Obama Picks Bush Critics For Legal Team

From the Politico:

Bush’s legal foes now Obama’s legal team

By: Ben Smith
January 24, 2009

President Barack Obama is staffing his Justice Department with some of his predecessor’s fiercest critics, among them lawyers who were fired by President Bush or who quit jobs working for his administration.

Now, the opposition is in charge, and lawyers who spent years defining the limits of executive power will be helping wield it.

The change may be most dramatic at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — which defended some of Bush’s most controversial policies — where a small cadre of lawyers who had an outsized influence on legal criticism of Bush are taking the top three jobs.

Those three — Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron — and others made the case that Bush’s interrogation policy was justified by flawed legal reasoning. Their arguments precipitated one of Obama’s most dramatic early acts: flatly repudiating all government legal advice on interrogation issued between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009…

They step into positions ripe for conflict, and have staked out clear positions that could possibly restrain Obama’s ability to, among other things, conduct military operations against the wishes of Congress.

“They have alarmingly narrow views of executive power,” said a former Bush aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Others said the key would be how Obama’s lawyers handle concrete questions and decisions.

“It’s important for OLC to remember that it’s not a professorial office: there are real lives at stake, there are real liberties at stake,” said Douglas Kmiec, who headed the office under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and who supported Obama and praised the Johnsen pick.

The OLC lawyers are only a few among the erstwhile opposition figures now entering the administration. Neal Katyal, who successfully argued a key Supreme Court case on the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees, will be principal deputy solicitor general. David Kris, who was an internal and then external critic of warrantless wiretapping, will head the Obama Justice Department’s national security division. And David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico whose firing drew bipartisan condemnation and helped bring down an attorney general, has been called up as a top military terror prosecutor…

Johnsen, Lederman, and Barron have known one another since their time together in OLC in the 1990s, and as details of the office’s Bush-era legal opinions leaked out..

The three signed one statement, which Johnsen principally wrote, favorably quoting a comparison of Bush’s attorneys to mafia lawyers and laying out principles for restoring the Office of Legal Counsel’s independent tradition.

Barron and Lederman are the authors of a pair of long articles  in the Harvard Law Review examining President Bush’s claim that he can wage war — and the war on terror — largely free of congressional oversight or restraint. In the articles, they argue that the notion of overriding war powers of any sort is a modern invention, with few roots in precedent or the Constitution.

The Bush position, they wrote, is “a radical attempt to remake the constitutional law of war powers.”

Lederman and Barron argue for Congress’s right to deep involvement both in making and waging war…

Johnsen has also written that OLC lawyers should be “prepared to resign” if their opinions are ignored…

Johnsen has described the Bush Administration’s conduct as “illegal” and Lederman wrote that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other Bush aides appear to be guilty of “conspiracy to violate the Torture Act.” …

This is more of that “new tone” of “post-partisan” “unity” that we were promised by the Messiah.

Meanwhile, our National Security will be held hostage by fools and America-hating knaves.