Tag Archives: U.S. Justice Department

U.S. moves to drop case against Trump ex-adviser Flynn

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday abruptly asked a judge to drop criminal charges against Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn following mounting pressure from the Republican president and his political allies on the right.

The move drew furious criticism from congressional Democrats and others who accused the department and Attorney General William Barr of politicizing the U.S. criminal justice system by bending to Trump’s wishes and improperly protecting his friends and associates in criminal cases.

Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as an adviser to Trump during the 2016 campaign, had been seeking to withdraw his 2017 guilty plea in which he admitted to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia’s U.S. ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump took office.

The Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss the charges with U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who has presided over the case and has a reputation for fierce independence. Judges generally grant such motions, but Sullivan could demand answers from the department about its reversal or even deny the motion and sentence Flynn, a less likely scenario.

Sullivan at a 2018 hearing expressed “disgust” and “disdain” toward Flynn’s criminal offense, saying: “Arguably, you sold your country out.”

Trump, who had publicly attacked the case against Flynn and has frequently castigated the FBI, said he was “very happy” for his former aide, adding: “Yes, he was a great warrior, and he still is a great warrior. Now in my book he’s an even greater warrior.” Trump said in March he was considering a full pardon and accused the FBI and Justice Department of having “destroyed” Flynn’s life and that of his family.

Flynn was one of several former Trump aides charged under former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that detailed Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election to boost Trump’s candidacy and contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Trump’s longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone and his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort both were convicted and sentenced to multi-year prison terms.

The Justice Department said in its filing it was no longer persuaded that the FBI’s Jan. 24, 2017 Flynn interview that underpinned the charges was conducted with a “legitimate investigative basis” and did not think his statements were “material even if untrue.”

“A crime has not been established here. They did not have the basis for a counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage,” Barr said in a CBS interview. Asked about the fact that Flynn lied to investigators, Barr said: “Well, people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes.”

In a filing, Flynn’s lawyers agreed with the department’s motion to dismiss the charges.

It marked the latest instance of the department under Barr, a Trump political loyalist, changing course under public pressure from the president to go light on one of his allies. In February, Barr and other senior department officials abandoned a tough sentencing recommendation by their own career prosecutors in Stone’s case after Trump publicly lashed out at the prosecution team. The prosecutors quit the case in protest.

Shortly before the Flynn motion was filed on Thursday, career prosecutor Brandon Van Grack withdrew from the case and other related legal matters. He remains a Justice Department employee, a department spokeswoman said.

‘WITHOUT PRECEDENT’

Trump critics have accused him of becoming emboldened after his February acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial and interfering in cases involving people close to him.

“Flynn PLEADED GUILTY to lying to investigators. The evidence against him is overwhelming,” Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, wrote on Twitter. “The decision to overrule the special counsel is without precedent and warrants an immediate explanation.”

“We have to be deeply skeptical that this is anything other than a further capturing of our criminal justice system for the benefit of the president,” added Noah Bookbinder, a former prosecutor who now heads the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics advocacy group.

Seth Waxman, another former prosecutor now in private practice, added, “To have the case dismissed like this raises a lot of uncertainty for the institution of the Department of Justice.”

Barr was appointed by Trump long after Flynn was charged. Barr three months ago named Jeffrey Jensen, a U.S. attorney in Missouri, to review the case. Jensen said he “concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case.”

Trump fired Flynn after only 24 days on the job when it emerged that Flynn had misled Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI about his Kislyak dealings.

According to the indictment, Flynn in December 2016 – after Trump won the election but before he took office – discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak and asked him to help delay a U.N. vote seen as damaging to Israel, a move contrary to then-President Barack Obama’s policies.

Flynn was supposed to cooperate with prosecutors under his plea deal. But he switched lawyers and said prosecutors had tricked him into lying about his Kislyak conversations.

Pressure from Trump allies to drop the charges intensified last week after partially redacted documents turned over to Flynn’s defense showed more about the FBI’s thinking before interviewing Flynn.

An unidentified FBI agent wrote: “What is our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”

Flynn’s allies have argued those documents show the FBI was out to get him.

“The government has concluded that the interview of Mr. Flynn was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn – a no longer justifiably predicated investigation,” the Justice Department wrote in Thursday’s filing.

Prosecutors asked the judge in January to sentence Flynn to up to six months in prison, saying he “has not learned his lesson” and acts like “the law does not apply” to him.

