After graduating from law school, Plaskett was an Assistant District Attorney in the Bronx, New York. She prosecuted several hundred cases and was eventually in the Narcotics Bureau. She then worked as a consultant and legal counsel focused on internal corporate investigations and strategy for the Mitchel Madison Group, a spin-off from McKinsey & Company. Plaskett moved to Washington, DC and worked as counsel on the US House of Representatives, Committee on Standards of Official Conduct; the Ethics Committee. Plaskett left the Committee when she was asked by mentor and fellow trustee at Choate, Robert McCallum (later Ambassador to Australia) to work at the Justice Department as a political appointee.

She served as Counsel for the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, and also as Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Torts Branch in the Civil Division. Plaskett then worked on the staff of Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, primarily working on the Justice Honors program and an initiative to increase the number of minority and women attorney's at the Justice Department. At Justice she also worked on the Terrorism Litigation Task Force and the September 11 Victims' Compensation Fund. She was also the lead attorney (heading a team of 50 attorneys against over 300) for the US RICO case against the tobacco industry (at the time the largest civil case in US history); US v. Phillip Morris, et al. The lawsuit sought disgorgement of ill-gotten gains from youth advertising, false advertisement and specifically noted advertisement in minority communities for "replacement smokers".

During her time at Justice her boss, Larry Thompson, resigned and was replaced by James Comey. Comey asked Plaskett to remain on staff, and she served under his leadership as well. Plaskett left government to be a deputy general counsel at United Health Group, where she worked in the Medicaid/Medicare division: Americhoice under the leadership of Anthony Welters. She then relocated full-time to her ancestral home of the US Virgin Islands and worked in the private sector and then with the Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority. There she worked on tax incentive programs and public private partnerships trying to bring economic growth to the development of the territory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacey_Plaskett

>>5419686

Kek

Two former House staffers were indicted Thursday by the U.S. attorney’s office on charges related to an alleged revenge porn leak against their former boss, Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat who represents the Virgin Islands. In her first stateside interview since the incident, which took place just before her July 2016 Democratic primary election, Plaskett told The Daily Beast the exclusive story of how she became a victim of what she calls “cyber sexual assault.”

It was 1 a.m. on a sweltering July night in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the then-first-term congresswoman was asleep in her home with her family, when the phone rang. It would ring many more times that night.

Plaskett and husband Jonathan Buckney-Small scrambled from bed to take the first call. His brother was on the line, saying somebody just posted a topless selfie of Plaskett on Facebook, as well as a short video Plaskett took of her nude husband and their clothed daughter in their bathroom, playing with makeup. It’s on a public page, he said, being downloaded as we speak.

The couple started calling Facebook and anyone they could think of who might have sway with Facebook or law enforcement, which was a lot of people. Buckney-Small is a popular community activist and former professional tennis player, and Plaskett is the Virgin Islands’ lone delegate to the U.S. Congress.

Facebook took the post down at 4 a.m.—which was at least three hours too late.

That was the opening sequence of the saga Plaskett and her family endured beginning July 21, 2016, and culminating Thursday with the Department of Justice’s indictment of her two former congressional aides on federal charges related to the circulation of their former boss’ private nude images.

The staffers worked in Plaskett’s legislative office in Washington, D.C. According to the indictment, Juan R. McCullum, 35, of Washington, D.C., who worked in the office from April 2015 to July 2016, was charged with two counts of cyberstalking, and Dorene Browne-Louis, 45, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, who worked in the office from January 2015 to April 2016, was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice.

The indictment alleges that McCullum offered to get Plaskett’s iPhone repaired at a local Apple store in March 2016. The iPhone contained private, nude photos and videos that McCullum is alleged to have stolen and distributed using a Hotmail address and a Facebook account under a fictitious name. McCullum also is alleged to have encouraged others on social media to distribute and post the images in Plaskett’s congressional district during the run-up to her primary election.

McCullum told Browne-Louis about his activities as early as July 2, according to the indictment. She is accused of deleting text messages from McCullum and making false, incomplete, and misleading statements to law enforcement and a grand jury. Browne-Louis made her first appearance in court on Thursday, where she pleaded not guilty to the charges and was released on her own recognizance. McCullum’s first appearance in court has not yet been scheduled.

