I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Perhaps having learned a lesson by watching the last two presidents encounter major scandals over their handling of U.S. Attorneys, President-elect Obama appears to be preparing to handle the possible replacement of any federal prosecutors on a case-by-case basis:
“[The president-elect] is going to be smart and be cautious. My gut feeling is it won’t be like it was in 1993,” said U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton of Texas’ Western District, a member of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys. On Dec. 11, Sutton and 15 other members of the committee met with Obama’s DOJ transition chief, David Ogden, and his staff at the Justice Department to advise them on law enforcement issues and to point out areas the committee believes require special attention.
At the meeting, Ogden briefly discussed the U.S. Attorney issue, though he said he had had no role in deciding who stays and who goes, according to one committee member. Ogden, a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, is reportedly the leading candidate for the Justice Department’s No. 2 spot.
Sutton declined to characterize Ogden’s comments but said he left the meeting with the impression that the president-elect will address the U.S. Attorneys individually. “I think they’re going to work on a case-by-case basis,” said Sutton, who as a member of the Bush-Cheney transition took part in similar meetings before he was a committee member.
When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he immediately accepted resignations from all of the U.S. Attorneys in the country, all of whom had been appointed by Republican presidents. It is customary for the U.S. Attorneys to offer their resignations when a new president takes office, but it is rare that those resignations are accepted en masse because doing so can be highly disruptive to ongoing investigations and prosecutions. Clinton received a great deal of criticism for his actions.
More recently, George W. Bush sparked a major scandal by selectively firing U.S. Attorneys, including Margaret Chiara, the former U.S. attorney for the western district of Michigan for apparently political purposes. A report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice concluded a few months ago that many of them were fired for illegal reasons, including anti-gay discrimination.
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