On Wednesday, Attorney
General Jeff Sessions eliminated an Obama administration directive that
prevented local law enforcement from circumventing state restrictions on
forfeiture of civil assets, a tactic that was heavily employed in the early
years of the war on drugs, but has since been linked to civil rights abuses:
people losing cash, cars and homes without any proven link to illegal activity;
police taking cash in exchange for not locking suspects up; a legal system that
makes it hard for victims to get their possessions back. Joining me today to talk all about the
practice of civil assets forfeiture and what the Attorney General’s directive means is Ames Grawert who is Counsel
in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program at NYU School of Law.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration’s ‘election-integrity’ commission
had its first meeting to map out how the Trump administration can best strip
the right to vote from millions of Americans, and while the commission hasn’t
gotten off to the strongest start it is joined in its efforts to disenfranchise
citizens by the immensely more powerful Justice Department. Joining me today to talk all about Trump’s
effort to suppress the vote and why she feels that Voter purges are coming
is Vanita Gupta, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, she was also formally Principal Deputy
Assistant Attorney General and head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil
Rights Division in the Obama administration.
This sure has been
another crazy week in politics what with Republicans in the Senate experiencing
yet another setback in their effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and
replace it with Trumpcare to the news that the Mueller investigation is now
possible looking at Trump’s businesses. Joining me today to help us wrap up the
week in politics is Eleanor Clift
the Washington correspondent for The Daily Beast, where she covers the White House and writes about politics and
culture.
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