“I was informed today that preliminary arrests had been made of individuals who are alleged to have been involved in those illegal acts,” Plaskett said in a statement Friday. “I am deeply grateful to the Capitol Police and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia for their thorough and in-depth investigation of the crimes committed against me.” Her office declined to comment further on the specifics of the indictment, given the ongoing investigation.

But in an exclusive interview conducted before the indictments, Plaskett told The Daily Beast that on July 22, 2016, when she and her husband got the stolen material temporarily removed from Facebook, their relief was short-lived.

That same afternoon, Politico came out with a story about Plaskett’s photos and video under a soon-to-be-edited headline using the phrase “sex tape.” Before the day’s end, other publications including The Hill, Jezebel, and New York Daily News picked up not just the story but the “sex-tape” misnomer. Bipartisan Report took less than a day to label the scandal “career-ending.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/congresswoman-stacey-plaskett-opens-up-about-being-a-revenge-porn-victim

>>5420076 (Continued)

“I had to call my sons in college and sit down with my son in the eighth grade and try to explain this to them,” Plaskett, 51, told The Daily Beast in her first stateside interview on the events in question. “The [New York] Daily News ran a story, so I had to call my parents, who are in their eighties and live in New York and were getting phone calls about me.”

The photo, she explained, was a topless selfie she had taken for her husband, something like a souvenir of “a healthy marriage,” she said, and the video was a non-sexual home movie of a private family moment. Both, Plaskett alleged then, were criminally hacked from her phone or computer.

When the photo and video were released, Plaskett said she felt like she was traversing a minefield. She wanted to win re-election, but she refused to act like a victim. “People were trying to bait me to go down a rabbit trail of talking about this a lot, and I didn’t want to play the victim or be this distraught and upset woman,” she said.

The most painful part was “the allusion or allegation that the close family relationship we had was inappropriate,” Plaskett said, referring to the video of her husband and their daughter. “We live in a hot climate in the tropics, and we only have ceiling fans. We don’t have central air because it costs too much, so you walk around in your underwear, or someone can walk into you in a bathroom and you don’t have any clothes on. It’s really no big deal, but people were alluding to us doing [sexual] stuff with our little girl around. That was really, really hurtful.”

It didn’t hurt her at the polls, though. The day the photo and video appeared, Plaskett issued a statement denouncing the hacking and non-consensual posting of the material, and two days later she did a lone interview on the topic with the Virgin Islands Consortium. She went on to trounce her Democratic primary opponent, 85 percent to 14 percent.

Some critics, such as the Republican write-in opponent in the 2016 general election, Gordon Ackley, pounced on the video as evidence of inappropriate behavior in Plaskett’s family.

“It is deeply unfortunate when those entrusted to serve our community engage in a manner that poorly reflects upon the Virgin Islands,” Ackley wrote in a statement to Politico on July 21, the morning the photos were posted. “I have always tried to conduct myself in an honorable manner and to provide a positive influence for the next generation of Virgin Islanders.”

Plaskett went on to overwhelm Ackley in the November general election, garnering almost 98 percent of the vote. Her press secretary, Richard Motta, said the effort to harm her politically backfired.

“There was an overwhelmingly positive outpouring of support for the congresswoman,” Motta said. “People said, ‘She’s this elected official, and if this can happen to her… it can happen to me too.’”

Plaskett was heartened that even the “church ladies” of the Virgin Islands had her back.

“Those people who they thought would be upset with me, the elders, were the ones who were like, ‘Young lady, that’s your home, that’s your private business, and I don’t want anybody looking in my bedroom, so what you do in your bedroom is not my business either,’” Plaskett said. “That was really kind of an amazing feeling to me.”

The now-two-term, non-voting delegate to the U.S. House says she was equally comforted by all the professional women, including women of color, who rallied to her cause.

“One of the groups that is difficult to gain support from, as a woman of color, is other professional women of color, because we’re harder on each other,” said Plaskett, who was born in Brooklyn, and whose family is from the Virgin Islands. “Women can be very critical of other women, but when they saw someone going after me directly as a woman, that group was like, ‘Oh, hell no, we’re not going to stand for that.’ So I think it was really important to have other professional women see me as a human being, and see themselves in me.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/congresswoman-stacey-plaskett-opens-up-about-being-a-revenge-porn-victim

>>5420126

I wonder how good the anal is in the Virgin Islands