
Federal Judge Jay Bybee accepted $3.4 million in free legal assistance from 2007 to 2010 as he was under investigation for his role in the so-called "torture memos," the National Law Journal reported. Much of the money -- $3,251,893 of it -- came from the Latham & Watkins law firm, whose lawyers previously appeared before Bybee in the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)In House Judiciary Committee testimony released yesterday, former Bush DOJ lawyer Jay Bybee said he hadn't authorized all of the enhanced interrogation techniques the CIA used -- a point that is at the heart of the criminal investigation into the CIA's use of torture.
Bybee, one of the authors of the infamous torture memos that authorized the use of waterboarding and other techniques, testified before the committee in May.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (2)The House Judiciary Committee today released the transcript of the testimony of torture memo author Jay Bybee.
You can get the full transcript here (PDF).
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)A coalition of civil and immigrants rights groups has filed suit against Arizona's draconian immigration law. But efforts to challenge the law could be complicated by a memo written by one of the Bush Justice Department lawyers who also drafted some of the key opinions greenlighting torture.
Fourteen groups -- among them the ACLU of Arizona, the NAACP, and MALDEF -- filed the suit yesterday. They charge, among other things, that Arizona's law violates the federal Supremacy Clause by trying to bypass federal immigration law, and that it deprives minorities of their equal protection rights.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (0)Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) has forwarded materials on the writing of the torture memos to state bars where John Yoo and Jay Bybee are licensed, calling on the bar association to consider possible disciplinary action, Nadler's office announced today.
The torture memo report produced by the Justice Department's ethics office concluded that Yoo, now a professor at Berkeley, and Bybee, now federal judge on the ninth circuit, committed professional misconduct in their drafting of the memos that authorized torture.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (10)Attorney General Eric Holder has "the utmost confidence" in the Justice Department's ethics office, despite the fact that it was recently overruled by a top Holder aide in its most high-profile case in years, a DOJ spokeswoman tells TPMmuckraker.
The 290-page torture memo report produced by the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is tasked with investigating misconduct by DOJ attorneys, found that Bush-era attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee had committed professional misconduct in writing the legal opinions that authorized torture.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (4)The Torture Memos will forever be known as the work of John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who took the lead in preparing them. But the internal Justice Department report on the memos, released Friday, reveals that a less experienced OLC attorney, working under Yoo, played a key role in the process -- in some cases writing initial drafts of the opinions before getting feedback from Yoo and others.
The name of that lawyer is redacted throughout the report. But in what appears to be an oversight in the redaction process, a footnote identifies her as Jennifer Koester. (The Justice Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the reason for the redaction, and about the oversight.)
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (25)In John Yoo's vision of executive power, the president can legally order a village of civilians "massacred," according to the internal Justice Department report released Friday.
But in a letter (.pdf) sent to the DOJ last October, Yoo's lawyer, Miguel Estrada, accused the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility of ripping "out of context" Yoo's statement on the massacre question.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (8)A long-awaited internal Justice Department report will essentially clear the lawyers who crafted the legal justification for the Bush Administration's torture policies, reversing the tougher findings of a draft version of the report, according to Newsweek.
The draft version of the Office of Professional Responsibility report recommended that John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- who served in the Office of Legal Counsel and are now a law professor at Berkeley and a federal appeals court judge in Nevada, respectively -- be referred to state bar associations for potential discipline for their role in writing memos that concluded torture was justified.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (5)One of the authors of the Bush Justice Department's notorious memos approving torture has set up a legal defense fund to help pay anticipated lawyers' fees in connection with the episode.
A website for the Bybee Legal Defense Fund "explains how contributions may be made to help Judge Jay S. Bybee pay costs and expenses he is incurring or may incur in connection with claims, investigations or proceedings relating to his service as Assistant Attorney General for the Office Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice or his service on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit."
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (3)That long-awaited report on the Justice Department's role in the Bush administration's torture program could finally be ready to see the light of day.
During his testimony before Congress today, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the report, by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, is "in its last stages," and that he expects it will be released by the end of the month.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (3)There's a critical unanswered question about the torture investigation -- or "preliminary review" announced yesterday by Attorney General Eric Holder. And the Justice Department doesn't seem eager to clear it up.
Who, exactly, is to be investigated?
The fact that John Yoo was the only Justice Department OLC official who was "read into" the surveillance program -- even though he wasn't the head of OLC at the time -- has already been noted by others looking through the inspectors general report on the program released last week.
But one excerpt from the report is worth paying particular attention to, since it underlines the special role that Yoo came to play on the White House's behalf.
The pendulum appears to have swung back in the other direction on the issue of criminal investigations into Bush-era torture. It had looked for a while like President Obama's stated desire to look forward not back had carried the day. But now it appears that Attorney General Eric Holder -- independent of his boss's political concerns, which is how things should work -- is leaning back towards initiating a probe. The news was first reported over the weekend by Newsweek, then picked up today by the New York Times and Washington Post.
But whatever Holder ultimately decides, there are already several ongoing government efforts to investigate torture, which figure to substantially fill out our still patchwork understanding of the issue. So as we wait for official word from the Justice Department on a criminal inquiry, it's worth being clear about what those efforts are, and how they relate to each other.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (2)TPMmuckraker favorite Alberto Gonzales went on CNN this afternoon to talk Sotomayor.
But Wolf Blitzer also asked him about the ongoing torture debate. And it was interesting to see that Gonzo -- who was White House counsel at the time the torture policies were first formulated -- seemed eager to shift any blame onto the Justice Department he would later go on to lead.
Pressed by Blitzer about his role in approving torture, he first clarified that he wasn't at the Justice Department at the key time, and said "It's the responsibility of the Department of Justice to provide legal guidance on behalf of the executive branch."
In other words: blame Ashcroft, Yoo, and Bybee.
Of course, it's unclear how that stance lines up with a report that Gonzo, while at the White House, personally signed off on CIA requests to conduct torture.
Gonzo also assured Blitzer: "I stand by my record," and "I did my best to defend our country."
Watch:
Via Think Progress:
Jay Bybee may not be responding to Pat Leahy's invitation that he testify before the Senate Judiciary committee. But that doesn't mean he isn't trying to get out his side of the story behind the scenes.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (11)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.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (11)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.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (9)Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who sits on the House Judiciary committee (and also happens to be TPM's congressman) went on MSNBC's Countdown last night to repeat his call for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, who, while a member of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote one of the torture memos released last week.
Nadler also said he supported the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate whether Bush administration officials, including Bybee, committed crimes.
Watch:
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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.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (11)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.PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (8)
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.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (2)Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) went on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show last night, to talk about the fallout from the release last week of the Bush administration's torture memos. And his appearance added to the growing sense that pressure is mounting to hold the memos' authors accountable.
Whitehouse, who sits on the Senate Judiciary committee, did temporarily pour a little bit of cold water on the spate of calls to impeach Jay Bybee, the author of one of the memos, who is now a federal judge. He said that it's "certainly possible" that Bybee should be impeached, but that first, we should wait for the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to release its long-held report into the authorship of the memos.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (22)More fallout from last week's release of the Bush DOJ's torture memos...
Both Congressman Jerry Nadler and the New York Times are calling for Jay Bybee, the author of one of the memos, who's now a federal judge, to be impeached.
PERMALINK | COMMENTS | RECOMMEND RECOMMEND (28)For all the (justified) clamor over the Bush administration's torture memos that were released yesterday, there's been surprisingly little attention paid to the two authors of those documents.
As officials in the department's Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury authored the four memos. The first was written in 2002 by Bybee, and the latter three in 2005 by Bradbury. So: who are Bybee and Bradbury?
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