[Washington Examiner] Obama appointee Sally Yates was acting attorney general under President Trump for just 10 days -- from January 20, 2017 until January 30, 2017 -- but by any measure they were consequential days. Even now, two issues from Yates' brief tenure are still of interest to congressional investigators. One was the series of events that led Yates, in charge of the Justice Department, to reject the president's executive order temporarily suspending the admittance into the United States of people from some Muslim nations. The second is Yate's role in the FBI's questioning, apparently on dubious premises, the president's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, four days into the new administration -- questioning that ultimately led to Flynn's guilty plea in the Trump-Russia investigation.
Both are matters of great public significance and interest -- and on both, the Justice Department is refusing to allow the Senate Judiciary Committee access to documents from Yates' time in office.
On Feb. 23, 2017, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley wrote to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking for "all emails to, from, copying, or blind-copying Ms. Yates from Jan. 20, 2017, through Jan. 31, 2017." Grassley also asked for all of Yates' other correspondence from that period, plus records of her calls and meetings.
The reason Grassley cited -- his committee has direct oversight authority over the Justice Department -- was that Yates' order to the Justice Department not to defend the president's executive order cost the administration precious time as it prepared to fight the inevitable legal challenges. The Department did not have its facts together when a federal judge in Washington State demanded them, setting the stage for the judge to issue a temporary restraining order.
"It looks like Ms. Yates' action may have substantially harmed the Justice Department's initial ability to defend the executive order," Grassley wrote. "It is important to determine the extent to which Ms. Yates' actions may have sabotaged the government's defense in that litigation."
"Even commentators who took issue with the executive order believed her directive to stop the entire Justice Department from defending the order in the middle of frenetic ongoing litigation was improper," Grassley added.
...and if you can't trust the Boston Globe, who can you trust? Behold, perhaps the biggest whitewashing in the Globe's sordid history. Note the premise of the article - it's not Warren's claim of Native American ancestry, it's how Harvard supposedly didn't consider it a factor in her hiring, which is quickly contradicted a few paragraphs in. With bonus old Liz Warren pictures that'll make you spit out your morning coffee!
[Boston Globe] - CAMBRIDGE ‐ The 60-plus Harvard Law School professors who filed into an auditorium-style room on the first floor of Pound Hall on that February 1993 afternoon had a significant question to answer: Should they offer a job to Elizabeth Warren?
The atmosphere was a little fraught. Outside the hall, students held a silent vigil to demand the law school add more minorities and women to a faculty dominated by white men. Note this second paragraph before the article goes on to declare...
In the most exhaustive review undertaken of Elizabeth Warren’s professional history, the Globe found clear evidence, in documents and interviews, that her claim to Native American ethnicity was never considered by the Harvard Law faculty, which voted resoundingly to hire her, or by those who hired her to four prior positions at other law schools. At every step of her remarkable rise in the legal profession, the people responsible for hiring her saw her as a white woman. Tell me, dear reader, how does that square with the second paragraph? It doesn't.
#4
O HLS, puff out your chest!
You're blessed, and the best never rest.
Go, manifest bravery,
When pressed, against slavery,
And cast off your shield on request.
#5
O Harvard, to harmony harbor
'Tween snowflake and red-blooded larper,
Of the arms that you wield,
What's my favorite? The shield
Barry, argent and gules, of ye barber.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.