The Justice Department sent out a bogus email to DOJ employees two weeks ago designed to test their awareness of cyber-security threats, the Associated Press reported. The email was signed “Thrift Savings Plan Account Coordinator” and tried to ”phish” for sensitive personal information. No word on how many, if any, DOJ employees fell for the hoax.

The American Civil Liberties Union today  sent a letter asking the Justice Department to release dozens of  still-secret legal memos used by the Bush administration to justify controversial national security policies.

The letter was addressed to Acting Assistant Attorney General David Barron, who overseas the Office of Legal Counsel. It cited President Obama’s new Freedom of Information Act policy directing the government to become more transparent. The ACLU noted it has sought release of the memos for more than five years and has filed three lawsuits seeking to force the government to comply with their FOIA requests.

While the government has released thousands of pages of documents to the ACLU already, it’s withheld key memos, mostly about detainee treatment. The investigative journalism site ProPublica has compiled a list of the still-secret memos here.

Attorney General nominee Eric Holder “assured senior Republican senators that he won’t prosecute intelligence officers or political appointees who were involved in the  Bush administration’s policy of ‘enhanced interrogations,’” Eli Lake reports today in The Washington Times:

Holder’s assurances were apparently key to moving the nomination forward, the Times said:

Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, a Republican from Missouri and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview … that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.’s nomination for Attorney General because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama’s Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.

But wait a minute. This isn’t exactly what Holder, who has said he considers waterboarding to be torture, told Republican Judiciary members in written responses to follow-up questions from his Jan. 15 confirmation hearing. He didn’t rule out any prosecutions. He just said  it would be “exceedingly difficult” to prosecute those officials who relied on DOJ legal advice to carry out orders. He didn’t say anything about the officials who ordered up those orders.

Here’s what he wrote in a  response to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.):

“I believe deeply in the principle that no person is above the law. But decisions to prosecute must depend on the facts. Government officials must do everything they can to comply with the law. It is, and should be, exceedingly difficult to prosecute those who carry out policies in a reasonable and good faith belief that they are lawful based on assurances from the Department of Justice itself.”

UPDATE: Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report in Newsweek that a Holder aide is denying the Washington Times report.

“Eric Holder has not made any commitments about who would or would not be prosecuted,” an aide to Holder told NEWSWEEK. “He explained his position to Senator Bond as he did in the public hearing and in his responses to written questions.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc) just said on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show the White House had assured his staff the Washington Times report was wrong. “They indicated that’s not the case. He [Holder] certainly did not give an assurance there’d be no prosecution. So I don’t think he got that assurance, and that Sen. Bond should rely on such assurance.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Holder’s nomination today, 17-2. The full Senate is expected to confirm him easily in a vote as early as Thursday.

Former White House advisor Karl Rove’s presence on Capitol Hill has been requested, once again, by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) Conyers wants Rove to testify about the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, his role in the Bush administration’s firing of U.S. Attorneys and general “politicization” of the Justice Department. A copy of the subpoena is here.

Rove has already thumbed his nose at the committee. He refused last July to comply with a subpoena to appear before the House Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law, claiming immunity as a former top White House counselor. The committee rejected his claims of privilege and recommended Rove be cited for contempt by the House. The House hasn’t acted on the contempt question. But with the change in administration, Conyers said of Rove: “It’s time for him to talk.”

In a related matter, a federal  court  last year sided with the House in its attempts to enforce 2007 subpoenas against former White House counsel Harriet Miers and White House chief of staff Josh Bolton, both of whom also refused to testify in Congress about the U.S. Attorney firings. An appeal is pending.

At the end of this National Public Radio report about the Obama administration’s selection of new U.S. Attorneys is this interesting bit: many recently departed USAs are having a hard time finding new jobs.  Says NPR:

Other U.S. attorneys from the Bush administration appear to be having a difficult time finding jobs in the private sector. This is extremely unusual; former U.S. attorneys typically land top jobs at private law firms without a problem. But during this economic crisis, law firms have been laying off attorneys across the country. As a result, according to people in the U.S. attorney community, even some high-profile prosecutors in major cities have had no luck in their search for the next job.

