Jeff Sessions

Who's The Favorite Senator Of Followers Of White Nationalists On Twitter

... via AP Images. By day, Joe Tien is a math professor at Ohio State University, where he studies the spread of infectious diseases. His research maps how a disease like Ebola jumps from village to village and plots the best way to stop its spread. On his own time, Tien has begun putting his skills in network science toward other subjects, including the connection between white nationalists and American politicians. After the election, Tien and two other mathematicians set out to map the relationship between white nationalists and US senators on social media. The results produced one clear outlier: Based on an analysis of senators' Twitter followers, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), President Donald Trump's nominee to be attorney general, had the most overlap with white nationalist groups and individuals. "He's the closest of all senators to the white nationalist groups," says Tien. Sessions has a controversial track record on matters of race , including ...

5 Fast Facts You Need To Know

... Louis J. Freehsaid told The Washington Post in 2014. “Her biggest fans are the FBI street agents, the DEA agents, the postal inspectors and the Secret Service. Everybody sings her praises. And she has no ego. She would rather be writing a sentencing memo than get up and have a press conference.”. Eric Holder, former attorney general of the United States, has also praised Yates. “She was totally conversant with the facts,” Holder said in 2015, recalling his first impression of Yates. “She had a real knowledge of the law and a real good tactical sense about where this case ought to go, good predictions that were borne out about how ultimately it was going to be resolved. She had done her homework. She showed a keen sensitivity to the trauma that this had inflicted on the Atlanta region. She just was a star.”. The most prominent case Sally Yates has been ...

What Jeff Sessions As U.s. Attorney General Would Mean For Corporate Crime

... to be taken seriously. Far from falling within the Republican Party line, Sessions was one of the 25 senators who refused to vote for Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s economic bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, citing the need for corporations to be held responsible for their actions. In fact, he stood alongside none other than Bernie Sanders, proving that politics does make for strange bedfellows. In 2010, at the confirmation hearing for Deputy Attorney General James Cole, Sessions argued that, with respect to British Petroleum (bp) , no company should be considered “too big to fail,” and that arguing otherwise was a “dangerous philosophy.”. Perhaps this is one reason Sessions found favor with the president, who was elected in part because of an increasing distrust of perceived “elites” to hold business leaders accountable for their bad actions. The failure of the DOJ under the Obama administration to prosecute a single executive for the actions that led to the 2008 financial crisis partially created the conditions in which many Americans demanded a ...

As Attorney General, Jeff Sessions Would Be A Threat To Civil Rights

... “NEW USER” sign-up option. Log In. As Attorney General, Jeff Sessions Would Be a Threat to Civil Rights. He will be the most dangerous on issues where the Obama administration has been the most successful. US Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, DC, on January 10, 2017. (Reuters / Kevin Lamarque). Four days before Donald Trump attacked him as “all talk” and tweeted that his district was “crime infested” and “falling apart,” Georgia Congressman John Lewis testified against Trump’s pick for attorney general, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. “Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Senator Sessions’s call for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then,” Lewis said, when “the rule of law was used to violate the human and civil rights of the poor, the dispossessed, people of color.”. Ad Policy. Lewis was describing days like March 7, 1965, when he was brutally beaten in Selma while marching for the right to vote. One of the people who marched directly behind ...

Sen. Baldwin Explains Why She Won't Vote To Confirm Sessions For Attorney General

... time when I believe we actually need to increase resources and focus on that part of the department of justice.”. You can listen to the full interview here. Baldwin is also concerned about how Sessions might investigate and prosecute hate crimes such as the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last June, which left 49 people dead, most of them queer Latinx. “The aftermath of the massacre at the Pulse nightclub that targeted LGBT Americans, Latinos was a hate crime where we saw at that moment, that tragic, tragic moment, we saw people unwilling to speak of it as a hate crime, and to acknowledge that it was a crime that was perpetrated against the LGBT community, the Latino community,” she said. “It just says to me: we need to be increasing resources for prevention of hate crimes and enforcement of our hate crimes laws.”. Though she is voting against Sessions, Baldwin said, “if he indeed is confirmed by the Senate ― and it is certainly a probability that he will be ― it is up to all of us to do our best to keep him accountable.”. Sessions, whose confirmation vote was delayed by Senate Democrats but is now scheduled for Tuesday , has been ...

Why Jeff Sessions Should Police The Police

... city. There was the earnest lieutenant eager to tell me of changes that his department made to training and use-of-force reporting; the community leader who told me how he and others had convinced town officials to change the way fines and fees are collected after pointing them to our Ferguson consent decree; the sergeant telling me she’d “read every one” of our consent decrees and kept her chief apprised to ensure their department had mechanisms to detect and respond to incidents of officer misconduct. Law enforcement officials sometimes sent me new policies and trainings revised after reviewing our consent decrees. Justice Department police consent decrees, created with input from national police experts, local police officers and interested community members (and affirmed by local legislatures) inspire the creation of best practices that can be implemented to restore police legitimacy and avoid the tragic incidents that have roiled too many communities the past ...

Five Myths About Sen. Jeff Sessions

... offenses. And in the Senate, he has pushed for tougher enforcement of drug laws. Federal drug enforcement may become a higher priority under Sessions than it was under Obama’s attorney generals. But bringing back a full-scale war on drugs — a la Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign — isn’t likely. Critics fear that Sessions would go after the marijuana industry in the states that permit medical marijuana (28 states and the District) or recreational uses (eight states and D. C.). Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department chose not to pursue most individual recreational users in states that had legalized marijuana, instead focusing on preventing distribution to minors or across state lines. During his confirmation hearing, Sessions described the current solution for dealing with inconsistency between state and federal laws, crafted by former attorney general Eric Holder, as “truly valuable.” He added that more comprehensive enforcement of federal marijuana laws in these states is “a problem of resources for the federal government” — suggesting that it’s not worth the cost. Sessions could ...

Jeff Sessions, Trump's Pick For Attorney General, Will Likely Renew Fight Against Strong Encryption

... Hayden have directly refuted Comey, saying “I actually think end-to-end encryption is good for America.”. Trump has previously spoken out against Apple’s actions in 2016 and has generally favored expanding the powers of the government in matters of national security. He has repeatedly stated that his will be a “law and order presidency,” and about the need for increased security and a strong cyberspace presence. In this regard, Trump, Comey, and Sessions himself are all wrong. Repeated testimony from experts in the field, as well as real-life events, have demonstrated that government backdoors do not work, for the simple reason that no government can guarantee it remains the sole entity in charge of or aware of those backdoors. Last August, Microsoft accidentally leaked a debugging tool it created to allow its own developers to test unsigned code, forcing the company to release a patch against it. This type of accident will happen. There is no near-term cryptographic system so good it can’t be broken, no code so perfect that anyone is willing to testify it represents an unbreakable ...

Delay Sessions Confirmation Vote Until ‘muslim Ban’ Is Stopped

... updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set. By David Weigel By David Weigel January 30 at 9:16 AM Follow daveweigel. Protesters sit in the international terminal at San Francisco International Airport on Jan. 29. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images). On a call organized by Move __link__ on Sunday night, ACLU political director Faiz Shakir encouraged activists to demand a slowdown in the Senate until President Trump’s executive orders on immigration and refugees were tacked back. “We’ve got [attorney general nominee] Jeff Sessions, who we’re told was involved somehow in the drafting of these executive orders,” said Shakir. “If they want to press this through, say: You don’t get an attorney general until you overturn the Muslim ban.”. Currently, the Alabama senator’s nomination for attorney general is scheduled for a Tuesday morning ...