Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at this point. But the latest example of the Obama administration mimicking the Bushies in opting for secrecy over openness feels like one of the most infuriating yet.

The Justice Department is declining to release Dick Cheney's interview with federal investigators looking into the Valerie Plame leak, arguing -- as it did under President Bush -- that doing so would discourage future high-level officials from cooperating with criminal investigations.

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Change we can believe in? Maybe not so much.

The Obama administration is siding with the Bush administration in trying to kill a lawsuit brought by watchdog groups that seeks to gain access to Bush White House emails, reports the Associated Press.

At issue are emails from key periods of the Bush years, including the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and the investigation into the Valerie Plame leak.

In response to the suit brought by two groups, CREW and the National Security Archive, the Bush White House recently said that it had found 14 million of the e-mails and had taken steps to archive others. But the plaintiffs called those steps inadequate.

Now the Obama Justice Department is seeking to have the suit dismissed, just as the Bush DOJ did.

"The new administration seems no more eager than the last" to deal with the issue, Anne Weismann of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Associated Press.

The AP adds:

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department "apparently never got the message" from Obama, Blanton said.

Sounds about right.

When a new president comes in, he usually replaces all 93 US attorneys with his own nominees. But, in what could be bad news for Rod Blagojevich, at least one high-profile US Attorney won't be asked to step down, it looks like.

NBC News reports that Patrick Fitzgerald, the no-nonsense U.S. attorney for Chicago, will stay on under President Obama, despite being a Bush appointee.

Fitzgerald is preparing an indictment against the former Illinois governor. He also served as the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leak case, in which Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury.

The new administration has asked all the US the current Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys to stay on in the short term, while it decides which to retain. But it has already made a decision on Fitzgerald, it appears.

The suggestion to keep Fitz, who has been in the job since 2001, was made by Sen. Dick Durbin, who's close to Obama. Durbin's suggestion was "positively received," according to DOJ officials, as well as aides to Durbin.

The decision is not unexpected, since replacing Fitzgerald while he's in the midst of a high-profile and long-running probe of his state's former governor, would likely have generated an outcry.

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.

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.

Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) came together today to criticize the White House for their use of executive privilege in the Valerie Plame leak scandal.

The two lawmakers called Bush's refusal to disclose the report of the FBI interview with Vice President Cheney "legally unprecedented" and "inappropriate." The committee seeks the document in order to establish the White House's role in the leak of Plame's name to the media.

From The Hill:

"The president's assertion of executive privilege over this document was legally unprecedented and an inappropriate use of executive privilege" Waxman, the panel's chair, and Davis, the ranking Republican, said in a joint report.

Although both lawmakers agree that the president's action was "inappropriate," they disagree over whether Bush had the right to invoke executive privilege. Waxman rejects the validity of the assertion while Davis supports the privilege.

Waxman has been attempting to get access to the document since December 2007, and the committee issued a subpoena for it on June 24th 2008.

The Justice Department declared it would "not provide or make available any reports of interviews with the president or the vice president from the leak investigation" in response to the subpoena.

Valerie Plame lost an appeal when the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected her request for a civil suit against the Bush administration.

From the AP:

A federal judge dismissed the case last year on largely procedural grounds. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that ruling Tuesday.

The lawsuit accused Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, among others, as naming Plame to reporters as a CIA operative in 2003.

Just hours after a federal judge shot down the White House's claim to sweeping immunity from Congressional oversight, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) fired off a round of letters renewing his demand for testimony from Karl Rove and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten.

The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman sent a letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding asking whether the two officials will agree to testify in light of today's ruling against the Bush administration's blanket claim of executive privilege.

The investigation at issue is the allegedly political firings of eight U.S. attorneys. The Senate committee issued subpoenas in June and July 2007 for Bolton and Rove to testify on Capitol Hill.

"Today's decision renders the grounds for Mr. Bolten and Mr. Rove's refusal to comply with the Committee's subpoenas moot," Leahy wrote in the letter to Fielding.

Leahy also sent a terse letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking whether he planned to rescind the legal memos based on the theory of blanket executive privileged that the judge dismissed today.

