Legal News

Yoo Lawyer Attacks Dawn Johnsen?s ?Partisan? Assertions

By Ashby Jones

Love them or loathe them, one thing that’s undeniable about former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo: neither has shrunk from the public eye quietly.

The latest on Yoo, who’s been making appearances on this blog on a practically weekly basis: The Berkeley law professor still has some arrows left in his quiver for his detractors, including Dawn Johnsen, President Obama’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the same office that once employed Yoo.

The remarks made by Yoo and his lawyer, Gibson Dunn’s Miguel Estrada came in this reply brief, filed Friday to the Ninth Circuit, in the case involving federal prisoner Jose Padilla and Yoo. The court is reviewing a lower court’s refusal to dismiss a lawsuit Padilla that accuses Yoo of approving his allegedly illegal detention and providing the legal cover for the government’s harsh interrogation techniques. Click here for the San Francisco Chronicle story (Hat tip: Main Justice); here and here for previous LB posts on the Padilla/Yoo situation.

In his filing, Estrada dismissed Yoo’s critics as uninformed academics or Democrats with political axes to grind. At the top of Estrada’s list: Dawn Johnsen, who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under President Clinton. Johnsen has written that Yoo’s memos approving waterboarding and other practices violated legal standards and the office’s tradition of impartial advice.

In a 2006 law review article, she proposed guidelines for the office that stressed its duty to stand up to the president.

In Friday’s filing, Estrada said Johnsen’s guidelines reflect “only partisan disagreement with the policies of the previous administration.”

Estrada also cited the Justice Department’s report last week concluding that Yoo committed no professional misconduct in his memos. He did not mention earlier findings by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that Yoo gave Bush one-sided advice.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 23, 2010 (boomark / email).