The Department of Justice has agreed to comply with part of a Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena and will turn over documents to the panel related to legal advice DOJ lawyers provided to the Bush administration about the use of force in Iraq, torture, and other highly controversial legal memos drafted after 9/11, according to Patrick Leahy, the committee's Democratic chairman.The DOJ faced a Tuesday deadline of turning over a wide-range of legal opinions issued by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Council (OLC), which Leahy subpoenaed last month after Attorney General Michael Mukasey rebuffed several previous requests to voluntarily turn over the documents to Leahy’s committee.
Mukasey was also subpoenaed and scheduled to testify before the committee Tuesday. But that hearing was postponed, a spokesman for Leahy said, due to Democratic caucus meetings scheduled to take place.
On Friday, Keith Nelson, the DOJ’s Deputy assistant Attorney General, sent Leahy a letter stating the DOJ would not turn over all of the legal memorandums the Democratic senator sought.
“Complying with the Committee's request for all OLC opinions since 2001 on national security and terrorism issues, or a list of those opinions, would constitute a wholesale disclosure of confidential legal advice that would undermine the ability of the Executive Branch to obtain confidential legal advice from OLC in the future,” Nelson wrote.
“As we have discussed with Committee staff, agencies would be substantially chilled from seeking OLC advice on sensitive, important subjects if they believed that the resulting memoranda would be disclosed to others. Moreover, OLC's confidential opinions are intended to assist Executive Branch entities in understanding what activities are permissible or impermissible under the law, but they are not themselves law.”
Nelson, however, said the DOJ would turn over some OLC memorandums Leahy had subpoenaed sometime Monday.
Those memos include:
• March 18, 2004 memorandum regarding “Protected persons’ in Occupied Iraq”
• November 6, 2001 memorandum entitled “Re: Legality of the Use of Military Commissions to Try Terrorists”
• February 7, 2002 memorandum entitled “Status of Taliban Forces Under Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949”
• October 23, 2002 memorandum entitled “Authority of President Under Domestic and International Law to Use Military Force Against Iraq”
• November 8, 2002 memorandum entitled “Effect of a Recent United Nation’s Security Counsel Resolution on the Authority of the President Under International Law to Use Military Force Against Iraq”
• December 7, 2002 memorandum entitled “Further Material Breach Under U.N. Security Counsel Resolution 1141 as a Result of False Statements or Omissions in Iraq’s WMD Declaration”
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1 comment:
Look for Mr. Yoo to be tossed under the bus and others. Now the White House is only saving close friends because there to many crimes to cover up.
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