Please advise me by no later than next Thursday, August 7, when you will withdraw the erroneous [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion from Stephen Bradbury relied upon by the White House to justify its non-compliance with congressional subpoenas since that opinion has been repudiated by the court.

In addition, please inform me whether the court's decision will cause you to re-evaluate your memos and those from [Office of Legal Counsel] in support of overbroad and unsubstantiated executive privilege claims not only in the U.S. Attorneys investigation, but also in other matters, like the claims used to block Congress from investigating warrantless wiretapping, the leak of the name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame for political retribution, and White House interference in the Environmental Protection Agency's decision-making. Which of these do you now intend to withdraw?

Leahy sounds like he's asking for a complete surrender in this ongoing battle over White House officials' testimony. But there's a lot of litigation still to go in this case.

We've seen a lot of assertions of executive privilege in the last few months-- from Karl Rove to Stephen Johnson -- but now Attorney General Michael Mukasey has claimed executive privilege on behalf of President Bush.

Mukasey's letter to House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) last night, pre-empted a vote this morning on contempt of Congress stemming from the White House's refusal to release FBI documents relating to the Valerie Plame leak scandal. The documents were subpoenaed by Committee on June 16.

From the Mukasey's letter to Bush:

I am greatly concerned about the chilling effect that compliance with the Committee's subpoena would have on future White House deliberations and White House cooperation with future Justice Department investigations.

Hmmm. Where have we heard that before?

House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) is wielding more than his gavel against Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

In a letter to the AG today, Waxman brought out the big guns, stating that the Committee would vote to hold him in contempt on July 16, if he failed to produce a report on an interview with Vice President Cheney regarding the Valerie Plame leak scandal.

From Waxman's letter:

Despite the Committee's repeated requests, you have consistently refused to provide these reports to the Committee or unredacted versions of the reports of FBI interviews with White House staff. In response to the Committee's June 16 subpoena, you wrote: "we are not prepared to provide or make available any reports of interviews wi t h t he President or Vice President from the leak investigation" because of "core Executive Branch confidentiality interests and fundamental separation of powers principles."

. . .I regret that your failure to produce responsive documents has created this impasse, but Congress has a constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the executive branch. Therefore, unless all responsive documents, with the exception of the FBI interview report of President Bush, are provided to the Committee or a valid assertion of executive privilege is made, the Committee will meet on July 16 to consider a resolution citing you in contempt. I strongly urge you to reconsider your position and comply with the duly issued subpoena.

As we mentioned earlier today, House Oversight's subpoenas for Bush and Cheney's interview records from DOJ Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's inquiry into the Valerie Plame leak case were rebuffed by the Justice Department.

Since then, we've obtained a copy of the letter dated June 24 that the Justice Department sent to Congress, declining to comply with the subpoena.

Their reasons? The ever-ready assertion of executive privilege because the write ups of the FBI interviews with White House officials during the Plame leak investigation contain accounts of of internal White House deliberations, including those involving how to respond to the fallout from the infamous 16 words on Niger yellowcake in the President's 2003 State of the Union address:

However, these reports also contain considerable information detailing the internal White House deliberations and communications of senior White House staff concerning how they should respond on behalf of the President to public assertions challenging the accuracy of a statement made in the President's State of the Union Address.

The DOJ was also concerned that by releasing their interview records with Bush and Cheney, they would create a disincentive for future voluntary interviews from the executive branch. . . despite the fact that it's all been done before. In 1999, the FBI surrendered interview records of former President Bill Clinton and former Vice-President Al Gore:

We are aware that in 1999 the Department made available to this Committee the FBI reports of interviews with President Clinton and Vice President Gore that were taken during the Department's campaign finance investigation. We consider that situation to be fundamentally different from the present situation. We understand that the intrusion on Executive Branch confidentiality interests was significantly less because the Clinton Administration interview reports presumably did not involve the substance of internal White House deliberations and communications concerning official White House business, but rather concerned campaign-fundraising political activities.

The full text of the letter, after the jump.

