Tag Archives: U.S. Department of Justice

Exclusive: While battling opioid crisis, U.S. government weighed using fentanyl for executions

By Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice examined using fentanyl in lethal injections as it prepared last year to resume executing condemned prisoners, a then untested use of the powerful, addictive opioid that has helped fuel a national crisis of overdose deaths.

The department revealed it had contemplated using the drug in a court filing last month, which has not been previously reported.

In the end, it decided against adopting the drug for executions. Attorney General William Barr announced in July his department instead would use pentobarbital, a barbiturate, when it resumes federal executions later this year, ending a de facto moratorium on the punishment put in place by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama.

But the special consideration given to the possibilities of fentanyl, even as federal agents were focused on seizing illegal imports of the synthetic opioid, show how much has changed since the federal government last carried out an execution nearly 20 years ago.

Many pharmaceutical companies have since put tight controls on their distribution channels to stop their drugs being used in executions.

As old supply chains vanished, many states, and the federal government in turn, have been forced to tinker with their lethal recipes. They have experimented with different drugs, in some cases leading to grisly “botched” executions in which the condemned prisoners have visibly suffered prolonged, excruciating deaths, viewed by some as a breach of the constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual” punishments.

In 2017, Nebraska and Nevada announced they would use fentanyl, which is 100 times more powerful than morphine, in new multi-drug execution protocols.

By 2018, the U.S. Justice Department was also examining the “use of fentanyl as part of a lethal injection protocol,” according to a three-page internal memorandum from March 2018 by the director of the department’s Bureau of Prisons.

The Justice Department revealed the memo’s existence in an August court filing after a federal judge ordered it to produce a complete “administrative record” showing how it arrived at the new pentobarbital execution protocol announced in July.

The full contents of the memo are not public. It is not known why the department decided to examine fentanyl, what supply channels were considered or why it ultimately rejected fentanyl as a protocol. The government’s court filing shows the only other named drug examined as the subject of a department memo was pentobarbital, the drug it now says it wants to use in December and January to kill five of the 61 prisoners awaiting execution on federal death row.

Wyn Hornbuckle, a department spokesman, declined to share a copy of the memo or to answer questions about the government’s execution protocol.

Mark Inch, who was the Bureau of Prisons’ director at the time, acknowledged in a brief telephone interview writing the memo. Inch, who abruptly resigned a couple months after writing the memo, declined to answer questions, in part because he said it would be in conflict with his current role running Florida’s Department of Corrections.

Doctors can prescribe fentanyl for treating severe pain. In recent years, illegal fentanyl has become a common additive in bootleg pain pills and other street drugs, contributing to the tens of thousands of opioid overdose deaths in the country each year. Even tiny quantities can slow or stop a person’s breathing.

Earlier this year, an Ohio lawmaker proposed using some of the illegal fentanyl seized from drug traffickers to execute condemned inmates.

‘FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG’

Death penalty researchers say that just because a drug is deadly does not mean it is always appropriate as an execution drug.

“I don’t think it’d be a surprise that the government would be looking at alternative methods of carrying out lethal injection, and fentanyl has been in the news,” Robert Dunham, the director of the Washington-based non-profit group the Death Penalty Information Center, said in an interview.

“But there is just something fundamentally wrong about using a drug implicated in illegal activities as your method of executing prisoners.”

In August 2018, Carey Dean Moore became the first person in the United States to be executed using a protocol that included fentanyl.

Nebraska prison officials injected him with fentanyl and three other drugs. Moore took 23 minutes to die. Witnesses said that before succumbing, Moore breathed heavily and coughed and that his face turned red, then purple.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

In losing legal battles over census, Trump may win political war

T-shirts are displayed at a community activists and local government leaders event to mark the one-year-out launch of the 2020 Census efforts in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

By Tom Hals

(Reuters) – The Trump administration has few realistic options to get a citizenship question onto next year’s census, but by keeping the issue in the public eye it could still trigger an undercount of residents in Democratic-leaning areas, legal and political experts told Reuters.

Constant media coverage linking citizenship and census forms could scare undocumented immigrants away from responding and rally U.S. President Donald Trump’s base to participate, they said. That, in turn, would help redraw voting districts across the country in favor of his Republican party, encouraging the president to pursue a legal battle that he has little chance of winning.

The latest parlay came on Sunday evening, when the U.S. Department of Justice installed a new team of lawyers to handle the last iterations of litigation that has been going on for more than a year.