 

UBS AG is in talks with the Department of Justice about ending an investigation into whether the Swiss financial services giant helped some 17,000 Americans evade taxes, the Wall Street Journal reports. One option under discussion: UBS would admit to criminal conduct to head off a felony indictment and pay around $1.2 billion in penalties, the Journal reports.

One former UBS executive has already been indicted in Florida on charges of helping U.S. clients evade taxes. Another former UBS executive, Bradley Birkenfeld, has pleaded guilty to the same charges and is now cooperating with the Internal Revenue Service and DOJ. Justice lawyers are assisting the IRS in a separate civil case seeking the names of the Swiss firm’s American clients.

Now that Michael Mukasey is no longer the Attorney General, he (or his high-level designee) doesn’t have to answer for what US District Judge Emmet Sullivan clearly sees as major shenanigans by the Public Integrity Section leading up to  the October conviction of ex-Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) for lying on his financial disclosure forms.

On Wednesday, Sullivan vacated his Jan. 16 order that Mukasey file a statement with the court explaining who knew what when about whether FBI Agent Chad Joy had been granted protected whistleblower status. Joy made an explosive complaint of prosecutorial misconduct. Stevens has asked the court to throw out his conviction or order a new trial.

Instead of having the now-departed Mukasey answer for the prosecutors, Sullivan ordered the Department of Justice to file under seal all communications to, from, or between anyone in Public Integrity, the FBI, DOJ Office of Inspector General, DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility, and the US Attorney’s Office in Alaska about the matter.

Sullivan’s order revealed a partial transcript of what was said in a sealed Dec. 19, 2008 hearing. Sullivan grilled Public Integrity deputy chief Brenda Morris, the lead prosecutor on the case, about whether DOJ lawyers intentially mislead the court about the need to keep Agent Joy’s complaint sealed — over defense objections. The government lawyers initially argued that Joy’s privacy rights as a protected “whistleblower” mandated keeping his complaint secret. They later abruptly reversed course, saying the FBI agent actually didn’t have official whistleblower “status.”

SULLIVAN: “If you were a defense attorney, you’d be raising a storm about that information [in Joy's complaint] and you know it, don’t you? You can look me in the eye and tell me.”

MORRIS: “It’s not about looking in your eye and telling you or not, Judge … I’m biased in the situation.”

Agent Joy alleged in his complaint that prosecutors had concealed exculpatory information in an FBI Form 302 witness interview summary from the defense. He described a meeting in which Public Integrity attorney Nick Marsh was “absolutely against turning over” the new information to the defense. Morris in the Dec. 19 hearing gave a different version of that meeting. She said it was Marsh, in fact, who’d discovered the improper redactions and alerted his colleagues. Morris, Marsh, Public Integrity Section Chief William Welch and other government officials then held a meeting to discuss what to do, Morris told Sullivan.

“It was at least ten of us in the room going back and forth as to what is it and how best to deal with it,” Morris said. “So, I mean, Judge, just like that maybe his, Agent Joy’s recollection or his belief of what may have happened – I was present. I’m going to be a witness, too. Bill Welch, he’ll be a witness.” The government must turn over the material requested by Sullivan by Jan. 29.

From his remarks to senior staff today:

I will also hold myself as President to a new standard of openness. Going forward, anytime the American people want to know something that I or a former President wants to withhold, we will have to consult with the Attorney General and the White House Counsel, whose business it is to ensure compliance with the rule of law. Information will not be withheld just because I say so. It will be withheld because a separate authority believes my request is well grounded in the Constitution.

Also says he will restore FOIA:

The directives I am giving my administration today on how to interpret the Freedom of Information Act will do just that. For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city. The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should not be disclosed. That era is now over. Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information but those who seek to make it known.

 

Republicans have questions about whether he’d prosecute intelligence agents for warrantless wiretapping and torture. The Senate Judiciary Committee vote was supposed to be this afternoon, but it’s now delayed a week.

Wired magazine has a piece called “ The Plot to Kill Google” w ith some good inside dope on a meeting last Oct. 17 between company lawyers and then-DOJ antitrust chief Tom Barnett. Barnett and the Bush administration were known as pretty faithful defenders of Google’s archrival Microsoft. Three days later, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced his endorsement of Obama.