Former US Attorney General Eric Holder is a huge fan of NBA hall of famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
So much so that Holder used Abdul-Jabbar’s birth name, Lew Alcindor, as an alias for his official Department of Justice (DOJ) email account, raising more questions about the email practices of top Obama administration officials, and about the ability of US government agencies to track down correspondence in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The Lew Alcindor revelation was made in a February 16 letter that DOJ sent to VICE News and Ryan Shapiro, a historian and doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in national security research.
“For your information,” the letter said, “e-mails in the enclosed documents which use the account name ‘Lew Alcindor’ denote e-mails to or from former Attorney General Holder.”
The letter was part of about 500 pages of heavily redacted emails and other documents given to VICE News and Shapiro in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed in late 2014. The documents show that Justice Department officials sent emails to Lew Alcindor regarding calls from lawmakers for a federal investigation into claims that CIA personnel spied on Senate staffers while the Senate was drafting a report about the CIA’s torture program. Holder’s name does not appear anywhere in his Lew Alcindor email account.
The responses from Lew Alcindor, notably one about Senator Ron Wyden’s demand that the DOJ “reopen” an investigation into the CIA after the agency’s own internal watchdog upheld the spying allegations, are virtually all redacted. DOJ declined to launch a criminal probe into the matter, claiming there was insufficient evidence. (Earlier this month, Wyden confronted CIA Director John Brennan about the spying incident and tried to get him to acknowledge it was improper and would not happen again.)
Other documents center around messages sent to the DOJ by David Grannis, the former staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, about authorizing Senate staffers to return to a secure facility leased by the CIA so they could finish fact-checking and writing the torture report. Grannis brings up the DOJ’s subsequent “odd” request, communicated to Grannis through the CIA, that Senate staffers “receive a security refresher beforehand, highlighting especially the computer system’s audit feature.”
“Can you cast any light on what DOJ personnel meant by this, or why they said it? Seems odd for DOJ to get involved in the security procedures between the Agency and the Committee, so I wanted to make sure we understood DOJ’s recommendation,” Grannis wrote, suggesting that the DOJ gave credence to CIA claims that Senate staffers inappropriately gained access to a coveted internal CIA document that sparked CIA spying.
There are vast swaths of redacting black ink throughout the emails — including DOJ’s response to Grannis.
Last March, a week after the New York Times revealed that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account to conduct official business while she was Secretary of State, Holder’s chief spokesman, Brian Fallon, disclosed that his boss had used three different aliases — all of which had a usdoj.gov domain — during his tenure as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
‘Will members of the public reviewing the records of Eric Holder’s tenure as attorney general understand emails purporting to be from Lew Alcindor are actually from him?’
Fallon made the disclosure less than a week before he announced that he would serve as lead press secretary for Clinton’s presidential campaign. Fallon identified two of the email accounts Holder previously used, but they weren’t the names of any known living person. Fallon declined to identify Holder’s third email alias other than to say that it was “based” on an athlete. (Before leaving the DOJ in April 2015, Holder had still been using the Lew Alcindor email address.)
Fallon, who exchanged many of the emails in the cache with Lew Alcindor, explained the rationale for the practice: to combat spam and to avoid being inundated with correspondence from the public.
A Justice Department spokesman told VICE News there was nothing improper or legally questionable about Holder using the identity of a living person for his email account. Nor was it in any way an attempt, he said, to thwart FOIA or the Federal Records Act, which requires government agencies to preserve federal records. DOJ officials who handle FOIA requests and congressional inquiries, the spokesman said, knew of Holder’s email aliases.
Yet DOJ and many other federal agencies, the State Department and FBI in particular, have been harshly criticized (including by VICE News) for poorly performing searches meant to capture emails from officials who use their true identities. Experts in FOIA law said Holder’s Lew Alcindor identity calls into question the ability of FOIA staff to locate all emails from an official who uses an alias.
Laura Sheehan, a spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), said the email alias practice appears to be fairly common among agency heads in large government departments.
“There is no prohibition against it, so long as they can be linked to the actual name,” Sheehan said.
A few years ago, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, came under fire from conservative lawmakers and open government advocates — and was accused of attempting to thwart open records requests and federal records retention laws — after it was revealed that she used the email alias Richard Windsor when conducting official business. An inspector general review into the practice concluded that EPA lacks “internal controls to ensure the identification and preservation of records when using private and alias email accounts for conducting government business.” The disclosure lead NARA to issue policy guidance to the heads of federal agencies on email management, which say:
Agencies must ensure that the name of an individual employee is linked with each account in order to comply with FOIA, discovery, and the requirement to transfer permanent email records… to NARA. In most cases, this requires the full name or readily identifiable nickname that is maintained on a distribution list.
