Bid to strip citizenship from N.Y. terror plotter hits snag

The Trump administration has hit a setback in its effort to strip U.S. citizenship from a Pakistani-born truck driver who admitted 15 years ago to involvement in an Al Qaeda plot to cut the cables on New York City's iconic Brooklyn Bridge.

A federal judge in Illinois issued an order last week turning down a Justice Department motion for a ruling denaturalizing Iyman Faris, 49, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2003 on a charge of providing material support for terrorism.

The order from U.S. District Court Judge Staci Yandle did not definitively resolve the denaturalization lawsuit filed in March 2017 as part of a broader Trump administration drive to step up efforts to rescind the citizenship of those deemed to have received it under false pretenses, but the judge's decision denied the Justice Department its bid for a victory in the relatively early stages of the litigation.

Government lawyers said Faris was naturalized in 1999 based in part on acts of fraud or misrepresentation, including using someone else's passport to enter the country and lying by claiming that he crossed into the U.S. over the Canadian border to Buffalo when, in fact, he flew into New York City.

However, Yandle said the government had not established — yet — that those acts had any impact on the approval of his U.S. citizenship.

"American citizenship is precious, and the government carries a heavy burden of proof when attempting to divest a naturalized citizen of his or her citizenship," wrote Yandle, an appointee of President Barack Obama. "The Government must produce evidence justifying revocation that is 'clear, unequivocal, and convincing and not leave the issue in doubt. ...' However, there is nothing in the record currently before the Court that establishes as a matter of law what effect, if any, Faris' alleged misrepresentations had on the decision to grant him citizenship."

'The Government's arguments fall short of meeting its burden of clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence," the judge added in her five-page order, issued last Wednesday.

The case is now expected to proceed to a fact-finding stage and, possibly, a trial.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the ruling, noting that the case is ongoing. However, a Justice official said the administration plans to press on with an initiative that has significantly boosted the number of denaturalization cases. In a budget document last year, the administration said it was planning for "exponential growth" in citizenship-stripping cases.

"The law is clear that the United States can pursue denaturalizations at any time if evidence indicates that an individual unlawfully secured the ultimate immigration benefit of naturalization," the official said.

A lawyer for Faris, Thomas Durkin, welcomed Yandle's decision.

"We’re very pleased with the judge’s ruling," he said. "We believe she was correct that this is a remedy that is rarely ever granted. Anyone is entitled to their day in court and we look very forward to challenging the government’s evidence. ... We think the discovery will get very interesting."

Durkin said the effort to denaturalize Faris is a breach of promises made to him at the time of his guilty plea in 2003 — a plea he unsuccessfully sought to withdraw at the last minute.

"We think it's a mean-spirited attempt at further punishment and violates his original plea agreement with the government," the attorney said.

Faris is due for release in December 2020, according to information on the Bureau of Prisons' website.

Defenders of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh are accusing his critics of distorting his views on whether a sitting president can be indicted, but they may be overlooking another key clue about his take on what's likely to be a contentious issue at Kavanaugh's Senate confirmation hearing.

Kavanaugh's allies note that the 2009 Minnesota Law Review article he wrote addressing such subjects advocates for a congressional statute that would exempt the president from civil suits while in office, as well as immunizing him from criminal investigation and prosecution. He does use some pretty strong language about the prospect of a criminal trial of a sitting president, saying it would "cripple the federal government"—an assessment that one could imagine leading a Supreme Court justice to step in to avert such a prospect.

However, Kavanaugh's supporters observe that by backing a law to provide such immunity, he was implicitly accepting that it could not be found in the Constitution or existing law. Perhaps so, but it turns out Kavanaugh was asked directly about his view on the subject two decades ago and signaled his belief that a presidential indictment was beyond the pale.

During a 1998 Georgetown Law School conference on what would turn out to be the dim prospects of renewing the independent counsel law, moderator Mark Tuohey (who hired Kavanaugh onto the staff of independent counsel Ken Starr) put a question to the panel:

"How many of you believe, as a matter of law, that a sitting president cannot be indicted during the term of office?" Tuohey asked.

Kavanaugh's hand went up, as did more than half of the experts on the panel, including some with liberal political outlooks.

Kavanaugh's stance—or his stance at that time— is not an unusual or outlandish one. In fact, it's the official position of the Justice Department, formally articulated in a 1973 opinion under President Richard Nixon and reaffirmed in 2000 under President Bill Clinton. But it could be that there's less nuance to Kavanaugh's view than his supporters are suggesting.