“Even if the question is (taken) off, if people are tweeting as if it may be a real possibility, it continues to raise fears and depress the count,” said Thomas Wolf, a lawyer who focuses on census issues at the Brennan Center for Justice.

The U.S. Constitution requires the government to count all residents – whatever their legal status – every 10 years. The information collected becomes the basis for voting maps and distributing some $800 billion in federal funds each year.

It is illegal for the Census Bureau to share information about individuals with law enforcement or immigration authorities. But the idea of asking residents about citizenship status has nonetheless stoked fears that the survey would become a tool for the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies.

The president and his allies have said it is important to know about citizenship status, and characterized the question as something that should not draw controversy.

“So important for our Country that the very simple and basic ‘Are you a Citizen of the United States?’ question be allowed to be asked in the 2020 Census,” the president tweeted on July 4.

A Reuters poll earlier this year also showed 66% of Americans support its inclusion.

But demographers, advocacy groups, corporations and even the Census Bureau’s own staff have said the citizenship question threatens to undermine the survey.

Communities with high immigrant and Latino populations could have low response rates. Researchers have estimated that more than 4 million people out of a total U.S. population of some 330 million may not participate.

That would benefit non-Hispanic whites, a core part of Trump’s support, and help Republicans gain seats in Congress and state legislatures, critics have said.

The question seemed dead in June, when the Supreme Court blocked it, saying the administration had given a “contrived” rationale for its inclusion.

However, the high court left open the possibility that the administration could offer a plausible rationale. Department of Justice lawyers said on Friday that they were exploring other explanations. Trump also said he may try to force it into the survey through an executive order.

Legal experts immediately slapped down the ideas. It will be hard to convince justices that a new explanation is not also contrived, and an executive order would not override the Supreme Court decision or undo other court orders blocking the citizenship question, they said.

“There is nothing talismanic about an executive order,” said a statement from Thomas Saenz, the president and general counsel of MALDEF, a Latino rights group pursuing one of the cases against the administration. “Our government is not a dictatorship.”

Trump also said on Friday that although census forms are already being printed, the government could later produce “an addendum.”

It is not clear how that might work, but census experts said it would be an unprecedented disruption to a process that has been in motion for years.

“Any suggestion that on a moment’s notice the Census Bureau could add an extra piece of paper with an additional question to a census that it has been planning literally for a decade demonstrates a breathtaking ignorance of what it takes to pull off a census,” said Terri Ann Lowenthal, a census consultant.

An addendum would also likely be challenged in courts for running afoul of various administrative laws.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/motion-amend to prevent the citizenship question from being added.

In the meantime, attention surrounding the legal debacle may already be hurting the census and helping Trump achieve his goals, said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

“The longer he has this conversation, the worse it is for an accurate census count,” she said.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Additional reporting by Lawrence Hurley in Washington; Editing by Lauren Tara LaCapra and Rosalba O’Brien)

U.S. charges ex-intelligence analyst with leaking classified documents

FILE PHOTO: A police vehicle blocks an entrance into the National Security Administration (NSA) facility in Fort Meade, Maryland, U.S. March 30, 2015. REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File Photo/File Photo

By Sarah N. Lynch and Susan Heavey

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A former intelligence analyst was arrested on Thursday over allegations he illegally obtained and disclosed classified national defense information to a journalist, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The analyst, Daniel Everette Hale, 31, of Nashville, Tennessee, had worked at the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and began communicating with the reporter starting in 2013, the department said.

Classified documents were later published by the reporter’s online news outlet, the government alleged, without naming the publication or the journalist.

Reuters could not immediately determine the lawyer representing Hale.

The charges unsealed against Hale on Thursday marked the latest in a broad crackdown on media leaks by the Justice Department that started when Jeff Sessions was Attorney General.

During the Trump administration, the government has filed several criminal cases against leakers, including former intelligence analyst Reality Winner who divulged a report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to the Intercept news website.

Hale, who had served in the U.S. Air Force, is charged with five criminal counts, each carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, the Justice Department said.

According to the indictment, Hale was assigned to work at the NSA while serving on Air Force active duty from December 2011 to May 2013, and later that year also worked as a defense contractor assigned to the NGA.

In April 2013 while he was still at the NSA, prosecutors say Hale met a reporter at a book tour event in Washington.

The next month, Hale confided to a friend that the reporter wanted him to “tell my story about working with drones at the opening screening of (the reporter’s) documentary about the war and the use of drones,” according to the indictment.

The next month, Hale confided to a friend that the reporter wanted him to “tell my story about working with drones … and the use of drones,” according to the indictment.

