Equifax had people agree in fine print to forced arbitration in exchange to getting some compensation.
I'm breaking my general rule not to respond to AC trolls since you're not as obvious as many.
The exact reason that Equifax unequivocally said in the link I posted above that no, you CANNOT be forced into arbitration over harm related to this breach, is because of people like you who squeeze their eyes shut and keep spraying around the internet as fact the same tired paranoid narrative you've convinced yourself is true. After making such an unequivocal statement, there's no court in the country that would entertain a motion to compel arbitration in response to a lawsuit. Get some perspective.
This is exactly the same as dropping a scribbled napkin or leaving a folder in a seat -- just much more information in much smaller of a form factor.
And I'm not really sure what is going to change this. If there's a way to enforce the use of encrypted flash drives, that would help. But even if so it seems like exceptions typically get carved out for big shots who either can't or don't want to deal with extra layers of bother.
If credit cards were as effective as tracking purchases and customers as 'loyalty cards', then stores would not incur the expense of running the programs.
Stating the obvious, with a loyalty card they can track purchases across payment methods, so for some people it could be more effective on the margins. But I'm not sure what that really has to do with my comment (or your "show your papers" language I was addressing). My point was that if you really consider presenting a quasi-anonymous ID # at the time of purchase to be "showing your papers," it's hard to see how you could feel good about providing a definitive ID # to them by paying with a credit card that's (if used lawfully) explicitly tied to you. It's virtually certain they're aggregating and tracking purchases made with the same (hashed, I'm sure) credit card number, so you're leaking the same quality of information without getting the benefits of the loyalty program.
But don't jack up the prices and then pretend you are giving me a discount. Many retailers have been fined for such practices
They're not pretending to give you a discount -- they actually are. Again stating the obvious, people who don't participate in the loyalty program don't get the discount. This isn't like the "GOLD CHAIN 95% OFF" schemes of yesteryear. Here, the regular prices are what they are, and every customer makes a conscious decision whether to trade information for discounts on select, rotating items. You may not like it, but there's nothing even vaguely illegal about that construct.
They had to do what they had to do. I'm not mad at Apple. I'm not going to stop buying Apple products. Rules are in place for the happiness and for the safety of workers
Those who want to be ripped at at Krogers unless they show their papers will continue to make that choice.
If you're concerned about presenting a plastic card with an ID # that need not be tied to your name, I certainly hope you don't pay with a credit card.
Which part of "forcing people to pay $10 billion a year to burn more polluting coal don't you understand?"
Pro tip: when using quotation marks, it's usually considered sporting to put them around the actual words you're quoting. The most charitable way to characterize your rewrite of your original statement would be a paraphrase. Using quotation marks around a paraphrase is misleading at best.
Moving past that, I'll patiently repeat, one more time, that your article says nothing about rolling back anything in the 1963 and/or 1970 Clean Air Acts (or, as you put it, "dismantling" them). In fact, other than a touch-feely and utterly unmeasurable statement at the outset, the article says nothing about air quality at all and focuses its angst on the unfairness of what it considers to be subsidies for coal and nuclear.
Ergo, your initial rhetorical statement that I questioned (i.e., "Trump is dismantling the Clean Air Act so we'll be like China soon") continues to be, as was clear from the start, absolutely baseless.
And with that, I'm done putting the rattle back on the high chair on this topic. Have as tin-foil-free of a weekend as you can manage.
A certified letter from the plaintiff's attorneys was sent to the Secretary of State demanding that the evidence be preserved almost two weeks before the lawsuit was filed.
Well, it's passably strange that (a) you're the only one I've seen mention a supposed certified letter, and (b) the only document the plaintiff is actually talking about as evidence of notice is an email sent a week after the lawsuit was filed. (Also (c) that you haven't provided a link to this supposed document that nobody else is talking about, but that isn't really so strange since it would impair your ability to just tell us what it really says and what it really means, right?)