His sentencing has been deferred several times.

Flynn previously headed the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency but he was forced out in 2014 in part due to his management style and opinions on how to combat Islamist militancy. He joined Trump’s 2016 campaign and at the Republican National Convention led chants of “Lock her up,” referring to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Jan Wolfe, Richard Cowan, and Alistair Bell; Editing by Scott Malone, Will Dunham and Peter Cooney)

FBI needs to do more to fight domestic extremist threats, watchdog says

By Andy Sullivan and Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The FBI has not done enough to fight homegrown extremist threats and has yet to figure out how to determine whether people it investigates who have mental health issues pose an actual threat to national security, the U.S. Justice Department’s internal watchdog said on Wednesday.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz also found that the FBI did not follow up on some cases that had been flagged as potential threats.

The report found shortcomings in the FBI’s efforts to prevent mass attacks by U.S. residents who have been inspired by international militant groups like Islamic State and al Qaeda, which the agency says its highest counterterrorism priority.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

So-called homegrown violent extremists have carried out more than 20 attacks in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001 – some perpetrated by people the FBI had already investigated.

Horowitz found that the FBI conducted reviews after those attacks to find out what it had missed, but didn’t make sure that agents followed through with its proposed improvements.

The FBI concluded in 2017 that it should have conducted about 6 percent of its counterterrorism assessments more thoroughly. But the agency did not re-examine nearly half of those cases for 18 months, Horowitz wrote.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan and Mark Hosenball; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)

Mistakes, but no political bias in FBI probe of Trump campaign: watchdog

By Sarah N. Lynch, Andy Sullivan and Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department’s internal watchdog said on Monday that it found numerous errors but no evidence of political bias by the FBI when it opened an investigation into contacts between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia in 2016.

The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz gave ammunition to both Trump’s supporters and his Democratic critics in the debate about the legitimacy of an investigation that clouded the first two years of his presidency.

It will not be the last word on the subject.

Federal prosecutor John Durham, who is running a separate criminal investigation on the origins of the Russia probe, said he did not agree with some of the report’s conclusions.

Horowitz found that the FBI had a legal “authorized purpose” to ask for court approval to begin surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

But he also found a total of 17 “basic and fundamental” errors and omissions in its applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) that made the case appear stronger than it was.

For example, the FBI continued to rely on information assembled by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele in its warrant applications even after one of Steele’s sources told the agency that his statements had been mischaracterized or exaggerated.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said that effectively turned the investigation into a “criminal enterprise” to defraud the court and violate Page’s rights.

“I don’t fault anybody for looking into allegations like this. I do fault them for lying and misrepresenting to the court,” said Graham, who will hold a hearing on Wednesday examining the report’s findings.

The report also singled out an FBI lawyer for altering an email in a renewal of the warrant application to claim that Page was not a source for another U.S. government agency, when in fact he did work from 2008 to 2013 with another agency that was not identified in the report. The lawyer, identified by Republicans as Kevin Clinesmith, did not respond to a request for comment.

Democrats said the report showed that there was no basis for Trump’s repeated charges that the FBI was trying to undermine his chances of winning the White House.

“This report conclusively debunks the baseless conspiracy that the investigations into Mr. Trump’s campaign and its ties to Russia originated with political bias,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said at a news conference.

Trump called the investigation a witch hunt and assailed FBI leaders and career staffers who worked on it.

“This was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it, and they got caught,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

The FBI investigation was taken over in May 2017 by former FBI chief Robert Mueller after Trump fired James Comey as the agency’s director.

“Those who attacked the FBI for two years should admit they were wrong,” Comey said in a Washington Post op-ed.

Mueller’s 22-month special counsel investigation detailed a Russian campaign of hacking and propaganda to sow discord in the United States and help Trump defeat Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Mueller documented numerous contacts between Trump campaign figures and Moscow but found insufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

Attorney General William Barr, who ordered the Durham investigation, said the report showed that the FBI launched its investigation “on the thinnest of suspicions.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray said he had ordered dozens of revisions to fix problems highlighted in the report, such as changes to warrant applications and methods for dealing with informants. The FBI would review the conduct of employees mentioned in the report, he said.