Earlier in the panel discussion, helpfully preserved for eternity by C-SPAN, Kavanaugh refers to the issue as "a question that has been a lurking constitutional issue for a long time which at some point here should be resolved so we can determine whether the Congress or an independent counsel should investigate the president when his conduct is at issue."

"I tend to think it has to be the Congress," Kavanaugh added, presaging the views he would offer in more detail in his law review article a decade or so later. Democrats are expected to press Kavanaugh hard on the topic at his confirmation hearings, arguing that Trump picked him as a kind of insurance policy against potential negative developments in special counsel Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia probe.

Some scholars are of the view that a president could be indicted while in office, but could not be tried until he vacated the office, whether by impeachment, resignation or because his term expired. But the most recent Justice Department opinion, which is likely binding on Mueller's office, says that even a sealed indictment of the president would be impermissible.

Details emerge on Justice Department meeting with reporters on Manafort

Lawyers for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort are crying foul over a meeting Justice Department prosecutors held with four Associated Press reporters last year as news organizations and the FBI bore down on the longtime lobbyist and political consultant.

Manafort’s defense has argued for months that the off-the-record session on April 11, 2017, was a potential conduit for improper leaks to the press about the probe that led to two criminal cases against the former Trump campaign chief.

Now, Manafort’s attorneys have fresh evidence they say bolsters their claims: two memos written by FBI agents who attended the meeting and documented their version of what transpired.

Manafort’s legal team paints the evidence as confirmation that journalists were given inside information about the investigation in violation of Justice Department policies and, perhaps, legal prohibitions on disclosure of grand jury secrets.

“The meeting raises serious concerns about whether a violation of grand jury secrecy occurred,” Manafort's lawyers wrote in a filing Friday with U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis, who’s set to oversee an upcoming trial of Manafort on bank and tax fraud charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. “Now, based on the FBI’s own notes of the meeting, it is beyond question that a hearing is warranted.”

One of the FBI memos indicates that the AP did get some information at the meeting. At the conclusion of the session, reporters got a vague assurance that they “appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings,” one memo says. The same memo says the meeting was “arranged” by Andrew Weissmann, then the chief of the fraud section of Justice’s Criminal Division and now the top prosecutor on the Manafort case.

Weissmann responded to an AP query about Cyprus’ cooperation in the probe by urging the reporters to ask Cypriot officials whether they had given the U.S. all the information it sought about Manafort’s bank dealings there or just a portion of it, one of the memos says.

However, the memos indicate that the bulk of the information flow at the meeting went the other way, with the AP journalists providing the FBI with a bevy of facts the news organization uncovered during its inquiries into Manafort's work and finances. The meeting took place a day before the AP published a story saying that Manafort received at least some payments ascribed to him or his companies in a so-called black ledger of off-the-books spending by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Reporters do sometimes give government agencies a heads-up on forthcoming stories that could significantly affect an investigation, but the details in the FBI memos show that the AP provided numerous details to the officials about the news outlet's investigation. Many appear to have already been public, but some seem unreported, like a claim that Manafort sent an internal White House document to people he was working with in Ukraine.

One of memos also says the purpose of the meeting was for the FBI to “obtain documents from the AP reporters,” although it’s unclear any documents were shown or changed hands.

The memos also show that one of the AP journalists gave the FBI an unusual detail about a storage unit in Alexandria, Virginia that Manafort used to keep records of his worldwide business dealings. Both memos say the AP revealed a code number to access the unit, although one memo says the reporters declined to share the unit number of the locker or its street address. (The memos give two slightly different versions of the code, with one suggesting it was to access a locked parking lot at the storage facility.)

The FBI agent who wrote one of the memos, Jeff Pfeiffer, testified last week that the tip from the AP may have led to discovery of the locker, although he said there was a possibility he had heard about the storage site before the April 2017 meeting. The FBI later found a Manafort aide who led them to the spot where Manafort’s records were stored. After looking in with the aide, the FBI got a search warrant and seized many of the records.

One journalism expert said he was taken aback by the AP sharing the code with the FBI, but he cautioned that the FBI's accounts are only their perspective on the meeting.

“I’m surprised by the access code notation, that does seem rather unorthodox if the FBI memo is accurate in stating or implying that the AP reporters volunteered that information,” said University of Maryland journalism professor Mark Feldstein. “Generally speaking, skepticism is warranted when it comes to self-reporting by both the FBI and news outlets about their interactions. Neither side is supposed to share confidential information with the other, but in fact each often does — perhaps to seek corroboration, perhaps to get other confidential information back in exchange or perhaps to spur on the other side's investigation.”

An AP spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment on the FBI reports, but said last month that the organization’s goal in the meeting was to gather news.