The server was wiped the day after a lawsuit was filed to preserve the server as evidence.
That's a tighter time frame than I'd read elsewhere, but let's run with it since you always seem to know what you're talking about.
So since the lawsuit was filed on July 3, that means the server would have been wiped on July 4, two days before legal notice of the lawsuit was served on even one of the defendants on July 6, and six days before the earliest date the plaintiff even claims the defendant that had possession of the server got notice.
I think you'd best go shopping for another canister of smoke for that gun.
Yes, yes I do. I see a pattern of you making histrionic allegations that (a) our air quality is going to become like China's, because (b) Trump is "dismantling" the 1963 and 1970 Clean Air acts, and then when asked for the basis of those allegations providing a spray of random links that don't even pretend to support your claims.
I see one of two choices: either critical thinking is tough for you and so you honestly don't understand how citing an article about cost recovery for coal and nuclear plants needn't have anything at all to do with subverting the Clean Air Act, or you fully realize you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar and are flailing around trying to save face and ignoring the fact that makes you look even sillier. My gut says the latter, but I've been wrong before.
Nice try being an apologist, but there's no excuse for them to wipe the server and the backups.
As I explain further up-thread, there's a timing problem such that the plaintiffs can't even claim with a straight face (and in fact aren't) that CES had notice of the lawsuit before the scheduled wipe of the original server. As to whatever these "backups" were (I'm not finding any concrete details -- perhaps you have and can provide those), there's now about 15 years of case law that has developed over whether and when there's an obligation to preserve those. If you're conversant with that and have some concrete reasons why there would have been an obligation here, please do share. Otherwise you're just mindlessly repeating talking points.
Still, if you're wiping data coincidentally right after you find out you're being investigated, it's suspicious.
The "right after you find out" part of the story is problematic too. There's no automatic process that notifies defendants when someone files a lawsuit against them -- it's the responsibility of the plaintiff to "serve" (think process server) a copy of the complaint and court summons to each defendant. The plaintiff then files a "certificate of service" with the court with the who/what/when/how details.
Here, the certificate of service says that a FedEx copy was sent overnight on July 5 personally addressed to Brian Kemp at his address in the State Capitol building, first named defendant and chair of the state election board. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they made the FedEx pickup deadline, the earliest Brian Kemp could have seen it was sometime on July 6 (assuming he was even around that day, it got to the top of his mail stack, etc.). The certificate of service also says that a copy was emailed to Kemp's general counsel Ryan Germany, who in that role probably gets more than a few emails about new and pending lawsuits and thus may or may not have read it on the 6th.
That's fairly tight timing already just as to Kemp, but the above doesn't even pertain to the defendant at issue, the Center for Election Systems. The earliest notice they got appears to be on July 10, three days after the hard drive was wiped. You'll notice in the Ars Technica article I linked that the plaintiffs' representative doesn't really drum up the July 7 hard drive wiping as being suspicious. That in and of itself pretty much tells the tale -- giving up a cherry supposed smoking gun like that basically confirms that there's no way she could claim that CES had notice earlier than the 10th. And the event she does point to (the subsequent erasure of the backups a month later) seems an awful lot more like a measured step someone would allow to happen after confirming that the FBI's forensic image still existed than a desperate scramble to destroy relevant information. Their backups likely were file copies rather than bit-for-bit forensic copies anyway and thus wouldn't even be redundant to the FBI's forensic image -- they would be pretty much irrelevant.
Lawsuits are often won and lost over timelines, and the plaintiffs are doing everything they can to try to make this one look suspicious. Can't fault lawyers for doing their job. But given all the above points as well as the broader story in my original post, In my opinion there's just no there there.
