Bush's Legal Foes Now on Obama's Team

Bush's Legal Foes Now on Obama's Team

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/us_world/Bush_s_legal_foes__Obama_s_legal_team.html

By BEN SMITH

Updated 7:02 AM PST, Sat, Jan 24, 2009

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.

It will take a lot of scrubbing and fumigating to rid the nation of the stench left by Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, David Addington, Alberto Gonzalez, and the rest of that crew.

in some future republican administration. That is why it is so important to make this not possible in the future.

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