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President Trump suggested the special prosecutor's team might not be fair, impartial investigators because of previous political contributions, legal clients and personal friends. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

The people that have been hired are all Hillary Clinton supporters. Some of them worked for Hillary Clinton. I mean the whole thing is ridiculous, if you want to know the truth, from that standpoint. President Trump, interview with Fox & Friends, June 23, 2017

Then who does Mueller select to help lead the independent investigation? Four top lawyers, all major donors to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Party. One of them even worked for the Clinton Foundation. Only in Washington could a rigged game like this be called independent. Pro-Trump group Great America Alliance, political ad, June 23, 2017

President Trump and his surrogates are attacking the judgment and independence of former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation and related matters. They are criticizing the political contributions of some of the attorneys hired to Muellers team, questioning the investigators independence.

Trump claimedthe attorneys are all supporters of Hillary Clinton and worked for her. The ad described the hires as a part of a rigged game.Lets dig into it.

The attacks aimed at discrediting Mueller one month into his special investigation are similar to efforts by former president Bill Clintons supporterstwo decades ago. Democrats at the timeworked to undermineKenneth Starr, special counsel whose investigations ultimately led to Clintons impeachment in the House. They painted Starr as an unethical investigator with a conflict of interest conducting a partisan witch hunt.

Mueller has hired 13 attorneys and is expected to hire more. Most are veteran attorneys at the Justice Department or the FBI, or attorneys Mueller worked with at the WilmerHale law firm, which he left in May whenhe was appointed special counsel. The members who have been made public:

Four (Quarles, Weissmann, Rhee, Prelogar) have made political contributions to Democrats and four (Zebley, Dreeben, Page, Jed) have no record of making political contributions. Previous news reports incorrectly identified Dreeben as a Democratic donor, mistaking him for a furniture designer in Chicago named Michael W. Dreeben.

Quarles gave the most political donations out of the four nearly$33,000 to various Democrats since 1999, Federal Election Commission records show. Recipients included Obama for America, Hillary for America and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Quarles is the only one who donated to Republicans. In 2005, he gave $250 to then-Sen. George Allen of Virginia.In 2015, he gave $2,500 to Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican and chairman of the House Oversight Committee who later wouldinvestigate Hillary Clintons private email server use.

Weissmann donated $4,300 total to the Obama Victory Fund in 2008 and the Democratic National Committee in 2006. Rhee gave $5,400 total to Hillary for America in 2015 and 2016; $5,800 total in 2008 and 2011 to the Obama Victory Fund; and $250 to the DNCin 2004. (Quarles and Rhee gave maximum contributions of $2,700 to Clintons 2016 presidential campaign.)Prelogar donated $500 total to Obama Victory fund in 2012 and Hillary for America in 2016.

Rhee was a partner on the defense team representing the Clinton Foundation in a lawsuit over Clintons use of her private email server. Zebley once represented a Clinton aide at WilmerHale, PolitiFact found.

So Trump twisted the facts: Not all of Muellers hires supported Clinton, and none of them worked for Clinton directly.The White House did not provide an explanation of Trumps claim.

A Great America Alliance spokesman said the ads message is that hiring four high-profile attorneys who contributed to Democrats means Mueller cannot credibly claim to conduct an investigation without some inherent bias or conflict.

An independent investigation should actually be independent and Mr. Mueller is failing to achieve that standard, the spokesman said. Stacking the investigative team with political opponents of the president will not achieve an unbiased result and we are committed to exposing this reality.

But that overlooks important context. Federal regulations prohibit the Justice Department from considering the political affiliation or political contributions of career appointees, including those appointed to the Special Counsels Office. So the implication that Mueller is making politically motivated hires is quite a stretch, as he is legally prohibited from considering their political affiliations.

Under the Rules of Professional Responsibility, attorneys are permitted to participate in matters involving their former firms clients so long as they have no confidential information about the client and did not participate in the representation, said Peter Carr, spokesman for the Special Counsels Office. Moreover,attorneys are bound by confidentiality rules and may not useinformation they learned from one client (say, Clinton Foundation) and divulge it in another case (say, the Russia probe).

The Justice Departments ethics experts found Mueller and those he hired from his former firm are consistent with DOJ rules, Carr said. This was despite concerns over WilmerHales representation of Trumps former campaign manager Paul Manafort, son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump.

Mueller reports to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. In a June 13 Senate hearing, Rosenstein said it is not a disqualification for a lawyer in the Special Counsels Office to have made a political donation, and that as a general matter, it is not a disqualification for a lawyer to have represented Clinton in the past.

That Rhee represented the Clinton Foundation is irrelevant, said Stephen Gillers, expert in legal ethics at the New York University School of Law:The Mueller investigation is not about Clintons emails. The two matters are apples and oranges. A lawyer could work on both.