“Associated Press journalists met with representatives from the Department of Justice in an effort to get information on stories they were reporting, as reporters do,” spokeswoman Lauren Easton said. “During the course of the meeting, they asked DOJ representatives about a storage locker belonging to Paul Manafort, without sharing its name or location.”

The AP has vehemently objected in recent years to government actions it said threatened its independence as a news organization.

In 2014, the AP denounced the FBI’s impersonation of an AP reporter in a bid to gain access to the computer of a suspect in a case involving cyberattacks. “The agency’s unacceptable tactics undermine AP and the vital distinction between the government and the press,” AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said at the time. A year earlier, the AP lodged a formal complaint after investigators obtained phone records for numerous AP reporters as part of a leak investigation.

Manafort’s lawyers noted in their plea for a hearing on the issue that the House Intelligence Committee asked for more information on the meeting earlier this year. The defense attorneys also seem eager to get a hearing at which they can seek to call Weissmann to the stand. When Pfeiffer briefly testified about the meeting last month, Weissmann did not take his usual position at the prosecution table, instead opting to sit elsewhere in the courtroom.

A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined to comment Sunday on the 2017 meeting or the new court filings.

The FBI documents made public Friday by Manafort’s defense are not the standard forms the bureau uses when interviewing witnesses in a case. Instead, they’re formal internal memos known as “electronic communications.” Neither memo indicates who requested that the details of the session be written up. One of the memos is dated about three weeks after the session, and the other is dated a full month after the meeting.

Feldstein said journalists and law enforcement often have a different perspective on their interactions.

“FBI records may suggest reporters are something akin to confidential informants,just as reporters’ notes will suggest it’s the law enforcement officials who are sources for the journalists. And it’s not necessarily deliberately misleading; often each side views the other that way as they are more focused on what new information they picked up than what information they provided,” the former CNN and ABC reporter said. “It’s all part of the way the news sausage is made in Washington, even if it looks unappetizing to those who don’t know how it works.”

Manafort judge emerges as skeptic of long mandatory minimum sentences

The judge overseeing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's looming trial on tax and bank fraud charges is known as a tough jurist, often snapping at attorneys for ignoring his directions and rebuking defendants he views as insufficiently contrite.

But, in recent years, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis has begun to direct his public ire at an unusual target for a Reagan-appointed judge: laws that impose lengthy mandatory minimum sentences judges have no authority to waive or reduce.

Ellis has complained directly to Congress about what he's called the "excessive" sentences required for some offenders. He's also publicly lamented the situation, as he did recently during a drug dealer's sentencing that took place in an Alexandria, Virginia courtroom packed with national media, high-powered prosecutors and others awaiting a key hearing in the case against Manafort.

"This situation presents me with something I have no discretion to change and the only thing I can do is express my displeasure," Ellis said last week as he sentenced Frederick Turner, 37, to a mandatory minimum of 40 years in prison for dealing methamphetamine. "I chafe a bit at that, but I follow the law. If I thought it was blatantly immoral, I'd have to resign. It's wrong, but not immoral."

Ellis told Turner's lawyer that any relief for his client lies with Congress. "I think you're knocking on the wrong door for a remedy. The remedy is across the river," the judge said.

However, in another case, the 78-year-old judge is going even further.

In April, confronted by a 28-year-old armed robbery convict facing a mandatory minimum 82-year sentence, Ellis' frustration grew so intense that he balked at imposing what he called a "very severe" sentence. Instead, the judge recruited a high-powered law firm to scour the law in search of some way to avoid imposing what is effectively a life sentence on Lamont Gaines, who was convicted of a string of robberies of 7-11 stores and a check-cashing business.

The judge appointed Daniel Suleiman, a former aide to Attorney General Eric Holder, to come up with any argument that might help Gaines win a more lenient sentence. Suleiman, a partner at Covington & Burling, set on one possibility: a Supreme Court ruling in April that invalidated a law very similar to the one requiring the lengthy sentence for Gaines.

In a brief filed last month, Suleiman argued that the April decision has "direct application" to Gaines' case and "would permit this Court not to sentence Gaines to 82 years."

Federal prosecutors rejected that argument last week, insisting that the 82-year sentence is still required in the case. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Alexander Blanchard and Rebeca Bellows filed a brief urging Ellis to consider Gaines "real-world conduct" and reminding the judge that the defendant "endangered...victims' lives and instilled them with the fear they would be physically harmed."

Ellis has yet to signal whether he'll buy into the new argument to cut down the potential sentence in Gaines' case.

Ellis' current preoccupation with federal sentencing laws is not that the mandatory minimums for specific crimes are too harsh, but that in cases involving multiple charges the result can be unjust, resulting in decades of extra incarceration for a defendant who chooses to go to trial rather than plead guilty.