In a Q&A with the Washington Post shortly thereafter, NARA’s chief records officer, Paul Wester Jr., said that while there is no prohibition against using email aliases, the practice makes it difficult to locate and turn over records in response to FOIA requests, and NARA does not condone it.
“We’ve been pretty clear with agencies it is not a good practice to follow, and we don’t recommend that they authorize the use of personal e-mail accounts or alias accounts to conduct their business,” Wester said. “There’s a higher probability the emails wouldn’t be documented properly with their broader record keeping systems.”
Anne Weismann, the executive director of good government group Campaign for Accountability, and an expert on FOIA, told VICE News that even though the DOJ has acknowledged that Holder used an email alias, and that DOJ’s FOIA staff is aware, “it still raises a question about whether the agency is properly documenting its work and preserving records under the Federal Records Act.”
“Will members of the public reviewing the records of Eric Holder’s tenure as [attorney general] understand emails purporting to be from ‘Lew Alcindor’ are actually from him?” Weismann said. “An investigation clearly is warranted.”
Several years ago, Weismann inquired with the DOJ about the number of email accounts associated with Holder and his deputies. The DOJ responded to her inquiry by saying Holder’s email address does not use his name.
“This protects his privacy and security and allows him to conduct official business efficiently via e-mail,” DOJ attorney Vanessa Brinkman wrote in a September 30, 2013 letter addressed to Weismann. (Brinkmann also signed the February 16 letter turned over to VICE News and Shapiro.)
Holder, who returned to his old law firm Covington after he left the DOJ, did not return a call for comment.
A DOJ spokesman said Attorney General Loretta Lynch uses an official DOJ email address to conduct government business, but “to help guard against security risks, the Attorney General does not use her given name in the handle of her email address.”
Douglas Cox, a law professor with the City University of New York School of Law whose research focuses on the intersection of information policy and national security, said he believes there is a “legitimate problem” with alias emails, “especially in the way agencies appear to be administering them.”
“Agencies are unnecessarily creating risks of undermining FOIA responses, subpoena responses, and discovery disclosures,” Cox said. “I also think alias emails are inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the federal record keeping laws.”
Cox said he understands why Holder would want to avoid being spammed and receiving unsolicited emails from the public, “but I don’t see what the justification would be for not configuring [[email protected]] so [Holder’s] actual name appears in internal emails.”
“Is there some reason why the identity of the sender has to be masked internally? And if so, then they must be tightly controlling who knows the alias, which in turn invites, if not guarantees, FOIA and record keeping problems,” Cox said. “When you consider the possibility, if not likelihood based on what we know, that alias emails are common practice among high-ranking officials across dozens of agencies, the risk of undermining FOIA searches and discovery requests within the various agencies approaches certainty.”
Meanwhile, Abdul-Jabbar, who legally changed his name in 1971, was unaware that Holder used his birth name for his official government email account. A spokeswoman for the former Los Angeles Lakers great declined to comment about the issue. Last year, Abdul-Jabbar interviewed Holder for a documentary he is producing on race. And in an interview with Politico around the same time, Holder said he idolized Abdul-Jabbar growing up and that the basketball legend had become a friend.
Category Archives: Legislation
The Core of the Hillary Server Controversy, Revealed
Once a year, those who handle classified information must attend a refresher class on dealing with classified material and the consequences of violating the rules governing classified material. My guess is Hillary and her circle of aides and protectors waived themselves from attending. Obama approved?
I guess there is a good reason it is called ‘Foggy Bottom’.
Spy agencies say Clinton emails closely matched top secret documents: sources
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. spy agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton’s home computer server contained some emails that should have been treated as “top secret” because their wording matched sections of some of the government’s most highly classified documents, four sources familiar with the agency reports said.
The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.
The State Department has already acknowledged that the emails contained top secret intelligence, though it says they were not marked that way. It has not previously been clear if the emails contained full classified documents or only some information from them.
The agencies did not find any top secret documents that passed through Clinton’s server in their full version, the sources from Congress and the government’s executive branch said.
However, the agency reports found some emails included passages that closely tracked or mirrored communications marked “top secret,” according to the sources, who all requested anonymity. In some cases, additional classification markings meant access was supposed to be limited to small groups of specially cleared officials.
Under the law and government rules, U.S. officials and contractors may not transmit any classified information – not only documents – outside secure, government-controlled channels. Such information should not be sent even through the government’s .gov email network.
