Tag: hit&run

As a senator, Jeff Sessions helped kill bipartisan legislation that would have made federal drug penalties less mindlessly draconian. As attorney general, he seems determined to make those penalties as disproportionate as possible, writes Jacob Sullum. Last week Sessions instructed federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious provable charges without regard to culpability or dangerousness.

That policy, announced in a memo last week, reverses a Justice Department initiative that sought to spare low-level, nonviolent drug offenders the five-, 10-, and 20-year minimum sentences that are supposedly aimed at ringleaders and kingpins. The shift, writes Sullum, signals a return to unfair, ineffective drug policies that have been rightly repudiated by politicians across the political spectrum.

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John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Philadelphia, called civil rights attorney Larry Krasner’s candidacy for district attorney “hilarious” in February. But last night Krasner won the Democratic nomination, earning 38 percent of the vote, almost twice as much as his next nearest opponent in a 7-way race that saw a turnout 50 percent higher than 2009, the last time the contest was without an incumbent.

“I hope he has a good night,” Krasner told reporters when asked if he had anything to say to McNesby after his primary victory.

Krasner’s victory (in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 7 to 1) and the enthusiasm illustrated in the increased turnout represent a dramatic shift from the kind of “tough on crime” and “law and order” politics that have historically played well in Philadelphia, from Frank Rizzo to Lynne Abraham, the four-term Philly district attorney dubbed the “deadliest DA.” for the frequency with which she sought the death penalty, and who left office in 2010.

Abraham’s zeal for the death penalty came despite Pennsylvania executing just three people since the re-instatement of capital punishment in 1976, none of whom were prosecuted while she was DA.

The waste of resources ($2 million a year to keep 200 inmates on death row, Krasner told C.J Ciamarella in an April interview) on this kind of symbolic tough on crime hard line was one of the points made during Krasner’s campaign.

Asked about whether the campaign was worried about the FOP working to defeat them in November, Mike Lee, the campaign chair, told Reason that “as citizens, we’re always concerned how the FOP spends its resources to influence politics, but you can rest assured that Larry’s record of standing up against the FOP for the last 30 years will continue through November and the future, were he to be elected.”

Krasner’s campaign hit on a range of criminal justice reform issues, including ending mass incarceration, discontinuing cash bail, reducing the use of asset forfeiture and preventing seized loot from funding the DA’s office.

Krasner worked as a public defender in Philadelphia for six years, including two at the federal public defender’s office, before opening a private practice focused on criminal defense and police brutality in 1993. His campaign was supported by a coalition of activists, grassroots groups, the ACLU, and other organizations, some of which he’s defended.

It was also backed by Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety, a super PAC funded by Georg Soros, which spent $1.45 million on the campaign, including a massive ad buy in late April that had some of the other candidates respond with negative ads portraying Krasner as unsympathetic to crime victims.

A number of Soros-backed reform-minded district attorney’s candidates have won elections in the last year or so, including the prosecutor who defeated Angela Corey in Florida, but Krasner dismissed questions about Soros’ influence on the election.

“The reality is George Soros wasn’t there 30 years ago when I came to the opinion that the death penalty was wrong, when I was representing protesters for exactly the same ideas that are part of my platform,” the Democratic nominee told reporters. “No disrespect to Mr. Soros, who I have never met, or to his organization, but the bottom line is I’ve held these views for a long time and I’ve shown throughout my career that I mean them,” Krasner said, calling himself “humbled, honored, and lucky” to be the Democratic nominee for DA.

“We’re going to move things directly towards justice, we’re going to move on more of a prevention model, ” Krasner told reporters when asked how his district attorney’s office might look if he wins the general electionn. “We’re going to remember that the district attorney’s office does not exist in isolation and that where there is unnecessary incarceration, it necessarily destroys schools, and it destroys the rehabilitation of people of the medical condition of addiction, and it destroys individual families and neighborhoods in ways that are also destructive of the economy and it goes on and it goes on.”

Krasner told reporters he believed many police officers agreed with his views.

