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FNC: The Justice Department reportedly has garnered enough evidence to charge at least six Russian government operatives with hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers during the 2016 presidential election.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that federal prosecutors could bring charges early next year. The Journal reported that dozens of others may have also played a role in the cyberattack.
19,000 malicious links collected by Secureworks after Fancy Bear mistake.
4,700 Gmail users across the globe were targeted by the state hacking team.
Alongside Democrats, a handful of Republican targets were also identified.
The hackers who upended the US presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, US defence contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.
The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe — from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow.
“It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Centre in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.”
The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.
Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet.
The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered “unfounded.” But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.
“This is the Kremlin and the general staff,” said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data. “I have no doubts.”
New evidence
Secureworks’ list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria.
In the United States, which was Russia’s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country’s diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, US Army Gen. Wesley Clark.
The list skewed toward workers for defence contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton’s inner circle.
The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.
Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks.
“They got two years of email,” Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn’t know for sure who was responsible, “I always suspected some Russian connection.”
In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers.
The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington.
In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists.
Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.
“Everything on this list fits,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following.
Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin’s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican’s representative in Kiev; an adult education organisation in Kazakhstan.
“It’s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre in Washington.
He was also on the list.
“If you’re not Russia,” he said, “hacking these people is a colossal waste of time.”
Working 9 to 6 (Moscow Time)
Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren’t new. But raw data has been hard to come by.
Researchers have been documenting the group’s activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia’s intelligence services. The “Fancy Bear” nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia’s national symbol.
In the wake of the 2016 election, US intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin.
But the US intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.
That makes the Secureworks’ database a key piece of public evidence — all the more remarkable because it’s the result of a careless mistake.
Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear’s signature pieces of malicious software.
He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google’s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group’s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.
The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders.
The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET.
The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95% of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours — between 9 am and 6 pm Monday to Friday.
The AP’s findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.
Secureworks’ roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers’ emails in early April 2016 — exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in.
Fancy Bear have long been linked to the Russian security servicesiStock
And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin.
“We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,” said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. “I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.”
The myth if the 400-pound man
Even if only a small fraction of the 4,700 Gmail accounts targeted by Fancy Bear were hacked successfully, the data drawn from them could run into terabytes — easily rivalling the biggest known leaks in journalistic history.
For the hackers to have made sense of that mountain of messages — in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Arabic and many other languages — they would have needed a substantial team of analysts and translators. Merely identifying and sorting the targets took six AP reporters eight weeks of work.
The AP’s effort offers “a little feel for how much labour went into this,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
He said the investigation should put to rest any theories like the one then-candidate Donald Trump floated last year that the hacks could be the work of “someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
“The notion that it’s just a lone hacker somewhere is utterly absurd,” Rid said.
***
Axios: Marathon congressional hearings on Russian election interference and social media left execs from Facebook, Google and Twitter badly bruised and with a new view of just how mad Washington is about their handling of content aiming to divide Americans.
The big takeaway: Lawmakers’ rebukes went far beyond the companies’ responses to Russia’s interference. They also repeatedly revealed a discomfort with the size, power and limited accountability of the large web platforms.
Washington isn’t buying that Facebook, Google and Twitter aren’t media companies. Both Republicans and Democrats seemed baffled at times by an assumption that has been fundamental to Google, Facebook and Twitter’s growth: that they are neutral platforms for information, not judges of content. Multiple lawmakers questioned that argument: “That may well be a distinction that is lost on most of us, that you’re just a platform for other people to express their views as opposed to being a publisher in their own right of those views,” said Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
We now know what the Russian ads look like. Lawmakers released some of the Russian-bought ads, which were focused largely on divisive political issues like civil rights, immigration and religion. According to the metadata released, the ads targeted both Republicans and Democrats and were paid for in rubles. For example, one “Black Matters” ad targeted adults in Georgia, Maryland, Missouri and Virginia and received more than 200,000 impressions and more than 12,000 clicks. It cost 53,425 rubles ($915).
Still no backing for a regulatory fix. The only piece of concrete legislation tied to this issue is the Honest Ads Act, which would require disclosure for online political ads. While the companies all committed to improving transparency, and companies indicated that they could work with lawmakers on the bill, they did not endorse it.