While prosecutors often settle for a guilty plea to a single serious charge, carrying, say, a 10-year minimum sentence, the government will pursue several such charges when a defendant goes to trial. Federal law typically requires that sentences for crimes involving use of a gun run consecutively, a phenomenon often referred to as "stacking."

At the sentencing last week, Ellis called the result in Turner's case "excessive in the current circumstances." The judge also noted that prosecutors' decisions about how to frame the indictment led to the outcome. "You don't have to pursue every charge," he said.

However, Ellis didn't really fault the prosecutors. He noted that because Turner decided to go to trial, they couldn't be sure he'd be convicted on all the counts, so it was logical to include several. The jury found him guilty on all of them, with two involving possession of a firearm while dealing drugs effectively extending his sentence by 30 years. Critics say the prospect of such sentences gives prosecutors extraordinary leverage and can induce defendants to plead guilty even in instances where they're not.

In 2015, Ellis wrote to Congress about the "stacking" practice, calling it "grossly excessive and unjust." He said the law was supposed to cover felons who re-offended after leaving prison, but is being applied to those "who never had the chance to learn a lesson from the sentence imposed for the first conviction."

While efforts have been underway in Congress for years to ratchet back some of the mandatory sentences, the Trump administration's policy on the issue has been confusing.

White House officials, including President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, have shown interest in criminal justice reform proposals. However, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a letter to the Senate in February slamming a bipartisan bill that would limit the application of mandatory minimum sentences, including by reining in "stacking" of charges. Sessions said the measure was ill-advised at a time when the U.S. is struggling with an epidemic of opioid abuse and deaths.

"Passing this legislation to further reduce sentences for drug traffickers in the midst of the worst drug crisis in our nation's history would make it more difficult to achieve our goals and have potentially dire consequences," the attorney general wrote.

Back in 2015, though, Sessions said he believed changes to "stacking" were called for. "I think the stacking issue is a problem....I would support reform on the stacking provisions," the Alabama senator said at a Judiciary Committee session on a similar reform bill that never passed.

While Trump has campaigned publicly on a "law-and-order" message, earlier this month he commuted the sentence of Alice Johnson, a 63-year-old great-grandmother who had served 21 years of a life sentence for a non-violent drug conviction. Trump acted in her case after an in-person plea by reality TV star Kim Kardashian. White House officials have said he's considering other cases for possible clemency action.

Criminal justice reform advocates say Congress needs to step in and that laments like the one from Ellis last week underscore the urgency of the issue.

"The federal gun stacking law isn’t tough. It’s stupid. It’s irrational. That’s why even conservative judges like Judge Ellis are urging Congress to fix it," said Kevin Ring of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "It's a no-brainer."

Unsealed documents detail tactics in Clinton email probe

Court documents approved for release in the lead-up to a massive Justice Department watchdog report on the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email account offer fodder for both critics and defenders of the bureau's work.

The newly unsealed court filings, obtained by POLITICO, may well serve as a Rorschach test about the Clinton email probe. They demonstrate that the FBI's investigation did not rely solely on the voluntary cooperation of those involved, since agents and prosecutors used a combination of search warrants and other court orders to gain evidence relevant to the probe.

At the same time, the records do not contradict complaints by Republicans that the FBI did not use grand jury subpoenas to demand testimony from top Clinton aides, obtain search warrants to gain access to laptops Clintons' lawyers used to review her emails, or seek the personal phones and similar devices used by her top aides.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz sought unsealing of the records in May, in order to allow him to publish some details from the filings in his report released in June on alleged misconduct at the FBI and Justice Department prior to the 2016 presidential election.

Nearly 100 pages of filings from federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, show how investigators used a very broad search warrant in September 2015 to gain access to the email account of top Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan. The FBI told a federal magistrate judge that a July 2009 email forwarded to Sullivan's personal Gmail account showed that "top secret" information, including records related to sensitive satellite imagery, likely resided on Google's servers.

Investigators don't appear to have disclosed the subject matter of the message to the magistrate, but records made public by the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act show it pertained to a launch of ballistic missiles by North Korea.

Based largely on the forwarding of that message, the magistrate agreed to allow the FBI to obtain every message in Sullivan's Gmail account and review each that was sent to or from or copied to a dot-gov email address. In addition, the FBI was permitted to review any message in Sullivan's account that contained a "key word" from a list the FBI put together. It appears that list was not shared with the magistrate who issued the warrant. "The list of terms is subject to modification and is updated as necessary to reflect case developments," an FBI agent wrote in the court submission.

