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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) had many “anxieties” and “fears” about Sen. Jeff Sessions’ (R-AL) nomination to attorney general, she said in her opening statement during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Can he effectively “dispatch himself from President-elect Donald Trump and his record,” she wondered. In particular, Feinstein insisted that Sessions’ job does not include the prosecution of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who we all know abused her email use and put national security at risk. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump suggested that he was going to hire a special prosecutor to “look into her situation.” “An attorney...

Using a visa loophole to fire well-paid U.S. information technology workers and replace them with low-paid immigrants from India is despicable enough when it’s done by profit-making companies such as Southern California Edison and Walt Disney Co. But the latest employer to try this stunt sets a new mark in what might be termed “job laundering.” It’s the University of California. Experts in the abuse of so-called H-1B visas say UC is the first public university to send the jobs of American IT staff offshore. That’s not a distinction UC should wear proudly. UC is training software engineers at the...

Hillary Clinton is "hurting" following her election loss to Donald Trump, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Wednesday. "I think it is fair to say she’s hurting," Feinstein said during an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. The Democrat had lunch with Clinton last week when the former secretary of state visited Capitol Hill to attend Nevada Sen. Harry Reid’s retirement party. "She is brave," Feinstein said of Clinton. "She is a real professional in the sense of her values, care, concern. I think all of us know who watch that campaign, it was a very hard campaign for her - the...

Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is “hurting” after the 2016 campaign because of the “name-calling,” and “e-mail intrusion,” she endured. Feinstein said, “We had a quiet dinner, just the two of us in my hideaway. I am extraordinarily fond of this woman. I think it is fair to say she’s hurting. She is brave. She is a real professional in the sense of her values, her care, her concern. I think all of us know who watched that campaign, it was a very hard campaign for her.”

DEC 9 2016 Is Trump Softening on Young Immigrants? Senators Hope So, Offer Bill by SUZANNE GAMBOA WASHINGTON - Seizing on President-elect Donald Trump's "encouraging" comments in a Time interview, two U.S. senators are pushing for a stopgap protection from deportation for young immigrants who arrived or stayed in the country illegally as children. Senate Minority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., partnered to introduce legislation Friday that would protect the young immigrants should Trump repeal the executive action before Congress takes up immigration reform. The protection would be temporary to keep them from being deported while...

Following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, psychologist and U.S. Air Force veteran Dr. James Mitchell was called back to national service. Along with a partner, Bruce Jessen, he was tasked with developing the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. Designed to elicit time-sensitive intelligence from hardened al Qaeda leaders, the EITs later became immersed in controversy. In 2014, Senate Democrats released a report accusing Mitchell of torturing suspects with EITs and producing no results. In his new book, Enhanced Interrogation, Mitchell offers his own testimony on the EITs. He argues that the techniques were critical in saving the lives...

Republican politicians often claim they’ll slash back the jungles of red tape, in the form of regulations, that are strangling small businesses and making it difficult for American business to compete with imports. But that’s all they say, as the details are, by design, often tedious, boring, nonsensical and political. But here’s a comprehensible example of a rule change made by one senator that is making it hard for U.S. manufacturers to compete in foreign markets.

President Obama on Thursday nominated a former CIA officer and longtime lawyer who examined missteps in U.S. intelligence to be the spy agency’s next inspector general, hoping to fill a position at the watchdog office that’s been vacant for more than a year. If confirmed by the Senate, Shirley Woodward would fill the role left empty since David Buckley stepped down from in January 2015, on the heels of a landmark determination that CIA officials had gained unauthorized access to Senate computer files. Lawmakers called the episode a potential violation of constitutional separation of powers, and the spat led to...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Ca.) told ABC's Jonathan Karl Sunday that Hillary Clinton just wanted some privacy to be able to talk to her husband, daughter, and friends "and not have somebody looking over her shoulder into her e-mails." "Oh wait a second, I don't believe she was trying to hide anything," Feinstein said. "I've known Hillary for a quarter of a century. Let me tell you what I do think. I think this is a woman who wants a little bit of a private life. She wants to be able to communicate with husband, with daughter, with friends, and...

