Barack Obama

Buying Obama Time, Congress Delays Rove Subpoena Deadline

Zachary Roth | January 30, 2009, 5:48PM

Justice delayed?

The House Judiciary committee has agreed to a request from Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, to postpone the deadline by which Rove must respond to a subpoena issued by the committee.

Here's the letter sent by the committee, agreeing to Luskin's request and setting a new date of February 23 for Rove's testimony.

The hold-off serves the interests of the White House. The Obama administration is scheduled to file a brief on February 18 in the ongoing court case over the House's subpoena of two other senior Bush White House aides, Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten. At that time, it will likely indicate whether it intends to back President Bush's claim of retroactive executive privilege on behalf of his aides. So the committee's decision to agree to Luskin's request means the Obama administration has until then to formulate its position.

The ball, then, is still in Obama's court. And court is still exactly where the battle over Rove's testimony is most likely headed.

Barack Obama

Clinton Lawyer On Bush's Exec Privilege Claim: "There's Only One President At A Time"

Zachary Roth | January 30, 2009, 3:16PM

So does that letter Newsweek obtained, sent January 16 by the Bush White House to Karl Rove's lawyer, instructing Rove not to respond to any subpoenas that might be issued, change the state of play as to whether Rove will end up testifying on the US Attorneys firings? After all, President Bush is now on the record claiming the right to assert executive privilege even after leaving office.

Not according to Neil Eggleston, who specialized in executive privilege issues for President Clinton's White House. Eggleston told TPMmuckraker that, since President Obama has already issued an executive order that appears to take the view that a former president can't assert executive privilege, he's unlikely to back Bush's claim. And assuming things then wind up in court, Eggleston said he'd be very surprised if a court sided with Bush, ruling that executive privilege can be asserted retroactively.

"Remember what Obama kept saying during the transition: 'There's only one president at a time?'" asked Eggleston. "This is one where I think a court's going to decide there's only one president at a time."

Eggleston told TPMmuckraker last week that Obama's order seemed designed to help gain access to Bush White House documents and testimony that Congress has been seeking, including on the US Attorney firings matter.

Barack Obama

Newsweek Obtains Letter From Bush Lawyer, Asserting Retroactive Privilege

Zachary Roth | January 30, 2009, 9:52AM

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff has obtained the letter sent by White House counsel Fred Fielding to Karl Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin, just a few days before Bush left office, instructing Luskin that Rove "should not appear before Congress" in response to any subpoenas issued. The letter makes clear that Bush is continuing to assert a retrospective executive privilege over his White House years.

The Wall Street Journal had reported the existence of the letter -- which makes clear the lengths to wish the former president is wiling to go to keep a lid on what happened inside his White House -- earlier this week.

Earlier this week, the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to Rove, ordering him to testify February 2 about the US Attorney firings, and the prosecution of ex Alabama governor Don Siegelman. Luskin told us he had forwarded the subpoena to the Obama White House, which must decide whether to back Bush's claim of retroactive privilege. If it doesn't, but Bush continues to assert it -- which it would appear from the letter he will -- the matter looks headed for the courts. There is no settled legal precedent to guide how a court might rule.

The Obama White House told Newsweek it's still studying the issue.

Fielding also sent a near identical letter to former White House counsel Harriet Miers, instructing her not to appear for a scheduled deposition in front of the Judiciary committee. The issue of whether Miers and another Bush White House aide, Josh Bolten, can testify is currently the subject of a court fight between the committee and the Bush White House.

The Obama White House is scheduled to file a brief in that case by February 18, in which it may make clear whether or not it intends to back Bush's executive privilege claim.

Barack Obama

Keying Off Obama, ACLU Asks For Bush Torture Memos

Zachary Roth | January 28, 2009, 12:13PM

Those directives issued by President Obama last week, reversing the Bush administration's policy of secrecy, have really shaken things up.

Earlier this week, the House Judiciary committee subponaed Karl Rove for testimony in the US Attorney firings matter. That move appears to have been in response to the Obama's moves, since Rove had long been claiming executive privilege backed by President Bush.

Now, McClatchy reports, the ACLU has asked the new administration to release Bush Justice Department memos justifying harsh interrogation methods, eavesdropping, and secret prisons.

The Bush administration had long refused to release them, citing national security concerns, among other things.

It's clear that Obama's moves -- specifically, his rescinding of a Bush DOJ memo that gave backing to agencies when they refused to disclose material, and his issuing of an executive order urging agencies to take a broader view of the Freedom of Information Act -- triggered the request.