Lawmakers felt slighted by the CEOs’ absence. “I wish your CEOs were here,” said Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, one of many lawmakers who voiced that sentiment. “They need to answer for this.”
The companies are putting significant resources toward vetting content. During nine hours of hearings, they repeatedly touted how much they were investing in both money and personnel to solve the election interference issue. Facebook is doubling the people working on safety and security issues to 20,000 by the end of 2018, for example.
Democrats were the harshest critics. Silicon Valley has long had a strong relationship with the liberal left, but that didn’t stop California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, as well as tech ally Sen. Ron Wyden, from lacing into the witnesses. Republicans, while critical of the companies, stopped short of conceding that social media manipulation was a deciding factor in Donald Trump’s win.
Congressional investigators are still learning the basics. One lawmaker asked Twitter’s general counsel to explain the difference between a bot and a troll. Several inquired about the definition of “impressions.” This highlights how steep the learning curve is for elected officials to fully grasp the nuances of what went wrong online in 2016.
Tech made a huge political miscalculation in not moving faster. Again and again, the companies were chided for how long it took them to deliver the goods to investigators. “I hear all your words,” said Sen. Mark Warner, “but I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were frankly blown off by the leaderships of your companies.”
What’s next? All of the companies indicated their investigations are ongoing, so the scale of the Russian disinformation campaign could turn out to be even bigger than we know now.
Imagine that….Europe may be more right on this issue than the United States is due to congress where decisions just cannot be made.
Going back to 2011, the Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.
In 2016, Pentagon leaders are still working to determine when, exactly, a cyber-attack against the U.S. would constitute an act of war, and when, exactly, the Defense Department would respond to a cyber-attack on civilian infrastructure, a senior Defense Department official told lawmakers on Wednesday.
A cyber strike as an act of war “has not been defined,” Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security Thomas Atkin told the House Armed Services Committee. “We’re still working toward that definition.” More here.
So, is Europe ahead of the United States on this issue?
EU governments to warn cyber attacks can be an act of war
European Union governments will formally state that cyber attacks can be an act of war in a show of strength to countries such as Russia and North Korea.
Diplomats and ambassadors in Brussels have drafted a document, obtained by The Telegraph, that represents an unprecedented deterrent aimed at countries using hackers and cyber espionage against EU members.
The document, set to be agreed by all 28 EU members states, including Britain, in the coming weeks warns that individual member states could respond “in grave instances” to cyber attacks with conventional weapons.
The British government has now said it was all but certain that North Korea was behind the “WannaCry” malware attack that hit NHS IT systems in May. Work on the EU paper began among fears that Russia would attempt to influence this year’s German elections and over hybrid warfare employed in Ukraine. More here.
This could be a pretext for what is a probable threat.
Banks fearing North Korea hacking prepare defenses: cyber experts
WASHINGTON/TORONTO (Reuters) – Global banks are preparing to defend themselves against North Korea potentially intensifying a years-long hacking spree by seeking to cripple financial networks as Pyongyang weighs the threat of U.S. military action over its nuclear program, cyber security experts said.
North Korean hackers have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from banks during the past three years, including a heist in 2016 at Bangladesh Bank that yielded $81 million, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer at cyber security firm CrowdStrike.
Alperovitch told the Reuters Cyber Security Summit on Tuesday that banks were concerned Pyongyang’s hackers may become more destructive by using the same type of “wiper” viruses they deployed across South Korea and at Sony Corp’s (6758.T) Hollywood studio.
The North Korean government has repeatedly denied accusations by security researchers and the U.S. government that it has carried out cyber attacks.
North Korean hackers could leverage knowledge about financial networks gathered during cyber heists to disrupt bank operations, according to Alperovitch, who said his firm has conducted “war game” exercises for several banks.
“The difference between theft and destruction is often a few keystrokes,” Alperovitch said.
Security teams at major U.S. banks have shared information on the North Korean cyber threat in recent months, said a second cyber security expert familiar with those talks.
“We know they attacked South Korean banks,” said the source, who added that fears have grown that banks in the United States will be targeted next.
Tensions between Washington and Pyongyang have been building after a series of nuclear and missile tests by North Korea and bellicose verbal exchanges between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
John Carlin, a former U.S. assistant attorney general, told the Reuters summit that other firms, among them defense contractors, retailers and social media companies, were also concerned.