The non-clickbaity side of the story (a statement from Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, who had possession of the server) is here:
"In March 2017, a Center for Election Systems’ server involved in an alleged data breach was turned over to the FBI. While the server was in the possession of the Bureau, a forensic image or copy of all the data on the server was made and held by the agency. Following the notification from the FBI that no data was compromised and the investigation was closed, the server was returned to the University’s Information Technology Services group and securely stored. In accordance with standard operating procedures, an after-action report was prepared. This report outlined hardware improvements for the Center, including repurposing the impacted server and surplusing servers that had exceeded end of life. As part of the report, the original server that had been investigated by the FBI was designated to be repurposed, and the drives on the server were erased and the server made available for alternative uses."
"As noted by the subpoena filed today by the Attorney General’s Office, the data and information that was on the server in question has been and is still in the possession of the FBI and will remain available to the parties in the event it is determined to be relevant in the pending litigation."
So (a) the feds already investigated and found no evidence the server was compromised, and (b) they still have their forensic image of the server. This seems a lot more like litigants and journalists huffing and puffing than it does a real issue.
I don't at all doubt your experiences, and I trust you don't doubt mine where a healthy percentage of GL[A-Z]+ folks I know don't seem particularly interested in taking care of children at all, much less to a degree that's likely to increase their overall survival rate per OP's somewhat risible claim. (I do note you limited your observation to couples, which could explain some of the difference in our experiences. But OP didn't limit the proposition to couples, and given the large percentage of single-parent households these days it seems like you'd need to include single people to really have an apples to apples comparison.) In any event, I very much agree it would be useful to have data rather than anecdotes.
But even if some reasonable amount of that goes on, there's a higher-level flaw in OP's thought process imo: it assumes that the average person-years society gains by them helping care for others' children exceeds (or even comes close to) the person-years society gains by them having a child or two of their own. I'm sure you could come up with some outlier situations where that might hold, but in the main that would be some fairly surprising math.
Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own, will likely therefore have extra time and resources available to help protect and care for the children of child-bearing couples in their family or community
Yeah, that's definitely how it goes in the real world. Did you have a source but forgot to cite it?
So let's take stock: the trollish comment braying ridiculous partisan talking points is modded insightful; the comment asking for the basis of the first comment is modded troll.
The lunatics are officially running the Slashdot asylum.
Please. Here's the actual text from the executive order:
Sec. 3. Rescission of Certain Energy and Climate-Related Presidential and Regulatory Actions. (a) The following Presidential actions are hereby revoked:
(i) Executive Order 13653 of November 1, 2013 (Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change);
(ii) The Presidential Memorandum of June 25, 2013 (Power Sector Carbon Pollution Standards);
(iii) The Presidential Memorandum of November 3, 2015 (Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment); and
(iv) The Presidential Memorandum of September 21, 2016 (Climate Change and National Security).
Your turn if you have an actual source that actually says stuff from 1963 and 1970 is going away.
(Of course, now Trump is dismantling the Clean Air Act so we'll be like China soon).
Right -- rolling back rules that have been in place for about 2 years is going to take us back to the air quality of the 50s.
If you weren't just tossing around baseless partisan rhetoric, I'd be really curious to hear the details of how you genuinely believe that's going to happen.
If attorney-general Jeff Sessions were going to bring charges against Hillary, if it was winnable, if it's even a good idea to go after your former opponent just after the election's over, he would have done so already.
It's ironic that you're happy to acknowledge that the Trump administration's decision not to prosecute might be politically motivated -- you're simply proving my point about Obama's.
In the "Mark Felt" movie, they (the FBI) said they specifically don't work for the White House.
Movies take a lot of creative liberties with facts. There's a decent discussion of the issue here. An excerpt:
For much of the 108-year history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it had only one director – J. Edgar Hoover, who led the agency for a few days short of 48 years. He was as near to a truly independent official in the federal government’s Executive Branch as the Constitution allows. He had his own special relationship with Congress, and ran the Bureau much as he wished.