The front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president and former secretary of state has insisted she broke no rules. Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, did not respond to a request for comment. Clinton campaign spokespeople did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Two sources said some of the top secret material was related to the CIA’s campaign of drone strikes against Islamist militants in the Middle East and South Asia.
That campaign has been widely reported by Reuters and other media outlets, but it officially is classified as a “Top Secret/Special Access Program” (SAP), meaning only a limited number of people whose names are on a special list are allowed to learn details about it.
One source said the reports identified some information in messages on Clinton’s server that came from human sources, such as confidential CIA informants, and some from technical systems, such as spy satellites or electronic eavesdropping.
The Clinton campaign criticized the State Department’s decision last month to withhold the 22 emails containing top secret information from the public, blaming it on “bureaucratic infighting” and “over-classification run amok.”
“As we have previously made clear, we are not going to speak to the content of the emails,” a State Department official said on Wednesday when asked about the intelligence agency reports.
Clinton’s use of a private server in her New York home for her government work is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department’s and spy community’s internal watchdogs and several Republican-controlled congressional committees.
Two of the sources told Reuters that one of the reports on the emails came from the CIA. Three sources said the other report came from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), which analyzes U.S. spy satellite intelligence.
A spokesman for NGA did not immediately respond to requests for comment. CIA spokespeople declined to comment.
The two spy agencies’ reports were sent to Congress in the past few weeks by the intelligence community inspector general, an official government watchdog for multiple spy agencies.
The inspector general’s office has confirmed that it requested the reports from two intelligence agencies, but didn’t identify them.
It was unclear what the congressional committees that received the classified reports, the House and Senate intelligence and foreign relations panels, will do with them. The contents cannot be discussed publicly. The committees requested intelligence reports in connection with their efforts to ensure that government secrets are appropriately protected.
Sidebar:
Everyone who handles Classified Material signs the SF-312 that outlines handling according to EO 13526 that requires an annual refresher course for originators of Classified Materials. Section 1 outlines handling. Section 4 is agreement to punishment if violation is discovered. Text of SF-312 below:
1. Intending to be legally bound, I hereby accept the obligations contained in this Agreement in consideration of my being granted access to classified information. As used in this Agreement, classified information is marked or unmarked classified information, including oral communications, that is classified under the standards of Executive Order 13526, or under any other Executive order or statute that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of information in the interest of national security; and unclassified information that meets the standards for classification and is in the process of a classification determination as provided in sections 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4(e) of Executive Order 13526, or under any other Executive order or statute that requires protection for such information in the interest of national security. I understand and accept that by being granted access to classified information, special confidence and trust shall be placed in me by the United States Government.
4. I have been advised that any breach of this Agreement may result in the termination of any security clearances I hold; removal from any position of special confidence and trust requiring such clearances; or termination of my employment or other relationships with the Departments or Agencies that granted my security clearance or clearances. In addition, I have been advised that any unauthorized disclosure of classified information by me may constitute a violation, or violations, of United States criminal laws, including the provisions of sections 641, 793, 794, 798, *952 and 1924, title 18, United States Code; *the provisions of section 783(b}, title 50, United States Code; and the provisions of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. I recognize that nothing in this Agreement constitutes a waiver by the United States of the right to prosecute me for any statutory violation.
Nightmare for Taxpayers According to an IRS Bulletin
IRS is warning taxpayers of a new surge in tax-related incidents
It is a nightmare for taxpayers according to an IRS bulletin there is a 400 percent surge in tax-related phishing and malware incidents.
SecurityAffairs: The IRS is warning taxpayers of newer forms of attacks aiming victims into disclosing credentials to third-party tax preparation service accounts.
“The Internal Revenue Service renewed a consumer alert for e-mail schemes after seeing an approximate 400 percent surge in phishing and malware incidents so far this tax season.” states the bulletin. “The emails are designed to trick taxpayers into thinking these are official communications from the IRS or others in the tax industry, including tax software companies. The phishing schemes can ask taxpayers about a wide range of topics. E-mails can seek information related to refunds, filing status, confirming personal information, ordering transcripts and verifying PIN information.”
The IRS Commissioner John Koskinen used the adjective “dramatic” to describe this surge in tax-related incidents inviting taxpayers to watch out for scammers.
“This dramatic jump in these scams comes at the busiest time of tax season,” said Koskinen. “Watch out for fraudsters slipping these official-looking emails into inboxes, trying to confuse people at the very time they work on their taxes. We urge people not to click on these emails.”