The search warrant for Sullivan's Gmail account appears to contain no date range or other limitation on the age of messages the FBI could access. The federal court filings also show the use of a search warrant to obtain greater access to a server Clinton's attorneys turned over. The FBI said Clinton's lawyers gave permission only to search the email domain she used, clintonemail.com, and not others on the server. A search warrant was also obtained for an email account set up by Paul Combetta, a technology aide who said he set up the account to store some of Clinton's messages while copying them from a laptop to a server at his firm, Platte River Networks.

Sullivan was not the only Clinton aide to have a personal email account accessed by investigators. The FBI also collected years of information on the email accounts used by longtime Clinton personal aide Huma Abedin and Clinton adviser Cheryl Mills. In February 2016, investigators received a magistrate order allowing access to address and timing details on more than four years' worth of emails Abedin sent and received on a Yahoo account, although they did not — at that time — gain access to the messages themselves.

To obtain the order, the FBI cited an October 2009 message about U.S. policy in Pakistan that Abedin forwarded from her official State account to her personal Yahoo one. Another version of the message sent the following day to national security adviser James Jones was classified as "Secret." Abedin told FBI interviewers she didn't know the message, unmarked in the version sent to her, was classified.

The unsealed court documents black out the names of two other individuals whose email metadata was obtained by court order as part of the FBI's Clinton email probe. However, their identities are fairly obvious from details in the filings.

One is Philippe Reines, who was a senior adviser to Clinton and later was formally named a deputy assistant secretary of state for strategic communications. The records show that on May 1, 2016, the FBI got a metadata order covering use of Reines' Gmail account for the four-plus years he was at State. The sole basis for the order appears to be a single email Reines sent on March 21, 2009. It's described as having been deemed by the CIA to be classified "Secret" and not for distribution to foreign governments.

The message in question appears to be one Reines sent to Clinton from his personal email account with a subject line referencing Afghanistan's president at the time, Hamid Karzai. "I think you know that my close friend Jeremy Bash is now Panetta's Chief of Staff at CIA," the one-page message to Clinton begins. The rest was withheld from public release under the Freedom of Information Act based on a legal provision exempting intelligence methods.

The other person whose name was deleted from the court documents appears to be a Japan-based venture capitalist and management consultant, Mitch Murata. He drew the attention of investigators for an email he sent to friends about the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactor after it was hit by a tidal wave in 2011. A friend of a friend sent it to Mills, who sent it to two State Department officials and to Clinton.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which runs America's spy satellites, determined that part of the message contained information considered "Secret" and not for foreign distribution. How that information would have ended up with Murata is unclear. In any event, the FBI used it to obtain two months of metadata from Murata's Gmail account.

A lawyer for Mills, Sullivan and Reines did not respond to a request for comment for this post. Murata could not be reached for comment.

Judge slams Kobach for flouting court rules

As a federal judge on Monday permanently blocked a Kansas law requiring voters to prove their citizenship before registering to vote, she also delivered a rebuke to the law’s main proponent: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson’s ruling against the law was widely expected, but she coupled it with pointed complaints that Kobach had failed to comply with court rules requiring disclosure of evidence to the law’s opponents in advance of the trial.

“The disclosure violations set forth above document a pattern and practice by Defendant of flaunting disclosure and discovery rules that are designed to prevent prejudice and surprise at trial,” Robinson wrote. “The Court ruled on each disclosure issue as it arose, but given the repeated instances involved, and the fact that Defendant resisted the Court’s rulings by continuing to try to introduce such evidence after exclusion, the Court finds that further sanctions are appropriate.”

“It is not clear to the Court whether Defendant repeatedly failed to meet his disclosure obligations intentionally or due to his unfamiliarity with the federal rules,” the judge added. “Therefore, the Court finds that an additional sanction is appropriate in the form of Continuing Legal Education. Defendant chose to represent his own office in this matter, and as such, had a duty to familiarize himself with the governing rules of procedure, and to ensure as the lead attorney on this case that his discovery obligations were satisfied despite his many duties as a busy public servant.”

Robinson, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ordered Kobach to do an additional six hours of continuing legal education in the 2018-19 year, above and beyond the ordinary state requirements.

Kobach is currently locked in a tight race challenging incumbent Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, who is running for reelection.

Spokespeople for Kobach did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new ruling.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the suit against Kobach, said the ruling demonstrated that the Kansas official’s actions were unconstitutional.

“This decision is a stinging rebuke of Kris Kobach, and the centerpiece of his voter suppression efforts: a show-me-your-papers law that has disenfranchised tens of thousands of Kansans,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “That law was based on a xenophobic lie that noncitizens are engaged in rampant election fraud. The court found that there is ‘no credible evidence‘ for that falsehood, and correctly ruled that Kobach’s documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement violates federal law and the U.S. Constitution.”

