Harold Koh

Buried in this transcript at Media Matters, I see Sean Hannity making things up about State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh. “You have a State Department lawyer,” said Hannity, “Harold Koh, who says the U.S. should follow Sharia law in some cases.”
Koh has never said this.

The new legal adviser to the State Department (on a 62-35 vote) sent this message to a group of supporters on Facebook:
My dear friends:
Earlier today, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm my nomination as Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. Starting tomorrow, I will assume that position, and begin a public service leave [...]

A vote on Harold Koh’s nomination to be legal adviser to the State Department is scheduled for 4:10 p.m. Yesterday, after cloture passed on Koh, I asked Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council for a reaction on a nominee his group had campaigned hard against.
“I thought the vote would be a little closer,” said [...]

In the end, every Democrat* and eight Republicans voted for cloture on Harold Koh’s nomination for legal adviser to the State Department. The Republicans: Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and George Voinovich (R-Ohio). Three of them — Gregg, Martinez, [...]

Laura Rozen reports that Harold Koh’s nomination for State Department legal adviser has just overcome a major Senate hurdle:
“Cloture passed on a 65-31 vote,” a Congressional source relays at 11:30am. ”There was applause in the Senate gallery after the vote was announced. Republicans are threatening to exercise their right to use all 30 hours of floor [...]

Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office just announced that a cloture vote for Harold Koh’s nomination for State Department legal adviser is scheduled for 11 a.m. tomorrow.

Even though Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh hasn’t yet been confirmed as State Department legal adviser, his current employer is apparently pretty confident that he will be.
Bloomberg reports that Yale University yesterday named Robert C. Post — an expert in constitutional law who’s been teaching at Yale since 2003 — as the law [...]

Conservatives see victory in the stalled nomination of a normally uncontroversial post.

A spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tells me that the senator is filing cloture on Harold Koh, the president’s nominee for State Department Legal Adviser, “right now.” Koh has been buffetted by attacks from conservatives, and Democrats hesitated to move on the nomination until they were confident they had the votes to confirm him.

Via Ben Smith, we find Center for Security Policy founder Frank Gaffney pulling out his hair and rending his garments about President Obama’s Cairo speech. Gaffney has previously cited “evidence” (what evidence, he didn’t say) that the president was “born in Kenya,” but he’s a reliable agitator for aggressive wars in Central Asia, so he’s [...]