Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel under President Bush, has finally testified, behind closed doors, as part of Congress's investigation of the US attorney firings, reports FOXNews.com.
That raises an obvious question: When will Karl Rove do the same? Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, told TPMmuckraker last month that he expected Rove to testify in early June. But today Luskin did not immediately return our call.
Add another (perhaps more minor) entry to the list of ways in which the Obama administration is mimicking its predecessor on issues of transparency.
MSNBC.com reports that the Secret Service has denied the news outlet's request for the names of visitors to the White House since President Obama was sworn in. It also denied a narrower request by the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington for records of visits by coal executives.
It's looking more and more like Barack Obama's pledge to usher in a new era of openness in government may well go unfulfilled.
Yesterday, administration lawyers cited national security concerns to argue that Bush-era documents detailing the videotaped interrogations of detainees should not be released. And in the wake of that news, open-government advocates are reluctantly acknowledging that, despite Obama's campaign promises, his approach to secrecy on issues of national security will likely not depart significantly from that of George Bush.
But the Times also, to its credit, released Comey's emails in full, allowing us all to make our own judgments about what they show. And after a close look at the emails, it seems clear that the paper could have used them to write a very different story -- with a very different effect on the public debate.
We've told you about one way in which President Obama has so far continued his predecessor's tactics: by invoking the state secrets privilege to argue for the dismissal of lawsuits in the war on terror.
And now Congress will consider reforming the State Secrets Act, in an effort to make it more difficult to invoke it when national security concerns are not truly at take.
We've told you in recent months about the Obama administration's disappointing tendency to mimic some of its predecessor's more troubling war-on-terror tactics. But is the administration's approach to public relations another area to add to the list?
Yesterday's aggressive push-back against the Daily Telegraph report on torture photos suggests it could be.
Amazing as it seems, there was a time not so long ago, when people were talking about a very different potential first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice: Alberto Gonzales. That never came to pass, of course. But it hasn't stopped Gonzo from using the Sotomayor nomination to get himself back in the media spotlight, making the rounds on cable news to discuss the historic moment.
Still, we can't help but feel there's a longer-term agenda behind the ex-AG's recent media tour. Call it the self-rehabilitation of Alberto Gonzales.
This came out a few weeks ago, but it's worth taking note of: We've told you about the Obama administration's frequent invocations of the state secrets claim in domestic national security cases -- mimicking the Bush administration. But it now appears the administration is going further by leaning on our allies to adopt a similar approach.
Binyam Mohamed, who was released from Guantanamo in February, claims he was tortured into confessing to bombing plots, and that the British government is complicit in the torture, for feeding questions to the CIA.
You've got to hand it to Karen Hughes. She fights for what she believes in.
The former top Bush adviser talked torture in a recent interview with the Houston Chronicle:
It looks like the Bushies are going all in to limit the damage from those torture memos.
The Washington Post reports that former Bush administration officials have launched a "behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign," designed to pressure DOJ to soften its forthcoming ethics report into the lawyers who approved torture.
Building off our post from yesterday -- in which we noted the interesting timing of the original 2006 report about the investigation into Jane Harman's AIPAC ties -- Foreign Policy's Laura Rozen has put together, on her personal blog, what amounts to a complete theory of the case. And it's a theory that implicates the Porter Goss camp right from the start.
So we thought we'd follow that road a bit further. It's not news that Harman and Goss haven't exactly been best buds, either while Goss chaired the House intelligence committee and Harman was its ranking Democrat, or later when Goss led the CIA from 2004 to 2006.* One former intel committee staffer explained the relationship to TPMmuckraker this way: "Jane is an assertive person. And Porter struck me as someone who wanted to avoid conflict. I would not say they were good friends."
As the calls for his impeachment grow louder, Jay Bybee -- the Bush OLC lawyer who wrote one of the torture memos, and who is now a federal judge -- has been given the chance to share his side of the story.
The unlikely invitation comes from Pat Leahy, the chair of the Senate Judiciary committee. In a letter sent to Bybee today, Leahy invites him to testify before the committee about his role in writing the memos.
A court has rejected the Obama administration's claim of the state secret privilege.
