ThinkProgress

Federal judge doesn’t hold back on Kris Kobach’s deceit of Kansas voters

“You are under ethical obligation to tell me the truth,” the judge said. “That’s why lawyers are licensed.”

By Kira Lerner      March 20, 2018

Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach (left) and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, attend the first meeting of the presidential advisory commission on election integrity in the Eisenhower Executive office building, on July 19, 2017 in Washington, DC. Credit: Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

A Kansas federal judge had sharp words for Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach during a contempt hearing Tuesday, accusing him of misleading the court and failing to inform voters whose registrations were previously suspended that they are eligible to vote.

In May 2016, Judge Julie Robinson issued a preliminary injunction ordering Kobach “to register for federal elections all otherwise eligible motor voter registration applicants,” whether or not they have shown a documentary proof of citizenship. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit challenging Kobach’s proof of citizenship law, argued that Kobach was failing to add voters to the rolls, making eligible voters cast provisional ballots, and failing to send voters affected by the preliminary injunction a postcard that would notify them of their registration status.

After seven days of trial, the court held a hearing on contempt Tuesday in which Judge Robinson repeatedly chastised Kobach when he argued that he did not violate the order.

“You have a duty to tell them that and to assure me that they complied,” the judge told Kobach about his obligation to tell counties to register all eligible voters. “It’s your duty to make sure they do what they are supposed to do and abide by the law.”

Bryan Lowry: Judge tells Kobach he had no problem making sure counties adhered to his proof of citizenship policy, but not her order. #ksleg #ACLUvKobach

In a telephone conference in October 2016, roughly five months after the injunction, Kobach made a verbal promise that counties would send postcards to voters who had previously been on the suspense list for not showing proof of citizenship, but became registered because of the court’s order, informing them of their registration status.

In court Tuesday, Kobach and his attorneys claimed the judge never ordered them to send those postcards to voters, but the judge didn’t buy that argument.

“Why would I order something you told me you’d take care of?” the judge said, according to ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman, who was in the courtroom. “You are under ethical obligation to tell me the truth… that’s why lawyers are licensed.”

At another point, Kobach grew exasperated, telling Judge Robinson: “I certainly would have no interest in failing to comply with any court’s order.” Last June, the court upheld a $1,000 fine against Kobach for intentionally misleading the court about a document he was photographed carrying into a November 2016 meeting with Trump.

In its motion for contempt, the ACLU had previously argued that Kobach’s violation of the preliminary injunction was already affecting elections.

“These are not merely technical violations of the order; they have real consequences for all affected Kansans,” the ACLU wrote. “The refusal to register the plaintiffs deprives them of the most basic protections afforded to registered voters… Because of the Secretary’s defiance of the Order, covered voters have received no assurance that they may participate in the upcoming election or that their votes will be counted.”

The ACLU claimed that Kobach’s actions could have a “chilling effect,” suppressing turnout in upcoming elections.

“It’s an election year this year, and there’s no more time for games,” Dale Ho, lead attorney for the ACLU, told the judge Tuesday.

Kobach helped draft and enact the documentary proof of citizenship law, which took effect in January 2013, requiring all Kansas residents to show a document like a birth certificate or passport when they registered to vote. The law was in place for more than three years until the court issued the preliminary injunction order before the 2016 presidential election.

The contempt hearing came on the eighth day of a trial that was originally supposed to last just four days, but ended up stretching for far longer because Kobach’s legal team struggled to cross-examine witnesses and follow basic rules of evidence. At the start of Tuesday’s hearing, Ho apologized to the judge for having to address the motion for contempt.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen: ACLU (Dale Ho): Apologizes to judge to spend time on this. Says Kobach could have very easily complied with judge’s preliminary injunction, but he failed to update the online elections manual & to send postcards to voters with info including their polling place. #ACLUvKobach

Ho told the judge that Kobach is refusing to update the online elections manual until the U.S. Supreme Court issues a final judgement on this case, which could take years. “Incorrect information is continually distributed to the general public,” he said.

