seizure

Holder Defends Justice Department in Records Seizure

“It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole,” he said in an apparent reference to an article on May 7, 2012, that disclosed the foiling of a terrorist plot by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen to bomb an airliner. “And trying to determine who was responsible for that, I think, required very aggressive action.”

In a statement in response, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, Gary Pruitt, disputed that the publication of the article endangered security.

“We held that story until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed,” he said. “Indeed, the White House was preparing to publicly announce that the bomb plot had been foiled.” Mr. Pruitt said the article was important in part because it refuted White House claims that there had been no Qaeda plots around the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.

At a news conference at the Justice Department, Mr. Holder also disclosed that he recused himself last year from overseeing the case after F.B.I. agents interviewed him as part of their investigation. His deputy, James M. Cole, approved the subpoena seeking call records for 20 office and personal phone lines of A.P. reporters and editors.

Mr. Pruitt disclosed the seizure of the phone records on Monday in a letter to Mr. Holder protesting the action as overly broad and “a serious interference with A.P.’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”

But in a letter to The A.P. on Tuesday, Mr. Cole portrayed the search as justified and disputed a detail in the wire service’s account of the Justice Department action. While the news organization had said that records from “a full two-month period” had been taken, Mr. Cole said that the seizure covered only “a portion” of two calendar months.

“We understand your position that these subpoenas should have been more narrowly drawn, but in fact, consistent with Department policy, the subpoenas were limited in both time and scope,” he wrote. He added that “there was a basis to believe the numbers were associated with A.P. personnel involved in the reporting of classified information. The subpoenas were limited to a reasonable period of time and did not seek the content of any calls.”

The dispute centered on an ambiguous description in the original notice to The A.P., which an employee of the news organization said was sent as an attachment to an e-mail on May 10 from Jonathan M. Malis, a federal prosecutor, to several A.P. employees.

The attached letter, the employee said, consisted of a single sentence citing the Justice Department regulation for obtaining journalists’ telephone records, and saying that The A.P. “is hereby notified that the United States Department of Justice has received toll records from April and May 2012 in response to subpoenas issued” for 20 phone numbers in five area codes and three states.

The regulation requires subpoenas for reporters’ tolling records — logs of calls made and received — to be narrowly focused and undertaken only after other ways of obtaining information are exhausted. Under normal circumstances, news organizations are to be notified ahead of time so they can negotiate or ask a judge to quash the subpoena, but the regulation allows exceptions, in which case journalists must be notified no later than 90 days afterward.

Mr. Cole said the department had undertaken “a comprehensive investigation” before seeking the phone records, including more than 550 interviews and a review of “tens of thousands of documents.” The calling records, he added, “have been closely held and reviewed solely for the purposes of this ongoing criminal investigation” and would not be used in any other case.

The A.P. on Tuesday was still examining whether any telephone companies had tried to challenge the subpoena on its behalf before cooperating. But at least two of the journalists’ personal cellphone records were provided to the government by Verizon Wireless without any attempt to obtain permission to tell them so the reporters could ask a court to quash the subpoena, the employee said. Debra Lewis, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman, said the company “complies with legal processes for requests for information by law enforcement,” but would not comment on any specific case.

Christine Haughney contributed reporting from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/us/politics/facing-trio-of-crises-white-house-dodges-questions.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Greek Oligarch Arrested in Fraud Inquiry

Prosecutors charged Mr. Lavrentiadis, 40, with embezzling from a bank he helped oversee, Proton Bank, to prop up his struggling businesses. He is also accused of fraud, money laundering and membership in a criminal gang, charges that could carry a life term, a court official said.

Mr. Lavrentiadis, who built a multibillion-dollar empire only to see it stumble in the Greek crisis, is expected to face an investigating magistrate on Friday. A spokesman said he was not immediately available for comment.

The arrest coincided with the approval of the release of a $45 billion portion of aid from Greece’s European creditors, who have vigorously pressed Athens to clean up the corruption that has been a root of the country’s problems.

On Wednesday, an Athens court ordered the seizure of assets belonging to Mr. Lavrentiadis and 29 of his former associates. The ruling upheld an appeal by the shareholders of Proton Bank, once majority-owned by Mr. Lavrentiadis, who claimed to have suffered major losses after the lender allegedly issued hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans to dormant companies.

Few figures of Mr. Lavrentiadis’s stature have been prosecuted recently in Greece. Greek news outlets on Thursday evening debated the significance of the timing of the arrest, and whether efforts were being made to make an example of Mr. Lavrentiadis.

As a relative upstart, Mr. Lavrentiadis had been working hard to gain acceptance among the small circle of Greece’s ruling families, contributing heavily to charities and buying media outlets. But in an interview recently, he raised the possibility that he was being sacrificed because he was still an outsider.

A court official said the timing was coincidental. “The investigation reached fruition and it was time for his arrest,” the official said.

The Bank of Greece and Greece’s financial prosecutor had spent over a year investigating Mr. Lavrentiadis and his associates. But a few months ago, his name resurfaced as one of more than 2,000 Greeks appearing on the so-called Lagarde list of people said to have accounts in a Geneva branch of the bank HSBC. The accounts are now the subject of an investigation into tax evasion, a charge Mr. Lavrentiadis denies.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has sought to make examples of some cases of suspected wrongdoing by high-profile figures. In September the government began investigating the bank accounts of more than 30 Greek politicians to determine whether they should be charged with tax evasion.

But George Katrougalos, a Greek constitutional lawyer who is a fellow at New York University, said the arrest was unlikely to represent the beginning of a sustained campaign against suspected wrongdoers.

“Quite the opposite,” he said. “He’s being made a scapegoat for the system to continue to be like it used to be, which is closed networks between government and the economic elite, which are not transparent, and no one knows what’s happening.”

Mr. Lavrentiadis has denied wrongdoing and dismissed the investigation by the Bank of Greece as not objective. In the recent interview, he said that he was “clean” and that he was being unfairly targeted.

Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/world/europe/greek-oligarch-lavrentis-lavrentiadis-arrested-in-fraud-inquiry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Holder Defends Justice Department in Records Seizure

Greek Oligarch Arrested in Fraud Inquiry

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