Bush's legal foes now Obama's legal team

[one...two...tree 2,762]

By BEN SMITH, Politico

President Barack Obama is staffing his Justice Department with some of his predecessor's fiercest critics, among them lawyers who were fired by President Bush or who quit jobs working for his administration.

Now, the opposition is in charge, and lawyers who spent years defining the limits of executive power will be helping wield it.

The change may be most dramatic at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel—which defended some of Bush's most controversial policies—where a small cadre of lawyers who had an outsized influence on legal criticism of Bush are taking the top three jobs.

Those three—Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron—and others made the case that Bush's interrogation policy was justified by flawed legal reasoning. Their arguments precipitated one of Obama's most dramatic early acts: flatly repudiating all government legal advice on interrogation issued between September 11, 2001 and January 20, 2009.

"I think they will be an irritant for Obama in the best possible way—they're very honest lawyers," said Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, where Lederman also taught. . "When Dawn and Marty and David think that he is asking if he can do something that in their view pushes the envelope and goes beyond the bounds of what is legal, they're going to say, 'Sorry Mr. Obama, we think that would be illegal.'"

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17895.html

[mox 298]

Seems to me these are exactly the type of people you want in charge of the Justice Department. People who are willing to risk their career and livelihood when they see executive power being abused. Those on the right should hail this move.

[pedroh 21]

cool.. looks like Obama wants to restore the civil liberties and the privacy of americans.. it's time for people to realize that any violation of them 'in the name of security' was just wrong.