Saturday, December 13, 2008

Department of Justice is working desperately to keep Obama transition team from gaining access to documents that prove administration broke the law.

A senior Justice Department official said today that “99.8 percent” of the department’s work with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team has gone smoothly. The 0.2 percent snag: The department has reservations about granting the team's request to review classified legal opinions related to secret CIA and National Security Agency programs.

In a roundtable discussion with reporters last week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey declined to discuss specific requests made by transition staff regarding opinions issued by the Office of Legal Counsel, the arm of the Justice Department that provides legal advice to the president and all other executive branch agencies.

The Justice official said the dispute over access to the NSA and CIA opinions has made its way up to Williams & Connolly's Gregory Craig, who earlier this month was named to be Obama’s White House counsel. Craig was expected to meet with current White House counsel Fred Fielding to discuss the issue, the official said. It's unclear whether such a meeting has already taken place. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Justice official said the department was reluctant to provide the opinions to Obama's team without permission from the two intelligence agencies whose activities they address. At the roundtable, Mukasey said OLC opinions are issued at the request of other agencies with their "own equity or interest in the information.”

"And so what we try to do is determine whether, and to what extent, we can clear that information and try to do it as quickly as we can so as to get it to the transition team so that they're aware of all the things that they need when they take over on the 21st," Mukasey said, according to a transcript provided by the department.

The opinions, some of which have been released to Congress in redacted form, contain the legal rationale of the NSA’s warrantless spying program and the CIA’s detention and interrogation policies, among other intelligence initiatives.


Delay, obfuscate, lose e-mails, shred evidence, revise history, these are but a few of the tactics being used by George Bush and his cronies to hide from justice.

But we cannot allow him to rape our country, sell our souls to oil companies, and murder thousands of innocent people without having to pay for his crimes.

Americans MUST keep the pressure on President Obama and the Democrats to make public ALL of the crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration, and ensure that every single one of the people responsible are tried and convicted so that our people, and the people all over the world, can see that America really does stand for justice.

If we fail to do this one thing then we will have lost the right to call ourselves patriots. Because no REAL American would ever stand still and allow so blatant a criminal organization as the Bush administration, to get away scot free.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:19 AM

    I wonder if Bush will be on his way to Paraguay on January 21st?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dayum...Obama's first order of biz should be to utterly dismantle the Office of Legal Counsel and salt the ground on which it lay.

    ReplyDelete

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