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Two weeks ago, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued subpoenas for FBI paperwork regarding interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

And now the Justice Department has responded: Think again, Henry.

In the latest subpoena denial from the administration, Attorney General Mukasey informed the Committee that it will not be issuing documents to comply with the congressionally issued subpoena.

But Waxman is giving them one last chance. In a letter to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald on Friday, he informed Fitzgerald that the DOJ has until July 3rd to release the requested documents.

Scott McClellan's testimony is underway before the House Judiciary Committee.

He was asked early on about President Bush's involvement in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.

"I do not think the president in any way had knowledge of it," McClellan said.

Also, we heard he got a $75,000 advance for the book.

Read more for the text of his opening statement.

Late Update: The Judiciary Committee recessed for the House debate on the compromise bill on the federal wiretapping law. That debate is underway and will last one hour.

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At first Rep. Henry Waxman asked politely.

But today the chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee issued subpoenas for the FBI's paperwork stemming from interviews of Vice President Cheney and President Bush regarding the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

What are the odds Attorney General Michael Mukasey turns them over?

Meanwhile, we can expect former White House press secretary Scott McClellan to be on Capital Hill testifying about the same matter on Friday.

It's been several years since President Bush, Cheney and others sat down with investigators to talk about who leaked the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

And Congress is still trying to find out what they said.

In the wake of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book published this week, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is reiterating his request for access to documents related to those interviews.

Waxman writes a letter today to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey:

New revelations by fonner White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan raise additional questions about the actions of the President and the Vice President. Mr. McClellan has stated that "[t]he President and Vice President directed me to go out there and exonerate Scooter Libby." He has also asserted that "the top White House officials who knew the truthincluding Rove, Libby, and possibly Vice President Cheney - allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie." It would be a major breach of trust if the Vice President personally directed Mr. McClellan to mislead the public. ... The Committee is conducting an important investigation to answer questions that Mr. Fitzgerald's criminal inquiry did not address. As I explained at the Committee's hearing last year, the purpose of the Committee's investigation is to examine:

(1) How did such a serious violation of our national security occur?
(2) Did the White House take appropriate investigative and disciplinary steps after the breach occurred?
And
(3) what changes in White House security procedures are necessary to prevent future violations of our national security from occurring?

Read more for the complete text of the letter.

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From the AP:

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is trying to resurrect a lawsuit against those in the Bush administration she says illegally disclosed her identity.

A federal judge dismissed Plame's lawsuit last year, saying there was no basis to bring a case. Plame's lawyers asked a federal appeals court Friday to send the case back before the judge and force him to consider its merits....

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the case, saying the law requires Plame's complaints be raised under the Privacy Act. Plame's attorneys say that law is insufficient. They asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to send the case back to Bates for reconsideration.

Details about the suit here, which was originally filed way back in July of 2006.

It's the burning question of the Bush Administration: malfeasance or incompetence? Did the White House just lose an untold number of emails because of their "primitive" archiving setup? Or is there something worse at play -- something criminal?

CREW, which has been pursuing a lawsuit over the lost emails, wants to know. And today the group wrote (pdf) FBI Director Robert Mueller to request that he investigate whether White House officials deleted emails relevant to the Valerie Plame investigation.

The complaint is based on evidence that "for the period September 30 through October 6, 2003, there were no e-mails for the entire Office of the Vice President on either the White House servers or on a back-up tape created on October 21, 2003, with the exception of e-mails that had not yet been erased from individual OVP employee mailboxes." Then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales had notified all White House employees that the Department of Justice was investigating the Plame outing on September 30th.

In its release, CREW says that it doesn't have all that much confidence that the FBI will follow up. That's because of their experience with ex-Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL): months before the scandal exploded, the group brought evidence to the FBI of Foley's inappropriate advances toward male House pages. The FBI did not open an investigation, but when the scandal broke, unnamed FBI officials were quoted claiming that was because CREW had withheld key evidence -- a claim that was later shown to be untrue.

Maybe his last letter got lost in the mail?