“I think everybody realizes that the vast majority of police officers in Philadelphia are really good people who got into this job because they want to do justice,” Krasner said. “Like me, they hate bad police officers, and they need the backing of law enforcement to make sure that the good police officers are promoted, that the good officers have room to do their jobs, that the good police officers are safe, and that the bad police officers who endanger them and who cause there to be disrespect and a rift between police and the community are out of the way.”

Among his supporters, the smart justice campaign director for ACLU said the group reached out door-to-door to 11,000 members in the city, while Lev Hirschhorn of Reclaim Philly told Reason his grassroots group, formed by Bernie Sanders volunteers after the 2016 presidential primary, knocked on 60,000 doors and talked to 12,000 voters, including 25,000 in the last four days.

At the end of his campaign, Krasner responded to the description of him as a kind of “Bernie Sanders” of Philadelphia, telling The Intercept that he did feel like “the Bernie in the race.”

“Ain’t nobody perfect but neither am I, so I think it’s great. They stood for change from the outside,” Krasner told The Intercept. “When we look back, we have to admit that the old Vermont Jewish socialist septuagenarian would have won. Because he did represent an outside perspective that got channeled in the worst way towards Donald Trump.”

Hirschhorn said his group encouraged Krasner to run after he represented them when they were arrested while protesting. “We knew that this was the guy who should be the next district attorney, and we told him that, and then he ran.”

The Reclaim Philly organizer also told Reason he believed Donald Trump had an influence on the election.

“People saw that Jeff Sessions was attorney general and knew that we needed something different in Philadelphia,” he said. “So we voted for Larry Krasner.”

The current district attorney, Seth Williams, was indicted on federal bribery and corruption charges in March.

The Mormon Church is making the Boy Scouts of America look mentally woke, Sarah Rose Siskind writes:

The Boy Scouts is an institution more wholesome and more American than a Norman Rockwell painting of a puppy saluting an American flag. And when the Boy Scouts don’t give a damn about that puppy’s sexual orientation, we know we’re making progress as a society.

The Mormon Church, on the other hand, has taken a partisan stance, forgetting the prime objective of Boy Scouts. No, not being prepared, loyal, trustworthy or helpful. The duty of every scout is to wantonly light shit on fire. Gay or straight, transgender or cis, all boy scouts are united in their pyromania.

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For critics of the war on drugs and supporters of sentencing reform, the policy shift that Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced last Friday is definitely a change for the worse. But it’s not clear exactly how bad the consequences will be, partly because the impact of the policy he reversed, which was aimed at shielding low-level, nonviolent drug offenders from mandatory minimum sentences, is hard to pin down.

Sessions rescinded a 2013 memo in which Attorney General Eric Holder encouraged federal prosecutors to refrain from specifying the amount of drugs in cases involving nonviolent defendants without leadership roles, significant criminal histories, or significant ties to large-scale drug trafficking organizations. Since mandatory minimums are tied to drug weight, omitting that detail avoids triggering them.

Numbers that the Justice Department cited last year suggest Holder’s directive, which was the heart of his Smart on Crime Initiative, had a substantial effect on the percentage of federal drug offenders facing mandatory minimums. According to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), the share of federal drug offenders subject to mandatory minimums has fallen steadily since Holder’s memo, from 62 percent in fiscal year 2013 to less than 45 percent in fiscal year 2016. If the percentage had remained the same, more than 10,000 additional drug offenders would have fallen into that category during this period.

“The promise of Smart on Crime is showing impressive results,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates said last year, citing the USSC numbers through fiscal year 2015. “Federal prosecutors are consistently using their discretion to focus our federal resources on the most serious cases and to ensure that we reserve harsh mandatory minimum sentence for the most dangerous offenders.”

Counterintuitively, however, the defendants whom the USSC describes as “drug offenders receiving mandatory minimums” include drug offenders who did not actually receive mandatory minimums. Many of them were convicted under provisions that call for mandatory minimums yet escaped those penalties because they offered “substantial assistance” or qualified for the statutory “safety valve.”