His successors have not been as powerful, nor as independent. Indeed, one director in the Bureau’s history – former federal judge William S. Sessions – was fired for ethical reasons by President Bill Clinton in the summer of 1993, a little more than halfway through a 10-year appointment. The President’s public explanation was that there had been a loss of confidence in Sessions’ leadership. Then-Attorney General Janet Reno recommended the dismissal.
It is sometimes assumed that the President can oust an FBI director only “for cause” – that is, for some misconduct in office. But, as a Congressional Research Service study of the director’s office pointed out two years ago, “there are no statutory conditions on the President’s authority to remove the FBI director.”
The constitutional reality is that, if a government official is clearly placed within the Executive Branch, that official serves at the pleasure of the President, and can be fired “at will.” That history has had a recent illustration: earlier this month, the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., struck down part of a law by which Congress created a single director to lead the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau – a law that specified that the director could be removed by the President only “for cause.”
The appeals court simply deleted that phrase from the law, thus making the agency’s head subject to being fired by the President for any reason, or no reason at all. (The government has not yet indicated whether it will challenge that ruling in further appeals, perhaps to the Supreme Court.)
That is very much in line with what the Supreme Court has ruled over the years, to preserve the power of the President to be fully in charge of the Executive Branch. Since 1968, a federal law has provided that the head of the FBI will have a 10-year term in office. But the situation legally is that the chance to serve a full term depends upon retaining the confidence of the President.
Slashdot Mirror
Equifax had people agree in fine print to forced arbitration in exchange to getting some compensation.
I'm breaking my general rule not to respond to AC trolls since you're not as obvious as many.
The exact reason that Equifax unequivocally said in the link I posted above that no, you CANNOT be forced into arbitration over harm related to this breach, is because of people like you who squeeze their eyes shut and keep spraying around the internet as fact the same tired paranoid narrative you've convinced yourself is true. After making such an unequivocal statement, there's no court in the country that would entertain a motion to compel arbitration in response to a lawsuit. Get some perspective.
So don't troll.
Indeed.
This is exactly the same as dropping a scribbled napkin or leaving a folder in a seat -- just much more information in much smaller of a form factor.
And I'm not really sure what is going to change this. If there's a way to enforce the use of encrypted flash drives, that would help. But even if so it seems like exceptions typically get carved out for big shots who either can't or don't want to deal with extra layers of bother.
I, for one, have NEVER signed any kind of contract with Equifax, so howdahell would this apply to me?
It wouldn't. But don't take my word for it -- read where Equifax itself specifically said so.
Or, is Congress doing the usual "Fuck the poor!" approach, legal rights and non-contracts be damned?
No. This is just another misleading, sensationalist, clickbait headline in whatever it is Slashdot has become these days.
If credit cards were as effective as tracking purchases and customers as 'loyalty cards', then stores would not incur the expense of running the programs.
Stating the obvious, with a loyalty card they can track purchases across payment methods, so for some people it could be more effective on the margins. But I'm not sure what that really has to do with my comment (or your "show your papers" language I was addressing). My point was that if you really consider presenting a quasi-anonymous ID # at the time of purchase to be "showing your papers," it's hard to see how you could feel good about providing a definitive ID # to them by paying with a credit card that's (if used lawfully) explicitly tied to you. It's virtually certain they're aggregating and tracking purchases made with the same (hashed, I'm sure) credit card number, so you're leaking the same quality of information without getting the benefits of the loyalty program.
But don't jack up the prices and then pretend you are giving me a discount. Many retailers have been fined for such practices
They're not pretending to give you a discount -- they actually are. Again stating the obvious, people who don't participate in the loyalty program don't get the discount. This isn't like the "GOLD CHAIN 95% OFF" schemes of yesteryear. Here, the regular prices are what they are, and every customer makes a conscious decision whether to trade information for discounts on select, rotating items. You may not like it, but there's nothing even vaguely illegal about that construct.
They had to do what they had to do. I'm not mad at Apple. I'm not going to stop buying Apple products. Rules are in place for the happiness and for the safety of workers
That's just a little creepy.
