Update: Bush officials trying to interfere with Justice Department ethics report

By Stephen C. Webster

UPDATE 328 PM ET: The Washington Post reports: Former Bush administration officials are launching a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.

In recent days, attorneys for the subjects of the ethics probe have encouraged senior Bush administration appointees to write and phone Justice Department officials, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

A draft report of more than 200 pages, prepared in January before Bush’s departure, recommends disciplinary action by state bar associations against two former department attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel who might have committed misconduct in preparing and signing the so-called torture memos. State bar associations have the power to suspend a lawyer’s license to practice or impose other penalties.

Read the full Post story here.

The deadline for Bush lawyers who wrote the administration’s policies on torture to respond to a Justice Department investigation has come and gone, Congress was told Tuesday, as the Justice Department ethics unit signaled the final leg of its investigation.

“Sources familiar with the much-anticipated report by the Justice Department’s ethics unit, known as the Office of Professional Responsibility, said it is sharply critical of the authors of the controversial policies,” reported CNN.

The three former top Bush lawyers — including Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury — face possible disciplinary action from state bar associations for what a former Justice Department official has called “deeply flawed” and “sloppily reasoned” legal analysis in the creation of the so-called “torture memos.”

The forthcoming report is expected to be highly critical of the attorneys.

“… [An] earlier draft of the investigators’ report recommended disciplinary referrals to local bar associations for two of the men: Yoo, now a law professor in California, and Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge based in Nevada,” sources told The Washington Post. “The report requires the approval of new Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., and findings could be released as early as this summer, according to two sources familiar with the process.

“Meanwhile, a Senate Judiciary panel will hold a hearing May 13 on the origins and legal analysis of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos, as well as whether the harsh techniques proved effective in securing useful information that prevented terrorist strikes, a Democratic aide said. Among the witnesses at the hearing will be Zelikow and former FBI agent Ali Soufan, who has been critical of the CIA interrogation program.”

“At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning,” wrote Zelikow on April 21. “My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn’t entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department’s archives.”

The House Judiciary Committee has asked the State Department to produce a copy of the memo.

Philip Zelikow, a former colleague of then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, was appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission despite his close ties to the Bush White House, and he remained in regular contact with Rove while overseeing the commission, according to New York Times reporter Philip Shenon’s book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.

Correction: An earlier version of this article, as well as its headline, wrongly stated that Bush lawyers did not respond to the Justice Department’s probe. Congress was told that the deadline for their responses had passed, not that they had not responded. It has been corrected in this version.