Several members of the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel worked on memos authorizing torture, but particular attention has been focused on Jay Bybee, who is now a federal judge with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Since the release of the memos, calls have been coming from all quarters for his impeachment.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday, however, that he believes no action should be taken “until the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility finishes its investigation.”
“It is certainly possible that an impeachment inquiry is warranted — but I think that decision should probably wait,” Whitehouse stated. “They’ve been working on this for, I would say, more than a year now, and I expect it will be a very thorough report. … I think it can’t be more than a few weeks away.”
“There’s … every reason to believe this will be a devastating opinion,” Whitehouse commented.
Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reported on the forthcoming OPR report in February, and what he wrote then takes on additional significance with the release of the torture memos.
“An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials,” Isikoff wrote. “H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos ‘was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.’”
“OPR investigators focused on whether the memo’s authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted, according to three former Bush lawyers who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing probe.” Isikoff continued. “One of the lawyers said he was stunned to discover how much material the investigators had gathered, including internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted.”
Whitehouse refused to blame the Obama administration for not being eager to pursue the torture issue, saying, “The White House has a strong political imperative to reassure the people of America that they are working as hard as they can on getting us out of the economic ditch that the Bush administration drove us into. … To have the president be focused in that area is exactly, I think, the right message for them to send.out.”
“But it’s a completely different question when it’s the Department of Justice looking at whether the evidence is in place for a criminal prosecution.” Whitehouse concluded. “There’s a lot of evidence that remains to be gathered, and I think no good prosecutor would make a decision about going forward until he had all the evidence in place. … We need to let that process go forward.”