Horowitz said his office on Monday began a new review to further scrutinize the FBI’s compliance with its own fact-checking policies used to get applications to surveil U.S. persons in counterterrorism investigations, as well as counterintelligence probes.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball, Brad Heath and Andy Sullivan; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Will Dunham, Jonathan Oatis, Grant McCool and Cynthia Osterman)

U.S. Justice Department Russia probe review now criminal investigation: source

U.S. Justice Department Russia probe review now criminal investigation: source
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Justice Department review of the origins of the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election is now a criminal investigation, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The person, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, declined to say whether a grand jury had been convened in the investigation, which was first reported by the New York Times.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr launched a review earlier this year to investigate President Donald Trump’s complaints that his campaign was improperly targeted by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies during the 2016 election.

Democrats and some former law enforcement officials say Barr is using the Justice Department to chase unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that could benefit the Republican president politically and undermine former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The Democratic chairmen of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees blasted the reported move, saying it raised “profound new concerns” that Barr had turned the department into “a vehicle for President Trump’s political revenge.”

“If the Department of Justice may be used as a tool of political retribution or to help the President with a political narrative for the next election, the rule of law will suffer new and irreparable damage,” Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff said in a statement late Thursday night.

As part of his inquiry, Barr has asked Australian and British justice officials for assistance and visited Italy twice, meeting intelligence agents in Rome in August and September to learn more about people mentioned in Mueller’s report. Trump has also contacted foreign officials over the review, the department has said.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte this week said that the meetings established that Italy had no information in the matter and was not involved. A letter reviewed by Reuters showed Australia offered to assist in May.

Mueller’s investigation found that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, and led to criminal convictions of several former campaign aides. But Mueller concluded that he did not have enough evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy with Russia.

Barr appointed Connecticut State Attorney John Durham to lead the review of whether U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies acted properly when they examined possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, which ultimately led to the Mueller investigation.

Trump, who calls the Russia investigation a witch hunt and a hoax, says U.S. officials launched the probe to undermine his chances of winning the White House, although he and his supporters have provided no evidence.

Trump is also grappling with a Democratic-led impeachment inquiry focused on his request in a July telephone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, who is a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination to face Trump in the 2020 election.

Schiff is leading the impeachment inquiry being conducted along with the House foreign Affairs and Oversight panels.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Writing by Mohammad Zargham and Susan Heavey; Editing by Eric Beech, Peter Cooney and Giles Elgood)

U.S. charges FEMA official, contractor in Puerto Rico corruption case

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday announced corruption charges against a senior government official and a contractor who worked to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017.

In a 15-count indictment, U.S. prosecutors allege that Ahsha Tribble, who oversaw the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s efforts to restore electrical power after the hurricane, accepted helicopter rides, hotel rooms and other bribes from Donald Ellison, president of a company called Cobra Acquisitions LLC, which performed much of the work.

In return, Tribble pressured FEMA and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority to steer work to Ellison’s firm, prosecutors say. Cobra was awarded two contracts worth $1.8 million, according to federal prosecutors in Puerto Rico.

Prosecutors also charged Jovanda Patterson, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff who they say evaluated Cobra’s work even as she was trying to get a job with the company. Patterson also lied about her government pay to secure a higher salary at Cobra, they say.

FEMA and Cobra’s parent company, Mammoth Energy Services Inc., both said they were cooperating with the investigation.

Tribble and Patterson were not immediately reachable for comment. Attorneys for Ellison did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Charges filed against Tribble and Ellison include conspiracy to commit bribery, honest-services wire fraud and disaster fraud.

As part of the investigation, prosecutors have $4.4 million, a sailboat, and construction equipment from Ellison, according to the announcement.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Federal prosecutors to fight Boston Marathon bomber’s appeal

FILE PHOTO: A pedestrian walks past a memorial for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings and its aftermath near the race's finish line, on the second day of jury selection in the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston, Massachusetts January 6, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

BOSTON (Reuters) – Prosecutors on Thursday will urge a federal appeals court to uphold Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s conviction and death penalty sentence for helping carry out the 2013 attack, which killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

The U.S. Justice Department is expected to file a brief urging the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to reject Tsarnaev’s arguments that he was deprived of a fair trial when a judge declined to move the case out of the city rocked by one of the highest-profile attacks on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.

Their arguments are due by midnight EDT (0400 GMT Friday).