In fact, the lead defense attorney that Rhee worked with on the Clinton Foundation case now represents Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Trump mischaracterized the donations from Muellers attorneys and falsely claimed some even worked for Hillary Clinton. Four out of eight attorneys made public so far have contributed to Democrats, including Clinton and Obama. The other four have no record of political contributions.

One attorney who donatedthe maximum amount to Clintons 2016 presidential campaign represented the Clinton Foundation in a 2015 lawsuit. Another attorney who made no political donations represented a Clinton aide at one point. Both attorneys worked for WilmerHale, a firm that also represents Trumps former campaign manager, daughter and son-in-law.

Further, Trump and the ad use these political contributions to suggestbias orconflict of interest. But that twists the facts that misleads the public to believe there is something nefarious going on. Legally and under federal ethics rules, there is no conflict of interest. The DOJ is legally barred from discriminating career appointees based on political affiliation, so Mueller cant decide his team based on their contributions. That half of the publicly named special counsel attorneys donated to Democrats is not an indication that Mueller has failed to achieve a standard of independence. We award Three Pinocchios.

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Read more from the original source:
Do Russia probe attorneys' donations to Democrats threaten their independence? - Washington Post

Thousands attended a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for President Donald Trump on June 21, 2017, his first visit to the state since the election. (Getty Images)

President Donald Trump recently told supporters that he wanted to reduce the number of people receiving public assistance, and he wants to put in place new rules barring immigrants from receiving government benefits for at least five years.

"We want to get our people off of welfare and back to work. We also want to preserve our safety net for struggling Americans who truly need help," Trump said in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on June 21. "That's why I believe the time has come for new immigration rules which say that those seeking admission into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years."

Trump said legislation for that purpose would come "very shortly." But several media outlets pointed out that a law on benefits for immigrants already exists, passed more than 20 years ago, though it had some exceptions.

Neither Trump or administration officials have detailed exactly what Trump would like to see in new legislation that would be different from the 1996 law. Here, we lay out whats already on the books and what weve heard so far from Trumps team.

1996 law restricts benefits

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 said immigrants who entered the United States on or after Aug. 22, 1996, (when the law was enacted) would not be eligible for federal "means-tested" public benefits for five years, starting on the date of their entry into the United States with a status that met the definition of "qualified alien."

The term qualified alien included lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees. But the law outlined several exemptions and said certain groups were not subject to the five-year restriction, including refugees and asylees, military veterans, and active duty military members along with their spouses and unmarried dependent children.

Federal means-tested benefits offer assistance for health care, nutrition, education and other needs. The five major programs are: non-emergency Medicaid, the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which was previously known as the Food Stamp program. (States provide some funding for Medicaid, CHIP and TANF.)

States such as California and New York fund some benefits for immigrants who are restricted by the five-year rule, said Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

A December 2015 report from the National Immigration Law Center also noted that since the passage of the 1996 law, additional legislation has expanded access to SNAP for some individuals, including qualified immigrant children.

Also, in 2000, Congress allowed survivors of trafficking to become eligible for federal public benefits "to the same extent as refugees, regardless of whether they have a qualified immigrant status," the report said.

Individuals living in the country illegally and those who arrive on non-immigrant visas (such as students and tourists) are generally not eligible for federal public benefits, but are able to receive care for emergency medical conditions, short-term non-cash, in-kind emergency disaster relief, crisis counseling and select other services.

Trumps plans for legal immigration reform

Trumps spokesman Sean Spicer at a June 23 press briefing said the president was aware of the 1996 law already restricting federal public benefits.

"But that law, while on the books, has not been enforced and clearly either needs to be reexamined, enforced, or new legislation needs to be introduced," Spicer said.

Trumps fiscal year 2018 budget proposal said welfare and immigration were among the eight pillars Trump wanted to reform. The budget said the National Academy of Sciences found that in 2013 first-generation immigrants and their dependents may cost all levels of government $279 billion more than they paid in taxes. Trump said a variation of this in his February address to Congress. FactCheck.org and the Washington Posts Fact Checker noted that Trumps claim did not reference long-term contributions of the children of immigrants.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a statement in response to Trumps claim, saying: "The report found that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. The report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S."

Nonetheless, Trumps budget said some of the billions-of-dollars cost was driven by the nations refugee policy that allows them to be "instantly eligible for time-limited cash benefits and numerous non-cash federal benefits, including food assistance through SNAP, medical care, and education, as well as a host of state and local benefits."

The budget said it supports immigration reform in favor of merit-based admissions for legal immigrants, an end to illegal immigration and "substantial reduction" in refugee admissions.

Trump in March met with Republican senators who support his campaign promise to reform legal immigration. Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue introduced legislation in February seeking to cap refugee admissions per fiscal year to 50,000, to reduce the number of family-sponsored immigrants, and to eliminate the diversity visa program, among other restrictions.