Threat actors are very interested in using the tax season as a lure, in a common attack scenario victims receive an email containing links to the domain used to serve malware. In other cases, the attackers used emails with attachments that include documents embedding malicious macros. Once the victims open the document, the macro drops a malware on the victim’s machine, including dreaded ransomware like CryptoLocker, TeslaCrypt and Locky.
These are the alarming statistics provided by the IRS:
- There were 1,026 incidents reported in January, up from 254 from a year earlier.
- The trend continued in February, nearly doubling the reported number of incidents compared to a year ago. In all, 363 incidents were reported from Feb. 1-16, compared to the 201 incidents reported for the entire month of February 2015.
- This year’s 1,389 incidents have already topped the 2014 yearly total of 1,361, and they are halfway to matching the 2015 total of 2,748.
Recently IRS services were abused by crooks to target taxpayers, in May 2015 the Internal Revenue Service was breached by hackers that “used an online service provided by the agency” to access data for more than 100,000 taxpayers. The IRS issued an official statement on the incident and specified that the compromised system was “Get Transcript.” The Transcript service could be used by taxpayers to get a transcript online or by mail to view their tax account transactions.
In August 2015, the Internal Revenue Service disclosed a new review of its system, revealing that 334,000 taxpayers (more than three times it initially estimated) may be affected by the hack it announced in May.
A couple of weeks ago the IRS detected roughly unauthorized attempts using 464,000 unique SSNs, and 101,000 attempts allowed crooks in generating PINs.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service confirmed that cyber criminals abused the Electronic Filing PIN application running on irs.gov that allows taxpayers to generate a PIN that they can use to file tax returns online.
Obama Placing Legacy Above Truth in Cuba
First of 8,000 stranded Cuban migrants cross into US
MEXICO CITY (AP)— The first of 8,000 Cuban migrants recently stranded in Central America have crossed the Mexican border into the United States.
Some 180 migrants flew from Costa Rica to El Salvador, and have been making their way to the U.S., with the first reaching Laredo, Texas, on Thursday night.
“I’m a Cuban who has just acquired the American Dream,” said Daniel Caballero, one of the first to cross into Laredo, according to a Facebook posting of the sponsoring non-profit group, Cubans in Liberty.
***
In Part from Panama City (AFP): The first flight left from Panama’s international airport. The foreign ministry said in a statement it would land in Juarez, a Mexican city on the US border. Other flights would follow this week.
It emphasized that the flights were a “limited” and “exceptional” measure.
They mirrored flights Costa Rica has been carrying out since January, for some 8,000 Cubans who had been stuck on its territory.
The Cubans aim to get to the United States where a Cold War-era law allows them easy entry and a fast-track to residency.
But their journey, to South America, up through Central America and then Mexico and the US border, was frustrated in November last year when Nicaragua — a Cuban ally — closed its borders to them, and Costa Rica dismantled a people-smuggling ring they had been relying on.
Costa Rica in December closed its own border to any more Cuban arrivals as it struggled to clear the migrants from its territory.
Cuban State Media: Obama Visit ‘Disproves Human Rights Violations’ by Communists
Cuba’s communist propaganda newspaper Granma has published an article claiming that President Barack Obama’s scheduled visit to Havana in March “disproves” decades of evidence that the Cuban government violates the human rights of its citizens, on a weekend in which Cuban state police arrested almost 200 dissidents for peaceful marches against communism.
Breitbart: In a column titled “Four Myths Obama’s Trip to Cuba Disproves,” the newspaper cites “Cuba violates human rights” as the top “myth” that President Obama is helping to eradicate by visiting the island. The article calls the fact of Cuba’s rampant human rights violations “the mantra of those who want to justify as a philanthropic crusade the politics of aggression begun in 1959 before the advance of a socialist Revolution in their own backyard.” The fact that Cuba violates international human rights law on a routine basis, the article continues, “permeated realpolitik previous to the December 17, 2014 announcement,” referring to the day President Obama announced a number of concessions to the Raúl Castro regime in exchange for, in Castro’s words, “nothing in return.”
Granma also claims that President Obama’s decision to endorse the legitimacy of the Castro regime with his presence dismantles the allegation that “the ultra-right in Miami, especially legislators of Cuban origin, had totally held hostage the United States’ politics towards Cuba.” Cuban state propaganda often insults ethnic Cuban voters in Miami as “ultra-right” extremists, using terms like “the Miami Mafia” in an attempt to alienate Republican-leaning voters in the region. Cuban-American voters in Miami have also been consistently mocked and derided in American left-wing media, particularly the cable news pundits associated with NBC.