"The president has made a very visible and clear commitment to transparency. We're eager to see that put into practice," an ACLU staffer told McClatchy.

Pro Publica has a rundown of the missing memos.

As McClatchy notes, Obama's nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen, has written articles suggesting she thinks that in general, such memos should be released.

So this could be another set of crucial Bush records that will finally see the light of day.

Barack Obama

Gibbs: We're Mulling Rove Subpoena

Zachary Roth | January 27, 2009, 4:21PM

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was just asked at a briefing about Congress's subpoena, issued yesterday to Karl Rove, seeking his testimony on the US Attorneys firings.

Gibbs replied that the White House counsel's office "is studying those issues and will advise us when they have a recommendation."

As we reported earlier, the ball is now largely in President Obama's court as to whether Rove can continue to defy Congress's subpoena.

We'll keep you posted.

Barack Obama

Clinton Lawyer: Obama's Order Designed To Pry Loose Key Bush Docs

Zachary Roth | January 23, 2009, 11:25AM

Already, a consensus of experts has formed to tell TPMmuckraker and others that President Obama's executive order on presidential records, issued Wednesday, could impact efforts to pry loose key documents from the Bush White House.

And the man who served as President Clinton's lead attorney for executive privilege issues yesterday went further, suggesting that that was exactly Obama's goal.

Neil Eggleston, a White House counsel under Clinton, told TPMmuckraker that in his view, the Obama White House issued the order with specific ongoing cases in mind -- that is, with the goal of bolstering those efforts to obtain Bush's records.

Congress and good-government groups are currently fighting to get access to key Bush White House documents that might shed light on a range of subjects, from the level of White House involvement in the US Attorney firings, to the Valerie Plame leak probe, to the decision to invade Iraq. "This is absolutely about all those issues," said Eggleston.

At its heart, said Eggleston, Obama's order is about "who gets to assert executive privilege." It says that former presidents can claim such privilege, but they have no automatic ability to prevent the release of their records if the current administration deems it to be in the national interest. That echoes the view of other experts who have examined the order, including the conservative legal scholar Doug Kmiec, who spoke to TPMmuckraker yesterday.

In a sense, said Eggleston, it's a directive to the National Archivist. "It says: 'Archivist -- if Bush calls up and says don't release certain papers, don't listen to what he says, listen to what I say.'"

Eggleston, now a partner at Debevoise and Plimpton's Washington office, cautioned that if a decision were made to release certain Bush records, and the former president chose to go to court to stop it, it's not absolutely certain that he would lose -- since no executive order can alter the constitution's executive privilege guarantee. But he said that the order would at the very least be likely to sway a court towards openness.

So if we do eventually learn the full story of the Bushies' involvement in the US Attorney firings, and get access to information about their record on a range of other issues, it looks like we may have the new president to thank.

Barbara Boxer

Experts: Obama Order Could Let Us See US Attorneys Docs

Zachary Roth | January 22, 2009, 12:04PM

The experts' verdicts on the potential impact of President Obama's executive order on presidential records are starting to come in. And they're bolstering our initial take that Obama's move could significantly boost efforts to release crucial records that the Bush administration has fought to keep secret.

Doug Kmiec, a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine law school and expert on executive privilege, told TPMmuckraker that the order makes it harder for former presidents to block the release of their documents.

And, crucially, he said it could impact current high-profile struggles over Bush's records, "whether it be the dismissal of US Attorneys, whether it be other assertions of executive privilege dealing with White House emails and the like."

Congress and the Bush White House have been struggling over a key memo that details the level of White House involvement in the US Attorney firings of 2006. And open-government groups have sued the Bush administration to gain access to White House emails on a range of subjects, including the Valerie Plame leak probe and the decision to invade Iraq.

Kmiec, a noted conservative legal scholar who nonetheless supported Obama's campaign, said he had done some work with the Obama transition team, and had offered his assistance to the new administration.

Kmiec said the order appears to shift power from former presidents to the current administration, and to the National Archivist. Under an order issued by President Bush, former presidents and vice presidents could compel the Archivist to keep documents secret. Under the new order, former presidents can still ask the Archives to do so. But the burden of proof is squarely on the former president to prove that secrecy is in the nation's interest, and the Obama administration can decline the request if it's not convinced. That approach reorients things toward the original intention of the Presidential Records Act, passed in the wake of Watergate.

"If the Archivist were to make a determination that those materials would be made public," explained Kimiec, "then holding it back would take something extraordinary," in terms of an argument from the former president.