Defense lawyers in a brief filed in December acknowledged that their client, then 19, carried out the April 15, 2013, attack along with his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gunbattle with police days later.

But they argued that wall-to-wall media coverage of the bombings meant that nearly the entire jury pool was exposed to news about the attacks, which included “heart-wrenching stories about the homicide victims, the wounded and their families.”

Many victims of the blasts at the packed finished line of the race lost legs.

Defense lawyers said U.S. District Judge George O’Toole also ignored evidence that two jurors had commented on the case on social media before being picked and prevented the defense from telling jurors about Tsarnaev’s brother’s ties to a 2011 triple murder.

That evidence, they said, would have supported their sentencing-related argument that Tsarnaev was a junior partner in a scheme run by his older brother, “an angry and violent man” who had embraced radical Islam.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now 25, is a prisoner in the federal “Supermax” facility in Florence, Colorado.

Prosecutors in a filing earlier this month previewing their opposition brief said they planned to argue that Tsarnaev’s right to a fair trial was not violated.

A federal jury in 2015 found Tsarnaev guilty of placing a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the world-renowned race, as well as fatally shooting a policeman three days later.

The bombing killed three people: Martin Richard, 8; Chinese exchange student Lingzi Lu, 26, and restaurant manager Krystle Campbell. Tsarnaev shot dead Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, 26.

A park dedicated to Richard’s memory opened this month on the Boston waterfront.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond; Editing by Scott Malone and Susan Thomas)

U.S. charges WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with espionage

FILE PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves Southwark Crown Court after being sentenced in London, Britain, May 1, 2019. REUTERS/Henry Nicholls/File Photo

By Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department unveiled 17 new criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday, saying he unlawfully published the names of classified sources and conspired with and assisted ex-Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in obtaining access to classified information.

The superseding indictment comes a little more than a month after the Justice Department unsealed a narrower criminal case against Assange.

Assange was initially charged with conspiring with Manning to gain access to a government computer as part of a 2010 leak by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of U.S. military reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He now faces a total of 18 criminal counts and could face many decades in prison if convicted.

“These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavor to inform the public about actions that have been taken by the U.S. government,” said Barry Pollack, an American attorney for Assange.

The Justice Department said that not only did Assange aid and encourage Manning with the theft of classified materials, but he jeopardized the lives of human sources that included Afghans, Iraqis, journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates and political dissidents from repressive regimes by publishing their identities.

Law enforcement officials said on Thursday that the State Department had pleaded with Assange not to reveal the identities of such sources, but Wikileaks ignored the warning.

Manning was arrested in May 2010 and convicted by court-martial in 2013 of espionage in connection with the 2010 Wikileaks disclosures.

President Barack Obama reduced Manning’s sentence to 7 years from 35 years, but she is now in jail after repeatedly refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Assange.

Wikileaks describes itself as specializing in the publication of “censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption.”

Assange is now fighting extradition to the United States, after Ecuador in April revoked his seven-year asylum in the country’s London embassy. He was arrested that day, April 11, by British police as he left the embassy.

He is now serving a 50-week sentence in a London jail for skipping bail when he fled to the Ecuadorean embassy in 2012.

The decision to charge Assange with espionage crimes is notable and unusual. Most cases involving the theft of classified information have targeted government employees, like Manning, and not the people who publish the information itself.

In the wake of Assange’s arrest, prosecutors in Sweden re-opened a criminal investigation into allegations that Assange sexually assaulted a woman during a visit to Sweden.

Swedish authorities recently indicated they may send British authorities a fresh request for Assange’s extradition.

The decision regarding which country should have its chance to prosecute him first is now in the hands of Home Secretary Sajid Javid, Britain’s interior security minister.

The Justice Department’s quick turnaround with the filing of a more substantial indictment against Assange is not surprising.

Under extradition rules, the United States had only a 60-day window from the date of Assange’s arrest in London to add more charges. After that, foreign governments do not generally accept superseding charges.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball; Editing by Leslie Adler and Phil Berlowitz)

U.S. says Alabama state prisons ‘routinely’ fail to protect inmates from abuse

A U.S. flag and an Alabama State flag wave in the wind in Dauphin Island, Alabama, U.S., September 5, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday accused Alabama’s state prisons of regularly violating the constitutional rights of male inmates by failing to protect them from violence and sexual abuse.

