bush

Despite President Obama’s previous criticism of former President George W. Bush’s “signing statements” that limit the president’s responsibility to comply with a bill passed by Congress, it turns out Obama has been doing much the same thing since he took office.  Charlie Savage reported in The New York Times on Sunday that Obama has issued [...]

Emails provided to the House Judiciary Committee at closed-door hearings yesterday reveal that President George W. Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and other high-ranking officials in the former administration had even more influence over the politically charged firings of U.S. attorneys three years ago than has been previously revealed.
The Washington Post has obtained those emails [...]

Eric Kleefeld rounds up more local Tea Party coverage and sees a conflict between “the hard-line activists who attend these things, versus the more mainstream politicians who want to win elections and are looking for their votes.”
This isn’t really new. The first big round of Tea Parties* on April 15 were products of grassroots activists [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union will file a brief tomorrow urging the federal court to suppress evidence gathered using torture, which the government wants to rely on in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the boy who “confessed” to throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers after being arrested and tortured by Afghan authorities in 2002, then [...]

Marcy Wheeler made a great point on Friday that’s worth following up on. President Obama’s declaration to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture tosses the responsibility for developing “effective policies and programs for stopping torture” to the State Department, asking it to “solicit information from all of our diplomatic missions [...]

Pressed by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) on his view of whether the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal, Attorney General Eric Holder said the program was “inconsistent” with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, but repeatedly refused to say it was “illegal,” or that President Bush broke the law — despite previous statements [...]

This probably won’t come as a huge surprise to most readers, but since it still might to former Vice President Dick Cheney or former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, both of who’ve been going around asserting that the Bush administration’s torture and abuse tactics as have saved America from another terrorist [...]

While we’re all duly praising Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) for calling a hearing next Wednesday on the torture memos, I’m still puzzled by one thing: why isn’t the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts calling the authors of the memos to explain how and why they reached their legal conclusions despite clearly [...]

The Obama Justice Department has asked a judge to dismiss charges against two former American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists accused of receiving classified information from the Bush Pentagon and passing it on to journalists and Israeli government officials. Good.
Put aside whatever you may feel about AIPAC. The case amounted to the criminalization of extremely [...]

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has invited Jay Bybee, the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer and current judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, reports Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post. Is this the beginning of a broader Senate Judiciary Committee probe?