dChan
Anonymous ID: 695cb9 Sept. 25, 2020, 7:19 a.m. No.10782664   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>2681 >>2963 >>3152 >>3210

Democrats prepare bill limiting U.S. Supreme Court justice terms to 18 years

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Democrats in of the House of Representatives will introduce a bill next week to limit the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices to 18 years from current lifetime appointments, in a bid to reduce partisan warring over vacancies and preserve the court’s legitimacy. The new bill, seen by Reuters, would allow every president to nominate two justices per four-year term and comes amid heightened political tensions as Republican President Donald Trump prepares to announce his third pick for the Supreme Court after the death on Sept. 18 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with just 40 days to go until the Nov. 3 election. “It would save the country a lot of agony and help lower the temperature over fights for the court that go to the fault lines of cultural issues and is one of the primary things tearing at our social fabric,” said California U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, who plans to introduce the legislation on Tuesday, along with Representatives Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts and Don Beyer of Virginia.

 

Partly due to rising life expectancies, justices serve increasingly long tenures, on average now more than 25 years. Term limits for high court justices have for years had support from a number of legal scholars on both the right and the left. Several polls in recent years have also shown large majorities of the American public support term limits. The bill - the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act - is the first to try to set Supreme Court term limits by statute, according to Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, a judicial transparency group whose campaign for high court term limits has been gaining attention. Some legal observers, including those who favor term limits, say they must be accomplished through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has been interpreted as requiring life tenure for federal judges and justices. The bill seeks to avoid constitutional concerns by exempting current justices from the 18-year rule. Those appointed under term limits would become “senior” upon retirement and rotate to lower courts. “That’s perfectly consistent with their judicial independence and having a lifetime salary and a lifetime appointment,” Khanna said.

https://ca.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-termlimits-idUSKCN26F3L3

 

Thinking lawmakers should be moar concerned with their own term limits first.

Anonymous ID: 695cb9 Sept. 25, 2020, 7:50 a.m. No.10782942   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3177 >>3282

FBI Investigated Steele Dossier Source As A Possible Russian Spy Years Before Trump Probe

 

The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation on the primary source for dossier author Christopher Steele, and considered obtaining a warrant to wiretap him in 2010, according to a document released Thursday. The FBI was also aware of the information about the source, identified elsewhere as Igor Danchenko, by December 2016, according to the document. “This is the most stunning and damning revelation the committee has uncovered,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said in a statement after releasing an FBI memo about the dossier source. The document shows that the FBI considered a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant of Danchenko years before the bureau relied heavily on information that he had provided Steele, a former British spy, to obtain FISAs against Carter Page. Danchenko is not named in the memo, though is attorney has confirmed to reporters that the Russian national was Steele’s source. The information also could increase concerns that Russian disinformation was fed to Steele, a former MI6 officer who investigated the Trump campaign on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC. A Justice Department inspector general’s report released Dec. 9 said that the FBI received evidence in January and February 2017 that Russian intelligence officers may have fed false information into Steele’s network of sources. Footnotes from the IG report say that two Russian intelligence officers knew in July 2016 that Steele was investigating the Trump campaign.

 

According to the FBI document, Danchenko had contact with suspected Russian intelligence officers in Washington, D.C. in 2005 and 2006. The document says that the FBI had an investigation into Danchenko open from May 2009 to March 2011, based on an interaction he allegedly had with three employees of an American think tank. Danchenko worked at the time as a Russia analyst for the Brookings Institution, a prominent liberal foreign policy think tank. An employee of the think tank said that another employee, seemingly Danchenko, told others that if they got jobs in the government and obtained classified security clearances, they might be put them in touch with people so they could “make a little extra money.” “The coworker did express suspicion of the employee and had questioned the possibility that the employee might actually be a Russian spy,” the FBI memo says. The FBI opened a full counterintelligence investigation on Danchenko after discovering that he was an associate of two other subjects of FBI counterintelligence probes, the FBI assessment says. FBI databases also showed that Danchenko had contact in September 2006 with a Russian intelligence officer. The memo says that the intelligence officer invited Danchenko to his office at the Russian embassy. There, Danchenko allegedly told the officer that he was interested in entering the Russian diplomatic corps. The intelligence officer contacted Danchenko four days later to work “on the documents and then think about future plans,” the memo says.

 

The following month, Danchenko contacted the Russian intelligence officer, and mentioned finding out whether “the documents can be placed in tomorrow’s diplomatic mail pouch.” Danchenko also had contact in 2005 with a Russian intelligence officer based in Washington, according to the memo. The FBI interviewed several of Danchenko’s associates, according to the memo. One said that while Danchenko was not anti-American, he often presented pro-Russian viewpoints. Two interview subjects said that Danchenko “persistently” asked them about their knowledge of a U.S. military vessel. The memo says that an FBI field office initiated the process for applying for a FISA on Danchenko in July 2010. The bureau dropped the issue after Danchenko left the country in September 2010. “Because the Primary Sub-source had apparently left the United States, the FBI withdrew the FISA application request and closed the investigation,” the memo says.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/09/24/dossier-source-russian-spy-igor-danchenko-steele/

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/AG%20Letter%20to%20Chairman%20Graham%209.24.2020.pdf