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DOJ will not prosecute former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson

The Justice Department announced Wednesday that it will not prosecute former Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old, while also releasing a report faulting the city and its law enforcement for racial bias.
In the criminal investigation, federal officials concluded Wilson's actions "do not constitute prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal rights statute."
Specifically, the DOJ said there was "no evidence" to disprove Wilson's testimony that he feared for his safety, nor was there reliable evidence that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot.
The report said: "Although there are several individuals who have stated that Brown held his hands up in an unambiguous sign of surrender prior to Wilson shooting him dead, their accounts do not support a prosecution of Wilson.‎ As detailed throughout this report, some of those accounts are inaccurate because they are inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence; some of those accounts are materially inconsistent with that witness's own prior statements with no explanation, credible or otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time."
The decision in the Aug. 9 shooting had been expected, in part because of the high legal standard needed for a federal civil rights prosecution. Wilson, who has said Brown struck him in the face and reached for his gun during a tussle, also had been cleared by a Missouri grand jury in November and later resigned from the department.
But the DOJ, in its evaluation of the police department itself, said blacks in Ferguson are disproportionately subject to excessive police force, baseless traffic stops and citations for infractions as petty as walking down the middle of the street.
The report also cited "evidence of racial bias" in emails by Ferguson officials. They included one April 2011 email that "depicted President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee"
Attention now turns to Ferguson as the city confronts how to fix racial biases that the federal government says are deeply rooted in the police department, court and jail.
"Now that our investigation has reached its conclusion, it is time for Ferguson’s leaders to take immediate, wholesale and structural corrective action," Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday.
Holder said the Justice Department had two sets of immediate recommendations: increased civilian involvement in police decision-making and police misconduct allegations, and changes to the municipal court system, including modifications to bond amounts and detention procedures, an end to the use of arrest warrants as a means of collecting owed fines and fees, and compliance with due process requirements.
Similar federal investigations of troubled police departments have led to the appointment of independent monitors and mandated overhauls in the most fundamental of police practices. The Justice Department maintains the right to sue a police department if officials balk at making changes, though many investigations resolve the issue with both sides negotiating a blueprint for change known as a consent decree.
"It's quite evident that change is coming down the pike. This is encouraging," said John Gaskin III, a St. Louis community activist. "It's so unfortunate that Michael Brown had to be killed. But in spite of that, I feel justice is coming."
Others said the federal government's findings confirmed what they had long known and should lead to change in the police department leadership.
Brown's killing set off weeks of protests and initiated a national dialogue about police use of force and their relations with minority communities.
The findings of the investigation, which began weeks after Brown's killing last August, were released as Holder prepares to leave his job following a six-year tenure that focused largely on civil rights. The report is based on interviews with police leaders and residents, a review of more than 35,000 pages of police records and analysis of data on stops, searches and arrests.

GOP-led Senate fails to override Obama's Keystone veto, lawmakers say fight not over

The GOP-controlled Senate failed Wednesday to override President Obama’s veto of Keystone XL pipeline legislation but vowed to continue to fight to complete the project.
The vote was 62-37, five votes short of the 67-vote super-majority needed to override a presidential veto. The bill turned back by the president would have approved the controversial pipeline.
“The Senate’s failure to override President Obama’s veto is a defeat for our economy and American workers," Indiana GOP Sen. Dan Coats said after the vote. "Obama and a majority of Senate Democrats have said no to creating new jobs and increasing our energy security. Despite support from the majority of Americans, this important pro-growth project remains in political paralysis.”
But some lawmakers are looking at other ways to muscle the legislation through.
“If we don’t win this battle today, we’ll attach [the legislation] to another bill and win the war,” North Dakota GOP Sen. John Hoeven, a major sponsor of the bill, said before the vote.
Hoeven is considering attaching the Keystone measure to a highway infrastructure bill.
The completion of the Canada-to-Texas pipeline has been a contentious Washington issue for the past six years.
Republicans and other supporters argue the project would create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs and help the United States become less dependent on foreign oil.
Democrats and other opponents say that drilling for the oil in Canada’s tar sands will emit too much greenhouse gas and contribute to global warming.
The Senate passed the legislation Jan. 29 -- just weeks after Republicans officially took control of the chamber from Democrats, who for years had held up the effort.
Obama later vetoed the legislation, making good on his vow that no final decision could be made until the State Department completed its impact studies.
“By vetoing the bipartisan Keystone jobs bill, President Obama sided with [the] moneyed special interests over the middle class,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
But Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., earlier this week told The Hill newspaper that the effort to override the veto was a “ludicrous idea” and rejected the idea of attaching Keystone to the highway legislation.
"First, they hold the homeland security funding bill hostage to immigration,” Boxer said. “Now they want to hold the highway bill hostage to big polluting Canadian special interests.”

