Attorney General Loretta Lynch

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is expected to announce today that she will accept the recommendation of prosecutors and the FBI who are investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, a Justice Department official told the New York Times. 

Lynch plans to discuss her handling of the case this morning in Aspen, Colorado.

By accepting whatever recommendation is handled down, she is removing herself as a political appointee who could overrule investigators.

The announcement comes after a private meeting between Lynch and President Bill Clinton this week.

Republicans claimed that the meeting undermined the independence of the investigation.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Without a warrant, the FBI is permitted to use secret surveillance to obtain journalists’ phone records with the approval of two government officials.

The Intercept obtained classified rules that show agents only have to get the consent of the FBI’s general counsel and executive assistant director of its national security branch.

Privacy and media advocates said the FBI has made it too easy to bypass courts to get subpoenas or search warrants to access journalists’ information.

The classified rules mean that agents could try to identify leakers and sources of new.

“These supposed rules are incredibly weak and almost nonexistent — as long as they have that second sign-off they’re basically good to go,” said Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has sued the Justice Department for the release of these rules. “The FBI is entirely able to go after journalists and with only one extra hoop they have to jump through.”

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

The FBI debated establishing an alert system seven years ago to determine who is making multiple gun purchases.

But the Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI abandoned the idea over legal concerns.

Such an alert system would have tipped off the FBI when the Orlando nightclub shooter made several gun purchases.

Mass shooters often make multiple gun purchases before carrying out a massacre.

The FBI and Justice Department are also considering an alert system to warn investigators when people who were once investigated for terrorism buy firearms.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A former Secret Service agent who stole money seized during the Silk Road investigation is now accused of stealing money in two other cases.

Fortune reports that former agent Shaun Bridges is accused of stealing about $700,000 worth of bitcoin from a Secret Service account.

The theft appeared to occur three months after the agency was told to block the agent’s access to the bitcoin account.

Bridge was sentenced to nearly six years in prison in December for stealing more than $800,000 in bitcoins during the Silk Road investigation.

The department was told to move the funds somewhere else.

“Unfortunately, the U.S. Secret Service did not do so and the funds were thereafter stolen, something the U.S. Secret Service only discovered once it was ordered by a court to pay a portion of the seizure back to affected claimants,” a team of prosecutors wrote in an accompanying motion.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Border Patrol officials have concluded that agents acted properly while opening fire while on duty on four different occasions, The Los Angeles Times reports. 

An internal panel for Customs and Border Protection reviewed the cases after concerns about a pattern of agents using deadline force.

CBP also is investigating 14 other shootings.

In one of the cases where agents were found to have acted properly, they repeatedly fired at the engine of a boat smuggling immigrants near Solana Beach in San Diego County in June 2015.

After the shooting, the boat crashed with the agent’s boat and capsized. One woman drowned.

Two other cases involve agents opening fire on people throwing rocks at them.

In the fourth shooting, an agent shot a suspect who was clutching a rifle and fleeing local police.

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• Homeland Security’s Jeh Johnson Talks Terrorism, Border Patrol
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