Sue Becker, an attorney for Kobach, claimed that the secretary of state’s office put the required information on its website and emailed counties with the notice to begin registering voters without documentary proof of citizenship. If individual counties misunderstood the directive, Becker argued, it was not Kobach’s fault.

Judge Robinson said she was not going to take Becker’s word that her office sent notices to the counties. “You’re going to present evidence to that effect or am I supposed to accept your statement?” she said. “I want evidence… In light of everything that’s happened.”

“You all have engaged in gamesmanship with this court,” she said.

Later in the hearing, Kansas Director of Elections Bryan Caskey testified that the state was equipped to register all eligible voters before the 2018 election. But during cross-examination, Caskey admitted to failures by the state in the past.

Bryan Lowry: Judge gets Caskey to definitively say that he does not remember Kobach telling him to tell the counties to send out postcards to these voters. #ksleg #ACLUvKobach

At the end of the hearing Tuesday, Judge Robinson said she will issue a written opinion in the case and on the motion for contempt — the second time the ACLU has sought to hold Kobach in contempt in this trial. Kobach has already indicated his intentions to appeal an unfavorable ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Related:

Huff Post

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe Is Fired 2 Days Before Retirement

Carla Herreria     March 16, 2018

Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI and a frequent target of President Donald Trump, was fired Friday, days before his formal retirement. The firing of McCabe, a civil servant who has been at the bureau for more than two decades, could significantly affect his pension.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the decision to oust McCabe after the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility recommended he be fired for his alleged lack of candor during an internal review of how the FBI and Justice Department handled an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. McCabe and his attorney met Thursday with Scott Schools, the highest-ranking career employee of the Justice Department, in an attempt to prevent the firing or at least save his ability to begin collecting a pension estimated at $60,000 a year.

McCabe, a lifelong Republican, had officially stepped down from his post in late January but was using accrued leave to stay on the FBI’s payroll until his retirement date on Sunday, his 50th birthday. Being fired before his birthday means he’d have to wait several more years before he can draw a pension.

Sessions said late Friday in a statement:

“After an extensive and fair investigation and according to Department of Justice procedure, the Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) provided its report on allegations of misconduct by Andrew McCabe to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

“The FBI’s OPR then reviewed the report and underlying documents and issued a disciplinary proposal recommending the dismissal of Mr. McCabe. Both the OIG and FBI OPR reports concluded that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor ― including under oath ― on multiple occasions.

The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability. As the OPR proposal stated, “all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.”

Pursuant to Department Order 1202, and based on the report of the Inspector General, the findings of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility, and the recommendation of the Department’s senior career official, I have terminated the employment of Andrew McCabe effective immediately.

McCabe responded to the firing in a lengthy statement.

“The investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has to be understood in the context of the attacks on my credibility,” McCabe wrote.

He continued:

The investigation flows from my attempt to explain the FBI’s involvement and my supervision of investigations involving Hillary Clinton. I was being portrayed in the media over and over as a political partisan, accused of closing down investigations under political pressure. The FBI was portrayed as caving under that pressure, and making decisions for political rather than law enforcement purposes. Nothing was further from the truth. In fact, this entire investigation stems from my efforts, fully authorized under FBI rules, to set the record straight on behalf of the Bureau, and to make clear that we were continuing an investigation that people in DOJ opposed.    

McCabe had been with the bureau since 1996 and served a short stint as the acting FBI director after President Donald Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey last May. After the U.S. Senate confirmed Christopher Wray as the bureau chief, McCabe returned to his original role as deputy director.

McCabe abruptly announced he was leaving the bureau at the end of January while tangled in an internal investigation of his handling of the FBI investigations into Hillary Clinton. The Justice Department’s inspector general has been investigating how officials handled the Clinton investigation since just before Trump took office.