Paul Hofer, a policy analyst at Federal Public and Community Defenders, took those other forms of relief into account in a 2013 estimate of the Holder memo’s possible impact. In fiscal year 2012, Hofer found, “6,780 defendants convicted under drug statutes carrying a mandatory minimum penalty appeared to meet the memo’s measurable criteria,” but “most of these already receive[d] some form of relief from the mandatory minimum penalties.” All but 868 of those defendants were already eligible for relief, and judges gave 467 of them sentences longer than the mandatory minimums, which suggests the new rule would not have helped them.

In addition to 401 qualifying defendants otherwise ineligible for relief who “had drug statutory minimums that were higher than the otherwise applicable guideline minimums,” Hofer counted 129 who “had statutory minimums lower than the guideline range and received the maximum downward departure or variance possible prior to the memo.” He said “these defendants seem likely to have received greater reductions if the limitation on judicial discretion were removed.” That’s a total of 530 defendants who “would likely have received a lower sentence if the Holder memo had been in effect in FY 2012.” Hofer’s analysis suggests that the vast majority of drug offenders who seem to have benefited from the 2013 memo—thousands each year—did not actually receive shorter sentences as a result of the policy change.

Then again, the benefits of Holder’s memo may extend beyond the federal defendants who avoided mandatory minimums. By encouraging prosecutors to focus their efforts on the most serious drug offenders, Holder may have indirectly reduced punishment by allowing some people to avoid federal charges altogether. That instruction may help explain why the total number of federal drug cases fell from 25,000 in fiscal year 2013 to 21,387 in fiscal year 2016, a 14 percent drop.

As Molly Gill, director of federal legislative affairs at Families Against Mandatory Minimums, points out, there is some evidence that federal prosecutors did try to focus on the most serious cases: During the same period, the share of defendants benefiting from the safety valve (which excludes high-level and violent offenders) fell from 24 percent to 13 percent. “With the directive not to slam low-level drug defendants,” says University of California at Irvine criminologist Mona Lynch, “there was likely some shift toward bringing more serious cases and simply passing on smaller, street-dealing type of cases.”

Sessions is now telling federal prosecutors to pursue the most serious provable charges against drug offenders (and other federal defendants) unless they believe an exception to that policy is warranted, in which case they have to seek permission from their supervisors and justify the decision in writing. Although Sessions argues that the new default rule will produce more uniform results, Lynch thinks it could have the opposite effect.

“The big question is whether he has the power to roll back time and change the prevailing legal culture that has tempered the ‘drug war’ mentality of the 1990s in many federal jurisdictions,” says Lynch, who studied the behavior of federal prosecutors for her 2016 book Hard Bargains: The Coercive Power of Drug Laws in Federal Court. “Even under a more stringent set of charging policies…U.S. attorneys have considerable discretion as to what cases to bring….This policy may only increase the divide between jurisdictions that collectively eschew aggressive federal drug prosecutions and those that dive back into the harsh practices of an older era. This would result in even more geographic disparity in federal justice outcomes, a longstanding concern of Congress and of the U.S. Sentencing Commission.”

Douglas Berman, a sentencing expert at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law, argues that the general message sent by Holder, and now by Sessions, is more important than the details of their instructions. “The tone/attitude of DOJ ultimately matters even more than the particulars of the memo,” Berman says. “Things got a lot more lenient during Obama’s second term in part because a signal was coming from everyone that federal prosecutors should be a lot more lenient, and the Holder memo was most essential piece of this story for prosecutors. Things are likely to get tougher during Trump’s first term, but how much tougher is going to depend a lot on whether others formally and informally jump on the toughness bandwagon.”

• The New York Times reported Tuesday evening that a memo from newly unemployed FBI Director James Comey claims President Trump asked him, in private, to drop an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. A statement from the White House disputed this:

  While the President has repeatedly expressed his view that General Flynn is a decent man who served and protected our country, the President has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn. The President has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the President and Mr. Comey.

• The classified info that Trump may have revealed to visiting Russian officials last week was allegedly provided by Israel. Russian President Vladimir Putin has volunteered to provide U.S. lawmakers with a record of the meeting.
• Northwestern University scientists say their 3D-printed ovaries are a success in mice.
• Chelsea Manning was released from military prison this morning, after serving seven years of the 35-year sentence she received for leaking government documents to WikiLeaks. Barack Obama commuted her sentence before leaving office in January.

