It's the missing emails story.
The Justice Department is on the trail. Senator Patrick Leahy, Senate Judiciary Committee chair, is back on the matter of malfeasance of the Bush White House. Things do tend to go missing during Republican presidencies -- has any ever filled the gap in the "missing" tapes from the Nixon administration? And we're not even talking (yet) about huge amounts of missing information and money from the Reagan and Bush2 administration.
No wonder people of the calibre of Patrick Leahy are hot under the collar.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who leads the panel, angrily demanded to know what had happened to the e-mail files, and he noted that the destruction of government records, including official e-mail messages, was a criminal offense.
The New York Times goes on to report that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee seem unconcerned. With a degree of irresponsibility that has become the norm on the right, they assert that "if the Justice Department were to continue investigating anything involving the interrogation memos, it should be whether officials at the Office of Professional Responsibility or elsewhere at the Justice Department improperly leaked details of the ethics inquiry to the news media over the last year."
What's deeply annoying to many has been DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility's virtual exoneration of "torture lawyers" Bybee and Yoo. That's only one case, but it's the one which has angered people across the country.
A government watchdog group and the editorial board of the New York Times have called on the DOJ to probe the missing emails. Leahy also called for a "comprehensive review," saying the Office of Professional Responsibility report on Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the torture memos, was insufficient.
"In my view it was the wrong focus. These legal memoranda were only part of the problem," he said. "They were intended to provide a golden shield to commit torture and get away with it." ...TPM
Talking Points Memo also has Senator Leahy's full statement about the matter. Leahy writes:
... In my view President Bush was disserved. These lawyers told the administration what Vice President Cheney wanted to hear. Without question, our government institutions, the Justice Department and, in particular, the Office of Legal Counsel, were undermined. The rule of law was disrespected. Most importantly, the American people were harmed and put at greater security risk. The torture of individuals was not just a violation of our laws and treaties; it handed al Qaeda a propaganda tool to gain new recruits, and it made us less safe.
Just last weekend, General Petraeus said that "the use of the interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual" work, and that when we have "taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside." He is right. Colin Powell was right. Alberto Mora was right. The many JAG officers who fought these encroachments were right.
Focusing on whether these lawyers failed to meet legal ethics standards misses the fundamental point. The real concern is that lawyers who were supposed to be giving independent advice regarding the rule of law and what it prohibits were instead focused on excusing what the Bush-Cheney administration wanted to do. The OLC is charged to provide, both in times of war and peace, "candid, independent and principled advice -- even when that advice may be inconsistent with the desires of policymakers." These lawyers abandoned their independent responsibilities to become apologists. ...
