws in general falls disproportionately on black and Hispanic men, even. And, in a world where people see disparity of outcomes as proof of racism, then maybe it’s time to re-evaluate all gun control laws.

Granted, I’m not someone who ascribes to that personally. I think it can be evidence of racism, but it’s not always. At least not directly, anyway.

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DOJ Sues SIX More States for Withholding Voter Rolls — 14 States Now Targeted as Bondi and Dhillon Launch Aggressive Nationwide Crackdown

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced Tuesday that it has filed federal lawsuits against six additional states, Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, for refusing to hand over their statewide voter registration lists, as required under federal law.

Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who has taken a dramatically tougher posture on election transparency than her predecessors, called the states’ stonewalling a direct threat to clean elections.

“Accurate voter rolls are the cornerstone of fair and free elections, and too many states have fallen into a pattern of noncompliance with basic voter roll maintenance,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi.

“The Department of Justice will continue filing proactive election integrity litigation until states comply with basic election safeguards.”

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon, who has led the most aggressive election-integrity enforcement push in modern DOJ history, went further, accusing noncompliant states of actively undermining public trust.

“Our federal elections laws ensure every American citizen may vote freely and fairly,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“States that continue to defy federal voting laws interfere with our mission of ensuring that Americans have accurate voter lists as they go to the polls, that every vote counts equally, and that all voters have confidence in election results. At this Department of Justice, we will not stand for this open defiance of federal civil rights laws.”

This latest wave of lawsuits brings the total number of states now facing DOJ litigation to fourteen.

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Law firm representing alleged Epstein victims sends scathing letter over DOJ document release

When the House Oversight Committee released a trove of files and emails from the Epstein estate earlier this month, alleged victims of the convicted sex offender responded with “widespread panic” after learning the documents included dozens of unredacted victim names, prominent attorneys for Epstein victims told a federal judge this week.  

“I thought the government had promised to redact our names and identifying material. I don’t understand how this is happening again,” one alleged victim told attorneys Bradley Edwards and Brittany Henderson, with the Edwards Henderson law firm, according to a court filing Wednesday.  

“This type of negligence by the government to a survivor is just unable to comprehend. It is just impossible,” another alleged victim said, according to the filing. “I don’t understand how this is possible.” 

“I have been unable to mentally and emotionally function or sleep,” yet another alleged victim wrote, per the court filing. 

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DOJ Employee Arrested, Booked on Terrorism and Evidence Tampering Charges For Doxxing Federal Agent

A DOJ employee was arrested and booked on terrorism and evidence tampering charges for doxxing a federal agent during a raid in Brownsville, Texas.

Karen Olvera De Leon, an employee with the US Attorney’s Office in Brownsville, appeared on a live stream of a federal raid on June 9.

A male joined the livestream and issued a death threat against one of the federal agents conducting a raid.

Another viewer of the livestream, later identified as Karen Olvera De Leon, doxxed the federal agent and provided his identity to the man issuing the death threat.

KRGV reported:

An employee with the United States Attorney’s Office in Brownsville was arraigned in connection with an online death threat against federal agents, according to a news release from Cameron County District Attorney’s Office.

Karen Olvera De Leon was booked on Thursday on charges of terrorism and tampering with or fabricating evidence, Cameron County jail records show.

According to the news release, Olvera De Leon’s arrest is linked to a June 9 federal enforcement operation conducted in Cameron County that bystanders filmed and livestreamed on social media.

“A male subject joined the chat and made an online death threat towards one of the federal agents involved in the operation,” the news release stated. “A viewer of the live stream commented providing the identity of the federal agent to the person making the threat.”

Olvera De Leon was identified as the viewer who provided the federal agent’s identity.

Jail records show Olvera De Leon was released on a $20,000 bond.

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