Staff members in Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip’s office had the honor of telling the Obama transition team the Bill Richardson grand jury probe was more “significant” than he’d indicated, the WaPo says.

And since we’re on the subject of Obama’s diffiiculties in finding a Commerce Secretary who can get confirmed, remember Penny Pritzker? The Chicago billionaire-Obama advisor/fundraiser was floated as potential Commerce Secretary but swiftly demurred. The Pritzker empire (the family owns Hyatt hotels) was pioneering in the use of off-shore trusts to shield their fortune from taxes. And Penny Pritzker also helped lead a bank that pioneered sub-prime mortgages that collapsed amid allegations of unsound financial practices and predatory lending. Now that would have been a confirmation hearing.

No suprises here. Obama announced David Ogden, the Wilmer Cutler partner leading his DOJ transition team, to be Deputy Attorney General. Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan will be the nation’s first woman Solicitor General. Tom Perrelli, who was managing editor of the Harvard Law Review when Obama was its president, will head the Civil Division. He’s now managing partner of Jenner & Block’s DC office and a specialist in intellectual property. All will require Senate confirmation.

Ogden will be in charge of managing the day-to-day operations of Justice’s more than 100,000 employees. He is a former Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division under Clinton and also served as then-AG Janet Reno’s chief of staff.

As for Kagan, former Solicitor General Ted Olson said Kagan’s always been “very gracious” to students with conservative views at Harvard. Brad Berenson in the same WaPo article calls them all pros. Kagen served in the Clinton White House as an associate counsel to the president from 1995 to 1999 and as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council from 1997 to 1997.

President Obama today announced Indiana University School of Law professor Dawn Johnsen as his choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel. I bet she can’t wait to get a look at the rest of those secret opinions! As per my last post, Johnsen has been aggressively outspoken about the direction of OLC under Bush. She’s been overseeing the DOJ transition team’s OLC efforts and met resistance in trying to gain access to classified legal memos on national security issues.

The OLC, of course, is the once-obscure office that became part of a raging national debate over the use of torture. OLC advises the executive branch how to act within the law. Under the influence of Dick Cheney, and with the help of the now-notorious John Yoo (whom I remember from the Senate Judiciary Committee when I was a cub reporter at Roll Call), OLC used some pretty twisted legal reasoning to justify what most everyone else believes was illegal activity, from warrantless domestic wiretapping to torture of terrorism suspects. Johnsen’s clearly on the record with her anger at what she called the “shockingly flawed” reasoning justifying torture (or “extreme interrogation techniques” as I used to have to call them when I worked for the MSM.) It’s likely Jon Kyl or some other conservative on the Judiciary Committee will kick up a fuss about her blunt words, but there’s no way she won’t be confirmed.

The rise of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) in the Obama administration has been widely noted. ACS is the liberal antidote to the long-influential Federalist Society; Monica Goodling and her gang blackballed applicants to the prestigious Summer Law Intern Program (SLIP) who cited ACS affiliations.

But what’s been overlooked is how activist and outspoken many of the Obama DOJ transition team members have been – often in ACS forums – about the Bush DOJ’s frequent disregard for the law. Law professor Dawn Johnsen, a former Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel and Obama DOJ transition team “leader,” wrote a hard-hitting paper in 2007 called “All the President’s Lawyers: How to Avoid Another ‘Torture Opinion’ Debacle. “Presidential lawyers must be prepared to resign in the extraordinary event the President persists in acting unlawfully,” she wrote.

Here’s Johnsen in her own words: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8-FrzhHT_w&feature=channel]

Georgetown law professor Martin Lederman and Duke law professor Christopher Schroeder — both Obama DOJ transition team members — have also been publicly outspoken. (For more details, see my post on my friend Al Lengel’s federal law enforcement site, Tickle the Wire.) And of course, ACS executive director Lisa Brown will be Obama’s White House staff secretary. But Obama is a political animal through and through; it remains to be seen whether he’ll satisfy liberal bloggers and activists screaming for blood, including prosecution of any government officials involved with illegal practices such as torture.

UPDATE: As expected, Dawn Johnsen was tapped to head of the Office of Legal Counsel Monday.

Dick Cheney is sticking by his story that DOJ and Office of Legal Counsel approved the controversial warrantless domestic wiretapping program, despite the near mutinies of FBI Director Mueller, DAG Comey and OLC chief Goldsmith, among others. In this interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation this morning, Cheney also defended his controversial interpretation of the constitution that the president basically faces no legal restraint on his actions. For example, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, Cheney said.

“But nobody thinks that was legal,” Schieffer said.

“Well, it certainly was, in the sense he wasn’t impeached,” Cheney replied.

U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton of Texas’s Western District didn’t get the impression from Obama Department of Justice transition team leader David Ogden there’d be requests for mass resignations of U.S. Attorneys, as Janet Reno asked in 1993, Legal Times blog reports.

Although Sutton was President George W. Bush’s former criminal policy director in Texas when Bush was governor, Sutton was villified in the right-wing press for prosecuting two Border Patrol agents for shooting a fleeing Mexican drug-runner and then trying to cover the incident up. The critics thought the prosecution would put a chilling effect on federal agents.

A rush of end-of-year corporate settlements prompts Carrie Johnson at the WaPo to report suspicions the Bush admin may be trying to settle cases on favorable terms before it leaves the stage.

This Washington Independent piece highlights the controveersy of career DOJ staff (who are supposed to be non-political) hired during the Bush administration to carry out a conservative ideological agenda. But it doesn’t name names. Who are they? Send tips to mainjustice@gmail.com