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The claim that Donald Trump is guilty of obstructing justice suddenly looks more plausible in light of the report that the president asked then-FBI Director James Comey to drop his investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. But it still would be hard to make that charge stick in federal court (although it would be easier in impeachment proceedings, where Congress decides how much evidence is enough). The chief obstacle might be that Trump is too ignorant to be guilty.

The U.S. Code includes more than 20 provisions dealing with obstruction of justice. The most appropriate one in this context seems to be 18 USC 1505, which makes it a felony to “influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law,” either “corruptly, or by threats or force, or by any threatening letter or communication.” The provision covers “any pending proceeding…before any department or agency of the United States,” which according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit includes investigations. The appeals court rejected the argument that “§1505 applies only to adjudicatory or rule-making activities, and does not apply to wholly investigatory activity.”

On the face of it, Trump’s actions might fit the description of this offense. He and his spokesmen have offered shifting, often contradictory, and sometimes plainly phony explanations for his decision to fire Comey last week. But in his May 11 interview with NBC News, Trump admitted that the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the presidential election, which includes the possible involvement of the Trump campaign, was on his mind. “When I decided to just do it,” he said, “I said to myself…this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.” But at the same time, Trump insisted that he wants the investigation, which he slammed as a “taxpayer-funded charade” the day before he sacked Comey, to proceed.

Although Trump clearly has the constitutional authority to fire the FBI director, even legal actions can qualify as obstruction if done “corruptly,” i.e. “with an improper purpose, personally or by influencing another.” But proving that Trump specifically intended to impede the FBI investigation when he dismissed Comey would be tricky. In all likelihood, Trump had a mix of motivations, including (by his own admission) irritation at the investigation of ties between Russia and his associates but also his feeling that Comey was too easy on Hillary Clinton, that he was insufficiently enthusiastic about pursuing leakers, that he was disloyal in contradicting Trump’s claim that Barack Obama tapped his phones, and that he was rude to say he feels “mildly nauseous” about the possibility that his handling of the Clinton investigation helped Trump win.

“Obstruction of justice cases often come down to whether prosecutors can prove defendants’ mental state when they committed the act,” notes New York Times reporter Charlie Savage in a legal explainer he updated yesterday in light of the latest revelation. “It is not enough to show that a defendant knew the act would have a side consequence of impeding an investigation; achieving that obstruction has to have been the specific intention.”

The motive for Trump’s alleged intercession on behalf of Flynn, one of the associates whose ties to Russia are a matter of interest to the FBI, seems much clearer. According to a description of notes by Comey that was shared with The New York Times and NBC News by two people who claim to have read them, Trump asked Comey to stick around after a national security meeting on February 14, the day after Flynn was forced to resign because he had lied about his contacts with Russian officials. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump reportedly told Comey. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

The White House denies this account of Trump’s conversation with Comey. But if the contemporaneous memo described by the Times and NBC exists, it would be pretty strong evidence that the White House is (once again) lying. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wants to see the document, along with Comey’s written accounts of other conversations with the president. In a letter he sent to Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe yesterday, Chaffetz notes that such memos would “raise questions as to whether the president attempted to influence or impede the FBI’s investigation.”

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) went further, saying the reported conversation “certainly appears to meet the definition in the [obstruction] statute.” Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) was even surer. “Asking FBI to drop an investigation is obstruction of justice,” Deutch tweeted yesterday. “Obstruction of justice is an impeachable offense.”

It’s not clear whether McCabe, who last week told the Senate Intelligence Committee “there has been no effort to impede our investigation to date,” knew about the alleged conversation regarding Flynn. But even assuming the account is true, proving that Trump acted with the requisite criminal intent might be difficult, especially since it is entirely plausible, given what we know about the president’s ignorance of how the federal government works, that he did not realize his attempt to help Flynn was improper. If so, it is hard to see how he could have acted “corruptly,” as the statute’s mens rea element requires. The problem here is similar to the challenge of characterizing Trump’s myriad misstatements. Is it a lie if he thinks it’s true? Is it a crime if he does not realize he’s breaking the law?

