OPR

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 [...]

The Washington Post’s story today about liberals who are frustrated that the Obama administration isn’t pressing harder to win confirmation for liberal-leaning judges to the federal courts should also serve as a reminder that there are a whole lot of key Justice Department posts still not confirmed yet, either. Whether that’s because the White House [...]

Former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen today commends the Bush administration’s “well-run, highly disciplined CIA interrogation program, where clear guidelines were established and abuses or deviations from approved techniques were stopped, reported and addressed.”
I guess Thiessen didn’t read the same CIA inspector general report that so many of us have been scrutinizing in the [...]

This isn’t the long-awaited ethics report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that Spencer referred to this morning, but another ethics report from that office reportedly bolsters Attorney General Eric Holder’s conclusion that the Department of Justice should re-open nearly a dozen cases of prisoner abuse and even murder that the Bush administration [...]

John Yoo should be fired, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes, according to anti-war activists who greeted the University of California at Berkeley law professor when he returned to Boalt Hall, the law school where he has tenure, on Monday.
Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and [...]

I’ve been asking why the Senate Judiciary subcommittee holding the first congressional hearings on the torture memos this morning aren’t calling the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who wrote the memos, or their clients — the Bush administration’s most senior officials — to testify.
On Tuesday night, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told Keith Olbermann on MSNBC [...]

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 [...]

Following up on Spencer’s post about CIA Director Leon Panetta’s letter to his employees: Panetta’s statement that CIA officers “should not be investigated, let alone punished,” because this “is what fairness and wisdom require,” is not surprising. But it may not be all that wise, either.

Attorney General Eric Holder this afternoon named Mary Patrice Brown as the new head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, the Justice Department’s internal ethics unit.
The changing of the guard at the sensitive ethics office comes just after embarrassing revelations of federal attorney misconduct in the prosecution of former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). U.S. District [...]

Here’s an insightful observation from Harper’s Scott Horton today about Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s latest defense of the academic freedom of John Yoo, who reportedly may be asked to leave his tenured professorship at the University of California at Berkeley if an internal Justice Department report finds him guilty of ethical violations, as is [...]