US ambassador to South Korea injured in knife attack

The U.S. ambassador to South Korea was slashed by a man screaming demands for Korean unification Thursday morning in Seoul, and was hospitalized with wounds to his face and wrist.
Media images showed a stunned-looking Mark W. Lippert examining his blood-covered left hand and holding his right hand over a cut on the right side of his face, his pink tie splattered with blood. The attack occurred at a performing arts center in downtown Seoul where Lippert was about to give a lecture on the prospects for peace on the divided Korean peninsula.
The U.S. Embassy said Lippert was in stable condition after surgery at a Seoul hospital.
In a televised briefing, Chung Nam-sik of the Severance Hospital said 80 stitches were needed to close the facial wound, which was just over 4 inches long and just over 1 inch deep. He added the cut did not affect Lippert's nerves or salivary gland.
Chung said the knife also penetrated through Lippert's left arm and damaged the nerves connected to his pinkie and tendons connected to his thumb. Lippert will need to be treated at the hospital for the next three or four days and may experience sensory problems in his left hand for several months, Chung said.
YTN TV reported that the suspect — identified by police as 55-year-old Kim Ki-jong — screamed during the attack, "South and North Korea should be reunified." The comments touch on a deep political divide in South Korea over the still-fresh legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which is still technically ongoing because it ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. Some South Koreans blame the presence of 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in the South as a deterrent to the North for the continuing split of the Korean Peninsula along the world's most heavily armed border -- a view North Korea's propaganda machine regularly pushes in state media.
Witnesses said the attack happened suddenly. A knife-wielding man ran screaming up to Lippert as soup was being served for the breakfast meeting and began slashing, said Kim Young-man, spokesman for the group hosting the breakfast, the Korean Council for Reconciliation and Cooperation. A separate, unidentified witness told local media that as Lippert stood up for a handshake, the suspect wrestled the ambassador to the ground and slashed him with a knife.
Yonhap TV showed men in suits and ties piled on top of the attacker, who was dressed in a modern version of the traditional Korean hanbok, and Lippert later being rushed to a police car with a handkerchief pressed to his cheek. The suspect also shouted anti-war slogans after he was detained, police said, later adding that the knife was around 10 inches long.

Hillary Clinton says she's asked State Department to make emails public

Hillary Clinton said late Wednesday that she had asked the State Department to make thousands of her emails available to the public, her first public response to a furor that followed the revelation that she used a private e-mail account for her correspondence while Secretary of State.
State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf released a statement early Thursday saying, "The State Department will review for public release the emails provided by Secretary Clinton to the Department, using a normal process that guides such releases. We will undertake this review as quickly as possible; given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete
Clinton's message came hours after the House select committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya subpoenaed her personal emails. The committee also also sent letters to Internet companies informing them of "their legal obligation to protect all relevant documents."
The controversy began Monday after The New York Times reported that Clinton had never had an official government e-mail account for conducting official business. The practice is a potential violation of federal law, and has also raised questions of why Clinton went to such lengths to keep her messages off government servers.
The Times reported that members of the Benghazi committee initially discovered that Clinton had used a private e-mail account during her tenure at Foggy Bottom. The paper also said that Clinton had turned over 55,000 messages that had been selected by her advisers to the State Department in response to a records request. Clinton's Twitter post appeared to refer to those messages, about 300 of which are related to the Benghazi attack.
On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that the server Clinton used to store her emails had been traced to an Internet service registered to the Clintons' home address in Chappaqua, N.Y. That maneuver would have given additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails.
Meanwhile, the AP said it was considering legal action under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act against the State Department for failing to turn over some emails covering Clinton's tenure as the nation's top diplomat after waiting more than one year. The department has never suggested that it doesn't possess all Clinton's emails.
The controversy has also raised new questions about Clinton's credibility as a presidential candidate. Though she has not formally declared her intention to run, Clinton is widely considered to be the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
Clinton still has not described her motivation for using a private email account -- hdr22(at)clintonemail.com, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym -- for official State Department business. However, a Clinton aide told Fox News she was not bucking the system, and in fact was keeping with what former secretaries of state had done, including Colin Powell. The aide stressed that Clinton quickly responded to the request from the department for her emails, following updated guidance from the government's central records office.
The White House has deferred the question of whether any laws were broken to the State Department. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Wednesday it was "clear that Secretary Clinton's team has gone to great lengths" to collect and turn over emails and said Clinton's actions seemed consistent with the Federal Records Act.
But he also reiterated that the administration gave "very specific guidance" that employees should use official accounts when conducting government business, which Clinton did not do. Earnest later clarified that "when there are situations where personal email accounts are used, it is important for those records to be preserved, consistent with the Federal Records Act."

