A Texas man, ranting on social media about the congressional response to the coronavirus outbreak, has been charged with making death threats to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, federal prosecutors announced on Thursday. Gavin Weslee Blake Perry, 27, of Wichita Falls, Texas, wrote on his personal Facebook page on Monday that Ms. Pelosi was […]
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A New Jersey man was charged with making a terroristic threat after he intentionally coughed near a supermarket employee and told her he had the coronavirus, the authorities said on the same day that the Justice Department warned of similar threats to spread the virus. The man, George Falcone, 50, of Freehold, N.J., was shopping […]
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WASHINGTON — The British government must withhold key evidence from the United States for the trial of two Islamic State detainees because the Trump administration has not provided assurances that the men will not be executed, the British Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday. The detainees were half of a cell of four ISIS Britons who […]
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WASHINGTON — Invoking the coronavirus crisis, the Justice Department has asked Congress to let more federal inmates serve their time at home and to steer scarce masks and testing kits to federal prisons ahead of other agencies, according to draft legislation submitted last week to congressional leaders. The department has also asked Congress to relax […]
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A man who was arrested in 2017 after a thwarted attempt to blow up a bank in downtown Oklahoma City — a plot that echoed the deadly bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building there in 1995 — was sentenced Monday to 25 years in prison, the authorities said. The man, Jerry Drake Varnell, […]
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WASHINGTON — The federal government on Monday began directing its employees to work from home, after a week of confusion as some workers were told to report to the office even as public health officials implored employers to keep people at home. Facing mounting criticism and anxiety from federal employees, the Trump administration on Sunday […]
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WASHINGTON — The Justice Department moved on Monday to drop charges against two Russian shell companies accused of financing schemes to interfere in the 2016 election, saying that they were exploiting the case to gain access to sensitive information that Russia could weaponize. The companies, Concord Management and Concord Consulting, were charged in 2018 in […]
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WASHINGTON — The entire federal appeals court in Washington said on Friday that it would take up two cases that raised the question of whether and when Congress may sue to resolve a dispute with the president, setting up a double-barreled test for establishing when the judicial branch can resolve disputes over separation of powers. […]
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WASHINGTON — The Justice Department this week hosted training for its lawyers on religious liberty laws as part of Attorney General William P. Barr’s push to prioritize religious freedom cases, but the workshops prompted concern among some career lawyers that they were being educated on ways to blunt civil rights protections for gay and transgender […]
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WASHINGTON — The House passed a bipartisan adjustment of key surveillance laws on Wednesday, cobbling together an unusual coalition of lawmakers to approve some new privacy protections for Americans and extend three expiring F.B.I. tools for investigating terrorism and espionage. The vote appeared to be a breakthrough after weeks of negotiations in both the House […]
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WASHINGTON — The House has a right to see secret grand-jury evidence gathered in the Russia investigation, an appeals court ruled on Tuesday in a victory for Congress’s power to gather information for an impeachment inquiry. In a 2-to-1 decision, a panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit […]
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WASHINGTON — There were more than 70 friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the big abortion case argued last week at the Supreme Court. But only one such friend was granted time to argue alongside the parties: the Office of the Solicitor General, the elite unit of the Justice Department that represents the federal government in the […]
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WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr testified before Congress last spring that “it’s time for everybody to move on” from the special counsel investigation into whether Trump associates conspired with Russia’s 2016 election interference. Nearly a year later, however, it is clear that Mr. Barr has not moved on from the investigation at all. […]
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WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr’s handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying that Mr. Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account of its findings and lacked credibility on the topic. Judge Reggie B. Walton said Mr. Barr could not […]
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A United States immigration judge has ordered that a Tennessee man who served as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany during World War II be deported to the country, where he is a citizen and has continued to receive a pension based on his employment, “including his wartime service.” The Justice Department […]
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Legislation announced on Thursday aimed at curbing the spread of online child sexual abuse imagery would take the extraordinary step of removing legal protections for tech companies that fail to police the illegal content. A separate, international initiative that was also announced takes a softer approach, getting the industry to voluntarily embrace standards for combating […]
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The morning after the Senate trial of President Trump was one of the rare occasions over my yearlong tenure as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee when I was able to join my family for breakfast. My duties for the impeachment and its trial had made me particularly scarce. My teenage daughter wasted no […]
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AMHERST, Mass. — The process of democratic backsliding in the United States is proceeding in a recognizable way. Now that the Republican Party has proved that it is unwilling to curb the president’s worst impulses, Donald Trump is turning to the next step in his quest for more power for the executive branch, the opposite […]
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WASHINGTON — A secretive federal court on Wednesday effectively barred F.B.I. officials involved in the wiretapping of a former Trump campaign adviser from appearing before it in other cases at least temporarily, the latest fallout from an internal inquiry into the bureau’s surveillance of the aide. A 19-page opinion and order by James E. Boasberg, […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump met on Tuesday at the White House with Attorney General William P. Barr and key Republican lawmakers in an effort to resolve a fight in Congress over domestic spying powers before three F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation tools expire next week. The meeting came as a range of surveillance critics on Capitol Hill […]
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Can a member of the executive branch simply defy a congressional subpoena for testimony? That question was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On Friday, the three-judge panel came to a confounding — and for many people, deeply troubling — decision: The court had no jurisdiction to consider the […]
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WASHINGTON — House Democrats are scrutinizing whether President Trump has improperly interfered at the Justice Department for political reasons, a prominent committee chairman said Friday, requesting documents and interviews with more than a dozen U.S. attorneys related to the cases of three Trump associates and a review of the F.B.I.’s Russia inquiry. The requests are […]
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Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Play | RadioPublic | Stitcher Less than a month after the end of his impeachment trial, are we witnessing an emboldened President Trump? This week on “The Argument,” the columnists discuss Trump’s cascade of norm-breaking following his acquittal by […]
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