“They are thinking ‘Are we going to see an escalation in attacks from North Korea?’” said Carlin, chair of Morrison & Foerster international law firm’s global risk and crisis management team.
Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it is unlikely that North Korea would launch destructive attacks on American banks because of concerns about U.S. retaliation.
Representatives of the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the top U.S. banking regulators, declined to comment. Both have ramped up cyber security oversight in recent years.
His indictment contains 12 counts including conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading FARA statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.
This development comes after months of news stories about Manafort’s alleged business dealings with foreign governments. These stories inspired curiosity in the minds of computer security researchers, reports Motherboard’s Louise Matsakis.
That curiosity caused a couple of security researchers to dig in and discover that Paul Manafort appeared to be fond of the James-Bond-inspired password “bond007”.
Their interest was piqued in February, after Manafort confirmed to Politico that hackers broke into Manafort’s daughter’s iPhone. As Business Insider previously reported, hackers then published roughly 300,000 of what they said were her text messages — about four years’ worth — to the “dark web.” The dark web is a secret version of the internet often used for criminal activity accessible only via a special browser.
Those messages apparently contained Manafort’s former email address, uncovered by a security researcher who goes by the online name Krypt3ia. Another researcher discovered that accounts that used this same email address were compromised in two big security hacks: the 2013 Adobe hack, and the 2012 Dropbox hack.
The password hints for the Adobe account were things like “secret agent” and “James Bond.” Those hints basically allowed the researchers to correctly guess that the password itself was “bond007.” The same Bond-inspired password worked for both the Adobe and Dropbox accounts. More here.
*** He is no longer a flight risk, the Feds have his passport. Hope they have ALL of them.
So, wait for it….there is more….
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort owns multiple passports and used a phone and email account registered under a fake name while traveling, according to a new court filing obtained by CNN on Tuesday.
Manafort, who surrendered to the FBI on Monday after being indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe into Russian election meddling, currently has three different U.S. passports and has submitted 10 applications for passports over the last several years, according to the filing.
Manafort used the fake name for his phone and email account while traveling to Mexico, China and Ecuador this year, the filing shows.
The new filing provided by CNN details Manafort’s extensive travels and use of multiple banks to house the millions of dollars gained through his work as a consultant for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine.
It also shows that Manafort reported vastly different figures regarding the value of his assets, from $19 million in April of 2012 to $136 million in May 2016. More here.
*** At center, from left to right: Paul Manafort, Yan Jiehe, Brad Perkins and Brad Zackson
Manafort had a long history of being a player….crony player asking for money.
In 2008, Manafort and Zackson made an unsuccessful run at the Drake Hotel site (now home to 432 Park Avenue), backed by equity investments from a Russian metals billionaire and a Ukranian natural gas mogul who are both now suspected of criminal activity. That deal triggered a federal investigation now being run by Mueller.
In the decade since the Drake plan fizzled, Zackson, a convicted felon who became a protégé of Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, has tried to position himself as a master developer whose best projects are yet to come. Among these, he said, is a plan to build an apartment complex in Queens’ Willets Point neighborhood that would dwarf Stuyvesant Town and a run at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown.
Much like Manafort, Zackson’s real estate career is dotted with controversy. Deals tend to include a revolving cast of foreign tycoons, assorted cronies and, in at least one instance, Trump himself. In comparison with the likes of Bayrock Group principals Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif, Zackson is a lesser-known character from Trump’s old stomping grounds of high-stakes property deal-making. But understanding him is key to understanding the bare-knuckled, truth-optional world Trump inhabited and continues to reflect in his approach to the presidency.
“On the surface when he speaks to you, it seems like a great story,” Kevin Maloney, founder of Property Markets Group, said of Zackson, whom he’s battling in court. ”When you dig down, it’s not true — or it’s only 10 percent true. That’s the truth of it. There’s nothing beyond his stories, and when he gets to the end of the story, he will inevitably ask you for money.” More here.
Bring your Podesta boys along for the ride to explain all this please. Did a handful of people sign waivers for this these transactions? Any lawyers out there than can explain this?
