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Right-wing Israeli political parties have begun a campaign to sue president Abbas for "war crimes" at the International Criminal Court in response to the Palestinian Authority's recent decision to join international conventions and treaties.The campaign comes amid a near breakdown in ongoing peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO, and seeks to file legal procedures against Abbas accusing him of supporting "terrorism" and aiding to terrorist organizations.Beginning on Friday, Israeli newspapers and websites have published advertisements calling on Israeli lawyers to join the campaign led by the Israel Law Center to sue Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on charges of supporting terrorist organizations.

Right-wing Israeli political parties have begun a campaign to sue president Abbas for "war crimes" at the International Criminal Court in response to the Palestinian Authority's recent decision to join international conventions and treaties.The campaign comes amid a near breakdown in ongoing peace negotiations between Israel and the PLO, and seeks to file legal procedures against Abbas accusing him of supporting "terrorism" and aiding to terrorist organizations.Beginning on Friday, Israeli newspapers and websites have published advertisements calling on Israeli lawyers to join the campaign led by the Israel Law Center to sue Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on charges of supporting terrorist organizations.

Palestinian minister of justice Ali Muhanna told Ma'an that the Israeli government had "lost balance both politically and legally." Their response, he said, reflects the degree of rage in Israel towards the PA for attempting to join international conventions. Muhanna confirmed that Israel "cannot engage in any legal action at the ICC because Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court." "Such legal proceedings are submitted through the ICC's Attorney General or through the UN Security Council.""Abbas' move isn't a war crime. But the ongoing Israeli settlement construction, confiscation of Palestinian money, killing and detention of children are war crimes," he added.

The House voted Wednesday to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress and to instruct the Justice Department to probe her for criminal charges. The actions mark the culmination of two simultaneous committee investigations into allegations that Lerner knowingly presided over the improper targeting of conservative outside groups seeking tax-exempt status with the agency, including stalling the application process and giving special scrutiny to organizations that appeared to be affiliated with the tea party movement.

One resolution (H Res 574), agreed to on a 231-187 vote, will make Lerner the sixth public official since 1982 to be held in contempt for her refusal to testify before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Lerner cited her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in an appearance last year. The other resolution (H Res 565), referred by the Ways and Means Committee and supported Wednesday by a 250-168 vote, would call upon Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to appoint a special prosecutor to evaluate whether Lerner should face criminal charges on specific counts of misconduct related to the scandal. Neither resolution is likely to yield results: The Justice Department is actually under no obligation to appoint a special counsel, and the criminal contempt statute says the U.S. attorney has a “duty” to convene a grand jury in an event of a contempt citation, but it doesn’t appear to be mandatory.

Judges of the International Criminal Court presented a new challenge to Israel on Thursday, asking the court’s chief prosecutor to review her decision not to investigate a deadly Israeli commando raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla of aid ships in 2010. Israel denounced the move.In their request, posted on the court’s website, the judges of a pretrial chamber said the prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, had committed “errors of fact” and reached “simplistic conclusions” in her assessment of whether a criminal inquiry was warranted into the raid on the flotilla, which left eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent dead on the lead vessel, the Mavi Marmara.The judges asked that Ms. Bensouda “reconsider her decision not to initiate an investigation,” and do so “as soon as possible.”

A US Navy official has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and bribery charges, admitting he received envelopes of cash and the services of prostitutes from a Singapore-based company at the center of a multimillion-dollar fraud investigation. John Beliveau II, a supervisor in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), entered his plea at a hearing in federal court in San Diego, California on Tuesday. The bribery scandal has ensnared six US Navy officials so far and could lead to an expansion of the investigation if Beliveau cooperates with authorities as part of his plea agreement.

Beliveau became the first to be convicted in the bribery probe involving US Navy contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars in maintenance and restocking for Pacific Fleet ships. Beliveau, who was arrested in September, was accused of accepting money, travel and hotel costs for trips to Thailand and Indonesia from a Malaysian contractor, where he was also provided with prostitutes, according to charging documents.