“I do not believe that our president sufficiently understands the nature of the office that he holds, the nature of the legal constraints that are supposed to bind him, perhaps even the nature of normal human interactions, to be guilty of obstruction of justice in the Nixonian or even Clintonian sense of the phrase,” writes New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He has a point. Someone who understood that firing Comey could be construed as obstruction of justice would not have broadcast his irritation with the Russia investigation the day before or so casually admitted afterward that it was a factor in his displeasure with Comey. Someone who understood that asking the director of the FBI to lay off Flynn could be construed as obstruction of justice never would have asked.

“It is a child who asks the head of the FBI why the rules cannot be suspended for his friend and ally,” Douthat says, and a child “cannot really commit ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ in any usual meaning of the term.” But that determination is ultimately up to Congress, which needn’t worry about the legal niceties that can make a crucial difference in criminal court. Obstruction of justice figured prominently in the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. At that point (which seems quite distant for Trump right now), obstruction is whatever 67 senators say it is.

In Florida, a Miami-Dade County Parks and Recreation employee ran over three people lying on the beach at Crandon Park with his county truck. A county spokesman described the incident as “unfortunate” but said the driver was only trying to let people know the park was going to close soon.

Fired FBI head James Comey may have notes showing that President Donald Trump asked him to drop an investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

The New York Times is the source of this latest potential bombshell, but to be very clear, the newspaper doesn’t have a copy of this memo. One of Comey’s former associates apparently read the contents of the memo to a New York Times reporter. The White House denies the allegation. From the Times:

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey that Mr. Flynn had done nothing wrong, according to the memo.

Mr. Comey did not say anything to Mr. Trump about curtailing the investigation, only replying: “I agree he is a good guy.”

In a statement, the White House denied the version of events in the memo.

“While the president has repeatedly expressed his view that General Flynn is a decent man who served and protected our country, the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn,” the statement said. “The president has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the president and Mr. Comey.”

This has the potential to be a smoking gun, but we don’t know who is actually holding it yet. If the memo is real and is an accurate representation of the conversation between Comey and Trump then we will see calls to impeach grow even louder. There are already mutterings of “obstruction of justice” as a justification. Other media outlets are now verifying the contents of the memo, but an actual copy of it has not been released.

Those are a couple of big “ifs.” And in the other direction, if the memo is faked and the Times fell for it, or if there’s evidence that Comey misrepresented the conversation, then the metaphorical gun here is being held by one of the biggest media outlets that has been the target of much of the president’s anger. If the Times gets this wrong (and the media outlets rushing to catch up with the story as well), a screw-up this huge is going to damage the media’s reputation even further, likely for at least the remainder of Trump’s administration.

Given that there are sources at the FBI who are very furious about Comey’s abrupt firing, Times and other media outlets better have it together on this. If this remotely has the chance of actually taking Trump down, there’s no getting around the role that the media is taking on by disclosing this information so early. Indeed, according to this memo, Trump told Comey to consider arresting and imprisoning reporters for publishing classified information.

So stay tuned. It is May sweeps, after all. Are we setting up for a crazy and unexpected series finale, or a hard-core battle fought out through the next year?

Read the Times reporting here.

Update: Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tweets his concerns:

The allegations reportedly contained in the memo are incredibly serious. Mr. Comey also needs to testify in open session ASAP. https://t.co/OjZIvpRsxm

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 16, 2017

Via the Facebook page of Kendra Okonski comes a link to the 10-millionth study showing that adolescents need more sleep than regular humans, and that they are given to slow starts in the morning. One of the obvious implications of this is that kids would benefit if high school started later in the morning than it does for 99 percent of students. My own sophomore son gets up around 6:10 in order to show up at a school that gets things rolling at around 7:15 A.M.

In a new set of guidelines, the American Society of Sleep Medicine recommends that kids between the ages of 13 and 18 get eight to 10 hours of sleep a night. Which nobody does, thus compounding the hormone-challenged years with sleep deprivation. Hilarity—and crying jags, fights, depression, bad performance, etc.—ensues.

