Eric Holder Jr.

By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
WASHINGTON — The newly minted Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. addressed Justice Department employees Tuesday morning and vowed to fight terrorism and improve the integrity of the department.
“We must restore the credibility of this Department, which has been so badly shaken by allegations of improper political interference,” he said, according to a prepared statement released by the Justice Department. “Law enforcement decisions and personnel actions must, and they will, be untainted by partisanship.”
In the area of terrorism, he said:
“We must strengthen the activities of the federal government as we protect the people – the American people – from terrorism. Nothing we will do will be more important. We must use every available tactic to defeat our adversaries – and we must do so within the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. There is not a tension between the ideals that formed this nation and that which we must do to keep it safe.
The following is the full text of his speech:

Good morning.

Roger Clemens

Baseball star Roger Clemens could often be trusted on the mound to do great things. But the latest DNA tests may renew a big question: Can he be trusted to tell the truth?

By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
WASHINGTON – Scientific tests have linked Roger Clemens’s DNA to blood in syringes that a personal trainer says he used to inject the former star pitcher with performance-enhancing drugs, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.
The DNA results, which are preliminary and subject to verification tests, could prove critical if prosecutors seek an indictment of Clemens on charges that he lied about the use of steroids, according to the sources.
Clemens told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last year that he has never taken performance-enhancing drugs.
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As Atty. Gen. Eric. H. Holder Jr. takes over, we may see some of the secret and controversial actions of the Bush Justice Department that will provide more insights to what happened in the past eight years.

• U.S. Detainee Presents Big Question Marks For Government (Washington Post)
• A Pentagon Letter Could Pose Problems for Prosecutors in Blackwater Case (AP)
• Fed Judge in Chicago Orders FBI To Search DNA Database in Murder-Rape of Girl (Chicago Tribune)
• Rep. Frank Wolf Wants to Know Why FBI Cut Off Contact With Islamic Group CAIR (Spy Talk)

Quotas are seldom a good idea, particularly in law enforcement.

By AMY TAXIN
Associated Press Writer
SANTA ANA, Calif. — The U.S. Border Patrol on Monday ordered an investigation of allegations by agents in Southern California that they were given arrest quotas and threatened with punishment if they failed to meet them.
Jeffrey Calhoon, El Centro’s chief patrol agent, said he learned the patrol agent in charge of the agency’s Riverside station some 100 miles north of the Mexican border gave agents numerical goals for how many suspected illegal immigrants they should arrest in January.
Calhoon says he has ordered a probe into whether agents were told they would be punished if they failed to meet this target.
“If there is some threatening behavior, we’re not going to tolerate it,” Calhoon said.
The probe comes after Border Patrol agents in Riverside said they were ordered to arrest at least 150 suspected illegal immigrants in January or faced having their work shifts changed.

No one has been suspended during the probe, said Richard Velez, an agency spokesman.

David Ogden

By David Ingram and Joe Palazzolo
Legal Times
WASHINGTON — Eric Holder Jr. and David Ogden, two men who have split their time since the mid-1990s between Main Justice and Big Law, are drawing on that experience to recruit their top assistants.
They’re preparing to surround themselves with lawyers from Covington & Burling and from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr-their respective firms for the last eight years-as well as from the ranks of the Clinton-era Department of Justice.
Justice officials say that Holder, whose nomination to be attorney general is scheduled for a Senate vote today, has chosen Kevin Ohlson as his chief of staff. Ohlson, who is currently the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, served as Holder’s chief of staff when he was deputy attorney general.
Stuart Delery is Ogden’s pick for chief of staff if Ogden is confirmed as deputy attorney general, according to the Justice Department. A Wilmer alum, Delery specializes in securities litigation. He represented the special investigative committees convened by the boards at both Enron and Worldcom. He was also on the team of Wilmer lawyers that represented the University of Michigan in the high-profile Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the consideration of race as a factor in admissions.

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Sure the FBI saw this mortgage mess way back when. And sure it was clear it didn’t have enough resources to deal with it. But back then it wasn’t a disaster. Now it is. And that’s our nature: we seldom address things until they become a crisis. Now we’ve got us a real crisis. Now the FBI wants more resources to deal with it all.

By PAUL SHUKOVSKY
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
SEATTLE — The FBI was aware for years of “pervasive and growing” fraud in the mortgage industry that eventually contributed to America’s financial meltdown, but did not take definitive action to stop it.
“It is clear that we had good intelligence on the mortgage-fraud schemes, the corrupt attorneys, the corrupt appraisers, the insider schemes,” said a recently retired, high FBI official. Another retired top FBI official confirmed that such intelligence went back to 2002.
The problem, according to the two FBI retirees and several other current and former bureau colleagues, is that the bureau was stretched so thin that no one noticed when those lenders began packaging bad mortgages into bad securities.
“We knew that the mortgage-brokerage industry was corrupt,” the first of the retired FBI officials told the Seattle P-I. “Where we would have gotten a sense of what was really going on was the point where the mortgage was sold knowing that it was a piece of dung and it would be turned into a security. But the agents with the expertise had been diverted to counterterrorism.”
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