Kobach found himself in hot water on several prior occasions during the proof-of-citizenship case. Last June, a federal magistrate fined Kobach $1,000 for presenting misleading arguments in the suit. And in April, Robinson held him in contempt for failing to send standard registration postcards to voters covered by a court order she issued.

Robinson’s new ruling on the law itself found that Kansas had failed to demonstrate that voting by noncitizens was a significant problem and failed to show that the law was necessary to remedy whatever issues existed with such voting.

“The Court finds that the burden imposed on Kansans by this law outweighs the state’s interest in preventing noncitizen voter fraud, keeping accurate voter rolls, and maintaining confidence in elections,” she wrote.

Judge green-lights ‘kill list’ lawsuit

A lawsuit challenging the U.S. government's use of a so-called kill list to target suspected terrorists for drone attack overseas can go forward in part, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer rejected the government's bid to dismiss the entirety of the the case brought last year by former Al Jazeera Islamabad bureau chief Ahmad Zaidan and freelance journalist Bilal Kareem.

Both men said they were nearly killed in a series of U.S. drone strikes overseas, leading them to conclude that they have been placed on a list approved targets for deadly drone attacks carried out by American forces.

Collyer threw out the claims raised by Zaidan, a Pakistani and Syrian citizen, but said Kareem, who is U.S. citizen, can proceed with several of his claims that the so-called kill list process violates his constitutional rights.

"Due process is not merely an old and dusty procedural obligation required by Robert’s Rules. Instead, it is a living, breathing concept that protects U.S. persons from overreaching government action even, perhaps, on an occasion of war," wrote Collyer, an appointee of President George W. Bush. "As a U.S. citizen, he seeks to clarify his status and profession to Defendants and, thereby, assert his right to due process and a prior opportunity to be heard. His interest in avoiding the erroneous deprivation of his life is uniquely compelling."

Collyer rejected arguments from Justice Department attorneys that the case raised political questions ill-suited for resolution by the judicial branch and intruded on military judgments left to the executive.

"Mr. Kareem is not in U.S. custody and, if targeted because he is on the Kill List, may well have been identified by means other than his name, profession, place of birth, and the like. Now that he has made it to a U.S. court, however, his constitutional rights as a citizen must be recognized," the judge wrote in her 30-page opinion. "These are weighty matters of law and fact but constitutional questions are the bread and butter of the federal judiciary."

The lawsuit was brought by Reprieve, a London-based human rights group.

Jennifer Gibson, who leads Reprieve’s assassinations project and is co-counsel for the plaintiffs, said: “Today was a huge win, not just for Bilal Abdul Kareem, but for all those who believe we must protect that most cherished of American values — due process. For too long, the U.S. Government has sentenced people to death in secret, including American citizens, denying them their constitutionally-guaranteed right to walk through the courthouse doors and defend themselves. Today’s ruling reminds everyone that we cannot just ignore the Constitution in the name of national security.”

Courts rejected similar suits in recent years brought on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar Al-Aulaqi and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, both of whom were killed in U.S. drone attacks in Yemen. Judges rejected both those suits.

Collyer said those suits were different, in part because they appeared to challenge battlefield decisions, while Kareem's case alleges the relevant decisions were made in the U.S. "The persons alleged to have exercised this authority are alleged to have followed a known procedure that occurred in Washington or its environs," the judge wrote.

The journalists' suit named President Donald Trump as the lead defendant in the case, although the alleged targeting of the two men appears to have begun under President Barack Obama. Trump loosened some restrictions Obama placed on the target approval process, but has left much of it intact.

Collyer dismissed Trump as a defendant for technical reasons. The case will proceed against several agencies and their leaders, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department and the Justice Department.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the ruling.

Judge delays Manafort's first trial — again

A federal judge in Virginia has again delayed the trial scheduled for next month for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on charges of tax evasion, bank fraud and failing to report foreign bank accounts.

In a new order dated Monday and released Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis pushed back the scheduled start of Manafort's trial one day to July 25.

The move came at the request of prosecutors from special counsel Robert Mueller's office who said the earlier start date would conflict with a previously set hearing on another criminal case Manafort is facing in Washington.

Ellis originally set the Alexandria, Virginia trial for July 10 but recently postponed the trial by two weeks after he delayed a hearing on some key motions in the case.

The Washington case, set for trial Sept. 17, charges the longtime political consultant and lobbyist with money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent in connection with his Ukraine-related work.

Manafort has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.

