Greg Craig Won’t Tell You How Obama Disappeared the Whistleblowers
Charlie Savage has an article chronicling Chuck Grassley’s objection to something I objected to last week–Obama’s signing statement undermining whistleblowers.
But that’s not the really creepy part of the article. The creepy part is the way some Obama Administration official, who happens to have the same legal credential and sophist argumentative technique as Greg Craig, provided input for the article.
The White House press office referred questions to an administration official, imposing the condition that he not be identified by name or title.
The official, a lawyer, said Mr. Obama was “committed to whistle-blower protections.” He declined to define every kind of instance in which the president’s power to keep a matter confidential would trump a whistle-blower protection statute, but he did say the administration had no intention of going further than did Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in signing statements concerning similar provisions.
“I don’t think President Obama’s signing statement injects a new level of uncertainty into the law,” he said.
[snip]
The administration official pointed to a memorandum Mr. Obama issued on March 9 laying out a signing statements policy. The document, which does not mention legislative intent, says he will employ only “legitimate” interpretations of statutes. Mr. Obama’s challenge in this case, the official said, is consistent with that principle.
So, let’s review here: They’ve got Charlie Savage talking to a mysterious lawyer on the condition that the lawyer not be named. Said lawyer refuses to explain what the signing statement means for whistleblowers, but claims this doesn’t create any new uncertainty. And then said lawyer asserts that the signing statement from last week was–by definition–a "legitimate" interpretation of statute, legislative intent be damned.
Yup. This is the way we bring transparency to the White House alright.
Chuck Grassley’s ire at Obama’s childish games with whistleblowers will remain a story, so I’m happy Savage covered it. But at some point, Obama’s just as ridiculous approach to discussing legal issues with the press needs to become the story. I realize Greg Craig just recently came fromWilliam & Connolly, where the off-the-record manipulation of the press may be second nature, but he’s working for the American people now, and these things he’s talking about are actually supposed to be laws. It’d be really nice if Greg Craig had the decency to tell us what the laws in this country are.
Happy St. Patty’s Day, EW!
This is sickening. Please.
You are so picky EW. After all, it’s not as if Obama didn’t tell us over and over in his campaign, “I’ll handle things just like George Bush”
As we say here in Kentucky, God bless him.
I thought is was “Bless his heart”
that was the Southern Curse.
There are whistle blowers, Marcy, and then there are whistle swallowers.
OT: Bush is making his first post-presidential speech in Calgary today.
There have been petitions to the RCMP to arrest Bush as a war criminal as soon as he arrives, but of course, in Steve’s Canada, that is not gonna happen. Calgary is my home town (although I’m a long way away right now), and I really resent this. Oil-biz carpetbaggers — grrr.
ETA: Oh, and happy St Patrick’s Day, EW and all.
Erin Go Braugh!
Erin go bragh, nitwit.
Look at it this way. There are a lot of Bush and Cheney moles in the government after 8 years of swilling from the public trough. They would like to do nothing better than leak damaging information to a right-wing MSM, who would like nothing better than to turn the Obama administration into a Clinton administration. I think Obama is protecting his rear here. I’m not claiming it’s something we should applaud, but we need to understand the civil war.
I think Chuck Grassley just asked AIG execs to commit seppuku, literally. rethug senators demanding ritual suicide from corporate execs… now that’s something new.
“O happy dagger!”
he.. the Grassley quote deserves to be framed for posterity (from AFP):
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa): “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them [is] if they would follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide. In the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.”
more bs from mr. hope: i am against signing statements … a couple of days later he uses them.
we will have a transparent government … then a bill to make sure we don’t by punishing whistleblowers and this after using the same lame executive privilege arguments to protect bush in federal lawsuits that bush did.
i’m against retroactive immunity for the telecoms … signs a bill that contains exactly that.
we no longer will use the term “enemy combatants” … but keeps the same policies of dealing with the now newly non-enemy combatants as when they were enemy combatants.
now according to his cabinet member summers, we are a nation of laws … when he allows war criminals to run loose that have murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people and tells us that we need to move on and not get caught in the past.
he thinks he’s so smart that he can delude the public with little dumbass pr stunts like yesterday … with his staff clapping wildly in the background like a bunch of trained seals … when he chided aig for what they did to US posturing like he’s an outraged powerless victim also when HE ain’t US and HE could have stopped them from doing it to US.
change you can delude yourself to believe if you are so inclined to stick your head up your ass like so many dems did with clinton.