According to the plea, Beliveau gave Francis detailed advice on how to thwart a years-long NCIS investigation against him, leaking the names of witnesses and sharing hundreds of pages of confidential NCIS files with him. In exchange, he received travel and dinners worth thousands of dollars, at least five envelopes of cash, and the services of prostitutes, the document said.

Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño confirmed Friday that his country granted the request submitted by Swedish authorities to interrogate Julian Assange in London, which could possibly result in the dropping of any future criminal charges against him. “Before (the Sweedish authorities) file three of the possible trials, they asked to go to the Ecuadorean embassy in London in order to collect his declarations,” said the state official in an interview with Radio Publica. “Julian Assange benefits from our protection for being exiled, and remains under the Ecuadorean juridiction.” Patiño explained that the procedure was the result of a two-month negotiation between the whistleblower and Swedish authorities.

For instance, the Swedish prosecutor could hand questions to their Ecuadorean counterpart, and the interrogation would be carried out with the presence of a Swedish attorney, he said. Once Assange's declarations are collected, Swedish authorities will be able to decide whether to proceded with criminal charges against Assange or not, meaning Assange could be able to finally leave the embassy were he has been forced to stay in since June 19, 2012. “We hope there won't be any issues with United Kingdom,” added Patiño, explaining Ecuador would then ask British authorities a letter of safe-passage, so Assange could head to the airport without fearing arrest. “Supposedly (Assange) should go straight to Ecuador, where he was granted asylum.” Swedish prosecutors have not indicated yet when they plan to visit the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to question Assange.

The Obama administration is now accusing Russia of cyber-crime and trying to disrupt the US presidential election. The claim is so far-fetched, it is hardly credible. More credible is that the US is reeling from Putin’s stunning humiliation earlier this week. Since June, US media and supporters of Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton have been blaming Russian state-sponsored hackers for breaking into the Democratic party’s database. It is further alleged that Moscow is stealthily trying to influence the outcome of the election, by releasing damaging information on Clinton, which might favor Republican candidate Donald Trump. Russia has vehemently denied any connection to the cyber-crime charges, or trying to disrupt the November poll. Now the Obama administration has stepped into the fray by openly accusing Russia. «US government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections», reported the Washington Post. This takes the row to a whole new level. No longer are the insinuations a matter of private, partisan opinion. The US government is officially labelling the Russian state for cyber-crime and political subversion.

Predictably, following the latest allegations, there are calls among American lawmakers for ramping up more economic sanctions against Russia. While US intelligence figures are urging for retaliatory cyber-attacks on Russian government facilities. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov derided the US claims as «rubbish». He noted that the Kremlin’s computer system incurs hundreds of hacking attempts every day, many of which can be traced to American origin, but Moscow doesn’t turn around and blame the US government for such cyber-attacks. There are several signs that the latest brouhaha out of Washington is a bogus diversion. As with previous Russian-hacker claims by the Democrats and US media, there is no evidence presented by the Obama administration to support its grave allegations against the Russian government. Assertion without facts does not meet a minimal standard of proof. When reports emerged in June – again through the Washington Post – that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) was hacked by Russian agents, the allegation relied on investigations by a private cyber security firm by the name of CrowdStrike. The firm is linked by personnel to the NATO-affiliated, anti-Russian think tank Atlantic Council. Again no verifiable evidence was presented then, just the word of a dubious partisan source.

Back then the Russian scare story, for that’s what it was, served as a useful diversion from far more important issues. Such as the 19,000 emails released from the DNC database showing that the party chiefs had preordained Clinton’s presidential nomination over her Democrat rival Bernie Sanders. Much-vaunted «US democracy» was exposed as a fraud, and so the Washington establishment quickly went into damage-limitation mode by smearing Russia. It was the whistleblower site Wikileaks, run by Australian journalist Julian Assange, that released the embarrassing emails. It had nothing to do with Russia. Assange has since hinted that his source was within the Democrat party itself. This is where it gets really explosive. Assange has vowed to release more emails that will prove that Clinton as Secretary of State back in 2011-2012 masterminded the supply of weapons and money to Islamist terror networks in Libya and Syria for the objective of regime change. Furthermore, Assange says that the emails prove that Clinton lied under oath to Congress when she denied in 2013 that she was had any involvement in facilitating arms to the jihadists. Assange has said that Wikileaks is going to publish the incriminating emails on Clinton’s alleged gun-running to terrorists this month. If the evidence stands up, Clinton could be prosecuted for perjury as well as treason in aiding and abetting official terrorist enemies of the US.