Quds force leader, commanding Iraqi forces against ISIS, alarms Washington

The enemy of your enemy is your enemy.

Twice designated a terrorist by the United States government, considered responsible for up to 20 percent of American casualties in the Iraq war, Major General Qasem Suleimani, the legendary Iranian spymaster and leader of the Quds Force – the elite special operations wing of the hardline Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – is now stirring alarm in Washington for doing something the Obama administration would ordinarily cheer: taking the fight to ISIS in Iraq.
Photographs circulating on social media show Suleimani operating alongside senior Iraqi officials in the theater in and around Tikrit, the Sunni ancestral home of Saddam Hussein that is located almost equidistant between Mosul, the ISIS-controlled city 120 miles to the north, and Baghdad, the capital of the Iraqi government 100 miles to the south.
The presence of Suleimani at the forefront of Iraqi forces’efforts to reclaim Tikrit from ISIS control underscores both the expanding influence of Iran on the central Iraqi government and the increasingly critical role that Shi’ite militiamen, thought to be operating under Quds command, are playing in the Iraqi fight against ISIS. Neither development brings pleasure to senior U.S. officials or lawmakers in Congress.
Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., raised the issue of the Iranians with President Obama’s new defense secretary during a House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. “I know we're keeping our distance physically from them in Baghdad,” Frelinghuysen said. “Have we ceded most of the governance of Iraq to Iranians?...And will the military operations that are undergoing, which we are watching, divide the country and require us in some ways to spend more of our resources?”
“I absolutely share your concern about the role of Iran in Iraq and the wider region,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told the panel.
Among those concerns is a fear about what may happen if and when ISIS fighters surrender or flee Tikrit, which is presently said to be encircled and witnessing combat. Of the advancing forces, two-thirds are believed to be Shi’ite militiamen loyal to Iran, with the remainder belonging to Iraqi security forces, and officials worry that the Shi’ite troops may seek to avenge ISIS’ massacre of 1,700 Iraqi troops, almost all Shi’ites from nearby Camp Speicher, last June.
“The killings that were perpetrated in the time after we left Iraq would never be forgotten,” Frelinghuysen said.
“I completely agree with you,” Carter replied. “And sectarianism is one of the things that concerns me very much. And of course, it's the root of the Iranian presence in Iraq.”
“We're watching carefully,” added U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who appeared alongside Carter at the hearing. “If this becomes an excuse to ethnic cleanse, then our campaign has a problem and we're going to have to make a campaign adjustment.”
An additional reason the battle for Tikrit bears close watching at the Pentagon is because it may serve as an indicator of how well the Iraqi forces and their Shi’ite comrades can perform when the larger contest for Mosul is engaged. Analysts who have examined recent Iranian casualty reports said the data show the Islamic regime deploying more rank-and-file troops to Syria, but higher-level commanders to Iraq, to oversee the Shi’ite militia groups.
Ali Alfoneh, an Iranian-born scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, cast the involvement of the Quds Force in the ISIS conflict as reflecting a larger trend in Iranian society: its slow transformation from a radical Islamic theocracy to a military dictatorship, with the IRGC assuming ever greater powers.
“This is an organization which has engaged in spreading sectarian terror in Iraq. And now, this is the force that the Iraqi government has turned to for help in order to liberate Tikrit from Islamic State terrorists,” Alfoneh told Fox News. “In other words, we have one terrorist organization which is helping the Iraqi government get rid of another terrorist organization.”
Such tangled lines of authority and influence are exactly what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had in mind on Tuesday, when he told a joint meeting of Congress: “When it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.”