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A Tough Job Market for Discredited Bush Lawyers

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As many of you have pointed out, Alberto Gonzales is having a tough time on the job market. I’ll get to that, but first I want to remind you of two other experiences former Bush lawyers have had after they left. First, there’s Harriet Miers, who after a four month job search, ended up where she started, at her old firm of Locke Liddell. She found a job, sure, but it didn’t look like any other big firms were eager to snap up the former White House Counsel.

Then there’s William Haynes. He found something right away–as Corporate Counsel for Chevron. But Chevron doesn’t want you to know they’ve hired Haynes.

When a company recruits a prominent government official, it’s usually eager to put the word out immediately. But Chevron Corp. took more than a month to publicly confirm that it had hired William "Jim" Haynes II, the controversial former general counsel of the Pentagon. Chevron officials say that they didn’t make a big deal of Haynes’ hiring because they didn’t think it was newsworthy.

[snip]

The U.S. Department of Defense announced Haynes’ resignation as general counsel Feb. 25. Two days later Chevron general counsel Charles James sent a memo to the company’s management committee stating that Haynes would be coming aboard as chief corporate counsel. Haynes, who will report to James, will manage the 45-attorney legal department.

Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson says that the company did not make an external announcement about Haynes’ hiring. "I don’t think we thought it was newsworthy," Robertson says. Word of Haynes’ employment by Chevron began appearing in blogs last week, and was reported on Newsweek‘s Web site April 5.

Mr. Robertson, you may not want the general public to know where Haynes ended up, but particularly with the news that Dick Cheney has leant his personal lawyer to Haynes to represent him in matters pertaining to torture, it is certainly newsworthy that Haynes ended up at one of the oil companies Dick and Bush have been making rich of late.

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Torture Telltale Timing

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Kudos to McClatchy to choose this week to interview Glenn Fine–and to induce him to get unusually chatty. Marisa Taylor reports that DOD is stalling the release of a DOJ IG report on the FBI’s role in torture.

 The release of a report on the FBI’s role in the interrogations of prisoners in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq has been delayed for months because the Pentagon is reviewing how much of it should remain classified, according to the Justice Department’s watchdog.

Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s inspector general, told McClatchy that his office has pressed the Defense Department to finish its review, but officials there haven’t completed the process "in a timely fashion."

"Why that happened, I don’t know," Fine said in an interview this week.

Tell me, Marisa Taylor, did Fine have a smirk on his face when he said that? I couldn’t imagine why DOD would be stalling the release of this report!

Though Fine suggests there has been some recent movement in the classification review process.

Fine said the Pentagon now appears to be moving on his request.

"My sense is they are working hard on it now, and I believe we’re going to reach a resolution one way or another in the not-too-distant future," he said. [my emphasis]

Tell me, Glenn Fine, did this sudden responsiveness on the part of the DOD start in the last three weeks or so. You know, since the time when William Haynes left DOD in an awfully big hurry? I couldn’t help but notice that Daniel Dell’Orto got around to declassifying the Torture Memo just weeks (if not days) after Haynes left DOD. I wonder if he has been equally busy clearing Fine’s report for publication.

Acting Counsels and Torture

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Marty Lederman links to the finally declassified March 2003 memo authorizing torture in the military (Part One, Part Two). He reminds us the significance of the memo:

As I’ve discussed previously — see for instance here and here, and as Jane Mayer has reported in great detail, the March 14th Yoo memorandum, and the April 2, 2003 DOD Working Group Report that incorporated its outrageous arguments about justifications for ignoring statutory limits on interrogation, was secretly briefed to Geoffrey Miller before he was assigned to Iraq, and became the source of all the abuse that occurred there in 2003 and early 2004. (In late 2004, new OLC head Jack Goldsmith reviewed the March 2003 memo, was stunned by what he later called the "unusual lack of care and sobriety in [its] legal analysis" — it "seemed more an exercise of sheer power than reasoned analysis" — and immediately called the Pentagon to implore them not to rely upon it. Later, the next head of OLC, Dan Levin, wrote the Pentagon to confirm that they rescind any policies that had been based on the Yoo memo. See the whole story here.)

But I’m even more interested in this part of Marty’s post:

On Friday, March 13, 2003, Jay Bybee left his office as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. The very next day — a Saturday — John Yoo, merely a Deputy AAG in the Office, issued his notorious memo to the Pentagon, on behalf of OLC, which effectively gave the Pentagon the green light to disregard statutory limits on torture, cruelty and maltreatment in the treatment of detainees.

It describes how, as soon as the established top lawyer for one part of the executive branch left, his replacement took responsibility for a significant legal act. I find it ironic, particularly given the stamp that appears on the first page of the first part of the memo:

Declassify under authority of Executive Order 1958
By Acting General Counsel, Department of Defense,
By Daniel J. Dell’Orto
31 March 2008

Dell’Orto, you’ll remember, replaced William Haynes at some point last month. I’m not precisely sure when Haynes’ last day was–but within weeks of taking over as Acting General Counsel at DOD, Dell’Orto declassified an opinion we’ve been trying to declassify for years. Read more →

Gitmo Fixer Resigns

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I guess BushCo cares more about their show trials than they do having a long-time Cheney fixer.

William Haynes, one of the architects of our DOD detainee policies, announced his resignation today (h/t TPMM).

The Department of Defense announced today that General Counsel of the Department of Defense William J. Haynes II is returning to private life next month. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said of Haynes, “I am sorry to see Jim leave the Pentagon. I have valued his legal advice and enjoyed working with him. Jim held this important post longer than anyone in history and he did so during one of America’s most trying periods. He has served the Department of Defense and the nation with distinction.” Said Haynes, “I thank the President and the Secretary of Defense for their confidence and for the opportunity to serve. I leave the Pentagon humbled and inspired by the selfless sacrifices of the men and women, uniformed and civilian, who defend our country. And, I thank their families.”

You’ll recall that Haynes is the guy who said "we can’t have acquittals" in the Gitmo show trials coming up.

"[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled [Morris] Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.’"

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions’ chain of command. "Everyone has opinions," Davis says. "But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders."

Reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Cynthia Smith said, "The Department of Defense disputes the assertions made by Colonel Davis in this statement regarding acquittals."

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