Egypt’s Court of Cassation, on Thursday, acquitted ousted ex-president Hosni Mubarak on all charges related to the death of protesters on January 25, 2011.

With its ruling, the Court of Cassation acquitted Hosni Mubarak on all charges related to the death of 239 people, and injuries suffered by another 1,588 across eleven of Egypt’s governorates during the so-called January 25, 2011 revolution. Mubarak had been sentenced to life in prison in 2012 for the killing of protesters before appealing the sentence. In November 2014 Mubarak, in a rare comment to the press, described the charges and especially the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2011 as “weird” and rejected that he was guilty of killing anyone. It is widely known that Egypt, under Mubarak, was plagued by corruption and that its human rights record was alarming. Egypt under the Mubarak regime was among others involved in the United States illegal extraordinary rendition program. That is, Egypt “officially” made “black sites” available for the USA and was involved in torturing rendered captives vicariously for the USA. The more surprising then, that the US administration of Barack Obama and the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were involved in “stage managing” the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, that led to the overthrow of Mubarak and the January 25 “revolution” being coopted by the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohammed Morsi. It is worth recalling that current Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, in a 2013 interview with Larry Weissman “The people of Egypt are aware of the fact that the USA has stabbed Egypt in the back with the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi. It is nothing that Egypt will easily forget, or forgive”.

The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials. The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.

Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a “New York Times problem.” If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

“We have repeatedly asked the Department of Justice to tell us what the status of the investigation was with respect to Mr. Assange,” said Barry J. Pollack, a Washington attorney for Assange. “They have declined to do so. They have not informed us in any way that they are closing the investigation or have made a decision not to bring charges against Mr. Assange. While we would certainly welcome that development, it should not have taken the Department of Justice several years to come to the conclusion that it should not be investigating journalists for publishing truthful information.”

More than six months after the US government finally dropped all charges against Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the stateless Palestinian academic and activist was deported yesterday to Turkey. During his appearance on Democracy Now! today, Dr. Al-Arian expressed relief that his twelve-year-long persecution in the US, where he lived for forty years, had finally come to an end. “It feels like I’m free, finally really feeling freedom for the first time in twelve years,” Dr. Al-Arian said.

During the half-hour segment, Dr. Al-Arian revealed how he campaigned for George W. Bush, helping him win crucial votes from the Muslim community that would clinch his 2000 presidential election victory in the decisive state of Florida. Dr. Al-Arian was very active politically, and had visited the White House several times during both the Bush and Clinton administrations. Regarding his role in Bush’s election, Dr. Al-Arian said that he received a call “from someone who was very close to [Bush advisor] Karl Rove” asking how the campaign could win the endorsement of the Muslim American community. Dr. Al-Arian told this contact that Bush needed to declare his support for proposed legislation against secret evidence being used against Arab and Muslim Americans. During the second presidential candidate debate, Dr. Al-Arian told Democracy Now!, Bush did just that, securing the support of Muslim and Arab American leaders.

His administration had invited these leaders to the White House after Bush took office for a big announcement of good news regarding the legislation. “Unfortunately, it was on 9/11,” Dr. Al-Arian said, referring to the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. “So that meeting never happened.” Instead, the country went in a very different direction. “At the time, we were protesting secret evidence,” Dr. Al-Arian added. “What happened after 9/11 is that they were arresting people with no evidence.”

The Justice Department is preparing to file corruption charges against Senator Robert Menendez, a scrappy 61-year-old veteran of New Jersey politics, after a two-year investigation into allegations that he accepted gifts and lavish vacations in exchange for political favors for a longtime friend and political benefactor.A law enforcement official said on Friday that the charges would be filed within a month against Mr. Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, who rose from a childhood in the tenements to become the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is now the highest-ranking Latino Democrat in Congress.

With the senator aggressively raising money for a legal-defense fund for more than a year now, charges against him had long been anticipated. But even in New Jersey, a state with a long history of political corruption, the case is jarring.

