Here’s the domestic legal news we covered this week:
The legal world is a busy place.
US Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke on Thursday
announced plans [press release] to make much of the US coast available for potential offshore drilling.
US
President Donald Trump [official profile] on Wednesday
revoked [executive order] the May
executive order [JURIST report] that created the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.”
This order terminates the Trump administration’s investigation into alleged voter fraud during the 2016 election.
The administration cited [press release] the fact that “many states have refused to provide …
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) [advocacy website] filed a
complaint [text, PDF] on Wednesday alleging that the Department of Justice (DOJ) violated the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [text] in failing to respond to their expedited request seeking communications concerning the DOJ’s decision to release private text messages sent during the 2016 presidential campaign by two former FBI investigators who had previously worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team.
The request stems from DOJ’s December 12 invitation to a group of reporters to view the FBI investigators’ anti-Trump text messages at their offices prior to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s [official website] public hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on December 13.
A judge for the
US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan [official website]
ruled [order, PDF] Tuesday that the Trump administration must release or conduct bond hearings for 1,444 detained Iraqi immigrants.
In a followup to his July nationwide stay [JURIST report] protecting the detainees from deportation, US District Judge Mark Goldsmith held that unless the government can show that a detainee poses an unreasonable risk of flight or danger to the community, they should be allowed to return to their productive life while the legal process unfolds.
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