Originally posted here:
Trump says 'time has come' for law restricting federal assistance to immigrants. It already exists - PolitiFact

Sacramento Bee

Americans take the First Amendment for granted. They shouldn't under Trump Sacramento Bee The words of the First Amendment may be 45 of the the most important ever written. Those who doubt the value of those freedoms of religion, speech, the press, assembly and petitioning for redress of grievances might look to Asia, where I work, and ...

Read more here:
Americans take the First Amendment for granted. They shouldn't under Trump - Sacramento Bee

Officials were on notice they were flouting decades of precedent

It was a new day, but same result for Iowa State University.

After asking a federal appeals court to reconsider its February ruling that the public university violated the First Amendment rights of pro-marijuana activists on campus, ISU got an even worse ruling earlier this month.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals doubled down on its original decision in Gerlich v. Leath that ISU singled out the campus chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) by not letting it use the university logo on its T-shirts.

In a finding that could endanger college officials across the 8th Circuits jurisdiction of Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota, the appeals court refused to shield individual administrators from liability.

The case had united a broad coalition of national college groups, from pro-life activists to press freedom defenders and libertarians, in favor of NORML ISU leaders Paul Gerlich and Erin Furleigh.

We wanted the court to be aware that discrimination against speakers on campus is a common occurrence and a real problem, Casey Mattox, director of the Alliance Defending Freedoms Center for Academic Freedom, told The College Fix in a phone interview.

The alliance, which represented several of the friend-of-the-court filers, conveyed to the judges that viewpoint discrimination on campus, particularly against conservative speakers on university campuses, has a long track record and needs to be addressed, said Mattox.

No reasonable university official can think this is government speech

In an opinion for the three-judge panel, Judge Diane Murphy wrote that ISU had discriminated against Gerlich and Furleigh because of their viewpoints and political pushback from Iowa politicians.

In addition, the court found ISU did not engage in government speech by letting campus groups use its trademarks: Rather, it provided a limited public forum that facilitated the speech of private persons.

NORML ISU also did not violate the terms of the limited public forum, because the organization advocates for reform to marijuana laws, not the illegal use of marijuana, according to the panel.

MORE: Potheads, press and pro-lifers unite for student speech

The judges split, however, on the issue of qualified immunity, which excludes government officials acting in their official capacity from civil lawsuits unless they violate a clearly established constitutional or statutory right.

Murphy and Judge Jane Kelly said ISU administrators, including then-President Steven Leath, should have been aware of legal precedents going back decades that ban universities from using viewpoint discrimination in a limited public forum.

It was clearly established when administrators singled out NORML ISU in rejecting a series of T-shirt designs the chapter had submitted, according to the judges.

Judge James Loken wrote a dissent specifically on the qualified-immunity issue, saying administrators were neither plainly incompetent nor knowing lawbreakers when they rejected a string of proposed T-shirt designs.

The court cites no case in which school officials administering a trademark licensing program violated, or were even accused of violating, the First Amendment by denying proposed uses of the schools registered trademark, Loken wrote.

Its trademark licensing policy already prohibited products causing potential health risks such as tobacco: Based on these undisputed program policies, it was far from clear prior to this litigation that ISUs trademark licensing program was not a form of government speech.

Loken blamed Gerlich, then the president of NORML ISU, for publicly suggesting the university gave its stamp of approval to pro-marijuana advocacy. Gerlich bragged in the media that the original approval of the clubs T-shirt reflected nothing but support from the university, support for the group that was blowing our minds.

MORE: Court tells ISU to stop suppressing pro-weed activists

Judge Kelly challenged Lokens dissent in a concurrence, saying qualified immunity does not require a case directly on point nor a previous ruling that the action was explicitly unlawful:

At the time of the challenged actions in fall 2012, the defendants were on notice of several cases that clearly established that their conduct violated plaintiffs First Amendment rights. In at least four cases, the Supreme Court has held that a university creates a limited public forum when it distributes benefits to recognized student groups.

Here, it is undisputed that ISU granted recognized status to NORML ISU as a student organization. ISU concluded that NORML ISUs purpose was consistent with the broad educational mission of the university, but it made clear that it does not support or endorse the purposes of any registered organizations, including NORML ISU.

Kelly said the university only claimed its trademarks were government speech because of the purported confusion around the NORML shirt: No reasonable university official could have relied on this single example of confusion, in a field of at least 2,195 student organization uses of ISU marks, to convert a historic forum for student speech into government speech.

Iowa State rebuked more severely by 8th Circuit in second ruling on First Amendment and marijuana by The College Fix on Scribd

Free speech has impacts on other people, and ISU must recognize that

We are very happy the 8th U.S. Circuit Court reaffirmed its earlier finding that Iowa State had violated our clients First Amendment rights, Robert Corn-Revere, head counsel for the plaintiffs and prominent First Amendment lawyer, told The College Fix in a phone interview.