It revolves around the friendship between the senator and Salomon Melgen, a wealthy Florida eye surgeon. The two spent holidays together at Dr. Melgen’s home in the Dominican Republic, a gated oceanfront resort where the neighbors included Oscar de la Renta. Dr. Melgen eventually delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars to benefit Mr. Menendez and the national Democratic Party.Mr. Menendez accepted two round-trip flights aboard Dr. Melgen’s private jet for personal vacations in the Dominican Republic in 2010, but failed to report them as gifts or to reimburse Dr. Melgen at the time, as required under Senate disclosure rules.

A former head of a major Irish bank has been extradited from the U.S. and brought before Dublin District Court to face several charges stemming from the bank’s role in the 2008 financial crisis. David Drumm, former chief executive of Irish Anglo Bank from 2005 until 2008, had been arrested in Boston in October 2015, and originally attempted to fight extradition — but he recently withdrew the objection and was returned to Ireland early on Monday. Drumm faces 33 charges in Ireland, which echoes Iceland’s unprecedented move to hold its bankers criminally accountable for their role in that country’s economic meltdown. Though Drumm predictably denied wrongdoing, his charges include “fraud, forgery, misleading management reporting, unlawful lending, falsifying documents, and false accounting, linked to financial transactions prior to the collapse of Anglo,” according to the Irish Times.

Though prosecutors consider Drumm a flight risk — after all, he seemed to be seeking safe haven inside the United States — the court allowed the ex-banker to post bail under several conditions. Drumm’s passport is currently being held by the Gardaí (Garda Síochána, or Irish Police), and under the bail arrangement, he assured the court he would not apply for another and does not possess a U.S. passport. Seven of Drumm’s relatives offered to put their houses on the line as ‘security’ for his bail, though the judge only required four names. As RT reported, Drumm is alleged to have participated in transactions totaling around €7 billion between Anglo and a second lending institution, Irish Life and Permanent. Anglo “posted the worst corporate results in Irish history with losses of €17.5 billion for 2010.” Drumm came to the United States in 2009, and reportedly refused to cooperate with an investigation. Prosecutors fear his “capacity to marshal significant sums” of money adds to the possibility Drumm could easily disappear. However, his solicitor argued that in order to better prepare his defense — including sorting through the “millions of documents” and nearly 400 hours of phone conversations — Drumm needed to remain out of prison. As the Times noted, two “books” of evidence will need to be heard by the court — one of which entails bringing 120 witnesses to testify. The former banking executive has not yet entered a formal plea. He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison if found guilty.

(just incidentally, the notion that a government that has spent the last decade invading, bombing, torturing, rendering, kidnapping, imprisoning without charges, droning, partnering with the worst dictators and murderers, and targeting its own citizens for assassination would be above such conduct is charmingly quaint

Mahmoud Abbas has threatened to break off a unity agreement with Hamas if the movement does not allow the government to operate properly in the Gaza Strip. Speaking in Cairo ahead of an Arab League foreign ministers' meeting, the Palestinian president accused Hamas of running a shadow government and said he wanted a single authority and a single system of rule. "We will not accept the situation with Hamas continuing as it is at the moment," Abbas said on arrival in the Egyptian capital late on Saturday, in remarks published by official Palestinian news agency WAFA. "We won't accept a partnership with them if the situation continues like this in Gaza where there is a shadow government ... running the territory. "The national consensus government cannot do anything on the ground," he charged.  His comments came nearly two weeks after a ceasefire ended a deadly 50-day confrontation with Israel in Gaza. Abbas also accused Hamas of undertaking executions without trial.  Hamas denounced his allegations as baseless.

Under the terms of the reconciliation deal earlier this year, the factions agreed to form an interim consensus government and end seven years of rival administrations in the West Bank and Gaza. The deal sought to end years of rivalry between Hamas and Fatah.

The new cabinet, which is based in Ramallah, took office on June 2, with Gaza's Hamas government officially stepping down the same day. Hamas is however the de facto power in Gaza. Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader in exile, said Palestinians should steer away from triggering problems in the media. "I call on Abbas, Fatah, Hamas and all Palestinian factions and forces, including independent figures, to meet at the earliest, and come to an agreement in order to conclude our unity and the way forward ... one voice, one decision, one authority and one goal."

