In those Office of Legal Counsel memos released yesterday is a telling footnote that appears to try to exonerate the DOJ crew that gave the now-discredited legal advice on things like torture, domestic surveillance, and the scope of executive power.
Funny thing is, the author of the footnote is Steven Bradbury, the acting OLC chief under Bush whose own conduct was reportedly criticized in an internal Justice Department investigation into whether OLC lawyers failed to meet professional standards when they concocted their legal theories.
The internal report from the Office of Professional Responsibility was mostly completed last fall, but apparently ran into such resistance from then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey that he declined to authorize its public release, Newsweek reported last month.
So then along comes Bradbury, writing his January memo (.pdf) explaining why all those post-9/11 OLC opinions were withdrawn, and punctuating it with this odd footnote, in a pre-emptive strike of sorts against the OPR’s findings.
But it was only pre-emptive in the sense that the OPR’s findings were not yet public. Those findings were already known at the top levels of the Justice Department — and in fact, according to Newsweek, Mukasey’s second in command was demanding that the report include responses from Bradbury and the others. So it’s possible, though not certain, that Bradbury had already seen the preliminary report from OPR when he wrote the self-exonerating footnote.