Mystery judge challenges plan for special prosecutor in Arpaio appeal

A federal appeals court judge is challenging his or her colleagues’ decision to appoint a special prosecutor to defend a district court judge’s handling of a pardon President Donald Trump issued last year to former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio on a contempt-of-court charge.

An unidentified member of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals objected to a split appeals court panel’s decision in April to use the special prosecutor mechanism in the review of Phoenix-based U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton’s ruling, 9th Circuit Chief Judge Sidney Thomas wrote in an order Friday.

Bolton concluded that Trump’s pardon did not wipe out the guilty verdict in the case, even though the president’s move did spare Arpaio jail time or a fine. Arpaio appealed that decision, seeking to have the guilty verdict vacated. Typically, the Justice Department would argue against the defendant’s appeal in a criminal case, but it declined to do so.

Senior Judge Richard Tallman dissented from the 2-1 April order calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to argue Bolton had the authority to refuse to vacate the guilty verdict.

“I fear the majority’s decision will be viewed as judicial imprimatur of the special prosecutor to make inappropriate, unrelated, and undoubtedly political attacks on Presidential authority. We should not be wading into that thicket,” Tallman wrote.

Wallace Tashima and William Fletcher, the two judges who backed naming a special prosecutor to argue against Arpaio. said federal court rules permit such an appointment and that it is equivalent to the Supreme Court’s frequent practice of naming esteemed attorneys to argue legal positions parties in a case are refusing to advance.

It’s unclear whether Tallman is the judge who asked the full bench of the 9th Circuit to consider reversing the ruling. He recently took senior status. A staffer in his chambers said he was not in Friday. A 9th Circuit spokesman did not immediately respond to a query on the point.

In the new order Friday, Thomas called on the parties to file briefs on the appeals court’s authority to name an outside attorney to argue against Arpaio’s appeal. The chief judge also invited outside groups and individuals to file briefs on the question. He set a June 22 deadline for the submissions.

Tashima, Fletcher, Tallman, Thomas and Bolton were all appointed by President Bill Clinton.

Mueller team's special status could save Virginia Manafort case

An obscure special status obtained by several of special counsel Robert Mueller's attorneys could prevent a judge from ousting Mueller's lawyers from their role in the prosecution of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in federal court in Virginia.

Several court filings indicate that when lawyers from Mueller's office appeared in federal court in Alexandria earlier this year, they did so not only as representatives of Mueller's office but as special assistant United States attorneys (SAUSAs) attached to the United States attorney's office there.

That designation gives the Mueller prosecutors a kind of dual status that could complicate any attempt by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III to try to shift the case to federal prosecutors based in Alexandria — a possibility the judge mentioned on a couple of occasions during a contentious hearing earlier this month.

A spokesman for Mueller's office, Peter Carr, confirmed to POLITICO that some of the attorneys on the special counsel's team have the SAUSA status. Carr pointed to a local federal court rule that allows federal prosecutors to handle cases there when "appearing pursuant to the authority of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia."

One lawyer who has studied the use of SAUSAs said the granting of that status to lawyers on Mueller's team theoretically gives them the authority to pursue matters that aren't within the special counsel's mandate.

"As special assistant U.S. attorneys, they are not confined to the scope the special counsel is acting under," said Haley White, a North Carolina attorney who wrote a 2015 law review article on the SAUSA phenomenon. "They can potentially have the ability to go outside that scope. ... They have all the powers and abilities that just a regular U.S. attorney would have."

At least four of Mueller's prosecutors have submitted court pleadings indicating they have SAUSA status: Andrew Weissmann, Greg Andres, Kyle Freeny and Scott Meisler.

It's unclear at precisely what point Mueller's lawyers acquired their SAUSA status. If it was before the first indictment against Manafort in Virginia was obtained on Feb. 13, 2018, Manafort's defense could lose much of its argument that the indictment is tainted because it was sought by prosecutors who lacked proper authorization. However, if prosecutors didn't have that status when obtaining search warrants in Virginia and Washington last year, there could still be legal questions about evidence obtained through those searches.

Mueller's response to Manafort's motion to dismiss the Virginia case does mention some court decisions related to SAUSAs, but doesn't explicitly argue that the SAUSA status negates much of Manafort's argument about Mueller's team being unauthorized or exceeding its mandate.

With Mueller pursuing separate criminal cases against Manafort in Washington and Alexandria, it could be that Mueller's team wanted to keep their arguments in the two cases parallel as Manafort attacked the special counsel's authority in both courts. The SAUSA argument would not have been open to Mueller's team in Washington, because they don't have that status in D.C., where Justice Department attorneys routinely appear in federal court without any special appointment. (In any event, Mueller's team didn't need the argument in Washington, since the judge there rejected Manafort's challenge last week.)