The 29-year-old former NSA contractor and source of the Guardian's NSA files coverage will – with the help of Glenn Greenwald – take your questions today on why he revealed the NSA's top-secret surveillance of US citizens, the international storm that has ensued, and the uncertain future he now faces. Ask him anything.

I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the "consent of the governed" is meaningless.

I was debriefed by Glenn and his peers over a number of days, and not all of those conversations were recorded. The statement I made about earnings was that $200,000 was my "career high" salary. I had to take pay cuts in the course of pursuing specific work. Booz was not the most I've been paid.

Venezuelan former deputy María Corina Machado yesterday filed a criminal report against Caracas mayor Jorge Rodríguez, who on Wednesday linked her to an alleged “plot to assassinate” President Nicolás Maduro. Machado, who vehemently denies the accusations, aims for charges to be brought against Rodríguez for defamation, falsifying documents, cyber-spying, insult, and fabricating a criminal case, among others. The public prosecutor, Luisa Ortega, came out to justify the interception of communications, calling the situation a serious state security problem. She also confirmed that the relevant authorities had given their backing to the interception, and underscored that a criminal investigation is underway into the alleged plot.

In a rare public accounting of its mass surveillance program, the United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations.The number of requests, contained in a 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general, shows that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax.The audit, along with interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, offers one of the first detailed looks at the scope of the program, which has played an important role in the nation’s vast surveillance effort since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Postal Service also uses a program called Mail Imaging, in which its computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail sent in the United States. The program’s primary purpose is to process the mail, but in some cases it is also used as a surveillance system that allows law enforcement agencies to request stored images of mail sent to and received by people they are investigating.

The mail cover surveillance requests cut across all levels of government — from global intelligence investigations by the United States Army Criminal Investigations Command, which requested 500 mail covers from 2001 through 2012, to state-level criminal inquiries by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which requested 69 mail covers in the same period. The Department of Veterans Affairs requested 305, and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security asked for 256. The information was provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information request.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Postal officials did not say how many requests came from agencies in charge of national security — including the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection — because release of the information, wrote Kimberly Williams, a public records analyst for the Postal Inspection Service, “would reveal techniques and procedures for law enforcement or prosecutions.”

The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) ruled last week that General Carlos Eugenio Vides-Casanova could be removed to El Salvador on account of his participation in human rights abuses in the 1980s when he was head of the National Guard (1979–1983) and then Minister of Defense (1983–1989). (The judgment is here.) In so ruling, the BIA affirmed a February 2012 opinion by an Immigration Judge, which — apparently for privacy reasons — was not released by the Justice Department until April 2013 after The New York Times filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Vides-Casanova has been found deportable under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1127(a)(4)(D) (passed in 2004 but rendered retroactive), which is intended to bar individuals who participated in genocide, Nazi persecution, torture, or summary execution from enjoying safe haven in the United States.

The Vides-Casanova decision reiterated D-R-’s determination that: inadmissibility under … the Act is established where it is shown that an alien with command responsibility knew or should have known that his subordinates committed unlawful acts covered by the statute and failed to prove that he took reasonable measures to prevent or stop such acts or investigate in a genuine effort to punish the perpetrators. The BIA’s opinion constitutes precedent and is binding upon all Immigration Judges. In reaching these results, both sets of adjudicators rejected Vides-Casanova’s claims that:  the human rights violations were the result of “rogue units” acting autonomously and his conduct was “consistent with the ‘official policy’ of the United States” such that it would be unfair under principles of equitable estoppel to remove him.

The head of the International Monetary Fund arrived in the dock of a Paris courtroom today as she braced herself to be formally charged with embezzlement and fraud.Christine Lagarde’s humiliation is not only a massive personal blow which could lead to her resignation, but one which will plunge the world’s banking system into further ignominy.