While Trump has accused McCabe of having a political bias in favor of Clinton, the Justice Department’s forthcoming internal review suggests he may have actually authorized the disclosure of information that was damaging to the Clinton campaign.

The report evidently says that McCabe authorized a discussion involving one of his top aides, the FBI’s chief spokesman and a Wall Street Journal reporter for a story, published Oct. 30, 2016, that included details of McCabe pushing back on Obama appointees in the Justice Department to continue an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

FBI officials are barred from disclosing information about ongoing criminal investigations. The Justice Department’s inspector general recommended that Sessions fire McCabe as a result of the internal review, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

McCabe has been at odds with Trump in recent months, with the president apparently trying to undermine McCabe and the FBI’s credibility.

In December, Trump publicly complained about McCabe’s wife’s political affiliations (Jill McCabe unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for a Virginia state Senate seat in 2015), criticized his oversight of the FBI investigations into Clinton and even mocked his retirement plans.

In one of his tweets, Trump claimed that McCabe received a campaign donation of $700,000 from “Clinton Puppets,” apparently referencing a donation to Jill McCabe’s campaign totaling up to $675,000 from former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee.

The donation was made before Andrew McCabe was promoted to deputy director and headed the FBI’s Clinton investigation. McAuliffe is an ally to both Hillary and Bill Clinton.

Trump also reportedly called McCabe into his office for a meeting, then asked him which candidate he voted for in the 2016 presidential election, The Washington Post reported in January.

David Bowdich, the FBI’s associate deputy director, is expected to replace McCabe as deputy director, according to The Washington Post. Bowdich has been with the FBI since 1995.

Mother Jones

Trump White House Worked with Newt Gingrich on Political Purge at State Department, Lawmakers Say

Trump officials called civil servants “turncoat” and “Obama/Clinton loyalists.”

Dan Friedman     March 15, 2018

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich on March 16, 2017. Melanie Rogers/Cox/Planet Pix via Zuma Wire

White House and State Department officials conspired with prominent conservatives, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to purge the State Department of staffers they viewed as insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump, two top House Democrats allege in a letter released Thursday.

The letter states that an unidentified whistleblower shared documents with Democrats on the House Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees showing that a group of White House officials pressed political appointees at the State Department to oust career civil service employees they described with terms like “Turncoat,” “leaker and a troublemaker,” and “Obama/Clinton loyalists not at all supportive of President Trump’s foreign policy agenda.”

As described in the letter, those actions would likely violate federal laws protecting federal civil servants from undue political influence.

In the letter to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and State Department Deputy Secretary John Sullivan, Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Eliot Engel of New York, the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees, cite an email forwarded by Gingrich to Trump appointees in the State Department (the Democrats released a summary of the leaked documents, rather than the original emails). In an undated email, David Wurmser, who advised former Vice President Dick Cheney and former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, wrote, “Newt: I think a cleaning is in order here. I hear [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson has actually been reasonably good on stuff like this and cleaning house, but there are so many that it boggles the mind.” (Trump fired Tillerson earlier this week.)

Cummings and Engel say they are “particularly concerned” about documents showing an effort to drive out Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, a career civil servant at the State Department assigned to the policy planning staff. The letter notes that Brian Hook, the director of that division, forwarded an email from Nowrouzzadeh in which she defended herself against an attack that had been published in a conservative publication. The officials then discussed whether she was too supportive of the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by President Barack Obama. Several of the officials discussed ousting Nowrouzzadeh. Julia Haller, a White House liaison to the State Department, wrote that Nowrouzzadeh “was born in Iran and upon my understanding cried when the President won.” Nowrouzzadeh was born in Connecticut. Haller did not cite the basis of her claim about Nowrouzzadeh’s election reaction.

Nowrouzadeh was removed from her post on the Policy Planning Staff three months earlier than scheduled in a manner she said violated a memorandum of understanding governing her assignment.

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