In a letter to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, prosecutors and the country’s top civil rights law enforcement official said they had evidence the state was violating prisoners’ Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

“We have reasonable cause to believe that Alabama routinely violates the constitutional rights of prisoners housed in the Alabama’s prisons by failing to protect them from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, and by failing to provide safe conditions,” the letter said.

The review looked into prisons housing only male inmates.

The letter, which cited overcrowding and “serious deficiencies” in staffing levels and supervision, ordered the prison system to correct the problems within 49 days or the state could face a federal civil rights lawsuit.

The Justice Department said it also had the option of having U.S. Attorney General William Barr intervene in related private lawsuits against the state prison system.

The letter was signed by Eric Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, and the U.S. attorneys for the southern, northern and middle districts of Alabama.

The investigation was first initiated in October 2016, at the tail end of the Obama administration, and before Jeff Sessions, who is from Alabama, became the attorney general under President Donald Trump in early 2017, the department said.

The Alabama governor acknowledged the Justice Department’s findings and said the state’s Department of Corrections had been actively working to fix the issues.

The department “has identified many of the same areas of concern that we have discussed publicly for some time,” Ivey said in a statement on her official website.

“Over the coming months, my administration will be working closely with DOJ to ensure that our mutual concerns are addressed and that we remain steadfast in our commitment to public safety.”

The state’s Department of Corrections had been working to bolster the hiring and retention of correctional officers, to prevent prisoners from sneaking contraband into its facilities, and was replacing outdated prisons, the governor said.

The Justice Department said it preferred to resolve the issues with Alabama through a “more cooperative approach” in order to avoid litigation.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Glass ceiling for female federal investigators: U.S. watchdog report

An FBI agent exits her car in Austin, Texas, U.S., March 12, 2018. REUTERS/Sergio Flores

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Women are not getting hired or promoted at the same rate as men in the U.S. Justice Department’s top law enforcement arms, leaving many female employees feeling they face routine gender discrimination in the workplace, the department’s internal watchdog has found.

A report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, issued on Tuesday, looked at gender equity issues across the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

The low number of women in the ranks and the lack of promotions compared to their male counterparts is a large factor behind a perception of inequality that many women in the agencies have, the report found.

In fiscal year 2016, for instance, women comprised only 16 percent of the criminal investigator population across all four law enforcement agencies, it said.

And of the women employed, many worked in human resources or other administrative roles, and few held top leadership positions.

While a majority of male employees surveyed believed the workplace treated men and women equitably, a minority of women – only 33 percent – believed this was the case.

“We find it concerning that 22 percent of all women and 43 percent of female criminal investigators reported to us in the survey that they had been discriminated against based on their gender,” the report said.

“Additionally, in almost all the interviews and female focus groups we conducted, women reported to us that they had experienced some type of gender discrimination.”

Despite the fact many women reported being passed over for promotions or experiencing gender-based discrimination, few decided to file a formal Equal Employment Opportunity complaint.

Many of the women surveyed said they were concerned that filing a complaint might trigger retaliation, create a negative stigma or else they did not have confidence in the process.

“Underreporting and ineffective handling of EEO claims undermines employee trust and confidence that components (agencies) will address discriminatory behavior,” the report concluded.

The report calls on the Justice Department to take steps to improve how it hires, recruits and retains female employees.

All of the four agencies concurred with the watchdog’s recommendations.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Violent crime in U.S. rose in 2016 vs. 2015: Justice Department

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Violent crime rose 4.1 percent nationwide in 2016 compared to the 2015 estimates, the U.S. Justice Department said on Monday.

Violent crime, which the report defines as non-negligent killings, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, had steadily dropped since 2006, but had increased slightly in 2015, according to the annual report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“The report … reaffirms that the worrying violent crime increase that began in 2015 after many years of decline was not an isolated incident,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

The report said an estimated 1.2 million violent crimes took place across the country in 2016, an increase of 4.1 percent over the 2015 estimate.

In cities with populations larger than 100,000, the violent crime rate in 2016 was up 3.4 percent compared to the estimate from 2015.

President Donald Trump, who took office in January, has said he would do more to fight criminal gangs and would send in federal help to stem violent crime in Chicago.

The Justice Department has reversed or distanced itself from many of the Obama administration’s policies, including consent decrees to reform police departments and limits on transferring certain types of military gear to local law enforcement agencies.

 

(Reporting by Makini Brice; Editing by Bill Trott)