Lagarde faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail if found guilty of the very serious charges.It was when she was President Nicolas Sarkozy’s finance minister that she is said to have authorised a 270 million pounds payout to one of his prominent supporters, so abusing her government position.The money went to Bernard Tapie, a convicted football match fixer and tax dodger who supported Lagarde and Sarkozy’s UMP party.

n the late summer of 2009, lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission were preparing to bring charges in what they expected would be their first big crackdown coming out of the financial crisis. The investigators had been looking into Goldman Sachs’ mortgage-securities business, and were preparing to take on the bank over a complex deal, known as Abacus, that it had arranged with a hedge fund. They believed that Goldman had committed securities violations in developing Abacus, and were ready to charge the firm. James Kidney, a longtime SEC lawyer, was assigned to take the completed investigation and bring the case to trial. Right away, something seemed amiss. He thought that the staff had assembled enough evidence to support charging individuals. At the very least, he felt, the agency should continue to investigate more senior executives at Goldman and John Paulson & Co., the hedge fund run by John Paulson that made about a billion dollars from the Abacus deal. In his view, the SEC staff was more worried about the effect the case would have on Wall Street executives, a fear that deepened when he read an email from Reid Muoio, the head of the SEC’s team looking into complex mortgage securities. Muoio, who had worked at the agency for years, told colleagues that he had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.” This attitude agitated Kidney, and he felt that it held his agency back from pursuing the people who made the decisions that led to the financial collapse.

While the SEC, as well as federal prosecutors, eventually wrenched billions of dollars from the big banks, a vexing question remains: Why did no top bankers go to prison? Some have pointed out that statutes weren’t strong enough in some areas and resources were scarce, and while there is truth in those arguments, subtler reasons were also at play. During a year spent researching for a book on this subject, I’ve come across case after case in which regulators were reluctant to use the laws and resources available to them. Members of the public don’t have a full sense of the issue because they rarely get to see how such decisions are made inside government agencies. Kidney was on the inside at a crucial moment. Now retired after decades of service to the SEC, Kidney recently provided me with a cache of internal documents and emails about the Abacus investigation. The agency holds the case up as a success, and in some ways it was: Goldman had to pay a $550 million fine, and a low-ranking trader was found liable for violating securities laws. But the documents provided by Kidney show that SEC officials considered and rejected a much broader case against Goldman and John Paulson & Co. Kidney has criticized the SEC publicly in the past, and the agency’s handling of the Abacus case has been previously described, most thoroughly in a piece by Susan Beck, in The American Lawyer, but the documents provided by Kidney offer new details about how the SEC handled its case against Goldman. The SEC declined to comment on the emails or the Abacus investigation, citing its policies not to comment on individual probes. In a recent interview with me, Muoio stood by the agency’s investigation and its case. “Results matter. It was a clear win against a company and culpable individual. We put it to a jury and won,” he said.

Kidney, for his part, came to believe that the big banks had “captured” his agency — that is, that the SEC, which is charged with keeping financial institutions in line, had become overly cautious to the point of cowardice.

The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against David H. Petraeus, contending that he provided classified information to a lover while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, and leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information.F.B.I. agents discovered classified documents on her computer after Mr. Petraeus resigned from the C.I.A. in 2012 when the affair became public.

Mr. Petraeus, a retired four-star general who served as commander of American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has said he never provided classified information to Ms. Broadwell, and has indicated to the Justice Department that he has no interest in a plea deal that would spare him an embarrassing trial. A lawyer for Mr. Petraeus, Robert B. Barnett, said Friday he had no comment.

Mr. Holder was expected to decide by the end of last year whether to bring charges against Mr. Petraeus, but he has not indicated how he plans to proceed. The delay has frustrated some Justice Department and F.B.I. officials and investigators who have questioned whether Mr. Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Mr. Holder has led a crackdown on government officials who reveal secrets to journalists.The protracted process has also frustrated Mr. Petraeus’s friends and political allies, who say it is unfair to keep the matter hanging over his head. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, wrote to Mr. Holder last month that the investigation had deprived the nation of wisdom from one of its most experienced leaders.“At this critical moment in our nation’s security,” he wrote, “Congress and the American people cannot afford to have his voice silenced or curtailed by the shadow of a long-running, unresolved investigation marked by leaks from anonymous sources.”