While Granma is open to using President Obama’s visit to promote the lie that the Cuban government does not oppress its dissidents, it continues to condemn the United States for defending human rights internationally. In a separate column published Saturday, the propaganda outlet condemns President Obama for not using executive orders to lift trade bans on Cuba, accusing his inaction of “keeping alive politics of aggression.”
President Obama is expected to meet with dictator Raúl Castro and “other Cuban people” during his visit, though it remains unclear whether he will be present in meetings with Cuban civil society or pro-democracy activists.
Whether any of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents will be out of jail during President Obama’s visit remains to be seen. If this weekend is any indication, there is little hope that the leaders of dissident groups will be allowed to attend events involving the President. Various dissident groups, including the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and the Ladies in White, staged multiple events across the island this weekend. More than 170 dissidents were arrested, including dozens of Ladies in White arrested for attending Sunday Catholic Mass. An estimated 40 Ladies in White are still in custody after their prayer march in Havana.
The silent marches against the Castro regime this week were dedicated to Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a prisoner of conscience who died during a hunger strike in 2010, and the four men killed in 1996 when the Cuban government shot down a plane belonging to the pro-democracy group Brothers to the Rescue, which included one U.S. citizen.
Cuban dissidents have called President Obama’s decision to visit the island “an error” and warn that “these sorts of visits bring a lot of collateral damage” with them. They note that more than 250 pro-democracy activists were arrested in September during Pope Francis’s visit to Havana, including one man who was beaten and arrested in front of Pope Francis for saying the word “freedom” too loudly near the Pontiff. (The Pope denied having seen the event occurring before him.)
According to the NGO People in Need, President Obama’s efforts to warm up to the Castro regime have significantly deteriorated conditions for dissidents on the island. “There has been no substantial improvement in regard to human rights and individual freedoms on the island. … [The Cuban government] has adapted its repressive methods in order to make them invisible to the scrutinizing, judgmental eyes of the international community, but it has not reduced the level of pressure or control over the opposition,” the group said in a report in December.
Hearing for Nominee to Replace Scalia? Nah
LETTER: ‘this Committee will not hold hearings on any Supreme Court nominee’ until 1/20/17
Republicans on Judiciary Committee Slam Door on Any Obama Supreme Court Nominee
DailySignal: All Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee promised Tuesday to block any candidate nominated by President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
In an open letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the 11 Republican senators said they plan “to exercise our constitutional authority to withhold consent on any nominee to the Supreme Court submitted by this president.”
Under the leadership of Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the group effectively has barred any Obama nominee to succeed Scalia from advancing to the Senate floor through the regular process.
After Scalia’s unexpected death Feb. 13, McConnell, R-Ky., and other GOP leaders quickly declared the Senate should not confirm anyone to fill the seat until after a new president takes office in January.
With the letter Tuesday, the 11 committee Republicans rallied to that position, writing:
Because our decision is based on constitutional principle and born of a necessity to protect the will of the American people, this committee will not hold hearings on any Supreme Court nominee until after our next president is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017.
They said the current debate doesn’t present “a difficult or novel constitutional question.” As justification, they cited a statement made in 2005 by then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.:
“[The Constitution] says appointments shall be made with the advice and consent of the Senate. That is very different than saying every nominee receives a vote.”
Senate Democrats accuse Republican colleagues of a dereliction of their constitutional duty. Earlier Tuesday, Reid, now minority leader, called on Republicans to “do your job.”
He said: “Democrats [have] never stopped a Republican [Supreme Court] nominee from receiving a hearing and getting a vote on confirmation. Never.”
In their letter, the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee counter that there’s no modern historical precedent for the Senate to confirm a nominee during a year when the country casts ballots for the next president:
Not since 1932 has the Senate confirmed in a presidential election year a Supreme Court nominee to a vacancy arising in that year. And it is necessary to go even further back—to 1888—in order to find an election year nominee who was nominated and confirmed under divided government, as we have now.
Nine Democrats are on the Judiciary Committee, led by the ranking member, Rep. Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
Over the past 10 days, mostly while Congress was in recess, speculation mounted about a fracturing Republican conference when a few less conservative GOP senators said an Obama nominee should receive a committee hearing.
Hopes for that dimmed with the letter signed by Grassley and the 10 other Republican committee members: Orrin Hatch (Utah), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), John Cornyn (Texas), Mike Lee (Utah), Ted Cruz (Texas), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), David Vitter (La.), David Perdue (Ga.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.).
If Republicans ultimately are successful at blocking an Obama nominee, the Supreme Court would operate without a full bench for at least 332 days, more than 10 months.
The eight justices then would not be joined by a ninth until the Senate confirms the nominee of Obama’s successor, who takes office Jan. 20.