Those who want to be ripped at at Krogers unless they show their papers will continue to make that choice.
If you're concerned about presenting a plastic card with an ID # that need not be tied to your name, I certainly hope you don't pay with a credit card.
Which part of "forcing people to pay $10 billion a year to burn more polluting coal don't you understand?"
Pro tip: when using quotation marks, it's usually considered sporting to put them around the actual words you're quoting. The most charitable way to characterize your rewrite of your original statement would be a paraphrase. Using quotation marks around a paraphrase is misleading at best.
Moving past that, I'll patiently repeat, one more time, that your article says nothing about rolling back anything in the 1963 and/or 1970 Clean Air Acts (or, as you put it, "dismantling" them). In fact, other than a touch-feely and utterly unmeasurable statement at the outset, the article says nothing about air quality at all and focuses its angst on the unfairness of what it considers to be subsidies for coal and nuclear.
Ergo, your initial rhetorical statement that I questioned (i.e., "Trump is dismantling the Clean Air Act so we'll be like China soon") continues to be, as was clear from the start, absolutely baseless.
And with that, I'm done putting the rattle back on the high chair on this topic. Have as tin-foil-free of a weekend as you can manage.
Any comments, angry folks?
Apparently the horde of vikings has already moved on to the next village.
A certified letter from the plaintiff's attorneys was sent to the Secretary of State demanding that the evidence be preserved almost two weeks before the lawsuit was filed.
Well, it's passably strange that (a) you're the only one I've seen mention a supposed certified letter, and (b) the only document the plaintiff is actually talking about as evidence of notice is an email sent a week after the lawsuit was filed. (Also (c) that you haven't provided a link to this supposed document that nobody else is talking about, but that isn't really so strange since it would impair your ability to just tell us what it really says and what it really means, right?)
The server was wiped the day after a lawsuit was filed to preserve the server as evidence.
That's a tighter time frame than I'd read elsewhere, but let's run with it since you always seem to know what you're talking about.
So since the lawsuit was filed on July 3, that means the server would have been wiped on July 4, two days before legal notice of the lawsuit was served on even one of the defendants on July 6, and six days before the earliest date the plaintiff even claims the defendant that had possession of the server got notice.
I think you'd best go shopping for another canister of smoke for that gun.
See a pattern yet?
Yes, yes I do. I see a pattern of you making histrionic allegations that (a) our air quality is going to become like China's, because (b) Trump is "dismantling" the 1963 and 1970 Clean Air acts, and then when asked for the basis of those allegations providing a spray of random links that don't even pretend to support your claims.
I see one of two choices: either critical thinking is tough for you and so you honestly don't understand how citing an article about cost recovery for coal and nuclear plants needn't have anything at all to do with subverting the Clean Air Act, or you fully realize you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar and are flailing around trying to save face and ignoring the fact that makes you look even sillier. My gut says the latter, but I've been wrong before.
Nice try being an apologist, but there's no excuse for them to wipe the server and the backups.
As I explain further up-thread, there's a timing problem such that the plaintiffs can't even claim with a straight face (and in fact aren't) that CES had notice of the lawsuit before the scheduled wipe of the original server. As to whatever these "backups" were (I'm not finding any concrete details -- perhaps you have and can provide those), there's now about 15 years of case law that has developed over whether and when there's an obligation to preserve those. If you're conversant with that and have some concrete reasons why there would have been an obligation here, please do share. Otherwise you're just mindlessly repeating talking points.
Still, if you're wiping data coincidentally right after you find out you're being investigated, it's suspicious.
The "right after you find out" part of the story is problematic too. There's no automatic process that notifies defendants when someone files a lawsuit against them -- it's the responsibility of the plaintiff to "serve" (think process server) a copy of the complaint and court summons to each defendant. The plaintiff then files a "certificate of service" with the court with the who/what/when/how details.