In a bit of epistolary throat-clearing, House oversight committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote Attorney General Michael Mukasey today to reiterate his request two weeks ago. The White House has arbitrarily blocked former Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald from turning over records of his interviews during the Valerie Plame leak investigation of White House officials, including the President, Waxman wrote then, but it's your call, Mikey, not theirs, on whether to fork it over. Apparently Waxman got no response.

Waxman adds helpfully in his letter today (which you can read below) that since Scooter Libby has dropped his appeal, "there remains no further pending litigation associated with the Fitzgerald investigation."

He concludes: "I urge you to cooperate with Congress’ investigation into these unanswered questions."

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Another test for Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

In a letter to Mukasey today, House sleuth Henry Waxman (D-CA) said that the White House has prevented former Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald from turning over records of his interviews during the Valeria Plame leak investigation of White House officials, including the President.

In July, Waxman said, Fitzgerald agreed to turn over the documents to Waxman's House oversight committee, along with documents from his interviews with State Department and CIA officials. But though he's turned those other documents over to the committee, the White House has prevented the release of his records of the White House interviews.

In the letter, Waxman urges Mukasey to ignore the White House's position, saying that "the role of the Attorney General is to administer the laws with impartiality." During the Clinton Administration, he writes, Janet Reno "made an independent judgment and provided numerous FBI interview reports to the Committee, including reports of interviews with President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and three White House Chiefs of Staff." Apparently the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales had agreed to the White House's request to keep the documents from Congress. Waxman wants to know if things will change now that there's a new boss.

Waxman had requested transcripts or other documents relating to Fitzgerald's interviews of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Andrew Card, Stephen Hadley, Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, and Scott McClellan. Fitzgerald is prepared to turn over at least some of these, Waxman writes, though it's unclear which.

Outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson held a senior position in the CIA's intelligence-gathering group tasked with nailing down the details of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, a new book says.

From spring 2001 until Bush Administration officials leaked her identity to reporters, Plame -- her maiden name, which was used to out her -- was an undercover operative placed in charge of the operations group for the agency's Joint Task Force on Iraq. She oversaw clandestine programs to acquire inside knowledge of the Hussein regime's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, report David Corn and Michael Isikoff in their new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War."

Some, including the National Review's Jonah Goldberg, claimed Plame had been "a desk jockey" before her outing. Bob Novak, who played a key role in revealing her identity, called her an "analyst."

Corn and Isikoff note that at the time of the outing Plame was "in the process of changing her clandestine status. . . to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management," Corn writes on the Nation Web site today. "Official cover" means an operative acknowledges they work for the U.S. government, although not necessarily the CIA. The book says she planned to return eventually to undercover work.

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"[Former secretary of state Richard] Armitage's central role as the primary source on [former undercover CIA officer Valerie] Plame is detailed for the first time in "Hubris," which recounts the leak case and the inside battles at the CIA and White House in the run-up to the war," Newsweek says this week, teasing an upcoming book co-authored by one of its star investigators, Michael Isikoff.

The book confirms that Armitage was one of the initial sources of the Plame leak, for both conservative columnist Robert Novak and the Washington Post's Bob Woodward. Last week, AP reported that Armitage met with Woodward in June, on the same day Woodward had said he spoke with a source about Plame's identity.

"The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation," Newsweek says:

that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

Update: "Hubris" co-author David Corn has more.

AP reports that outed CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame is mulling whether to add a former Deputy Secretary of State to her suit against Bush administration figures involved in leaking her identity.

The wire service revealed yesterday that Richard Armitage, who served under former Secretary of State Colin Powell, met with the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in June. That's "the same day Woodward met with a confidential source who spoke to him about Plame," AP reports, surmising that Armitage is likely Woodward's leaker.

Vice President Dick Cheney has hired a lawyer to defend him against the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson civil suit, court documents reveal.

The lawyer, Emmet T. Flood of Williams & Connolly, certainly has White House experience: he was a member of former president Bill Clinton's impeachment defense team. Despite that, he appears to be a reliable Republican: a check of campaign donor records shows he has given solely to GOP candidates.

Cheney is being sued for unspecified damages by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for revealing her identity and profession.