Justice Department

The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place. President Obama's economic advisers and outside experts say the nation's much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind , including young people looking to buy their first homes and...

A civil liberties group is set to file a motion Thursday asking a special federal court to allow the release of a classified opinion that found the government engaged in unlawful surveillance on Americans. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is turning to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court after the Justice Department refused to release the court's opinion under a Freedom of Information Act request. The opinion's existence was revealed in July by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)

In the contentious debate over immigration policy, three groups have dominated public and political attention: the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants seeking to become legal, the skilled foreign workers bound for high-tech jobs and relatives waiting to be reunited with their families. Then there are those who won the green card lottery. This tiny visa program, aimed at diversifying the pool of immigrants to the United States, selects 55,000 applicants at random each year.

President Obama told advisers this week that he is not interested in prosecuting reporters for soliciting information from government officials, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday. "If you're asking me whether the president believes that journalists should be prosecuted for doing their jobs, the answer is no," Carney said in his daily briefing. The news comes a day after Carney had refused to answer questions about a Justice Department leak investigation into the...

President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency. Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word that the Justice Department had gone on a fishing expedition through months of phone records of Associated Press reporters . And yet President Obama reacted much as he did to the equally astonishing revelation on Friday that the IRS had targeted conservative...

Journalists, First Amendment watchdogs and government transparency advocates reacted with outrage Monday to the revelation that the Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks. Critics said the government's suggestion that James Rosen, Fox News's chief Washington correspondent, was a "co-conspirator" for soliciting classified information threatened to criminalize press freedoms...

Majorities of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service deliberately harassed conservative groups by targeting them for special scrutiny and say that the Obama administration is trying to cover up important details about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans last year. But a new Washington Post-ABC News poll also finds that allegations of impropriety related to the controversies have yet to affect President Obama's political...

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material. They used security badge access records to track the reporter's comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit . They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the...

As the nation's top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows. Why didn't his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters' phone records ? "I do not know," the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, "why that was or was not done. I simply don't have a factual basis to answer that question.

In a sweeping and unusual move, the Justice Department secretly obtained two months' worth of telephone records of journalists working for the Associated Press as part of a year-long investigation into the disclosure of classified information about a failed al-Qaeda plot last year. The AP's president said Monday that federal authorities obtained cellular, office and home telephone records of individual reporters and an editor; AP general office numbers in Washington, New...

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama believes journalists shouldn't be prosecuted for doing their jobs, the White House said Tuesday, showing solidarity with First Amendment advocates alarmed by a pair of high-profile federal probes into national security leaks. Although Obama believes leaking classified information violates the law, he also believes that a free press is critical — and that questions being raised about the proper balance between those two concerns are entirely...

Majorities of Americans believe that the Internal Revenue Service deliberately harassed conservative groups by targeting them for special scrutiny and say that the Obama administration is trying to cover up important details about the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans last year. But a new Washington Post-ABC News poll also finds that allegations of impropriety related to the controversies have yet to affect President Obama's political...

NEW ORLEANS — A federal judge has dismissed a charge that is the backbone of the case against a former BP executive accused of concealing information from Congress about the amount of oil spewing in 2010 from the company's blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico. Defense attorney Reid Weingarten called it a huge victory for David Rainey, who was BP's vice president of exploration for the Gulf. The charge of obstructing Congress thrown out Monday by U.S....

Journalists, First Amendment watchdogs and government transparency advocates reacted with outrage Monday to the revelation that the Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks. Critics said the government's suggestion that James Rosen, Fox News's chief Washington correspondent, was a "co-conspirator" for soliciting classified information threatened to criminalize press...

District and federal law enforcement officials arrested 17 people Monday after protesters opposing foreclosures attempted to storm the entrances of the Justice Department. About 100 protesters with groups called the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes marched on the building about 2 p.m. Some set up tents on the lawn and sidewalk while others ran up to the building's Constitution Avenue entrance. According to D.C. police, 17 people were arrested. Ann C. Wilcox, an attorney who represents...

The Justice Department inspector general said Monday that the former U.S. attorney in Phoenix retaliated against the main whistleblower in a botched federal gun operation by leaking information to a television producer that was meant to harm the whistleblower's credibility. Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz determined that former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke violated Justice Department policy by giving a Fox News producer a memo about John Dodson, a Bureau of Alcohol,...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Tuesday that he recused himself from involvement in a Justice Department leak investigation that secretly acquired telephone records of Associated Press journalists. But in response to questions at a news conference, he defended the department's conduct in probing what he described as one of the damaging leaks he has seen. In a letter to Holder and his deputy Tuesday, a media coalition rejected what it called "an overreaching dragnet for...

President Obama on Wednesday demanded and accepted the resignation of the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Steven T. Miller, as part of a multi-pronged effort to quell controversies that threaten to dominate his second term. The action was Obama's first substantive step to address a political uproar stemming from the IRS's disclosure that it had targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. It capped a day when the White...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Attorney in Arizona violated Justice Department policy by providing Fox News with information apparently aimed at undercutting the credibility of a federal agent who helped reveal the botched arms-trafficking probe called Operation Fast and Furious, the Justice Department's inspector general said Monday. There was substantial evidence in the 2011 incident that then-U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke's motive for disclosing a memo by federal agent John Dodson was retaliation,...

WASHINGTON — The Associated Press' president and chief executive says the government's secret seizure of two months of reporters' phone records has already had a chilling effect on newsgathering, a week after the subpoenas were revealed publicly. Gary Pruitt on Sunday called the Justice Department's actions "unconstitutional" and said the AP hasn't ruled out legal action. In his first television interviews since the AP reported the Justice Department...