Here, the certificate of service says that a FedEx copy was sent overnight on July 5 personally addressed to Brian Kemp at his address in the State Capitol building, first named defendant and chair of the state election board. Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they made the FedEx pickup deadline, the earliest Brian Kemp could have seen it was sometime on July 6 (assuming he was even around that day, it got to the top of his mail stack, etc.). The certificate of service also says that a copy was emailed to Kemp's general counsel Ryan Germany, who in that role probably gets more than a few emails about new and pending lawsuits and thus may or may not have read it on the 6th.
That's fairly tight timing already just as to Kemp, but the above doesn't even pertain to the defendant at issue, the Center for Election Systems. The earliest notice they got appears to be on July 10, three days after the hard drive was wiped. You'll notice in the Ars Technica article I linked that the plaintiffs' representative doesn't really drum up the July 7 hard drive wiping as being suspicious. That in and of itself pretty much tells the tale -- giving up a cherry supposed smoking gun like that basically confirms that there's no way she could claim that CES had notice earlier than the 10th. And the event she does point to (the subsequent erasure of the backups a month later) seems an awful lot more like a measured step someone would allow to happen after confirming that the FBI's forensic image still existed than a desperate scramble to destroy relevant information. Their backups likely were file copies rather than bit-for-bit forensic copies anyway and thus wouldn't even be redundant to the FBI's forensic image -- they would be pretty much irrelevant.
Lawsuits are often won and lost over timelines, and the plaintiffs are doing everything they can to try to make this one look suspicious. Can't fault lawyers for doing their job. But given all the above points as well as the broader story in my original post, In my opinion there's just no there there.
The non-clickbaity side of the story (a statement from Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, who had possession of the server) is here:
"In March 2017, a Center for Election Systems’ server involved in an alleged data breach was turned over to the FBI. While the server was in the possession of the Bureau, a forensic image or copy of all the data on the server was made and held by the agency. Following the notification from the FBI that no data was compromised and the investigation was closed, the server was returned to the University’s Information Technology Services group and securely stored. In accordance with standard operating procedures, an after-action report was prepared. This report outlined hardware improvements for the Center, including repurposing the impacted server and surplusing servers that had exceeded end of life. As part of the report, the original server that had been investigated by the FBI was designated to be repurposed, and the drives on the server were erased and the server made available for alternative uses."
"As noted by the subpoena filed today by the Attorney General’s Office, the data and information that was on the server in question has been and is still in the possession of the FBI and will remain available to the parties in the event it is determined to be relevant in the pending litigation."
So (a) the feds already investigated and found no evidence the server was compromised, and (b) they still have their forensic image of the server. This seems a lot more like litigants and journalists huffing and puffing than it does a real issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
How many more instances until we call this a trend?
The Gray Lady issuing anti-Trump screeds isn't a "trend" -- it's a way of life.
I don't at all doubt your experiences, and I trust you don't doubt mine where a healthy percentage of GL[A-Z]+ folks I know don't seem particularly interested in taking care of children at all, much less to a degree that's likely to increase their overall survival rate per OP's somewhat risible claim. (I do note you limited your observation to couples, which could explain some of the difference in our experiences. But OP didn't limit the proposition to couples, and given the large percentage of single-parent households these days it seems like you'd need to include single people to really have an apples to apples comparison.) In any event, I very much agree it would be useful to have data rather than anecdotes.
But even if some reasonable amount of that goes on, there's a higher-level flaw in OP's thought process imo: it assumes that the average person-years society gains by them helping care for others' children exceeds (or even comes close to) the person-years society gains by them having a child or two of their own. I'm sure you could come up with some outlier situations where that might hold, but in the main that would be some fairly surprising math.
Consider that childless homosexuals, not being burdened by the task of having to care for children of their own, will likely therefore have extra time and resources available to help protect and care for the children of child-bearing couples in their family or community
Yeah, that's definitely how it goes in the real world. Did you have a source but forgot to cite it?
