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.

It's good to see that the grownups are back in charge at the Justice Department.

Even before the Senate has voted on Eric Holder's nomination to be Attorney General, the department is filling up with respected legal figures whose records suggest an intention to use DOJ as America's law firm, not the president's.

Neal Katyal, the Georgetown Law professor who successfully challenged the military trials in Guantanamo while representing Osama bin Laden's driver, will be deputy solicitor general. He'll join Elena Kagan, the dean of Harvard Law School, who has been nominated to be Solicitor General.

Meanwhile, Katyal's Georgetown colleague Marty Lederman -- known to the blogosphere from his writing at the legal blog Balkanization -- will return to the Office of Legal Counsel as deputy assistant Attorney General. With his record of opposition to warrantless wiretapping and torture, Lederman figures to represent quite a change -- for the better -- from another recent OLC lawyer, torture-memo author John Yoo.

Lederman will work with Dawn Johnsen, an Indiana University law professor and vocal critic of Bush terror policies, who's been nominated to head the OLC, as well as David Barron, who will serve as the principal deputy. Both Johnsen and Barron served at OLC during the Clinton administration.

Add to that the news that fired US Attorney David Iglesias will be prosecuting Guantanamo cases as a military prosecutor, and you get the impression that on issues of justice, many of the wrongs of the Bush years are in the process of being righted.

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...

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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."

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.

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.

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.

The Bush DOJ may not usually be inclined to hold its own members accountable for criminal wrongdoing. But when the alleged wrong-doing consists of embarrassing the administration by revealing the existence of a program that was illegally spying on the American people, the wheels of justice seem to start turning.

Last month, as we noted at the time, Newsweek unmasked the man, Thomas Tamm, who leaked to the New York Times the news that the NSA had been conducting a secret wiretapping program that was being concealed from the FISA court.

And as the magazine reported, Tamm, who spoke on the record to Newsweek for its story, has been in federal law enforcement's sights thanks to his fateful decision.

Now, DOJ has written a letter to his lawyer -- obtained by Salon's Glenn Greenwald -- asking whether, in light of his decision to speak to Newsweek, Tamm "is willing to reconsider his prior refusal to speak with agents of the FBI and/or to testify before the Grand Jury regarding his knowledge of and/or participation in the disclosure of TSP-related information to [James] Risen, Mr. Lichtblau and others."

(Risen and Lichtblau, of course, are the New York Times reporters who first reported on the program, based on Tamm's leak.)

The letter, signed by Steven Tyrrell, the chief of DOJ's fraud section, continues with what appears to be a veiled threat to subpoeana Tamm:

if I do not hear from you by [January 7], I will assume that Mr. Tamm is not interested in submitting to a voluntary interview or testifying before the Grand Jury.

In its report last month, Newsweek wrote that federal agents have "pursued [Tamm] relentlessly for the past two and a half years ... raided his house, hauled away personal possessions and grilled his wife, a teenage daughter and a grown son. More recently, they've been questioning Tamm's friends and associates about nearly every aspect of his life."

That pursuit appears to be continuing -- even as the department declines to bring charges against anyone in connection with the illegal program itself that Tamm revealed.