Goldsmith: Cheney Lawyer Is Frothing Lunatic

If there’s a villain in Jack Goldsmith’s account of his time in the Justice Department, it’s David Addington, Dick Cheney’s legal alter ego. Addington, who became the vice president’s chief of staff after Scooter Libby resigned following his indictment, served as Cheney’s eyes and ears in the legal battles within the administration over warrantless surveillance, coercive interrogations and indefinite detentions. His style of argument, as recounted by Goldsmith, isn’t exactly a subtle one.

[W]hen Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. “If you rule that way,” Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, “the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands.”

Jane Mayer’s profile of Addington introduced him as a zealot for unchecked presidential power during wartime. Barton Gellman and Jo Becker’s series on Cheney added crucial detail, including Addington’s role in functionally authoring White House opinions denying al-Qaeda detainees Geneva Conventions protection.

Goldsmith delves even further in establishing Addington as a relentless legal force for unbridled executive authority. Take the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since 9/11, the court has rejected only four requests for surveillance in the U.S., about as many as it’s rejected in its entire 30-year existence. Yet for Addington, the court’s requirements for niceties like probable cause represented an unacceptable hindrance, putting the country at risk of devastation.

“We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.

From Goldsmith’s description, Addington can be reasonably said to consider the machinery of republican government to be a strategic asset of al-Qaeda. If the FISA Court was a meddlesome institution that needed scaling back, an impertinent bureaucrat like Goldsmith was vastly more irksome, representing as he did a mere executive appendage like the Justice Department. Addington would rebuke Goldsmith with stunning phrases like this one:

“The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. “You cannot question his decision.”

Somehow, Addington got into his head the idea that he alone represented President Bush’s interests.

Again and again the two lawyers clashed. In 2004, Goldsmith threatened to resign unless the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel formally repudiated an August 2002 memo justifying torture. Resignation would have meant intensifying a very public controversy over interrogations in the middle of an election year. Addington viewed Goldsmith, who had withdrawn a number of over-broad opinions on wartime authority during his tenure at OLC, as unconscionably willing to sacrifice national security out of legal squeamishness. He confronted Goldsmith in Gonzales’s White House office:

[Addington pulled] out of his jacket pocket a 3-by-5 card that listed the withdrawn opinions. “Since you’ve withdrawn so many legal opinions that the president and others have been relying on,” Addington said, according to Goldsmith, “we need you to … let us know which [of the remaining] ones you still stand by.”

Ultimately Goldsmith prevailed. The OLC rescinded the memo in December 2004. But it says a lot that Goldsmith is out of government, about to publish a book and testify to the Senate, and Addington has only ascended in the veep’s office.