After multiple meetings with the reporter, the government said, in February 2014 Hale printed six documents from his classified computer related to his work at NGA and then texted the reporter to see if they could meet in Washington.

The documents were later published by the reporter’s online news outlet, the indictment says.

Hale is accused of printing a total of 36 top secret documents from his computer, nine of which were related to his NGA work.

Of those, he allegedly provided 17 to the reporter or to the reporter’s news outlet.

Hale is due to make an initial appearance in federal court in Nashville on Thursday.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Bill Trott)

U.S. Justice Department to investigate frigid Brooklyn jail

FILE PHOTO - A New York City Police (NYPD) car is parked outside the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, following a bomb threat in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., February 4, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

By Gina Cherelus

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice will investigate a New York City jail where inmates said they spent days in freezing, dark cells and were left without medical care after a fire cut power and heat during a cold snap, the agency said.

The Justice Department said its watchdog Office of the Inspector General will examine whether or not the Federal Bureau of Prisons responded appropriately to the incident at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

The Bureau of Prisons, which oversees federal prisons and jails, is part of the Department of Justice.

“The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) are committed to the safe and humane living and working conditions of all inmates and employees,” the department said on Wednesday in a statement.

An electrical fire on Jan. 27 caused a weeklong power outage at the detention center as temperatures fell to near zero Fahrenheit (minus 18 Celsius). This sparked legal challenges, a public outcry and protests outside the jail by political activists, friends and relatives of the more than 1,600 male and female prisoners held there.

Attorneys from the law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, which on Monday filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons, on Thursday called for an independent review, noting that the Justice Department would be probing the bureau while simultaneously defending it in litigation.

“An independent special master is needed to ensure that any review has real and perceived integrity,” the lawyers, Sean Hecker and Jenna Dabbs, said in a statement.

A hearing for the lawsuit was set for Feb. 13.

Detention center employees, inmates and their lawyers testified on Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres in Manhattan. Torres is one of several judges looking into possible violations at the facility.

Jail authorities have said that power, heat and medical care were restored on Sunday, but lawyers for prisoners said at the hearing that some parts of the prison were still without heat and some inmates have not received medical care since the power outage began.

“I was struggling with trying to stay warm and keep my spirits up,” Donnell Murray, an inmate at the jail since 2017, said during the hearing.

John Maffeo, a facilities manager at the detention center, testified that the building had issues with heating and power for about a week or two before the fire.

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; Additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Darren Schuettler and Jonathan Oatis)

U.S. says foreign meddling didn’t affect 2018 election systems

People fill out their ballots during the midterm election at Philomont Fire Station, in Purcellville, Virginia, U.S., November 6, 2018. REUTERS/Al Drago

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Top U.S. officials said on Tuesday that foreign actors did not have a significant impact on computer systems and other equipment underpinning the November, 2018 congressional elections, despite reports of hacking attempts.

The statement by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security contrasted with U.S. officials’ view that the 2016 presidential election was the target of a sophisticated Russian hacking and propaganda campaign to help Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hilary Clinton.

The two agencies said the U.S. government has found no evidence that foreign governments or agents had an impact last November, when Democrats won control of the House of Representatives.

Neither political campaigns nor electronic voting machines or other infrastructure was significantly affected, they said in a joint statement. They declined to provide further details.

U.S. prosecutors are investigating whether President Donald Trump’s campaign worked with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election. Trump has denied any collusion, and Moscow has also denied involvement.

Security experts have warned for years that U.S. election infrastructure — voting machines, voter registries and other computer systems — could be manipulated to change vote tallies or prevent people from casting ballots.

The 2016 election also illustrated how hackers can compromise candidates by releasing internal emails and other sensitive documents, and by working to sway public opinion through social media.

Ahead of the November 2018 election, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials warned that foreign actors were continuing their manipulation efforts. Prosecutors charged a Russian national with participating in a Kremlin-backed plan to interfere in the election.

Some state and local governments reported attempts to access their networks ahead of the November 2018 election, but U.S. officials said they were able to prevent or limit access.

On the night of the Nov. 6 election, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said there were no signs that voting systems had been breached.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect Republican candidates, said it was the target of a hacking attempt last year. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, running for re-election in West Virginia, also said his social-media accounts had been hacked.

U.S. intelligence officials warned last week that Russia and China are already targeting the 2020 presidential election.

