Mukasey the Obstructionist

Mukasey had given previous indications that he would not turn on the White House.

For instance, at his confirmation hearings in October, he refused even to acknowledge that waterboarding was torture, an indication that he had no interest in looking too closely into past conduct by the Bush administration. He ordered his prosecutors not to refer contempt of Congress charges against senior administration officials to a grand jury.

But this may have been his ultimate test.

The Coverage

Dan Eggen of The Washington Post, Neil A. Lewis of the New York Times and Laurie Kellman of the Associated Press report the basics.

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write for Newsweek: "The Bush administration today unveiled a set of novel and controversial legal arguments in refusing to disclose key details about Vice President Dick Cheney's role in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity."

They note Mukasey's insistence that Cheney's interview report was covered by what he called "the law-enforcement component of executive privilege."

"'As far as I know, this is an utterly unprecedented executive-privilege claim,' said Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor who is an expert on executive privilege and separation-of-powers issues. 'I've never heard this claim before.'

"Normally, claims of executive privilege are invoked to protect the disclosure of the president's communications with his top advisers. But in this case, the White House invoked the claim to keep secret Cheney's responses to FBI agents (hardly what anybody would call his advisers), who were grilling him as part of the now-closed criminal investigation headed by Fitzgerald. . . .

"What makes the decision to withhold the Cheney interview all the more unusual was the fact that the White House had already agreed to permit congressional investigators to inspect the FBI 302 reports of other top White House aides in the Plame case, including Karl Rove.

"So what was different about Cheney?

"Mukasey argued that giving Congress a copy of the FBI 302 report on Cheney would 'significantly impair' the Justice Department's ability to investigate wrongdoing by future White House officials. Presidents and vice presidents would be reluctant to submit voluntarily to FBI interviews because there would be 'an unacceptable risk' that their accounts would eventually become public, he contended in a letter to Bush recommending that the president invoke the privilege."

But as Isikoff and Hosenball make clear, that argument is a stretch.