FBI

According to Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Seamus P. McCaffery's lawyer, the justice has been cleared by the FBI in an investigation about fees paid to McCaffrey's wife and chief judicial aide, Lise Rapaport, by law firms for case referrals, The Legal Intelligencer's Gina Passarella reports. The revelation came as part of arguments held on whether preliminary objections should be granted in a defamation lawsuit brought by McCaffery and Rapaport against the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News for coverage of the referral-fee issue. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the FBI did not confirm or deny the status of the investigation.

The plaintiffs argue that the articles falsely suggest that McCaffery's decisions on the court were tainted by the referral fees, while the defense argue that the press' job is to highlight potentially problematic actions of public officials, The Legal further reports.

Ladar Levison, founder of the now-shuttered secure Lavabit email service, is finally free to talk about the federal government's electronic pursuit of his most famous customer, leaker Edward Snowden, after a court unsealed documents in the case. Levinson told The New York Times that he closed down his business rather than cooperate because law enforcement didn't just want access to Snowden's communications but such broad access that they could have gotten to all of his patrons. According to The Times, "they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code that would essentially allow the government untrammeled access to the protected messages of all his customers. That, he said, was too much 'You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,'" Levison said.