Thursday, June 28, 2007

28301-016 (1:18 pm)

Scooter Libby has a new name: inmate number 28301-016. That’s according to the Bureau of Prisons, which is ready and waiting for Libby’s arrival.

posted by Brian Zick | start the discussion

Quote of the Day (1:00 pm)

“It’s tough to get lectured on the Constitution from the same Administration that said the Vice President is his own branch of government.”

Paul Kiel quotes Representative Linda Sanchez.

posted by Brian Zick | start the discussion

Et Tu, Broder? (3:15 am)

Even Broder piles on:

when presidential candidate George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney as his running mate, I applauded the choice… Boy, was I wrong.
(…)
Cheney, as described in a breathtakingly detailed series in The Post this week by reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, is something else.

What they discovered, in a year of work that reveals more about the inner workings of this White House than any previous reporting, is a vice president who used the broad authority given him by a complaisant chief executive to bend the decision-making process to his own ends and purposes, often overriding Cabinet officers and other executive branch officials along the way.
(…)
It was not illegal, and it was not unconstitutional, but it could not have happened unless the president permitted it and enabled it. And ultimately the president is responsible for what has become, in very large respect, the resulting wreckage of foreign policy, national security policy, budget policy, energy policy and environmental policy under Cheney’s direction and on Cheney’s watch.

posted by Brian Zick | 1 comment

Alberto “Give ‘Em Death” Gonzales (2:43 am)

Amy Goldstein for WaPo reports:

Paul K. Charlton, one of nine U.S. attorneys fired last year, told members of Congress yesterday that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has been overzealous in ordering federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty, including in an Arizona murder case in which no body had been recovered.

Justice Department officials had branded Charlton, the former U.S. attorney in Phoenix, disloyal because he opposed the death penalty in that case. But Charlton testified yesterday that Gonzales has been so eager to expand the use of capital punishment that the attorney general has been inattentive to the quality of evidence in some cases — or the views of the prosecutors most familiar with them.
(…)
Justice Department data presented at the hearing demonstrated that the administration’s death penalty dispute with Charlton was not unique. The Bush administration has so far overruled prosecutors’ recommendations against its use more frequently than the Clinton administration did. The pace of overrulings picked up under Gonzales’s predecessor, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, and spiked in 2006, when the number of times Gonzales ordered prosecutors to seek the death penalty against their advice jumped to 21, from three in 2005.

posted by Brian Zick | start the discussion

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Henry, John, and Wm. Lacy Write a Letter to Alberto Gonzales (7:06 pm)

Spencer Ackerman at TPM Muckraker reports that Representatives Henry Waxman, John Conyers, and William Lacy Clay have jointly written a letter to Attorney General Gonzales, inquiring about “the status of a DOJ review requested by the head of the Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office in January to settle the matter of whether the vice presidency resides in the executive branch.” The letter asks:

(1) What is the status of your department’s response to the January 2007 request from the Archives?
a. When did the review commence?
b. Which individuals at the department have been assigned to review this matter?
c. Please produce all documents relating to your department’s review of this matter, including without limitation all communications, analyses, memoranda. or other documents.

(2) Have officials from the Department of Justice ever communicated with officials from the White House, including the Office of the Vice President, concerning the request from the Archives or the issue of whether the executive order does or should apply to the Office of the Vice President?
a. If so, please identify and explain the substance of any such communication.
b. Please produce all documents relating to any such communication.

(3) Has the Department of Justice ever taken a position on or analyzed the issue of the status or existence of the Vice President or the Office of the Vice President within the executive branch, the legislative branch, both, or neither?
a. If so, please identiff all instances in which the department has addressed this issue and... read more

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Subpoenas for White House and OVP (12:58 pm)

Laurie Lellman for AP reports:

The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush’s warrant-free eavesdropping program.

Also named in subpoenas signed by committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., were the Justice Department and the National Security Council.

The committee wants documents that might shed light on internal squabbles within the administration over the legality of the program, said a congressional official speaking on condition of anonymity because the subpoenas had not been made public.

posted by Brian Zick | start the discussion

Addington’s Bullshit Has Been Called Already (12:24 pm)

Michael Abramowitz for WaPo reports:

Addington’s legal argument yesterday has previously been rejected by the director of the Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, J. William Leonard. In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in January, Leonard noted that the 2003 executive order includes only one explicit reference to the Office of the Vice President.

“This sole explicit reference for the purpose of exempting the OVP from a provision of the Order supports an interpretation that the rest of the Order does apply,” Leonard wrote. “Otherwise there would be no need for an exemption.”

Jesse Lee at The Gavel has posted a portion of text from the letter sent by William Leonard of the National Archives to Attorney General Gonzales:

Analysis

Consistency in application: An interpretation that the OVP is not subject to the reporting provisions of the Order is fairly recent, in that up until 2002, the OVP did submit annual reports to this office.

Plain text reading: There are several explicit references in the Order to the constitutional position of Vice President that confer specific authorities and exemptions upon the individual encumbering that position. There is but a single explicit reference to the government entity (the OVP) which serves the Vice President. This sole explicit reference for the purpose of exempting the OVP from a provision of the Order supports an interpretation that the rest of the Order does apply, to include the Order’s definition of an “agency,” otherwise there would be no need for an exemption.... read more

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Kerry Calls Bluff, Addington Backs Down from Fourth Branch of Government Claim (11:19 am)

Spencer Ackerman for TPM Muckraker reports that David Addington responded to a letter from John Kerry, “inquiring about the role of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) of the National Archives and Records Administration and the nature of the vice presidency under the Constitution.”

Addington wrote:

The executive order on classified national security information — Executive Order 12958 as amended in 2003 — makes it clear that the Vice President is treated like the President and distinguishes the two of them from “agencies.” The executive order gives the ISOO, under the supervision of the Archivist of the United States, responsibility to oversee certain activities of “agencies,” but not of the Vice President or the President.

Constitutional issues in government are best left for discussion when unavoidable disputes arise in a specific context instead of in theoretical discussions. Given that the executive order treats the Vice President like the President instead of like an “agency,” it is not necessary in these circumstances to address the subject of any alternative reasoning, based on the law and history of the legislative functions of the vice presidency, and the more modern executive functions of the vice presidency, to reach the same conclusion that the vice presidency is not an “agency” with respect to which ISOO has a role.

Spencer observes that Addington had two options:

either argue that the Office of the Vice President is outside the scope of the executive order governing review of how executive branch agencies are supposed to handle classified material, or return to the claim that the veep is a unique branch of government and is exempt by default. Addington, somewhat surprisingly, chooses Option One.

But Addington willfully disregards that the EO explicitly refers not just to “agencies” but to “entities” within the Executive Branch, effectively shifting his claim now to be that the President and Vice President are “nonentities.”