Kmiec's view is supported by open-government advocates. Scott Nelson of Public Citizen believes, in the words of the Associated Press, that "researchers should find it easier to gain access to records under the new order."

And yesterday, Anne Weissman of CREW, which unsuccessfully brought a lawsuit against Dick Cheney's office to compel him to hand over records to the Archives, told TPMmuckraker that the order "does have the potential to impact ongoing litigation," including over the US Attorney documents.

So when might we see those documents? If the Archivist and the Obama administration agree to it (in practice, the Archivist would likely defer to the administration), they could be made public as soon as the Archivist has prepared them for public display. Of course, President Bush could sue to stop the move -- but it looks like he'd face an uphill climb in convincing a court that there's a pressing need to keep them secret.

It really is a new day.

Barack Obama

Could Obama's Executive Order Help Pry Loose Bush Records?

Zachary Roth | January 21, 2009, 5:57PM

Over at TPM, Josh and David have been mulling the significance of the executive order, issued today by President Obama, concerning the Presidential Records Act. Could it apply retroactively to previous administrations, making it easier to pry loose records that the Bush White House has fought to keep secret?

According to Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the tentative answer is yes.

As David notes, the order says:

Going forward, anytime the American people want to know something that I or a former President wants to withhold, we will have to consult with the Attorney General and the White House Counsel, whose business it is to ensure compliance with the rule of law.

As a result, Weismann told TPMmuckraker, the order could affect any case in which the White House has claimed executive privilege over presidential (or, to be clear, vice presidential) records. Most important, it would subject those claims to review by the Justice Department. "It does have the potential to impact ongoing litigation," she said.

Weismann specifically cited the ongoing legal fight between the House Judiciary committee and the Bush White House, over documents relating to the US Attorney firings. Among other documents, Congress has been seeking a key memo written by a White House counsel, which might shed light on White House involvement in the firings.

Weismann told TPMmuckraker that that the order likely would not affect a lawsuit she had been working on, on behalf of CREW, which sought to compel Dick Cheney's office to hand over all his records to the National Archives. On Monday a judge declined to order Cheney to do so. Weismann said that case turned on an interpretation of the Presidential Records Act itself, rather than on a claim of executive privilege.

Still, it certainly seems possible that on his first full day in office, the new president has dealt significant a blow to the Bush administration's efforts to permanently keep information from the public. But a lot more questions than answers remain, and we've got calls out to some experts in executive privilege who might be able to shed further light on what Obama's order does and doesn't do.

Wiretapping

Feingold: Wiretap Ruling No Big Deal

Zachary Roth | January 16, 2009, 4:46PM

We wrote earlier about the still-murky significance of a FISA court's ruling that a law passed by Congress in 2007, giving the president the power to conduct warrantless wiretaps, is constitutional.

And now Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin senator who has led Democrats' efforts to oppose Bush on the issue, has weighed in to help make the case that the decision is limited in its implications.

In a statement just distributed to reporters, Feingold declared that the court's decision "in no way validates or bolsters the president's illegal warrantless wiretapping program."

He continued:

It did not support the President's claim of inherent constitutional authority to violate the law. In fact, the court explicitly stated that "we caution that our decision does not constitute an endorsement of broad-based, indiscriminate executive power."

The whole statement and an accompanying "fact sheet" follows after the jump...

Read more »

George Bush

Big Surprise: Bush Administration Claims On Missing Emails Likely Overstated

Zachary Roth | January 16, 2009, 4:02PM

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported the claim by a Justice Department lawyer that the White House had, at the eleventh hour, found the famous "missing emails" which for four years it's been claiming that the dog ate -- I mean, that it lost when switching to a new email system after President Bush's re-election.

But it sounds like the Post was overly sanguine about the situation. In reality, the government's claim on behalf of the White House may not be worth much at all.

"It's definitely questionable that they're doing something to solve the problem," Meredith Fuchs, a lawyer for the National Security Archive, one of the groups suing to require the White House to recover the emails, told TPMmuckraker.

The emails at issue are from periods that will be crucial in assessing the Bush legacy, including the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and Pat Fitzgerald's probe of the Valerie plame leak. We'll know more about just how much has been preserved by next Tuesday or Wednesday, when the records will be transferred to the National Archives.

But it doesn't sound like we'll get everything. The new email system that the White House switched to four years ago allowed all staff members to access storage files and delete messages -- unlike the previous system, which was designed to preserve all messages containing official business. Fuchs said that the White House has still declined to make a forensic copy of the records, so any emails that were deleted likely won't be recovered. And since we're talking about millions of emails, it may be impossible to know what we don't have.