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein warned that Bernie Sanders' intention to take his candidacy to the Democratic convention in July could spark unrest similar to the chaotic 1968 convention in Chicago and the riots surrounding it. "It worries me a great deal," Feinstein told CNN's Manu Raju. "You know, I don't want to go back to the '68 convention, because I worry about what it does to the electorate as a whole -- and he should, too." Her comments were the latest evidence that Democrats are increasingly fretting that the divide between supporters of Sanders and backers of Hillary Clinton will...

The CIA inspector general’s office — the spy agency’s internal watchdog — has acknowledged it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved, Yahoo News has learned. Although other copies of the report exist, the erasure of the controversial document by the CIA office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according...

Sens. Richard Burr (R) of North Carolina and Dianne Feinstein (D) of California should be stripped of their positions for introducing a bill that would endanger American digital security and privacy. The Burr-Feinstein antiencryption bill isn't just bad, it's evidence of a dangerous incompetence in congressional leadership that is undermining America’s security. In fact, the draft bill, leaked two weeks ago and now officially released, is compelling evidence that Senate leadership should strip – or at least not reappoint – Senators Burr and Feinstein of their positions on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.... To say this most recent Burr-Feinstein...

Analysis In the wake of the FBI's failed fight against Apple, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have introduced a draft bill that would effectively ban strong crypto. The bill would require tech and communications companies to allow law enforcement with a court order to decrypt their customers' data. Last week a draft copy of the bill, dubbed the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016, was leaked, but the new version is even worse than the discussion draft.... The senators want to have their cake--by requiring tech companies to protect their customers' data--and eat it too--by insisting...

It's no secret that law enforcement agencies and governments at large want to have access to our personal data whether we like it or not. Hot on the heels of the FBI managing to bypass security measures that should have protected the data on a terrorist's iPhone 5c, we see that the case is definitely not closed. As many had suspected, now that the floodgates are open, agencies like the FBI are not content to let this one win be the last. This week, draft legislation leaked out of the U.S. Senate that to some highlights the government's ignorance about encryption. Within...

This is part two of a three-part series.Richard Ramirez had killed Peter Pan, 69, in his Lake Merced area home on August 18, 1985, over a year after he had raped and killed a 9-year-old girl in a Tenderloin basement (a crime in which he may have had help). The evidence linking Pan's murderer to the suspect in a string of Los Angeles County killings — now called the Night Stalker — made its way through the ranks of the San Francisco Police Department up to then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein. She held a press conference on August 23 to sooth citizens'...

Dear Senators Boxer and Feinstein, You say something to the effect that abortion is such an important "right" that nothing must be allowed to interfere with it or threaten it. Not even the "inconvenient" fact that sixty-four percent (64%) of women in a 217 member population sample "felt pressured by others" to get abortions.  Induced abortion and traumatic stress: A preliminary comparison of American and Russian women. Vincent M. Rue et al. Med Sci Monit, 2004; 10(10): SR5-16 Since you feel that we shouldn't be discussing topics that work against universal abortion, like forced abortion in China, what would...

Ted Cruz schools Dianne Feinstein on the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights...

A leading Democratic senator will seek legislation requiring the ability to "pierce" through encryption. The potential bill would allow American law enforcement to read protected communications with a court order. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that she would seek a bill that would give police armed with a warrant based on probable cause the ability “to look into an encrypted Web." "I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really...

Three months after Breitbart News and others outed Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) 's backdoor effort to freeze development on over one million acres of California dessert by having President Obama declare the area subject to the Antiquities Act of 1906, her efforts are going down in flames as Congressional Republicans are moving to ban the Antiquities designation. Feinstein's seven-year quest to convince "ongress to sequester over 1560 square miles of the Mojave Desert into three new national monuments under her proposed 'Desert Conservation and Recreation Act" has gone nowhere. Feinstein has argued that the area she wants designated as 'Mojave...

Senator Ted Cruz spoke out Wednesday against horrific forced abortions in China via its "totalitarian" one-child policy. In a speech on the Senate floor, he proposed "shaming" the one-party communist state by renaming the street on which the Chinese embassy is located after an imprisoned political dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. During his remarks, Cruz called out Senator Dianne Feinsteins's objection to the passage of a resolution towards this end.Cruz began with China's one-child policy and forced abortions. He recalled the story of Feng Jianmei, who was abducted from her apartment in June of 2012 after her husband...