In the Virginia case, Manafort is facing charges of bank fraud, tax evasion and failing to report foreign bank accounts. The Washington indictment charges Manafort with money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent for his work related to Ukraine.

The use of SAUSAs has provoked some controversy, particularly when U.S. attorneys rely on the mechanism to appoint state or local prosecutors to pursue cases in federal court that ran aground in state courts. U.S. attorneys' offices have also used the SAUSA status to augment their prosecution staff with unpaid volunteers who are often buffing their résumés with federal court prosecution experience.

However, some scholars have warned of dangers in the SAUSA phenomenon, with U.S. attorneys' offices blurring lines of responsibility with other entities and sometimes giving local prosecutors an option to avoid the urban jury pools of their local courts. U.S. attorneys seem to make uneven use of the SAUSA arrangement, with some offices rarely, if ever, relying on it and one office reporting more than 50 SAUSAs on its rolls.

Justice Department appeals order to disclose Clinton grand jury records

The Trump administration is again fighting for greater secrecy in a Clinton-focused investigation: this time, the independent counsel probe that explored President Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

A raft of court records from grand jury-related proceedings related to the investigation have remained secret for two decades, but last month a federal judge — acting on a request from CNN — ruled that the vast majority of the files should be made public.

But early Wednesday, the Justice Department appealed that decision to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The move is likely to delay the release of the request information for months or longer.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment, but court filings indicate that government lawyers made the broad assertion that the court lacks authority to release grand jury records for reasons of “extreme public interest” or any other reason not specifically detailed in federal court rules.

Chief U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell disagreed, ruling that the court had “inherent” power to disclose grand jury information for other reasons.

Justice Department attorneys did not object to unsealing some information already made public in a report Independent Counsel Ken Starr sent to Congress in 1998, but Howell said some matters had been so thoroughly aired in the report that there was little point in keeping the related records under wraps.

The D.C. Circuit is already considering an appeal in another case raising the same issue, so Howell agreed Wednesday to freeze her order until that case is resolved.

Most of the files pertain to claims of legal privilege that were brought to fight subpoenas issued at the request of Starr’s office. However, a lawyer for Clinton, David Kendall, asked Howell to release additional records involving litigation over alleged leaks by Starr’s personnel. The judge agreed.

Kendall was granted access to the records being considered for release but did not object to the disclosures. Several others mentioned in the files were also notified and did not object.

Kendall did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Justice Department’s decision to appeal the order to make the records public.

The new appeal is not the first time the Trump administration has asserted that the Clintons deserve greater privacy from the government.

When President Donald Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey a year ago, the White House said the firing was justified by a Justice Department memo arguing that Comey unfairly smeared former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by publicly denouncing her email practices during an unusual media appearance to announce the closing of an investigation into the issue.

In addition, when the Justice Department fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in March, officials cited what they said was his role in an improper disclosure of an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. McCabe has said he was authorized to discuss such matters with the media.

Manafort picks up new defense attorney

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has added a new defense attorney to his team.

Jay Nanavati, a former Justice Department tax-crimes prosecutor, filed a formal appearance Tuesday in a Virginia-based case in which special counsel Robert Mueller has charged Manafort with tax evasion, bank fraud and failing to report overseas bank accounts.

Nanavati is a founding partner of the Washington office of Kostelanetz & Fink, a New York-based law firm.

The hiring was not a total surprise. Last February, the two attorneys leading Manafort's defense since October, Kevin Downing and Thomas Zehnle, moved into the Washington office of Nanavati's firm but did not formally join the firm. POLITICO reported at the time that Nanavati could be joining the defense team.

Spokespeople for Nanavati and Manafort declined to comment on the development.

Manafort faces a July 10 trial on the indictment brought in Virginia on the tax-related charges. He also faces a scheduled Sept. 17 trial on the first case Mueller filed against him, charging him with money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent in connection with his work for Ukraine.

In the early stages of the Mueller investigation, Manafort was represented by attorney Reg Brown of WilmerHale, but the former Trump campaign chief switched attorneys in advance of his original October 2017 indictment.

Like Nanavati, Downing and Zehnle were both previously tax prosecutors with the Justice Department. Downing and Zehnle detached from the Miller & Chevalier law firm in order to take on Manafort's defense.

In March, Manafort added another lawyer: RIchard Westling of the Washington- and New York-based law firm Epstein, Becker & Green. Westling, who is primarily a health care law expert, argued a motion last month in Washington asking that the money laundering charges against Manafort be tossed out.