Chairman shelby the committee will come to the order. Mr. Deputy attorney general, welcome to the congresss Appropriations Committee, which we will hear in the fiscal year 2018 budget request. I am pleased to welcome you here to your first hearing before this subcommittee. I am grateful that you and the attorney general brought the new leadership to the doj. Your input is helpful and necessary as we reviewed the priorities for the Justice Department to ensure that National Security and Law Enforcement is funded appropriately and sufficiently. This is a challenging budget climate as you know. Violent crime has risen and terrorists have escalated fiscal constraints. The president proposes to decrease funding at the department of justice by 630 million in 2018 for the new total of 28. 3 billion. Since the start of the new administration, in the early days of your tenure as Deputy Attorney general, im pleased the department is refocusing on the core mission of enforcing a constitution and
Reservoir and also to fill up those helicopter buckets and then douse the fires directly. We are hearing between 200 to 300 structures are in harms way. Evacuations are now mandatory. If you look at your screen, you can see them dropping some of the red fire retardant that they are trying to do it around the perimeter. So it looks like they are right on the top maybe leaning on the western edge where they will try to draw a line with that red retardant to keep the flames from coming over the ridge towards the western side of the mountain. And this started i would say around 3 20 in the afternoon, the photographer steve dorr and i were on the opposite side of san jose when we first saw the smoke in the sky. At that point the smoke was a light gray color as we would turn it around and head into this direction. By the time you got here, you can see the smoke has changed color, now its the darker color going up into the sky and that smoke is continuing to spread across the sky to the west.
On behalf of nij and our director, Nancy Rodriguez, i welcome you to the most recent iteration of research in the thereal world. For those of you unfamiliar, this is a series that nij runs where we Link Research presentations, sometimes research refunded, sometimes research that others have done, with practitioners to emphasize the importance of applied science, and taking science and translating it into the real world so it is not simply an academic exercise and it really is focused on advancing the work in the field. Today we are obviously speaking on firearm violence and injury prevention. We have some great panelists. I have to read something from which i apologize for, but im told i have to. And then we will get started. In the unlikely event of a situation requiring evacuation, the following procedures should be followed. If you hear an alarm from anywhere in the building you should begin evacuation. If you encounter flashing strobe lights but hear no alarm, this indicates you sh
Has been taken, has been shifted i should say. Dont want to say it was taken away. Resides within dea. Dea will have i believe six additional heroin based tax forces. While they pull in state and local law enforce Law Enforcement officers was a great support for local Law Enforcement. Targeted have, very efforts, mikulskis efforts. Murkowski actually, of alaska. I think Barbara Mikulski also so we have a good team. The last thing i wanted to mention, i wont ask a question. Im out of time, just on opioid bill and we know how important that is. We look forward to continuing to work with the Justice Department. Thank you for your efforts in that regard. Thank you. Senator sessions. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you attorney general lynch good morning. Thank you for your courtesies and tempered leadership we appreciate that. The number of questions are important that we dont have time to go into fully today but i would like to raise some of them. First, in response to my colleague, senato
I want to have a conversation about recent policy changes and an approach that i have long called for i would explore with you a host of issues relative to the department including my reit recent fbi i also want to discuss with you at another example of stonewalling at the administration and using the department as a tool for its resistance. The people are now aware that they have used nongovernment service for official business over 2000 emails containing classified information with some containing with what we describe as topsecret, sensitive, compartmented information and other related to special access programs. The department and the fbi have refused to officially confirm basic information about the scope and nature of the investigation to this committee. Apparently the fbi is conducting an investigation relating to the mishandling of that classified information. Given the politics involved, the potential for improper influence over the work of the investigators and career prosecu