Z
obama is a vain man, and that’s the key to getting to him. simply continue to pound away at his intellectual dishonesty, and intellectually anemic justifications of shameful actions. he hates to be perceived as weak, so we must illustrate how he is prostrating himself to firewall war criminals. it’s all there for anyone to see.
Tbau,
You may be right.
Like I said, he thinks he is so much smarter than us that he can bs us. He is very smart, but he can’t take intellectually dishonest positions and transform them into the truth.
Z
um, i seriously doubt many of his former u of c students now think he’s smarter, especially after all the goofy rationalizations he’s trotted out. and plenty of us were apprehensive all along.
i just don’t buy this ten-dimensional chessmaster nonsense. it goes against the very transparency he advocated. but his apologists will go to great lengths to keep him pristine. after all, the mind does strange things to protect itself.
Do you think this could be part of a deal with the Clintons since their may have been some fisa no no’s that began during his tenure as well as torture?
Just wondering.
what do you mean by deal? each candidate has nominally been critical of the executive’s overreaching, only to embrace those very powers once in office. thus protecting their predecessors is a matter of course.
this administration is every bit as pr-obsessed as the last one. obama scripted his first press conference, replete with pre-approved questions and pre-selected reporters. see also rahm’s very own hagiography-for-access deal with stenographer lizza.
force him and his apologists to resort to, “well, the previous administration did it as well.” i suspect this is last meme they’d want to find refuge in.
The real question is will the citizenry put up with a the money-carrot Congress in the next election. As long as the Congress is run so inneffectually and to the detriment to the general commonwealth, the economic and political situation is only going to get worse in the U.S. But, as always, we should look at the positive…everyone else in the world is probably just as competently lead?
I don’t buy the 10 dimensional chess bs either … it’s a delusive exercise for those that want to believe that there is something happening beneath what they are observing. people that believe that bs are likely the same idiots that believed that clinton wanted to represent the american people and do all these wonderful things for us but the nasty republicans made him do otherwise and it was just a coincidence that clinton became filthy rich in the process.
If he was playing this multi-dimensional game of chess, then he’d be taking advantage of this groundswell of disgust for the aig bonuses rather than doing damage control with substance-less pr stunts .
Z
I favor a more direct approach whenever it’s feasible. I’m just having trouble thinking of a visual symbol for putting whistleblowers in jail.
According to TPM, they changed their tune about getting those bonuses back within hours of Obama’s speech:
http://online.wsj.com/article/…..ml?ref=fp1
If the Fourth Amendment can be stomped in the rush to grant retroactive immunity to those involved in the illegal wiretapping, why can’t . . . ? Grrrrrrr.
He got his soundbite, that’s all the cynical bastards wanted out of that little pr stunt yesterday: the vision of obama being outraged, the sound of clapping in the background in support (supplied by aides), and semantics that suggest that obama is on our side and is a victim too.
Then a few hours later while everyone is asleep with fairytale visions of a president that represents them dancing in their dreams, a quiet statement that nothing can be done.
Z
TPM is slow to the mark here. This point was blindingly obvious from yesterday’s first reports of Obama supposedly wanting the bonuses to be recovered. Here is direct language from yesterday morning’s NYT article:
White House officials said that the administration is not looking to take A.I.G. to court to stop the company from paying out the bonuses.
Obama’s outrage was never anything more than a face saving PR show.
Agree with all you’ve said.
a good read
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..74496.html
Thanks. Great story…
So maybe one piece of good news here: it’s not Rahm’s whisperings.
So that’s the new standard now? No worse than W? Geez, I’m so relieved. /s
The mantra of transparency in this Administration is a joke. We see it everyday in the financial crisis. It’s transparency, transparency, transparency. Yet despite all this transparency, we don’t know who is getting billions, why, and what they are using it for.