Sept. 12, 2014: US Treasury/
WASHINGTON – Due to continued Russian efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew today determined that persons operating within Russia’s defense and related materiel sector may now be subject to targeted sanctions under Executive Order 13662. In addition, the U.S. Department of the Treasury today extended targeted financial sanctions to Russia’s largest bank, deepened existing sanctions on Russian financial institutions, expanded sanctions in Russia’s energy sector, and increased the number of sanctioned Russian entities in the energy and defense sectors.
• Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew has made a determination that persons operating within Russia’s defense and related materiel sector may now be subject to targeted sanctions under Executive Order 13662. Following Secretary Lew’s determination, Treasury has imposed sanctions that prohibit transactions by U.S. persons or within the United States involving new debt of greater than 30 days maturity issued by Rostec, a major Russian conglomerate that operates in the defense and related materiel sector.
• Treasury has added Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank of Russia, to the existing prohibitions on U.S. persons providing equity or certain long-term debt financing. In addition, we have tightened the debt financing restrictions by reducing from 90 days to 30 days the maturity period for new debt issued by the six Russian banks subject to this restriction. These banks are Bank of Moscow, Gazprombank OAO, Russian Agricultural Bank, Sberbank, VEB, and VTB Bank.
• Treasury has designated and blocked the assets of five Russian state-owned defense technology firms – OAO ‘Dolgoprudny Research Production Enterprise,’ Mytishchinski Mashinostroitelny Zavod OAO, Kalinin Machine Plant JSC, Almaz-Antey GSKB, and JSC NIIP – for operating in the arms or related materiel sector in Russia.
• Treasury has also imposed sanctions that prohibit the exportation of goods, services (not including financial services), or technology in support of exploration or production for Russian deepwater, Arctic offshore, or shale projects that have the potential to produce oil, to five Russian energy companies – Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftegas, and Rosneft – involved in these types of projects. This measure complements restrictions administered by the Commerce Department and is similar to new EU measures published today. U.S. persons have until September 26, 2014 to wind down applicable transactions with these entities pursuant to a general license that Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued today.
Okay got that now? Great…now how about Hillary’s top friend, campaign chairman and money man, John Podesta and that funky Podesta Group?
Seems in March of 2016, those Podesta fellers signed a lobby agreement with Sberbank. But there is a set of US Treasury sanctions on that bank. Is that legal? Anyone? What is ironic here is that lobby agreement goes to both houses of congress. So anyone interested or has access knows this about those Podesta boys and about that Russian bank. (Notice the top of that document)
Okay…there are 3 names listed on the lobby document:
Anthony Podesta, Principal of The Podesta Group
Stephen Rademaker, Former National Security Deputy for the Senate Majority Leader, worked at Podesta Group and is now at Covington and Burling. Interestingly enough, his wife is Danielle Pletka who is a Vice President at the American Enterprise Institute.
David Adams, Former assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs and chief legislative adviser to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Meanwhile, this Rademaker fella wrote this statement on Russia being a threat in May of this year, 2017:
Principal, The Podesta Group “The Growing Russian Military Threat in Europe:
Assessing and Addressing the Challenge” Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
May 17, 2017
What?
Hold on, there is more:
Also of interest is the fact that this is not first time the Podestas have been involved with Sberbank. Back in 2009, Sberbank was intimately involved in the Russian deal to purchase Uranium One. Uranium One, a company whose holdings included 20 percent of the U.S.’ uranium ore, was owned by Frank Giustra, one of Bill Clinton’s closest friends and an integral part of the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s sale to the Russian state atomic agency, besides having been facilitated by the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, was aided by the Podesta Group, who represented Giustra’s company and lobbied to advance the transaction.
In 2012, that same Podesta Group was paid $40,000 to represent the Uranium One deal to three agencies of which the Senate has committee oversight. There were: U.S. SENATE, Natl Park Service (NPS), Natl Security Council (NSC), State – Dept of (DOS). Again, this same form went to both houses of Congress.
Clinton flew with Giustra in September 2005 on a private jet to Kazakhstan. There, the mining tycoon negotiated with that nation’s mining agency, Kazataprom, for rights to three mines. After Clinton appeared publicly in support of Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had just allegedly won an election with more than 90 percent of the vote, the mining deal was approved.
Months later, Giustra donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation with a pledge of $100 million more.
In 2007, UrAsia Energy, with its access to Kazakhstan’s lucrative mines, merged with South Africa’s Uranium One in a $3.5 billion deal.
