jay bybee

Michael Isikoff reports:
The federal judge who helped draft Justice Department memos on torture has set up a legal defense fund to pay the costs of defending against possible disciplinary or impeachment proceedings. Jay Bybee, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in Las Vegas, quietly set up the fund last July following widespread news reports that [...]

Responding to a question from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who’s asked frequently when the Justice Department will finally release the repeatedly delayed report by the Office of Professional Responsibility on the conduct of lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel under President Bush, Holder said that he expects it will be released by the end [...]

Earlier this year when Arlen Specter was still a Republican, the Pennsylvania senator was among the harshest critics of Dawn Johnsen, the Indiana University law professor who is President Obama’s pick to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The OLC is the office that housed such Bush-era luminaries as John Yoo and Jay Bybee, [...]

The Spanish newspaper Público reported Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for facilitating the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, according to Andy Worthington.
In March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the legal architects of the Bush detention and interrogation policies, [...]

Patrick Appel, who is filling in for Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, yesterday suggested that I was accusing John Yoo & Co. in the Bush Justice Department of the “crime” of approving vague CIA interrogation guidelines. Appel writes:
This seems more likely to be raised in defense of the CIA interrogators than against the lawyers. [...]

The explosive inspectors general report released on Friday makes one thing increasingly clear: the Bush White House knew that it was probably breaking the law.
From the report itself, John Yoo’s Office of Legal Counsel memo — and the lightning-fast reporting of Spencer Ackerman, Marc Ambinder and others on Friday — we now know that President [...]

Sure, the associate attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department is supposed to be in charge of the office. But in 2001, then-OLC chief Jay Bybee “was never read into” the President’s Surveillance Program and instead, his deputy, John Yoo, was the only one in the office who would “draft [...]

Interesting fact about the soon-to-be-declassified report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on the propriety of the Bush-era torture advocates at the department: while the office has gone out of its way to accommodate former Office of Legal Counsel officials John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, a rule-of-law whistleblower who nearly had [...]

Former Bush administration officials are urging the Justice Department to soften the criticisms contained in an ethics report examining the work of the lawyers who justified torture and other harsh interrogation techniques, reports The Washington Post.
According to two anonymous sources, lawyers for the subjects of the investigation — which include former Office of Legal Counsel [...]

U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee shocked a lot of people this week when he told The New York Times that has no real regrets about signing off on the Office of Legal Counsel memorandums that have since horrified much of the American public. Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), as I wrote earlier, has since [...]