Alston & Bird and Latham & Watkins are the latest major law firms to recruit lawyers with cybersecurity and privacy expertise, with both firms announcing new partner additions in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
Motherâs Day Concert
Brad Wiegmann delivers a tuneful puzzle performance.
A baby gorilla gazed in wonder at a maternal figure at the Bronx Zoo in 2015.Credit.Damon Winter/The New York Times
May 8, 2021
SUNDAY PUZZLE â Happy Motherâs Day! Brad Wiegmann is back so soon â does the name ring a bell? He was behind (pun intended) the nudist puzzle from February. That makes this puzzle fitting, in a way, because if anyone has seen you in your birthday suit it is certainly Mom.
Anyone with musical taste so rarefied that they eschew the Ramones, Frank Sinatra
and Britney Spears will be sorely ill prepared for the challenge today. For those of us who know âem all, the process of solving this puzzle will certainly be more comfortable than the process its theme describes to us. Scratch that: Even if you donât know a single answer, youâre almost certainly more comfortable.
Wed May 5, 2021 Last week, Jill Sanborn, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told lawmakers that James Hodgkinson “intended for the shooting to be his final act on Earth,” when he attacked Republican lawmakers on June 14, 2017, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise. According to Sanborn, Hodgkinson knew “he would likely be killed,” a tacit acknowledgement that the FBI had indeed classified the attack as “suicide by cop,” not an act of terrorism. “I am not aware of the rationale,” Sanborn told lawmakers. “I was not in my seat at the time, so I would have to get back to you on the specifics of what the rationale was.” In the seat of acting FBI director at the time was Andrew McCabe, a Clinton crony and major player in the Russia hoax. McCabe did not testify about the rationale for calling the attack suicide by cop.
Domestic Terrorism Law Being Weighed by Justice Department
Chris Strohm and Shaun Courtney, Bloomberg, April 29, 2021
The Justice Department is “actively considering” whether to seek a new law that would let prosecutors bring specific charges for plotting and carrying out acts of domestic terrorism, a senior department official said.
“One of the things we’re looking at is would we need new authorities,” Brad Wiegmann, deputy assistant attorney general for the department’s national security division, said during a House hearing Thursday.
Wiegmann said the department has been successful using existing laws to fight domestic terrorism, such as bringing charges for offenses involving violations of weapons or explosives laws, hate crimes and arson. He said more than 430 arrests have been made in connection with the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. The attack was carried out by extremist supporters of then-President Donald Trump.
We’ve known for a while that U.S. federal antiterrorism law has a large gap: While it has a panoply of penalties attached to the international form of terrorism, domestic terrorism is not a federal crime. Now the Biden administration is considering resolving the matter by having Congress fill the gap but there are ample and important questions about whether it should even try.
A senior official in Biden’s Justice Department told a House hearing this week that it is “actively considering” whether it should pass such legislation a question made particularly acute by the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Yet while the Democrats’ approach is manifestly more responsible than Republican denialism, obstruction, and obfuscation in dealing with the matter, passing such legislation remains fraught primarily because despite the omission, federal and local law enforcement has more than adequate ability to prosecute domestic terrorism with laws already on the books, while a n