Ah, yes the newly elected left coast California Senator, Kamala Harris has a brother in law, Tony West.
Remember him? He was part of the Obama/Holder inner circle and in charge of billions of dollars located at the Holder/Lynch Justice Department slush fund.
Tony by the way is the President of the PepisCo Foundation and he helped repeal DOMA, Defense of Marriage Act. You know those big cases where Justice sued Wall Street banks and won huge settlements? See this link here as a reminder.
Sidebar: There is also a victims fund which is also has very subjective payout activities. It is managed by the Department of Justice and is discretionary.
Sidebar: The real anger and the fraudulent part of the case is the 2 for 1 dollars if the corporations paid the money directly at the behest of the DoJ, meaning insurance and tax fraud and also means that it would not be subject to Congressional oversight. WHAT?
Okay now for the slush fund story at the Justice Department:
Forbes: Internal U.S. Department of Justice documents confirm the existence of a department “slush fund” under the Obama Administration and that DOJ officials “went out of their way” to exclude conservative groups, the head of the House Judiciary Committee told fellow lawmakers Tuesday.
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-VA, made the claim just ahead of a vote by the U.S. House of Representatives on a bill that would prohibit government officials, most notably the DOJ, from entering into or enforcing a settlement agreement on behalf of the United States that provides for a payment or a loan to any person or entity other than the United States, with some exceptions.
On Tuesday evening — after hours of discussion — the House voted mostly along party lines, 238-183 in favor of the bill. Of the “yes” votes, 231 were Republican and seven were Democrat. Democrats made up all 183 “no” votes. Eleven members did not vote.
U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-GA, who introduced the Sunshine for Regulations and Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act of 2017, or H.R. 469, in January, said during debate Tuesday that it is simply unacceptable to “shortchange victims.”
Similarly to Goodlatte’s legislation, the sunshine bill inhibits the ability of federal agencies to participate in back-door sue-and-settle arrangements with special interest groups, which circumvent established regulatory processes.
“It’s a problem we’ve seen grow,” Collins said of the settlement agreements, adding that it’s a “scenario that should concern everyone.”
But U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-FL, told fellow lawmakers both bills were “deficient in process and substance.”
Hastings criticized Republicans for putting forth such “pointless and partisan” legislation, given that Barack Obama is no longer in office and that other, more important issues demand the attention of federal lawmakers.
He also argued that a House Judiciary Committee investigation “yielded no credible evidence.”
But Goodlatte, who introduced H.R. 732, said new internal DOJ documents “tell a different story.”
Goodlatte has said the need for the legislation arose after an extended judiciary committee investigation found that the DOJ had engaged in a pattern or practice of systematically subverting Congress’ budget authority by using settlements from financial institutions to funnel money to what he describes as “left-wing activist groups.”
The House Judiciary Committee held two hearings, in February 2015 and May 2015, to question DOJ officials regarding the settlement practices.
Both the House Judiciary and Financial Services committees also sent multiple oversight letters, including two to the DOJ, seeking documents and answers.
The probe by the two committees revealed that, in approximately the last two years, the DOJ used mandatory donations to direct nearly $1 billion to such groups.
In January, the judiciary panel also sent a letter to the DOJ requesting it preserve all documents related to the department’s settlement practices.
“It is not every day in Congressional investigations that we find a smoking gun,” Goodlatte told fellow lawmakers Tuesday, pointing to the documents. “Here, we have it.”
The internal documents show that a deputy for former Associate Attorney General Tony West — who now serves as executive vice president of government affairs, general counsel and corporate secretary for PepsiCo Inc. — asked colleagues about settlements in negotiation.
“Can you explain to Tony the best way to allocate some money to an organization of our choosing?” the deputy wrote in a November 2013 email.
West’s team also went out of its way to exclude conservative groups, the internal DOJ documents show.
In a July 2014 email, a senior official explained that the DOJ reworded a draft mandatory donation provision to achieve the aim of “not allowing Citi to pick a statewide intermediary like the Pacific Legal Foundation [PLF],” which the official explained “does conservative property-rights free legal services.”
The documents also show outside groups lobbied the DOJ directly to obtain such incentives.
In particular, activist leaders met with a senior official from West’s office in March 2014 to “make the case” that, in settling mortgage-lending cases, the DOJ should make donations “mandatory in all future settlements.”
