https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/528170-ousted-federal-prosecutor-hired-by-new-york-law-firm

Geoffrey Berman, the ousted U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, will be joining a New York-based law firm.

Berman was hired by New York-based law firm Fried, Frank Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, the law firm said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Justice Department announced on June 19 that the former prosecutor had stepped down. Berman refuted that claim the same day, making it clear that he had not resigned.

Attorney General Willam Barr then sent Berman a letter notifying him that President Trump agreed to fire him. Berman was in the middle of several investigations into the president and some of his associates, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and former attorney Michael Cohen.

Berman told the House Judiciary Committee in July that Barr “repeatedly urged” him to resign prior to his ouster.

“The Attorney General said that if I did not resign from my position I would be fired," Berman told the panel. "He added that getting fired from my job would not be good for my resume or future job prospects. I told him that while I did not want to get fired, I would not resign."

One week after his testimony, he was hired to teach a course titled “Prosecutorial Discretion and Ethical Duties in the Enforcement of Federal Criminal Law” at Stanford Law School in the fall 2020 term.

At his new job, Berman will represent individuals and corporations in white-collar cases, internal investigations and complex commercial litigation.

https://codeanddagger.com/news/2020/12/1/the-cia-secret-patents-and-americas-best-battery-guy

Not a life-or-death problem, or a traitor-in-their-midst problem, but a battery problem. At least, the agency’s tech division wanted to hire a person who was “one of the best battery folks in the country,” but couldn’t because of an on-going technical-bureaucratic obstacle: patents.

See, the prospective hire held more than 60 patents already, but if he joined the agency, he would’ve had to give up his intellectual property.

“We could do secret patents,” said Dawn Meyerricks, CIA Deputy Director for Science and Technology (DS&T), “but I almost think they’re not real patents, because they don’t get published. You can’t license them. Goes into the same place the Ark of the Covenant does.”

The U.S. Patent Office currently lists nearly 6,000 patents that are under secrecy orders, according to the Federation of American Scientists, with 45 new ones this year, mostly ordered by the Navy. Twenty-one private inventors had their inventions covered by some of the orders in the last fiscal year — meaning they basically can’t do anything with them, according to a 2013 WIRED report.