In other words, there was no basis for your original post other than you meeting Chicken Little for drinks tonight. Hardly a surprise.
So let's take stock: the trollish comment braying ridiculous partisan talking points is modded insightful; the comment asking for the basis of the first comment is modded troll.
The lunatics are officially running the Slashdot asylum.
Try 1963 and 1970... a little more than 2 years.
Please. Here's the actual text from the executive order:
Sec. 3. Rescission of Certain Energy and Climate-Related Presidential and Regulatory Actions. (a) The following Presidential actions are hereby revoked:
(i) Executive Order 13653 of November 1, 2013 (Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change);
(ii) The Presidential Memorandum of June 25, 2013 (Power Sector Carbon Pollution Standards);
(iii) The Presidential Memorandum of November 3, 2015 (Mitigating Impacts on Natural Resources from Development and Encouraging Related Private Investment); and
(iv) The Presidential Memorandum of September 21, 2016 (Climate Change and National Security).
Your turn if you have an actual source that actually says stuff from 1963 and 1970 is going away.
(Of course, now Trump is dismantling the Clean Air Act so we'll be like China soon).
Right -- rolling back rules that have been in place for about 2 years is going to take us back to the air quality of the 50s.
If you weren't just tossing around baseless partisan rhetoric, I'd be really curious to hear the details of how you genuinely believe that's going to happen.
You can have cheap products, be the industrial center of the world, or have clean air. Pick any two.
It will be interesting to see how serious they are about this.
If attorney-general Jeff Sessions were going to bring charges against Hillary, if it was winnable, if it's even a good idea to go after your former opponent just after the election's over, he would have done so already.
It's beyond debate that Clinton committed a felony even under Comey's optimistic rendition of the facts. You and I would have been most cheerfully prosecuted -- and likely convicted -- under these same facts.
It's ironic that you're happy to acknowledge that the Trump administration's decision not to prosecute might be politically motivated -- you're simply proving my point about Obama's.
And here comes the "-1, Truth Hurts" contingent -- just like clockwork.
In the "Mark Felt" movie, they (the FBI) said they specifically don't work for the White House.
Movies take a lot of creative liberties with facts. There's a decent discussion of the issue here. An excerpt:
For much of the 108-year history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it had only one director – J. Edgar Hoover, who led the agency for a few days short of 48 years. He was as near to a truly independent official in the federal government’s Executive Branch as the Constitution allows. He had his own special relationship with Congress, and ran the Bureau much as he wished.
His successors have not been as powerful, nor as independent. Indeed, one director in the Bureau’s history – former federal judge William S. Sessions – was fired for ethical reasons by President Bill Clinton in the summer of 1993, a little more than halfway through a 10-year appointment. The President’s public explanation was that there had been a loss of confidence in Sessions’ leadership. Then-Attorney General Janet Reno recommended the dismissal.
It is sometimes assumed that the President can oust an FBI director only “for cause” – that is, for some misconduct in office. But, as a Congressional Research Service study of the director’s office pointed out two years ago, “there are no statutory conditions on the President’s authority to remove the FBI director.”
The constitutional reality is that, if a government official is clearly placed within the Executive Branch, that official serves at the pleasure of the President, and can be fired “at will.” That history has had a recent illustration: earlier this month, the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., struck down part of a law by which Congress created a single director to lead the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau – a law that specified that the director could be removed by the President only “for cause.”
The appeals court simply deleted that phrase from the law, thus making the agency’s head subject to being fired by the President for any reason, or no reason at all. (The government has not yet indicated whether it will challenge that ruling in further appeals, perhaps to the Supreme Court.)
That is very much in line with what the Supreme Court has ruled over the years, to preserve the power of the President to be fully in charge of the Executive Branch. Since 1968, a federal law has provided that the head of the FBI will have a 10-year term in office. But the situation legally is that the chance to serve a full term depends upon retaining the confidence of the President.