This follows a letter requesting that the DOJ offer banks “enhanced credit” for making donations.
A few months later, the department announced major bank settlements requiring mandatory donations to community groups and offering enhanced credit for these donations.
In an August 2014 email, recipient organizations then discuss how they can “thank” West for the money.
One organization, in the correspondence released, suggested a resolution and a formal plaque — and even threw out the idea of having a statue of West built so they could “bow down to this statue each day after we get our $200,000+.”
The documents are contrary to the DOJ’s sworn testimony.
Geoffrey Graber, former deputy associate attorney general and director of the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities, or RMBS, Working Group at the DOJ, had told Congress in February 2015 that the department “did not want to be in the business of picking and choosing which organization may or may not receive any funding under the agreement.”
Graber now serves as a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and is a member of the firm’s consumer protection practice group.
“This legislation, however, remains necessary because history shows that we cannot rely on the current DOJ policy remaining in place,” Goodlatte said.
His bill provides exceptions to allow payments or loans that: (1) remedy actual harm (including to the environment) caused by the party making the payment or loan, or (2) constitute a payment for services rendered in connection with the case or a payment that a court may order for restitution to victims in certain criminal cases or other persons in plea agreements.
Under H.R. 732, government officials or agents who violate this prohibition may be removed from office or required to forfeit to the government any money they hold for such purposes “to which they may otherwise be entitled.”
Also under the bill, federal agencies must report annually for seven years to the Congressional Budget Office about the parties, funding sources and distribution of funds for their settlement agreements permitted by the exceptions in this bill.
In addition, agency inspectors general must report annually to Congress about any of their agency’s settlement agreements that violate this bill.
The legislation previously passed the House Judiciary Committee by a vote of 17-8.
An identical bill — the Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act, or H.R. 5063 — passed the House in the last Congress by a vote of 241-174, but then stalled.
In June, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo to all DOJ components and 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices prohibiting them from entering into any third party settlements.
“When the federal government settles a case against a corporate wrongdoer, any settlement funds should go first to the victims and then to the American people — not to bankroll third-party special interest groups or the political friends of whoever is in power,” Sessions said. “Unfortunately, in recent years the Department of Justice has sometimes required or encouraged defendants to make these payments to third parties as a condition of settlement.
“With this directive, we are ending this practice and ensuring that settlement funds are only used to compensate victims, redress harm, and punish and deter unlawful conduct.”
Goodlatte praised Sessions for his decision.
“The practice is wrong no matter which party is in power,” he said at the time. “Attorney General Session’s integrity stands in stark contrast to the behavior of Obama Administration officials who used their position to funnel billions of settlement dollars to their political allies.”
He echoed that statement following his bill’s passage Tuesday.
“Regardless of which party is in the White House, subverting Congress to funnel money to outside organizations is unacceptable and unconstitutional,” Goodlatte said.
“I applaud the passage of this bipartisan bill that bans settlement payments to non-victim third parties permanently for future administrations. There should be no excuse or justification for this banned behavior, and I urge my colleagues in the Senate to defend Congress’s constitutional interests and support H.R. 732.”
Americans for Limited Government, a Fairfax, VA-based conservative nonprofit, commended Goodlatte for his release of the internal DOJ documents.
“The Justice Department emails released by Goodlatte show that only approved left-wing groups were eligible for the banks to make payouts to as part of their settlements, overtly excluding deemed to be too conservative,” President Rick Manning said in a statement. “What’s worse, is that the settlements often gave the banks double credit if they gave money to the left-wing groups rather than paying the government. Meaning, every $10 million to left-wing groups was counted the same as $20 million to the government.
Manning said Goodlatte was right to seek to defund such third-party settlements, calling them “nothing more than political payola” to radical, left-wing groups.
“Goodlatte’s disclosures show once again that there wasn’t single area of government that Obama did not corrupt into being a part of a left-wing funding machine,” he said. “Obama’s Justice Department effectively appropriated federal funds to these third-party groups without Congressional approval, violating Article I of the Constitution as this was a revenue stream to the government that was then illegally diverted to political ends.
“The actors who signed off on those political allocations should be subjected to the full weight of the law, including loss of pension and at the very least significant fines.”
At center, from left to right: Paul Manafort, Yan Jiehe, Brad Perkins and Brad Zackson