Simply using the label trademark doesnt make government action immune from the First Amendment. College administrators need to be aware that if they violate students First Amendment rights there can be consequences, he said.

NORMLs national office referred The Fix to Dan Viets, the head of its Missouri affiliate, for comment. Iowa State was clearly discriminating against the NORML chapter because they did not agree with their message, Viets said in a phone interview, calling the incident an unusual occurrence for a NORML campus chapter.

ISU hasnt decided what its next steps will be, lead counsel Mike Norton told The Fix in a phone interview.

He said the 8th Circuits new ruling wont have much effect on how the university handles First Amendment issues: In the near term I dont think the ruling will have an impact except those directly related to trademark use.

While Iowa State is committed to the protections of the First Amendment, it cant ignore the impact that speech has on other people, Norton said.

MORE: Judge says students can sue president for t-shirt censorship

The case was reopened in March after the appeals court granted ISUs petition, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which sponsored the case through its three-year-old Stand Up for Speech litigation project.

The NORML ISU case was part of the first group of cases to be litigated under the project, and its the only one that has made it to an appeals court.

Iowa State has consistently lost in court. It lost its motion to dismiss more than two years ago, and a year later the district court issued a permanent injunction preventing the university from using the trademark policy to prohibit NORML ISU from making shirts containing marijuana symbols. It also lost on qualified immunity then.

Groups that joined the Alliance Defending Freedom brief in support of NORML ISU were Students for Life of America, Young Americas Foundation, Young Americans for Liberty, Ratio Christi and Christian Legal Society.

MORE: How license plates are like campus speech

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IMAGE: Africa Studio/Shutterstock, NORML ISU

About the Author

Zachery Schmidt is a senior at Western Washington University where he is majoring in political science and public relations. In his free time, Zach enjoys exercising, reading and writing.

Read more from the original source:
Iowa State officials knowingly violated students' First Amendment rights, appeals court says - The College Fix

For example, Facebook generally allows the sharing of animal abuse, a category of speech the Supreme Court deemed protected in 2010. But diverging from First Amendment law, Facebook will remove that same imagery if a user shows sadism, defined as the enjoyment of suffering.

Similarly, Facebooks manual on credible threats of violence echoes First Amendment law on incitement and true threats by focusing on the imminence of violence, the likelihood that it will actually occur, and an intent to credibly threaten a particular living victim.

But there are also crucial distinctions. Where First Amendment law protects speech about public figures more than speech about private individuals, Facebook does the opposite. If a user calls for violence, however generic, against a head of state, Facebook deems that a credible threat against a vulnerable person. Its fine to say, I hope someone kills you. It is not fine to say, Somebody shoot Trump. While the government cannot arrest you for saying it, Facebook will remove the post.

These differences are to be expected. Courts protect speech about public officials because the Constitution gives them the job of protecting fundamental individual rights in the name of social values like autonomy or democratic self-governance. Facebook probably constrains speech about public officials because as a large corporate actor with meaningful assets, it and other sites can be pressured into cooperation with governments.

Unlike in the American court system, theres no due process on these sites. Facebook users dont have a way to easily appeal if their speech gets taken down. And unlike a government, Facebook doesnt respond to elections or voters. Instead, it acts in response to bad press, powerful users, government requests and civil society organizations.

Thats why the transparency provided by the Guardian leak is important. If theres any hope for individual users to influence Facebooks speech governance, theyll have to know how this system works in the same way citizens understand what the Constitution protects and leverage that knowledge.

For example, before the Guardian leak, a private Facebook group, Marines United, circulated nude photos of female Marines and other women. This prompted a group called Not in My Marine Corps to pressure Facebook to remove related pages, groups and users. Facebook announced in April that it would increase its attempts to remove nonconsensual nude pictures. But the Guardian leaks revealed that the pictures circulated by Marines United were largely not covered by Facebooks substantive revenge porn policy. Advocates using information from the leaks have begun to pressure Facebook to do more to prevent the nonconsensual distribution of private photos.

Civil liberties groups and user rights groups should do just this: Take advantage of the increased transparency to pressure these sites to create policies advocates think are best for the users they represent.

Today, as social media sites are accused of spreading false news, influencing elections and allowing horrific speech, they may respond by increasing their policing of content. Clarity about their internal speech regulation is more important now than ever. The ways in which this newfound transparency is harnessed by the public could be as meaningful for online speech as any case decided in a United States court.

Margot E. Kaminski is an assistant professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Kate Klonick is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School.

Margot E. Kaminski and Kate Klonick

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 27, 2017, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Speech in the Social Public Square.

See original here:
Facebook, Free Expression and the Power of a Leak - New York Times