Via the blog Legal Pad: A three-member panel of the 9th circuit Court of Appeals ruled this morning on a request from the government that it dismiss the Jeppesen case, which focuses on the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) of the Senate Intelligence committee has just released a declassified narrative (pdf) of the OLC's development of its opinions on torture.
The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder has already picked out a key excerpt, that sheds some light on just who in the Bush administration helped devise and approve the torture policies:
As we noted, Philip Zelikow, a former top lawyer to Condi Rice at the State Department, yesterday wrote that the White House tried to destroy all copies of a memo he authored, which took issue with the legal opinions laid out in the infamous OLC torture memos.
Today, Zelikow appeared on MSNBC to flesh out that story. Among other things, he reveals that the Bushies said his memo was "inconvenient to have around." (Would it have been too much for Andrea Mitchell to have followed up by asking him who, exactly, said that?)
Watch:
Jonathan Turley, the media-friendly George Washington Law School professor, who's an outspoken advocate of curbing executive power, gave a bravura performance on MSNBC's Countdown last night, on the subject of possible torture prosecutions.
Arguing that investigations aren't just necessary but long overdue, Turley made two important points that have been getting a bit lost in the rapid-fire debate lately.
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is the latest to call for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, in response to the release of those torture memos last week.
Bybee wrote one of the memos in 2002, when he served in the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel.
Here's Feingold's statement:
The just released OLC memos, including the 2002 memo authored by Jay Bybee, are a disgrace. The idea that one of the architects of this perversion of the law is now sitting on the federal bench is very troubling. The memos offer some of the most explicit evidence yet that Mr. Bybee and others authorized torture and they suggest that grounds for impeachment can be made. Clearly, the Justice Department has the responsibility to investigate this matter further. As a Senator, I would be a juror in any impeachment trial so I don't want to reach a conclusion until all the evidence is before me.
The White House press corps gave Robert Gibbs a hard time today about President Obama's comments this morning that left the door open to prosecutions of Bush officials for torture.
It's true that the president's comments go further than anything he'd said before, and could suggest that the White House is tacking this way and that on a crucial subject. That impression is strengthened by the fact that the White House has now had to walk back Rahm Emanuel's comments from Sunday that the Bushies wouldn't be prosecuted.
Late Update: Looks like The Huffington Post's Sam Stein had the same response to the briefing that we did.
Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary committee, has announced that he plans to hold hearings into the Bush-era OLC memos released last week.
Despite his pledge to hold hearings in his own committee, Conyers said he agrees with President Obama's statement that he favors a probe conducted by a bipartisan commission, rather than solely by a congressional committee.
Think Progress, the blog of the Center for American Progress, is circulating an online petition calling on Congress to impeach Jay Bybee, who, while at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote one of the torture memos released last week. Bybee is currently a federal judge.
CAP is led by John Podesta, a close White House ally who helped run Barack Obama's transition.
Think Progress joins Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Rep. Jerry Nadler, the New York Times, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in calling for Bybee's impeachment.
Late Update: Sen. Pat Leahy, who chairs the Judiciary committee, has called on Bybee to step down from the bench, though he doesn't seem to have mentioned anything about impeachment.
We didn't have the chance to get to this earlier but CQ's Jeff Stein went on MSNBC's Countdown last night to talk about his now-famous report on Jane Harman and AIPAC*.
Among other things, Stein said that there are "several people who have known this for some time."
And interestingly, he adds that, according to his sources,the investigation into Harman that Time first reported on back in 2006 "never got started" because it was quashed by then-AG Alberto Gonzales.
The whole segment is worth watching...
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* This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version that wrongly said Stein had appeared on Hardball.
President Obama is leaving the door open for prosecutions of Bush DOJ officials who provided the legal rationale to support torture policies.
In comments to reporters this morning, Obama said he didn't support prosecuting CIA officers who were carrying out the policy. But:
On Sunday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel went on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos and clearly declared that the Obama administration would not prosecute the Bushies who "devised" torture policies.
That seemed to go further than anything the administration had said before. So yesterday we called the White House to get a more formal statement on the issue. And when we didn't hear back, we got to wondering: had Rahm been freelancing, and gotten out ahead of White House policy?
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