"They wait until the last moment and then they try to slam the door," Fuchs added.

Earlier this year, CREW, which is also bringing the suit, asked the FBI to probe whether the deletions of the emails had deliberate, and criminally. But there's no evidence the bureau followed up.

A fittingly disturbing coda to eight years of secrecy and obfuscation.

Wiretapping

Jury Still Out On Wiretapping Verdict's Significance

Zachary Roth | January 16, 2009, 12:12PM

Yesterday we noted the news that a secret court had ruled that a law passed by Congress empowering the president to eavesdrop without a warrant was constitutional.

But there was debate over the broader implications of the ruling. The New York Times suggested that it could give "legal credence to the Bush administration's repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping."

But other commentators disagreed, arguing that the decision bore only on the law under review.

Now the Times has modified its take in a new story, which cautions higher up that the ruling "did not directly address whether President Bush was within his constitutional powers in ordering domestic wiretapping without warrants, without first getting Congressional approval,"

Still, the picture remains murky. One law professor tells the paper that "while the ruling did not address Mr. Bush's surveillance without warrants directly, 'it does bolster his case' by recognizing that eavesdropping for national security purposes did not always require warrants."

But a national security law expert disagrees, saying: "I think this kind of maintains the status quo. I don't think it is a surprise that the FISA court found that the legislation was constitutional."

George Bush

UPDATED: Court: Bush Can Eavesdrop Without Warrant

Zachary Roth | January 15, 2009, 1:53PM

In its waning days, the Bush administration has suffered a few adverse rulings from the courts on the broad issue of executive power.

But it looks like it's about to get a major one in its favor on the issue of warrantless wiretapping. The New York Times reports:

A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans' private communications may be involved.

In other words, at least according to this court, the administration didn't need to get a warrant after all for its controversial domestic spying program. As the Times puts it, the decision "may offer legal credence to the Bush administration's repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping."

The Times explains that the court did not directly rule on the legality of the NSA's controversial secret wiretapping program, conducted between 2001 and 2007, which the same paper first revealed in 2005. Rather, in 2007, Congress passed the Protect America Act, which gave the executive branch the power to listen in on international communications. The constitutionality of that law was challenged by a telecom company. The FISA court, in a secret decision last year, upheld the law, and now an appeals court has agreed.

All the same, this is the first time that an appeals court has ruled on the constitutionality of the president's power to eavesdrop, and the decision could be a boost for other telecom companies who are being sued for cooperating with the program.

Late Update: The ruling itself has now been released, and several commentators, including Salon's Glenn Greenwald, make the case that the Times erred in its characterization, and that the ruling bears on a narrower question. Writes Greenwald:

[I]t merely concluded that the warrantless eavedsdropping powers authorized by Congress under the (now-expired) Protect America Act do not violate the Fourth Amendment because, the court found, there is an exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement for foreign intelligence gathering. It's a bad ruling (and should be reviewed by the Supreme Court), but it has nothing to do with the President's authority to override statutes generally or violate FISA specifically...

So this ruling may not be as far-reaching as the Times appeared to suggest.

Dick Cheney

Top Military Official: We Tortured

Zachary Roth | January 14, 2009, 10:38AM

George Bush and Dick Cheney are continuing to insist we haven't committed torture. But that's now been contradicted by the Bush administration official whose job is to decide whether to bring Guantanamo detainees to trial.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-] Qahtani," the convening authority of military commissions, Susan Crawford, told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" (for prosecution).

Al-Qahtani is a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the 9/11 attacks.

According to the Post, the techniques used included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, which left al-Qahtani in a "life-threatening condition."

Crawford told Woodward:

The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge (to call it torture).

The Post adds:

[Crawford] is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

George Bush

Conyers Wants Criminal Probe Of Bush Officials' Wrongdoing

Zachary Roth | January 14, 2009, 9:41AM

Over the weekend, President-Elect Obama said we should "look forward as opposed to looking backwards" on the question of prosecuting Bush administration officials for torture, illegal wiretapping, and other possible crimes committed in the name of national security.

But yesterday, the House Judiciary committee got behind a very different approach, releasing a nearly 500-page report that recommends establishing a blue-ribbon commission -- along the lines of the 9/11 commission, but with subpoena power -- to investigate whether crimes were committed. (Last week, as we reported over at Election Central, Judiciary chair John Conyers and nine other lawmakers introduced a bill to set up such a commission.)