We are just coming off the worst Presidency in our history. All kinds of awful and stupid things were done and put in place by it. I would expect that as part of the cleaning up process that there would be a lot of whistleblowing needed. Instead I see Obama taking up the position that he will only protect whistleblowers if he happens to agree with them. This is fundamentally at odds with the concept. And on top of that he does it in a way that undercuts the whole idea of transparency.
This brings me back to my view that Obama is very much an embodiment of the Washington Establishment. Like it, he does not disagree with what Bush did. He only thinks that, in some instances, Bush went too far and executed poorly.
I hope Savage follows your suggestion EW and starts to really delve into the ridiculous obsession with anonymity in the Obama White House. For a guy that campaigned on transparency, it is more than a little odd that he can’t get his staff to speak with the press on the record. It’s not hard. Maybe he should send them all to an AA meeting where they can all learn how to start a conversation by saying, “Hi. My name is…”.
My favorite AA slogan applied here: “You are only as sick as your secrets”.
And in regard to Grassley’s statement…that is just some good snark.
And in other news: Faux news reports that Grassley told finance professionals to kill themselves. (seriously that was the voice over).
No mention of hari kari or the cultural comparison in regard to shame, of course.
10 – that’s for more minor infringements, like when you’ve had no sleep, had to run into a pharmacy with a snotty nose, wearing ripped sweats with paint fleck and unbrushed teeth and hair, and run into a high school acquaintance who has just had their nails done and they say, ‘well you just haven’t changed in all these years, hon’ you answer back, ‘aw, well bless y’alls heart’
I think some advisor is pressuring Obama to shield Bush tocha planners’ identities, cloaked in the generic term whistle blowing. The Republicans working in congress attempted to render the whistleblowing statutes meaningless early in the Bush presidency. Although Grassley is a known supporter of an increment of checks and balances, his press statement began with a litany of falsifications of what actually Obama’s campaign speeches said. Keep building, Barack, any improvement is worthwhile.
Bravo Marcy for spotting this one so early in the day. Greg Craig now knows we have figured out that he is busy Bushifying the White House to protect his former firms clients — who would otherwise be looking at jail time. How long can Obama let him run loose before the MSM and the base figure this out? Craig is trying to hide as an anonymous functionary. I hope Charlie Savage, and others wake up. I wish Grassley was one of ours.
Meanwhile, Obama is also denying GITMO defense counsel access to a set of UNCLASSIFIED documents affecting 100 or so detainees.
I guess this is the “otherwise confidential” kind of stuff that Obama wants to be able to prosecute whistleblowers for leaking.
The documents at issue, “returns” are statements of the allegations against the detainees and a summary of the kinds of evidence that might exist to support those allegations. The court ordered that the DOJ put together unclassified versions of returns that allegedly had classified info – kind of like a CIPA order to make an unclassified summary available.
DOJ finally got around to complying with the order for unclassified returns and started filing some last year, but according to the article, “a few months ago” DOJ began making all the unclassified returns filings under seal.
In a really bizarre and complicated set of circumstances, some of the witnesses (inculpatory or exculpatory) are ex-GITMO detainees. As long as the returns detailing the allegations against the detainees are under seal, witnesses can only be advised of the info and offer up their information in response to the allegations (like, ‘oh, no, I didn’t mean your Abu Omar when I confessed under torture to knowing an Abu Omar who went to a training camp, I meant THIS Abu Omar’) IF they sign off on strict rules, including liability rules, regarding handling and use of the info.
Amazingly:
Really? Not trust a government who childnaps, tortures, disappears, then has its Changeling President assert that non-US citizens have no recourse against US Government torture, no matter who was tortured or what was done to them or however far removed they may have been from being involved in the GWOT.
How could anyone not trust that gov?
Childish is being kind. Lumping together Clinton and Bush on whistleblowers and signing statements seems like a smarmy, inside-the-Beltway middle finger.
Obama won’t go farther than Bush in his use of signing statements or WB protection? Since when has the rotten apple that spoils the barrel been the standard for what to pick off the tree?