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham and David Gregorio)

Dutch government says it disrupted Russian attempt to hack chemical weapons watchdog

Dutch Minister of Defence Ank Bijleveld speaks during a news conference in The Hague, Netherlands, October 4, 2018. REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

By Anthony Deutsch and Stephanie van den Berg

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Dutch authorities disrupted an attempt in April by Russian intelligence agents to hack the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Defence Minister Ank Bijleveld said on Thursday.

At a news conference in The Hague, Bijleveld called on Russia to cease its cyber activities aimed at “undermining” Western democracies.

She noted that the U.S. Department of Justice is expected to issue indictments of suspected Russian spies later on Thursday, in part due to information gleaned from the Dutch operation.

According to a presentation by the head of the Netherlands’ military intelligence agency, four Russians arrived in the Netherlands on April 10 and were caught on the 13th with spying equipment at a hotel next to the OPCW headquarters.

The men were not successful in breaching OPCW systems, the minister said.

At a presentation, Dutch Major General Onno Eichelsheim showed the antennae, laptops and other equipment the men intended to use to breach the OPCW’s wifi network. He said the spies were caught red-handed and attempted to destroy some of their own equipment to conceal what they had been doing.

At the time, the OPCW was working to verify the identity of the substance used in the March attack in Salisbury, Britain, on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. It was also seeking to verify the identity of a substance used in an attack in Douma, Syria.

The four Russians in the Netherlands were detained in April and expelled to Russia and not immediately prosecuted because the operation was considered military, not police, Eichelsheim said.

The men, who were also believed to have spied on the investigation into the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 had planned to travel on from the Netherlands to a laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland used by the OPCW to analyze chemical weapons samples, he said.

They were instead “put on a flight to Moscow,” said Bijleveld.

Eichelsheim warned against being naive and considering the Netherlands as relatively safe from Russian cyber attacks.

Russian military intelligence “is active here in the Netherlands … where a lot of international organizations are (based),” Eichelsheim said.

(Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

U.S. states sue Mylan, Teva, others for fixing drug prices

A person holds pharmaceutical tablets and capsules in this picture illustration taken in Ljubljana

y Diane Bartz and Sarah N. Lynch

(Reuters) – Twenty states filed a lawsuit Thursday against Mylan, Teva Pharmaceuticals and four other generic drug makers, saying they conspired on pricing of two common generic drugs, according to a copy of the complaint.

The civil lawsuit is one piece of a broader generic drug pricing probe that remains under way at the state and federal level, as well as in the U.S. Congress. The inquiries have grown over the past two years to include multiple drugs and companies, some of which have disclosed they are being investigated by the Justice Department.

The drugs involved in Thursday’s lawsuit include the delayed release version of a common antibiotic, doxycycline hyclate; and glyburide, an older drug used to treat diabetes.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, names Heritage Pharmaceuticals Inc as a “ring leader” of the price manipulation, and also lists Mayne Pharma, Aurobindo Pharma and Citron Pharma LLC as participants.

Asked for comment on Thursday, a spokesman for Heritage referred to their comment from the previous day, which blamed the former executives for the price-fixing and said that they had been terminated. Heritage is part of Indian company Emcure Pharmaceuticals.

Mylan denied the charge. “To date, we know of no evidence that Mylan participated in price fixing,” Mylan spokeswoman Nina Devlin said by email.

Teva spokeswoman Denise Bradley said by email that the company had just received the complaint and was reviewing it.

The other three companies had no immediate comment.

Teva shares were off 0.4 percent at $36.84 in New York trading. Mylan’s rose 0.9 percent at $38.01. Mylan has also come under fire for hiking the price of the Epipen to $600 for a two-pack, from $100.

The lawsuit alleges that top executives of the drug companies and their sales executives propped up the prices of the two drugs either by setting the prices or allocating markets, the New York attorney general’s office said in the statement.

The states also say in their lawsuit that executives knew that the conduct was illegal and either deleted emails or made efforts to avoid communicating in writing.

“Companies that collude and fix prices for generic drugs in order to pad their profits must be held accountable for the very real harm they inflict on New Yorkers’ ability to pay for life-saving medications,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement.

The state attorneys’ investigation into drug price fixing found evidence of broad, well-coordinated schemes on a number of generic drugs and is ongoing, according to the complaint.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit this week against two former Heritage executives alleging that they colluded to fix the prices of doxycycline hyclate, and to split up the market for glyburide.

Generic drug pricing became an issue in 2014, driven in large part by media reports of sharply rising drug prices, and Congress opened an investigation.

The lead state in the probe was Connecticut and the other states involved are Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington.