Legal News

One Little Video, One Blossoming Controversy

By Ashby Jones

The fallout from this Keep America video released last week just keeps on comin’.

The backstory: A conservative advocacy group affiliated with Liz Cheney (pictured) and Bill Kristol, Keep America Safe, released this video that questioned the identities and motives of a group of current Justice Department lawyers who represented terrorist suspects while in private practice. (Click here and here for previous LB posts.)

Let’s get you caught up on the recent flood of articles.

John Schwartz at the NYT: For starters, John Schwartz at the NYT offers up a page-one story on Wednesday on how the controversy has “split the tightly knit world of conservative legal scholars.” Schwartz landed some nice quotes, including one from Chicago law prof Richard Epstein: “Liz Cheney is a former student of mine - I don't know what moves her on this thing.”

Our favorite from Schwartz’s story comes courtesy of John Yoo (some days we really feel like this is the Wall Street Journal’s Yoo Blog). Yoo pooh-poohed the controversy, noting that President Obama has the right to appoint whomever he wants. "He can and should put people into office who share his views," Yoo told the Times. Then "they can decide whether they agree with him or not."

Michael Mukasey at the WSJ: On the WSJ’s op-ed page, former federal judge and attorney general Michael Mukasey weighs in on the situation, essentially condemning the Keep America Safe position, while also tossing a barb toward those who criticized the lawyering done by Yoo and current Ninth Circuit judge Jay Bybee while serving as White House lawyers:

A lawyer in public service, particularly one dealing with sensitive matters of national security, has the obligation to authorize any step or practice the law permits in order to keep the nation and its citizens safe. And a lawyer who undertakes to represent someone whom his neighbors-perhaps rightly-revile as a threat to the public welfare is obligated to bring his talents to bear just as forcefully in favor of that client as he would if he were representing Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the French artillery officer who in 1895 was found guilty of treason and sent to Devil’s Island for little more than being Jewish.

Marc Thiessen at the WaPo: Thiessen, an author and former speechwriter for President Bush and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld (and who mixed it up bigtime with Jon Stewart Tuesday night (click here for the videos)) argued two chief points in this recent Washington Post column: that current AG Eric Holder should have identified the Obama administration lawyers sooner, and that the lawyers for accused terrorists were not “simply following a great American tradition, in which everyone gets a lawyer and their day in court.”

Writes Thiessen:

The habeas lawyers were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants. They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military’s ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 10, 2010 (boomark / email).