Torture's Smoking Guns

"Mr. Lefkowitz said the administration decided not to press its pre-emption agenda in Congress, where it might lose. 'There was already authority within federal government statutes and regulations to start the reform process without legislation,' he said. 'Using that and legal briefs, we proceeded.'"

There's much more in a report from the American Association for Justice, the trial lawyers' lobby, based on its repeated attempts to learn more through the Freedom of Information Act.

Executive Privilege Watch

Jeff Bliss writes for Bloomberg: "President George W. Bush overstepped his authority by withholding an FBI interview of Vice President Dick Cheney from a congressional panel probing the leak of a CIA agent's identity, a draft bipartisan House report said.

"The interview may shed light on who disclosed former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity, the draft report said. The report was circulated by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, and Virginia Representative Tom Davis, the panel's senior Republican.

"The president's decision to withhold the interview transcript from the committee in July 'was legally unprecedented and an inappropriate use of executive privilege,' the report said. . . .

"White House spokesman Tony Fratto today objected to the report and another one circulated by Waxman that said the administration wrongly asserted executive privilege regarding a separate panel investigation of climate change and Clean Air Act policies.

"Fratto said the committee received 'upwards of a million pages of documents' from the administration and that today's reports were partisan and unhelpful."

From the bipartisan report: "At its core, the doctrine of executive privilege is intended to preserve the ability of the President to receive confidential advice from the President's closest advisors. In the case of the FBI interview with the Vice President, there is no legal basis -- or precedent -- for asserting executive privilege in a situation like this. The Vice President had no reasonable expectation of confidentiality regarding the statements he made to Mr. Fitzgerald and the FBI agents. . . .

"There is no precedent holding that summaries of presidential conversations given to third parties -- as opposed to the original conversations themselves -- are subject to claims of executive privilege. . . .

"There is also no precedent in which executive privilege has been asserted over communications between a vice president and his staff about vice presidential decisionmaking. The Administration's refusal to produce the Vice President's interview report is particularly puzzling in light of the position taken by the Office of the Vice President that the Vice President is not an 'entity within the executive branch.' The logical extension of the Vice President's position is that executive branch confidentiality interests would not be relevant to his communications."

For background, see my Dec. 3 column, Bush Blocking Fitzgerald Cooperation, and my July 17 column, Mukasey the Obstructionist.

Politicization Watch

A draft report from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman out this morning charges that in the months before the 2006 elections, the White House Office of Political Affairs "enlisted agency heads across government in a coordinated effort to elect Republican candidates to Congress," directing them "to make hundreds of trips -- most at taxpayer expense -- for the purpose of increasing the electability of Republicans."