“Early school start times make it difficult for adolescents to get sufficient sleep on school nights, and chronic sleep loss among teens is associated with a host of problems, including poor school performance, increased depressive symptoms, and motor vehicle accidents,” guideline author and former AASM president Dr. Nathaniel Watson said in a news release from the group.

“Starting school at 8:30 a.m. or later gives teens a better opportunity to get the sufficient sleep they need to learn and function at their highest level,” he said.

More here.

For me, one of the surest signs of a state-enforced monopoly is that most schools, whether public or private, look the same and act the same. About 90 percent of K-12 students go to public schools and while charters, home schooling, and other forms of more personalized and individualized education are gaining steam and changing the status quo, the simple fact is that most kids go to schools that are not all that different than the ones I went to as a kid in the 1970s, or that my parents went to when they were growing up in the goddamned 1930s! School starts in late August or early September and lets out in late May or early June, with requisite vacations that don’t take into account parental schedules or the well-observed loss of learning that takes place every summer. And schools start ridiculously early in the mornings and then let out in the mid-afternoon, for reasons that make no sense at all. Don’t buy into the myth that we’re prisoners of a agricultural-economy schedule, by the way. Even if that were true (and it ain’t), those days have long since passed and even farmers these days don’t work by an ag calendar.

I know there are schools out there that have adjusted their schedules to better edumicate teenagers. It really shouldn’t be so rare, though, and I can’t imagine it would be if school choice were more robust than it is. The Libertarian Moment—increasing comfort with choice and personalization that is abetted through technological and cultural innovation—has remade and improved every aspect of our commercial, professional, and personal lives. We can produce and consume all sorts of cultural expression on schedules of our choosing, we can work from home or an office, we can live with whomever we want and eat an ever-increasing array of food. And yet when it comes to legally mandated school, our kids are still getting up in the dark at a time when they are not just battling darkness but biology. That should change, and yesterday.

Related video: Libertarian Bob Luddy isn’t waiting for the public system to change. He’s building a chain of low-cost, private schools right now.

So far, Jeff Sessions’ tenure as attorney general has been more or less a worst-case scenario. He’s escalating the war on drugs, ordering prosecutors to seek maximum penalties again. He’s scrapped a forensic science commission aimed at weeding pseudoscience out of the criminal justice system. He’s ordered a review of all consent degrees with police departments found to be committing civil rights violations by the Department of Justice (DOJ), one of the few things the Obama administration got right. After a federal judge approved a DOJ-negotiated consent decree over the Sessions-led department’s newfound objections, the attorney general warned it could lead to higher crime, echoing the kind of “Ferguson effect” concern pushed by the former FBI director James Comey even during the Obama administration.

Sessions, as one Twitter user rightly noted, seems like one member of the Trump administration with a coherent worldview and the competence to see it through. Unfortunately, that worldview is terrifying. Combined with the Trump administration’s fast and loose approach to traditional political-career boundaries in government, Sessions’ tenure could have far-reaching effects on the kinds of civil rights cases the DOJ pursues.

So it should be interesting to follow the DOJ’s investigation, opened last week, into the police shooting of Jordan Edwards, a 15-year-old Texas boy who was shot and killed by a police officer who had open fired on a car full of teenagers leaving a party. Police initially claimed the car was being driven “aggressively” but the police chief withdrew that statement after body camera footage showed the car driving away. The police officer, Roy Oliver, was fired and later charged with murder.

Dallas district attorney’s office, which is pursing the murder charges against Oliver, confirmed the DOJ investigation to Reuters, but the agency was not able to get a comment from the DOJ. The department hasn’t announced the investigation yet either.

Trump made his pro-police law and order sentiments a central part of his campaign, insisting police were treated unfairly in the U.S., and chose as his attorney general, Sessions, a politician who has expressed the same kind of deference and the desire to institutionalize it in a department which, however flawed, is charged in part with the responsibility to protect civil rights from government abuse. Whether or not Sessions and the Trump administration acknowledge it, it remains a duty.