The report also advocates an investigation by the Justice Department, potentially involving a special prosecutor. And in addition to focusing on issues of torture, wiretapping, and the like, the report also recommends continuing to probe matters like the leaking of the name of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, and the US Attorney firings.

It'll be interesting to see how Democrats will reconcile Conyers' aggressive stance, which seems to enjoy broad support among the party's base, with Obama's more cautious approach.

Barack Obama

Obama On Probing Bush GWOT Policies: "We Need To Look Forward"

Zachary Roth | January 12, 2009, 11:05AM

It looks like an ambitious new effort to set up an investigation of President Bush and his top aides for potential crimes committed on their watch may have a had time getting traction.

As we reported last week over at Election Central, House Judiciary chair John Conyers recently introduced a measure to create a "National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties." The commission, whose members would be appointed by the resident and congress, would be designed to probe the legality of Bush administration policies on issues like torture, treatment of detainees, and extraordinary rendition.

But the president-elect appears lukewarm to the idea. Asked yesterday on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" about the idea of a broad inquiry into those Bush administration programs, Obama said: "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards."

He added:

Part of my job is to make sure that, for example, at the C.I.A., you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got spend their all their time looking over their shoulders.

Here's the video:

So it doesn't exatly sound like Obama would be eager to sign Conyers' bill.

And the top two House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, weren't jumping to express their support for the bill when Election Central called their offices about it last week.

Harriet Miers

House Not Giving Up The Fight On Miers-Bolten Testimony

Zachary Roth | January 7, 2009, 5:39PM

In case you were worried, the coming of a new Congress won't stop House leaders from continuing their long-running effort to obtain documents and testimony about the US Attorney firings from White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers.

As part of the rules package voted on by members yesterday, the House voted to continue its lawsuit against the White House, which seeks to compel Miers and Bolten to testify and hand over the documents, reports the Las Vegas Sun. Citing executive privilege, the two have been defying subpoenas issued by the House Judiciary committee, creating a protracted legal struggle.

Those subpoenas expired with the start of the new Congress, so as part of the rules package, the House passed rules ensuring the subpoenas could be promptly reissued.

Let the legal maneuvering continue!

George Bush

Bush Clemency Followed Call From Iowa Governor

Zachary Roth | January 2, 2009, 4:34PM

The New York Times has gone through President Bush's latest round of pardons and commutations, issued on December 23rd, and found some interesting new nuggets.

We already knew about the case of Isaac Toussie, the New York real estate crook whose pardon was revoked after it emerged that his father was a major Bush donor.

But the Times adds to that the story of Reed Prior, an Iowan serving a life sentence for a drug conviction.

Prior's previous applications for clemency, including one filed as recently as December 2007, were rejected. But this year, Prior's lawyer asked Iowa governor Chet Culver (whose wife he happened to know) to call White House counsel Fred Fielding and schedule a meeting about the application. Culver did so. After meeting with Prior's lawyer, Fielding recommended granting the application, which President Bush then did.

And here's another case of what looks like special treatment:

Alan S. Maiss, once president of Bally Gaming Inc., was convicted in 1995 in a case related to a video-poker scandal in Louisiana. In seeking a pardon, Mr. Maiss was represented by H. Christopher Bartolomucci, an associate White House counsel from 2001 to 2003.

Mr. Maiss applied on Dec. 26, 2007, far later than most of the other pardon recipients. A Justice Department spokeswoman, Laura Sweeney, said Mr. Maiss did not get through quickly because of special treatment. Ms. Sweeney noted that two others who were granted pardons in December had applied recently -- in August 2007 and February 2008.

But Douglas A. Berman, a criminal law professor at Ohio State University, and a clemency consultant, said "there's no doubt" that Mr. Maiss had received fast-track treatment.

Mr. Bartolomucci, who has several other clemency clients, said he visited the White House in August 2008, "hand-delivered the materials that had already gone to the Justice Department," and "took a few minutes" to talk with the associate counsel who handles pardons, Kenneth Lee, about Mr. Maiss's case.

"His application was granted because of its considerable merits," Mr. Bartolomucci said.

Leaving aside the merits or lack thereof of these particular cases, the larger problem here is the simple fact that these backdoor routes aren't open to the great majority of people.

Karen Orehowsky, described as a volunteer clemency consultant who advised Mr. Prior's commutation team, tells the Times:

It takes a 'Hail Mary' from people who have a lot of connections and who are willing to put their neck out for people they care about, and it's unfair to people who don't have those connections.

Seems about right.